Considering their volume, I find it hard to believe that Valve couldn't find another, more lenient payment processor with similar fees.
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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.
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.
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.
Also that's not a reason to ban certain genres/kinks, which is what's happening here.
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.
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.
The permanent solution is a federal government operated electronic money system operated as a utility with constitutionally protected rights.
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.
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.
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."
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)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
https://bsky.app/profile/steamdb.info/post/3lu32vdlsmg27
Wondering if this will be a slippery slope towards pulling more anodyne stuff.
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.
And people who laundry money out stolen cards won't do that with nsfw games. They'll do that with CSGO knifes.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Good luck censoring purchases on ETH.
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.
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.
https://www.collectiveshout.org/open-letter-to-payment-proce...
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Steam-Payment-providers-force-V...
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).
(I'm not in the US)
I'm curious about how does that happen. Do they reach out to you? Your bank?
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.
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...
Sincerely, Ted K.
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.
This is not okay, and we need to take a strong moral stance here. Some views should not be acceptable in a society.
Am I missing something?
Amazon, Walmart, Target and then increasingly unsure.
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...
> 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-...
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
The show itself was losing viewership cause who the F watches late night TV these days?
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.
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
they have their own banned topics lists and if you fuck up you lose your income
The ruling ethnic group, of course, as is tradition.
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.
> Only thing that works is partnering up with existing bank
Could Visa just reject payments from this bank and kill your whole thing?
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).
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?"
https://www.aclu.org/documents/federal-trade-commission-comp...
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.
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.
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.
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.
However, that's clearly not all that's going on -- it doesn't seem like the government is still doing this.
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.
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.
[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-...
[1] as a random example: https://archive.kyivpost.com/technology/japanese-payment-sys...
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?
This is a solvable geo regulation issue, solvable like many other geo regulatory issues
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
US courts are too easy to use as a tool of abuse.
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.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Body-Keeps-Score-Healing-Trauma/dp/01...
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.
If a customer is regularly purchasing adult material that would be definitely be a red flag.
They should have at least aimed at Living With Sister: Monochrome Fantasy.
Hopefully they don't know about the little-sister route in Making Lovers.
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.
whats gonna replace that slot that people are gonna watch? a blank screen?
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.
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.
Which is why some merchants get effectively blacklisted if they have too many fraudulent transactions
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
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.
the people making a stink about this know this but are pretending that they don't because it would overtly out them as pedophiles.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Visa being responsible for CSAM isn't a theoretical lawsuit they're afraid about. (2022)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
They're half of a duopoly.
And I’m willing to bet some content removed does not fall in these categories
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.
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.
You can get a long ways just by assuming that the people involved in these transactions are utterly amoral.
It has nothing to do with any sort of puritanical premise.
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."
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
And Ethereum's Proof of Stake algorithm is highly censorship resistant. That's why it took seven years to design.
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.
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.
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!
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?
But often time they 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.
Of course, one the camping is set in motion, it takes a life of its own, that has nothing to do with the concerns of the victims are more with prudishness.