Why do payment processors do stuff like this? Is there some regulation that requires them to? I get that they don't want to process fraudulent transactions, but I'd think the response to a higher percentage of fraud from some industry would be to charge them more. It doesn't make sense to me why they would be concerned about the content of games, as long as everything is legal and the parties concerned aren't subject to sanctions.
Some of these games seem completely abhorrent, and probably illegal in more restrictive jurisdictions, but not the United States. And I've not seen any suggestion they're funding terrorism or something. So I'm perplexed.
One factor is the ongoing campaigns from number of moral crusading groups who lobby them to cut off payment processing for things they don't approve of. NCOSE has been working for decades on the project, and targeting credit card companies has been a successful tactic for them for a decade or so.
What could possibly hold enough leverage that Visa would jeopardize their sweet gig as an ideology-neutral, essential piece of American infrastructure siphoning 1-2% off of every dollar of consumer spending?
The leverage is that the activists will potentially be able to draw the ire of the government. Visa and MC get away with absolute murder in terms of the size of the fees that they charge in the US. Most developed countries don't allow that. The US government could easily regulate them (as they already do with debit card fees) or use anti-trust law against the obvious duopoly charging exorbitant prices. Because of this situation, Visa and MC have a very strong incentive to crack down on things the government doesn't like.
The unspoken arrangement is that the government allows them to keep charging a de facto sales tax on a massive portion of the economy as long as they cooperate and de facto ban things that the government wants banned but can't ban themselves due to that pesky constitution.
Tbh that's quite alarming what you've just said, and I'm not saying about government. I'm saying about an additional huge sales tax. I understand that wiring money or sending them in an envelope is the thing of past, but e.g. in my country and in whole EU the digital payment is promoted as the only righteous, because "cash is only used by gangsters and human traffickers" etc. And this is really playing against us and pushing us to the duopoly you've mentioned
Credit cards are much less heavily relied on in Europe than in the USA. Europe basically runs on debit cards that every kid can have and where the fees are minuscule. There are countless banks providing the service and everything is highly regulated. On top of that, Europe still curbed Visa and Mastercard several times for antitrust behaviour. And the idea that physical money primarily aids social fraud, money laundering and other illegal activities is pretty well established. They even killed the 500€ bank note, because it was almost exclusively used by criminals and most normal people never even touched one, much less used one for legit transactions.
> the idea that physical money primarily aids social fraud, money washing and other illegal activities is pretty well established
I think that's very hyperbolic. In france most people I know carry cash and use it regularly (not as much as cards), the gen X and older tend to find it strange to pay for small sums (eg bread) with card. Germany is infamously almost cash-only. In many Central Europe countries, shops taking card is not a given (Bulgaria, Hungary).
Let's not exaggerate. While I am often enough exasperated at how often certain restaurants or bars will still only accept cash (or sometimes EC card), I'm still able to do about 90% of my transactions by card.
> And the idea that physical money primarily aids social fraud, money washing and other illegal activities is pretty well established. They even killed the 500€ bank note, because it was almost exclusively used by criminals and most normal people never even touched one, much less used one for legit transactions.
At least in Germany in particular older people prefer to pay cash if possible - this gives the banks also less leverage with respect to abhorent fees. Since many people in Germany neither trust the banks nor the government anymore, acting this way is very rational.
Also the arguments concerning cash restrictions are seen very differently by the population: since there existed two oppressive regimes on German soil in the 20th century, a lot of people realize that the restrictions on cash are just another step towards restrictions of the citizen's freedoms (thus I am honestly surprised all the time that a lot of US-Americans who are so freedom-loving and distrust the government concerning the restrictions of civil rights are not in love of cash).
Thus, in Germany there exists the saying "Bargeld ist gelebte Freiheit" [cash is lived freedom].
> At least in Germany in particular older people prefer to pay cash if possible
Sure, but that's for small, everyday amounts. For values upwards of 500€, I think the familiarity of paying cash would be swamped by the nervousness of carrying way too much money with you, what if it gets stolen?
> this gives the banks also less leverage with respect to abhorent fees
The only time my bank has ever charged me a per-transaction fee was, ironically, when I withdrew cash abroad using my credit card.
> Since many people in Germany neither trust the banks nor the government anymore, acting this way is very rational.
Speak for yourself, this is either heavily overstated or a fringe opinion, luckily. Most people definitely do trust both government and banks to a sensible degree, even if they don’t like some decisions.
Some people like you apparently also don’t appreciate the immense freedom of SEPA transactions. Sure it’s good to have cash as an escape hatch for the occasional transaction off the record, but for almost everything else bank transfers are safe, inaccessible to third parties, free from fees, and easy to use. And above all else, we have a working democracy and not an oppressive regime? This whole debate often feels very disconnected and overblown in Germany.
I'm from Croatia but I don't send money abroad, I only use credit cards and banks locally. As far as I can see from our local banks' websites, they implement SEPA standards. There must be some sort of misunderstanding or error.
> I am honestly surprised all the time that a lot of US-Americans who are so freedom-loving and distrust the government concerning the restrictions of civil rights are not in love of cash
I suspect it's a combination of factors, one of them being that US cash has absolutely awful usability compared to the Euro.
In what way? One unpleasant discovery I made in Portugal (and also saw to some extent in Spain) was that ATM’s - every one I could find, including those that were bank-owned at physical branches - had a limit of EUR200 per transaction regardless of my own bank limit (at USD1000/day, that should have been at least EUR800).
And while convenience stores, fast food, etc., won’t take a bill over $20 (which is understandable but really a trifling sum when you consider inflation - it’s a fast-food breakfast for three people), many other businesses are happy to do so. Nothing above $100 is in circulation anymore, and inflation means that $100 in 1980 is worth over $400 in today’s money even by government figures. A $20 bill 45 years ago was worth almost $100 in today’s money. And, of course, cash declaration rules have not updated the amounts to reflect this.
Where may I read about anything supporting your statement "cash is primarily used for illegal activities"? I highly doubt that this is the case, unless there are more illegal activities out there than legal ones.
I would assume the metric isn’t number of transactions, but total transaction value. It’s really uncommon to pay for really expensive things (e.g., houses, cars, boats) in cash, and doing so almost always means that the duffel bag of cash came from shady means.
OK, but look at the original statement, that cash is mainly used for illegal activities. I do not think that is true.
Now, check this out:
> Cash was the most frequently used payment method at the POS in the euro area and was used in 52% (59%) of transactions, but the share of cash payments has declined.
> Cash was the most frequently used payment method for small-value payments at the POS, in line with previous surveys. For payments over €50, cards were the most frequently used payment method.
> Cash was the dominant means of payment in P2P transactions, accounting for 41% of such payments. Cards and mobile apps were used for 33%, credit transfers for 9% and instant payments for 6% of P2P transactions.
> The most frequently used instrument for online payments was cards, representing 48% (51%) of transactions. The share of e-payment solutions, i.e. payment wallets and mobile apps, was 29% (26%).
> The large majority of recurring payments were made using direct debit, with credit transfers ranking in second place.
Regarding privacy:
> A majority of euro area consumers (58%) said they were concerned about their privacy when performing digital payments or other banking activities.
I think they genuinely care about privacy and are not thugs.
Yes - and Japanese gay porn games are an easy soft target before they go on to ban things they really want to ban. We've been through this before in the 70s-90s.
The Durbin amendment (regulating debit interchange in the US) and its EU equivalent aren't regulating Visa and Mastercard scheme fees, but rather interchange fees, which Visa and Mastercard set, but issuing banks earn.
Of course scheme fees are ultimately at least partially paid from interchange, but lower interchange is primarily a problem for issuing banks, not the networks.
The Durbin amendment in particular was also supposed to foster competition between networks (by mandating each debit issuer to support at least two unaffiliated networks per card), but given that only very few places accept only debit cards, that didn't work out quite as well as intended in terms of bringing down both interchange and scheme fees via market forces.
> What could possibly hold enough leverage that Visa would jeopardize their sweet gig as an ideology-neutral, essential piece of American infrastructure siphoning 1-2% off of every dollar of consumer spending?
Pressure campaigns could lead to laws regulating the card industry, self regulation prevents some of that (see movies and games ratings agencies, which avoid government ratings coming in and potentially connecting an 18+ rating with outright bans like we’ve seen in the UK and Australia in the past)
What competitors? You mean a "Jesus Card" issued by Visa or Mastercard? At this point, it's basically an oligopoly. The only other real player is Amex, and they're a very distant third.
Amex isn't really a competitor, since they're both card issuer and network in one. (I believe they have a few third party issued cards these days, but it's not a significant part of their business. The same goes for Discover.)
They wouldn’t need to create a new payment processor if they could just swap to Mastercard. Thus it was also implicitly excluded by Chick-fil-A in their proposal.
One thing to notice is the group that claims responsibility for this is some kind of funky radfem puritan mixture from Australia. They campaigned against titles like GTA V, Detroit Become Human AND abortion pills.
Since they ran a campaign to ban GTA V from stores I can say for sure they are not stopping on fringe content like eroge porn shovelware.
If they've implemented (2), that seems like much less of a problem as applied to onlyfans than to animated content on Steam. But even in the case of Steam, there just isn't a constituency for being pro-incest. This is the last political fight you'd want to get into.
> But even in the case of Steam, there just isn't a constituency for being pro-incest. This is the last political fight you'd want to get into.
Of course the constituency that is openly pro-incest is small. On the other hand, I believe the constituency for a quite encompassing freedom of speech has to be taken seriously.
Another factor is the board members and other investors of the institutions themselves.
I have been privy to two specific instances where pressure to either ban or reject providing support for specific content was handed down from beyond the executive level at a major financial network player that my client was doing business with.
The US obsession with sex (both positive and negative) is something else.
Here in Europe, sex is a normal part of human life. Not a center of everything, nor a sin to be avoided. Sex art is normal. Sex games are fine. There are no moral crusaders here, because sex is moral. We tell sex jokes at work and nobody faints. We are constantly perplexed why American culture is so different from other Western cultures in that regard.
People keep saying "Puritans" like it answers all questions, but Puritans were hundreds of years ago. We had our own share of people with peculiar attitudes back then. Today is 2025, not 1785.
Its ridiculous that your comment that has factual information is downvoted while on top of you there's a bunch of comments going on random tangents not based at all on reality.
It's due to the difference in Christian values, the US has a hard on for believing that ignorance is a virtue when it comes to sin or adult topics.
Like for instance the outrage if you have a sign on your lawn stating that x president is a rapist to the economy, people will say that children should not be "exposed" to such words.
No, Europe is not a monolithic bloc, stop treating it as such, stop saying here in Europe or European here. You'd get annoyed if a yank generalised all of europe with a not take so don't do it yourself. State what country/countries you're talking about because social attitudes and norms vary massively across this continent!
Of course, it doesn't help anyone to generalise. Europe has a wide demographic. But, one thing that doesn't happen is its attitude to sex affecting worldwide commerce or other worldwide issues.
Here in the UK religion and sex are not part of the national conversation. A politician mentioning their love of god would seem weird to us. The only way it enters the national conversation are when right-wing religious zealots, from the US, try to affect our laws: I'm thinking of abortion laws and trans rights. These are entirely imported issues from US religious hangups. It's quite tedious, because mostly we were on a path of reasonable discourse with relation to sex, sexuality, relationships (marriage), etc. but with the advent of social media you see pockets of society being dragged into it.
I have friends in much of Europe (Sweden, Norway, France, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Croatia, Slovakia, Poland, Romania, Greece) and have travelled to those destinations extensively. I still can't speak for all of Europe, but I think when it comes to sex and religion we're kinda similar. The only one that stands out to me was the Greek Orthodox church used to have an out-sized role, but even that doesn't seem to be the case any more (I just came back from visiting friends in Greece a few weeks back and we discussed this).
So whilst we can't say all of Europe is the same, we can say that it's not causing global problems due to its sexual and religious hangups.
They sure do, just like there are different states in the US with vastly different attitudes to life and everything.
And yet, you can take an averaged vector of all US states and all European countries and meaningfully compare those. Or extract some things that are common through all Europe as compared through all US.
I had a privilege of living for some time in Italy, Denmark, Spain and Switzerland (I still live in Switzerland). They are all really different, and yet there is something common compared to the US.
> People keep saying "Puritans" like it answers all questions, but Puritans were hundreds of years ago. We had our own share of people with peculiar attitudes back then.
We literally had Puritans in Europe [1]
” The Puritans were English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who sought to rid the Church of England of what they considered to be Roman Catholic practices, maintaining that the Church of England had not been fully reformed and should become more Protestant.[1] Puritanism played a significant role in English and early American history, especially in the Protectorate in Great Britain, and the earlier settlement of New England.”
Yeah, and then most of them left and came here, which the article cites as having caused a "radical" divergence:
> Almost all Puritan clergy left the Church of England after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the Act of Uniformity 1662. Many continued to practise their faith in nonconformist denominations, especially in Congregationalist and Presbyterian churches.[2] The nature of the Puritan movement in England changed radically. In New England, it retained its character for a longer period.
It's not crazy to think that this could have had an outsized influence on the US given how influential New England was in the early days. Even 120-130 years after the point that the quoted section mentions, when the colonies were transitioning into what's now the United States, close to a third of them were part of New England.
The US is largely theocratic and has in part because of this managed to resist socialism and other forms of scientific governance to a much larger degree.
Using religious leaders as power brokers is a clever strategy, they'll never budge due to the better argument or scientific reason, hence making it almost impossible for non-violent progressive movements to having an effect at the macro level.
Are you sure it’s a good thing to be so small minded that reason won’t reach you, just because you happened to avoid those big ideas that turned out to not work?
It's easy to dismiss all such campaigns as religious prudes and moral crusaders, especially on a site with the demographics and political leanings of YC News.
But often time such campaigns are waged by former victims of trafficking. It's well documented that trafficking, prostitution and pornography are closely interlinked - this modern notion of a fully liberated "sexual worker" controlling their careers, choices and finance is substantially a fiction of the pornographic industry. So there is real merit în the anti porn stance.
Of course, once the camping is set in motion, it takes a life of its own, that has nothing to do with the concerns of the victims and more with prudishness; the religious circus will join hands and demand the removal of synthetic pornography etc.
I think the biggest issue here is that somewhere down the line we gave payment processors the responsibility of policing for crime and terrorism. Our governments and regulators punish those institutions for "not doing enough" to prevent such things from happening.
You might think I'm defending the multibillion company but here comes the catch: all of this is expensive so when you are doing something funky even though not illegal they just cut you out. You are a small dev or merchant and it's not worth running a whole monitoring apparatus over your activities.
Then we get into this situation where borderline cartel activity like this happens and we have a sort of shadow government enacting their own regulations. This raises some eyebrows dont you think? It will probably continue until governments realize this is happening.
The responsibility ended up with payment processors and other financial institutions because otherwise they would be forced to give access to all their customer / transaction data to governments and law enforcement.
I really wish we had a push for payment neutrality. Financial transactions are infrastructure and infrastructure should be dumb and neutral. Why does everyone have to suffer slow and expensive transfers just to maybe occasionally catch some bad guys (and they're not actually caught, just mildly inconvenienced)? And of course once you're already doing it, there's inevitably overreach, as evidenced by Visa here.
And before someone chimes in about how crypto will solve this: yes, crypto has already solved this for the criminal class. But most of the rest of people still have to suffer all the fincrime policing every time they move money or pay for something.
> and they're not actually caught, just mildly inconvenienced
I read somewhere that criminal organizations and individuals love KYC and AML because they have the resources to go around it and it makes their operations look legit.
As a generalisation it seems sensible that it should be illegal to knowingly handle illegal things and the proceeds of illegal things.
It’s hard to say that it’s ok to profit from someone else’s crime.
If I sell you a bike cheap, no questions asked, then you ought be as culpable as me as you don’t have reasonable doubt that it’s stolen. Etc.
This can be weaponised. The lobbies go after visa and Mastercard etc by giving the company “proof” that same transactions are very illegal, eg leaks or underage or duress etc. This forces them in the position of being complicit which means they have to step back.
My guess is it's simply a chargeback risk. It's the reason casinos and adult sites have trouble getting credit card processing and are charged much higher basic rates, even under the best of circumstances when the casino or adult site is operating entirely within the law in the jurisdictions it allows.
Punters run a lot of chargebacks on casinos, and people whose spouses catch a XXX video or game on their card statement will lie and run chargebacks too.
In the case of Valve, a lot of chargebacks would drastically increase the processing rates demanded by the payment providers for all transactions across the board, not just those related to adult games.
There's probably a great market opportunity here for a game store focused on adult games and willing to take on that risk.
Does Valve actually have a high risk of chargebacks? I was under the impression that moreso than other platforms, most Valve customers would rather go through Valve's own refund system. I understand that chargebacks is supposedly the reason for adult-only platforms.
Yes. Steam used to have card declines if your address did not match exactly.
Card not present was and still is higher risk than in person shopping. Now that most US customers have chip cards in their wallets fraud has shifted from in person to CNP. Digital goods are high risk because a customer could theoretically download and enjoy the digital good or save a copy and then chargeback. There's no shipping tracking number to prove delivery. Or a fraudster could go on a spending spree from the comfort of their home in another country. Adult-only games are even higher risk because a customer might have to explain to a spouse what the Steam charges were for.
Of course copy protection and the prospect of a ban of their whole Steam account blunts the most obvious customer cheating of keeping a copy and charging back. Steam games cannot be resold. Digital goods that can be easily resold are magnets for fraud. Such as cloud GPUs or international long distance calls.
Sorry, I should clarify my question: does Valve actually face a significantly increased risk of chargebacks if it should be more liberal in its adult game rules.
I suppose that if consumer behavior is to have their adult game purchases and conventional game purchases on separate accounts, and the Steam platform allows for that, then that may be so.
These days Steam allows hiding games from your public profile by marking them as "private", meaning that people can't see that you own the game and can't see that you are playing the game (which is presumably what you would want if you were a fan of "Sex Adventures - Incest Family - Episode 9"). I imagine this is good enough for people so that they won't bother having a separate Steam account just for porn games, as having a single account is more convenient. There's a reason why people hate having multiple game launchers on PC.
Chargebacks of legitimate purchases on most large platforms are extremely rare. Most will be from stolen cards. On most large platforms, if you start a chargeback you can expect your account to get locked. Do you want to give up your entire account just for a refund on one purchase? Luckily these large platforms typically have their own refund process.
Somehow, it's forbidden for the government to oppress pornographers directly, but it's perfectly fine to impose legal sanctions on banks who maintain business relationships with them.
This is the correct answer. There are many merchant categories, adult being just one of them, that are susceptible to high chargeback rates which result in payment processors banning them.
This is nonsense. If you want us to believe this you need to show that Steam with erotic games is more of a risk than Steam without them. Comparing Steam with things like “adult merchants” like Onlyfans or a porn streaming service does not sound very appropriate.
It's not nonsense. I've hosted, moderated and managed sites that were only obliquely related to porn or gambling, and you wouldn't believe the level of rejection for running ads or getting payment processing that they are faced with. And I ran a casino for 4 years. I coded it and I ran it 24/7, and believe me, I did everything by the book. The CC companies do not give a shit as long as they make money. Chargebacks cost them a lot in time more than in actual cash, and they have categories of risk for every merchant who may expose them to that risk. The highest categories of risk are porn and gambling.
Any entity that uses a CC gateway and has any exposure to either of those risks is exposing itself to all the risk. The CC companies almost certainly told Valve that they would be considered a porn site and face a 1.5%-2% higher processing fee for every transaction.
That's the problem though. The risk means the market for those riskier credit transactions is literally categorically not a great market. You think JP Morgan gives a shit about Japanese titty games? Hah. No. They care that these games get charged back way more often.
If there is a market opportunity, it's probably in a processor for debit-based transactions that are harder to reverse. But then that makes fraud harder to combat, and one of the reasons everyone loves credit cards so much is because consumers are far more confident to buy from random shops if they know they can always get their money back if the shop scams them.
So - this whole system's lucratively is entirely predicated on easy credit and low risk meaning low fees. Anyone who wants to play in the mud that's leftover by these companies taking the good business are inherently playing a low margin risky game.
I wouldn't scoff at the leftovers. You're talking about maybe a trillion dollar industry that struggles to find payment solutions. This is why I gave up on credit card processing for my startup casino in 2010 and just went to taking Bitcoin and other crypto. I originally planned to just take Visa. I wasn't looking to skirt the law. Card companies are looking out for themselves, and they don't really even need regulatory capture to shaft anyone running a business that the public could consider shady or immoral. There's plenty of demand out there, and in my opinion they're leaving money on the table. But their business model makes it difficult to take on the risk, especially in the case of something like Valve where they can't pick each transaction apart and evaluate the risk separately. So yeah... a globally accepted porn and gambling card? That would be a home run if the bills showed up never to someone's spouse, and it won't happen. Using a combination of crypto and higher CC fees to sell the content, though, there's a lot of pent-up demand.
>This is why I gave up on credit card processing for my startup casino in 2010 and just went to taking Bitcoin and other crypto.
And how many customers you lost in 2010 because of that? Probably more than 90%. Even now people are reluctant to use crypto but tbh crypto crowd is so big that you can perhaps succeed in opening crypto only business.
Yes, about 90%. I would have had maybe the 6th or 7th biggest online casino in the world to being one which catered only to early adopters of cryptocurrency, who were not necessarily gamblers on roulette or blackjack but had nothing better to do with their coins. It was an interesting experience, and it didn't leave me as wealthy as I could have been if the barriers to entering the larger market hadn't already been negotiated between CC companies and governments. That said, at least I'm not in prison like a lot of people who followed what I did.
With the CFPB under threat, there may be room for payment processors which don’t protect consumers from fraud. (Regulation is only as strong as its enforcement)
Yes, and it's been tried before. LibertyCoin, I think.
Write a Steam knockoff platform that's trustworthy enough for people to download, and load it up with dirty games. Put the premium on the customers if they want to use credit card transactions, otherwise push them towards crypto payments. Maybe you won't be an oligarch, but you'll probably end up with a reasonably sized yacht.
[edit] hell, in a few years if the winds shift you might be DraftKings.
>Write a Steam knockoff platform that's trustworthy enough for people to download, and load it up with dirty games. Put the premium on the customers if they want to use credit card transactions, otherwise push them towards crypto payments.
Easier said than done. It is hard to earn trust....you would probably need to jumpstart the platform with quite a few indie devs so people start trusting the site and using it.
The US has a weird fetish with privatizing things that the government should handle, like consumer protection. If there were a reasonably robust infrastructure for this outside of payment processors in the US, there would be far less pressure on porn providers to comply with fucked up morals about porn. What we have here is an instance of late stage capitalism, and half the people are too narrowminded to see how it hurts their freedom.
I'm not sure about that. Late stage capitalism would involve the government bailing out credit card companies if there were fraud. I kind of prefer for them to deal with it themselves. And whether they deal with fraud themselves or the government does, they're going to classify certain types of transactions as riskier than others. My point was that this is probably not a "moral" decision, just a business decision. It would be a lot worse if it were the government mandating it, and worse still if they were mandating it because it conflicted with the moral code of some plurality of voters. That's not the case here, and I'm glad it's not. I wouldn't want the government to control consumer protection to the degree that voters in Texas could decide whether to protect certain consumers or not.
Isn't it a little odd that Visa/Master isn't out there making that argument? Why would we assume them having the best of intentions of they aren't even willing to argue those intentions themselves?
They don't need to make an argument for anything. They tell Valve: "Hey, if 1% of your transactions are for smut and incur smut-level-chargebacks, we're going to just treat all your transactions as smut", and Valve says, "no problem, we'll pull those games." It's not like Valve stands to profit by holding the line for free speech here or something. Valve gives as little a shit about an indie porn game as it does about anything else. Honestly, why should they pay the extra percentage across the board to defend it anyway? This is why I'm saying a separate X-rated platform would get a lot of traction.
But can't they just block buying those games with visa/mc and only allow using steam wallet credit? Some Japanese sites have been having these issues for a while and that's what they ended up doing (or just closing shop entirely).
I guess that would be the logical thing to do. There's probably some synergy at work. If these games could be widely promoted, maybe their average value to Valve would be $10k each or something. Instead, they probably net 1/10th of that before they drop off the radar completely. Building in a sub-system that guarantees that certain games can only be bought with certain methods of payment seems like a pain in the ass. However, they could do it. And that sort of argues against the idea that you'd be building yourself any kind of moat by setting up a game platform for just the XXX stuff.
There isn’t. Even worse, there’s no legislation prohibited them from doing so.
Payment processors (eg: Mastercard, Visa) are the ultimate deciders of whether you can sell something online or not, regardless of whether it is legal.
They haven’t just blocked adult content, they’ve also blocked non-profits with which they disagree in the past.
We need much stronger legislation around this. Private entities shouldn’t be capable of deciding that a given organisation can’t charge online. Only institutions which represent the public’s interests should have this level of influence.
If I remember correct from the hot money podcast https://www.ft.com/content/762e4648-06d7-4abd-8d1e-ccefb74b3... part of the problem for the credit card companies is figuring what are the boundaries of legality. Countries have very different laws. Things like representing homosexuality or age of consent are very different and credit cards feel that it is a risky business because of that.
The USA is extremely litigious, rules are decided not by the legislature usually but instead by people suing each other to establish case law, and anyone with a bone to pick could sink you in legal fees and proceedings at a whim. So probably people who don’t like the idea of adult content can use the courts to make payment processors’ lives painful and they decide to just forgo that business.
Sexual self-denial always was the driving force behind the western cultural success. You can not have hyper-specialization and rule of law, without some members of society sacrificing a "normal" life.
