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

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.

The owner of a stolen number is going to use a chargeback.

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.

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.

I never used ecommerce back in the day on the internet but I can imagine that ecommerce fraud was widespread. And that's why excluding other reasons Satoshi invented Bitcoin[0].

I wonder if cryptocurrencies didn't exist would someone nowadays burn the midnight oil to figure out P2P crypto coin since modern payment solutions are fairly good.

Tbh I think Satoshi invented technology around which he wanted to build products unlike Steve Jobs who said that you first need to figure out the product then build technology.

[0] "Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for nonreversible services. With the possibility of reversal, the need for trust spreads. Merchants must be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need. A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable. These costs and payment uncertainties can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party" https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

I don't see how this makes any sense. A reason for the creation of Bitcoin was offering less service than traditional methods?

"Financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes" is nonsense, they "can't" because it's constantly demanded by their clients, attempting to sell that as a bug rather than a feature is preposterous.