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

(www.pcgamer.com)
713 points freedomben | 3 comments | 18 Jul 25 15:54 UTC | HN request time: 0.898s | source
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maxbond ◴[19 Jul 25 00:26 UTC] No.44611358[source]▶
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.

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ijk ◴[19 Jul 25 00:50 UTC] No.44611517[source]▶
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-...

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SJC_Hacker ◴[19 Jul 25 01:58 UTC] No.44611877[source]▶
They tried to do the same to OnlyFans, but lost that battle
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morkalork ◴[19 Jul 25 02:44 UTC] No.44612107[source]▶
Didn't onlyfans severely limit the type of content creators could make and distribute through the platform, just like valve here?
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1. thaumasiotes ◴[19 Jul 25 02:57 UTC] No.44612156[source]▶
> 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.

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2. aleph_minus_one ◴[19 Jul 25 08:59 UTC] No.44613790[source]▶
> 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.

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3. mango7283 ◴[19 Jul 25 12:06 UTC] No.44614822[source]▶
I think the matter here is the activists are being strategic now and chipping away by targeting very specific content to get delisted. As you rightly said, most people are not going to sign their name to defend a incest/non-con fringe game specifically, so the counter petition is necessarily going to be on a broad ideal and therefore diffuse