From the monk in the monastry to Turing hyper-focused on an enigma there is clear line. Its a ugly recipe, but its working, unlike all those other societies out there, who are currently eating themselves. A judge doesn't dress like a priest for no reason.
Sexual caste slavery or anarchy- thats the choices.
> You can not have hyper-specialization and rule of law, without some members of society sacrificing a "normal" life.
Sex freaks hyper specialize in things all the time. Monks and priests also had reputations as horny perverts in Medieval literature. Also, there are plenty of non-Western countries that have been functional. This is such an out of touch, ahistorical take.
> Sexual self-denial always was the driving force behind the western cultural success.
It is a feature of a subset of the culture in some countries. It is far less universal as you say.
> You can not have hyper-specialization and rule of law, without some members of society sacrificing a "normal" life.
This really does not follow. How does the existence of laws prevent someone to live a normal life? In a liberal democracy, laws fundamentally guarantee that we can do so, as long as someone’s fundamental individual freedom does not cause unacceptable harm to someone else. In that framework, what we do in private with consenting adults is absolutely nobody’s business. Rule of law does not change this.
> From the monk in the monastry to Turing hyper-focused on an enigma there is clear line.
What line is this? In which way was Turing’s persecution a requirement for him being a genius? How do we benefit from him killing himself instead of leaving him be and make other contributions to our intellectual development?
> It’s an ugly recipe, but it’s working, unlike all those other societies out there, who are currently eating themselves.
It is not. What you are advocating is a theocracy and there are many examples in History and around the world that show that it is a terrible idea.
> A judge doesn't dress like a priest for no reason.
All I can say is LOL. Ceremonial clothing is more nuanced than that.
> Sexual caste slavery or anarchy- thats the choices.
The fact that you only see these possibilities says a lot more about you than the way human beings work.
I figured the reason was not wanting to support something harmful to the customer like a fake diet pill. Call me naive for letting that assumption of even a glimmer of empathy affect my guestimation. I should have known it was pure greed all the way down and due to something like this instead.
I mean I wouldn't do business with them, I think the supplements industry is infrastructure for grifters, quacks, and pyramid schemes to fleece the desperate, but what's the problem for Visa? Is it a brand safety thing? My presumption would be that payment processors are amoral and have no problem processing payments for Consolidated Baby Kickers if it were legal to do so, is that a misconception?
"Not as advertised" chargebacks. That industry is also full of subscription scams (e.g. someone thinks they're ordering a supplement for $5.99, but they're actually getting signed up for $39.99/month...).
> That industry is also full of subscription scams
Visa / MC are the ones who enable subscription scams and benefit from them. They implemented "convinience" option of "updating" your credit card data with replacement card. So even if you cancel and replace card charges continue to pass.
They also totally able to see all the places where your card been tokenised, but they dont push banks to expose this to you.
I don't think the credit card networks would care about that if it weren't for the risk of chargebacks. Credit card networks have no problem with processing payments for churches!
Control. People get a kick out of controlling others and stopping them doing things that don't effect them in any way. It's like how being a practising gay was illegal or how using certain drugs still is.
It could be a holdover from Operation Choke Point, an Obama-administration arm-twisting initiative that would subject banks to more regulatory scrutiny and possible disciplinary action if they did business with certain "high-risk businesses" including firearm and pornography sellers. Ostensibly the initiative was ended in 2017, but banks are probably still afraid to be handed the black spot for doing business with the "wrong" sorts of people.
Another factor is that credit providers (i.e. banks) are increasingly using customer transaction data to assess customer behaviour as part of its risk scoring.
If a customer is regularly purchasing adult material that would be definitely be a red flag.
This. I dont know who do you need to be in order to pay for the porn that you can pirate for free. In case of games or music or movies there is collecting and convinience, but porn is pretty much opposite.
But at the same time chance of "oops it's not mine" charbacks likely much higher compared to other spending.
> Why do payment processors do stuff like this? Is there some regulation that requires them to?
Generally no, but they exist in a regulatory morass where it's impossible to do what they do without arguably or perhaps technically being in violation of hundreds of regulations at any given time.
The US government then uses their power to selectively enforce the voluminous mess of bad regulations to coerce parties to undertake actions which it would be flatly illegal for the government to perform directly such as cutting off sexually explicit content from payment rails.
The practice isn't limited to payment processors but they're a particularly good vector given the level of regulation they're subjected to. Choke Point (and Choke point 2) are just specific examples of a general tactic to end run around the public's rights that has been used by the US government for decades. In most cases the abuse isn't so well organized that it has a project name you can point at.
Congress and the whitehouse leaning on social media companies to suppress lawful opinions on covid policy is another example of that kind of abuse that has received some public scrutiny. Most cases, however, go without notice particularly since the ultimate victims of the actions generally have no way to know the cause.
This is one of the ways the government can censor people despite the first amendment. It’s absolutely by design. The regulators “express concern” about certain financial activity and then the companies remove it.
I don't think so, it is death by a thousand cuts which is why we are in such a shitty place right now. Out rights have been attacked on all side for decades, little by little, but all together it is a huge loss.
This is a long ongoing issue tho and one of the main reasons many European sex stores don't take credit card at all. Visa and master do enforce irrational morals
I suspect Valve is blaming the credit card companies for something they really wanted for themselves. Steam is a big store open to everyone and you’re going to scare away a big chunk of seniors, Christians, etc with stuff like incest, ageplay, and rape just so that a small minority uses you instead of…itch.io? Better to keep the big safe names like Being a Dik and Eternum on Steam and flush the rest so that you can have the best of both worlds.
I think that for better or worse Valve is genuinely committed to lassies faire moderation, they have historically been very hesitant to remove really heinous games. I don't think they're using this as cover.
That changed with Hatred in 2015. There have been a number of them since. It seems that anything that gives Valve bad press is on its shit list, even if the premise theme has been done before by a bigger or more well-known company stateside. If the upcoming Grand Theft Auto game has full frontal nudity and realistically depicted sex scenes, I doubt Valve would give it a second look.
That was ten years ago, there have been tons of really objectionable games on Steam in recent years. Eg I just checked and the game where you roleplay as Kyle Rittenhouse shooting protestors is still on Steam.
Per Wikipedia:
> [Hatred] was shortly removed by Valve from their Steam Greenlight service due to its extremely violent content but was later brought back with a personal apology from [Valve's co-founder] Gabe Newell.
Look. Ignore the content. Why the fuck do we allow credit card companies have a say in how we spend our money?
Fraud? Abuse? Fine, let me put cash onto a card and if that card gets stolen, oh well, my loss. Mastercard should have no say in what what speech is considered acceptable outside of their offices. We don't care what execs at a water company think? Why do we care about the people at Mastercard?
It's because Visa got sued, lost, and it was found out they knowingly processed payments for illegal adult content, so they basically avoid the sector entirely now. Economist had an article about it maybe two years ago and came to much the same conclusion you did. IIRC, the failure in their mind was government not stepping in to make a law so things are less ambiguous in the future. Now payment processing cos get to gate keep people's speech, which means everything is basically a civil suit away from getting blacklisted.
No, don’t follow the underdog fallacy. What are you doing against it? How are you different from the other sheep? Merely complaining doesn’t make you any better.
When I buy an iPhone I am dealing with Apple. I know what I am buying and what I can or cannot do with the device. And if I am not happy there are alternatives.
When I buy stuff on Steam I am in no way making a contract with Visa. When Visa strong arms Valve to delist games I lose even if I never had any relation with Visa ever.
No, I get it. Give me a "Freedom Card" or whatever that generates a one-time use number/cvv combo, backed by cash, that I'm fully responsible for. If I give a guy on the corner $5 cash and he walks off with it, that's between me and him. We don't need to resort to crypto. I don't care if there's a paper trail, I don't need to be anonymous. I just don't want money people to have any say in how people choose to spend their money.
> Thats not exactly a credit card at that point. And with a credit card, you're explicitly not spending your money.
That point is not the problem though. They could just pressure Valve to refuse credit cards for all or some games. The financial aspect simply does not make sense, regardless of how you look at it (and many people had different takes in this thread).
The only angles that make sense are an ideological crusade and the risk of being sued. The first is unacceptable and the second is an utter failure on the part of the legal system.
Yeah, a "Freedom Card". Our money, they move it, no moralizing. We don't need crypto to fix this, just common sense legislation.
No company or individual should be denied the right to receive funds digitally without due process.
Companies should be free to transact with or exclude anyone, but there should be neutral infrastructure that facilitates the flow of money, with multiple players each with differing rules and risk profiles setup to help people and companies access it.
No one financial institution should be able to dictate the speech allowed on a platform.
The card networks are never on the hook for fraudulent transactions (nor for any other type of chargeback for that matter). If anything, it's the merchant's payment service provider/card acquirer that absorbs the loss if the merchant can't pay.
that wouldn't apply in this case, because the vendor, Valve, would be on the hook for fraudulent purchases and they would definitely have the deep pockets to pay out. The cc companies only have to worry about the small, fly by night companies that might disappear after a bunch of fraud.
Well your comment tells us why-- as is the law in the US is that credit card companies are almost entirely responsible for fraud. It's part of why they and their dubiously usurious practices are allowed to exist in the US at all.
If it were the case that the payment rail censorship were limited just to cases where there was an obvious elevated fraud risk-- then that would be the whole of the story. -- and there would be an obvious answer: use a payment mechanism where the fraud responsibility is entirely on the user, such as Bitcoin.
But their censorship exists where no such elevated fraud risk exists too, due to abusive conduct by the government to indirectly suppress activity that would be plainly unlawful for them to directly suppress. And the governments out of control abuse of its regulatory power is not limited to fraud-responsible payment rails, and get applied just as or even more extensively on Bitcoin payment processors.
No, I get it. Give me a "Freedom Card" or whatever that generates a one-time use number/cvv combo, backed by cash, that I'm fully responsible for. If I give a guy on the corner $5 cash and he walks off with it, that's between me and him.
Well, credit is not really "your money". The danger of course is if this gets extended to debit cards and they become the only option (ie. no cash). Every time you use your card you are giving them the power to do this.
Yes, I mentioned debit cards in the second of the three sentences in my comment.
It's an important distinction to make. Credit is very much not something you should feel entitled to and issuer can and should be selective about who and what they issue credit for. Or course the credit industry itself is disgusting, but that's another issue (this was covered almost 20 years ago in a documentary Maxed Out).
This shouldn't be conflated with payments in general which is (imo) a much bigger problem. You should be entitled to spend the money you earn on exactly what you want, and to do it anonymously.
You can fight back: don't spend on credit and refuse to use a card when cash would suffice. We are losing, though. For stuff like Steam you have no other option (as far as I know).
Payment processors(Visa, Master) , payment gateways(Stripe, Paypal...) and payment hosts (Patreon, Gumroad...) are a huge pain to deal with even when you're selling something which is legal and risk free just because their algorithm or employees are often overcautious, anything out of mundane they'll ban first and then ask questions(if you're lucky).
I have a FOSS project called Open Payment Host[1] which removes the payment hosts from the equation and removes the technical hassle of integrating multiple payment gateways but it does not solve the pain of having to deal with the payment gateways and by extension payment processors and banks.
My long term plan is to integrate direct banking API where ever it's available.
Is there any bank from any country which provides direct banking API to end customers for plain savings bank account (I've seen some provide for current accounts).
I built a cool tool the last week's. I spent more time on evaluating payment processor than the code itself.
I have ~5 projects in my shelf I did never launch because I didn't find a payment solution.
Got instantly banned with all of them, had to write them an email wait for days to get some response.
I usually just use crypto whenever it makes sense. And still have a hard time to believe that I can move as much as crypto as I want but a single payment from a Dubai account can get my bank account frozen for days ...
I haven't, I will definitely explore it. Quick read on it seems very promising.
Have you or anyone here any API in EU for getting payments directly to your bank account? I have started a discussion on this on OPH[1], I welcome any information on direct banking API in Europe in that discussion.
Okay so is Steam enough of a money printer for Valve to say "well fuck you guys, we'll make our own credit card with hookers and bingo"? And hold out Half-Life 3 (only purchasable with the ValveCard) as a carrot?
To replace visa/mastercard you need to have thousands of banks support ValveCard across the world. It's hard to imagine how it's going to happen. Players will not switch to another (probably foreign) bank just to buy Half-Life 3. They'll pirate it.
By the way, Gabe has a very famous quote:
> Piracy is a service problem.
He knows it very well that if it's hard for players to buy something they'll just get it free anyway. You can say he's probably the first person in the world who realized this idea profoundly enough to turn it into a business. It's very risky for Steam to make buying games even slightly harder.
You can do that currently. Steam already supports the exact process you described: top up your steam wallet and buy games with steam wallet balance. Actually, there are things you can only buy this way (some in-game items, not sure if it's to workaround gambling accusation or just coded so for no reason).
The issue is Visa/Mastercard/whoever is pressuring Valve isn't happy about the very existence of incest games. They don't want to be associated with incest/rape even indirectly.
If there was a prominent online marketplace for homegrown literature, I would bet there would be corporate pushback against selling incest themed porn on it. But I don’t think there is such a marketplace so it’s a very hypothetical question.
If a book publisher was selling erotic fiction about children online, you could bet your ass they would have a hard time with payment processors.
Visa and Mastercard are called card _networks_ for a reason. Wherever you are in the world, or in any site anywhere, if your card says Visa and the merchant’s POS machine (or payment gateway) take Visa, both parties know the transaction is good. The merchant gets his money and you get the product.
You get your card from your issuing bank, so the consumer’s last mile is the bank’s problem. The merchant get their POS/gateway from the acquirers. Your bank and the merchants acquirer don’t know each other.
Visa and Mastercard are intermediaries. There’s no way a NatWest card in the UK is connected to whatever POS is in Chile or whatever. They all route through the card brands.
You have to offset negative ValveCard balances with USD in everyone's banks, and there's a convenient middleman called Visa who does exactly that by tying store accounts to bank accounts through the universally accepted membership card they issue.
Privacy.com issues cards from the Visa and Mastercard networks.
You can’t run your own card network easily because you would have to convince all of the merchant banks that take card transactions to do business with you.
Digital money movement requires an operating agreement between at least two financial entities - but most of the time there’s a lot more. Depending on the type of transaction you may have two or more gateways, facilitators, processors, issuers and underlying banks involved.
It’s a very fragmented system that relies on many, many different entities all having agreements and contracts with eachother.
Entirely possible if you're JP Morgan Chase. They're big enough to have both merchants and consumers in their ecosystem, and they tried it, and Visa put a stop to that.
IBM was not able to. Story from a friend-who-claimed-to-be-there:
In days of yore, Visa did processing on IBM iron. The iron in question took a while to boot, and time is very definitely money to Visa and they wanted to speed up reboots (e.g., after a crash). Saving seconds = $$$.
Visa to IBM: "Please give us the source code for the <boot path stuff>, it's costing us money."
IBM: LOL
Visa to some big banks: "Please tell IBM to give us the source code for this, it's costing you money."
IBM, a little later: "Here's a tape. Need any help?"
> I am genuinely curious who can actually threaten Visa (I do not think it is Valve).
Visa is a clearing house whose members are banks. Think of it like a payment router between issuers (banks) and processors (banks).
Only sponsored organizations can directly use the "Visa rails", where "sponsor" is defined as a bank, a bank subsidiary, or an entity previously sponsored by one of the other two.
This is also the case for MasterCard and Discover. "Traditional" American Express is different though.
> Amazon, Walmart, Target and then increasingly unsure.
Those merchants use banks or one of their subsidiaries for processing credit card transactions. Most large merchants do as well in order to minimize their discount rate as well as other transaction fees. Smaller merchants often use ISO's or VAR's for business specific reason, knowing both ultimately transact with a bank or one of a bank's subsidiaries.
> I thought Venmo was trying the most with their card offers, as well as PayPal, Cash, Google Pay and several others too
I know at least two of the above used to use a specific US bank for the credit card transactions backing their payment services. For others, if service usage requires a verified credit card or debit card backed by a credit card network, they too use a processor owned/operated by a bank, bank subsidiary, or an entity sponsored by same.
EDIT:
For payment services which do not require a credit card or debit card backed by a credit card network, they almost certainly use the ACH[0] network. This is a more intimate financial relationship and best used with a dedicated bank account not linked to any others, as fund transfers can be bidirectional.
Those are all US companies so subject to the same puritan pressures. Their cards would still be good for buying ultra violent games but not sex games...
Walmart was very supportive of fedNow for the express purpose of removing MasterCard from cashless purchases. And for a long time the only way to pay by phone was to allow them to debit via ACH. out of all of them they get it the most.
Any coalition of banks can. Replacing Visa is a daunting task, but rolling out PoS support and the technical challenges are peanuts compared to actually getting banks onboard. Visa itself was started by a single bank, and Mastercard was started by a coalition of banks. They can do it again.
Interac[1] is Canada's debit system, originally created as a non-profit by our largest banks way back in '84, and these days is supported everywhere. The large banks are already used to bullying their way through political or bureaucratic challenges, and a single Canadian bank typically has trillion(s) in managed assets - they _can_ bully Visa.
Zelle[2] (2016) is a limited (etransfer only) clone for the American market, UPI (2016) in India, UnionPay (2002) in China, carte Bleue (1967) in France, etc etc. What's missing is cooperation between national systems like these, as well as lending as they typically only do debit instead of credit.
Any cooperation between these systems would likely get spun out as a separate entity, which would eventually just turn into a new Visa or Mastercard - but 3 choices is better than 2.
Other payment processors, mostly. So other credit card companies (e.g. JCB [1]), government run payment services like Pix in Brazil [2], theoretically crypto, etc.
>> I am genuinely curious who can actually threaten Visa (I do not think it is Valve).
> Likely Apple currently has the deepest finance industry roots.
Apple used a very large bank headquartered in the US for its credit card processing as of about ten years ago. Given that the cost of change is significant once these processes are put in place, it is likely this remains the case.
Note that this is not the same as what Apple Pay supports.
Honestly, with how prevalent iPhones and Androids are today, specially among newer humans, if Apple and Google made a payment system that just transferred money between iPhone/Android, it could practically replace cash & cards for a lot of people.
In some countries the vast majority of payments are done via phone apps for national payment systems already, bypassing Visa/Mastercard etc. entirely. Even kids pay for candy by phone.
Steam gift cards are funded by traditional banking products and partnerships. They can’t live without the invisible hand of the banking and credit card industry.
I like this (ab)use of the invisible hand meme. But in economics the “invisible hand” is more of a benevolent deity than a predictable mechanism. I propose “hidden hand” for what credit (card and rating) companies do.
it really is the same invisible hand. the economics invisible hand is doing whatever the capital owners want the economy to do. weighing influence by capital is what makes visa have that power
My first thought is: obviously not. But if 10 years ago you'd asked me if Valve would be able to turn Linux into a serious gaming platform, I'd have answered the same.
All that stemmed from an unlikely but existential fear that Microsoft could lock-down software distribution on Windows. My suspicion is that SteamOS sales and Steam Decks aren't actually profitable, they're just too valuable as a bargaining chip not to invest in. And Valve can invest in them, because they're rich and private.
While Valve bigwigs probably aren't losing sleep over the missed revenue from incest games, having the rest of their revenue stream threatened might make them seek another form of insurance.
I mean, if there's one company that I believe could pull that off is Valve. And maybe Amazon. Maybe the two together. It would be one hell of a JV for both parties.
They don't physically print the notes, but they do magically add money to a person's account when they take a loan. That kind of thing is where most "money" (in banks, anyway) comes from.
It's just like matter and antimatter being created at the same time, money and anti-money (debt) are created at the same time and when they meet, they cancel each other out.
So borrowing literally creates money (and debt), and repaying debts literally deletes money (and debt).
No, interest is a typical zero-sum transaction where the borrower spends and the lender earns. The loan itself represents a temporary net increase in the money supply, appearing from nothing and then vanishing when it is paid back.
Nope. Even a company such as valve would be intimidated by the regulation of setting up their own company payment network outside the traditional banking system.
Maybe crypto is an option but I haven’t seen use in retail. Only speculation instrument.
Apple tried. Failed. Google tried. Failed. Only thing that works is partnering up with existing bank
I think it’s hilarious we allow stuff like Postal or Soldier of Fortune without a question, where the whole focus is on going crazy and murdering a whole bunch of people.
But try to show a sensual human body, instead of one that’s ripped into small pieces, and oh my god, this is going too far!
Gender of who is murdered has a lot to do with it too. I don't think you'll find a video game where you predominantly kill women. The most infamous scene of murder in video games is the Call of Duty mission "No Russian" where you optionally commit terrorism at an airport. If you pay attention you'll notice they kill much more men than women, and made sure that despite pleasant weather none of the women were wearing dresses or skirts. Murder of men is a lot more digestible.
GTA, Elder Scrolls and Fallout series all allow for violence against women and not just the mutual violence of combat or whatever. One small example in one game from a long-ass time ago isn't really a broader trend (not to say that society at large doesn't view violence against men and women differently in different contexts)
This genuinely baffles me. Who cares! It's a video game. It's pixels on a screen. True crime podcasts and movies are a-okay but when its a video game that's where the line is drawn?
I suspect all new frontiers are like this. There was probably a similar outcry over violence in films. And maybe violence in fictional books too. Both long lost from living memory.
It does feel different in a video game, because you're the one pulling the trigger. I played that CoD mission when the game came out, and I felt a bit sick in my stomach playing that mission out. But I'd probably have exactly the same feeling from violence in films if I wasn't so desensitised to it after growing up watching american movies and tv shows.
The people who care signed their names[1]. It's not a secret or anything.
Most of the signatories are associated with Australian anti sex trafficking and exploitation groups, although there are several UK signatories and a couple Americans.
A publication[2] by one of the signatories connects the dots. It's driven by the core idea:
"Pornography Use Shapes and Changes Sexual Tastes"[3] which is supported by "In a survey of men involved in online sexual activities, 47% reported being involved in practice or seeing pornography which previously was not interesting to or even disgusted them."[4]
I'm trying to steelman when I say I believe that the authors would agree that this also applies to games with sexual content.
To address your comment specifically, while I see the appeal of consistent moral framework. I personally believe that moral frameworks trade consistency for completeness and rarely accomplish either. You have to assume the value-perspective of the other in order to understand why consistency might take a back seat to some other value we could only speculate on.
It really should be obvious that the natural objection to "if they banned this then why not X" is "they haven't gotten around to it yet" and that the reason they can be more successful is also that they have put their money where their mouth is and also named themselves, something a counter petition will probably struggle with.
There are still taboos even for pixels on a screen, even for video games. It's a good thing. There should be.
Perhaps you're just saying that you're mostly comfortable with the depiction of some forms of violence in some contexts. But what about other scenarios though? Would you feel the same about a game where the player runs around raping women, or capturing and lynching escaped slaves? It's just pixels!
What if it's a story but with very detailed descriptions? What if that short story is adapted into a video game but it's only a text adventure? What if we add artwork to it, but it's just pixel art? etc etc.
The ability and the freedom to explore the darkest parts of our psyche in a safe, controlled, and fictitious environment IS important. Even if we find certain aspects or fetishes repugnant and distasteful.
I find the idea that payment processors have enough power to dictate the morality of a game market concerning. Given the number of other NSFW fetishistic stuff that is still being permitted on Steam I don't buy the "chargeback" rational AT ALL.
> Would you feel the same about a game where the player runs around raping women, or capturing and lynching escaped slaves? It's just pixels!
Yeah. Same thing. Should be ignored. If someone feels an urge to run around raping women and lynching slaves, I'd much rather they were sitting around at home playing videogames than doing anything else in their spare time. What do you want them to be doing, the traditional creep move of figuring out how to get into positions of power and influence?
In addition taxpayers shouldn't be footing the bill in the war on pixels; if the banks are taking a firm moral stand then clearly the government is involved and that means they're probably spending money on expunging victimless non-crimes which is a low.
I disagree. there shouldnt be any taboos for pixels on a screen
i mean, i can understand a child porn game would be disallowed but we already have anime games where characters that look like children are nearly naked
Then you have an open world game where you can do all sorts of insane stuff, but everyone loses their shit specifically over feeding suffragettes to alligators.
> Republicans literally argue it's better for the country to have school shooters and for survivors and parents to live with PTSD for the rest of their lives than to limit access to military-grade weapons.
Can you quote any Republican who has “literally argued” this or are you just spreading lies that make it easier for you to vilify and dehumanize people who disagree with you politically?
You could just ask, "why do payment processors pressure content vendors not to offer this kind of content". You're starting from the premise that there's some weird puritan thing happening, but there's really nothing puritan about American business culture. There are other explanations!
You can get a long ways just by assuming that the people involved in these transactions are utterly amoral.
Or I suspect in this case there are Puritans with a lot of money who will sue the payment providers if the providers don't block things they think are bad.
Yes the payment provider is making a simple money based business decision, or possibly there is a threat of sanctions against the directors so a personal decision as well.
> You're starting from the premise that there's some weird puritan thing happening
Credit card processors don't have to be puritanical. Instead, puritanical people simply have to be smart enough to figure out that the best way to deplatform content that they disagree with is by putting pressure on their payment processor monopolistic vendors.
Giving in to a pressure campaign by ideological people can be a completely amoral and smart business decision.
> puritanical people ... deplatform content that they disagree
so that begs the question - what if the non-puritanical people also pressure the credit payment processors to stop curtailing to those puritanicals? Why is it effective one way, but not the other?
