The Future of Weight Gaming

Forum News
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IMPORTANT UPDATE, PLAN ON SEMI HOLD. SEE THIS POST

Ok, now we are finally to the final post. Before I get into it, I am expecting this to be fairly controversial. I think some people are going to like it, others will think it’s a mistake, and some will jump back and forth on how they feel about it. There is no doubt that these changes are going to be quite radical and what I will be going over today is only the first phase on what will be a larger rework of the site and its structure over the course of a year or two.

I spent a lot of time thinking about it though, and I think what I will be laying out here is the best way I can continue keeping the site up as well as hopefully bring things back under control. If you haven’t already I would suggest that you read my open letter as it contains quite a bit of context as to why I am doing this. Along with what I stated in my open letter here are some more factors that I considered when coming up with this plan.

  1. Weight Gaming is a large driver of traffic for devs and also acts as a port of call for smaller related communities, like game modding, where they can keep in contact with each other and reorganize as needed as explained by users like @thatweirdfatguy.
  2. There seems to be a growing concern among at least some vocal community members of the possibility of scams and bad actors taking advantage of the community. While our information does not yet show any noticeable rise in such activity, those I have talked to are more concerned about the possibility of it increasing due to lower barriers to entry and believe we should take more proactive action to prevent it.
  3. New laws and pressure from credit card processor companies have made it much harder and riskier to host fetish or sexual content on more general market places like itch.io and steam.
  4. Rising hosting costs and new laws are making it harder and harder for small sites like us to host user generated content.
  5. Due to the general expectation that web sites should offer their services generally free of charge it has proven difficult to reliably crowd-fund the site and its operations, and due to the sexual and fetish nature of our content traditional routes of funding like advertising is not very feasible without overloading everyone with ads or providing a custom system (much like Fur Affinity does).

Also, this is meant to be a high level overview of what changes will be coming. I will make more detailed posts for some of the changes as and when needed. So with that all setup lets get into the changes.

The Forums

The forums are going to have by far the most substantial changes happening to them. My main goal with these changes is to eventually try to get the forums refocused onto discussions and less about acting as a hub for projects. This is mainly because:

  • Moderation of the projects is becoming really difficult
  • The sheer number and activity of projects quickly buries other topics
  • As it currently stands, devs’ reliance on the forums for visibility of their projects makes it hard for me to do anything that can reduce costs if it involves the forums without having a larger impact on devs as well.

Phasing Out the Projects Category

Starting at the beginning of 2026 I will be locking down the projects category and we will no longer be allowing new projects to be posted to that category. Once we lock down the Projects Category we will be giving all projects a 6 month period to migrate to the Wiki’s community games section. Once this 6 month period is up all project topics will be locked and archived and the projects category will auto direct people to the wiki.

Even though forcing projects onto the wiki will likely prove to be problematic for some of the more active projects, I hope that it will make it a bit easier to find and keep track of less popular projects. Also, the more advanced tagging system and the fact the pages are maintained by the community will allow the community more control on how they want to organize games. Finally, the fact that the wiki doesn’t allow comments and is mainly static content will, I hope, reduce our overall moderation load and also prove less expensive for us to run compared to the forums - making it a more viable alternative if things start getting too expensive for me.

Phasing Out the Curated Projects Category

We have already been working on phasing this out for quite awhile but the main difference is I plan on picking up the pace. I have already started to clean up the curated projects category by archiving projects that have never had a release, whose dev is not active anymore, have moved to a project topic, or have not had any activity for at least a year or so.

Like the Projects Category we plan on archiving everything in it and forcing curated projects onto the wiki with all the other projects. Due to the more complex nature of the curated project sections we plan on doing this over a 12 month timeline instead of 6 months, and any devs with a curated project who we plan on letting onto the main site will have the option to migrate any existing topics in their curated project subcategory to the new auto generated one instead of having them archived if they wish to preserve the history.

Reorganization of Mods

Mods are the only project type we will still allow on the forums. We will still be encouraging mods to create pages on the wiki, but any mods currently in the projects category will be moved into a new mods subcategory in General Games.

