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.
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.
What could possibly hold enough leverage that Visa would jeopardize their sweet gig as an ideology-neutral, essential piece of American infrastructure siphoning 1-2% off of every dollar of consumer spending?
The leverage is that the activists will potentially be able to draw the ire of the government. Visa and MC get away with absolute murder in terms of the size of the fees that they charge in the US. Most developed countries don't allow that. The US government could easily regulate them (as they already do with debit card fees) or use anti-trust law against the obvious duopoly charging exorbitant prices. Because of this situation, Visa and MC have a very strong incentive to crack down on things the government doesn't like.
The unspoken arrangement is that the government allows them to keep charging a de facto sales tax on a massive portion of the economy as long as they cooperate and de facto ban things that the government wants banned but can't ban themselves due to that pesky constitution.
Tbh that's quite alarming what you've just said, and I'm not saying about government. I'm saying about an additional huge sales tax. I understand that wiring money or sending them in an envelope is the thing of past, but e.g. in my country and in whole EU the digital payment is promoted as the only righteous, because "cash is only used by gangsters and human traffickers" etc. And this is really playing against us and pushing us to the duopoly you've mentioned
Credit cards are much less heavily relied on in Europe than in the USA. Europe basically runs on debit cards that every kid can have and where the fees are minuscule. There are countless banks providing the service and everything is highly regulated. On top of that, Europe still curbed Visa and Mastercard several times for antitrust behaviour. And the idea that physical money primarily aids social fraud, money laundering and other illegal activities is pretty well established. They even killed the 500€ bank note, because it was almost exclusively used by criminals and most normal people never even touched one, much less used one for legit transactions.
> And the idea that physical money primarily aids social fraud, money washing and other illegal activities is pretty well established. They even killed the 500€ bank note, because it was almost exclusively used by criminals and most normal people never even touched one, much less used one for legit transactions.
At least in Germany in particular older people prefer to pay cash if possible - this gives the banks also less leverage with respect to abhorent fees. Since many people in Germany neither trust the banks nor the government anymore, acting this way is very rational.
Also the arguments concerning cash restrictions are seen very differently by the population: since there existed two oppressive regimes on German soil in the 20th century, a lot of people realize that the restrictions on cash are just another step towards restrictions of the citizen's freedoms (thus I am honestly surprised all the time that a lot of US-Americans who are so freedom-loving and distrust the government concerning the restrictions of civil rights are not in love of cash).
Thus, in Germany there exists the saying "Bargeld ist gelebte Freiheit" [cash is lived freedom].
The Bafin (german banking regulator) seems to want to restrict that freedom.
I have worked for a company where the business model is related to cash and the Bafin tries to find reasons to make it harder every couple of years, stating that the money could come from anywhere and because people are not fully KYCed (as it is only legally required for payments of 1000 EUR or more within 24h) there is no way to know.
The business model is legal, but they can also make it harder to operate by putting more pressure and scrutiny to banks the company worked with.
It's not so much that only criminals use cash, it's more that crash makes it incredibly easy to evade taxes. The archetype is a cash-only restaurant: it's trivial to both launder money by claiming more sales than you actually made and to evade taxes by reporting fewer sales. This is why many countries have strict laws about paper trails for cash sales.
> At least in Germany in particular older people prefer to pay cash if possible
Sure, but that's for small, everyday amounts. For values upwards of 500€, I think the familiarity of paying cash would be swamped by the nervousness of carrying way too much money with you, what if it gets stolen?
> this gives the banks also less leverage with respect to abhorent fees
The only time my bank has ever charged me a per-transaction fee was, ironically, when I withdrew cash abroad using my credit card.
When I bought a piece of furniture in Germany, I had to pay 1/3 right there in the store. They accepted various cards. When it was delivered, I had to pay the remaining balance (four digits) in cash. No other option.
Also, I believe when buying used cars and such, most people still prefer cash transactions.
That's pretty common in the US too though the cash balance is usually in the form of a check. Historically you'd often get a cashier's check from your bank but I was surprised the dealership accepted a regular personal check a couple years ago. I guess there are control systems in place these days that provide assurances for places like dealerships.
For a dealership I feel like there's less risk; they can do a quick background/credit check on you before accepting the personal check, and it's probably easier for them to track down someone who gives them a bad check. They also have better ability to absorb the loss, in the worst case. I'm sure they've modeled everything and have decided that taking personal checks is worth it financially to them.
(I remember reading long ago that if if a potential customer has to leave the dealership to go secure the proper form of payment, a significant percent just don't come back at all. They want to keep you there until you buy something, fairly standard sales tactic.)
But for a regular person just trying to sell their own car directly to someone else, they're absolutely going to want a cashier's check or cash. (Even the cashier's check can be risky; I doubt your average person is an expert in detecting a fraudulent one.)
When I’m selling a car I insist that we finalize the transaction at a brick and mortar bank, where I can watch them either get a bank draft or withdraw cash.
(In Canada, I’ve never actually seen a certified/cashier’s cheque used for anything. My house downpayment and vehicle purchase were both done via bank draft.)
> Since many people in Germany neither trust the banks nor the government anymore, acting this way is very rational.
Speak for yourself, this is either heavily overstated or a fringe opinion, luckily. Most people definitely do trust both government and banks to a sensible degree, even if they don’t like some decisions.
Some people like you apparently also don’t appreciate the immense freedom of SEPA transactions. Sure it’s good to have cash as an escape hatch for the occasional transaction off the record, but for almost everything else bank transfers are safe, inaccessible to third parties, free from fees, and easy to use. And above all else, we have a working democracy and not an oppressive regime? This whole debate often feels very disconnected and overblown in Germany.
> And above all else, we have a working democracy and not an oppressive regime? This whole debate often feels very disconnected and overblown in Germany.
Well as you can see from the US currently, a country that is now free and democratic, might not continue to do so in the future. But once you've given up the ability to use cash because you didn't need it then, how are you going to get it back when you do need it?
Not a single western democracy has really turned yet, so I’m not convinced this is imminent danger.
Besides, I’m not advocating for the abolishment of cash, but against dramatic claims of an evil scheme to control and spy on citizens. That’s a right-wing narrative in Germany, but nonsense nonetheless.
Germany, Spain, and Italy were no western democracies in any sense of the word before the rise of fascism, Japan, Brazil, and Chile are no western democracies per definition.
I’m talking about the post-WW2 order, which has been remarkably solid. Until Trump showed up, that is. But even the USA are still a working democracy, despite all the fear of an authoritarian regime. So I would at least argue for a bit of calm and reason before proclaiming the end of freedom due to discontinued 500€ notes.
I would like to know where you draw the line for "working democracy".
The German Democratic Republic had elections, it even had political mechanisms that allowed other parties to participate (which the East CDU made plenty of use of btw). It even had a lower rate of incarceration than the US and a far more primitive surveillance system.
Pre-WW2 Germany was a working democracy for the most part despite its court system still having being extremely biased in favor of monarchists and anti-leftism. Most of the violence committed by the Nazis at the time resulted in prosecutions even if many were excused for "being motivated by patriotism". Hitler even went to prison for attempting a coup before being pardoned - and the punishment succeeded in changing the NSDAP's strategy to mostly remain within the limits of the law. Hitler's absolute power was even legally granted through the Enabling Act, passed with the help of the government coalition partners including the ideological precursor to the modern CDU/CSU, the Christian (Catholic) conservative "Center" party.
Post-WW2 West Germany under Adenauer (who btw was a massive antisemite to the point of explaining the necessity of zionism with the need to appease the "very powerful" international Jewish community) on the other hand had the government pressuring its constitutional court to ban political parties, reinstate the Nazi era crime of "high treason" to criminalize any political attempts at reunification other than outright annexation and cracked down on pacifists and opponents to the remilitarization as desired by the US to have a regional power base in the Cold War. It also ran a system of rubber stamp courts to rehabilitate former NSDAP members, even when it required a re-trial after the destruction of incriminating evidence from prior unfavorable rulings.
And of course even after Adenauer German policing only ever-so-incrementally moved away from the traditional authoritarian "peace through power" approach following the bloodshed in its handling of the student protests in the 1960s (which led to the formation of the RAF terrorist group) although German federal and state governments still oppose any outside investigations into police violence nowadays even when it's evident enough to make international news headlines like in Lüzerath. Meanwhile corruption in the federal government has become so rampant there are literally score lists available for each political party showing how many of their representatives are tied up in legal corruption scandals with Jens Spahn probably being the most widely talked about case for funnelling government funds into his pockets during the pandemic only followed by former chancellor Schroeder's close business relations to Gazprom and Olaf Scholz's deliberate intervention in investigations of never seen before amounts of massive tax fraud (i.e. the Cum Ex scandal).
And that's just Germany. So: if interwar Germany and pre-reunification East Germany were not "working democracies" but every "western" democracy (I presume this means anything this side of the Cold War iron curtain) post-WW2 is - what's your yardstick? Where do you draw the line?
> Most people [in Germany] definitely do trust both government and banks to a sensible degree, even if they don’t like some decisions.
The major far-right fundamentalist opposition party has built its unprecedented success on a narrative of low government trust, and has been gaining ground in both polls and elections for years and years now.
So perhaps we shouldn't dismiss the parents' perspective entirely.
> Some people like you apparently also don’t appreciate the immense freedom of SEPA transactions.
If you include the wrong words in the transaction description, your account will almost certainly be cancelled. In a truly free payment system that safeguards democratic freedoms, these descriptions would be encrypted from end to end. (Just in the same way all personal communication should be protected.) This will, of course, never happen.
> And above all else, we have a working democracy and not an oppressive regime? This whole debate often feels very disconnected and overblown in Germany.
Any data we collect will probably be misused at some point in the future. Why take a risk with German institutions if we don't have to?
Germany recently experimented with greater financial control over some parts of the population, and it wasn't a total disaster in terms of control. In terms of freedom, however, it is a disaster.
Despite cash being a pillar of freedom and democracy in an open society, there is still no good anonymous alternative to it that is usable by normal people on a daily basis.
> The major far-right fundamentalist opposition party has built its unprecedented success on a narrative of low government trust, and has been gaining ground in both polls and elections for years and years now.
And yet, that is very far from the majority.
> If you include the wrong words in the transaction description, your account will almost certainly be cancelled.
That isn’t true. If you put "murder contract + 2kg heroin" in the description, at most a bank clerk will call to ask you to avoid that. The description is reviewed to detect fraud, and protects a lot of people from illicit transactions. We have that for the same reason we have KYC regulations; you may disagree with it, but it protects a lot of people, right now. If you need to obfuscate the description, you’re free to use an encrypted string or a numeric reference without any trouble.
> Any data we collect will probably be misused at some point in the future. Why take a risk with German institutions if we don't have to?
There are valid arguments against widespread cash usage; money handling is one of the top expenses in retail, for example. There also is fraud potential actively being used for sure. Yet, I don’t hear anyone working on completely abolishing cash, which is just not going to happen. Still, even Germans could benefit from questioning our ways from time to time.
Remember that our parent said, "Many people in Germany neither trust the banks nor the government." You denied that, and I suggested that the turnout for the AfD might be a useful proxy for institutional distrust. I don't know how the reference to majorities fits here or what argument it is intended to support. Presumably, there are also people in other parties who distrust public institutions, right? Why are we talking about majorities now?
I argued that the SEPA system has several flaws, one of which is the lack of privacy surrounding transaction descriptions. This can have consequences far more serious than receiving a call from a bank. While banks do check flagged transactions, if a certain number of criteria are met, they will definitely escalate your transaction to the authorities. This is a legal requirement, by the way — it's not specific to any particular bank. This can be mitigated almost entirely by using cash.
As you did not answer my question about why to gamble on institutional consistency, I wonder: Would you actively argue in favour of greater surveillance of the payment sector?
This would align with your seemingly tongue-in-cheek suggestion to manually encrypt transaction descriptions. Payment privacy can only foster democratic resilience if it is enabled by default. It's like saying an instant messaging app doesn't need end-to-end encryption for personal communication because users can encrypt the text by hand.
> There are valid arguments against widespread cash usage; money handling is one of the top expenses in retail, for example.
Liberty is not usually defined in monetary terms. For instance, regular elections are costly. We still do not eliminate them for economic benefit. Similarly, I think the idea of removing the option of payment privacy to reduce transaction costs is cynical, or very radical.
> Yet, I don’t hear anyone working on completely abolishing cash, which is just not going to happen.
I don't know why intention would be relevant here. The use of cash has been declining in Germany (and the EU) for quite some time now. This basic fact is not new or disputed by anyone in this field. To deny the decline of cash as a proportion of overall payments would be counterfactual.
Problems arising from reduced cash usage, such as the vulnerability of civil society and the reduced resilience of democratic institutions, occur regardless of whether someone is actively working to abolish cash payments.
I'm from Croatia but I don't send money abroad, I only use credit cards and banks locally. As far as I can see from our local banks' websites, they implement SEPA standards. There must be some sort of misunderstanding or error.
They charge for pretty much everything, even for running your bank account. But now they will not be allowed by law to charge you "bank account operating cost fees" for bank accounts that are used for receiving salary and/or pension.
> Speak for yourself, this is either heavily overstated or a fringe opinion, luckily.
I know quite a lot of people in Germany who think this way. In particular during the time when there was a risk of negative interest on savings (when this topic was brought up by politicians and banksters) these people were much more open in shouting out their political opinions.
Also the anti-corona measures separated the population into two groups:
1. Those who were in favour of the anti-corona measures also became more open with respect to paying with cards (well, to help avoiding the spread the virus)
2. Those who were against it became much more distrusting towards politicians (for obvious reasons) and banks afterwards. Why also banks? Because various groups at that time brought up idea that anti-vaxxers should be de-banked.
So, I am quite sure I'm not overstating. But if you only hang up with specific groups of people, it is in my opinion eather easy not to get in contact to those who think this way.
> I am honestly surprised all the time that a lot of US-Americans who are so freedom-loving and distrust the government concerning the restrictions of civil rights are not in love of cash
I suspect it's a combination of factors, one of them being that US cash has absolutely awful usability compared to the Euro.
In what way? One unpleasant discovery I made in Portugal (and also saw to some extent in Spain) was that ATM’s - every one I could find, including those that were bank-owned at physical branches - had a limit of EUR200 per transaction regardless of my own bank limit (at USD1000/day, that should have been at least EUR800).
And while convenience stores, fast food, etc., won’t take a bill over $20 (which is understandable but really a trifling sum when you consider inflation - it’s a fast-food breakfast for three people), many other businesses are happy to do so. Nothing above $100 is in circulation anymore, and inflation means that $100 in 1980 is worth over $400 in today’s money even by government figures. A $20 bill 45 years ago was worth almost $100 in today’s money. And, of course, cash declaration rules have not updated the amounts to reflect this.