Probably because people are willing to put their real names on the "We're against incest/rape simulators" petition while most people are not going to be quite so fortright on the "Valve should reinstate the incest/rape simulators" petition.
If by “people involved” you mean folks who consume this kind of content then id totally agree. As soon as you offer crypto or even mildly sexual content your cc abuse rate goes through the roof. Which i suspect is the sole reason for processors getting upset in this case
OK well this is interesting information, what are the connections between crypto or even mildly sexual content exactly that create this phenomenon? I mean they do not seem to be related - if you said crypto or drawings of currency I would say huh, well they are sort of related, but the graph connection between crypto and even mildly sexual content would seem to me to be about as tenuous as that between crypto and meat eating.
So why do these two things cause credit card abuse to go through the roof?
Furthermore if it caused the credit card abuse to go through the roof wouldn't Valve just remove it of their own accord - at some point the abuse would mean money was taken away from Valve right?
Finally the article doesn't give this as a reason why it was removed - it said "violate the rules and standards set forth by our payment processors" - which sure, that may mean "high rates of credit card abuse were reported", but I doubt it.
Anyway, a link to studies of this phenomenon?
ps: I would probably believe credit card abuse increase under crypto, due no doubt to my innate prejudices.
I bet it has higher chargeback percentage too and they probably pay higher fees. iirc if merchant is getting close to 2% fraud to sales ratio, they can get banned for life. It's probably different rules when you're the size of Valve though...
The difference I see is that the player is getting sexual pleasure from what is being simulated in porn type games. I.e. they are trying to simulate the feeling of doing that in real life.
Where as in violent games like soldier of fortune I doubt most players are trying to achieve the feeling of brutally killing another human being.
To be fair, Postal and SOF haven’t been relevant in almost 20 years, though your point stands.
I wonder how a modern implementation of these two games would look given the vast visual improvements since then. I assume UE5 or 6 already comes with a Ghoul-esque framework ready to go. Though I hope they would feature a curmudgeon caricature of Jack Thompson.
Adult content is considered a high risk merchant category - meaning it is susceptible to high chargeback and fraud rates. This is because after someone pays for and consumes adult content, a certain level of "clarity" overcomes them resulting in the execution of chargebacks against the merchant.
It has nothing to do with any sort of puritanical premise.
I don't think that can explain why they're only targeting certain sub-categories of porn, and it's also contradictory to the public statements by Valve:
> We were recently notified that certain games on Steam may violate the rules and standards set forth by our payment processors and their related card networks and banks
Individual games violating "rules and standards" doesn't really fit with prohibiting a category because of high rates of fraud.
That sounds like a reasonable argument. We should force them to make it publicly with data. Maybe even force them to release aggregate statistics every quarter going forward.
That seems disingenuous. (1) in this case, this is a not a tiny fly-by-night wannabe game company. (2) which is good for paying back (or never seeing) the money of chargebacks.
For a new company, the risk of chargebacks might rest on a credit card company (for a little while anyway). But not for a long established one.
Mastercard and Visa needs some serious competition. How come a payment company decides who to partner with and dictates what people use their system for. Ridiculous bullshite.
At the same time those "games" that were affected, well, who on earth pays for that seriously fucked up crap? People need to get a grip. I'd rather send a psycho team to evaluate people who pay for these games...
note: PCGAMER the epitome of games journalism. They didn't even checked which were the affected banned games.
Unconvincing argument considering what was widely known about certain prominent politicians and their adjuncts long before they became as prominent as they are today.
There's no evidence these people were corrupted by games on Steam. Somehow they managed to become who they are by other means.
>Implying that you like the idea of fucking your own children. You have just exposed yourself.
You imply that people that play shooter games like the dea of killing people, and people that play GTA like the ideas of being criminals and killing cops and innocents,
do this people also exposed themselves?
Do you also imply same things for movie watchers and book readers ? And metal listeners are Satanists right ?
If we let the Christian extremists ban something without any proof then they will move to the next thing and soon enough they will ban your favorite video game because it gives you the option to be bisexual. (I read about such extremists moving from Texas to Ruzzia since Texas is not Christian enough, it did not end well)
You could have opined that allowing certain extreme content was not a politically savvy business decision for US-based Valve.
Or that healthy societies have incest taboos for very good reasons, and Valve "having standards" would have had more social (plus lobbying/marketing) value.
Angrily insulting HN's user base, on HN, is not an effective method of persuasion.
This isn’t about “trying to show a sensual human body”, it seems to be about incest porn specifically. There are still plenty of pornographic games available on Steam, even absurdly offensive ones such as the multi-part “Sex with Hitler” series.
I think this is a bit of a strawman. The market for people who get addicted to gruesome gore and are willing to pay money to see it is several orders of magnitude smaller than people willing to pay to see porn or OnlyFans. There is simply far more risk with adult content as a result and a lot more chargebacks from disatisfied customers with a post nut clarity.
The GP highlights a classic observation: America's nearly unique cultural contradiction, where nudity and sex are considered highly offensive, while gore and violence are widely accepted.
This holds true in most other countries as well. Gore/ chopping of appendages is happily accepted and enjoyed (in movies, games etc) by all of India, whilst a simple kiss can be a taboo/ issue.
Japan has some of the weirdest/inconsistent rules around this stuff. Black lines or mozaic partial censorship of genitals, incest/stuff with minors widely available, and then you have some pretty violent uncensored movies, manga/anime, and games (though while it's mostly a China thing, sometimes the blood gets censored to be white instead of red which doesn't actually make it better (also sometimes done for urine)), GTA5 is as popular there as anywhere, but game franchises like Mortal Kombat are banned.
And of course, even in America, we tend to like our violence and gore more over-the-top and simulated. Most people didn't care for liveleak type content, even fewer for not so hard to find footage from ongoing wars.
Japan runs custom scratch-built implementation of ethics reverse engineered from Western cultures. That's all. Consistence is key, but it's consistent only with itself, and nothing else, and explicitly not aligned to Christian religious scripts. Nothing Japanese is compatible with anything unless and until it is the sole dominant standard, like Sony storage media or Apple hardware. Always has been.
So grotesque violence appeals to fewer people, but banning gets focused on material more people find acceptable, even desirable?
This really is a culture/posture driven issue.
It is not as if many people think (emphasis on "think", as in being honest, reasoning carefully and being scientific about evidence) that banning sexy curves in a video game is going to impact the prevalence of sexy curve imagery, or "save" anyone from anything.
Imagine if financial companies required their employees to sign a legal statement committing to not "use porn, escorts, blow ... or spicy video games!" So strange that they don't do that!!
Financial companies like to make a show of having "high standards" when it comes to "controversial" segments of the market, or unfortunate individuals who don't fit the mold, when that gets them a lot of showy theatre for being hard asses to their audience of regulators.
While keeping very quiet, and not looking into things too hard, when it comes to tens of billions of sketchy dollars going through their systems associated with very high net worth criminal actors, organizations and corrupt governments.
Are you saying porn buyers regret and that gore buyers do not? (As a broad generalization). Are you also asserting that's built in to risk-profole that payment gateways have?
I don’t have time for o look at the stats and provide quotes / cite sources but it does seem from what I’ve read on the topic that the more people play gore games the less violence there is in society.
If that’s true, maybe it’s also true that the more people have access to adult content the less babies we create as a society.
> There is simply far more risk with adult content as a result and a lot more chargebacks from disatisfied customers with a post nut clarity.
Do you have any evidence to back this wild claim? I've never heard this argument about chargebacks made before.
I don't think it's about this at all. I think it's about policing content, but then the observation of GP's comment applies: why is violence ok, but sex is not?
Related to this, here's an ACLU filing with the FTC that lays out the content that the credit card companies don't like and how they pressure companies to remove it.
The article calls out “certain adult games” which is vague. It is interesting to note that most of the delisted games were themed specifically around incest.
> The article calls out “certain adult games” which is vague.
A Quick Look at the list has me wishing I hadn’t thought to look at the list.
I suspect the vague “certain adult games” was chosen because it makes it sound more controversial. If the headline was “Valve removed incest-themed games under pressure” there would be a lesser reaction.
Collective Shout, the group behind this petition, has previously gone after more mainstream games, like Detroit Becomes Human, for spurious reasons. I have no doubt they'll use this win and mealy-mouthed language to push for more censorship.
Ah, like a video game version of "Game of Thrones"? None of the payment processors had any issues with taking money for that series. And that was live action.
Exactly. By content, here is a book on Amazon[1] where the author openly tells stories of rape and incest and somehow it's all Ok. Pretty much the same as Game of Thrones and those Steam games.
You are not in agreement. The person you are replying to is being sarcastic. They feel that a HBO produced tv show with incest is art that needs to be protected while an indie dev game with incest is trash that needs to be censored.
Seems like this could be easily solved with legislation without having to invent new currencies. Just make it a law that payment processors are not allowed to discriminate between legitimate goods and services. If the government thinks that sugary water or porn magazines are fine to buy and sell, why should MasterCard have anything to say about it? Payment processors are basically natural monopolies, so they should be able to be regulated.
Violence has no religious morality baggage - religions were extremely violent. Sex, however, has all the baggage from all the angles. Even if we aren't religious, it doesn't matter, religion still dictates huge chunks of our lives and our mindsets. It has thousands of years of inertia.
And yet it is possible to make simulations extreme enough I would not opposed to banning them. There are some things that should not be normalized in society.
It shouldn’t be payment processors doing it unilaterally, I’ll grant that. But I’m not (and I’m sure a great many more of a silent majority) wholly opposed to the outcome.
I love a good “POTUS” conspiracy as much as the next guy but The Late Show cancelation is a simple money game, the show was bleeeding money. If the show was profitable the chance of it being cancelled are same as me dating Beyonce
I would agree with this if this was factual, the money cbs paid via 60 minutes nonsense is same if you were fined a dime for something you did today. so not “massive” but whatever is the exact opposite of massive
The show itself was losing viewership cause who the F watches late night TV these days?
is said late night TV actually expensive though? they have a payong audience, and the whole thing is an ad for whoever is selling a book or movie release.
whats gonna replace that slot that people are gonna watch? a blank screen?
if you have a car that is a money pit you and your family keep bleeding money on to make repairs, would you keep making repairs or get another car? all of TV is a simple money game, shows get canceled, new ones spruce up, they get canceled, some are super successful but run their course, others stink from the get-go. what is going to replace the late show? not sure but whatever it does it better make money for cbs or the same faith awaits it
I don't know what your definition of "actual" free speech is but there are certainly limits to free speech even in the US[0].
And those are just explicit limits. Try supporting Palestine on a college campus or mentioning women or gay people in any government funded scientific publication, or finding a book portraying pro-LGBT content in a library or a school curriculum that portrays slavery in a way that "makes white people feel victimized" in the South.
The limits to speech (in USA) depends (roughly) on if it's intended to incite imminent lawless action and is likely to do so.
Actual speech is communicating ideas or opinions, even distasteful or unpopular ones. The fact that university morons throw a riot if anyone disagrees with them (many such cases), does not affect your right to do so.
Denmark passed a law in 2023 that makes public burning, tearing, stepping on, or defiling holy texts illegal. It's informally called the Quran Law, because everyone knows who doesn't tolerate any criticism of their religion at all. This is one of many limits on speech in Denmark. In my view, speech is either free or it isn't, hence my argument that only USA has free speech.
thats a historical view, but not the most useful now that the second american revolution has happened.
things that lightly annoyed the president is now the decider between legal and illegal speech in the US, and the punishment is death, because nothing the president does that could be part of their regular responsibilities like talking to secret service assasins, can be considered in court proceedings.
Isn't freedom of speech just "you're allowed to say whatever you want", and not "you're entitled to the use of taxpayer dollars to help distribute your message" or "you're entitled to have the government force children to read your message"?
Personally, I won't miss these games either, but it just seems like such a slippery slope to normalize achieving societal/political goals through exerting pressure on infrastructure companies instead of through democratic means.
I totally support this type of pressure being exerted on companies involved in editorializing and providing an audience (e.g. I don't think Valve should be required by law to carry any form of content, just like a publisher can't be forced to print any content it doesn't agree with). But infrastructure, due to being both fundamental to doing business and generally living in a society and very often being at least regionally monopolistic in nature, should be open to anybody that's acting within the law.
And conversely, if something seems ethically or morally unacceptable to a rule-based society, what ought to change is the law.
That's all assuming a functioning democratic and political process, of course, but it generally seems to be possible even in the US, with its strong protections of speech, to limit certain types of speech under obscenity laws, so I don't really get the desire to outsource this inherently political process to private corporations.
There is a world of nuance separating "normalizing" and "banning" something though, that's simply a false dichotomy.
I'd wager most "normal" people would recoil at the idea of eating excrement and, for all my open-mindedness, it's probably not something I'd actively endorse. But banning it is on a whole other leaf. Things can and should be allowed to exist on the fringe.
Otherwise we're moving towards the subject of the T.S. Eliot quote where "everything that is not forbidden will be compulsory, and everything not compulsory will be forbidden."
The term “silent majority” has a very specific political meaning.
But, in what way do you think those opposing “extreme” content being consumed by their fellow citizens are silent? State governments across the country are clamoring to censor all sorts of things, presumably to satisfy their constituents.
For the people who disagree: would you really be interested in seeing Child Grooming Simulator 25 on steam? I think we can almost all reasonably agree that at least this sort of content should not be sold on there.
I don't have to be "interested" in seeing something on steam to disagree with nkrisc.
I don't care about 99.9%+ of the games on steam, that doesn't mean I want them gone.
When we start saying "no content restrictions besides illegal stuff", your hyperbolic question becomes legitimate in a way that it's not when we're talking about Doom.
Are you saying the people who are petitioning Steam to remove porn games are playing the porn games themselves and simultaneously pretending porn games don't exist on Steam?
It's a slippery slope. It's not real but can certainly, by definition, create a situation that mimics reality to the point of assisting someone at committing a real crime that they couldn't possibly commit without the simulation.
The slippery slope is in banning speech. If you want to make the claim that simulated sex leads to crimes we have been over this a thousand times with violence in games. There is no connection, you are without a leg to stand on except your own religious indoctrination.
It's about time that credit cards were treated like money and this kind of behaviour forbidden. When you pay with cash the notes and coins don't refuse to be handed over because the issuing bank has an opinion about what you are buying, it should be the same for all payment methods.
The discussion seems to be mostly about the moral issues, but it seems likely that the titles being a 'magnet for scams and chargebacks' is more likely the cause.
Payment processors have ways of passing some of the chargeback risks onto the stores, and it's not like Steam itself is chargeback central. If you just want free games, pirating them is extremely easy, and trying to abuse chargebacks gets you banned.
It's not as straightforward as that. It's more like scammers getting other people to buy gift cards which are redeemed in steam and other games then the value getting moved around as in-game currency between game accounts (game-bucks, special items) before being cashed out again to make tracing very hard. Essentially laundering. I assume certain titles attract scammers because people will not want to pursue the claims due to embarrassment.
Why would Mastercard give a hoot that a game has boobs in it? They care about loosing money.
If Valve limited credit card purchases to PG games, but let customers purchase other games via crypto, then payment processors couldn’t complain about alleged high chargeback rates or association with adult content.
I imagine payment processors wouldn’t love this solution, but at that point they’re just asking for full editorial control, and we should resist.
For those thinking is only related to chargebacks and fraud, it is not.
VISA and Mastercard have been banning a lot of content that is not porn but has political values that are disapproved by certain billionaires and investors. There is a bunch of links I wanted to post about, such as US billionaires bragging he personally called VISA CEO to ban content on PH or japanese politicians mad at the censorship of japanese art with certain values because of these companies. But I am on phone walking home so if anyone else has such links please post.
They've colluded with the US federal government in the past on those issues as well. "Operation Choke Point" was ostensibly about fraud, but included transactions related to firearms in its scope. As a result, several major banks and payment processors dropped legitimate firearms dealers. For a while it got to the point that I was helping a couple of local gun stores contract with "high risk" payment processors that also serve the porn industry and get set up.
To this day if you're on a gun forum and mention that you use Bank of America, people will pile on to tell you horror stories of both companies and individuals having their accounts closed and funds held for weeks or months after completely legal transactions. In one case in particular, they claimed it happened after buying a backpack at a gun store.
Again, these are 100% legitimate and legal businesses. Federally licensed (FFL) gun stores had trouble for years even keeping a working business account. It was clearly not about fraud, at least not in practice.
Politics completely aside, the financial landscape for gun stores today looks a lot like the cannabis industry: a few institutions are quietly known in those communities to allow them to operate, but many choose to do business only in cash and most prefer it if given the option. The porn industry is similar from what I can see.
Try buying a second hand car and you want cash from the bank. Used to be very easy, but now you need to declare what your spending your money on.
You sold your car. O, its over 7 or 10k, well, this is getting reported to the local IRS. Where is that cash coming from, questions, questions?
Over here they are even cracking down on stuff like ebay, amazon because some people run a business on those sites and do not report the taxes. Result: If you make over 3k in the year on ebay, you need to provided your tax number, or ebay closes your account. And above 3k, it get reported to the IRS.
But wait, what happens if your a foreign national from some specific Asian countries and want to open a bank account? Refused, refused, refused... But you need a bank account for a lot of basic things. Well, tough luck. Lets not talk account closing issues.
And that is the EU, and just normal people. Nothing tax evasion, guns, or whatever. Just everybody putting up umbrella's to be sure, not understanding that when everybody does it, it really screws with people.
They are going crazy with this over regulation. Yes, i understand you want to fight black money but the people who get the big amounts will have ways to hide it. Your just hurting the normal people wanting to know what everybody is doing exactly with every cent.
You see this gradual effort to slowly phase out cash. Cashless payment are getting encouraged, cash withdrawals cost your money more and more, more questions regarding origins (so you say f it, and use bank deposits with release approvals).
Its not a surprise that we seen the increase in cryto usage (and the efforts of governments to control that also).
Your bank will file a report with FinCEN that says that you withdrew (or deposited, or transferred, or whatever) the money. They can/will also separately report suspicious transactions, including patterns of transactions that seem designed to evade the reporting requirements.
Not sure. Apparently walmart you can cash up to 7500 for half the year and 5000 other half for tax return purposes I guess. Still maybe you can get paid weekly instead of biweekly.
Of course it's not. Steam already has a very generous refund policy. It's hard to imaging the chargeback rate would be that high even for nsfw games when you can simply refund. Refund takes about 3~4 clicks on steam website; Chargeback takes a phone call with your bank and can get your steam account locked.
And people who laundry money out stolen cards won't do that with nsfw games. They'll do that with CSGO knifes.
Trump changed banking regulations so that "reputation" can no longer be a reason for banks to "derisk" customers after crypto industry outcry, but the reason to exit customers must be factual money laundering or similar reason. But the change does concern cards, as payments are not under FDIC surveillance.
This is not an issue oof payment processors. It is an issue of Visa and Mastercard duopoly, whom use payment processors as middlemen in order to be able to push their own "rules" onto businesses and get away clean.
The games that got banned this time, even before considering their depiction of incest, are often of such poor quality that it's difficult to even call them 'games.' Valve itself should have removed them from Steam long before payment processors had to step in. Defending these kinds of games is like equating Blue is the Warmest Color with a random PornHub video, simply because they both contain sexual acts. If Baldur's Gate 3 ever gets banned, then you can truly make a fuss.
It looks like the affected games are all rated "Adult Only" on Steam.
The games you mention are all sold without adult content on Steam, and the customer has to visit the publisher's website to download a patch restoring said content
Doesn't matter if anyone actually buys content or products the networks object to per their policies. If it's being offered and payment is accepted on a checkout that shows the networks' logos, merchants and their payment service providers can get into trouble.
In Europe, Wero[1] has a chance to become the de-facto payment system, once it's supported by more banks in more countries and adds online payments functionality.
Denmark has seen a trend where their national card network (Dankort, operating at the equivalent level to Visa and Mastercard) is seeing reduced usage.
Dane here, and I just don't see the point of using Apple or Google pay. Aside from not wanting American tech interfering in, or data harvesting, my finances, it's not any easier to use. I just touch my card to the terminal and payment happens. Some times, or if the amount is over some limit, I have to enter a pin. I cringe every time I see someone contorting their arm to pay with their watch. It's tech for the sake of tech.
Adult business is legitimate business in many parts of the world and companies using their monopoly to suppress it should be a case for an Investigation.
Instant payment systems that go direct from bank to bank, assuming the banks, the government or any other intermediaries don't also decide to not allow it.
Those solutions might work for some people in some countries, but I would argue that it's not acceptable for the vast majority of customers, and they would lose a very significant portion of revenue.
There's now Ethereum, Base and Solana featuring US dollar stablecoins and significantly cheaper fees. If you want to go a step further and eliminate the stablecoin issuer's counterparty risk you could even pay in the base asset of ETH. Shopify allows payments from crypto now, so Steam should try it again.
Even stablecoins aren't so great for the environment. Proof of stake isn't as bad, but also doesn't offer much beyond traditional systems once KYC is needed.
Stablecoins are great. The only way to be debanked is if the stablecoin issuer explicitly blacklists your address, which is a public act which they will be forced to justify.
And Ethereum's Proof of Stake algorithm is highly censorship resistant. That's why it took seven years to design.
It absolutely does affect me for disproportionately fraudulent activity to exist on the same system I use for routine payments. I don’t want to subsidize cc abusers with the cc processing fees I implicitly pay.
Because those sectors are particularly difficult for processors in terms of fraud and abuse. If your niche is so disproportionately problematic that cc companies don’t think it’s worth it to try to make money off you, then you should find a different solution.
The simple fact is, Visa/MC don't want to deal with porn because the number of chargebacks and fraud from porn purchases is significant and a huge outlier compared to most other charges. Their crusade against processing charges for adult material isn't about purity, it's simply business.
I'm not sure I buy the chargeback angle. It's commonly trotted out as a reason card companies would enforce censorship, but it doesn't make sense with the actions they take. Chargeback fees are paid by the merchant regardless of the chargeback's success, and are supposed to cover the costs of administering it (and then some). The very selective rules applied here are pretty odd from that angle too, if adult content chargebacks/fraud is the issue, then all of it should be the issue, not small niches.
Fraud is likely more realistic of an issue, but that's probably an issue with games in general, not just adult titles.
There are already high-risk merchant accounts with higher fees and cash reserve requirements, but AFAIK companies like Valve aren't being given any options other than comply or be destroyed.
I doubt it. If that were the case, I think they would only be complaining to Valve about the number of chargebacks issued from the Steam store. Not about genres-that-are-correlated-with-chargebacks-in-other-contexts.
Given Valve's generous refund policies, and the fact that a steam store purchase on your credit card statement looks quite innocent, and that the credit card companies didn't complain to Valve about chargebacks but about content, my guess is there are hardly any chargebacks, and this is just about moral purity.
Their generous refund policy, and more importantly their very-non-generous chargeback policy. If you chargeback a Steam purchase, your account is locked.
That's not true, anti-sex work and anti-porn activists have specifically been pressuring payment processors to assume these policies. The processors as the critical control point of this whole thing was identified decades ago and conservative christian think tanks have been pursuing this path since then.
This is part of a long-term plan to de facto ban lgbtq content without having to deal with first amendment protections. First have the payment processors ban explicit content, then have queer content categorized as explicit.
If they continued to carry any of the games that were singled out for removal by Visa and Mastercard, they would not be able to accept credit card payments for anything else in their store. This same drama has played out the same way with countless other online services.
Controversial games being restricted to purchase only with Steam Points. The credit card is only ever charged to buy points, which can then be used to purchase items on the store. Similar to fortnite.
My understanding is that it's not just the processor, but Visa/Mastercard themselves have rules against certain types of merchants/products... they really have a monopoly on credit cards in general so you have to play by their rules.
You're right, but it's slightly more complicated than that.
My understanding is that payment processors are obligated to follow the policies of Visa/MasterCard, AmEx, and Discover, but that those parties' policies don't explicitly ban these specific things for sale. Instead, they "strongly encourage" processors to ban them in their user agreements under the implicit threat of their risk level being increased, which in turn impacts the fees they pay to the credit card companies.
I've not been deep in this world since ~2014, but at that time the only processor I could find that wasn't specific to the porn industry, offered physical terminals, had reasonable (if high) fees, and didn't ban legal transactions in their user agreement was PAI ("Payment Alliance International"). A quick look at their site today shows that they seem to have been acquired by Brinks, so that may no longer be the case.
They could support a stablecoin like USDC and start pushing people to that. No censorship and lower fees. Valve broke ground with Steam, they could do it again.
The problem with that is that you usually end up using traditional payment rails (e.g. a Visa debit card) to "invisibly" buy the stablecoin and then you're subject to their rules and fees again.
Early crypto believer here. My first purchase of Bitcoin was at $0.23. I've been through the ups and downs, used the proceeds to buy physical assets over the years (land, and one vehicle), and lost interest in the "community" shortly after Ethereum gained initial popularity. I still hold some crypto, mostly Bitcoin but also Ethereum, Monero, and a handful of altcoins that don't amount to enough to bother withdrawing.
My hot take take: Crypto still fills a valuable role, and will still "take over" the global financial system both at the individual and institutional level. Whether that's Bitcoin, another coin, or something new created by the institutions themselves is yet to be seen.
You're right that it's "tainted", of course. That's why I think we're in a (hopefully) long slump in adoption. I think that will rapidly change if and when the US Dollar loses its place as the world's reserve currency.
At some point there will be a war or significant political disruption. A large part of the world will want to divest itself of dollars, and none of the state-backed alternatives will be stable enough for their needs. That's when we'll see a shift to crypto - first some international institutions that do business across ideological borders, then the rest of the internationals, then individuals.
