Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games

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.

Why does ValveCard need to work anywhere other than Steam? Privacy.com manages to issue card numbers somehow. How does that work?

> Privacy.com manages to issue card numbers somehow. How does that work?

Through Visa and Mastercard

By not working outside the US.

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.

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.

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.

What if you used your mastercard to buy valvebucks you spend on whatever the hell you want in the steam store?

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.

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.

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.

So are they banning erotic fiction books too or what? I guess the tradwifes actually secretly read that stuff though…

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 :)

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 there is, im buying it