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

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.

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

Is that not a similar or higher percentage for games with loot boxes or other sorts of gambling?

> 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.

> 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?

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.

Because, in expectation, they're going to lose money.

> 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?

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...

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.

Sure, but why?

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.

> 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!

Someone, somewhere is making a choice to pressure content vendors to not offer this kind of content, and not to pressure them to not offer other kinds of content. It may be upstream of the payment processors but there is absolutely a weird puritan American thing going on somewhere, and it's much more interesting to get to the bottom of that since that's the point where change could happen. If everyone involved was amoral, these profitable games would continue being sold.

Your premise is that they are, for the payment processors, profitable. They very probably are not.