Unless and until that happens, things will continue to slowly grow. The boom/bust cycle will keep going, getting longer and lower magnitude over time. There's still money to be made in speculation, but that's not what interests me :)
> At some point there will be a war or significant political disruption. A large part of the world will want to divest itself of dollars, and none of the state-backed alternatives will be stable enough for their needs. That's when we'll see a shift to crypto - first some international institutions that do business across ideological borders, then the rest of the internationals, then individuals.
Sorry how would crypto end up more stable than any candidates for a reserve currency? The only thing even remotely stable in the crypto world are stablecoins which... are pegged to the dollar (the actual reserve currency) which is already unstable in your scenario.
Is it the case the Mastercard/Visa will reject a site that has such content even if you can only purchase it using ValveBucks or PayPal or something? That seems plausible.
You need to be more specific. Conflating "adult content" with porn is both problematic is masks the real issue. A large majority of games Valve sells are adult content. But as you can imagine grand theft auto is not causing a lot of political backlash, despite the objectionable content.
But is there a good reason to do a chargeback if you can easily refund it? Yes if someone stole the CC and used it buy something on Steam, but is that the concern or that someone buys something with a CC on their own account, and then chargebacks instead of refunding?
The fact that these were specifically incest games makes me think a title was somehow involved in distributing CSAM, which is often why Visa/MC crack down on porn websites.
But it is possible that Visa sensibly and correctly said "anyone who makes or purchases such a game is a despicable scumbag, and we shouldn't assume the financial risk of dealing with them."
That's a pretty wild idea for what someone would be putting on steam as a visual novel. And why would they need to be pressured into removing horrible illegal content?
Or you think one person did that and it made the credit cards decide any story with incest would be the same? That would be ridiculous on their part.
I think the government should be the one deciding what makes someone qualify as a despicable scumbag, not a private payment processor that is essentially acting as a utility provider. For the same reason, I also don't think an electric company should be allowed to shut cancel your building's electricity if they don't like your mismatched socks.
The good old USA, when you can show someone bashing someone else's head with brain spilling out and it might get an R rating. But show a nipple and holy shit we have crossed the line.
The monetary layer is not the one where bad behavior should be policed. Being able to send and receive money is a basic utility that no government or bank should be able to deprive someone of. That's why I support cryptocurrency.
Tangent, but each of those events should be a reminder of why we must fight to never, ever live in a cashless society.
Because once big entities control the pipeline of what you can buy and you have no alternative, they basically can dictate what you can and can't do.
We saw that during the wikileak story when visa prevented Europeans to give to the org despite the fact it was perfectly legal to do so on their soil.
Just like data handled by an Apple device is not really your data since they can prevent you from doing what you want with it, money handled by Visa is only your money until they don't like what you do with it.
That one must be defended, since it was abuse of real people happening at scale and with full knowledge thereof, and PornHub's status-quo response was at best "do nothing and hope it goes away". Mind, the Justice Department also went after them (and won), so we can't even resort to "CC networks shouldn't be the ones enforcing this." At what stage of a court case is it appropriate to expect third parties to start breaking their business relationships with the defendant?
The weird part about the first-world sexual liberation mindset (usually said about feminism, but not limited thereto) is that it actively ignores how massively abusive sexual liberties very often and easily become.
I live in a red state in the South. I'd say about 2/3 of the women I know well enough to be confident of their politics to that degree of detail would describe themselves as both feminists and anti-abortion/pro-life.
If you want to put a name to it, they're basically second-wave feminists with a few third-wave beliefs tacked on.
The real lesson here is that politics are nuanced, and the US party dichotomy doesn't come close to covering it.
I consider myself an AnCap (shocking given my username, I know), but grew up here surrounded by Republicans. I fit in well enough overall because this is where I developed my "social mask" in the first place. I lived in a community with nearly directly opposite politics (Charlottesville, VA) for a few years and found that I fit in pretty well with that crowd as well.
I share enough with both parties that I can have conversations on things that I agree with them on and connect to the point that they assume that I'm "one of them". Invariably, once conversation turns to other topics I'm accused of being a member of the other party. It's to the point that it amuses me when it happens, and I frankly enjoy being in a place where I can connect with most everyone and serve as a sort of translator: I've spent enough time "in enemy territory" from their perspectives that I can explain the other side's position fairly and with empathy while explicitly not holding that position. It makes for stimulating conversation with little risk of offense.
> Because "anti-abortion/pro-life" removes a right from women. Trading the rights of a developed adult for the rights of a hypothetical future person.
Their perspective is that abortion is killing a human being. Given that, it’s entirely consistent.
> What does ancapistanism have to do with it?
Nothing, other than that I was providing some context on where I’m coming from.
> Is there a non-religious reason to be against the right to choose abortion up to 24 weeks of pregnancy?
While religion is certainly a factor for a lot of these people, this question doesn’t make sense to me. Is there a non-religious reason to be against killing any person, regardless of age?
The base difference in perspective is that the other side here believes that the fetus is a human being, with all the rights that come with it.
Well social/religious conservatives often think the child has rights even during pregnancy so it's not as simple as the mothers rights.
The libertarian view tends to much more favour the parents rights to make choices for their children if I remember correctly, and obviously favour the option where the government isn't deciding for them.
My personal belief is that life begins at conception. As a result, I’m opposed to abortion in all cases.
… but I’m also an anarchist, and therefore believe it is emphatically not the state’s role to make these types of decisions for people.
I don’t think there is a “right answer” here in terms of policy. Some large portion of the people will see it as a violation of their rights no matter how extreme or nuanced the line is drawn.
> Is there a non-religious reason to be against the right to choose abortion up to 24 weeks of pregnancy?
Of course there is. It's not hard to construct an argument to that effect either. For example: let's agree for the sake of argument that a newborn has moral rights, and that gametes do not. It doesn't make much sense to give the fetus moral rights only based on its physical location, therefore at some point between conception and birth the fetus gains moral rights. No matter what point n we choose, the objection "why is one day earlier any better" seems pretty persuasive. Therefore, by induction, the only point for assigning rights which can't be argued against in that way is at conception. Thus, we should disallow abortion so we aren't depriving the fetus of its rights.
I'm not saying that's a bulletproof argument. Indeed the argument doesn't even need to be correct for my point. My point is that nothing about that argument requires any religious belief whatsoever. So it is possible. I'm also quite certain that a cleverer person than I could construct a better argument which still doesn't require any religious dogma. This is an ethical topic, not a religious one. Obviously religion has a lot to say on ethics, but that's no reason to believe that secular arguments against abortion can't exist.
> No matter what point n we choose, the objection "why is one day earlier any better" seems pretty persuasive. Therefore, by induction
That's not persuasive at all. It's not just not "bulletproof", it's blatantly wrong. Also you can make the same argument in the other direction.
> Indeed the argument doesn't even need to be correct for my point. My point is that nothing about that argument requires any religious belief whatsoever.
They wanted someone to give a plausible argument that isn't religious.
> no reason to believe that secular arguments against abortion can't exist
I care about the merits of positions that people actually have, not theoretical positions.
And in the general case, if nobody can be found that has a simple position, that is a reason to believe it's not a coherent position.
Honestly, this whole Visa/Mastercard control thing feels a lot like realizing you’ve been following rules that don’t really fit you. It’s tough to break out of it. But FedNow is an interesting option. It lets banks move money instantly, 24/7, with no card networks involved, so less hassle with the content policing. It’s not a magic fix (still early days, only works in the US), but it shows there’s another way if you’re willing to step outside the old patterns. Sometimes that’s what you need to actually move forward. And no I'm not a Fednow shill. Has anyone tried Kagi btw? ;)
It is a shame that it takes payment processors to get Valve to do even the bare minimum curation of their store. IMO the thousands of outright bad games and ai slop asset flips and weirdo porn that verges on outright illegal content in many countries should have never been allowed in the first place. All of this leads back to various executives at Valve essentially doing no actual work and refusing to hire anybody because a huge part of their corporate culture is to keep headcount low while chasing constant growth.
It's interesting that Valve sort of put themselves in this situation by opting not to police their store anymore.
I'm personally a fan of fewer restrictions on content in video games and fewer "gatekeepers" but it's kind of inevitable that people would get upset when you chose to allow people to sell games like "Sex With Hitler" and "Pimp Life: Sex Simulator". Deciding to allow that content on your store and simultaneously not going to bat for it is weird, it's like they decided to just get the porn money while they could as a short-term boost to revenue.
Itch.io still has fewer restrictions but I assume they'll eventually have to clamp down too once payment processors cut them off - they don't have the financial resources to fight it like Valve or Epic do.
Interestingly Nintendo has as of late relaxed their restrictions too, you can find porn-adjacent shovelware on the Switch eShop despite their history of being very censorious. I wonder if payment processors will successfully push them around too or if Nintendo is too big to get pushed around.
> it's kind of inevitable that people would get upset when you chose to allow people to sell games like "Sex With Hitler" and "Pimp Life: Sex Simulator".
The problem isn't some people being upset, it's that a single digit number of companies effectively control the ability for anyone else in the world to do business with them. Those companies get lobbied as much as politicians but with no accountability and any overreach being far less visible. And no freedom of speech rules.
Simulated "immoral" activity could be considered a moral gray area. If nothing else, morality is subjective.
So I think it's reasonable to argue for private, individual consumption of morally subjective material (not least of which is the logistical difficulty of preventing such things), as well as the right to create and sell such things. (You or I might approve of or oppose those things, but that's a different argument from what I make below.)
Aside from that, I don't think Valve or a payment processor is obligated to be a neutral party. Whether it might come from collective consumer backlash or whoever makes decisions for an organization deciding what they will or will not allow to flow through their system, I think they too should have the right to allow or ban things. If publishers and consumers want their morally gray content, so be it, but don't feel entitled to have Steam and VISA along for the ride if they don't want to be.
Hypothetically, Valve might prefer Steam be neutral, because money. But then they have the option to fight their payment processor or look for alternatives, rather than "forcing" their payment processor to be a part of something that the payment processor opposes.
TL;DR when a morally subjective issue involves a lot of parties, every party should have the right to "opt out" if they are morally opposed. (in my opinion)
Payment processors banning companies from using them for anything other than illegal use or fraud issues seems like pretty egregious overreach to me.
They shouldn't be able to leverage their nigh monopoly on modern payment processing to choose winners and losers in the marketplace.
They are using pornography as a wedge issue to establish that they get to dictate what companies are allowed to exist in the modern distributed market.
It would be entirely reasonable to legally require them to act blindly towards retailers, with restrictions needing to be based on universally applied financial criteria.
Card payments have become inseparable from modern life.
Regulate them as a financial utility. The electric company or water company can't refuse to hook up a business just because the owner doesn't like that business.
I think the trouble here stems from the lack of alternatives to the small group of payment processors. The near-monopoly allows their choices to override the choice of all the other involved groups, and almost no viable alternatives exist for Valve to move to if they disagree.
well, something like this can't be fixed overnight. I think Valve have more than earned a benefit of the doubt with this kind of stuff. I don't know if they are thinking on ways around this issue or not, but I would bet highly that they are. Problem is the credit card companies have them (and everyone else) by the balls because any attempt to continue hosting those gmaes but accept alternative payments for them would be retaliated against and MC et al might cut them off entirely, which would be devastating. I'm not sure there is a good solution to this that doesn't involve change of law/regulation i.e. lobbying
In the early 2000's kink.com put together a coalition and told the credit card companies to stick their censorship rules where the sun don't shine, and they are still taking credit card payments... The video game industry is plenty big enough to wield similar influence.
Payments companies successfully got valve to stop purveying weapons grade incest/child-porn/rape themed smut that is barely a game?
Nabokov was a great author and Lolita was the work of a great author who turned his pen/typewriter to a detestable subject leading to innumerable questions about art.
These guys are just z-graders who get off on non-consensual sexual interactions involving children.
Valve absolutely should not be publishing this stuff.
I don't know how bad these specific games were, but meanwhile, OnlyFans pornographers continue to use sites like Twitch to advertise their work to teens, and Pornhub continues to operate, despite claims that they profit from sex trafficking amongst other things (https://traffickinghubpetition.com/)
Seems strange to go after obscure videogames (which presumably don't feature real human beings) in this way. Unless they really are unusually extreme?
Why do payment processors do stuff like this? Is there some regulation that requires them to? I get that they don't want to process fraudulent transactions, but I'd think the response to a higher percentage of fraud from some industry would be to charge them more. It doesn't make sense to me why they would be concerned about the content of games, as long as everything is legal and the parties concerned aren't subject to sanctions.
Some of these games seem completely abhorrent, and probably illegal in more restrictive jurisdictions, but not the United States. And I've not seen any suggestion they're funding terrorism or something. So I'm perplexed.
One factor is the ongoing campaigns from number of moral crusading groups who lobby them to cut off payment processing for things they don't approve of. NCOSE has been working for decades on the project, and targeting credit card companies has been a successful tactic for them for a decade or so.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/visa-and-mastercard-ar...
[2] https://www.newsweek.com/why-visa-mastercard-being-blamed-on...
[3] https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstreams/761eb6c3-9377-...
Targeting them with what?
What could possibly hold enough leverage that Visa would jeopardize their sweet gig as an ideology-neutral, essential piece of American infrastructure siphoning 1-2% off of every dollar of consumer spending?
The leverage is that the activists will potentially be able to draw the ire of the government. Visa and MC get away with absolute murder in terms of the size of the fees that they charge in the US. Most developed countries don't allow that. The US government could easily regulate them (as they already do with debit card fees) or use anti-trust law against the obvious duopoly charging exorbitant prices. Because of this situation, Visa and MC have a very strong incentive to crack down on things the government doesn't like.
The unspoken arrangement is that the government allows them to keep charging a de facto sales tax on a massive portion of the economy as long as they cooperate and de facto ban things that the government wants banned but can't ban themselves due to that pesky constitution.
Tbh that's quite alarming what you've just said, and I'm not saying about government. I'm saying about an additional huge sales tax. I understand that wiring money or sending them in an envelope is the thing of past, but e.g. in my country and in whole EU the digital payment is promoted as the only righteous, because "cash is only used by gangsters and human traffickers" etc. And this is really playing against us and pushing us to the duopoly you've mentioned
Credit cards are much less heavily relied on in Europe than in the USA. Europe basically runs on debit cards that every kid can have and where the fees are minuscule. There are countless banks providing the service and everything is highly regulated. On top of that, Europe still curbed Visa and Mastercard several times for antitrust behaviour. And the idea that physical money primarily aids social fraud, money laundering and other illegal activities is pretty well established. They even killed the 500€ bank note, because it was almost exclusively used by criminals and most normal people never even touched one, much less used one for legit transactions.
> the idea that physical money primarily aids social fraud, money washing and other illegal activities is pretty well established
I think that's very hyperbolic. In france most people I know carry cash and use it regularly (not as much as cards), the gen X and older tend to find it strange to pay for small sums (eg bread) with card. Germany is infamously almost cash-only. In many Central Europe countries, shops taking card is not a given (Bulgaria, Hungary).
> Germany is infamously almost cash-only.
Let's not exaggerate. While I am often enough exasperated at how often certain restaurants or bars will still only accept cash (or sometimes EC card), I'm still able to do about 90% of my transactions by card.
> And the idea that physical money primarily aids social fraud, money washing and other illegal activities is pretty well established. They even killed the 500€ bank note, because it was almost exclusively used by criminals and most normal people never even touched one, much less used one for legit transactions.
At least in Germany in particular older people prefer to pay cash if possible - this gives the banks also less leverage with respect to abhorent fees. Since many people in Germany neither trust the banks nor the government anymore, acting this way is very rational.
Also the arguments concerning cash restrictions are seen very differently by the population: since there existed two oppressive regimes on German soil in the 20th century, a lot of people realize that the restrictions on cash are just another step towards restrictions of the citizen's freedoms (thus I am honestly surprised all the time that a lot of US-Americans who are so freedom-loving and distrust the government concerning the restrictions of civil rights are not in love of cash).
Thus, in Germany there exists the saying "Bargeld ist gelebte Freiheit" [cash is lived freedom].
> At least in Germany in particular older people prefer to pay cash if possible
Sure, but that's for small, everyday amounts. For values upwards of 500€, I think the familiarity of paying cash would be swamped by the nervousness of carrying way too much money with you, what if it gets stolen?
> this gives the banks also less leverage with respect to abhorent fees
The only time my bank has ever charged me a per-transaction fee was, ironically, when I withdrew cash abroad using my credit card.
> Since many people in Germany neither trust the banks nor the government anymore, acting this way is very rational.
Speak for yourself, this is either heavily overstated or a fringe opinion, luckily. Most people definitely do trust both government and banks to a sensible degree, even if they don’t like some decisions.
Some people like you apparently also don’t appreciate the immense freedom of SEPA transactions. Sure it’s good to have cash as an escape hatch for the occasional transaction off the record, but for almost everything else bank transfers are safe, inaccessible to third parties, free from fees, and easy to use. And above all else, we have a working democracy and not an oppressive regime? This whole debate often feels very disconnected and overblown in Germany.
Croatian banks didn't get the memo about SEPA; I get charged to receive a SEPA transfer!
I'm from Croatia but I don't send money abroad, I only use credit cards and banks locally. As far as I can see from our local banks' websites, they implement SEPA standards. There must be some sort of misunderstanding or error.
> I am honestly surprised all the time that a lot of US-Americans who are so freedom-loving and distrust the government concerning the restrictions of civil rights are not in love of cash
I suspect it's a combination of factors, one of them being that US cash has absolutely awful usability compared to the Euro.
> absolutely awful usability compared to the Euro
In what way? One unpleasant discovery I made in Portugal (and also saw to some extent in Spain) was that ATM’s - every one I could find, including those that were bank-owned at physical branches - had a limit of EUR200 per transaction regardless of my own bank limit (at USD1000/day, that should have been at least EUR800).
And while convenience stores, fast food, etc., won’t take a bill over $20 (which is understandable but really a trifling sum when you consider inflation - it’s a fast-food breakfast for three people), many other businesses are happy to do so. Nothing above $100 is in circulation anymore, and inflation means that $100 in 1980 is worth over $400 in today’s money even by government figures. A $20 bill 45 years ago was worth almost $100 in today’s money. And, of course, cash declaration rules have not updated the amounts to reflect this.
Where may I read about anything supporting your statement "cash is primarily used for illegal activities"? I highly doubt that this is the case, unless there are more illegal activities out there than legal ones.
I would assume the metric isn’t number of transactions, but total transaction value. It’s really uncommon to pay for really expensive things (e.g., houses, cars, boats) in cash, and doing so almost always means that the duffel bag of cash came from shady means.
OK, but look at the original statement, that cash is mainly used for illegal activities. I do not think that is true.
Now, check this out:
> Cash was the most frequently used payment method at the POS in the euro area and was used in 52% (59%) of transactions, but the share of cash payments has declined.
> Cash was the most frequently used payment method for small-value payments at the POS, in line with previous surveys. For payments over €50, cards were the most frequently used payment method.
> Cash was the dominant means of payment in P2P transactions, accounting for 41% of such payments. Cards and mobile apps were used for 33%, credit transfers for 9% and instant payments for 6% of P2P transactions.
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/ecb_surveys/space/html/ecb.s...
This is to be expected though:
> The most frequently used instrument for online payments was cards, representing 48% (51%) of transactions. The share of e-payment solutions, i.e. payment wallets and mobile apps, was 29% (26%).
> The large majority of recurring payments were made using direct debit, with credit transfers ranking in second place.
Regarding privacy:
> A majority of euro area consumers (58%) said they were concerned about their privacy when performing digital payments or other banking activities.
I think they genuinely care about privacy and are not thugs.
Here for example: https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/cash...
> And the idea that physical money primarily aids social fraud, money laundering and other illegal activities is pretty well established.
I'd rather have that than a complete loss of privacy.
Yes - and Japanese gay porn games are an easy soft target before they go on to ban things they really want to ban. We've been through this before in the 70s-90s.
> We've been through this before in the 70s-90s.
What do you mean?
The Durbin amendment (regulating debit interchange in the US) and its EU equivalent aren't regulating Visa and Mastercard scheme fees, but rather interchange fees, which Visa and Mastercard set, but issuing banks earn.
Of course scheme fees are ultimately at least partially paid from interchange, but lower interchange is primarily a problem for issuing banks, not the networks.
The Durbin amendment in particular was also supposed to foster competition between networks (by mandating each debit issuer to support at least two unaffiliated networks per card), but given that only very few places accept only debit cards, that didn't work out quite as well as intended in terms of bringing down both interchange and scheme fees via market forces.
sounds like the fix is counter activism to remove the leverage these interest groups have
> Targeting them with what?
> What could possibly hold enough leverage that Visa would jeopardize their sweet gig as an ideology-neutral, essential piece of American infrastructure siphoning 1-2% off of every dollar of consumer spending?
The US courts.
Visa was specifically pulled into the lawsuit against PornHub; here's Visa's official statement on the matter: https://corporate.visa.com/en/sites/visa-perspectives/compan...
The lawsuit is still ongoing.
Pressure campaigns could lead to laws regulating the card industry, self regulation prevents some of that (see movies and games ratings agencies, which avoid government ratings coming in and potentially connecting an 18+ rating with outright bans like we’ve seen in the UK and Australia in the past)
Threats of exposure and boycotting/blacklisting the card making room for competitors.
Plenty of religious groups have the money to be able to start the "holy card". And there's plenty of businesses that'd be giddy to accept Jesus card.
Consider, for example, companies like hobby lobby or Chick-fil-A banning visa and promoting Jesus card.
It also wouldn't take much for such a card to advertise itself as kid friendly.
Thinking about it, I'm a little surprised this hasn't happened already.
What competitors? You mean a "Jesus Card" issued by Visa or Mastercard? At this point, it's basically an oligopoly. The only other real player is Amex, and they're a very distant third.
Amex isn't really a competitor, since they're both card issuer and network in one. (I believe they have a few third party issued cards these days, but it's not a significant part of their business. The same goes for Discover.)
Let’s be real, Chick-fil-A banning Visa would likely result in its bankruptcy.
Starting a holy card that doesn’t work at gas stations etc is an extremely uphill battle.
Don't know about that. Costco banned Mastercard and they're doing fine.
They wouldn’t need to create a new payment processor if they could just swap to Mastercard. Thus it was also implicitly excluded by Chick-fil-A in their proposal.
> would likely result in its bankruptcy.
Maybe? Depends on how customers are sold on the mission. If it's sold as protecting children I could see a number of people ditching their cards.
> Starting a holy card that doesn’t work at gas stations etc is an extremely uphill battle.
True. It'd take a large amount of initial capital and would likely need a targeted and regional rollout with some nice incentives to the merchants.
Yeah, 30 years ago this might've been able to get off the ground. Today? Not a prayer.
Do you mean like Greenlight?
Because Visa's revenue is not dependent upon ideological neutrality.
They're half of a duopoly.
One thing to notice is the group that claims responsibility for this is some kind of funky radfem puritan mixture from Australia. They campaigned against titles like GTA V, Detroit Become Human AND abortion pills.
Since they ran a campaign to ban GTA V from stores I can say for sure they are not stopping on fringe content like eroge porn shovelware.
They tried to do the same to OnlyFans, but lost that battle
Onlyfans actually made financial sense, though, because chargeback rates are very high. This move makes no financial sense at all.
Didn't onlyfans severely limit the type of content creators could make and distribute through the platform, just like valve here?
Yep. Even showing lactation gets you banned now.
Any animal or just human?
> Didn't onlyfans severely limit the type of content creators could make and distribute through the platform, just like valve here?
Well, this coverage identifies two restrictions that Valve is enforcing:
(1) No video footage of humans. Animation only.
(2) No incest.
Onlyfans clearly hasn't implemented restriction (1).
If they've implemented (2), that seems like much less of a problem as applied to onlyfans than to animated content on Steam. But even in the case of Steam, there just isn't a constituency for being pro-incest. This is the last political fight you'd want to get into.
> But even in the case of Steam, there just isn't a constituency for being pro-incest. This is the last political fight you'd want to get into.
Of course the constituency that is openly pro-incest is small. On the other hand, I believe the constituency for a quite encompassing freedom of speech has to be taken seriously.
As usual, the actual “cancel culture” comes from the conservatives.
Another factor is the board members and other investors of the institutions themselves.
I have been privy to two specific instances where pressure to either ban or reject providing support for specific content was handed down from beyond the executive level at a major financial network player that my client was doing business with.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/01/visa-mind...
Visa being responsible for CSAM isn't a theoretical lawsuit they're afraid about. (2022)
The US obsession with sex (both positive and negative) is something else.
Here in Europe, sex is a normal part of human life. Not a center of everything, nor a sin to be avoided. Sex art is normal. Sex games are fine. There are no moral crusaders here, because sex is moral. We tell sex jokes at work and nobody faints. We are constantly perplexed why American culture is so different from other Western cultures in that regard.
People keep saying "Puritans" like it answers all questions, but Puritans were hundreds of years ago. We had our own share of people with peculiar attitudes back then. Today is 2025, not 1785.
This boycott was run by Collective Shout, an Australian non-profit.
They aren't targeting all sex games on Steam, they were targeting rape, incest, and child abuse.
Its ridiculous that your comment that has factual information is downvoted while on top of you there's a bunch of comments going on random tangents not based at all on reality.
It's due to the difference in Christian values, the US has a hard on for believing that ignorance is a virtue when it comes to sin or adult topics.
Like for instance the outrage if you have a sign on your lawn stating that x president is a rapist to the economy, people will say that children should not be "exposed" to such words.