Once we have the mods sorted from the projects I plan to evaluate adding either additional categories, making a dedicated modding section for fetish mods, or if we should also force them to be shifted onto the wiki with the general projects.

The Main Site

For those of you who don’t know, I have been working on an itch.io like site for Weight Gaming, both for directly hosting projects as well as to make it easier for users to find projects they are interested in. My original intention was to try to run the site wide open but rising hosting costs, lower barrier to entry for making games, and an issue with the high risk payment processor I wanted to use has basically made this no longer feasible.

Due to this I am pivoting the site away from an itch.io like setup and closer to a really early Steam where I will be developing the main site more for my own personal use and the use of a handful of trusted devs.

While this may pivot may sound selfish, refocusing to making the site mainly for a smaller group of devs has already proven to be extremely helpful. I have been able to trim a fair bit of the scope creep that was bogging me down, and I feel much better about launching the site without features that I felt had to be in there or would have to be added in very quickly after release if it was running fully open.

Restricting Who We Let On

Basically the main site is going to be shifted to an invite only system where we will only be inviting a handful of devs to join us on the main site. We have already compiled a list of prospective devs and I have already been reaching out to some of, as well as consulting with, them to see who is interested in moving their project to the main site. While I won’t be releasing exactly how we are determining who we are and are not going to extend an invite to here is a small list of some of the factors we are considering:

  • Working relationship with the dev
  • Quality of the dev’s work
  • Popularity of the devs work
  • Historical significance in the community
  • Devs general activity/ongoing projects
  • Genre and other unique aspects of their current and/or past projects

Once the main site is up I plan on onboarding the devs we reached out to in waves. It is my goal to have all the devs onboarded to the main site before the end of 2026.

The site will remain invite-only until I feel the main site is stable, and I will reach out to any devs that I think have interesting projects and that we can develop a good working relationship with. I would like to eventually start loosening restrictions and open up a general application process or maybe even a community vote, but this will largely depend on how our hosting costs and income look.

Bring Your Own (BYO) Payment System

Originally I wanted to provide payment services for devs who wanted to sell games or assets, and we were going to use a percentage of those transactions to help fund the site’s operation. Unfortunately, to do this we needed to partner with a high risk payment processor to help us handle the payments. We were in discussions with one I liked but unfortunately in 2023 they updated their restricted lists to include sexual and fetish content which closed down our discussions. Unfortunately, the remaining HRPPs are more expensive and harder to work with and I don’t have the time to restart negotiations from scratch all over again.

Due to this I have switched to a BYO like system where devs can use integrations with Patreon for subscripts and Ko-fi for subscriptions and one time payments. While not as safe as using a HRPP directly, this offers a degree of separation for creators that makes it harder for payment processors to identify this content. Since we are only allowing a small handful of devs on the site I plan on making these tools available to all the devs we invite on with the exception of the asset store which will have some restrictions on who can access these tools and integrations.

Changes to the Asset Store

I am personally still committed to hosting an open asset store as I think it will provide a viable alternative to AIGC for many devs, and may be a good way for artists, musicians, and other creatives to make some extra money on the side if they want it. Unlike my original plans there are some minor changes that will be happening to the Asset Store.

  1. AIGC will not be allowed on the Asset Store. This makes no sense to me and undermines the fact that the Asset Store is supposed to be an alternative to AIGC.
  2. Unlike games, I will allow any user to use the Asset Store, but Asset submissions will be subject to review and I reserve the right to lock it down if it gets too expensive or I feel there is a need to do so.
  3. Integrations with Patreon and Ko-fi will be locked behind a Patreon tier for assets. The reason for this is if someone is willing to share their assets for free I don’t mind covering the hosting costs, but if the intent is to make money, asking for a small fee to help us cover hosting their content is not unreasonable to ask. I don’t intend this to be a barrier to entry though, so it will likely be locked behind one of the lower patreon tiers.
  4. I plan on having provisions in the licenses that will allow us to revoke access to assets if it is found out they are being used for training AIGC Generators without express written permission from the creator of those assets in an attempt to provide reasonable protection to those who have dedicated time to creating those assets.
  5. I will not be launching the Asset Store with the main site. The Game Store will be my primary focus, so I will be launching the Asset Store after the main site is live.