I went last year to Lisbon and Barcelona, from Brazil with 0 cash in any currency.
I had a debit card with some hundreds of EUR already charged, but I ended up using it with an NFC enabled smartphone.
No issues at all, even going in far places outside Barcelona. Everyone very receptive in BCN.
I looked at ATM terminals and they seemed full of rules and complications. I tried to get some cash just to collect the notes as a souvenir, but I gave up.
Again, everyone accepted my NFC enabled smartphone, I tested my debit NFC card and my local bank CC NFC card as well
So I think ATMs present a lot of friction for sure.
Same this year - I went through Spain, France, and Portugal last month and did not have to take money out of ATM for anything including eating, shopping for groceries, paying for gas or sightseeing.
ApplePay connected to my no forex transaction credit card earning 3% cashback covered 95% of these transactions and a few times I had to use that credit card directly.
How did you manage without cash in France? Many places here don’t accept anything but cash for amounts less than 5 or 10 Euros. If I just want to buy a coffee or a baguette, I often need cash.
> that US cash has absolutely awful usability compared to the Euro.
Euro bills differ clearly in color and size, which means they are quickly identified.
Also the Euro coins differ in shape and size quite a lot, which is easy to identify blind even when handled individually. More than U.S. coins which are more similar.
I don't know about an objective difference caused by the fact that 1€ and 2€ are coins and bills start only at 5€ whereas the one dollar coin isn't much used in favor of the one dollar bill.
A vocal minority are freedom loving. A significant number are hooked on consumer debt. I feel like any sweeping generalization is going to be wrong… especially when referencing the USA which is basically 50 countries and has a population exceeding all of Western Europe.
> especially when referencing the USA which is basically 50 countries and has a population exceeding all of Western Europe.
Germany is basically 16 countries (federal states [Bundesländer]). Europe is a whole countinent - here a suitable American analogue miht be USA+Canada+Middle America. Or if we talk about the EU, a suitable analogue would be NAFTA (the EU also started as a set of free trade agreements).
And they counted an even lower percentage of Eurasia. It might matter for a given conversation. It might not. What's your point (i.e., what are you actually trying to ask)?
> thus I am honestly surprised all the time that a lot of US-Americans who are so freedom-loving and distrust the government concerning the restrictions of civil rights are not in love of cash
I think there are a lot of Americans who distrust government/banks and try to deal in cash as much as they can. And there are a lot of people here who have bad credit and can't get a credit card, and quite a few unbanked lower-income folks who don't have bank accounts or debit cards.
But I think maybe as someone from another country you're misinterpreting the whole "individual freedom" thing that a lot of Americans push. I don't think cash vs. credit cards is really a big part of that, for whatever reason. While it is more common in some places in the US these days for some businesses to not take cash at all, still the vast majority of businesses do take cash, and everyone has a choice in how they'll pay.
There's also a financial engineering component, as most credit cards in the US offer some kind of rewards program or cash back for purchases made. For example, a credit card I have, when used for Lyft rides, gives me the equivalent of 7.5% off (I have to use the savings for travel costs through the credit card's travel site, but that's fine and worth it for me). Some cards are simple and just offer 1% or 2% back and that's it, but some have categories (like "3% cash back for gasoline purchases"), and some people get into the "game" of trying to match a credit card with a purchase to get the most cash back.
And even for people who don't get into the "game", they certainly won't mind a "free" 1% or 2% discount on everything just for using a credit card. Some businesses offer a discount for paying cash, or a surcharge for using a credit card, but many do not, so if you pay with cash, you're essentially overpaying, since the cost of credit card fees is built into the prices. (This is of course another way that poor people who can't get credit cards get screwed.)
I guess often enough, convenience and saving money wins over the whole "freedom" thing for people here.
Finally, I think there's also a bit of separation. Many credit cards don't even feel like they're associated with a bank. Many larger retail stores offer a branded credit card that of course has a Visa or MasterCard logo on it, but you have to dig to find mention of an actual bank. So even Americans who might distrust government and banks just don't see a strong association there when it comes to credit cards.
I also just don't think there's that much bank distrust going on in the US. Sure, people are still sore about the financial crisis of 2008, but also consider that was 17 years ago. We haven't had big bank issues in the US where banks devalue currency, or follow government orders to across-the-board steal money from citizens, at least not in widespread ways. People generally love to rag on banks when it comes to fees and penalties and hidden costs and crap like that, but many of those things have been made illegal, and, again, even for a bank-issued credit card, I think many people just don't make that association. It's just an easier way to make payments, without the risk of carrying cash around (and with protection if the card gets stolen and used), and sometimes you get discounts and cash back... what's not to like?
> the idea that physical money primarily aids social fraud, money washing and other illegal activities is pretty well established
I think that's very hyperbolic. In france most people I know carry cash and use it regularly (not as much as cards), the gen X and older tend to find it strange to pay for small sums (eg bread) with card. Germany is infamously almost cash-only. In many Central Europe countries, shops taking card is not a given (Bulgaria, Hungary).
Let's not exaggerate. While I am often enough exasperated at how often certain restaurants or bars will still only accept cash (or sometimes EC card), I'm still able to do about 90% of my transactions by card.
Interesting! As a tourist, almost all my transactions had to be cash: but ofc a tourist and a resident don't have the same spending patterns (mostly bars and restaurant for me)
Supermarkets and most stores where you'd buy everyday stuff (clothes, electronics, books, ...), especially if they're chains, will take card. It's really mostly independently owned kiosks, bars and restaurants that are holdouts, and even there the card acceptance rate is increasing.
COVID caused a major boost in shops adding card payments. Most shops now accept them even for small payments.
There are places which don't take cards, many of them also don't print receipts without asking, which might indicate than an tax audit might give interesting results ...
Where may I read about anything supporting your statement "cash is primarily used for illegal activities"? I highly doubt that this is the case, unless there are more illegal activities out there than legal ones.
I would assume the metric isn’t number of transactions, but total transaction value. It’s really uncommon to pay for really expensive things (e.g., houses, cars, boats) in cash, and doing so almost always means that the duffel bag of cash came from shady means.
OK, but look at the original statement, that cash is mainly used for illegal activities. I do not think that is true.
Now, check this out:
> Cash was the most frequently used payment method at the POS in the euro area and was used in 52% (59%) of transactions, but the share of cash payments has declined.
> Cash was the most frequently used payment method for small-value payments at the POS, in line with previous surveys. For payments over €50, cards were the most frequently used payment method.
> Cash was the dominant means of payment in P2P transactions, accounting for 41% of such payments. Cards and mobile apps were used for 33%, credit transfers for 9% and instant payments for 6% of P2P transactions.
> The most frequently used instrument for online payments was cards, representing 48% (51%) of transactions. The share of e-payment solutions, i.e. payment wallets and mobile apps, was 29% (26%).
> The large majority of recurring payments were made using direct debit, with credit transfers ranking in second place.
Regarding privacy:
> A majority of euro area consumers (58%) said they were concerned about their privacy when performing digital payments or other banking activities.
I think they genuinely care about privacy and are not thugs.
That would suggest to me that at least 30% of the value of cash is used for "shady" stuff (I mean I don't know anybody that would use 500 eur bills).
The fact that cash would be used mostly for illegal activities by value (I don't know if it is really the case), does not imply that "people that use cash use if for illegal activities".
I do not pretend that I know either, to be honest.
That said, there is "For payments over €50, cards were the most frequently used payment method.", which means they primarily use cash below 50 EUR, and you cannot do much illegal purchases with 50 EUR, it is such a small amount.
> And the idea that physical money primarily aids social fraud, money laundering and other illegal activities is pretty well established.
Another plausible reading could be that this is just a widely believed incorrect thing (or most exactly, they are just saying it is widely believed, and not anything about the underlying truthfulness of the belief). This seems easy for somebody to observe about the society around them (although I bet it is a regional thing, or something like that) and less likely for there to be hard data on. Perception is also more likely than actual facts to drive behavior, right?
> They even killed the 500€ bank note, because it was almost exclusively used by criminals and most normal people never even touched one, much less used one for legit transactions.
This, on the other hand, seems like a specific action taken by the government to solve a specific problem, so I’d expect it to be well documented…
I'm not sure which European country you're talking about, but in France most transaction are now done by card. Yes it's mostly debit cards, but they're still handled almost exclusively by Visa and Mastercard.
Many banks have tried to start other electronic payments independent from those 2 (for example Wero) but it doesn't really get any traction.
So I don't see how the duopoly is any less powerful here.
I think France is a bit of an exception because there's the CB network[1]. Most cards here are either CB/Mastercard or CB/Visa and a lot of stuff uses CB by default if I understand it correctly. According to their website the network accounts for 65% percent of national transactions[2] but I'm not sure of how to interpret their wording.
Cards and transfers are different things though. What I have seen from Wero (released to the public) are Peer to Peer transfers, so if you don't need to transfer money to a person, Wero will not help you for now.
Some card fees are capped by the EU: https://www.visa.co.uk/about-visa/visa-in-europe/fees-and-in..., quoting "From 9 December 2015, European regulation on interchange fees (Regulation (EU) 2015/751 of the European Parliament and of the European Council of 29 April 2015 on interchange fees for card-based transactions, “the IFR”) imposes interchange fee caps on most product types within the European Economic Area (EEA).".
It is true though that French banks have huge fees even for debit (0.20%) compared to, for example The Netherlands (0.02 eur).
So the doupoly is not as powerful everywhere, but I have no clue why the difference.
> They even killed the 500€ bank note, because it was almost exclusively used by criminals and most normal people never even touched one, much less used one for legit transactions
I wonder what is the source for this information?
In my country it's perfectly legal to request your payment in cash. And it should be paid to you in cash if you request it. Therefore, 500 banknotes make perfect sense, making however any payment with it really stressful for you and the teller
Debit cards are really common in the US as well. Pretty much every bank gives you one with a checking account and they’re accepted everywhere. You’ll have no problem never getting a credit card, aside from a couple of very specific cases such as renting a car where they’ll require a substantial deposit if you don’t use a credit card.
But it’s irrelevant to this issue, because the debit cards are still handled by Visa or Mastercard.
The U.S. consumer economy functions primarily on debt from start to end these days, complete with debt collectors who buy it pennies on the dollar and then con grieving relatives into voluntarily accepting duty towards those debts that would otherwise have been discharged by death. So there are quite a lot of people these days who couldn’t use the European debit methods because they don’t have the cash and likely never will, what with one quarter of the country’s households unable to afford housing on effectively poverty wages. The federal government can’t crack down on this because they’d have to replace that consumer debt with public assistance. The puritanical / religious orgs control majority voting blocs that haven’t aged out as they used to and so are a continued threat to elected officials. So the threat those groups are holding over Visa/MC is triple-pronged: not only will they boycott (they can afford to), they can also leverage politicians (enforce our will or get ejected from office) and threaten capitalism (better economic armageddon than unpalatable sexual expressions). Valve can’t hold a candle to that kind of leverage, not without giving up the neutral-apolitical stance that most tech corporations prefer. They would essentially have to promote a counter-bloc of voters to counter-pressure the U.S. House and Senate into passing payment provider neutrality laws through elections. Valve is vanishingly unlikely to do this, and so their only choice is to prostrate to Visa/MC (or stop accepting USD) until the puritan bloc ages out in two or three decades. They can certainly afford to wait, especially given that these incremental religious bans advance slower than their revenues.
I always found this principle odd because it offends across the political spectrum.
Every hassle the porn industry gets, the gun industry gets too, and that obviously has a very different political footprint. I'd also expect some industries with politically powerful friends (supplements, MLMs in general) to be offended by policies that put some merchants into higher risk/higher cost/higher rejection categories.
I had hoped something like FedNow would take off-- a government-backed payment rail with a formal mandate to service any legal business, so neither side could complain about being deplatformed.
The Durbin amendment (regulating debit interchange in the US) and its EU equivalent aren't regulating Visa and Mastercard scheme fees, but rather interchange fees, which Visa and Mastercard set, but issuing banks earn.
Of course scheme fees are ultimately at least partially paid from interchange, but lower interchange is primarily a problem for issuing banks, not the networks.
The Durbin amendment in particular was also supposed to foster competition between networks (by mandating each debit issuer to support at least two unaffiliated networks per card), but given that only very few places accept only debit cards, that didn't work out quite as well as intended in terms of bringing down both interchange and scheme fees via market forces.
Yes - and Japanese gay porn games are an easy soft target before they go on to ban things they really want to ban. We've been through this before in the 70s-90s.
The fix is legislation that ensures that payment processors aren't allowed to extra-legally moderate transactions based on "I don't like it". They need to be forced to process all legal transactions. Because these entities are nearly irreplaceable and are the cornerstone of many consumer industries, it seems like a reasonable compromise to me.
Just pushing back is neither guaranteed to succeed nor last for any serious amount of time. The ideological crazies can throw their entire existence at ensuring the fact that the "impure, corrupting filth" is squashed. People who oppose it might like the things that get censored, but none are religiously attached to the cause, not to an extent that would lead to a serious amount of organizing, anyway.
Rather, we remove the leverage by doing what these activists threaten to do, without all the hysterics. If the exorbitant fees give so much leverage to activists, fix the fees. and you know, allow the market to be freer and all that.
The Pornhub problem came from going after the payment processors for facilitating supposedly illegal transactions--namely, underage porn. The crusaders (in every direction) keep looking for ways to undermine the protections (Section 230 in this case) and all too often the government doesn't fight back.
As for keeping it in the family games--we still have "obscenity" on the books and such games fall afoul of it. I find the concept of "obscenity" bonkers amongst consenting adults.
> What could possibly hold enough leverage that Visa would jeopardize their sweet gig as an ideology-neutral, essential piece of American infrastructure siphoning 1-2% off of every dollar of consumer spending?
Pressure campaigns could lead to laws regulating the card industry, self regulation prevents some of that (see movies and games ratings agencies, which avoid government ratings coming in and potentially connecting an 18+ rating with outright bans like we’ve seen in the UK and Australia in the past)
What competitors? You mean a "Jesus Card" issued by Visa or Mastercard? At this point, it's basically an oligopoly. The only other real player is Amex, and they're a very distant third.
Amex isn't really a competitor, since they're both card issuer and network in one. (I believe they have a few third party issued cards these days, but it's not a significant part of their business. The same goes for Discover.)
They wouldn’t need to create a new payment processor if they could just swap to Mastercard. Thus it was also implicitly excluded by Chick-fil-A in their proposal.