>Here in Europe
No, Europe is not a monolithic bloc, stop treating it as such, stop saying here in Europe or European here. You'd get annoyed if a yank generalised all of europe with a not take so don't do it yourself. State what country/countries you're talking about because social attitudes and norms vary massively across this continent!
Of course, it doesn't help anyone to generalise. Europe has a wide demographic. But, one thing that doesn't happen is its attitude to sex affecting worldwide commerce or other worldwide issues.
Here in the UK religion and sex are not part of the national conversation. A politician mentioning their love of god would seem weird to us. The only way it enters the national conversation are when right-wing religious zealots, from the US, try to affect our laws: I'm thinking of abortion laws and trans rights. These are entirely imported issues from US religious hangups. It's quite tedious, because mostly we were on a path of reasonable discourse with relation to sex, sexuality, relationships (marriage), etc. but with the advent of social media you see pockets of society being dragged into it.
I have friends in much of Europe (Sweden, Norway, France, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Croatia, Slovakia, Poland, Romania, Greece) and have travelled to those destinations extensively. I still can't speak for all of Europe, but I think when it comes to sex and religion we're kinda similar. The only one that stands out to me was the Greek Orthodox church used to have an out-sized role, but even that doesn't seem to be the case any more (I just came back from visiting friends in Greece a few weeks back and we discussed this).
So whilst we can't say all of Europe is the same, we can say that it's not causing global problems due to its sexual and religious hangups.
They sure do, just like there are different states in the US with vastly different attitudes to life and everything.
And yet, you can take an averaged vector of all US states and all European countries and meaningfully compare those. Or extract some things that are common through all Europe as compared through all US.
I had a privilege of living for some time in Italy, Denmark, Spain and Switzerland (I still live in Switzerland). They are all really different, and yet there is something common compared to the US.
> People keep saying "Puritans" like it answers all questions, but Puritans were hundreds of years ago. We had our own share of people with peculiar attitudes back then.
We literally had Puritans in Europe [1]
” The Puritans were English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who sought to rid the Church of England of what they considered to be Roman Catholic practices, maintaining that the Church of England had not been fully reformed and should become more Protestant.[1] Puritanism played a significant role in English and early American history, especially in the Protectorate in Great Britain, and the earlier settlement of New England.”
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puritans
Yeah, and then most of them left and came here, which the article cites as having caused a "radical" divergence:
> Almost all Puritan clergy left the Church of England after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the Act of Uniformity 1662. Many continued to practise their faith in nonconformist denominations, especially in Congregationalist and Presbyterian churches.[2] The nature of the Puritan movement in England changed radically. In New England, it retained its character for a longer period.
It's not crazy to think that this could have had an outsized influence on the US given how influential New England was in the early days. Even 120-130 years after the point that the quoted section mentions, when the colonies were transitioning into what's now the United States, close to a third of them were part of New England.
The US is largely theocratic and has in part because of this managed to resist socialism and other forms of scientific governance to a much larger degree.
Using religious leaders as power brokers is a clever strategy, they'll never budge due to the better argument or scientific reason, hence making it almost impossible for non-violent progressive movements to having an effect at the macro level.
Are you sure it’s a good thing to be so small minded that reason won’t reach you, just because you happened to avoid those big ideas that turned out to not work?
It's easy to dismiss all such campaigns as religious prudes and moral crusaders, especially on a site with the demographics and political leanings of YC News.
But often time such campaigns are waged by former victims of trafficking. It's well documented that trafficking, prostitution and pornography are closely interlinked - this modern notion of a fully liberated "sexual worker" controlling their careers, choices and finance is substantially a fiction of the pornographic industry. So there is real merit în the anti porn stance.
Of course, once the camping is set in motion, it takes a life of its own, that has nothing to do with the concerns of the victims and more with prudishness; the religious circus will join hands and demand the removal of synthetic pornography etc.
I think the biggest issue here is that somewhere down the line we gave payment processors the responsibility of policing for crime and terrorism. Our governments and regulators punish those institutions for "not doing enough" to prevent such things from happening.
You might think I'm defending the multibillion company but here comes the catch: all of this is expensive so when you are doing something funky even though not illegal they just cut you out. You are a small dev or merchant and it's not worth running a whole monitoring apparatus over your activities.
Then we get into this situation where borderline cartel activity like this happens and we have a sort of shadow government enacting their own regulations. This raises some eyebrows dont you think? It will probably continue until governments realize this is happening.
> we gave payment processors the responsibility of policing for crime and terrorism
Mirrors what Marc Andreessen said on Lex's podcast.
The problem isn’t just regulatory overreach, it’s delegated enforcement w/out accountability.
Financial institutions are now playing judge and jury, not because they want to, but because the cost of scrutiny or punishment is too high.
It’s soft censorship by infrastructure...
The responsibility ended up with payment processors and other financial institutions because otherwise they would be forced to give access to all their customer / transaction data to governments and law enforcement.
I really wish we had a push for payment neutrality. Financial transactions are infrastructure and infrastructure should be dumb and neutral. Why does everyone have to suffer slow and expensive transfers just to maybe occasionally catch some bad guys (and they're not actually caught, just mildly inconvenienced)? And of course once you're already doing it, there's inevitably overreach, as evidenced by Visa here.
And before someone chimes in about how crypto will solve this: yes, crypto has already solved this for the criminal class. But most of the rest of people still have to suffer all the fincrime policing every time they move money or pay for something.
> and they're not actually caught, just mildly inconvenienced
I read somewhere that criminal organizations and individuals love KYC and AML because they have the resources to go around it and it makes their operations look legit.
As a generalisation it seems sensible that it should be illegal to knowingly handle illegal things and the proceeds of illegal things.
It’s hard to say that it’s ok to profit from someone else’s crime.
If I sell you a bike cheap, no questions asked, then you ought be as culpable as me as you don’t have reasonable doubt that it’s stolen. Etc.
This can be weaponised. The lobbies go after visa and Mastercard etc by giving the company “proof” that same transactions are very illegal, eg leaks or underage or duress etc. This forces them in the position of being complicit which means they have to step back.
My guess is it's simply a chargeback risk. It's the reason casinos and adult sites have trouble getting credit card processing and are charged much higher basic rates, even under the best of circumstances when the casino or adult site is operating entirely within the law in the jurisdictions it allows.
Punters run a lot of chargebacks on casinos, and people whose spouses catch a XXX video or game on their card statement will lie and run chargebacks too.
In the case of Valve, a lot of chargebacks would drastically increase the processing rates demanded by the payment providers for all transactions across the board, not just those related to adult games.
There's probably a great market opportunity here for a game store focused on adult games and willing to take on that risk.
Does Valve actually have a high risk of chargebacks? I was under the impression that moreso than other platforms, most Valve customers would rather go through Valve's own refund system. I understand that chargebacks is supposedly the reason for adult-only platforms.
Yes. Steam used to have card declines if your address did not match exactly.
Card not present was and still is higher risk than in person shopping. Now that most US customers have chip cards in their wallets fraud has shifted from in person to CNP. Digital goods are high risk because a customer could theoretically download and enjoy the digital good or save a copy and then chargeback. There's no shipping tracking number to prove delivery. Or a fraudster could go on a spending spree from the comfort of their home in another country. Adult-only games are even higher risk because a customer might have to explain to a spouse what the Steam charges were for.
Of course copy protection and the prospect of a ban of their whole Steam account blunts the most obvious customer cheating of keeping a copy and charging back. Steam games cannot be resold. Digital goods that can be easily resold are magnets for fraud. Such as cloud GPUs or international long distance calls.
Sorry, I should clarify my question: does Valve actually face a significantly increased risk of chargebacks if it should be more liberal in its adult game rules.
I suppose that if consumer behavior is to have their adult game purchases and conventional game purchases on separate accounts, and the Steam platform allows for that, then that may be so.
These days Steam allows hiding games from your public profile by marking them as "private", meaning that people can't see that you own the game and can't see that you are playing the game (which is presumably what you would want if you were a fan of "Sex Adventures - Incest Family - Episode 9"). I imagine this is good enough for people so that they won't bother having a separate Steam account just for porn games, as having a single account is more convenient. There's a reason why people hate having multiple game launchers on PC.
https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/1150-C06F-4D62-49...
Chargebacks of legitimate purchases on most large platforms are extremely rare. Most will be from stolen cards. On most large platforms, if you start a chargeback you can expect your account to get locked. Do you want to give up your entire account just for a refund on one purchase? Luckily these large platforms typically have their own refund process.
The owner of a stolen number is going to use a chargeback.
Often it's because of secret government requirements.
Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point .
Somehow, it's forbidden for the government to oppress pornographers directly, but it's perfectly fine to impose legal sanctions on banks who maintain business relationships with them.
This is the correct answer. There are many merchant categories, adult being just one of them, that are susceptible to high chargeback rates which result in payment processors banning them.
This is nonsense. If you want us to believe this you need to show that Steam with erotic games is more of a risk than Steam without them. Comparing Steam with things like “adult merchants” like Onlyfans or a porn streaming service does not sound very appropriate.
It's not nonsense. I've hosted, moderated and managed sites that were only obliquely related to porn or gambling, and you wouldn't believe the level of rejection for running ads or getting payment processing that they are faced with. And I ran a casino for 4 years. I coded it and I ran it 24/7, and believe me, I did everything by the book. The CC companies do not give a shit as long as they make money. Chargebacks cost them a lot in time more than in actual cash, and they have categories of risk for every merchant who may expose them to that risk. The highest categories of risk are porn and gambling.
Any entity that uses a CC gateway and has any exposure to either of those risks is exposing itself to all the risk. The CC companies almost certainly told Valve that they would be considered a porn site and face a 1.5%-2% higher processing fee for every transaction.
No nonsense involved, that's how it works.
That's the problem though. The risk means the market for those riskier credit transactions is literally categorically not a great market. You think JP Morgan gives a shit about Japanese titty games? Hah. No. They care that these games get charged back way more often.
If there is a market opportunity, it's probably in a processor for debit-based transactions that are harder to reverse. But then that makes fraud harder to combat, and one of the reasons everyone loves credit cards so much is because consumers are far more confident to buy from random shops if they know they can always get their money back if the shop scams them.
So - this whole system's lucratively is entirely predicated on easy credit and low risk meaning low fees. Anyone who wants to play in the mud that's leftover by these companies taking the good business are inherently playing a low margin risky game.
I wouldn't scoff at the leftovers. You're talking about maybe a trillion dollar industry that struggles to find payment solutions. This is why I gave up on credit card processing for my startup casino in 2010 and just went to taking Bitcoin and other crypto. I originally planned to just take Visa. I wasn't looking to skirt the law. Card companies are looking out for themselves, and they don't really even need regulatory capture to shaft anyone running a business that the public could consider shady or immoral. There's plenty of demand out there, and in my opinion they're leaving money on the table. But their business model makes it difficult to take on the risk, especially in the case of something like Valve where they can't pick each transaction apart and evaluate the risk separately. So yeah... a globally accepted porn and gambling card? That would be a home run if the bills showed up never to someone's spouse, and it won't happen. Using a combination of crypto and higher CC fees to sell the content, though, there's a lot of pent-up demand.
>This is why I gave up on credit card processing for my startup casino in 2010 and just went to taking Bitcoin and other crypto.
And how many customers you lost in 2010 because of that? Probably more than 90%. Even now people are reluctant to use crypto but tbh crypto crowd is so big that you can perhaps succeed in opening crypto only business.
Yes, about 90%. I would have had maybe the 6th or 7th biggest online casino in the world to being one which catered only to early adopters of cryptocurrency, who were not necessarily gamblers on roulette or blackjack but had nothing better to do with their coins. It was an interesting experience, and it didn't leave me as wealthy as I could have been if the barriers to entering the larger market hadn't already been negotiated between CC companies and governments. That said, at least I'm not in prison like a lot of people who followed what I did.
With the CFPB under threat, there may be room for payment processors which don’t protect consumers from fraud. (Regulation is only as strong as its enforcement)
Not a wise business model. Enforcement can return at any time if the political winds shift.
Yes, and it's been tried before. LibertyCoin, I think.
Write a Steam knockoff platform that's trustworthy enough for people to download, and load it up with dirty games. Put the premium on the customers if they want to use credit card transactions, otherwise push them towards crypto payments. Maybe you won't be an oligarch, but you'll probably end up with a reasonably sized yacht.
[edit] hell, in a few years if the winds shift you might be DraftKings.
>Write a Steam knockoff platform that's trustworthy enough for people to download, and load it up with dirty games. Put the premium on the customers if they want to use credit card transactions, otherwise push them towards crypto payments.
Easier said than done. It is hard to earn trust....you would probably need to jumpstart the platform with quite a few indie devs so people start trusting the site and using it.
Might be a good idea. This is so curious.
The US has a weird fetish with privatizing things that the government should handle, like consumer protection. If there were a reasonably robust infrastructure for this outside of payment processors in the US, there would be far less pressure on porn providers to comply with fucked up morals about porn. What we have here is an instance of late stage capitalism, and half the people are too narrowminded to see how it hurts their freedom.
I'm not sure about that. Late stage capitalism would involve the government bailing out credit card companies if there were fraud. I kind of prefer for them to deal with it themselves. And whether they deal with fraud themselves or the government does, they're going to classify certain types of transactions as riskier than others. My point was that this is probably not a "moral" decision, just a business decision. It would be a lot worse if it were the government mandating it, and worse still if they were mandating it because it conflicted with the moral code of some plurality of voters. That's not the case here, and I'm glad it's not. I wouldn't want the government to control consumer protection to the degree that voters in Texas could decide whether to protect certain consumers or not.
Isn't it a little odd that Visa/Master isn't out there making that argument? Why would we assume them having the best of intentions of they aren't even willing to argue those intentions themselves?
They don't need to make an argument for anything. They tell Valve: "Hey, if 1% of your transactions are for smut and incur smut-level-chargebacks, we're going to just treat all your transactions as smut", and Valve says, "no problem, we'll pull those games." It's not like Valve stands to profit by holding the line for free speech here or something. Valve gives as little a shit about an indie porn game as it does about anything else. Honestly, why should they pay the extra percentage across the board to defend it anyway? This is why I'm saying a separate X-rated platform would get a lot of traction.
But can't they just block buying those games with visa/mc and only allow using steam wallet credit? Some Japanese sites have been having these issues for a while and that's what they ended up doing (or just closing shop entirely).
I guess that would be the logical thing to do. There's probably some synergy at work. If these games could be widely promoted, maybe their average value to Valve would be $10k each or something. Instead, they probably net 1/10th of that before they drop off the radar completely. Building in a sub-system that guarantees that certain games can only be bought with certain methods of payment seems like a pain in the ass. However, they could do it. And that sort of argues against the idea that you'd be building yourself any kind of moat by setting up a game platform for just the XXX stuff.
That would be a nice solution.
itch.io already serves this purpose no?
I guess so. I haven't spent that much time checking out the darker corners of it. I wonder what their situation is with the credit card companies.
> Is there some regulation that requires them to?
There isn’t. Even worse, there’s no legislation prohibited them from doing so.
Payment processors (eg: Mastercard, Visa) are the ultimate deciders of whether you can sell something online or not, regardless of whether it is legal.
They haven’t just blocked adult content, they’ve also blocked non-profits with which they disagree in the past.
We need much stronger legislation around this. Private entities shouldn’t be capable of deciding that a given organisation can’t charge online. Only institutions which represent the public’s interests should have this level of influence.
At least at one time, part of the answer would have been Operation Choke Point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
However, that's clearly not all that's going on -- it doesn't seem like the government is still doing this.
If I remember correct from the hot money podcast https://www.ft.com/content/762e4648-06d7-4abd-8d1e-ccefb74b3... part of the problem for the credit card companies is figuring what are the boundaries of legality. Countries have very different laws. Things like representing homosexuality or age of consent are very different and credit cards feel that it is a risky business because of that.
This makes little sense with even the tiniest amount of probing.
This is a solvable geo regulation issue, solvable like many other geo regulatory issues
The USA is extremely litigious, rules are decided not by the legislature usually but instead by people suing each other to establish case law, and anyone with a bone to pick could sink you in legal fees and proceedings at a whim. So probably people who don’t like the idea of adult content can use the courts to make payment processors’ lives painful and they decide to just forgo that business.
US courts are too easy to use as a tool of abuse.
Just one of the ways the US forces it's weird morals onto the world.
Sexual self-denial always was the driving force behind the western cultural success. You can not have hyper-specialization and rule of law, without some members of society sacrificing a "normal" life.
From the monk in the monastry to Turing hyper-focused on an enigma there is clear line. Its a ugly recipe, but its working, unlike all those other societies out there, who are currently eating themselves. A judge doesn't dress like a priest for no reason.
Sexual caste slavery or anarchy- thats the choices.
> You can not have hyper-specialization and rule of law, without some members of society sacrificing a "normal" life.
Sex freaks hyper specialize in things all the time. Monks and priests also had reputations as horny perverts in Medieval literature. Also, there are plenty of non-Western countries that have been functional. This is such an out of touch, ahistorical take.
> Also, there are plenty of non-Western countries that have been functional.
And there are plenty of western countries that do not work like that, as well.
> Sexual self-denial always was the driving force behind the western cultural success.
It is a feature of a subset of the culture in some countries. It is far less universal as you say.
> You can not have hyper-specialization and rule of law, without some members of society sacrificing a "normal" life.
This really does not follow. How does the existence of laws prevent someone to live a normal life? In a liberal democracy, laws fundamentally guarantee that we can do so, as long as someone’s fundamental individual freedom does not cause unacceptable harm to someone else. In that framework, what we do in private with consenting adults is absolutely nobody’s business. Rule of law does not change this.
> From the monk in the monastry to Turing hyper-focused on an enigma there is clear line.
What line is this? In which way was Turing’s persecution a requirement for him being a genius? How do we benefit from him killing himself instead of leaving him be and make other contributions to our intellectual development?
> It’s an ugly recipe, but it’s working, unlike all those other societies out there, who are currently eating themselves.
It is not. What you are advocating is a theocracy and there are many examples in History and around the world that show that it is a terrible idea.
> A judge doesn't dress like a priest for no reason.
All I can say is LOL. Ceremonial clothing is more nuanced than that.
> Sexual caste slavery or anarchy- thats the choices.
The fact that you only see these possibilities says a lot more about you than the way human beings work.
It's fun when posters inadvertently reveal far more about themselves than whatever they are discussing, such as "Western cultural success" as here.
It's not just games.
Payment processors ban many things that are completely legal, even foods and dietary supplements. It's ridiculous. They have too much power.
I have no trouble seeing why a payment processor would want to avoid doing business with dietary supplement companies.
No issues buying Marlboro reds with the credit card of course.
Cigarette purchasers aren’t filing chargebacks when their partner checks the billing history, claiming their card got stolen.
Are dietary supplement purchasers doing so?
Extremely, infamously, yes.
Have you ever returned a pack of cigarettes? They basically do what you expect them to do.
I figured the reason was not wanting to support something harmful to the customer like a fake diet pill. Call me naive for letting that assumption of even a glimmer of empathy affect my guestimation. I should have known it was pure greed all the way down and due to something like this instead.
I mean I wouldn't do business with them, I think the supplements industry is infrastructure for grifters, quacks, and pyramid schemes to fleece the desperate, but what's the problem for Visa? Is it a brand safety thing? My presumption would be that payment processors are amoral and have no problem processing payments for Consolidated Baby Kickers if it were legal to do so, is that a misconception?
"Not as advertised" chargebacks. That industry is also full of subscription scams (e.g. someone thinks they're ordering a supplement for $5.99, but they're actually getting signed up for $39.99/month...).
> That industry is also full of subscription scams
Visa / MC are the ones who enable subscription scams and benefit from them. They implemented "convinience" option of "updating" your credit card data with replacement card. So even if you cancel and replace card charges continue to pass.
They also totally able to see all the places where your card been tokenised, but they dont push banks to expose this to you.
In Canada at least, you can opt out of having your new card number shared when you replace a card.
Also the products don't work!
I don't think the credit card networks would care about that if it weren't for the risk of chargebacks. Credit card networks have no problem with processing payments for churches!
Right, no, I'm just saying: that drives a lot of chargebacks.
There are or have been rules about which colours a dildo can have.
It definitely sounds like Christian morals being forced on us.
Control. People get a kick out of controlling others and stopping them doing things that don't effect them in any way. It's like how being a practising gay was illegal or how using certain drugs still is.
So true. People love meddling into other people's lives, control their actions, etc.
It could be a holdover from Operation Choke Point, an Obama-administration arm-twisting initiative that would subject banks to more regulatory scrutiny and possible disciplinary action if they did business with certain "high-risk businesses" including firearm and pornography sellers. Ostensibly the initiative was ended in 2017, but banks are probably still afraid to be handed the black spot for doing business with the "wrong" sorts of people.
Another factor is that credit providers (i.e. banks) are increasingly using customer transaction data to assess customer behaviour as part of its risk scoring.
If a customer is regularly purchasing adult material that would be definitely be a red flag.
A red flag of what?
Defaulting on their credit card bill. Or the account ends up having been started by an identity fraudster. Which also ends in default.
That seems backward. The people I’ve known that spend a lot of money on adult entertainment are exactly the group that pays their bills.
This. I dont know who do you need to be in order to pay for the porn that you can pirate for free. In case of games or music or movies there is collecting and convinience, but porn is pretty much opposite.
But at the same time chance of "oops it's not mine" charbacks likely much higher compared to other spending.
Then why would they want to stop getting these red flags?
> Why do payment processors do stuff like this? Is there some regulation that requires them to?
Generally no, but they exist in a regulatory morass where it's impossible to do what they do without arguably or perhaps technically being in violation of hundreds of regulations at any given time.
The US government then uses their power to selectively enforce the voluminous mess of bad regulations to coerce parties to undertake actions which it would be flatly illegal for the government to perform directly such as cutting off sexually explicit content from payment rails.
e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
The practice isn't limited to payment processors but they're a particularly good vector given the level of regulation they're subjected to. Choke Point (and Choke point 2) are just specific examples of a general tactic to end run around the public's rights that has been used by the US government for decades. In most cases the abuse isn't so well organized that it has a project name you can point at.
Congress and the whitehouse leaning on social media companies to suppress lawful opinions on covid policy is another example of that kind of abuse that has received some public scrutiny. Most cases, however, go without notice particularly since the ultimate victims of the actions generally have no way to know the cause.
Who runs Mastercard, are they linked to some American prudes?
See Bill Ackman and his crusade against PornHub.
This is one of the ways the government can censor people despite the first amendment. It’s absolutely by design. The regulators “express concern” about certain financial activity and then the companies remove it.
this is such small potatoes compared to the results of everything going on right now though
I don't think so, it is death by a thousand cuts which is why we are in such a shitty place right now. Out rights have been attacked on all side for decades, little by little, but all together it is a huge loss.
This is a long ongoing issue tho and one of the main reasons many European sex stores don't take credit card at all. Visa and master do enforce irrational morals
No institutionalized censorship of harmless content is small potatoes.
the other potatoes are really big
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I’d be pro banning of that shit.
How about GTA5 https://web.archive.org/web/20250122190645/https://www.colle... or Detroit Become Human https://xcancel.com/CollectiveShout/status/96466393143948083... ?
and I'd be against
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I suspect Valve is blaming the credit card companies for something they really wanted for themselves. Steam is a big store open to everyone and you’re going to scare away a big chunk of seniors, Christians, etc with stuff like incest, ageplay, and rape just so that a small minority uses you instead of…itch.io? Better to keep the big safe names like Being a Dik and Eternum on Steam and flush the rest so that you can have the best of both worlds.
I think that for better or worse Valve is genuinely committed to lassies faire moderation, they have historically been very hesitant to remove really heinous games. I don't think they're using this as cover.
That changed with Hatred in 2015. There have been a number of them since. It seems that anything that gives Valve bad press is on its shit list, even if the premise theme has been done before by a bigger or more well-known company stateside. If the upcoming Grand Theft Auto game has full frontal nudity and realistically depicted sex scenes, I doubt Valve would give it a second look.
That was ten years ago, there have been tons of really objectionable games on Steam in recent years. Eg I just checked and the game where you roleplay as Kyle Rittenhouse shooting protestors is still on Steam.
Per Wikipedia:
> [Hatred] was shortly removed by Valve from their Steam Greenlight service due to its extremely violent content but was later brought back with a personal apology from [Valve's co-founder] Gabe Newell.
Valve made the conscious choice to allow porn games in the first place, they knew what they were getting into imo
> I suspect
Based upon what evidence?
Look. Ignore the content. Why the fuck do we allow credit card companies have a say in how we spend our money?
Fraud? Abuse? Fine, let me put cash onto a card and if that card gets stolen, oh well, my loss. Mastercard should have no say in what what speech is considered acceptable outside of their offices. We don't care what execs at a water company think? Why do we care about the people at Mastercard?
It's because Visa got sued, lost, and it was found out they knowingly processed payments for illegal adult content, so they basically avoid the sector entirely now. Economist had an article about it maybe two years ago and came to much the same conclusion you did. IIRC, the failure in their mind was government not stepping in to make a law so things are less ambiguous in the future. Now payment processing cos get to gate keep people's speech, which means everything is basically a civil suit away from getting blacklisted.
> Why the fuck do we allow credit card companies have a say in how we spend our money?
Because sadly 80% of people are sheep. Same reason we allow a company to decide what we can and cannot install on our smartphones.
No, don’t follow the underdog fallacy. What are you doing against it? How are you different from the other sheep? Merely complaining doesn’t make you any better.
