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

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803 points freedomben | 5 comments | 18 Jul 25 15:54 UTC | HN request time: 0.855s | 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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noduerme ◴[19 Jul 25 01:11 UTC] No.44611625[source]▶
My guess is it's simply a chargeback risk. It's the reason casinos and adult sites have trouble getting credit card processing and are charged much higher basic rates, even under the best of circumstances when the casino or adult site is operating entirely within the law in the jurisdictions it allows.

Punters run a lot of chargebacks on casinos, and people whose spouses catch a XXX video or game on their card statement will lie and run chargebacks too.

In the case of Valve, a lot of chargebacks would drastically increase the processing rates demanded by the payment providers for all transactions across the board, not just those related to adult games.

There's probably a great market opportunity here for a game store focused on adult games and willing to take on that risk.

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delusional ◴[19 Jul 25 05:01 UTC] No.44612724[source]▶
Isn't it a little odd that Visa/Master isn't out there making that argument? Why would we assume them having the best of intentions of they aren't even willing to argue those intentions themselves?
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1. noduerme ◴[19 Jul 25 06:57 UTC] No.44613212[source]▶
They don't need to make an argument for anything. They tell Valve: "Hey, if 1% of your transactions are for smut and incur smut-level-chargebacks, we're going to just treat all your transactions as smut", and Valve says, "no problem, we'll pull those games." It's not like Valve stands to profit by holding the line for free speech here or something. Valve gives as little a shit about an indie porn game as it does about anything else. Honestly, why should they pay the extra percentage across the board to defend it anyway? This is why I'm saying a separate X-rated platform would get a lot of traction.
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2. soysaucy ◴[19 Jul 25 08:21 UTC] No.44613606[source]▶
But can't they just block buying those games with visa/mc and only allow using steam wallet credit? Some Japanese sites have been having these issues for a while and that's what they ended up doing (or just closing shop entirely).
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3. alexp2021 ◴[19 Jul 25 08:59 UTC] No.44613789[source]▶
That would be a nice solution.
4. noduerme ◴[19 Jul 25 09:47 UTC] No.44614015[source]▶
I guess that would be the logical thing to do. There's probably some synergy at work. If these games could be widely promoted, maybe their average value to Valve would be $10k each or something. Instead, they probably net 1/10th of that before they drop off the radar completely. Building in a sub-system that guarantees that certain games can only be bought with certain methods of payment seems like a pain in the ass. However, they could do it. And that sort of argues against the idea that you'd be building yourself any kind of moat by setting up a game platform for just the XXX stuff.
5. delusional ◴[19 Jul 25 12:02 UTC] No.44614804[source]▶
How would Visa/Master know? Steam doesn't include information about which games are purchased in the receipt (at least as far as I know). Unless they have some sort of back-channel they wouldn't know what's being charged back.

If Valve was getting a complaint from Visa/Master about charge back rates of certain games, I believe they'd be more forthcoming with that information. What we're seeing here is more consistent with Visa/Master taking offense with what the platform offers.

In either case, I find the lack of communication from Visa/Master deafening. If Visa/Master was seeing high chargeback rates from incest games on steam. Why would they not eagerly offer that data?