One thing to notice is the group that claims responsibility for this is some kind of funky radfem puritan mixture from Australia. They campaigned against titles like GTA V, Detroit Become Human AND abortion pills.
Since they ran a campaign to ban GTA V from stores I can say for sure they are not stopping on fringe content like eroge porn shovelware.
I wonder how this type of pressuring can be made illegal. To be clear: I certainly think this has to be made illegal, and even attempt to coerce a payment network to force a business to do something should be a serious crime. If the product is not illegal, you can sell it, either on your platform, or on a third party platform (Steam), if the platfrom is ok with selling your product. It's arguable, but perfectly reasonable to say that Steam can also choose to not sell it if it doesn't want to. But then, of course, it doesn't seem like a huge leap to say that a payment network can choose to not handle transactions for some type of business if it doesn't want to. Sure, you can appeal to it being a de-facto monopoly, but isn't Steam a de-facto monopoly as well? I mean, I have some trouble formally drawing a line here, yet it clearly seems not right to me, that a payment network can choose at all if they want to handle this or not.
And, as I said, attempt to apply pressure on a payment network, in order to apply pressure on its customer, in order to apply pressure on their customers... well, I think it's pretty obvious why this is a problem, and that things are not supposed to work this way.
I don’t think it should be made illegal, it should be made impractical.
One way would be to ensure proper competition in the payments space. If there were dozens of options then some of them would decide that it’s a competitive advantage to ignore the busybodies and cater to people who want to buy this stuff. We see this at work with hosting. There’s a multitude of options and it doesn’t seem like adult sites have much trouble finding a host that will allow them, even if others might reject them.
Another would be to regulate payment processors like common carriers and require them to serve everyone equally regardless. We see this model with the Post Office. As long as you’re not sending something that will compromise the safety of the workers, they’ll ship it.
It shouldn't ve hard to replace them but any other new service (like Wise) end up issuing a Visa/MC card. Why can't we have an open protocol which works between any machine with NFC?
the problem is over time they erected a giant moat that is regulation and captive customer base.
I dont understand how anti-trust regulation lets Visa/MC duopoly exist (at least with current rates), they must be heaviest donors to politicians.
and once you understand how 2-3 big corporations establish oligopoly and engage in rent seeking, protected by mountains of regulations, and share some of their wealth with politicians - you understand how American extractive institutions work.
The only hope is some giant like Apple/Google completely unseat visa with their own secure payment solutions that gets around VISA/MC card system
The trouble is that you either need cryptocurrency or you need some prearranged entity that both parties trust. With current credit cards, that prearranged entity is Visa/MC/Amex/Discover. I don't see cryptocurrency being practical for this use, or ever widely accepted even if somehow practical. Maybe the new FedNow could serve as that foundation with card processing built on top.
But then you have issues like, what about disputes and fraud? With existing credit cards, buyer and seller have both agreed in advance to abide by certain rules. With an open standard, I as a buyer could stand up my own service that makes the payment and then retracts it, or if FedNow doesn't allow retracting payments then I as a seller could make one that refuses to refund the money and I can just not give the buyer their item. (And yeah, this is already illegal, but we see plenty of nefarious activity like this online anyway.)
It would be great if it was impractical, but I still think it has to be made illegal. I think it is not only "bad" because it's bad for Valve of whoever wants to sell or buy these games, this is "bad" on its own, because it is simply another elaborate form of blackmail. It is as close as it gets to violence without actually beating one up: you are forced to do something not because you are required by law or by nature, but because I want you do that, and I have power over you. This isn't a unique situation in that sense, of course, this pattern appears a lot in life. This one is unique only in that sense that it targets a very narrow bottleneck. If you have power to influence a payment system, and it has legal right to choose to write regulations like that, then you have power over virtually anyone and everyone. Lobbying a policy clause for Mastercard is basically as good (or maybe even better) than lobbying a law. Which, yes, is a problem on its own, but this problem is rather "an unfortunate situation" than a malicious act.
Also, on the matter of the latter problem — fixing that is much easier said than done. Cryptocurrencies in a way were an attempt to fix that, but governments around the world do not want this problem to be fixed. And of course they don't. The field is highly regulated, because, as I've said, having control over the payment network is not that very much different from having a physical army to physically beat you up.
As an aside, I was especially surprised by:
> We see this at work with hosting.
Do we, though? It's another topic of course, but I actually share the sentiment that the current trend is the opposite one: good old days of the Free Web are gone, and the reality is that in the days of Gmail (and other major mail providers), Cloudflare (and other major CDNs) the Internet is inherently not a decentralized structure anymore. It takes a few powerful friends to reach an agreement with each other, and everyone else has to follow.
So, anyway, what I had in mind was exactly that:
> to regulate payment processors like common carriers and require them to serve everyone equally regardless
But, as I've said, I don't quite see how to draw the line here. After all, it would be somewhat unfair to payment networks to trip them from making any choices. Both because formally they are just a business, not a commodity (which may actually be the root of the problem, I think), and they should have some right to choose how they want to operate; and also because different customers and products objectively carry different risks. So they have to be able to produce some policies, these policies just have to… to be restricted to what's necessary somehow.
Unfairness would be something to care about if it was a rich market with several small companies competing in it. It's not something to care about corporate monopolies.
No, they should not have the right to choose how they want to operate. All those risks you mention only exist because they choose to keep them around as an excuse to why they are necessary. They refuse to modernize their systems so it works, and they should not be allowed to keep that option.
(Honestly, IMO they should just be terminated and replaced by some public service. But if you want to keep them, they shouldn't have that kind of freedom.)
Hosting is a very different landscape. Cloudflare and AWS and such are enormous and can exert a lot of control. But you can still ignore them and just do your own thing and it works fine. There are plenty of smaller cloud providers you can use instead. You can still colocate your own hardware in a data center. If nobody in your country wants your money, you can host your service in some other country that doesn't care so much about whatever morality is at issue.
This demonstrably works. There are plenty of porn sites out there, plenty of pirate sites, plenty of places selling illegal stuff, even Wikileaks is still up.
To your last paragraph, I think we can draw the line at "allow any transaction that you reasonably believe is actually authorized by the people who own the accounts." I don't care about being fair to payment networks. If we're going the regulatory route then we've decided that this stuff is critical infrastructure and the needs of the many etc. If individual people at the company don't like handling transaction for porn or whatever, they're free to find a new job. Different risks do make it trickier, but I think we can add some language to allow holding on to money for a certain period before paying it out, or requiring deposits, with some limits on what criteria they can use to make those determinations and how long/large the period/deposit can be.
Another factor is the board members and other investors of the institutions themselves.
I have been privy to two specific instances where pressure to either ban or reject providing support for specific content was handed down from beyond the executive level at a major financial network player that my client was doing business with.
This is absolutely not true. OF's chargeback rates are incredibly low. Vastly lower than, say, Amazon. I have this directly from friends who work in this space. Do you have a citation that shows otherwise?
Yes, recently they put in place a ban on fursuits and other animal-wear since the payment processors determined that it would promote bestiality. I am not joking.
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.
Claiming you need to be pro-incest to support the existance of incest themed video games is as absurd as claiming you need to be pro-murder to support much of the entire Action movie genre.
> 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.
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
This ban has nothing to do with the call to ban incestual rape games (which is what you refer to), but comes from MasterCard, which has a long story of puritan censorship.
Collective Shout is the activist group that put pressure on MasterCard to make this decision. They're claiming and celebrating the work they did to make this happen on their own X account.
The US obsession with sex (both positive and negative) is something else.
Here in Europe, sex is a normal part of human life. Not a center of everything, nor a sin to be avoided. Sex art is normal. Sex games are fine. There are no moral crusaders here, because sex is moral. We tell sex jokes at work and nobody faints. We are constantly perplexed why American culture is so different from other Western cultures in that regard.
People keep saying "Puritans" like it answers all questions, but Puritans were hundreds of years ago. We had our own share of people with peculiar attitudes back then. Today is 2025, not 1785.
No, Europe is not a monolithic bloc, stop treating it as such, stop saying here in Europe or European here. You'd get annoyed if a yank generalised all of europe with a not take so don't do it yourself. State what country/countries you're talking about because social attitudes and norms vary massively across this continent!
Of course one can generalize using the colloquial "Here in Europe". And generalization is useful -- one cannot go into all the complexity and details all the time, at some point one has to summarize/generalize an argument.
Yes, Europe is not a monolithic bloc, but there is a large fraction that is less sex focused, it's a fair generalization and comment to express that.
Of course, it doesn't help anyone to generalise. Europe has a wide demographic. But, one thing that doesn't happen is its attitude to sex affecting worldwide commerce or other worldwide issues.
Here in the UK religion and sex are not part of the national conversation. A politician mentioning their love of god would seem weird to us. The only way it enters the national conversation are when right-wing religious zealots, from the US, try to affect our laws: I'm thinking of abortion laws and trans rights. These are entirely imported issues from US religious hangups. It's quite tedious, because mostly we were on a path of reasonable discourse with relation to sex, sexuality, relationships (marriage), etc. but with the advent of social media you see pockets of society being dragged into it.
I have friends in much of Europe (Sweden, Norway, France, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Croatia, Slovakia, Poland, Romania, Greece) and have travelled to those destinations extensively. I still can't speak for all of Europe, but I think when it comes to sex and religion we're kinda similar. The only one that stands out to me was the Greek Orthodox church used to have an out-sized role, but even that doesn't seem to be the case any more (I just came back from visiting friends in Greece a few weeks back and we discussed this).
So whilst we can't say all of Europe is the same, we can say that it's not causing global problems due to its sexual and religious hangups.
Yeah when I went to the UK and tried to view adult content using a prepaid SIM, it was blocked and required verifying that I was an adult, and this was done at the ISP level. And I know for a fact that the UK has much stricter limits on kink and BDSM in adult content as well. What gives with people claiming it's just the US?
Log in to your account and toggle the “I want porn” option? It’s annoying, but not onerous.
> And I know for a fact that the UK has much stricter limits on kink and BDSM in adult content as well.
I know what you’re referring to, but don’t know the full details. I believe it’s around violent porn (rape, etc). We certainly have a “think of the children” brigade. I still think the discourse is significantly more civilised than that of the US, which feels like it’s approaching virtual civil war levels. When these subjects are debated, it's usually in parliament and doesn't turn into some societal ideological divide.
I think some of the policies you mention are more artefacts of the politicians not understanding the technological future we’re in, rather than ideology. Many of them think they can make the internet a safe space for kids through policy. It’s naive, for sure, but usually not dogmatic.
> What gives with people claiming it's just the US?
It’s not just the US, but when the people standing outside of UK abortion clinics harassing women are funded by US ‘pro life’ religious groups then you know there’s a problem. Puritanism is a US export.
The vitriolic political divisions in the US, which leads to all sorts of fringe issues becoming mainstream (trans rights, for example), is leaking out into the rest of the western democracies, poisoning the debate everywhere.
The Visa issue is just one more of these puritanical US exports.
So government regulating stuff like that does go against much of the thing you said in the comment above?
> doesn't turn into some societal ideological divide.
When governments try to introduce mass surveillance of personal communications to "protect the children" liek ChatControl maybe it should turn into one. Instead of everyone just handwaving and ignoring it...
> So government regulating stuff like that does go against much of the thing you said in the comment above?
It isn't law. But even if it was, that doesn't contradict what I am talking about. I'm talking about the export of puritanism. If you think having to turn the porn button from 'off' to 'on' in your phone contract's options is the same, then I don't know what to say.
> When governments try to introduce mass surveillance of personal communications to "protect the children" liek ChatControl maybe it should turn into one.
Yeah maybe, but that's not the topic of conversation here. The topic was about puritanical beliefs in the US and how its export affects the world (like the Visa issue).
Sure, technically its government imposed domestic puritanism which isn't exported. I agree its a completely different thing.
> The topic was about puritanical beliefs in the US and how its export affects the world
Yes, US has its quirks but it's not that exceptional as you are implying. e.g. when it comes to banning/regulated video games Australia is inarguable much more restrictive.
Post "Online Safety Act" UK is not that much better either.
US is very tame and less "puritanical" by your definition than those countries. The core difference being that the government can't really regulate it directly so credit card companies might be acting as some sort of a proxy.
Or are you implying that US somehow turned Germany and Australia more "puritanical" than itself and there would be no domestic support for censorship there otherwise?
So how does the US deal with age restricted games? I find this much more related to actually willing to implement a rule, rather than having rules for the sake of it (like the US buying alcohol rule - it is forbidden for people under 21 to drink but 40% of the people between 18 and 21 drink ?! source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_consumption_by_youth_i...).
Also what does this have to do with anything? e.g. adult-only games are simply unavailable on Steam in Germany. It doesn't matter at all how old you are.
It means there is a law, and Germany makes a reasonable effort to apply it. Germany asks for Steam to use a different system than "Asking the age to the user" (which in my opinion is hilarious and obviously a joke), Steam decides to not sell the games. (source: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Steam-Payment-providers-force-V...)
It's not like "Germany wants to ban sex games altogether", which seems to be what some other private groups would prefer.
> trans rights. These are entirely imported issues from US religious hangups.
No, in the UK it was left-wing feminists who led the opposition to gender identity policies long before any conservatives got involved, on the basis of this being harmful to women's rights.
Just look at the recent For Women Scotland win in the Supreme Court, it's nothing to do with US religious groups at all, and everything to do with protecting sex-based rights and sexual orientation in law.
That was waaaay after it had become an 'issue' in the US and exported. I also doubt they would describe themselves as "left-wing feminists". That language is incorrect at best and inflammatory at worst.
In 2014, Time magazine declared trans rights as "America's next civil rights frontier" [1]. For Women Scotland was formed in 2018 [2].
(Just looked at your comment history. Just, wow... is the trans issue the only one you care about?)
For Women Scotland wasn't the start of the opposition to gender identity policy in the UK. It was founded, by four women who met on Mumsnet, specifically to address policy in Scotland.
Feminist women opposed to the Tory government's plans to introduce "gender self-id" law and similar policy had already started organising by this point. Groups like Woman's Place UK and Fair Play For Women. This had nothing whatsoever to do with religious arguments from the US.
There's also significant liberal opposition to all this in the US, again not linked to religion but, like the UK, on the basis of women's rights.
Look, you have the right to believe whatever you want, but making every single discussion you have on here about how much you hate trans people is not really something I want to get involved with. Good day.
Absolutely. Italy too. I think a better way to phrase it: There are many countries in Europe where a right wing party uses the rise of Islam due to immigrants as a political issue.
They sure do, just like there are different states in the US with vastly different attitudes to life and everything.
And yet, you can take an averaged vector of all US states and all European countries and meaningfully compare those. Or extract some things that are common through all Europe as compared through all US.