The Patreon

If I hope to support the site through patreon I need to try to do something that will encourage a larger number of people to choose to support us instead of unfairly relying on a small number of big spenders. I plan on making a post detailing my plans around this more after I get the main site out, but generally speaking once the main site is out I plan on picking game dev back up and using those projects to help provide a more tangible reward to encourage users to support us and help me cover the operating costs for Weight Gaming.

While not directly related to the Patreon, by getting back into dev I also hope as a side effect I can start doing programming seminars for the community again, and maybe even stream development on occasion to provide a peek behind the curtain on how I handle dev.

FAQ

  • How will I know if you are planning to reach out to me or not for the main site?

    • I am not going to be announcing any specifics on who or how many devs I plan on reaching out to. I will be announcing once all devs we have planned on reaching out have been contacted. If you have not heard from me by that time then you were not on the list.

  • I want to be included on the main site, can I reach out to you with my game project?

    • You can if you want but I would suggest not to until I have a formal application process down. If I do receive a message asking to be included I will not be responding to them so you should not expect any response.

  • Why are you supporting Ko-fi’s one time purchases/store but not the one added to Patreon?

    • The reason for this is Patreon disables their one time purchases/store if your account is marked as NSFW last I checked so since almost every patreon account that a dev uses should be marked as NSFW I dont see a reason I should support it atm.

  • Are there any plans to support Subscribestar?

    • I would like to but currently Subscribestar has an application process you have to go through if you want to integrate with them as a payment processor like the way we want to. Due to this I don’t have any plans to really pursue them seriously until I have the time to go through that process.

  • If all the projects are being moved to the Wiki what will happen to discussion around them?

    • Unfortunately, that is kind of the point of forcing everyone to the wiki. While 95% of all discussions have been generally good; topics getting out of control (especially around AIGC) has been getting more frequent and severe. While I know Krod has been doing his best to keep things under control I can’t keep getting sidelined to deal with them while also working on getting the main site out. Until I feel we are in a position where we can more properly moderate those discussions, suppressing them in general is our best option.

  • Won’t this hurt devs?

    • I suspect so, especially ones of projects with a very active community that tends to keep them near the top of latest. But it will hurt less overall than a full shutdown. I am not claiming this is the best solution, but I think it’s the best option I currently have available to me.

  • Will the Gain Jams come back/how will they work with this new setup?

    • Currently I don’t know. I really like the Jams but as I stated in my open letter they have gotten a bit out of hand. I am still considering how to best approach them.

  • Are there going to be any more changes to the forums/discord after this?

    • Yes, I am still considering how I want to set it up but I am considering having separate areas for devs vs general users but I am not fully sure how I want to set that up yet.

  • Will you also be trying to expand out the moderation team?

    • Yes, I want to try to bring on a few more mods and at least one to focus on helping moderating the wiki. We just have to be careful of who we bring on so it may take us a little bit to find some people we are happy with.

  • Why are Mods not being forced to the Wiki?

    • Mainly because of the following:
      • There are less mods than general projects so they are easier to keep an eye on
      • Mods don’t tend to kick off too often
      • Since mods in nature can involve complex hacking of a game, communication of issues and the sharing of technical information is generally more critical to a modder than to a dev.

  • How will forcing projects to the Wiki help you handle your operating costs better?

    • The main reason for it is the forums make up somewhere around 80% of our operating costs atm. Due to this, if I get into a bind financially the only way I can really reduce our costs enough to be covered by Patreon is to shut down the forums until my financial situation improves, but currently as it stands I can not do that without really impacting a lot of the projects here.

  • Are you really at that much of a risk financially atm?

    • Yes, I have been lucky enough to survive the last 3 rounds of layoffs, but our company has been really layoff happy and we dont know when the next one will be. Also, due to rising cost of living and other external factors my savings have been effectively wiped and what used to give me a comfortable 12-18 month buffer if I tightened my belt turned into something I will be lucky to stretch to 3 months. Due to this if I was to lose my job I would need to cut as many costs as I could as quickly as I can.

