Possibly the most frequently broken rule on /r/lewdgames was #2: No Piracy.
The context for that rule on Reddit and on Lemmy is not quite the same. However, I’d still like to keep the stance that we want creators to be comfortable posting to the community, and not have to worry that someone will direct people to a site with an unlicensed copy of the game.
To that end, I plan to maintain a whitelist of sites that are acceptable sources for games. To be on the whitelist, they would need to make reasonable effort to keeping unlicensed content from the platform. IMO, F95’s stance of “provide a copy of the game but link to the official patreon/itch/whatever” isn’t enough.
Right now, I would whitelist patreon, itch, steam, dlsite, and subscribestar, but I’m open to suggestions.
Reasonably, any site fully controlled by the developer of the game can be sourced.
I will admit that that leaves some gaps; fan translations tend to release free copies of the games they translate (often Japanese games that would be available on dlsite). I’m interested in community feedback, especially from developers, on this.
Lewd Mods should be able to be sourced from anywhere, so long as they do not directly pirating anything. This will probably require additional consideration in the future.
Sounds reasonable indeed.
I have seen different approaches to piracy sites, especially on the many Discords I’m on, from “link away” to “don’t even talk about it or get banned.” On the Discord server for Come Home which I’m a mod of, we have made good experiences with “Mentioning F95 and similar sites is alright, but advertising it or posting links is not.” Especially because it DOES have some value for devs with its dev forums, also mods and fan translations.
Just my $0.02 :)
I appreciate the feedback, and that’s kind of how I’m leaning here as well.