I had a privilege of living for some time in Italy, Denmark, Spain and Switzerland (I still live in Switzerland). They are all really different, and yet there is something common compared to the US.
Eh? Not really. There's a gradient between North and South and East and West, and then there's UK, but some things are more or less in-common. What GP is saying is one of those things.
> They aren't targeting all sex games on Steam, they were targeting rape, incest, and child abuse.
https://www.collectiveshout.org/campaigns includes a number of campaigns against porn in general, so yes, they absolutely are targeting all sex games - simulated rape, incest, and child abuse are merely their first victory.
Its ridiculous that your comment that has factual information is downvoted while on top of you there's a bunch of comments going on random tangents not based at all on reality.
One of the games they are also going after is Detroit: Become Human, and they have gone after things like GTA in the past. Just because they claim they are going after things for those reasons doesn't mean that's actually an accurate claim as to what they are trying to go after. Though it's good to point out who is actually (supposedly) responsible.
"In 2020, following a complaint from the Hamburg/Schleswig-Holstein Media Authority, Valve blocked all titles that were labeled as “adult” and did not have an age rating. To be able to offer them, the US company would have to integrate a reliable age verification system into Steam in Germany. Because Valve has not yet implemented such a system, sex games remain blocked in Germany.
"
> People keep saying "Puritans" like it answers all questions, but Puritans were hundreds of years ago. We had our own share of people with peculiar attitudes back then.
We literally had Puritans in Europe [1]
” The Puritans were English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who sought to rid the Church of England of what they considered to be Roman Catholic practices, maintaining that the Church of England had not been fully reformed and should become more Protestant.[1] Puritanism played a significant role in English and early American history, especially in the Protectorate in Great Britain, and the earlier settlement of New England.”
Yeah, and then most of them left and came here, which the article cites as having caused a "radical" divergence:
> Almost all Puritan clergy left the Church of England after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the Act of Uniformity 1662. Many continued to practise their faith in nonconformist denominations, especially in Congregationalist and Presbyterian churches.[2] The nature of the Puritan movement in England changed radically. In New England, it retained its character for a longer period.
It's not crazy to think that this could have had an outsized influence on the US given how influential New England was in the early days. Even 120-130 years after the point that the quoted section mentions, when the colonies were transitioning into what's now the United States, close to a third of them were part of New England.
If you’re looking at the geographical distribution of their influence, isn’t it weird that the place where the puritans settled (“New England”) is arguably the least puritanical region of the US?
New England is perceived as less religious than the South, but one reason for that is that New England's moral perceptions had a strong influence on US political beliefs. In other words, the Puritans morphed into the Congregationalists who morphed into the Unitarians, who basically took over (in the 19th Century) US political thinking (or at least the Left side of it), giving the appearance that New England does not having any particular or special moral or religious beliefs (at least to those on the Left half of the US political divide).
I grew up in New England and have lived in the South and in California, and IMHO morality is a bigger determinant of the behavior of the average person in New England than it is in the other places I've lived (all in the US). The South and California are more pragmatic, less moralistic.
That's a good point. When something is within the usual for someone's experience, it's not going to be as obvious, so it becomes the baseline that's used to compare other things to. For stuff like religion, it's easy to assume that your amount is normal, and having more (if you don't feel like you have much) or less (if you do feel like you have a lot) is unusual.
I don't have any experience living outside of the northeast (although not New England specifically since high school), but I definitely agree that there's certainly more religion in New England than might be obvious from the outside (more Catholic than the rest of the country, which also might explain some of the differences).
Nowadays, sure, but keep in mind that the "US" didn't extend beyond the east coast when the Puritans first settled here. You might be able to make an argument that there's no cultural influence from the colonial days that lasted until today (although I'd disagree with that sentiment), but otherwise, where would you expect any cultural influence in the rest of the US to have come from?
(To be clear, I'm not saying that there weren't existing cultures there before the US expanded out further west, but I imagine most people would agree that the US today isn't culturally as influenced by them as much as from the the colonies and pre-expansion US.)
Doesn't mean that continental Europe wasn't full of puritanical nutjobs.
Calvin himself ran a dystopian theocratic state\hellhole in Geneva yet hardly anyone references that when talking about conservativism in Switzerland.
> Even 120-130 years after the point
There was a significant generational backlash towards puritanism and a push towards pluralism/secularism by the late 1700s. IMHO Second/Third "Great Awakenings" had a much bigger impact than a handful of Puritans inhabiting New England in the 1600s.
Yes the Pilgrims for instance emigrated from Holland and not England. Of course the Plymouth Colony was quite "progressive" compared to the oppressive theocracy in Massachusetts. At least they weren't hanging quakers, dissenters and didn't burn a single witch during the panic..
Anyway I don't think that the English Puritans/etc. were somehow particularly exceptional (besides the fact that they emigrated to North America) compared to other similar groups in Europe.
> Calvin himself ran a dystopian theocratic state\hellhole in Geneva yet hardly anyone references that when talking about conservativism in Switzerland.
I'm not familiar with Swiss politics, but if there's a significant Christian element to it, it seems like it would be pretty reasonable to wonder about whether the historical basis for this is related to Calvinism. If it's not significantly Christian, then it's not surprising it doesn't get mentioned.
> There was a significant generational backlash towards puritanism and a push towards pluralism/secularism by the late 1700s. IMHO Second/Third "Great Awakenings" had a much bigger impact than a handful of Puritans inhabiting New England in the 1600s.
Sure, but those those were backlashes themselves to the backlash to the secularism that you mentioned happened beforehand. I'm not saying that there weren't Puritan-like influences elsewhere, or that there were no other developments in between the Puritans and modern Christian conservatism in the US, but there's a clear historical tradition of Christian conservatism in US politics, so I don't know why you don't think it's unreasonable to recognize how that has influenced what we see today.
To explain at a higher level where I'm coming from: I don't see historical analysis as making claims about the state we're in today as being a deterministic outcome based on the events that happen in the past because that's not any more possible than predicting exactly what will happen in the future based on the knowledge we have today. The most we can do to explain why things are the way they are now is to look at what things in the past have influenced where we are today.
Not inherently disagreeing with you at all. I'm not just sure whether we should look as far back as the 1600s. Yes some American colonies were founded by religious extremists.
But the divergence between US and Europe didn't happen until the late 1800s if not the early 1900s.
e.g. according to the census of 1851 ~40% of people in Britain were regularly attending religious services. No hard figures for the US from the time but from what I can find the proportion in the US was comparable. Except while mid 1800s was pretty much the peak in Britain in US it kept rising and reached its highest point in the 1950s while in UK religious participation had almost reached current levels by then.
IMHO the rise of political secularism, socialiam and the near societal collapse across much of Europe during and after WW1 and WW2 had a much bigger impact than whatever happened 400 years ago.
It's due to the difference in Christian values, the US has a hard on for believing that ignorance is a virtue when it comes to sin or adult topics.
Like for instance the outrage if you have a sign on your lawn stating that x president is a rapist to the economy, people will say that children should not be "exposed" to such words.
The US is largely theocratic and has in part because of this managed to resist socialism and other forms of scientific governance to a much larger degree.
Using religious leaders as power brokers is a clever strategy, they'll never budge due to the better argument or scientific reason, hence making it almost impossible for non-violent progressive movements to having an effect at the macro level.
Are you sure it’s a good thing to be so small minded that reason won’t reach you, just because you happened to avoid those big ideas that turned out to not work?
It's easy to dismiss all such campaigns as religious prudes and moral crusaders, especially on a site with the demographics and political leanings of YC News.
But often time such campaigns are waged by former victims of trafficking. It's well documented that trafficking, prostitution and pornography are closely interlinked - this modern notion of a fully liberated "sexual worker" controlling their careers, choices and finance is substantially a fiction of the pornographic industry. So there is real merit în the anti porn stance.
Of course, once the camping is set in motion, it takes a life of its own, that has nothing to do with the concerns of the victims and more with prudishness; the religious circus will join hands and demand the removal of synthetic pornography etc.
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.
Somehow, it's forbidden for the government to oppress pornographers directly, but it's perfectly fine to impose legal sanctions on banks who maintain business relationships with them.
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.
Yes. Steam used to have card declines if your address did not match exactly.
Card not present was and still is higher risk than in person shopping. Now that most US customers have chip cards in their wallets fraud has shifted from in person to CNP. Digital goods are high risk because a customer could theoretically download and enjoy the digital good or save a copy and then chargeback. There's no shipping tracking number to prove delivery. Or a fraudster could go on a spending spree from the comfort of their home in another country. Adult-only games are even higher risk because a customer might have to explain to a spouse what the Steam charges were for.
Of course copy protection and the prospect of a ban of their whole Steam account blunts the most obvious customer cheating of keeping a copy and charging back. Steam games cannot be resold. Digital goods that can be easily resold are magnets for fraud. Such as cloud GPUs or international long distance calls.
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.
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.
Chargebacks of legitimate purchases on most large platforms are extremely rare. Most will be from stolen cards. On most large platforms, if you start a chargeback you can expect your account to get locked. Do you want to give up your entire account just for a refund on one purchase? Luckily these large platforms typically have their own refund process.
>Chargebacks of legitimate purchases on most large platforms are extremely rare. Most will be from stolen cards.
I never used ecommerce back in the day on the internet but I can imagine that ecommerce fraud was widespread. And that's why excluding other reasons Satoshi invented Bitcoin[0].
I wonder if cryptocurrencies didn't exist would someone nowadays burn the midnight oil to figure out P2P crypto coin since modern payment solutions are fairly good.
Tbh I think Satoshi invented technology around which he wanted to build products unlike Steve Jobs who said that you first need to figure out the product then build technology.
[0] "Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot
avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the
minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions,
and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for nonreversible services. With the possibility of reversal, the need for trust spreads. Merchants must
be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need.
A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable. These costs and payment uncertainties
can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments
over a communications channel without a trusted party" https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
I don't see how this makes any sense. A reason for the creation of Bitcoin was offering less service than traditional methods?
"Financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes" is nonsense, they "can't" because it's constantly demanded by their clients, attempting to sell that as a bug rather than a feature is preposterous.
Satoshi wanted to bypass banks and make P2P direct payments with no trusted party besides Bitcoin protocol hence >no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party
And crypto community speculated that Satoshi or team behind Bitcoin worked at the internet gambling industry and what use to happen is that angry customers would chargeback the money they lost at the internet casino and cause numerous problems for "merchants" or in this case internet entrepreneurs.
> people whose spouses catch a XXX video or game on their card statement will lie and run chargebacks too.
I don't understand this claim. Steam doesn't list specific games on credit card bills- why would chargebacks be higher for a bill that says "9.99 - STEAMPOWERED.COM (WA)" than for one that says "9.99 - STEAMPOWERED.COM (WA)" just because the latter was used to pay for Undertale and the former was used to pay for Sex Simulator 25?
This is the correct answer. There are many merchant categories, adult being just one of them, that are susceptible to high chargeback rates which result in payment processors banning them.
This is nonsense. If you want us to believe this you need to show that Steam with erotic games is more of a risk than Steam without them. Comparing Steam with things like “adult merchants” like Onlyfans or a porn streaming service does not sound very appropriate.
It's not nonsense. I've hosted, moderated and managed sites that were only obliquely related to porn or gambling, and you wouldn't believe the level of rejection for running ads or getting payment processing that they are faced with. And I ran a casino for 4 years. I coded it and I ran it 24/7, and believe me, I did everything by the book. The CC companies do not give a shit as long as they make money. Chargebacks cost them a lot in time more than in actual cash, and they have categories of risk for every merchant who may expose them to that risk. The highest categories of risk are porn and gambling.
Any entity that uses a CC gateway and has any exposure to either of those risks is exposing itself to all the risk. The CC companies almost certainly told Valve that they would be considered a porn site and face a 1.5%-2% higher processing fee for every transaction.
> I've hosted, moderated and managed sites that were only obliquely related to porn or gambling, and you wouldn't believe the level of rejection for running ads or getting payment processing that they are faced with. And I ran a casino for 4 years. I coded it and I ran it 24/7, and believe me, I did everything by the book. The CC companies do not give a shit as long as they make money.
It is not really comparable. Steam is not a casino, and it is largely the same platform with or without perfectly legal porn. The presence of a few (not even that popular) adult games does not change the overall demographics that much, or the risk profile. I am not even ready to accept without proof that the risks are higher than with all the other, non-porn shovelware.
Sure, if Steam turned into an adult-only platform, then the risk profile could change significantly. But that is not what happened.
Also, as many people pointed out, Steam really does not incentive customers to ask for chargebacks. All the available information points to Valve managing its platform quite well for everyone involved.
2. I think the argument being made is that the credit card companies are not actually experiencing higher risk (from Steam). Not that they have any qualms about putting a business into a “high risk” classification.
In this case, I suppose the argument is that Steam is a large enough entity that they should be able to “self-insure”. If the US had a relatively open way to become a payment processor, the free market would take care of this. Unfortunately that isn’t the case and also is very unlikely to change.
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?
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.
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?
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).
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.
That's the problem though. The risk means the market for those riskier credit transactions is literally categorically not a great market. You think JP Morgan gives a shit about Japanese titty games? Hah. No. They care that these games get charged back way more often.
If there is a market opportunity, it's probably in a processor for debit-based transactions that are harder to reverse. But then that makes fraud harder to combat, and one of the reasons everyone loves credit cards so much is because consumers are far more confident to buy from random shops if they know they can always get their money back if the shop scams them.
So - this whole system's lucratively is entirely predicated on easy credit and low risk meaning low fees. Anyone who wants to play in the mud that's leftover by these companies taking the good business are inherently playing a low margin risky game.
I wouldn't scoff at the leftovers. You're talking about maybe a trillion dollar industry that struggles to find payment solutions. This is why I gave up on credit card processing for my startup casino in 2010 and just went to taking Bitcoin and other crypto. I originally planned to just take Visa. I wasn't looking to skirt the law. Card companies are looking out for themselves, and they don't really even need regulatory capture to shaft anyone running a business that the public could consider shady or immoral. There's plenty of demand out there, and in my opinion they're leaving money on the table. But their business model makes it difficult to take on the risk, especially in the case of something like Valve where they can't pick each transaction apart and evaluate the risk separately. So yeah... a globally accepted porn and gambling card? That would be a home run if the bills showed up never to someone's spouse, and it won't happen. Using a combination of crypto and higher CC fees to sell the content, though, there's a lot of pent-up demand.
>This is why I gave up on credit card processing for my startup casino in 2010 and just went to taking Bitcoin and other crypto.