When I buy an iPhone I am dealing with Apple. I know what I am buying and what I can or cannot do with the device. And if I am not happy there are alternatives.
When I buy stuff on Steam I am in no way making a contract with Visa. When Visa strong arms Valve to delist games I lose even if I never had any relation with Visa ever.
It really is not comparable.
Because they are on the hook for fraudulent transactions, until they get to merchant to refund. Otherwise they wouldn't care.
Which is why some merchants get effectively blacklisted if they have too many fraudulent transactions
No, I get it. Give me a "Freedom Card" or whatever that generates a one-time use number/cvv combo, backed by cash, that I'm fully responsible for. If I give a guy on the corner $5 cash and he walks off with it, that's between me and him. We don't need to resort to crypto. I don't care if there's a paper trail, I don't need to be anonymous. I just don't want money people to have any say in how people choose to spend their money.
Thats not exactly a credit card at that point. And with a credit card, you're explicitly not spending your money.
Though i agree with the idea of a debit card that doesn't allow chargebacks, but without so many annoying restrictions.
> Thats not exactly a credit card at that point. And with a credit card, you're explicitly not spending your money.
That point is not the problem though. They could just pressure Valve to refuse credit cards for all or some games. The financial aspect simply does not make sense, regardless of how you look at it (and many people had different takes in this thread).
The only angles that make sense are an ideological crusade and the risk of being sued. The first is unacceptable and the second is an utter failure on the part of the legal system.
Yeah, a "Freedom Card". Our money, they move it, no moralizing. We don't need crypto to fix this, just common sense legislation.
No company or individual should be denied the right to receive funds digitally without due process.
Companies should be free to transact with or exclude anyone, but there should be neutral infrastructure that facilitates the flow of money, with multiple players each with differing rules and risk profiles setup to help people and companies access it.
No one financial institution should be able to dictate the speech allowed on a platform.
What's the status of FedNow?
The card networks are never on the hook for fraudulent transactions (nor for any other type of chargeback for that matter). If anything, it's the merchant's payment service provider/card acquirer that absorbs the loss if the merchant can't pay.
True until the acquiring (merchant side) bank is insolvent. Then the network pays. Source: worked at Visa for years.
It's why it's so hard to become an acquiring bank on the network.
that wouldn't apply in this case, because the vendor, Valve, would be on the hook for fraudulent purchases and they would definitely have the deep pockets to pay out. The cc companies only have to worry about the small, fly by night companies that might disappear after a bunch of fraud.
Well your comment tells us why-- as is the law in the US is that credit card companies are almost entirely responsible for fraud. It's part of why they and their dubiously usurious practices are allowed to exist in the US at all.
If it were the case that the payment rail censorship were limited just to cases where there was an obvious elevated fraud risk-- then that would be the whole of the story. -- and there would be an obvious answer: use a payment mechanism where the fraud responsibility is entirely on the user, such as Bitcoin.
But their censorship exists where no such elevated fraud risk exists too, due to abusive conduct by the government to indirectly suppress activity that would be plainly unlawful for them to directly suppress. And the governments out of control abuse of its regulatory power is not limited to fraud-responsible payment rails, and get applied just as or even more extensively on Bitcoin payment processors.
No, I get it. Give me a "Freedom Card" or whatever that generates a one-time use number/cvv combo, backed by cash, that I'm fully responsible for. If I give a guy on the corner $5 cash and he walks off with it, that's between me and him.
Well, credit is not really "your money". The danger of course is if this gets extended to debit cards and they become the only option (ie. no cash). Every time you use your card you are giving them the power to do this.
> credit is not really "your money"
Unless it's a prepaid credit card or a debit card, both of which are serviced by MC and Visa and fairly common in Europe.
Yes, I mentioned debit cards in the second of the three sentences in my comment.
It's an important distinction to make. Credit is very much not something you should feel entitled to and issuer can and should be selective about who and what they issue credit for. Or course the credit industry itself is disgusting, but that's another issue (this was covered almost 20 years ago in a documentary Maxed Out).
This shouldn't be conflated with payments in general which is (imo) a much bigger problem. You should be entitled to spend the money you earn on exactly what you want, and to do it anonymously.
You can fight back: don't spend on credit and refuse to use a card when cash would suffice. We are losing, though. For stuff like Steam you have no other option (as far as I know).
Payment processors(Visa, Master) , payment gateways(Stripe, Paypal...) and payment hosts (Patreon, Gumroad...) are a huge pain to deal with even when you're selling something which is legal and risk free just because their algorithm or employees are often overcautious, anything out of mundane they'll ban first and then ask questions(if you're lucky).
I have a FOSS project called Open Payment Host[1] which removes the payment hosts from the equation and removes the technical hassle of integrating multiple payment gateways but it does not solve the pain of having to deal with the payment gateways and by extension payment processors and banks.
My long term plan is to integrate direct banking API where ever it's available.
Is there any bank from any country which provides direct banking API to end customers for plain savings bank account (I've seen some provide for current accounts).
[1] https://github.com/abishekmuthian/open-payment-host
I built a cool tool the last week's. I spent more time on evaluating payment processor than the code itself.
I have ~5 projects in my shelf I did never launch because I didn't find a payment solution.
Got instantly banned with all of them, had to write them an email wait for days to get some response.
I usually just use crypto whenever it makes sense. And still have a hard time to believe that I can move as much as crypto as I want but a single payment from a Dubai account can get my bank account frozen for days ...
Have you looked in to "PSD2 and Open Banking regulation in Europe" ?
I haven't, I will definitely explore it. Quick read on it seems very promising.
Have you or anyone here any API in EU for getting payments directly to your bank account? I have started a discussion on this on OPH[1], I welcome any information on direct banking API in Europe in that discussion.
[1] https://github.com/abishekmuthian/open-payment-host/discussi...
I use Ko-fi but 95% of the fees go to Stripe and their processors (Visa etc).
Okay so is Steam enough of a money printer for Valve to say "well fuck you guys, we'll make our own credit card with hookers and bingo"? And hold out Half-Life 3 (only purchasable with the ValveCard) as a carrot?
Practically impossible.
To replace visa/mastercard you need to have thousands of banks support ValveCard across the world. It's hard to imagine how it's going to happen. Players will not switch to another (probably foreign) bank just to buy Half-Life 3. They'll pirate it.
By the way, Gabe has a very famous quote:
> Piracy is a service problem.
He knows it very well that if it's hard for players to buy something they'll just get it free anyway. You can say he's probably the first person in the world who realized this idea profoundly enough to turn it into a business. It's very risky for Steam to make buying games even slightly harder.
What if you used your mastercard to buy valvebucks you spend on whatever the hell you want in the steam store?
You can do that currently. Steam already supports the exact process you described: top up your steam wallet and buy games with steam wallet balance. Actually, there are things you can only buy this way (some in-game items, not sure if it's to workaround gambling accusation or just coded so for no reason).
The issue is Visa/Mastercard/whoever is pressuring Valve isn't happy about the very existence of incest games. They don't want to be associated with incest/rape even indirectly.
So are they banning erotic fiction books too or what? I guess the tradwifes actually secretly read that stuff though…
If there was a prominent online marketplace for homegrown literature, I would bet there would be corporate pushback against selling incest themed porn on it. But I don’t think there is such a marketplace so it’s a very hypothetical question.
If a book publisher was selling erotic fiction about children online, you could bet your ass they would have a hard time with payment processors.
I’m not sure you have a case with this argument.
If you read the founder of the "feminist" group she thinks that 50 shades is the equivalent of the book of Satan but about raping women.
There's a book of Satan?
So she read it? I tried but stopped at 10% or so :)
Why does ValveCard need to work anywhere other than Steam? Privacy.com manages to issue card numbers somehow. How does that work?
Visa and Mastercard are called card _networks_ for a reason. Wherever you are in the world, or in any site anywhere, if your card says Visa and the merchant’s POS machine (or payment gateway) take Visa, both parties know the transaction is good. The merchant gets his money and you get the product.
You get your card from your issuing bank, so the consumer’s last mile is the bank’s problem. The merchant get their POS/gateway from the acquirers. Your bank and the merchants acquirer don’t know each other.
Visa and Mastercard are intermediaries. There’s no way a NatWest card in the UK is connected to whatever POS is in Chile or whatever. They all route through the card brands.
This is why it’s so tough to break this monopoly.
> Privacy.com manages to issue card numbers somehow. How does that work?
Through Visa and Mastercard
They work with Visa and MasterCard to issue cards in systems run by both of them.
It needs to work with banks in different countries. It doesn't need to work everywhere, like being able to pay your dinner with it, obviously.
You have to offset negative ValveCard balances with USD in everyone's banks, and there's a convenient middleman called Visa who does exactly that by tying store accounts to bank accounts through the universally accepted membership card they issue.
Privacy.com issues cards from the Visa and Mastercard networks.
You can’t run your own card network easily because you would have to convince all of the merchant banks that take card transactions to do business with you.
Digital money movement requires an operating agreement between at least two financial entities - but most of the time there’s a lot more. Depending on the type of transaction you may have two or more gateways, facilitators, processors, issuers and underlying banks involved.
It’s a very fragmented system that relies on many, many different entities all having agreements and contracts with eachother.
By not working outside the US.
Entirely possible if you're JP Morgan Chase. They're big enough to have both merchants and consumers in their ecosystem, and they tried it, and Visa put a stop to that.
I am genuinely curious who can actually threaten Visa (I do not think it is Valve).
Amazon, Walmart, Target and then increasingly unsure.
IBM was not able to. Story from a friend-who-claimed-to-be-there:
In days of yore, Visa did processing on IBM iron. The iron in question took a while to boot, and time is very definitely money to Visa and they wanted to speed up reboots (e.g., after a crash). Saving seconds = $$$.
Visa to IBM: "Please give us the source code for the <boot path stuff>, it's costing us money."
IBM: LOL
Visa to some big banks: "Please tell IBM to give us the source code for this, it's costing you money."
IBM, a little later: "Here's a tape. Need any help?"
> I am genuinely curious who can actually threaten Visa (I do not think it is Valve).
Visa is a clearing house whose members are banks. Think of it like a payment router between issuers (banks) and processors (banks).
Only sponsored organizations can directly use the "Visa rails", where "sponsor" is defined as a bank, a bank subsidiary, or an entity previously sponsored by one of the other two.
This is also the case for MasterCard and Discover. "Traditional" American Express is different though.
> Amazon, Walmart, Target and then increasingly unsure.
Those merchants use banks or one of their subsidiaries for processing credit card transactions. Most large merchants do as well in order to minimize their discount rate as well as other transaction fees. Smaller merchants often use ISO's or VAR's for business specific reason, knowing both ultimately transact with a bank or one of a bank's subsidiaries.
I thought Venmo was trying the most with their card offers, as well as PayPal, Cash, Google Pay and several others too
> I thought Venmo was trying the most with their card offers, as well as PayPal, Cash, Google Pay and several others too
I know at least two of the above used to use a specific US bank for the credit card transactions backing their payment services. For others, if service usage requires a verified credit card or debit card backed by a credit card network, they too use a processor owned/operated by a bank, bank subsidiary, or an entity sponsored by same.
EDIT:
For payment services which do not require a credit card or debit card backed by a credit card network, they almost certainly use the ACH[0] network. This is a more intimate financial relationship and best used with a dedicated bank account not linked to any others, as fund transfers can be bidirectional.
0 - https://www.sofi.com/learn/content/ach-vs-check/
Cashapp cards for me, for example, are backed by Sutton Bank Ltd out of Chicago.
> Amazon, Walmart, Target
Those are all US companies so subject to the same puritan pressures. Their cards would still be good for buying ultra violent games but not sex games...
Walmart was very supportive of fedNow for the express purpose of removing MasterCard from cashless purchases. And for a long time the only way to pay by phone was to allow them to debit via ACH. out of all of them they get it the most.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36012866
And really, even banking isn't a safe harbor. I am pretty sure they were at the forefront of the rise in neobanks and products like green dot cards.
Any coalition of banks can. Replacing Visa is a daunting task, but rolling out PoS support and the technical challenges are peanuts compared to actually getting banks onboard. Visa itself was started by a single bank, and Mastercard was started by a coalition of banks. They can do it again.
Interac[1] is Canada's debit system, originally created as a non-profit by our largest banks way back in '84, and these days is supported everywhere. The large banks are already used to bullying their way through political or bureaucratic challenges, and a single Canadian bank typically has trillion(s) in managed assets - they _can_ bully Visa.
Zelle[2] (2016) is a limited (etransfer only) clone for the American market, UPI (2016) in India, UnionPay (2002) in China, carte Bleue (1967) in France, etc etc. What's missing is cooperation between national systems like these, as well as lending as they typically only do debit instead of credit.
Any cooperation between these systems would likely get spun out as a separate entity, which would eventually just turn into a new Visa or Mastercard - but 3 choices is better than 2.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interac [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zelle [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface
Zelle won't become that. Zelle was designed to offload liability onto consumers using the carrot of instant transfers.
Other payment processors, mostly. So other credit card companies (e.g. JCB [1]), government run payment services like Pix in Brazil [2], theoretically crypto, etc.
[1] as a random example: https://archive.kyivpost.com/technology/japanese-payment-sys...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pix_(payment_system)
Likely Apple currently has the deepest finance industry roots.
>> I am genuinely curious who can actually threaten Visa (I do not think it is Valve).
> Likely Apple currently has the deepest finance industry roots.
Apple used a very large bank headquartered in the US for its credit card processing as of about ten years ago. Given that the cost of change is significant once these processes are put in place, it is likely this remains the case.
Note that this is not the same as what Apple Pay supports.
If you consider the minutiae of percentage apple shaves off transactions with Apple Pay. Sure.
But they have partnered with GS and MC. Far from any sort of "finance industry roots".
They essentially offer a fancy UI on top of GS products and other traditional banks.
Apple Cash -> Green Dot or some other no name bank
Apple Card -> Goldman Sachs
Apple Pay -> some very small percentage of the bank and network fees charged to merchants
Honestly, with how prevalent iPhones and Androids are today, specially among newer humans, if Apple and Google made a payment system that just transferred money between iPhone/Android, it could practically replace cash & cards for a lot of people.
In some countries the vast majority of payments are done via phone apps for national payment systems already, bypassing Visa/Mastercard etc. entirely. Even kids pay for candy by phone.
It will be an ID number based payment service built on top of FedNow. In other countries similar services are used with QR codes to do easy payments.
Though unpopular, I'd say China is able to
1) They already have that (Unionpay). 2) I don't think they are less prone to censoring things.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c056nle2drno
China would never! /s
Only the USG.
Mastercard?
That's basically what gift cards are isn't it?
> Leaked internal slides peg Steam’s net revenue last fiscal year at just under $10 billion
https://www.simplymac.com/games/3-5m-per-employee-how-valve-...
Steam gift cards are funded by traditional banking products and partnerships. They can’t live without the invisible hand of the banking and credit card industry.
I like this (ab)use of the invisible hand meme. But in economics the “invisible hand” is more of a benevolent deity than a predictable mechanism. I propose “hidden hand” for what credit (card and rating) companies do.
it really is the same invisible hand. the economics invisible hand is doing whatever the capital owners want the economy to do. weighing influence by capital is what makes visa have that power
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My first thought is: obviously not. But if 10 years ago you'd asked me if Valve would be able to turn Linux into a serious gaming platform, I'd have answered the same.
All that stemmed from an unlikely but existential fear that Microsoft could lock-down software distribution on Windows. My suspicion is that SteamOS sales and Steam Decks aren't actually profitable, they're just too valuable as a bargaining chip not to invest in. And Valve can invest in them, because they're rich and private.
While Valve bigwigs probably aren't losing sleep over the missed revenue from incest games, having the rest of their revenue stream threatened might make them seek another form of insurance.
The problem is if visa/etc say no, valve instantly loses ~70% of their sales. So it’s a bet they won’t win
Visa needs to be broken up.
trying: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
I’m fairly certain they could but it wouldn’t exactly be fun right?
I mean, if there's one company that I believe could pull that off is Valve. And maybe Amazon. Maybe the two together. It would be one hell of a JV for both parties.
oh yes
I mean a bank is literally a money printer.
On a serious side note, only certain banks get to print money.
They don't physically print the notes, but they do magically add money to a person's account when they take a loan. That kind of thing is where most "money" (in banks, anyway) comes from.
It's just like matter and antimatter being created at the same time, money and anti-money (debt) are created at the same time and when they meet, they cancel each other out.
So borrowing literally creates money (and debt), and repaying debts literally deletes money (and debt).
How does interest fit in here? Isn’t that what creates money AKA inflation?
No, interest is a typical zero-sum transaction where the borrower spends and the lender earns. The loan itself represents a temporary net increase in the money supply, appearing from nothing and then vanishing when it is paid back.
What the poster you're replying to is talking about is called fractional reserve banking. That's how they "create" money.
Nope. Even a company such as valve would be intimidated by the regulation of setting up their own company payment network outside the traditional banking system.
Maybe crypto is an option but I haven’t seen use in retail. Only speculation instrument.
Apple tried. Failed. Google tried. Failed. Only thing that works is partnering up with existing bank
I have seen crypto used for payments, particularly if its overseas companies
Did Apple try? I don't recall.
> Only thing that works is partnering up with existing bank
Could Visa just reject payments from this bank and kill your whole thing?
I think it’s hilarious we allow stuff like Postal or Soldier of Fortune without a question, where the whole focus is on going crazy and murdering a whole bunch of people.
But try to show a sensual human body, instead of one that’s ripped into small pieces, and oh my god, this is going too far!
Gender of who is murdered has a lot to do with it too. I don't think you'll find a video game where you predominantly kill women. The most infamous scene of murder in video games is the Call of Duty mission "No Russian" where you optionally commit terrorism at an airport. If you pay attention you'll notice they kill much more men than women, and made sure that despite pleasant weather none of the women were wearing dresses or skirts. Murder of men is a lot more digestible.
GTA, Elder Scrolls and Fallout series all allow for violence against women and not just the mutual violence of combat or whatever. One small example in one game from a long-ass time ago isn't really a broader trend (not to say that society at large doesn't view violence against men and women differently in different contexts)
This genuinely baffles me. Who cares! It's a video game. It's pixels on a screen. True crime podcasts and movies are a-okay but when its a video game that's where the line is drawn?
I suspect all new frontiers are like this. There was probably a similar outcry over violence in films. And maybe violence in fictional books too. Both long lost from living memory.
It does feel different in a video game, because you're the one pulling the trigger. I played that CoD mission when the game came out, and I felt a bit sick in my stomach playing that mission out. But I'd probably have exactly the same feeling from violence in films if I wasn't so desensitised to it after growing up watching american movies and tv shows.
Its just new.
Now i imagine control concerned mothers rallying against papyrus which ruins the youth for healthy outdoor activities like warfare, sieges and murder.
The people who care signed their names[1]. It's not a secret or anything.
Most of the signatories are associated with Australian anti sex trafficking and exploitation groups, although there are several UK signatories and a couple Americans.
A publication[2] by one of the signatories connects the dots. It's driven by the core idea:
"Pornography Use Shapes and Changes Sexual Tastes"[3] which is supported by "In a survey of men involved in online sexual activities, 47% reported being involved in practice or seeing pornography which previously was not interesting to or even disgusted them."[4]
I'm trying to steelman when I say I believe that the authors would agree that this also applies to games with sexual content.
To address your comment specifically, while I see the appeal of consistent moral framework. I personally believe that moral frameworks trade consistency for completeness and rarely accomplish either. You have to assume the value-perspective of the other in order to understand why consistency might take a back seat to some other value we could only speculate on.
1. https://www.collectiveshout.org/open-letter-to-payment-proce...
2. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/391732869_Not_A_Fan...
3. ibid. pg 30
4. ibid
It really should be obvious that the natural objection to "if they banned this then why not X" is "they haven't gotten around to it yet" and that the reason they can be more successful is also that they have put their money where their mouth is and also named themselves, something a counter petition will probably struggle with.
I think it's about the simulation and agency that video games afford the consumer.
You’re risking potential revenue.
There are still taboos even for pixels on a screen, even for video games. It's a good thing. There should be.
Perhaps you're just saying that you're mostly comfortable with the depiction of some forms of violence in some contexts. But what about other scenarios though? Would you feel the same about a game where the player runs around raping women, or capturing and lynching escaped slaves? It's just pixels!
What if it's a story but with very detailed descriptions? What if that short story is adapted into a video game but it's only a text adventure? What if we add artwork to it, but it's just pixel art? etc etc.
The ability and the freedom to explore the darkest parts of our psyche in a safe, controlled, and fictitious environment IS important. Even if we find certain aspects or fetishes repugnant and distasteful.
I find the idea that payment processors have enough power to dictate the morality of a game market concerning. Given the number of other NSFW fetishistic stuff that is still being permitted on Steam I don't buy the "chargeback" rational AT ALL.
> Would you feel the same about a game where the player runs around raping women, or capturing and lynching escaped slaves? It's just pixels!
Yeah. Same thing. Should be ignored. If someone feels an urge to run around raping women and lynching slaves, I'd much rather they were sitting around at home playing videogames than doing anything else in their spare time. What do you want them to be doing, the traditional creep move of figuring out how to get into positions of power and influence?
In addition taxpayers shouldn't be footing the bill in the war on pixels; if the banks are taking a firm moral stand then clearly the government is involved and that means they're probably spending money on expunging victimless non-crimes which is a low.
I disagree. there shouldnt be any taboos for pixels on a screen
i mean, i can understand a child porn game would be disallowed but we already have anime games where characters that look like children are nearly naked
But your heart is not pixels.
and never children.
Then you have an open world game where you can do all sorts of insane stuff, but everyone loses their shit specifically over feeding suffragettes to alligators.
Same with movies. Piles of dead bodies are OK for children to watch but naked skin would be highly damaging.
I mean, these films usually get rated 15 or 18 in the UK, so I’d not say it’s “OK for children to watch.”
I think that's the classic US/UK culture split though.
US is strict on language and nudity, but comparatively lax on violence (except blood).
UK is lax on nudity and language (comparatively), but very strict on violence.
UK being the country that considered the word "ninja" too violent for children, for example.
Violence is pretty okay in the middle east, which makes it socially acceptable by inheritance in the uk.
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> Republicans literally argue it's better for the country to have school shooters and for survivors and parents to live with PTSD for the rest of their lives than to limit access to military-grade weapons.
Can you quote any Republican who has “literally argued” this or are you just spreading lies that make it easier for you to vilify and dehumanize people who disagree with you politically?
You could just ask, "why do payment processors pressure content vendors not to offer this kind of content". You're starting from the premise that there's some weird puritan thing happening, but there's really nothing puritan about American business culture. There are other explanations!
You can get a long ways just by assuming that the people involved in these transactions are utterly amoral.
Or I suspect in this case there are Puritans with a lot of money who will sue the payment providers if the providers don't block things they think are bad.
Yes the payment provider is making a simple money based business decision, or possibly there is a threat of sanctions against the directors so a personal decision as well.
> You're starting from the premise that there's some weird puritan thing happening
Credit card processors don't have to be puritanical. Instead, puritanical people simply have to be smart enough to figure out that the best way to deplatform content that they disagree with is by putting pressure on their payment processor monopolistic vendors.
Giving in to a pressure campaign by ideological people can be a completely amoral and smart business decision.
> puritanical people ... deplatform content that they disagree
so that begs the question - what if the non-puritanical people also pressure the credit payment processors to stop curtailing to those puritanicals? Why is it effective one way, but not the other?
Probably because people are willing to put their real names on the "We're against incest/rape simulators" petition while most people are not going to be quite so fortright on the "Valve should reinstate the incest/rape simulators" petition.
If by “people involved” you mean folks who consume this kind of content then id totally agree. As soon as you offer crypto or even mildly sexual content your cc abuse rate goes through the roof. Which i suspect is the sole reason for processors getting upset in this case
OK well this is interesting information, what are the connections between crypto or even mildly sexual content exactly that create this phenomenon? I mean they do not seem to be related - if you said crypto or drawings of currency I would say huh, well they are sort of related, but the graph connection between crypto and even mildly sexual content would seem to me to be about as tenuous as that between crypto and meat eating.
So why do these two things cause credit card abuse to go through the roof?
Furthermore if it caused the credit card abuse to go through the roof wouldn't Valve just remove it of their own accord - at some point the abuse would mean money was taken away from Valve right?
Finally the article doesn't give this as a reason why it was removed - it said "violate the rules and standards set forth by our payment processors" - which sure, that may mean "high rates of credit card abuse were reported", but I doubt it.
Anyway, a link to studies of this phenomenon?
ps: I would probably believe credit card abuse increase under crypto, due no doubt to my innate prejudices.
Is that not a similar or higher percentage for games with loot boxes or other sorts of gambling?
I bet it has higher chargeback percentage too and they probably pay higher fees. iirc if merchant is getting close to 2% fraud to sales ratio, they can get banned for life. It's probably different rules when you're the size of Valve though...
> You can get a long ways just by assuming that the people involved in these transactions are utterly amoral.
Which begs the question. Why would amoral people decline cash?
Because, in expectation, they're going to lose money.
Sure, but why?
The difference I see is that the player is getting sexual pleasure from what is being simulated in porn type games. I.e. they are trying to simulate the feeling of doing that in real life.
Where as in violent games like soldier of fortune I doubt most players are trying to achieve the feeling of brutally killing another human being.
To be fair, Postal and SOF haven’t been relevant in almost 20 years, though your point stands.
I wonder how a modern implementation of these two games would look given the vast visual improvements since then. I assume UE5 or 6 already comes with a Ghoul-esque framework ready to go. Though I hope they would feature a curmudgeon caricature of Jack Thompson.
