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709 points freedomben | 6 comments | | HN request time: 1.099s | source | bottom
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egypturnash ◴[] No.44611013[source]
Okay so is Steam enough of a money printer for Valve to say "well fuck you guys, we'll make our own credit card with hookers and bingo"? And hold out Half-Life 3 (only purchasable with the ValveCard) as a carrot?
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raincole ◴[] No.44611288[source]
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.

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kjkjadksj ◴[] No.44611934[source]
What if you used your mastercard to buy valvebucks you spend on whatever the hell you want in the steam store?
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raincole ◴[] No.44612259{3}[source]
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.

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1. kjkjadksj ◴[] No.44612879[source]
So are they banning erotic fiction books too or what? I guess the tradwifes actually secretly read that stuff though…
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2. 0dayz ◴[] No.44613440[source]
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.
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3. junon ◴[] No.44613571[source]
There's a book of Satan?
replies(1): >>44614926 #
4. nottorp ◴[] No.44613727[source]
So she read it? I tried but stopped at 10% or so :)
5. Jolter ◴[] No.44614184[source]
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.

6. 93po ◴[] No.44614926{3}[source]
if there is, im buying it