  • Couldn’t you just double down on the Patreon if that happens to help fund the site?

    • I actually think that if I did lose my job and made a plea to the community for help, enough people would want to help out that we could fully cover the site’s operating expenses through it. Due to the short amount of runway I have, though, I am just not sure if this would happen fast enough to prevent the site taking a chunk out of my savings if the worst was to come to pass.

  • Aren’t you just picking winners and losers?

    • I can not deny that the invite system is me picking winners and losers at the end of the day. Unfortunately, the fact is as things currently stand I can not afford to run the site wide open like I wanted to originally. If I am not careful about how many devs I let onto the main site I could easily find costs skyrocketing and back myself into a corner. While imperfect, I do hope the Wiki will at least be a little useful to the devs who won’t have access to the main site for posting their projects.
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I believe this kind of shift fundamentally kills what the site excels at. Weight Gaming works because it is a community hub, one where devs and users can easily interact; by doing this, you’re fragmenting that community and offloading the burden of moderation on devs, forcing them to find a new feedback hub such as Patreon comments, Itch discussions, Discord servers, etc. with zero centralization.

While I understand that it lessens the moderation burden here by shifting the responsibility, and allows you to focus more on what you want the site to be, I can’t help but feel that the longterm effect will be a net negative, both to WG and its users.

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If the only way to save the game forum is to take the games off the game forum, I don’t know if it should exist at all. The entire monetisation system for a single niche community feels like an incredibly risky (and itself costly) proposal that feels more suitable for a broader base than merely games what have WG in them. At that point, I would absolutely favour migration to another site and working with them to integrate (pointing at tfgames.site once again as a more sustainable example).

I would like to see serious consideration made for looking at what other groups have done first. I have been aware of the behind-the-scenes ideas around this and given how long they might take to actually take effect, I don’t know if they will ever happen before the money quite literally runs out.

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From my understanding, it sounds like the wiki is going to entirely replace the forums from the standpoint of browsing games.

I don’t have any objections to this exactly, given the explanations you’ve mentioned above, but I would like to have a bit of clarification as to how the wiki works (and if you’ve gone into this in a previous post, I apologize. I’ve been very busy lately and have only vaguely been following this whole series of events).

First of all, who would actually be editing the wiki? From the brief glance I had, it seems like it’s set up to be a community-edited wiki, AKA anyone who makes an account can edit pages.

Next, as a casual viewer who primarily plays games and doesn’t contribute much, I’d really like to see a “recently created pages” button- something that I can look at every so often and see what new games have dropped. Similarly, a “recently updated pages” button would be nice for when a game gets updates. Part of the appeal of the forums for me is that it acts as a sort of newsfeed for any games hosted on the site, and if the wiki is going to be replacing the forums, I’d like for the wiki to accommodate that same sort of casual browsing. At the moment it seems to just be a big list, with no way of differentiating between an active project that gets weekly updates and an “active” project that got updated once two years ago before the creator disappeared from the face of the earth.

Granted, I’ve only ever seen the wiki on mobile, so these concerns may be addressed already. If they have, that’s on me.

Feedback and comments on games are another concern I have, although I suspect the answer is going to be “just make a discord”. Without the ability to quickly and easily see how people feel about a game, it’s going to be hard to gauge whether or not it’s a game I want to play in the first place. I realize that moderation of these comments is the primary reason for the migration, and I don’t exactly know of a solution that property equates to scrolling down and seeing people’s thoughts, but the lack of visible comments will make things harder on me, personally.

Finally, I’d also be interested in hearing more about the Asset Store, and again, feel free to point me towards a previous post if I’m missing something that’s already there. What would the process be for a creator who wanted to post assets, paid or unpaid, to the store? If the assets were paid, how would payouts function, and what percentage of payment would go to the creator and how much would go to the site itself? What type of assets specifically would you be looking for? RPGmaker sprites? Static dating sim-style images? Tilesets?

I’ve been looking for a low-commitment way of making some extra change on the side for a while now, and this seems like a decent way of doing it, provided I know more.

