Last week, crowdfunding platform Kickstarter made some questionable updates to its “Rules” guidelines, prohibiting several forms of NSFW content, including “implied sex acts,” sexually “derogatory” themes, “photo-realistic” nudity, and, perhaps most bizarrely, “MILF/DILF” stuff. Oh, and “buttocks.” At the time, creators assumed the blame lay with Stripe, Kickstarter’s payment processor. It sounded awfully similar to Steam and Itch.io’s payment-processor-driven NSFW purge of 2025.
Today, Kickstarter has reverted the restrictive NSFW rules it had previously put in place, and, in a blog post titled “An Apology: Rethinking Our Mature Content Guidelines,” has outright confirmed that the “botched” guidelines were “primarily driven by requirements from [Kickstarter’s] payments processor, Stripe.”
“Stripe operates under its own legal and compliance requirements separate from Kickstarter’s own rules,” stated Kickstarter’s Chief Operating Officer, Sean Leow. “And even Stripe’s rules are dictated by a larger system shaped by financial institutions that govern how money moves globally. Under this system, many platforms – including other crowdfunding and creator monetization platforms – struggle with how to create space for mature content while getting the creators of that work paid without friction.”
Leow also noted that, as detailed in The Daily Cartoonist’s article, several Kickstarter-approved projects have subsequently been “suspended” by Stripe due to said compliance requirements: “Over the past several months, we’ve seen a growing number of campaigns that had already been approved by Kickstarter get suspended by Stripe mid-funding. When that happens, it’s devastating. A creator’s project can be frozen with funds in limbo, sometimes weeks into a campaign they’ve spent months, or even years, building.”
For now, Kickstarter has reverted to its previous guidelines that merely “prohibit pornography and illegal content,” but Leow made a point of noting that the newly reverted guidelines now, once again, mean that “Stripe can still suspend a campaign that Kickstarter has approved.” However, the “Rules” page does include a small update: a link titled “Stripe’s Prohibited and Restricted Business List.”
Kickstarter is pretty clearly stating that it wouldn’t have updated its rules in the first place if Stripe hadn’t started shutting down creators’ campaigns. If that wasn’t already obvious, this line from Leow’s statement confirms it: “Faced with the realization that creators would continue getting caught in the gap between our rules and Stripe’s, we thought that the best path forward was to close the gap, giving creators one set of rules to work within, versus having to navigate two different policy philosophies.”
Kotaku reached out to Stripe, but it declined to comment.