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Comment by phreack | Hacker News Reader

I had an affiliate marketing website when I was a kid, mostly for fun and learning with some friends, that made some money off backpack recommendations and Amazon links. We didn't feel too good about it after a while so we shut it down. I now hate SEO powered advice blogs.

More recently, I've started making adult videogames, one of which being an interactive fiction that had a lot of traction, but is now on hiatus due to Covid related reasons. One unintended effect of this, is that I learned personally how much both Apple and credit card providers have a chilling effect on freedom of nudity in entertainment - it's appalling.

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> how much both Apple and credit card providers have a chilling effect on freedom of nudity in entertainment - it's appalling

As in good or bad? they're blocking/enabling?

Blocking.

Really bad. For example, if you want to have push notifications on an iOS app, there's no way to do it via a website or a PWA. And there's no way of sideloading an app at all for nearly all users. So then the App Store is your only way, which means you must not ever dare have any kind of nudity in your app, since that's an instant rejection during reviews, particularly if you're an indie dev. So I was basically forced to drop iPhone support, to the dismay of some users who would have liked to pay for it (and mine).

Dang wasn't aware, thanks for the info

Interactive fiction in video games? Interesting, any examples?

On the side closer to 'interactive' books there's the Lifeline series of games which were really inspiring to me. Then, on more conventional videogames there's Life is Strange, which at times feels a lot like an interactive movie where you can optionally go much more in depth by interacting with characters and objects if you want to get more of the story.

On the indiest side, there's an /interactivefiction subreddit as well.

how did you manage the difficulty with payment processing? are you still able to put up ads (Google AdSense?)

No ads, basically sold early access to builds via Patreon, and we were investigating ways to allow play by paying with cryptocurrencies and possibly PayPal but never got as far as setting that up before having to pause. Long term there are plans of selling PC versions on Steam, itch.io, and other platforms once complete.

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