Overall, I’m not unhappy with any of these changes and I definitely understand your reasoning behind them, but I’d like to see some more concrete details, especially for the things that are outright replacing legacy features that people have gotten comfortable with.

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This, too, is a fundamental concern. Wikis are mostly static, and despite being editable repositories of information, the semi-static nature is core to their design. They can be updated to include new information, but the primary goal is to be a repository of content. Most wiki software isn’t designed to show off new pages or changes, because frequently these are the things most in need of - surprise! - moderation. A wiki cannot replace the forums - a system designed to show when and where new activity is happening - as a rapid means of disseminating updates or crucial new information.

EDIT: And on the topic of moderation: forum posts can only be edited by the moderators and original posters. But who can edit a wiki page? If it’s only the creator of the game, that risks the loss of information that players might find beneficial but the creator hasn’t considered. If you open it up to all users, even “trusted” ones, you run the risk of pages being overrun by trolls, hijackers, people with bones to pick over development choices, etc. That’s going to require far more moderation than the forums ever did, and can very quickly destroy trust from developers.

So, in short: The wiki drives away casual users who want to see what’s new, and risks massive blowbacks from devs who might have less control over how their proiects are presented or interacted with. So… who’s still around three months in? A year? Five years?

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I normally don’t pipe up with these, because I feel the site is usually run pretty well, but. I feel that a website called ‘Weight Gaming’ and getting rid of the ‘Gaming’ part of it by removing the Projects board just doesn’t feel right at all.

And honestly, I only see this hurting the site and devs, as well as dev trust, more than allowing/disallowing AI to be here.

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i understand that options are limited, but certainly there has to be a better way than this, there is very little chance this site will survive after this and i simply feel like this is the worst of all worlds in the end. i really, really hope another solution is figured out because otherwise there really isn’t much of a future

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One other point I forgot to bring up in my first post: you mentioned mods would be staying on the forums as they require more active maintenance and troubleshooting.

As someone whose (arguably) most significant contribution to this site is a graphical mod for someone else’s WG game, I’m a bit concerned about how these sorts of mods would be handled, and this goes double for games that are designed with open contribution in mind; AKA “I make the game and you draw your own character and their WG stages so they can get fat in the game” type games.

Are those discussions hosted here, or are they relegated to whatever space the creator makes for them? Do mods get a subsection on the wiki within the page of the game they’re modding?

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Absolutely insane changes that will accomplish nothing but killing the site.

Like, I get there needs to be changes to keep the site going, but it’s like you went and choose the worst possible options as your plan for that, to the point that it all that it will result in is the site dying anyways. You need to take these plans back to the drawing board and come up with something else.

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I’m thinking the same for mods like the ones I’ve made.

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I can’t speak for Grot personally on the subject, but my own interpretation is that discussion of games and other matters is still allowed on the forum, but it’s just that the hosting and documentation of the actual project is set to the wiki. This makes sense in practice, because ideally, having the source of the games themselves be somewhat distanced from the forum means that discussions are more concentrated around specific topics, rather than a broad thread that can be equal parts tech support or disparate clumps of discussions and replies, and therefore much harder to organize and moderate.

It essentially means that any topics that are created are more centralized to specific points and subjects, which means that if a situation occurs in that topic thread, it can be more easily identified and dealt with as it would be more immediately obvious if it spikes in activity.

How this applies to the connection of the Wiki to the forum is that while the Wiki page itself is semi-static/limited to specific editors, it can still be mentioned or discussed, just in a way that doesn’t swallow up the original project’s visibility or clarifications.

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It’s gonna be tough - the comments and criticisms I get here for games I’ve posted about are miles more insightful and helpful than over on itch, and that seems consistent with what I’ve seen for other creator’s posts - but this does seem like it will be an efficient way to lower the cost and time maintenance for the site. If the site is not currently sustainable, aggressive trimming / stream-lining makes sense.

Thank you for being so thorough in explaining what you’re planning and giving the background on how you came to these decisions.

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I mean, that’s explicitly contrary to what was said, and even if that were the case that opens the door for any topic on a game turning into a general discussion for that game, purposefully or otherwise.