And how many customers you lost in 2010 because of that? Probably more than 90%. Even now people are reluctant to use crypto but tbh crypto crowd is so big that you can perhaps succeed in opening crypto only business.
Yes, about 90%. I would have had maybe the 6th or 7th biggest online casino in the world - let's say that my software was about 5th (somewhere between Galewind and Microgaming) - but I ended up being one which catered only to early adopters of cryptocurrency, who were not necessarily gamblers on roulette or blackjack but had nothing better to do with their coins. It was an interesting experience, and it didn't leave me as wealthy as I could have been if the barriers to entering the larger market hadn't already been negotiated between CC companies and governments. That said, at least I'm not in prison like a lot of people who followed and tried to do what I did.
With the CFPB under threat, there may be room for payment processors which don’t protect consumers from fraud. (Regulation is only as strong as its enforcement)
Yes, and it's been tried before. LibertyCoin, I think.
Write a Steam knockoff platform that's trustworthy enough for people to download, and load it up with dirty games. Put the premium on the customers if they want to use credit card transactions, otherwise push them towards crypto payments. Maybe you won't be an oligarch, but you'll probably end up with a reasonably sized yacht.
[edit] hell, in a few years if the winds shift you might be DraftKings.
>Write a Steam knockoff platform that's trustworthy enough for people to download, and load it up with dirty games. Put the premium on the customers if they want to use credit card transactions, otherwise push them towards crypto payments.
Easier said than done. It is hard to earn trust....you would probably need to jumpstart the platform with quite a few indie devs so people start trusting the site and using it.
I remember having to redo all the art for a game because Apple's store rejected it. Six months. It would have been more fun with the original art. I'm sure there's many an indie dev in the same position who'd love a gray market for putting up games like that.
The US has a weird fetish with privatizing things that the government should handle, like consumer protection. If there were a reasonably robust infrastructure for this outside of payment processors in the US, there would be far less pressure on porn providers to comply with fucked up morals about porn. What we have here is an instance of late stage capitalism, and half the people are too narrowminded to see how it hurts their freedom.
I'm not sure about that. Late stage capitalism would involve the government bailing out credit card companies if there were fraud. I kind of prefer for them to deal with it themselves. And whether they deal with fraud themselves or the government does, they're going to classify certain types of transactions as riskier than others. My point was that this is probably not a "moral" decision, just a business decision. It would be a lot worse if it were the government mandating it, and worse still if they were mandating it because it conflicted with the moral code of some plurality of voters. That's not the case here, and I'm glad it's not. I wouldn't want the government to control consumer protection to the degree that voters in Texas could decide whether to protect certain consumers or not.
I think the biggest issue here is that somewhere down the line we gave payment processors the responsibility of policing for crime and terrorism. Our governments and regulators punish those institutions for "not doing enough" to prevent such things from happening.
You might think I'm defending the multibillion company but here comes the catch: all of this is expensive so when you are doing something funky even though not illegal they just cut you out. You are a small dev or merchant and it's not worth running a whole monitoring apparatus over your activities.
Then we get into this situation where borderline cartel activity like this happens and we have a sort of shadow government enacting their own regulations. This raises some eyebrows dont you think? It will probably continue until governments realize this is happening.
The responsibility ended up with payment processors and other financial institutions because otherwise they would be forced to give access to all their customer / transaction data to governments and law enforcement.
I really wish we had a push for payment neutrality. Financial transactions are infrastructure and infrastructure should be dumb and neutral. Why does everyone have to suffer slow and expensive transfers just to maybe occasionally catch some bad guys (and they're not actually caught, just mildly inconvenienced)? And of course once you're already doing it, there's inevitably overreach, as evidenced by Visa here.
And before someone chimes in about how crypto will solve this: yes, crypto has already solved this for the criminal class. But most of the rest of people still have to suffer all the fincrime policing every time they move money or pay for something.
> and they're not actually caught, just mildly inconvenienced
I read somewhere that criminal organizations and individuals love KYC and AML because they have the resources to go around it and it makes their operations look legit.
As a generalisation it seems sensible that it should be illegal to knowingly handle illegal things and the proceeds of illegal things.
It’s hard to say that it’s ok to profit from someone else’s crime.
If I sell you a bike cheap, no questions asked, then you ought be as culpable as me as you don’t have reasonable doubt that it’s stolen. Etc.
This can be weaponised. The lobbies go after visa and Mastercard etc by giving the company “proof” that same transactions are very illegal, eg leaks or underage or duress etc. This forces them in the position of being complicit which means they have to step back.
Yeah, but there should be a concept of what level of scrutiny is warranted. Pornhub had a legitimate problem in that in permitting user content they made it extremely hard to keep their system from being used for improper purposes (underage, revenge.) But neither would I expect any system to be 100%. Should you have known? If so, you're wrong. Things look reasonable? No fault.
Pornhub issue involved real exploitation of real people. Gaming characters are not real. I would think this is as reasonable as it can be.
The content might be illegal in some countries and thats fair if we can assume the people who pushed for these rules were voted for. No one voted for Visa and Mastercard.
>we gave payment processors the responsibility of policing for crime and terrorism
Maybe is time to do a reboot of the economy, what about everyone goes to the bank and withdraw all their money, and when everybody has his money, we put the money back in the bank? Would be funny to see how banks would react :)
Why would you consider those abhorrent while games where you can slaughter people, or commit all kinds of crimes like any random GTA, are widely considered normal?
I'll never understand American morals. What's clear is that we need non-US payment processors so that the values of a given culture aren't imposed worldwide.
Yes, stable-coins do. But if you have a crypto where the entire point seems to be "it should be worth more tomorrow than today", then it is stupid to use it to transact in rather than to hoard.
On the other hand, stable-coins suffer the same problems as visa. They're centralised, and subject to zealous regulations.
> On the other hand, stable-coins suffer the same problems as visa. They're centralised, and subject to zealous regulations.
Not all stablecoins are the same. There exists 2 main categories: Fiat-backed (as initially described), & collateral-backed.
(There also exists hybrid versions, but they're a combination of the 2, and as such will be covered by just mashing the 2 categories together.)
Fiat-backed stablecoins (USDC, USDT) are centralized: Their connection to external cash/bonds requires them to have an accountable name to be attached to.
Collateral-backed stablecoins (GHO, DAI/USDS) don't have to be centralized. A primitive form of this is a stablecoin (S) that can take in any other token as collateral and return $X amount of S stablecoins, up to a limit of (total_token_value * collateral_limit). However, it is known that this structure is inefficient capital-wise, when compared to fiat-backed stablecoins.
If there merely exists anything which is more valuable tomorrow than today, it is also equally "stupid" to have cash instead of whatever that thing is... and like, that isn't even theoretical: you are generally encouraged to hold more random assets than cash (if you are allowed to and if you can handle the volatility, of course).
The reality is that, even if the stocks you own are going to the moon, if you need food or want a television, it isn't at all "stupid" to sell some of your hoard to buy stuff.
> They're centralised, and subject to zealous regulations.
The currency wouldn't have to meet any particular definition of a stablecoin as long as it is inflationary. It could be exactly like Bitcoin but with a different mining algorithm.
Well that's the point isn't it? You don't buy an index fund in order to transact in it.
On-ramp has costs, then transaction has costs. And in my country at least, selling crypto (which is what you're doing when you buy something with it) is a taxable transaction. So now I have to keep all my transactions and report them to HMRC each year if I do that.
It's not going to happen. If people wanted to transact in crypto, they'd be doing it by now, it has had more than enough time.
Well, people do transact in crypto, especially in sectors that face censorship from payment processors, like the currently mentioned Japanese porn games.
I pay my VOIP bill in crypto. It's just easier and I usually pay a year or two at a time.
I've had to pay my DNS registration in crypto from time to time too. I don't know why but sometimes the anti-fraud AI at the bank gets triggered by my DNS provider and that's literally the only method I have for paying them.
It doesn't "solve" the problem, it's just not regulated the same way. If governments decided to extend the same regulations to crypto transactions, what recourse would a person have?
The difference is that a government or company can't ban you from using a cryptocurrency. They can only make it more difficult by banning your access to certain exchanges or something similar.
I'm not some crypto evangelist, but as far as I know, crypto at its foundation is a lot less "watertight" in terms of ascertaining who is who. Your government could pass laws to pressure your local money-to-crypto exchange service into complying with whatever regulation is needed. But they can't force the entire network of crpyto transactions to have real names tied to accounts, demand reasons for payment, discriminate based on what's being paid for, etc. So, circumventing payment processors' "grassroots" self-moderation requires finding a way to bypass basically the entire payment pipeline. Circumventing a hypothetical highly-regulated crypto environment just requires finding a way to sneak your money into the system. And there will probably be foreign or grey market services that don't care about what your specific country thinks.
Europeans thought they had finally gotten rid of the Puritans when the Mayflower set sail. But four centuries later their overzealous character still haunts them.
> Why do payment processors do stuff like this? Is there some regulation that requires them to?
Generally no, but they exist in a regulatory morass where it's impossible to do what they do without arguably or perhaps technically being in violation of hundreds of regulations at any given time.
The US government then uses their power to selectively enforce the voluminous mess of bad regulations to coerce parties to undertake actions which it would be flatly illegal for the government to perform directly such as cutting off sexually explicit content from payment rails.
The practice isn't limited to payment processors but they're a particularly good vector given the level of regulation they're subjected to. Choke Point (and Choke point 2) are just specific examples of a general tactic to end run around the public's rights that has been used by the US government for decades. In most cases the abuse isn't so well organized that it has a project name you can point at.
Congress and the whitehouse leaning on social media companies to suppress lawful opinions on covid policy is another example of that kind of abuse that has received some public scrutiny. Most cases, however, go without notice particularly since the ultimate victims of the actions generally have no way to know the cause.
It could be a holdover from Operation Choke Point, an Obama-administration arm-twisting initiative that would subject banks to more regulatory scrutiny and possible disciplinary action if they did business with certain "high-risk businesses" including firearm and pornography sellers. Ostensibly the initiative was ended in 2017, but banks are probably still afraid to be handed the black spot for doing business with the "wrong" sorts of people.
Like I said above, they are banning foods, not companies. Foods that do exactly what the vendors claim they do. Foods that are regulated by he FDA as foods. Foods that are listed in the Codex Alimentarius.
I figured the reason was not wanting to support something harmful to the customer like a fake diet pill. Call me naive for letting that assumption of even a glimmer of empathy affect my guestimation. I should have known it was pure greed all the way down and due to something like this instead.
I get the well-founded distrust of dietary supplement companies (the OG snake oil salesmen), but they've started banning kava, a completely legal food.
So... not dietary supplement companies, but a particular food that is completely legal and regulated as a food by the FDA.
You have a business selling food? Are you a bar? A restaurant? Well if you start selling this particular food we don't like, you will be debanked.
I mean I wouldn't do business with them, I think the supplements industry is infrastructure for grifters, quacks, and pyramid schemes to fleece the desperate, but what's the problem for Visa? Is it a brand safety thing? My presumption would be that payment processors are amoral and have no problem processing payments for Consolidated Baby Kickers if it were legal to do so, is that a misconception?
"Not as advertised" chargebacks. That industry is also full of subscription scams (e.g. someone thinks they're ordering a supplement for $5.99, but they're actually getting signed up for $39.99/month...).
> That industry is also full of subscription scams
Visa / MC are the ones who enable subscription scams and benefit from them. They implemented "convinience" option of "updating" your credit card data with replacement card. So even if you cancel and replace card charges continue to pass.
They also totally able to see all the places where your card been tokenised, but they dont push banks to expose this to you.
I don't think the credit card networks would care about that if it weren't for the risk of chargebacks. Credit card networks have no problem with processing payments for churches!
Aside from the moral clamor, if something has a higher likelihood of fraud, there's a direct relationship with the increase of its cost. Both legal fees and labor cost to deal with these claims could add up more than we outsiders may realize. It's very possible that some risk-averse analyst "ran the numbers", and decided this wasn't worth it. I would also speculate that there may be a certain hidden coat of false fraud claims. Certain folks buying something in the moment, then shamefully claiming they didn't after the fact, which in turn could carry the costs associated with processing a new card & number or conversely fighting false claims.
As for the morality angle though, while I definitely agree that these companies' main motivation has to be increasing revenue and profit, and that their only reason for doing anything is cost-driven; you never know what middle-manager who is swayed by what belief is actually making these decisions. So as much as the monolithic goal of the organization is more money, there are still emotional (and financially fallible) people pulling the levers.
The fraud thing explains why they might avoid an entirely adult storefront for it, but for steam? who has their own refund policies and support system that presumably shields the payment processor from charge backs most of the time?
There are also large anti porn lobbying groups applying pressure to the payment processors, so that angle creates costs in a different way.
Steam’s refund policy and support system doesn’t eliminate the possibility of someone buying on steam with their CC and then calling their CC and claiming fraud.
The USA is extremely litigious, rules are decided not by the legislature usually but instead by people suing each other to establish case law, and anyone with a bone to pick could sink you in legal fees and proceedings at a whim. So probably people who don’t like the idea of adult content can use the courts to make payment processors’ lives painful and they decide to just forgo that business.
This is an oft-repeated misconception. Germany is almost twice as litigious as the US. Sweden and Austria are also more litigious than the US.
> anyone with a bone to pick could sink you in legal fees and proceedings at a whim
This is FUD, not reality. While it’s “possible” for anyone in any country to try to sue, it simply doesn’t happen in the US more often than elsewhere. The relatively high number of US lawsuits are filled with corporate litigation, contract disputes, bankruptcy filings, car accidents, and appeals, among many other things, and not people suing each other for minor grievances.
“Coffee spills, Pokemon class actions, tobacco settlements. American courts have made a name for themselves as a wild lottery and a money machine for lucky few lawyers. At least in part, however, the reputation is unfounded. American courts seem to handle routine contract and tort disputes as well as their peers in other wealthy democracies.
“More generally, Americans do not file an unusually high number of law suits. They do not employ large numbers of judges or lawyers. They do not pay more than people in comparable countries to enforce contracts. And they do not pay unusually high prices for insurance against routine torts.
“Instead, American courts have made the bad name for themselves by mishandling a few peculiar categories of law suits. In this article, we use securities class actions and mass torts to illustrate the phenomenon, but anyone who reads a newspaper could suggest alternatives.
“The implications for reform are straightforward: focus not on the litigation as a whole; focus on the specifically mishandled types of suits.”
I can also pull out numbers and statistics that make it sound like the US is more litigous than other nations, like how it spends way more than any country as a fraction of GDP on litigation [1] as well as how litigation is used frivolously to prevent projects by weaponizing environmental regulation like NEPA and CEQA, to prevent the construction of practically anything in the USA.