Adult content is considered a high risk merchant category - meaning it is susceptible to high chargeback and fraud rates. This is because after someone pays for and consumes adult content, a certain level of "clarity" overcomes them resulting in the execution of chargebacks against the merchant.
It has nothing to do with any sort of puritanical premise.
I don't think that can explain why they're only targeting certain sub-categories of porn, and it's also contradictory to the public statements by Valve:
> We were recently notified that certain games on Steam may violate the rules and standards set forth by our payment processors and their related card networks and banks
Individual games violating "rules and standards" doesn't really fit with prohibiting a category because of high rates of fraud.
They should instead charge a higher transaction fee on those items to cover that risk
Do you think this happened because Valve was getting lots of chargebacks? I don't.
Just plain wrong and a puritanical group already claimed responsibility for this
That sounds like a reasonable argument. We should force them to make it publicly with data. Maybe even force them to release aggregate statistics every quarter going forward.
That seems disingenuous. (1) in this case, this is a not a tiny fly-by-night wannabe game company. (2) which is good for paying back (or never seeing) the money of chargebacks.
For a new company, the risk of chargebacks might rest on a credit card company (for a little while anyway). But not for a long established one.
> That seems disingenuous.
Why are you assuming bad faith? There’s no indication parent is being insincere at all.
TBF that’s US media culture going back several decades.
Mastercard and Visa needs some serious competition. How come a payment company decides who to partner with and dictates what people use their system for. Ridiculous bullshite.
At the same time those "games" that were affected, well, who on earth pays for that seriously fucked up crap? People need to get a grip. I'd rather send a psycho team to evaluate people who pay for these games...
note: PCGAMER the epitome of games journalism. They didn't even checked which were the affected banned games.
They blacklisted games that feature incest
This disgusting trash should never have been allowed on Steam.
Edit: downvoted by mentally sick degenerates. This site is filled with disgusting people.
I hereby declare that everything you like should be banned.
Implying that you like the idea of fucking your own children. You have just exposed yourself.
Bad-faith argument. Incest can also be between adult same-age siblings or cousins (and not everyone considers the latter case to be incest).
Also, I don't insult or look down on sick or disabled people. Why are you?
Unconvincing argument considering what was widely known about certain prominent politicians and their adjuncts long before they became as prominent as they are today.
There's no evidence these people were corrupted by games on Steam. Somehow they managed to become who they are by other means.
Why would having games on steam be the same as a person being an incest-child molester?
>Implying that you like the idea of fucking your own children. You have just exposed yourself.
You imply that people that play shooter games like the dea of killing people, and people that play GTA like the ideas of being criminals and killing cops and innocents, do this people also exposed themselves?
Do you also imply same things for movie watchers and book readers ? And metal listeners are Satanists right ?
If we let the Christian extremists ban something without any proof then they will move to the next thing and soon enough they will ban your favorite video game because it gives you the option to be bisexual. (I read about such extremists moving from Texas to Ruzzia since Texas is not Christian enough, it did not end well)
I hereby declare that you are only allowed to like veggie Burgers
You could have opined that allowing certain extreme content was not a politically savvy business decision for US-based Valve.
Or that healthy societies have incest taboos for very good reasons, and Valve "having standards" would have had more social (plus lobbying/marketing) value.
Angrily insulting HN's user base, on HN, is not an effective method of persuasion.
This isn’t about “trying to show a sensual human body”, it seems to be about incest porn specifically. There are still plenty of pornographic games available on Steam, even absurdly offensive ones such as the multi-part “Sex with Hitler” series.
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People don't choose their fetishes. What consenting adults do behind closed doors is none of our business.
Or in the case of incest games, a single consenting adult and a computer application.
I think this is a bit of a strawman. The market for people who get addicted to gruesome gore and are willing to pay money to see it is several orders of magnitude smaller than people willing to pay to see porn or OnlyFans. There is simply far more risk with adult content as a result and a lot more chargebacks from disatisfied customers with a post nut clarity.
The GP highlights a classic observation: America's nearly unique cultural contradiction, where nudity and sex are considered highly offensive, while gore and violence are widely accepted.
This holds true in most other countries as well. Gore/ chopping of appendages is happily accepted and enjoyed (in movies, games etc) by all of India, whilst a simple kiss can be a taboo/ issue.
Japan has some of the weirdest/inconsistent rules around this stuff. Black lines or mozaic partial censorship of genitals, incest/stuff with minors widely available, and then you have some pretty violent uncensored movies, manga/anime, and games (though while it's mostly a China thing, sometimes the blood gets censored to be white instead of red which doesn't actually make it better (also sometimes done for urine)), GTA5 is as popular there as anywhere, but game franchises like Mortal Kombat are banned.
And of course, even in America, we tend to like our violence and gore more over-the-top and simulated. Most people didn't care for liveleak type content, even fewer for not so hard to find footage from ongoing wars.
Japan runs custom scratch-built implementation of ethics reverse engineered from Western cultures. That's all. Consistence is key, but it's consistent only with itself, and nothing else, and explicitly not aligned to Christian religious scripts. Nothing Japanese is compatible with anything unless and until it is the sole dominant standard, like Sony storage media or Apple hardware. Always has been.
This really isn't unique to America.
So grotesque violence appeals to fewer people, but banning gets focused on material more people find acceptable, even desirable?
This really is a culture/posture driven issue.
It is not as if many people think (emphasis on "think", as in being honest, reasoning carefully and being scientific about evidence) that banning sexy curves in a video game is going to impact the prevalence of sexy curve imagery, or "save" anyone from anything.
Imagine if financial companies required their employees to sign a legal statement committing to not "use porn, escorts, blow ... or spicy video games!" So strange that they don't do that!!
Financial companies like to make a show of having "high standards" when it comes to "controversial" segments of the market, or unfortunate individuals who don't fit the mold, when that gets them a lot of showy theatre for being hard asses to their audience of regulators.
While keeping very quiet, and not looking into things too hard, when it comes to tens of billions of sketchy dollars going through their systems associated with very high net worth criminal actors, organizations and corrupt governments.
Epstein did not lack for financial services.
Are you saying porn buyers regret and that gore buyers do not? (As a broad generalization). Are you also asserting that's built in to risk-profole that payment gateways have?
I don’t have time for o look at the stats and provide quotes / cite sources but it does seem from what I’ve read on the topic that the more people play gore games the less violence there is in society.
If that’s true, maybe it’s also true that the more people have access to adult content the less babies we create as a society.
A society shrinking causes a number of issues.
> There is simply far more risk with adult content as a result and a lot more chargebacks from disatisfied customers with a post nut clarity.
Do you have any evidence to back this wild claim? I've never heard this argument about chargebacks made before.
I don't think it's about this at all. I think it's about policing content, but then the observation of GP's comment applies: why is violence ok, but sex is not?
You must be American if you think very violent games are not extremely popular.
They’re extremely popular in America.
I think they are referring to actual gore. For example, bull fighting.
Related to this, here's an ACLU filing with the FTC that lays out the content that the credit card companies don't like and how they pressure companies to remove it.
https://www.aclu.org/documents/federal-trade-commission-comp...
The article calls out “certain adult games” which is vague. It is interesting to note that most of the delisted games were themed specifically around incest.
https://bsky.app/profile/steamdb.info/post/3lu32vdlsmg27
Wondering if this will be a slippery slope towards pulling more anodyne stuff.
> The article calls out “certain adult games” which is vague.
A Quick Look at the list has me wishing I hadn’t thought to look at the list.
I suspect the vague “certain adult games” was chosen because it makes it sound more controversial. If the headline was “Valve removed incest-themed games under pressure” there would be a lesser reaction.
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Collective Shout, the group behind this petition, has previously gone after more mainstream games, like Detroit Becomes Human, for spurious reasons. I have no doubt they'll use this win and mealy-mouthed language to push for more censorship.
Specifically incest, rape, and child abuse-themed games.
Games/hentai about these topics are not illegal, even if they are in bad taste.
And I’m willing to bet some content removed does not fall in these categories
Ah, like a video game version of "Game of Thrones"? None of the payment processors had any issues with taking money for that series. And that was live action.
Yep, those games were exactly the same thing as Game of Thrones.
I mean by the content they were yeah. Precisely the problem with rules declaring what content is and isn’t acceptable.
Exactly. By content, here is a book on Amazon[1] where the author openly tells stories of rape and incest and somehow it's all Ok. Pretty much the same as Game of Thrones and those Steam games.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Body-Keeps-Score-Healing-Trauma/dp/01...
Seems like we’re in agreement - I read your prior comment differently
You are not in agreement. The person you are replying to is being sarcastic. They feel that a HBO produced tv show with incest is art that needs to be protected while an indie dev game with incest is trash that needs to be censored.
Yes, I don't know if selling those games is legal or not.
Thus I can imagine that they don't want to become criminally responsible if that's illegal.
Nekopara and Sabbat of the Witch are safe... for now.
Hopefully they don't know about the little-sister route in Making Lovers.
Visa and Mastercard generally don't like anything with incest, rape, and/or underage participants.
But they are strangely okay with murder.
That's american values for you.
Payment processors should be regulated like utilities. Permissionless and agnostic to anything you do.
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The same post by steamdb is on twitter too, they are a steam game tracker and database.
If there was ever an argument for the need of cryptocurrency, it is this.
Dethrone the payment processors or they get to decide what is and is not allowed to be sold.
Seems like this could be easily solved with legislation without having to invent new currencies. Just make it a law that payment processors are not allowed to discriminate between legitimate goods and services. If the government thinks that sugary water or porn magazines are fine to buy and sell, why should MasterCard have anything to say about it? Payment processors are basically natural monopolies, so they should be able to be regulated.
It is sad that in 2025 this needs to be repeated: fiction is not real.
This statement imply that:
* Simulated violence is not violence.
* Simulated sex is not sex.
* Simulated sorcery is not sorcery
Violence is still considered ok in games, last time I checked.
Which is possibly because violence is not as awkward to watch with your family as sex is.
Violence has no religious morality baggage - religions were extremely violent. Sex, however, has all the baggage from all the angles. Even if we aren't religious, it doesn't matter, religion still dictates huge chunks of our lives and our mindsets. It has thousands of years of inertia.
Abrahamic religion is prudish about sex none of the pagan or Buddhism is prudish.
i think peoppe would probably have much better sex in general if it wasnt so taboo, and so people could get outside feedback on how theyre doing
I could do without Jeff from accounting showing off his latest proud performance with the wife to the coworkers like it's his golf swing.
Something tells me Jeff from accounting can still freely show photos of him "hunting" with some dead wild animals and few will consider it gross.
And yet it is possible to make simulations extreme enough I would not opposed to banning them. There are some things that should not be normalized in society.
It shouldn’t be payment processors doing it unilaterally, I’ll grant that. But I’m not (and I’m sure a great many more of a silent majority) wholly opposed to the outcome.
> There are some things that should not be normalized in society.
That attitude has recently become normalized, and I find it Concerning(TM).
Recently? Such a sentiment has existed since the dawn of human society.
Recently? Hasn't society always topics they thought shouldn't be normalized?
Yeah, who gets to decide whats too far?
There's a similar issue with free speech - the moment you ban certain speech the door to banning your political opposition opens.
That’s the tricky bit.
> Yeah, who gets to decide whats too far?
The ruling ethnic group, of course, as is tradition.
> There's a similar issue with free speech - the moment you ban certain speech the door to banning your political opposition opens.
There is TONS of speech that is banned, even in America. There isn't a single place on the planet that has no limits on speech.
From what I can tell, only one country in the world has free speech. Actual free speech. USA.
Its dying fast. The Late Show was just cancelled because it was a massive thorn to the POTUS.
I love a good “POTUS” conspiracy as much as the next guy but The Late Show cancelation is a simple money game, the show was bleeeding money. If the show was profitable the chance of it being cancelled are same as me dating Beyonce
Technically yes, but the money game was CBS losing a massive lawsuit to POTUS.
I would agree with this if this was factual, the money cbs paid via 60 minutes nonsense is same if you were fined a dime for something you did today. so not “massive” but whatever is the exact opposite of massive
The show itself was losing viewership cause who the F watches late night TV these days?
is said late night TV actually expensive though? they have a payong audience, and the whole thing is an ad for whoever is selling a book or movie release.
whats gonna replace that slot that people are gonna watch? a blank screen?
if you have a car that is a money pit you and your family keep bleeding money on to make repairs, would you keep making repairs or get another car? all of TV is a simple money game, shows get canceled, new ones spruce up, they get canceled, some are super successful but run their course, others stink from the get-go. what is going to replace the late show? not sure but whatever it does it better make money for cbs or the same faith awaits it
Interesting, do you have a source for that claim? Mallen Baker [1] says it was gaining viewers.
[1]: https://youtu.be/KMLZAE4okWs
It's both. A merger is happening in two weeks and this helps. It was going off of the air in a year or two anyways. Easy way to give Trump a win.
Thanks for this mate, REALLY needed this laugh on this fine end-of-grinding-workweek… Fantastic!!
I don't know what your definition of "actual" free speech is but there are certainly limits to free speech even in the US[0].
And those are just explicit limits. Try supporting Palestine on a college campus or mentioning women or gay people in any government funded scientific publication, or finding a book portraying pro-LGBT content in a library or a school curriculum that portrays slavery in a way that "makes white people feel victimized" in the South.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
Supporting Palestine would get you deported to El Salvador (or worse) :)
The limits to speech (in USA) depends (roughly) on if it's intended to incite imminent lawless action and is likely to do so.
Actual speech is communicating ideas or opinions, even distasteful or unpopular ones. The fact that university morons throw a riot if anyone disagrees with them (many such cases), does not affect your right to do so.
Denmark passed a law in 2023 that makes public burning, tearing, stepping on, or defiling holy texts illegal. It's informally called the Quran Law, because everyone knows who doesn't tolerate any criticism of their religion at all. This is one of many limits on speech in Denmark. In my view, speech is either free or it isn't, hence my argument that only USA has free speech.
thats a historical view, but not the most useful now that the second american revolution has happened.
things that lightly annoyed the president is now the decider between legal and illegal speech in the US, and the punishment is death, because nothing the president does that could be part of their regular responsibilities like talking to secret service assasins, can be considered in court proceedings.
Are the assassins in the room with us right now?
Isn't freedom of speech just "you're allowed to say whatever you want", and not "you're entitled to the use of taxpayer dollars to help distribute your message" or "you're entitled to have the government force children to read your message"?
having a green card or visa stripped because you said something is not "having the government force children to read your message"
You should make a petition. Maybe we can exclude pro-exclusion websites from payment processors.
This is not okay, and we need to take a strong moral stance here. Some views should not be acceptable in a society.
Personally, I won't miss these games either, but it just seems like such a slippery slope to normalize achieving societal/political goals through exerting pressure on infrastructure companies instead of through democratic means.
I totally support this type of pressure being exerted on companies involved in editorializing and providing an audience (e.g. I don't think Valve should be required by law to carry any form of content, just like a publisher can't be forced to print any content it doesn't agree with). But infrastructure, due to being both fundamental to doing business and generally living in a society and very often being at least regionally monopolistic in nature, should be open to anybody that's acting within the law.
And conversely, if something seems ethically or morally unacceptable to a rule-based society, what ought to change is the law.
That's all assuming a functioning democratic and political process, of course, but it generally seems to be possible even in the US, with its strong protections of speech, to limit certain types of speech under obscenity laws, so I don't really get the desire to outsource this inherently political process to private corporations.
There is a world of nuance separating "normalizing" and "banning" something though, that's simply a false dichotomy.
I'd wager most "normal" people would recoil at the idea of eating excrement and, for all my open-mindedness, it's probably not something I'd actively endorse. But banning it is on a whole other leaf. Things can and should be allowed to exist on the fringe.
Otherwise we're moving towards the subject of the T.S. Eliot quote where "everything that is not forbidden will be compulsory, and everything not compulsory will be forbidden."
The term “silent majority” has a very specific political meaning.
But, in what way do you think those opposing “extreme” content being consumed by their fellow citizens are silent? State governments across the country are clamoring to censor all sorts of things, presumably to satisfy their constituents.
For the people who disagree: would you really be interested in seeing Child Grooming Simulator 25 on steam? I think we can almost all reasonably agree that at least this sort of content should not be sold on there.
I don't have to be "interested" in seeing something on steam to disagree with nkrisc. I don't care about 99.9%+ of the games on steam, that doesn't mean I want them gone.
Won’t somebody please think of the children?
Correction: Won't somebody please think of the pixels?
When we start saying "no content restrictions besides illegal stuff", your hyperbolic question becomes legitimate in a way that it's not when we're talking about Doom.
there are already hundreds, if not thousands of anime lolicon porn games on steam.
the people making a stink about this know this but are pretending that they don't because it would overtly out them as pedophiles.
Are you saying the people who are petitioning Steam to remove porn games are playing the porn games themselves and simultaneously pretending porn games don't exist on Steam?
That doesn't make sense.
Nothing you said here is true.
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It's a slippery slope. It's not real but can certainly, by definition, create a situation that mimics reality to the point of assisting someone at committing a real crime that they couldn't possibly commit without the simulation.
The slippery slope is in banning speech. If you want to make the claim that simulated sex leads to crimes we have been over this a thousand times with violence in games. There is no connection, you are without a leg to stand on except your own religious indoctrination.
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Should also ban GTA then. /s
You say this like they haven't already tried.
And all Hollywood studios as well.
It's about time that credit cards were treated like money and this kind of behaviour forbidden. When you pay with cash the notes and coins don't refuse to be handed over because the issuing bank has an opinion about what you are buying, it should be the same for all payment methods.
The discussion seems to be mostly about the moral issues, but it seems likely that the titles being a 'magnet for scams and chargebacks' is more likely the cause.
Nice excuse but we can see who censors behind this are and how they are gloating. https://xcancel.com/CollectiveShout
No. That's an often-repeated bullshit excuse.
Payment processors have ways of passing some of the chargeback risks onto the stores, and it's not like Steam itself is chargeback central. If you just want free games, pirating them is extremely easy, and trying to abuse chargebacks gets you banned.
It's not as straightforward as that. It's more like scammers getting other people to buy gift cards which are redeemed in steam and other games then the value getting moved around as in-game currency between game accounts (game-bucks, special items) before being cashed out again to make tracing very hard. Essentially laundering. I assume certain titles attract scammers because people will not want to pursue the claims due to embarrassment. Why would Mastercard give a hoot that a game has boobs in it? They care about loosing money.
Link for the petition and its signers.
https://www.collectiveshout.org/open-letter-to-payment-proce...
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Steam-Payment-providers-force-V...
Reverse petition where?
Seconded.
Regards: Game dev who cares about conservation and doesn't like chilling effects.
All eyes on you.
Agree or disagree, it won't matter. When you let gamers vote with their wallets, the answer speaks for itself.
I wonder what else we should just keep to voting on with our wallets?
If Valve limited credit card purchases to PG games, but let customers purchase other games via crypto, then payment processors couldn’t complain about alleged high chargeback rates or association with adult content.
I imagine payment processors wouldn’t love this solution, but at that point they’re just asking for full editorial control, and we should resist.
For those thinking is only related to chargebacks and fraud, it is not.
VISA and Mastercard have been banning a lot of content that is not porn but has political values that are disapproved by certain billionaires and investors. There is a bunch of links I wanted to post about, such as US billionaires bragging he personally called VISA CEO to ban content on PH or japanese politicians mad at the censorship of japanese art with certain values because of these companies. But I am on phone walking home so if anyone else has such links please post.
Yep.
They've colluded with the US federal government in the past on those issues as well. "Operation Choke Point" was ostensibly about fraud, but included transactions related to firearms in its scope. As a result, several major banks and payment processors dropped legitimate firearms dealers. For a while it got to the point that I was helping a couple of local gun stores contract with "high risk" payment processors that also serve the porn industry and get set up.
To this day if you're on a gun forum and mention that you use Bank of America, people will pile on to tell you horror stories of both companies and individuals having their accounts closed and funds held for weeks or months after completely legal transactions. In one case in particular, they claimed it happened after buying a backpack at a gun store.
Again, these are 100% legitimate and legal businesses. Federally licensed (FFL) gun stores had trouble for years even keeping a working business account. It was clearly not about fraud, at least not in practice.
Politics completely aside, the financial landscape for gun stores today looks a lot like the cannabis industry: a few institutions are quietly known in those communities to allow them to operate, but many choose to do business only in cash and most prefer it if given the option. The porn industry is similar from what I can see.
Unfortunately, cash is slowly getting phased out.
Try buying a second hand car and you want cash from the bank. Used to be very easy, but now you need to declare what your spending your money on.
You sold your car. O, its over 7 or 10k, well, this is getting reported to the local IRS. Where is that cash coming from, questions, questions?
Over here they are even cracking down on stuff like ebay, amazon because some people run a business on those sites and do not report the taxes. Result: If you make over 3k in the year on ebay, you need to provided your tax number, or ebay closes your account. And above 3k, it get reported to the IRS.
But wait, what happens if your a foreign national from some specific Asian countries and want to open a bank account? Refused, refused, refused... But you need a bank account for a lot of basic things. Well, tough luck. Lets not talk account closing issues.
And that is the EU, and just normal people. Nothing tax evasion, guns, or whatever. Just everybody putting up umbrella's to be sure, not understanding that when everybody does it, it really screws with people.
They are going crazy with this over regulation. Yes, i understand you want to fight black money but the people who get the big amounts will have ways to hide it. Your just hurting the normal people wanting to know what everybody is doing exactly with every cent.
You see this gradual effort to slowly phase out cash. Cashless payment are getting encouraged, cash withdrawals cost your money more and more, more questions regarding origins (so you say f it, and use bank deposits with release approvals).
Its not a surprise that we seen the increase in cryto usage (and the efforts of governments to control that also).
>You sold your car. O, its over 7 or 10k, well, this is getting reported to the local IRS. Where is that cash coming from, questions, questions?
(I'm not in the US)
I'm curious about how does that happen. Do they reach out to you? Your bank?
In the US, it’s a “Currency Transaction Report”: https://www.fdic.gov/news/financial-institution-letters/2021...
The bank collects the information necessary to submit that form at the time of transaction.
You’re also required as an individual to file IRS Form 8300 if you accept >$10k in payment: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
Your bank will file a report with FinCEN that says that you withdrew (or deposited, or transferred, or whatever) the money. They can/will also separately report suspicious transactions, including patterns of transactions that seem designed to evade the reporting requirements.
What if you cash your paychecks at the grocery store?
What grocery store is cashing checks in the 7-10k range?
Not sure. Apparently walmart you can cash up to 7500 for half the year and 5000 other half for tax return purposes I guess. Still maybe you can get paid weekly instead of biweekly.
Of course it's not. Steam already has a very generous refund policy. It's hard to imaging the chargeback rate would be that high even for nsfw games when you can simply refund. Refund takes about 3~4 clicks on steam website; Chargeback takes a phone call with your bank and can get your steam account locked.
And people who laundry money out stolen cards won't do that with nsfw games. They'll do that with CSGO knifes.
Visa/MasterCard porn ban was driven by American extremist Christian organisation called Exodus Cry, which is also anti-gay, etc.
https://screenshot-media.com/politics/human-rights/pornhub-p...
Exodus Cry leader was later fired for sexual misconduct
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-commentary/anti...
Trump changed banking regulations so that "reputation" can no longer be a reason for banks to "derisk" customers after crypto industry outcry, but the reason to exit customers must be factual money laundering or similar reason. But the change does concern cards, as payments are not under FDIC surveillance.
This is why crypto needs to rule the world
This is not an issue oof payment processors. It is an issue of Visa and Mastercard duopoly, whom use payment processors as middlemen in order to be able to push their own "rules" onto businesses and get away clean.
The games that got banned this time, even before considering their depiction of incest, are often of such poor quality that it's difficult to even call them 'games.' Valve itself should have removed them from Steam long before payment processors had to step in. Defending these kinds of games is like equating Blue is the Warmest Color with a random PornHub video, simply because they both contain sexual acts. If Baldur's Gate 3 ever gets banned, then you can truly make a fuss.
They went after no-name games instead of Summer Memories or Treasure Hunter Claire? Weak.
They should have at least aimed at Living With Sister: Monochrome Fantasy.
It looks like the affected games are all rated "Adult Only" on Steam.
The games you mention are all sold without adult content on Steam, and the customer has to visit the publisher's website to download a patch restoring said content
Hey, Summer Memories got an official shout out on their twitter once, someone must have a real weak spot for that one at valve.
They went after incest and non-con (for now).
But I don't know about the last game you mentioned... the "sister" part sounds sus.
You can track the list of banned games here: https://bannedgames.netlify.app
So why don't they make a second company, SteamyAdult? There is a market for it, so it seems.
Is it really a fact that porn transactions attract higher amount of fraud?
Does valve even leak the game titles you purchase to card processors? Don't they have some plausible deniability here?
Doesn't matter if anyone actually buys content or products the networks object to per their policies. If it's being offered and payment is accepted on a checkout that shows the networks' logos, merchants and their payment service providers can get into trouble.
What can be done to loosen card companies' grip on this? It has been a constant problem now for decades.
In Europe, Wero[1] has a chance to become the de-facto payment system, once it's supported by more banks in more countries and adds online payments functionality.
[1]https://wero-wallet.eu/
Denmark has seen a trend where their national card network (Dankort, operating at the equivalent level to Visa and Mastercard) is seeing reduced usage.
They're aiming to reverse that trend.
https://cphpost.dk/2025-06-28/general/new-political-agreemen...