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First, I want to say, do whatever you need to do to be able to keep this site alive.

I’m not a game dev, and I don’t post on here much if not all. But I’m a lurker, who has followed this site from back when it was just a thread on 4chan to where it is now. And someone who started to actually put patreon money to support the community when I could.

I’m worried that lack of discussion around game development may cause some developers to simply lose drive. I’ve seen that happen to so many in so many fields.

However, you are not wrong that conversation in some of these threads has gotten kinda nasty (A reflection of the state of our world rn for sure), and I can understand need to limit it.

Would it be possible to host game development on the wiki with the idea of one day in the future bring back discussion on the forum?

Also, I saw someone else say this, but I second the ability to have a recently added/updated tab. I check the projects category several times a week to see if any new updates or games are available. It’d be a nightmare for me otherwise.

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Well… Bad day for me I guess. I do think this will kill many game projects - including the ones certain game devs might rely on for income (which… Includes me).

Just to give more insight : the project category was easily generating 30-50% of traffic for many games on launch. Now, with the new restrictions itchio recently added to NSFW games this might be even more.

So yes, this decision is actively killing fetish/NSFW game development and a portion of income for those who rely on it. I doubt any alternative will suddenly emerge…

Anyway I don’t have much else to say, just another depressing day for me…

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Not gonna lie, I’m quite worried of what this means for people like me who haven’t been that active lately on the site. But, I can’t think of another kind of solution and to be frank, this year has been quite wild and heated for the forums and something drastic had to be done, so I kinda get the why grot chose this. I just hope that things can get better from now on for Weight gaming and for grot and to at least be more pragmatic or optimistic with this.

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I don’t like the idea still, but in a hypothetical world where the wiki is absolutely necessary to swap to, I at least checked it out, so here is my opinion.

…I tried to be open but it’s not at all ready. If there are not massive changes quickly, the site is dying. I mean like 75-90% viewership of most projects gone within months. No one wants an alphabetically sorted games list, and the only way to sort by recently modified or recently created is incredibly obscure and limited but it does exist.

If you’re curious and aren’t a computer professional who knows how to mess with this stuff, as in, you’re more a casual user like the average person browsing this forum, here are the steps:

  1. Find the “Browse by Tags” button. This is probably unironically the hardest step if you’re not directly told how to do it. At least 75% probably wouldn’t realize it exists. Go ahead and see how long it takes, and this is when you’re being directly told it exists. Answer: Next to the search bar.

  2. Set order by to “Creation Date” or “Last Modified.”

  3. Figure out which of the arrows to the right sorts by recent because it’s sorted by oldest by default for some reason.

  4. Select any tag. Pray that all the games are actually tagged properly because if not, you’re not going to see it. And no, you can’t search without selecting a tag, so if you’re looking for any game, just hit something generic like “bbw” and hope all the games you’re interested in have that tag.

Overall, I do appreciate the structure of the Games pages at the very least. It allows for a thumbnail picture, which is a huge improvement, and an actual description that doesn’t force me to put it in the title to make it stand out.

I think this COULD potentially work out, IF it was well-executed. However, the wiki is very clearly in major need of QoL. It is not at all ready at the moment and would devastate the popularity of the entire site.

Note: After writing this, I discovered that you can just use the “games” tag, but still, it took a long time to realize that there even was a games tag (since I incorrectly assumed every page would be a game, making it unnecessary). Imagine how few people will even discover how to search like this.

If the Games page was replaced with an automatically sorted version (with the option to either see recently updated or recently created games), I do think this could effectively become a valid replacement for the current projects category. Otherwise, this is going to massively damage the forum. Also, the Projects category should definitely redirect straight to the Games page rather than the front page because the navigation can be a little confusing if it’s on Browse by default.

Note 2: I apparently incorrectly assumed that people had properly tagged their games with the “games” tag. Just went to check it now and…

Not a single page except for the Games page has been tagged with the games tag, meaning it’s totally impossible to see a properly sorted list of all games at the moment. It could technically be fixed manually by some volunteers at least if anyone is willing to do that.

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