Trust & Safety for Indie Game Studios Without Building a Trust & Safety Department

Trust & Safety for Indie Game Studios Without
Building a Trust & Safety Department
The build-everything-yourself trap
Once a game adds chat, messaging, user-generated content, player accounts or social interaction,
a small studio may need to consider age signals, parental authorization, reporting, escalation,
policy enforcement, recordkeeping, evidence preservation and privacy. Building every layer
internally consumes engineering capacity.
Start with the actual risk surface
Ask what players can actually do. Can minors use the service? Can adults and minors
communicate? Can players communicate privately? Can they upload content? Can they contact
strangers? Can serious incidents require evidence preservation? These questions produce a more
useful architecture than starting with a vendor list.
Don't build a department before you need one
Infrastructure can allow a smaller studio to adopt capabilities incrementally. Age and authorization
signals can feed Ceremony and Assurance. Later social interaction can add Ledger and Evidence
Preservation as the risk surface grows.
The Candor Founder approach
The approach is not 'buy the biggest safety stack possible.' It is: identify the risk -> establish the
required control -> preserve the evidence -> expand when necessary.
Related concepts
Privacy-Preserving Age Assurance; Parental Consent Without Identity Documents; Ledger;
Evidence Preservation.
DON'T TRUST US. VERIFY US.
Test the system, inspect the architecture, and decide whether it belongs in your safety
stack.
candortrustandsafety.com