Not all European countries still have these independent networks.
Seeing reduced use partially because only a few banks support using it in Apple Pay. And Google Pay can't support it at all currently
Dane here, and I just don't see the point of using Apple or Google pay. Aside from not wanting American tech interfering in, or data harvesting, my finances, it's not any easier to use. I just touch my card to the terminal and payment happens. Some times, or if the amount is over some limit, I have to enter a pin. I cringe every time I see someone contorting their arm to pay with their watch. It's tech for the sake of tech.
Sincerely, Ted K.
Regulation and anti cartel laws.
Adult business is legitimate business in many parts of the world and companies using their monopoly to suppress it should be a case for an Investigation.
Instant payment systems that go direct from bank to bank, assuming the banks, the government or any other intermediaries don't also decide to not allow it.
Or cryptocurrency, I guess.
Choose a payment system by a company that is not as opinionated. Apple pay, for example.
Use ACH/Zelle/Paypal/etc.
The permanent solution is a federal government operated electronic money system operated as a utility with constitutionally protected rights.
PayPal has also been involved in this.
Those solutions might work for some people in some countries, but I would argue that it's not acceptable for the vast majority of customers, and they would lose a very significant portion of revenue.
Bitcoin was supposed to solve this.
You can get Pornhub subscription with Bitcoin, but not credit card.
And you could indeed use Bitcoin on Steam for a while!
But then the blocks got full, fees and wait times skyrocketed, and in response to the customer backlash Steam removed Bitcoin.
Meanwhile Bitcoiners were (and still are) only focused on number go up instead of other, more productive, use cases.
Such a waste.
They built the lightning network, it's meant for this use case.
Unfortunately it's shit at it. The user experience of using another currency or hell even just Bitcoin is far superior.
There's now Ethereum, Base and Solana featuring US dollar stablecoins and significantly cheaper fees. If you want to go a step further and eliminate the stablecoin issuer's counterparty risk you could even pay in the base asset of ETH. Shopify allows payments from crypto now, so Steam should try it again.
Good luck censoring purchases on ETH.
There are plenty of alternatives to Bitcoin payments in the crypto space.
The problem isn't technical, the problem is getting people to care.
Even stablecoins aren't so great for the environment. Proof of stake isn't as bad, but also doesn't offer much beyond traditional systems once KYC is needed.
Am I missing something?
Stablecoins are great. The only way to be debanked is if the stablecoin issuer explicitly blacklists your address, which is a public act which they will be forced to justify.
And Ethereum's Proof of Stake algorithm is highly censorship resistant. That's why it took seven years to design.
Exactly. It's really a tragedy that crypto becomes a speculator's tool, and the real problem didn't even get solved.
in a word, regulation.
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"It doesn't personally affect me so I don't care."
It absolutely does affect me for disproportionately fraudulent activity to exist on the same system I use for routine payments. I don’t want to subsidize cc abusers with the cc processing fees I implicitly pay.
Why do you think it's fair/acceptable to strongarm niche sectors that want to process credit cards just like everyone else?
Because those sectors are particularly difficult for processors in terms of fraud and abuse. If your niche is so disproportionately problematic that cc companies don’t think it’s worth it to try to make money off you, then you should find a different solution.
Likely nothing.
The simple fact is, Visa/MC don't want to deal with porn because the number of chargebacks and fraud from porn purchases is significant and a huge outlier compared to most other charges. Their crusade against processing charges for adult material isn't about purity, it's simply business.
I'm not sure I buy the chargeback angle. It's commonly trotted out as a reason card companies would enforce censorship, but it doesn't make sense with the actions they take. Chargeback fees are paid by the merchant regardless of the chargeback's success, and are supposed to cover the costs of administering it (and then some). The very selective rules applied here are pretty odd from that angle too, if adult content chargebacks/fraud is the issue, then all of it should be the issue, not small niches.
Fraud is likely more realistic of an issue, but that's probably an issue with games in general, not just adult titles.
There are already high-risk merchant accounts with higher fees and cash reserve requirements, but AFAIK companies like Valve aren't being given any options other than comply or be destroyed.
I doubt it. If that were the case, I think they would only be complaining to Valve about the number of chargebacks issued from the Steam store. Not about genres-that-are-correlated-with-chargebacks-in-other-contexts.
Given Valve's generous refund policies, and the fact that a steam store purchase on your credit card statement looks quite innocent, and that the credit card companies didn't complain to Valve about chargebacks but about content, my guess is there are hardly any chargebacks, and this is just about moral purity.
> Given Valve's generous refund policies,
Their generous refund policy, and more importantly their very-non-generous chargeback policy. If you chargeback a Steam purchase, your account is locked.
Can you link a reliable source for this claim? I personally couldn't find anything with substance.
I can't imagine people are risking their steam accounts to ripoff a $5 adult game
Visa charge a fee for processing chargebacks, and this will be a tiny fraction of Steam sales. I doubt it's their concern.
That's not true, anti-sex work and anti-porn activists have specifically been pressuring payment processors to assume these policies. The processors as the critical control point of this whole thing was identified decades ago and conservative christian think tanks have been pursuing this path since then.
This is part of a long-term plan to de facto ban lgbtq content without having to deal with first amendment protections. First have the payment processors ban explicit content, then have queer content categorized as explicit.
Considering their volume, I find it hard to believe that Valve couldn't find another, more lenient payment processor with similar fees.
It complicates things to have some games that can be purchased with credit cards and some games that can only be purchased with crypto.
If they continued to carry any of the games that were singled out for removal by Visa and Mastercard, they would not be able to accept credit card payments for anything else in their store. This same drama has played out the same way with countless other online services.
Controversial games being restricted to purchase only with Steam Points. The credit card is only ever charged to buy points, which can then be used to purchase items on the store. Similar to fortnite.
Or similar to DLSite and Fantia, where it didn't work.
My understanding is that it's not just the processor, but Visa/Mastercard themselves have rules against certain types of merchants/products... they really have a monopoly on credit cards in general so you have to play by their rules.
You're right, but it's slightly more complicated than that.
My understanding is that payment processors are obligated to follow the policies of Visa/MasterCard, AmEx, and Discover, but that those parties' policies don't explicitly ban these specific things for sale. Instead, they "strongly encourage" processors to ban them in their user agreements under the implicit threat of their risk level being increased, which in turn impacts the fees they pay to the credit card companies.
I've not been deep in this world since ~2014, but at that time the only processor I could find that wasn't specific to the porn industry, offered physical terminals, had reasonable (if high) fees, and didn't ban legal transactions in their user agreement was PAI ("Payment Alliance International"). A quick look at their site today shows that they seem to have been acquired by Brinks, so that may no longer be the case.
MasterCard have a specific restricted list that bans an awful lot of things in any adult context.
Some of how to interpret that is left up to the processor, but it is broadly under MCs and to a lesser extent Visa's control.
Yep, they are a just a modern day mafia. "Would be a real shame if you didn't take down these games. Then we couldn't do business with you anymore."
They could support a stablecoin like USDC and start pushing people to that. No censorship and lower fees. Valve broke ground with Steam, they could do it again.
nah. USDC funds can be frozen by Circle on demand/request.
You wouldn’t be buying or holding any USDC in your account. It would be invisible to you
The problem with that is that you usually end up using traditional payment rails (e.g. a Visa debit card) to "invisibly" buy the stablecoin and then you're subject to their rules and fees again.
Would you care to explain the process more? I'd be glad to see a useful application of crypto.
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Early crypto believer here. My first purchase of Bitcoin was at $0.23. I've been through the ups and downs, used the proceeds to buy physical assets over the years (land, and one vehicle), and lost interest in the "community" shortly after Ethereum gained initial popularity. I still hold some crypto, mostly Bitcoin but also Ethereum, Monero, and a handful of altcoins that don't amount to enough to bother withdrawing.
My hot take take: Crypto still fills a valuable role, and will still "take over" the global financial system both at the individual and institutional level. Whether that's Bitcoin, another coin, or something new created by the institutions themselves is yet to be seen.
You're right that it's "tainted", of course. That's why I think we're in a (hopefully) long slump in adoption. I think that will rapidly change if and when the US Dollar loses its place as the world's reserve currency.
At some point there will be a war or significant political disruption. A large part of the world will want to divest itself of dollars, and none of the state-backed alternatives will be stable enough for their needs. That's when we'll see a shift to crypto - first some international institutions that do business across ideological borders, then the rest of the internationals, then individuals.
Unless and until that happens, things will continue to slowly grow. The boom/bust cycle will keep going, getting longer and lower magnitude over time. There's still money to be made in speculation, but that's not what interests me :)
> At some point there will be a war or significant political disruption. A large part of the world will want to divest itself of dollars, and none of the state-backed alternatives will be stable enough for their needs. That's when we'll see a shift to crypto - first some international institutions that do business across ideological borders, then the rest of the internationals, then individuals.
Sorry how would crypto end up more stable than any candidates for a reserve currency? The only thing even remotely stable in the crypto world are stablecoins which... are pegged to the dollar (the actual reserve currency) which is already unstable in your scenario.
Price stability is a function of liquidity and velocity. Both would increase, thereby increasing stability.
They also use dollars and credit cards and gift cards.
There are no other payment processors.
There are no other payment processors that can replace Visa/Mastercard*.
There are other payment processors in India/Japan/China/Brazil/etc. But none of them is internationally adopted like Visa/Mastercard.
Is it the case the Mastercard/Visa will reject a site that has such content even if you can only purchase it using ValveBucks or PayPal or something? That seems plausible.
In some countries there are other systems. It's high time the modern world adopted something similar like Pix in Brazil.
There are national issuers like JCB or UnionPay.
I'm getting a JCB card. Screw Visa.
Adult content has a high chargeback rate and high fraud rates so payment processing for adult content has higher fees.
People say that a lot but I haven't seen actual statistics, and sites that have established low chargeback rates face the same issues.
Also that's not a reason to ban certain genres/kinks, which is what's happening here.
You need to be more specific. Conflating "adult content" with porn is both problematic is masks the real issue. A large majority of games Valve sells are adult content. But as you can imagine grand theft auto is not causing a lot of political backlash, despite the objectionable content.
You say that but the same censors behind this also got GTA5 pulled from retail stores
Which makes less sense when you consider Steam will refund you game if you dont want it.
I don’t think you understand what’s being said. He’s not talking about the ability to refund
But is there a good reason to do a chargeback if you can easily refund it? Yes if someone stole the CC and used it buy something on Steam, but is that the concern or that someone buys something with a CC on their own account, and then chargebacks instead of refunding?
The fact that these were specifically incest games makes me think a title was somehow involved in distributing CSAM, which is often why Visa/MC crack down on porn websites.
But it is possible that Visa sensibly and correctly said "anyone who makes or purchases such a game is a despicable scumbag, and we shouldn't assume the financial risk of dealing with them."
That's a pretty wild idea for what someone would be putting on steam as a visual novel. And why would they need to be pressured into removing horrible illegal content?
Or you think one person did that and it made the credit cards decide any story with incest would be the same? That would be ridiculous on their part.
I think the government should be the one deciding what makes someone qualify as a despicable scumbag, not a private payment processor that is essentially acting as a utility provider. For the same reason, I also don't think an electric company should be allowed to shut cancel your building's electricity if they don't like your mismatched socks.
If I'm going to be gracious to payment processors, what they need to do is lobby congress for a "DMCA-like safe harbor" for themselves.
Does anyone know if UPI solves this problem?
The good old USA, when you can show someone bashing someone else's head with brain spilling out and it might get an R rating. But show a nipple and holy shit we have crossed the line.
Maybe now is the time to rethink accepting crypto again? But this time stablecoins not volatile coins like BTC and ETH.
The monetary layer is not the one where bad behavior should be policed. Being able to send and receive money is a basic utility that no government or bank should be able to deprive someone of. That's why I support cryptocurrency.
Visa and Mastercard are the defacto world judges of the limits of porn.
they have their own banned topics lists and if you fuck up you lose your income
yup, the traditional banking system as a whole really
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Tangent, but each of those events should be a reminder of why we must fight to never, ever live in a cashless society.
Because once big entities control the pipeline of what you can buy and you have no alternative, they basically can dictate what you can and can't do.
We saw that during the wikileak story when visa prevented Europeans to give to the org despite the fact it was perfectly legal to do so on their soil.
Just like data handled by an Apple device is not really your data since they can prevent you from doing what you want with it, money handled by Visa is only your money until they don't like what you do with it.
Avoiding this was the initial promise of crypto and crypto pundits abandoned all their principals because line goes up.
Bring back crypto payments Valve.
I'm not sure why the payment processors can't just be excluded for the offending games during checkout instead.
Without a horse in this race, this precedent makes me deeply uncomfortable.
Valve should also delete its chat app. You can send a game if it's that important.
credit card companies (Mc?) did the same with mindgeek. No due process. Just revoked their access to CC networks.
mindgeek then wiped all _unconfirmed_ content regardless of whether it was revenge porn or not.
That one must be defended, since it was abuse of real people happening at scale and with full knowledge thereof, and PornHub's status-quo response was at best "do nothing and hope it goes away". Mind, the Justice Department also went after them (and won), so we can't even resort to "CC networks shouldn't be the ones enforcing this." At what stage of a court case is it appropriate to expect third parties to start breaking their business relationships with the defendant?
The weird part about the first-world sexual liberation mindset (usually said about feminism, but not limited thereto) is that it actively ignores how massively abusive sexual liberties very often and easily become.
Honestly glad to see this has sparked larger talks about this again. Surprised to see Valve is just now getting impacted by this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melinda_Tankard_Reist#Collecti...
> a "pro-life feminist"
What.
Seriously what? I thought pro-choice is a core tenet of feminism?
You could have clicked the link embedded in the very text you're quoting, to read an explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-abortion_feminism
Why would it be?
I live in a red state in the South. I'd say about 2/3 of the women I know well enough to be confident of their politics to that degree of detail would describe themselves as both feminists and anti-abortion/pro-life.
If you want to put a name to it, they're basically second-wave feminists with a few third-wave beliefs tacked on.
The real lesson here is that politics are nuanced, and the US party dichotomy doesn't come close to covering it.
I consider myself an AnCap (shocking given my username, I know), but grew up here surrounded by Republicans. I fit in well enough overall because this is where I developed my "social mask" in the first place. I lived in a community with nearly directly opposite politics (Charlottesville, VA) for a few years and found that I fit in pretty well with that crowd as well.
I share enough with both parties that I can have conversations on things that I agree with them on and connect to the point that they assume that I'm "one of them". Invariably, once conversation turns to other topics I'm accused of being a member of the other party. It's to the point that it amuses me when it happens, and I frankly enjoy being in a place where I can connect with most everyone and serve as a sort of translator: I've spent enough time "in enemy territory" from their perspectives that I can explain the other side's position fairly and with empathy while explicitly not holding that position. It makes for stimulating conversation with little risk of offense.
Because "anti-abortion/pro-life" removes a right from women. Trading the rights of a developed adult for the rights of a hypothetical future person.
What does ancapistanism have to do with it? Is there a non-religious reason to be against the right to choose abortion up to 24 weeks of pregnancy?
> Because "anti-abortion/pro-life" removes a right from women. Trading the rights of a developed adult for the rights of a hypothetical future person.
Their perspective is that abortion is killing a human being. Given that, it’s entirely consistent.
> What does ancapistanism have to do with it?
Nothing, other than that I was providing some context on where I’m coming from.
> Is there a non-religious reason to be against the right to choose abortion up to 24 weeks of pregnancy?
While religion is certainly a factor for a lot of these people, this question doesn’t make sense to me. Is there a non-religious reason to be against killing any person, regardless of age?
The base difference in perspective is that the other side here believes that the fetus is a human being, with all the rights that come with it.
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Well social/religious conservatives often think the child has rights even during pregnancy so it's not as simple as the mothers rights.
The libertarian view tends to much more favour the parents rights to make choices for their children if I remember correctly, and obviously favour the option where the government isn't deciding for them.
Exactly.
My personal belief is that life begins at conception. As a result, I’m opposed to abortion in all cases.
… but I’m also an anarchist, and therefore believe it is emphatically not the state’s role to make these types of decisions for people.
I don’t think there is a “right answer” here in terms of policy. Some large portion of the people will see it as a violation of their rights no matter how extreme or nuanced the line is drawn.
There is no unique dna at conception. I know this is fun to repeat but it really shows you ignore science. .
Right, is there a non-religious reason to be against the right to choose to abort early during pregnancy?
If you want population growth.
a moral reason
> Is there a non-religious reason to be against the right to choose abortion up to 24 weeks of pregnancy?
Of course there is. It's not hard to construct an argument to that effect either. For example: let's agree for the sake of argument that a newborn has moral rights, and that gametes do not. It doesn't make much sense to give the fetus moral rights only based on its physical location, therefore at some point between conception and birth the fetus gains moral rights. No matter what point n we choose, the objection "why is one day earlier any better" seems pretty persuasive. Therefore, by induction, the only point for assigning rights which can't be argued against in that way is at conception. Thus, we should disallow abortion so we aren't depriving the fetus of its rights.
I'm not saying that's a bulletproof argument. Indeed the argument doesn't even need to be correct for my point. My point is that nothing about that argument requires any religious belief whatsoever. So it is possible. I'm also quite certain that a cleverer person than I could construct a better argument which still doesn't require any religious dogma. This is an ethical topic, not a religious one. Obviously religion has a lot to say on ethics, but that's no reason to believe that secular arguments against abortion can't exist.
cool, then sperm and eggs have moral rights
> No matter what point n we choose, the objection "why is one day earlier any better" seems pretty persuasive. Therefore, by induction
That's not persuasive at all. It's not just not "bulletproof", it's blatantly wrong. Also you can make the same argument in the other direction.
> Indeed the argument doesn't even need to be correct for my point. My point is that nothing about that argument requires any religious belief whatsoever.
They wanted someone to give a plausible argument that isn't religious.
> no reason to believe that secular arguments against abortion can't exist
I care about the merits of positions that people actually have, not theoretical positions.
And in the general case, if nobody can be found that has a simple position, that is a reason to believe it's not a coherent position.
if I was doing a couple of billion a year in transactions then the payment processor would be told where to shove it
Okay, then you'd go from a billion a year to zero. Congratulations.
A couple of billion is an insignificant fraction of the $10000bn MasterCard processes every year.
which is relevant how exactly?
merchants don't deal with mastercard, they deal with an acquiring bank
of which there are hundreds
no doubt one of which will be happy to take the business
Mastercard appears to be involved in the pressuring. You can't avoid them.
certainly not explicitly mentioned in the article
and I very doubt it's the case, the card networks simply don't care, given you can buy adult entertainment from millions of websites
the acquirer will care if it pushes up their chargeback rate, but this is normally solved by the merchant by paying a couple of bps more
it's a negotiating tactic, nothing more
https://nationwidepaymentsystems.com/mastercards-policy-on-a...
You clearly think in small terms then. Trillion dollar fish eat billion dollar fish
Over 15 years from the Bitcoin Pizza Day, yet we're still dealing with this shit. What was the point.
Just get JCB cards. Done.
Does Steam offer different types of content to customers depending on their payment card brand?
No.
Honestly, this whole Visa/Mastercard control thing feels a lot like realizing you’ve been following rules that don’t really fit you. It’s tough to break out of it. But FedNow is an interesting option. It lets banks move money instantly, 24/7, with no card networks involved, so less hassle with the content policing. It’s not a magic fix (still early days, only works in the US), but it shows there’s another way if you’re willing to step outside the old patterns. Sometimes that’s what you need to actually move forward. And no I'm not a Fednow shill. Has anyone tried Kagi btw? ;)
It should be unlawful in every developed country, it's an assault on the freedom of speech and freedom of information by Visa.
They blacklisted games that feature incest. Good riddance. This trash should never have been allowed on Steam.
Clearly Steam disagreed. I don't see any publishers who were angry.
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you can start to gamble NFTs on Steam starting from age 13
but they'll tell you that they got pressured to ban "adult content" from steam
HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA
Who's kid is obsessed with microtransactions and cs:go cases gamba on steam?
Psyop and propaganda, calling them out gets you a ban
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It is a shame that it takes payment processors to get Valve to do even the bare minimum curation of their store. IMO the thousands of outright bad games and ai slop asset flips and weirdo porn that verges on outright illegal content in many countries should have never been allowed in the first place. All of this leads back to various executives at Valve essentially doing no actual work and refusing to hire anybody because a huge part of their corporate culture is to keep headcount low while chasing constant growth.
> It's not a great precedent, that's for sure.
It’s not a precedent, its been the status quo for half a century
It's interesting that Valve sort of put themselves in this situation by opting not to police their store anymore.
I'm personally a fan of fewer restrictions on content in video games and fewer "gatekeepers" but it's kind of inevitable that people would get upset when you chose to allow people to sell games like "Sex With Hitler" and "Pimp Life: Sex Simulator". Deciding to allow that content on your store and simultaneously not going to bat for it is weird, it's like they decided to just get the porn money while they could as a short-term boost to revenue.
Itch.io still has fewer restrictions but I assume they'll eventually have to clamp down too once payment processors cut them off - they don't have the financial resources to fight it like Valve or Epic do.
Interestingly Nintendo has as of late relaxed their restrictions too, you can find porn-adjacent shovelware on the Switch eShop despite their history of being very censorious. I wonder if payment processors will successfully push them around too or if Nintendo is too big to get pushed around.
Most Japanese adult game publishers had (some of) their games rejected from Steam.
Steam does police their store. It's just that Visa/Mastercard don't approve of how they police it.
What does "police" mean? They don't allow illegal content, that's policing no? You want more policing like morality police?
Yes, people have other moral values than yours and will act upon them.
The question is: has "kill in the name of Hitler" also been banned, or is that okay with Visa/MC?
I don't need your 'what ifs' and 'could haves.' Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is actually available on Steam, and that's good enough.
Looks to me like you read the opposite of what i wrote though.
> it's kind of inevitable that people would get upset when you chose to allow people to sell games like "Sex With Hitler" and "Pimp Life: Sex Simulator".
The problem isn't some people being upset, it's that a single digit number of companies effectively control the ability for anyone else in the world to do business with them. Those companies get lobbied as much as politicians but with no accountability and any overreach being far less visible. And no freedom of speech rules.
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Simulated "immoral" activity could be considered a moral gray area. If nothing else, morality is subjective.
So I think it's reasonable to argue for private, individual consumption of morally subjective material (not least of which is the logistical difficulty of preventing such things), as well as the right to create and sell such things. (You or I might approve of or oppose those things, but that's a different argument from what I make below.)
Aside from that, I don't think Valve or a payment processor is obligated to be a neutral party. Whether it might come from collective consumer backlash or whoever makes decisions for an organization deciding what they will or will not allow to flow through their system, I think they too should have the right to allow or ban things. If publishers and consumers want their morally gray content, so be it, but don't feel entitled to have Steam and VISA along for the ride if they don't want to be.
Hypothetically, Valve might prefer Steam be neutral, because money. But then they have the option to fight their payment processor or look for alternatives, rather than "forcing" their payment processor to be a part of something that the payment processor opposes.
TL;DR when a morally subjective issue involves a lot of parties, every party should have the right to "opt out" if they are morally opposed. (in my opinion)
Payment processors banning companies from using them for anything other than illegal use or fraud issues seems like pretty egregious overreach to me.
They shouldn't be able to leverage their nigh monopoly on modern payment processing to choose winners and losers in the marketplace.
They are using pornography as a wedge issue to establish that they get to dictate what companies are allowed to exist in the modern distributed market.
It would be entirely reasonable to legally require them to act blindly towards retailers, with restrictions needing to be based on universally applied financial criteria.
Card payments have become inseparable from modern life.
Regulate them as a financial utility. The electric company or water company can't refuse to hook up a business just because the owner doesn't like that business.
I think the trouble here stems from the lack of alternatives to the small group of payment processors. The near-monopoly allows their choices to override the choice of all the other involved groups, and almost no viable alternatives exist for Valve to move to if they disagree.
I guess Gabe's commitment to freedom of speech on his platform extended as far as nazis, but not as far as porn...
well, something like this can't be fixed overnight. I think Valve have more than earned a benefit of the doubt with this kind of stuff. I don't know if they are thinking on ways around this issue or not, but I would bet highly that they are. Problem is the credit card companies have them (and everyone else) by the balls because any attempt to continue hosting those gmaes but accept alternative payments for them would be retaliated against and MC et al might cut them off entirely, which would be devastating. I'm not sure there is a good solution to this that doesn't involve change of law/regulation i.e. lobbying
In the early 2000's kink.com put together a coalition and told the credit card companies to stick their censorship rules where the sun don't shine, and they are still taking credit card payments... The video game industry is plenty big enough to wield similar influence.
Payments companies successfully got valve to stop purveying weapons grade incest/child-porn/rape themed smut that is barely a game?
Nabokov was a great author and Lolita was the work of a great author who turned his pen/typewriter to a detestable subject leading to innumerable questions about art.
These guys are just z-graders who get off on non-consensual sexual interactions involving children.
Valve absolutely should not be publishing this stuff.
I don't know how bad these specific games were, but meanwhile, OnlyFans pornographers continue to use sites like Twitch to advertise their work to teens, and Pornhub continues to operate, despite claims that they profit from sex trafficking amongst other things (https://traffickinghubpetition.com/)
Seems strange to go after obscure videogames (which presumably don't feature real human beings) in this way. Unless they really are unusually extreme?
Even if I agree that this stuff shouldn’t be sold, it’s wrong that Visa has the power to force Valve to. The end does never justify the means.