But all that aside, taking that Harvard law article at face value, there are specifically mishandled types of suits, and those include those that are intended to inflict cost on payments processors to get them to reject customers that otherwise aren't doing anything illegal, but just operate in an industry that those suing don't like.
What point are you trying to make now? This has little to do with citizens suing each other, and doesn’t demonstrate that US litigation is either frivolous nor widely abused.
The cost of litigation doesn’t prove the US is more litigious, it only demonstrates litigation is expensive in the US. The fact that Germany is the most litigious and that multiple other countries are more litigious than the US is extremely easy for you to verify.
The Institute for Legal Reform is a group that historically denied climate change, and they are funded by and run entirely in the interests of the US’s largest corporations. Personally, I like clean air and water, and US corporations don’t have a great track record of telling the truth about their impacts on the environment. Forgive me if I don’t readily put a lot of stock in their complaints. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Chamber_of_Comme...
If I remember correct from the hot money podcast https://www.ft.com/content/762e4648-06d7-4abd-8d1e-ccefb74b3... part of the problem for the credit card companies is figuring what are the boundaries of legality. Countries have very different laws. Things like representing homosexuality or age of consent are very different and credit cards feel that it is a risky business because of that.
Control. People get a kick out of controlling others and stopping them doing things that don't effect them in any way. It's like how being a practising gay was illegal or how using certain drugs still is.
There isn’t. Even worse, there’s no legislation prohibited them from doing so.
Payment processors (eg: Mastercard, Visa) are the ultimate deciders of whether you can sell something online or not, regardless of whether it is legal.
They haven’t just blocked adult content, they’ve also blocked non-profits with which they disagree in the past.
We need much stronger legislation around this. Private entities shouldn’t be capable of deciding that a given organisation can’t charge online. Only institutions which represent the public’s interests should have this level of influence.
This is one of the ways the government can censor people despite the first amendment. It’s absolutely by design. The regulators “express concern” about certain financial activity and then the companies remove it.
I don't think so, it is death by a thousand cuts which is why we are in such a shitty place right now. Out rights have been attacked on all side for decades, little by little, but all together it is a huge loss.
the problem of Visa and Mastercard being against porn just seems like a such a small cut next to the US President forcing a comedian off the air for making critical remarks
This is a long ongoing issue tho and one of the main reasons many European sex stores don't take credit card at all. Visa and master do enforce irrational morals
This originated from an Australian-based feminist activist group called "Collective Shout", who put pressure on the payment processors to censor digital content.
They claimed it as their own victory on X this week.
Sexual self-denial always was the driving force behind the western cultural success. You can not have hyper-specialization and rule of law, without some members of society sacrificing a "normal" life.
From the monk in the monastry to Turing hyper-focused on an enigma there is clear line. Its a ugly recipe, but its working, unlike all those other societies out there, who are currently eating themselves. A judge doesn't dress like a priest for no reason.
Sexual caste slavery or anarchy- thats the choices.
> You can not have hyper-specialization and rule of law, without some members of society sacrificing a "normal" life.
Sex freaks hyper specialize in things all the time. Monks and priests also had reputations as horny perverts in Medieval literature. Also, there are plenty of non-Western countries that have been functional. This is such an out of touch, ahistorical take.
> Sexual self-denial always was the driving force behind the western cultural success.
It is a feature of a subset of the culture in some countries. It is far less universal as you say.
> You can not have hyper-specialization and rule of law, without some members of society sacrificing a "normal" life.
This really does not follow. How does the existence of laws prevent someone to live a normal life? In a liberal democracy, laws fundamentally guarantee that we can do so, as long as someone’s fundamental individual freedom does not cause unacceptable harm to someone else. In that framework, what we do in private with consenting adults is absolutely nobody’s business. Rule of law does not change this.
> From the monk in the monastry to Turing hyper-focused on an enigma there is clear line.
What line is this? In which way was Turing’s persecution a requirement for him being a genius? How do we benefit from him killing himself instead of leaving him be and make other contributions to our intellectual development?
> It’s an ugly recipe, but it’s working, unlike all those other societies out there, who are currently eating themselves.
It is not. What you are advocating is a theocracy and there are many examples in History and around the world that show that it is a terrible idea.
> A judge doesn't dress like a priest for no reason.
All I can say is LOL. Ceremonial clothing is more nuanced than that.
> Sexual caste slavery or anarchy- thats the choices.
The fact that you only see these possibilities says a lot more about you than the way human beings work.
I don't know if he had major active relationships specifically while working on Enigma (other than the short engagement to Joan Clarke in 1941), but Turing famously did have sexual relationships since the discovery of one eventually led to criminal prosecution of both him and his partner, his chemical castration and eventually possibly suicide.
Paul Erdős might be a better example, though I don't think he was deliberately self-denying and more just a huge oddball. Newton also never showed much interest, apparently, though an engagement was rumoured.
Many of the biggest and best-known brains in maths, engineering, physics and computing did marry: as a quick random survey: Euler, Chandrasekhar, Faraday, Maxwell, Watt, Babbage, Einstein, Dijkstra, Wiles, Hopper, Hamilton, Knuth, even Ramanujan and the Woz (4 times, even).
This BTW is 100% the reason why americans still perform circumcison and still radically cling to it.
Men must have their sexuality attacked and stymed from the very beginning of birth, or else they will waste their brain power on promiscuity. That's the only thinking anyway that explains why over half this country still circumcises.
Kant and I think Newton were famously virgins and a whole lot of moral crusaders in this world get extremely angry at the idea that people in this world have enjoyable sexual relations. A lot of people want a lot more sexual frustration to exist in this world, as it's good for capitalist exploitation.
That's absolutely not the reason. It started out that way, sure, but it's not why it's done now.
It's done now out of basic tradition (father is circumcised, so son is too), conformity (his peers are all circumcised, we don't want him made fun of), doctor advice (fewer infections, easier to keep clean), and plain old cultural inertia. It's slowly dying out but I expect it to stick around another several decades.
Get this - they power the payments infrastructure for OnlyFans, which to many people is arguably more degenerate than a few adult-themed games.
People can also buy TV shows and movies in which their content is far more grusome and disturbing than the video-games targeted by the activist groups putting pressure on payment processors.
I noticed someone else posted a list of other groups, but another one is called "Collective Shout", who censors their own ads because their subject matter is considered harmful.
I suspect Valve is blaming the credit card companies for something they really wanted for themselves. Steam is a big store open to everyone and you’re going to scare away a big chunk of seniors, Christians, etc with stuff like incest, ageplay, and rape just so that a small minority uses you instead of…itch.io? Better to keep the big safe names like Being a Dik and Eternum on Steam and flush the rest so that you can have the best of both worlds.
I think that for better or worse Valve is genuinely committed to lassies faire moderation, they have historically been very hesitant to remove really heinous games. I don't think they're using this as cover.
That changed with Hatred in 2015. There have been a number of them since. It seems that anything that gives Valve bad press is on its shit list, even if the premise theme has been done before by a bigger or more well-known company stateside. If the upcoming Grand Theft Auto game has full frontal nudity and realistically depicted sex scenes, I doubt Valve would give it a second look.
That was ten years ago, there have been tons of really objectionable games on Steam in recent years. Eg I just checked and the game where you roleplay as Kyle Rittenhouse shooting protestors is still on Steam.
Per Wikipedia:
> [Hatred] was shortly removed by Valve from their Steam Greenlight service due to its extremely violent content but was later brought back with a personal apology from [Valve's co-founder] Gabe Newell.
The fact that it was removed at all was a sea-change from Valve's previous stance. Temporary or not, it set a precedent for other removals. For example, Valve had unceremoniously prevented the publication of Super Seducer 3 and retroactively de-published its prequels as a result of a campaign launched by a group of British feminists. (https://happymag.tv/super-seducer-3-steam/)
"Completely abhorrent" is subjective. If you want it banned, show me the victims that would be saved. Otherwise, what happens behind closed doors is none of our business.
And the legality of them--we still have obscenity statutes on the books. Garbage as far as I'm concerned, but they're still there.
How can you not see the pattern yet? They've been putting the industry into deliberate managed decline for the last 2 years. Simply because it made people happy and that is a threat to the valueless deeducated world that they are trying to impose.
I'm more curious why PCGamer did not publish the name of the games that were removed. There are some incredibly perverse titles in there and if they are advocating to normalize this kind of content, they should have no shame doing so.
Jesus christ it’s not advocating for its normalization, it’s the idea that payment processors aren’t the arbiters of societies morals. You want to ban some weird porn game you use the government.
Another factor is that credit providers (i.e. banks) are increasingly using customer transaction data to assess customer behaviour as part of its risk scoring.
If a customer is regularly purchasing adult material that would be definitely be a red flag.
A regular purchaser of adult entertainment almost certainly has enough cash flow to pay their bills. And they'll have a hard time claiming it's not them when it matches their previous activity. Having an interest in sex doesn't in the slightest suggest a person is bad--if anything, the apparent lack of interest would be more worrisome. (Not that purchase history can be used to discern this.) Some of the ones who don't are asexuals, but some are those who are repressing their sexuality--and that's more likely to show up in unacceptable ways.
A first time purchaser of adult entertainment is another matter--that's going to have a lot of spouse-found-out chargebacks.
This. I dont know who do you need to be in order to pay for the porn that you can pirate for free. In case of games or music or movies there is collecting and convinience, but porn is pretty much opposite.
But at the same time chance of "oops it's not mine" charbacks likely much higher compared to other spending.
Look. Ignore the content. Why the fuck do we allow credit card companies have a say in how we spend our money?
Fraud? Abuse? Fine, let me put cash onto a card and if that card gets stolen, oh well, my loss. Mastercard should have no say in what what speech is considered acceptable outside of their offices. We don't care what execs at a water company think? Why do we care about the people at Mastercard?
It's because Visa got sued, lost, and it was found out they knowingly processed payments for illegal adult content, so they basically avoid the sector entirely now. Economist had an article about it maybe two years ago and came to much the same conclusion you did. IIRC, the failure in their mind was government not stepping in to make a law so things are less ambiguous in the future. Now payment processing cos get to gate keep people's speech, which means everything is basically a civil suit away from getting blacklisted.
>This week, US District Judge Cormac Carney of the US District Court of the Central District of California decided that there's reason to believe that Visa knowingly processed payments that allowed MindGeek to monetize "a substantial amount of child porn." To decide, the court wants to know much more about Visa's involvement, calling for more evidence of legal harms caused during a jurisdictional discovery process extended through December 30, 2022.
Seems rather weird that Visa out of all the parties involved got hit by this, that's like suing the national bank for printing cash currency that gets used in illegal ways? Or suing the pavement for allowing a heist getaway car to drive away. Or the gas station where they last filled it up.
No, don’t follow the underdog fallacy. What are you doing against it? How are you different from the other sheep? Merely complaining doesn’t make you any better.
youre allowed to be critical of things while still using said things. i have 8 million things going on in my life and the hill i die on isnt going to be the working conditions of humans that make iphones
When I buy an iPhone I am dealing with Apple. I know what I am buying and what I can or cannot do with the device. And if I am not happy there are alternatives.
When I buy stuff on Steam I am in no way making a contract with Visa. When Visa strong arms Valve to delist games I lose even if I never had any relation with Visa ever.
No, you misread. I have a commercial relation with Steam and I am happy for them to chose what game they sell and what game they don’t (and as a matter of fact I buy more games on gog than on Steam). I don’t have a relation with Visa and I object to them exercising any control over what I can or cannot buy.
Again, that is not the point I am making. I am not even necessarily disagreeing with you on that point. I am merely pointing out that I am perfectly able to make a rational compromise and that it does not mean that I accept a random company interfering with my life. If you have something to say on that, fine. Otherwise, what is the point?
No, I get it. Give me a "Freedom Card" or whatever that generates a one-time use number/cvv combo, backed by cash, that I'm fully responsible for. If I give a guy on the corner $5 cash and he walks off with it, that's between me and him. We don't need to resort to crypto. I don't care if there's a paper trail, I don't need to be anonymous. I just don't want money people to have any say in how people choose to spend their money.
If you have a central authority which is keeping track of the ledger, they always have the ability to disallow any given transaction at their discretion or at the behest of some more powerful organization, e.g governments
This is one of the problems that crypto was attempting to solve (if implemented properly and used correctly). There is a third party(the "network"), but its decentralized and at least for "proper" networks, no one organization has a controlling interest in the network
Now any given miner/producer does not necessarily have to accept any random transaction. In practice however, for mature networks such as Bitcoin there are so many different miners/producers, its unlikely they would all conspire to disallow certain accounts or types of transactions.
Now this is certainly possible for a crypto exchanges and therein lies the rub with cryptos - if you want to get the cryptocoin, you generally have to buy it with good old fashioned hard currency. Conversely if you want to convert the cryptocoin back into hard currency. And exchanges nowadays are facing increasing regulations from governments. Which means practically you are still largely under the thumb of those powerful organizations without some real gymnastics involved, such as trading crypto for cash with a real person in a back alley somewhere, or vice versa
> Thats not exactly a credit card at that point. And with a credit card, you're explicitly not spending your money.
That point is not the problem though. They could just pressure Valve to refuse credit cards for all or some games. The financial aspect simply does not make sense, regardless of how you look at it (and many people had different takes in this thread).
The only angles that make sense are an ideological crusade and the risk of being sued. The first is unacceptable and the second is an utter failure on the part of the legal system.
Yeah, a "Freedom Card". Our money, they move it, no moralizing. We don't need crypto to fix this, just common sense legislation.
No company or individual should be denied the right to receive funds digitally without due process.
Companies should be free to transact with or exclude anyone, but there should be neutral infrastructure that facilitates the flow of money, with multiple players each with differing rules and risk profiles setup to help people and companies access it.
No one financial institution should be able to dictate the speech allowed on a platform.
You think that common sense legislation is a more realistic solution than crypto?
You can never rely on governments or corporations to have reasonable policies. Any payment system that is centrally controlled will inevitably be corrupted.
That's really at this point that's back to where I am with crypto. Through all the speculation and cruft, there is still a shot at owning our own payments, or rather no one owning them.
The payment networks have power, and if you can twist the arm of the gatekeepers, people subvert that power.
The only thing I don't know about these days is with the stablecoins, how do you avoid the government sinking their claws into you if you intrinsically (esp. if successful) have to hold that much in cash or short-term instruments? Or you have something like tether, which leaving aside anything else, you can definitely say is comically opaque for an entity that is nominally running $160B.
The problem that seems to be being missed here is that while fraud is one reason Visa has say over what they accept, the much much much bigger issue is ATF, Money laundering and Sanctions.
