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

(www.pcgamer.com)
803 points freedomben | 2 comments | 18 Jul 25 15:54 UTC | HN request time: 0.434s | 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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jhanschoo ◴[19 Jul 25 02:41 UTC] No.44612096[source]▶
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.
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1. jhanschoo ◴[19 Jul 25 08:36 UTC] No.44613669[source]▶
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.

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2. Hamuko ◴[19 Jul 25 09:06 UTC] No.44613814[source]▶
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...