Cards like the Freedom card will never fly with either the Networks or the Issuing Banks as these kinds of payment instruments are immediately used to wash illicit funds.
Visa's stance with Steam is bollocks, and it is another example of the monopoly they hold over payment processing. They shouldn't have the ability to impact a legit merchants catalogue.
But the idea that we can have a Freedom card also doesn't checkout. The less known about what the money is spent on the higher the risk. And cost of complying with Suspicious Activity Reports regulations is really high (as the costs of you breach the requirements), so any attempts to create / run this kind of thing often don't stack up.
I think you underestimate just how much governments like the ability to control financial transactions within their borders, and in some cases (cough US) outside of it
The card networks are never on the hook for fraudulent transactions (nor for any other type of chargeback for that matter). If anything, it's the merchant's payment service provider/card acquirer that absorbs the loss if the merchant can't pay.
True – I was debating whether I should mention that edge case :)
I think the general idea is that acquiring banks are hopefully large enough to absorb any single merchant insolvency, but there are obviously limits to that. Airlines and event tickets are notorious example of that, since they usually take payment weeks or months ahead of providing the underlying service but want to get paid immediately.
that wouldn't apply in this case, because the vendor, Valve, would be on the hook for fraudulent purchases and they would definitely have the deep pockets to pay out. The cc companies only have to worry about the small, fly by night companies that might disappear after a bunch of fraud.
No they aren't. Fraudulent card not present transactions are fully on the backs of merchants. The networks and banks don't lose a dime of them. In fact, they make more money now, charging additional fees when disputes are filed, and additional fees when they are challenged.
Well your comment tells us why-- as is the law in the US is that credit card companies are almost entirely responsible for fraud. It's part of why they and their dubiously usurious practices are allowed to exist in the US at all.
If it were the case that the payment rail censorship were limited just to cases where there was an obvious elevated fraud risk-- then that would be the whole of the story. -- and there would be an obvious answer: use a payment mechanism where the fraud responsibility is entirely on the user, such as Bitcoin.
But their censorship exists where no such elevated fraud risk exists too, due to abusive conduct by the government to indirectly suppress activity that would be plainly unlawful for them to directly suppress. And the governments out of control abuse of its regulatory power is not limited to fraud-responsible payment rails, and get applied just as or even more extensively on Bitcoin payment processors.
No, I get it. Give me a "Freedom Card" or whatever that generates a one-time use number/cvv combo, backed by cash, that I'm fully responsible for. If I give a guy on the corner $5 cash and he walks off with it, that's between me and him.
Well, credit is not really "your money". The danger of course is if this gets extended to debit cards and they become the only option (ie. no cash). Every time you use your card you are giving them the power to do this.
Yes, I mentioned debit cards in the second of the three sentences in my comment.
It's an important distinction to make. Credit is very much not something you should feel entitled to and issuer can and should be selective about who and what they issue credit for. Or course the credit industry itself is disgusting, but that's another issue (this was covered almost 20 years ago in a documentary Maxed Out).
This shouldn't be conflated with payments in general which is (imo) a much bigger problem. You should be entitled to spend the money you earn on exactly what you want, and to do it anonymously.
You can fight back: don't spend on credit and refuse to use a card when cash would suffice. We are losing, though. For stuff like Steam you have no other option (as far as I know).
Fuck that. Why do we need credit card processors AT ALL? For that matter, why are debit cards tied to credit card networks? Unless and until people realize that these things are useless outmoded and antiquated, it's a waste of time trying to improve them. Do you want a faster horse, or the automobile?
Payment processors(Visa, Master) , payment gateways(Stripe, Paypal...) and payment hosts (Patreon, Gumroad...) are a huge pain to deal with even when you're selling something which is legal and risk free just because their algorithm or employees are often overcautious, anything out of mundane they'll ban first and then ask questions(if you're lucky).
I have a FOSS project called Open Payment Host[1] which removes the payment hosts from the equation and removes the technical hassle of integrating multiple payment gateways but it does not solve the pain of having to deal with the payment gateways and by extension payment processors and banks.
My long term plan is to integrate direct banking API where ever it's available.
Is there any bank from any country which provides direct banking API to end customers for plain savings bank account (I've seen some provide for current accounts).
I built a cool tool the last week's. I spent more time on evaluating payment processor than the code itself.
I have ~5 projects in my shelf I did never launch because I didn't find a payment solution.
Got instantly banned with all of them, had to write them an email wait for days to get some response.
I usually just use crypto whenever it makes sense. And still have a hard time to believe that I can move as much as crypto as I want but a single payment from a Dubai account can get my bank account frozen for days ...
This is what i settled on as well. I maintain a side project that is completely legal and above board but i refuse to go through the nonsense i was forced to go through the last time i had to integrate with a credit card payment gateway (another side project that went belly up).
If someone wants to buy something from me badly enough, they'll figure out how to get some bitcoin.
I don't have the time and energy to deal with their arbitrary bullshit anymore.
Exactly. Same boat here, fully legal normal business. My main issue is literally having customers from middle east. I've had bank accounts frozen, PayPal reverting my business account to personal without notice, fees, crazy amount of fees everywhere ... So much pain for no benefit compared to crypto.
I haven't, I will definitely explore it. Quick read on it seems very promising.
Have you or anyone here any API in EU for getting payments directly to your bank account? I have started a discussion on this on OPH[1], I welcome any information on direct banking API in Europe in that discussion.
If I understood it correctly, Open Payment Host can register as a TPP and offer direct banking to its users. But a customer of lunar bank can't access the API directly?
It sounds like you're about to reinvent Sofort, a (now defunct, or sold off at least) payment system that first worked on reverse engineered online banking and then PSD2 to mutually verify direct bank transfers.
The article calls out “certain adult games” which is vague. It is interesting to note that most of the delisted games were themed specifically around incest.
> The article calls out “certain adult games” which is vague.
A Quick Look at the list has me wishing I hadn’t thought to look at the list.
I suspect the vague “certain adult games” was chosen because it makes it sound more controversial. If the headline was “Valve removed incest-themed games under pressure” there would be a lesser reaction.
Collective Shout, the group behind this petition, has previously gone after more mainstream games, like Detroit Becomes Human, for spurious reasons. I have no doubt they'll use this win and mealy-mouthed language to push for more censorship.
Ah, like a video game version of "Game of Thrones"? None of the payment processors had any issues with taking money for that series. And that was live action.
Exactly. By content, here is a book on Amazon[1] where the author openly tells stories of rape and incest and somehow it's all Ok. Pretty much the same as Game of Thrones and those Steam games.
You are not in agreement. The person you are replying to is being sarcastic. They feel that a HBO produced tv show with incest is art that needs to be protected while an indie dev game with incest is trash that needs to be censored.
The fact of the matter is you will find more people willing to publicly bat for GOT than you will find people willing to bat for an "indie incest non-con game". And it's not like GOT has not received criticism for its content or that people haven't tried.
The movements here (the pro-censorship movement & the anti-sexuality movement) are mainly driven by religious beliefs, and as such, it comes as no surprise that they do not want to apply censorship in a fair or even logically consistent way; they merely want to ban things they personally do not like.
As I pointed out earlier, it's also valid that they are savvy enough to pick their battles and divide and conquer - you can't take down a critical mainstream success like GOT or GTA, but you can go after fringe games with content most people would be uncomfortable publicly defending.
That’s exactly the point: getting Valve to remove illegal content would not have caused any headlines. These themes go against common moral standards and so Visa et al don’t want to be seen selling them.
You can find the list of removed titles if you go looking for it. Feel free to point out which ones you think are collateral damage. I’m not looking at that list with my eyeballs though. I need them for later.
It's kind of fucked up that we are almost used to murder in various media (movies, games, etc.), meanwhile even slightly explicit sex is much more taboo. I do vaguely understand why this is (religious beliefs that formed our understanding of what is acceptable and what-not), but I am still surprised that this is how it is even with the rise of Atheism in recent decades.
So funny how people think this is a moral crusade. You should read articles around the tech stack for payment processing at any adult site. People try to do chargebacks all of the time on these kind of services. "Hunny what is this transaction on our account for BigBussomsCom?" .. "Oh must be some kind of fraud" "then let's call the bank and straighten it out". It's variations of this, over and over that lead to the high chargeback rates. I seem to recall that chargebacks are an order of magnitude higher for adult-oriented transactions. Unless you have a system of countering this with a team devoted to it, you will have a lot of successful chargebacks. I doubt Valve has the specialized team needed to deal with the amount of chargebacks, this the CC companies trying to avoid the headache.
It's so funny that people think it's about chargeback.
If you buy smut game on Steam, your bank statement won't show the name of the game. It looks exactly like any other transaction you make on Steam.
> "Hunny what is this transaction on our account for BigBussomsCom?" .. "Oh must be some kind of fraud" "then let's call the bank and straighten it out"
This is a scenario that literally can't happen in the Steam case. It could happen with Pornhub but not with Steam.
And Steam has a very generous refund policy. If your playtime is less than 2hr you can ask for a refund with a few mouse clicks. No phone call or email needed. Actually in my experience if your playtime is just over 2hr for a bit they'll still refund you.
If you chargeback you can get your whole steam account suspended.
To add: AFAIK most adult content websites bill under a different, innocuous name as well. You don't get a charge on your credit card from BigBussomsCom, you get a charge from SuperCard or something like that. (uh... I know because of a friend...)
Yeah. Never dealt with an adult content website, but in my admittedly limited experience adult products always come in innocent packaging and generally bill under innocuous names.
If what you said were true then they would ban all porn and not just rape/incest/bestiality porn. They're banning specific genres of porn which makes it an obvious morality issue.
I can't back this up with facts but the chargeback myth smells of an old astroturfing campaign to justify the moral policing on porn in general. But nowadays porn is more commonly accepted so they're shifting to more specific genres.
The new myth seems to be that payment processors can he held legally liable for facilitating illegal transactions, but the only lawsuits vs payment processors I can find is about child pornography, which has always been banned on steam.
When added that there was an advocacy group that sent an open letter to payment processors a week ago for this same exact issue[1], then the chargeback excuse has zero merit.
So yeah, it's 100% a moral crusade. Which side you sit on the crusade it up to you.
Just came here to ask. Is it a norm to not have any personal fund cache while in a relationship? I would not like anyone, spouse included, to question me about my purchases of (redacted), nor would I want to question them on purchases of the newest (redacted) or whatnot. What's the purpose?
Violence has no religious morality baggage - religions were extremely violent. Sex, however, has all the baggage from all the angles. Even if we aren't religious, it doesn't matter, religion still dictates huge chunks of our lives and our mindsets. It has thousands of years of inertia.
Buddhism literally teaches celibacy. Mostly for monks but if you get serious about your practice the advice is always to become celibate in order to make progress. It makes sense as you're trying to remove your desires.
Sure, but simulation does give you exposure. And too much exposure (from the simulations going mainstream) begets normalization, something you definitely do NOT want with content like that. We are already suffering enough from pop media making many kinds of abhorrent behavior mainstream.
And yet it is possible to make simulations extreme enough I would not opposed to banning them. There are some things that should not be normalized in society.
It shouldn’t be payment processors doing it unilaterally, I’ll grant that. But I’m not (and I’m sure a great many more of a silent majority) wholly opposed to the outcome.
I don't know what your definition of "actual" free speech is but there are certainly limits to free speech even in the US[0].
And those are just explicit limits. Try supporting Palestine on a college campus or mentioning women or gay people in any government funded scientific publication, or finding a book portraying pro-LGBT content in a library or a school curriculum that portrays slavery in a way that "makes white people feel victimized" in the South.
The limits to speech (in USA) depends (roughly) on if it's intended to incite imminent lawless action and is likely to do so.
Actual speech is communicating ideas or opinions, even distasteful or unpopular ones. The fact that university morons throw a riot if anyone disagrees with them (many such cases), does not affect your right to do so.
Denmark passed a law in 2023 that makes public burning, tearing, stepping on, or defiling holy texts illegal. It's informally called the Quran Law, because everyone knows who doesn't tolerate any criticism of their religion at all. This is one of many limits on speech in Denmark. In my view, speech is either free or it isn't, hence my argument that only USA has free speech.
thats a historical view, but not the most useful now that the second american revolution has happened.
things that lightly annoyed the president is now the decider between legal and illegal speech in the US, and the punishment is death, because nothing the president does that could be part of their regular responsibilities like talking to secret service assasins, can be considered in court proceedings.
Isn't freedom of speech just "you're allowed to say whatever you want", and not "you're entitled to the use of taxpayer dollars to help distribute your message" or "you're entitled to have the government force children to read your message"?
I love a good “POTUS” conspiracy as much as the next guy but The Late Show cancelation is a simple money game, the show was bleeeding money. If the show was profitable the chance of it being cancelled are same as me dating Beyonce
I would agree with this if this was factual, the money cbs paid via 60 minutes nonsense is same if you were fined a dime for something you did today. so not “massive” but whatever is the exact opposite of massive
The show itself was losing viewership cause who the F watches late night TV these days?
is said late night TV actually expensive though? they have a payong audience, and the whole thing is an ad for whoever is selling a book or movie release.
whats gonna replace that slot that people are gonna watch? a blank screen?
if you have a car that is a money pit you and your family keep bleeding money on to make repairs, would you keep making repairs or get another car? all of TV is a simple money game, shows get canceled, new ones spruce up, they get canceled, some are super successful but run their course, others stink from the get-go. what is going to replace the late show? not sure but whatever it does it better make money for cbs or the same faith awaits it
Personally, I won't miss these games either, but it just seems like such a slippery slope to normalize achieving societal/political goals through exerting pressure on infrastructure companies instead of through democratic means.
I totally support this type of pressure being exerted on companies involved in editorializing and providing an audience (e.g. I don't think Valve should be required by law to carry any form of content, just like a publisher can't be forced to print any content it doesn't agree with). But infrastructure, due to being both fundamental to doing business and generally living in a society and very often being at least regionally monopolistic in nature, should be open to anybody that's acting within the law.
And conversely, if something seems ethically or morally unacceptable to a rule-based society, what ought to change is the law.
That's all assuming a functioning democratic and political process, of course, but it generally seems to be possible even in the US, with its strong protections of speech, to limit certain types of speech under obscenity laws, so I don't really get the desire to outsource this inherently political process to private corporations.
That's a complicated question I'd like to see settled via legislation and in courts interpreting (and sometimes overturning) these laws rather than in a private corporation's compliance and/or PR department.
It definitely should not be determined by corporations because they not elected and almost untouchable by the individuals affected.
The state is a less bad alternative but bad (unintentionally harmful) and malicious (intentionally harmful) decisions are generally not punished either.
When people set rules which affect others, they should also be held accountable.
And in general, rules limiting a person's behavior should only exist when that behavior can be _proven_ to be harmful.
They should be determined by individuals capable of critical and logical thinking and without anything personal to gain from the rules.
They should not be determined by individuals who have antisocial traits or who are indoctrinated into various belief systems which are founded on preferential treatment (such as religion).
The term “silent majority” has a very specific political meaning.
But, in what way do you think those opposing “extreme” content being consumed by their fellow citizens are silent? State governments across the country are clamoring to censor all sorts of things, presumably to satisfy their constituents.
There is a world of nuance separating "normalizing" and "banning" something though, that's simply a false dichotomy.
I'd wager most "normal" people would recoil at the idea of eating excrement and, for all my open-mindedness, it's probably not something I'd actively endorse. But banning it is on a whole other leaf. Things can and should be allowed to exist on the fringe.
Otherwise we're moving towards the subject of the T.S. Eliot quote where "everything that is not forbidden will be compulsory, and everything not compulsory will be forbidden."
For the people who disagree: would you really be interested in seeing Child Grooming Simulator 25 on steam? I think we can almost all reasonably agree that at least this sort of content should not be sold on there.
I don't have to be "interested" in seeing something on steam to disagree with nkrisc.
I don't care about 99.9%+ of the games on steam, that doesn't mean I want them gone.
When we start saying "no content restrictions besides illegal stuff", your hyperbolic question becomes legitimate in a way that it's not when we're talking about Doom.
Are you saying the people who are petitioning Steam to remove porn games are playing the porn games themselves and simultaneously pretending porn games don't exist on Steam?
It's a slippery slope. It's not real but can certainly, by definition, create a situation that mimics reality to the point of assisting someone at committing a real crime that they couldn't possibly commit without the simulation.
The slippery slope is in banning speech. If you want to make the claim that simulated sex leads to crimes we have been over this a thousand times with violence in games. There is no connection, you are without a leg to stand on except your own religious indoctrination.
>There is no connection, you are without a leg to stand on except your own religious indoctrination.
Flagging my reply is gross (you state that, not me!) and grounds for ban. I'll just leave this 2nd rebuttal here as I take back both my legs to stand on and yours as well :P
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?
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.
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.
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.
Eh yeah the Levayen Satanist book exists but I thought they were referring to a religious book from the archaic Bible ages. That'd be much more interesting to read!
Visa and Mastercard are called card _networks_ for a reason. Wherever you are in the world, or in any site anywhere, if your card says Visa and the merchant’s POS machine (or payment gateway) take Visa, both parties know the transaction is good. The merchant gets his money and you get the product.
You get your card from your issuing bank, so the consumer’s last mile is the bank’s problem. The merchant get their POS/gateway from the acquirers. Your bank and the merchants acquirer don’t know each other.
Visa and Mastercard are intermediaries. There’s no way a NatWest card in the UK is connected to whatever POS is in Chile or whatever. They all route through the card brands.
Privacy.com issues cards from the Visa and Mastercard networks.
You can’t run your own card network easily because you would have to convince all of the merchant banks that take card transactions to do business with you.
Digital money movement requires an operating agreement between at least two financial entities - but most of the time there’s a lot more. Depending on the type of transaction you may have two or more gateways, facilitators, processors, issuers and underlying banks involved.
It’s a very fragmented system that relies on many, many different entities all having agreements and contracts with eachother.
You have to offset negative ValveCard balances with USD in everyone's banks, and there's a convenient middleman called Visa who does exactly that by tying store accounts to bank accounts through the universally accepted membership card they issue.
Entirely possible if you're JP Morgan Chase. They're big enough to have both merchants and consumers in their ecosystem, and they tried it, and Visa put a stop to that.
IBM was not able to. Story from a friend-who-claimed-to-be-there:
In days of yore, Visa did processing on IBM iron. The iron in question took a while to boot, and time is very definitely money to Visa and they wanted to speed up reboots (e.g., after a crash). Saving seconds = $$$.
Visa to IBM: "Please give us the source code for the <boot path stuff>, it's costing us money."
IBM: LOL
Visa to some big banks: "Please tell IBM to give us the source code for this, it's costing you money."
IBM, a little later: "Here's a tape. Need any help?"
> I am genuinely curious who can actually threaten Visa (I do not think it is Valve).
Visa is a clearing house whose members are banks. Think of it like a payment router between issuers (banks) and processors (banks).
Only sponsored organizations can directly use the "Visa rails", where "sponsor" is defined as a bank, a bank subsidiary, or an entity previously sponsored by one of the other two.
This is also the case for MasterCard and Discover. "Traditional" American Express is different though.
> Amazon, Walmart, Target and then increasingly unsure.
Those merchants use banks or one of their subsidiaries for processing credit card transactions. Most large merchants do as well in order to minimize their discount rate as well as other transaction fees. Smaller merchants often use ISO's or VAR's for business specific reason, knowing both ultimately transact with a bank or one of a bank's subsidiaries.
> I thought Venmo was trying the most with their card offers, as well as PayPal, Cash, Google Pay and several others too
I know at least two of the above used to use a specific US bank for the credit card transactions backing their payment services. For others, if service usage requires a verified credit card or debit card backed by a credit card network, they too use a processor owned/operated by a bank, bank subsidiary, or an entity sponsored by same.
EDIT:
For payment services which do not require a credit card or debit card backed by a credit card network, they almost certainly use the ACH[0] network. This is a more intimate financial relationship and best used with a dedicated bank account not linked to any others, as fund transfers can be bidirectional.
That seems an overly fine line to draw, when a check is basically just a plain piece of paper with your ACH number printed on it, and anyone with your ACH number can go get checks printed. A credit card is also bidirectional, so the question was just if alternatives exist to VISA processing, not if you necessarily would use them. I meant to mention Zelle and Plaid too, since they integrate with many (most?) banks already to allow transfers via your online account login authentication credentials instead of traditional ACH
From a card holder's perspective regarding a transaction being voided or refunded, sure. What I was talking about are services where the account holder can equally perform purchases as well as receive payments.
> I meant to mention Zelle and Plaid too, since they integrate with many (most?) banks already to allow transfers via your online account login authentication credentials instead of traditional ACH
For the purposes of bidirectional fund transfers, the mechanism for how it is implemented is moot. The net effect and account access (intimacy) is functionally the same.
Any coalition of banks can. Replacing Visa is a daunting task, but rolling out PoS support and the technical challenges are peanuts compared to actually getting banks onboard. Visa itself was started by a single bank, and Mastercard was started by a coalition of banks. They can do it again.
Interac[1] is Canada's debit system, originally created as a non-profit by our largest banks way back in '84, and these days is supported everywhere. The large banks are already used to bullying their way through political or bureaucratic challenges, and a single Canadian bank typically has trillion(s) in managed assets - they _can_ bully Visa.
Zelle[2] (2016) is a limited (etransfer only) clone for the American market, UPI (2016) in India, UnionPay (2002) in China, carte Bleue (1967) in France, etc etc. What's missing is cooperation between national systems like these, as well as lending as they typically only do debit instead of credit.
Any cooperation between these systems would likely get spun out as a separate entity, which would eventually just turn into a new Visa or Mastercard - but 3 choices is better than 2.
Other payment processors, mostly. So other credit card companies (e.g. JCB [1]), government run payment services like Pix in Brazil [2], theoretically crypto, etc.
>> I am genuinely curious who can actually threaten Visa (I do not think it is Valve).
> Likely Apple currently has the deepest finance industry roots.
Apple used a very large bank headquartered in the US for its credit card processing as of about ten years ago. Given that the cost of change is significant once these processes are put in place, it is likely this remains the case.
Note that this is not the same as what Apple Pay supports.
Honestly, with how prevalent iPhones and Androids are today, specially among newer humans, if Apple and Google made a payment system that just transferred money between iPhone/Android, it could practically replace cash & cards for a lot of people.
In some countries the vast majority of payments are done via phone apps for national payment systems already, bypassing Visa/Mastercard etc. entirely. Even kids pay for candy by phone.
Those are all US companies so subject to the same puritan pressures. Their cards would still be good for buying ultra violent games but not sex games...
Walmart was very supportive of fedNow for the express purpose of removing MasterCard from cashless purchases. And for a long time the only way to pay by phone was to allow them to debit via ACH. out of all of them they get it the most.
Steam gift cards are funded by traditional banking products and partnerships. They can’t live without the invisible hand of the banking and credit card industry.
I like this (ab)use of the invisible hand meme. But in economics the “invisible hand” is more of a benevolent deity than a predictable mechanism. I propose “hidden hand” for what credit (card and rating) companies do.
it really is the same invisible hand. the economics invisible hand is doing whatever the capital owners want the economy to do. weighing influence by capital is what makes visa have that power
My first thought is: obviously not. But if 10 years ago you'd asked me if Valve would be able to turn Linux into a serious gaming platform, I'd have answered the same.
All that stemmed from an unlikely but existential fear that Microsoft could lock-down software distribution on Windows. My suspicion is that SteamOS sales and Steam Decks aren't actually profitable, they're just too valuable as a bargaining chip not to invest in. And Valve can invest in them, because they're rich and private.
While Valve bigwigs probably aren't losing sleep over the missed revenue from incest games, having the rest of their revenue stream threatened might make them seek another form of insurance.
I mean, if there's one company that I believe could pull that off is Valve. And maybe Amazon. Maybe the two together. It would be one hell of a JV for both parties.
Nope. Even a company such as valve would be intimidated by the regulation of setting up their own company payment network outside the traditional banking system.
Maybe crypto is an option but I haven’t seen use in retail. Only speculation instrument.
Apple tried. Failed. Google tried. Failed. Only thing that works is partnering up with existing bank
They don't physically print the notes, but they do magically add money to a person's account when they take a loan. That kind of thing is where most "money" (in banks, anyway) comes from.
It's just like matter and antimatter being created at the same time, money and anti-money (debt) are created at the same time and when they meet, they cancel each other out.
So borrowing literally creates money (and debt), and repaying debts literally deletes money (and debt).
No, interest is a typical zero-sum transaction where the borrower spends and the lender earns. The loan itself represents a temporary net increase in the money supply, appearing from nothing and then vanishing when it is paid back.
I'm a bit unsure what happens when a borrower defaults on their loan. The money that was borrowed remains out in circulation, but what happens to the debt (anti-money)?
Does the bank itself use its own money to pay off the debt (deleting some of their own money), or do they simply delete the debt?
In principle, it is 'the bank uses its own money to pay off the debt', as long as you accept that the bank's own 'credit worthiness reputation' and other assets count as 'money'. The hit is _ultimately_ taken by the capital shareholders in the bank, which is the important part.
If you don't like it, start another payment processor that doesn't cave to pressure. Where are all the free market proselytizers at?
I expect all of you complaining about this to never once complain on legal grounds about Apple's 30% tax in the app store or when a bakery refuses to sell a cake to a gay person.
This is what unrestricted freedom for every entity looks like.
And this is why we need laws and regulations that are actually enforced. Because companies and larger organisms do not necessarily operate on timescales that are able to be reasonably responded to within a human lifespan.
> If you don't like it, start another payment processor that doesn't cave to pressure.
Or, gosh, use bitcoin et al.
It's interesting that when people ask "what's the use case for cryptos?", "being an alternative to Visa and Mastercard" is not often mentioned. That alone is a good enough reason to support it.
Civitai has been recently forced by payment processors to crack down on AI-generated porn. Since then, given that the processors told them that they may want do restrict them even more, they have added ability to use cryptos to pay for their services.
I have been a crypto evangelist since it was a weird nerd hobby nobody knew about for this exact reason. It should be nobody's business who I transfer value to or why. The corpo-state has had control of the levers and dials of currency for way too long. They can still enforce laws, and if I'm causing some illegal event to occur by paying money to someone, that event is still illegal. Arrest me for that. But get rid of the rent seeking and monetary policy that seems to just make the whole problem worse.
I don't understand this assumption that crypto transactions are nobody's business. That's a feature of cash payments, which from what I understand can only be emulated in crypto by transferring control over a non-custodial wallet, which is cumbersome to the average person.
If you're crypto banking with a third party that muddles your wallet's transactions you've already added one of the institutions you claim to be against.
If you transact on the blockchain, you're broadcasting who your wallet transacts with on levels that are far more publicly transparent than how fiat is traded via institutions.
The Monero download page requires me to choose my system architecture to get an installer, and insists that I absolutely must "verify the hashes" of the "archive". When I ran the installer, it first identified as "monero-gui-install-win-x64-v0.18.4.0" published by "Unknown", then as "Monero Fluorine Fermi GUI Wallet", and about 3/4 of the way through the setup my antivirus popped up to block it.
I don't think this is effectively available to anyone without deep tech experience, and any non-technical user who's willing to click through this kind of thing is definitely drowning in malware that will steal their crypto.
That is true in very unsophisticated systems. It's not true in zksnark based systems and it's not true on monero.
In any case, that's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying with crypto I need not ask permission to make a transaction. Whether that transaction should be open to government inspection after the fact is another matter entirely.
> I expect all of you complaining about this to never once complain on legal grounds about Apple's 30% tax in the app store
People complain that 24/7. The absolute majority of HN comments sided with Epic when they challenged that.
> or when a bakery refuses to sell a cake to a gay person.
It didn't happen. What happened was the bakery refused to make a cake for gay wedding. It's established that you can't refuse to sell something existing to someone just because of their sexuality.
IME people who propose absolute freedom in any regard (speech, use of power, use of money,...) fundamentally don't understand the difference of power between individuals, let alone individuals and organizations.
This is why anarcho- anything can't work. Some people specialize in building thing, since in providing a service, some specialize in making money and grabbing power. When the builders and providers don't unite to hold them back (like... forming a government) those people end up forming a mafia. Of course the state is a mafia too. You gotta pick your evils.
Absolutely. Some are really just sympathizers. I've known people who weren't rich by any means but acted and pretended to be and they supported greater inequality, less consumer protections, etc.
Same goes with abusive individuals and flying monkeys. Some people wanna be like those strong successful abusers so they take their side.
Absolute freedom can be achieved - as long as you're the one holding the gun. Other than that, it's social contracts all the way down (which are more or less letting someone else hold the gun)
Baader–Meinhof if you want to find more about this phenomenon.
Off topic, but when I was looking at cars when my old one died, I started noticing way more of the models I had been considering on the road. Funny how the mind works.
> Okay. I walk into a Jewish bakery and want a red cake with a Nazi flag on it.
This isn't a very good comparison, as this involves a payment processing company. An apt comparison would be the payment processor company demanding that you stop doing business with a Jewish store because that goes against their Nazi values.
It’s a perfectly good comparison. Nazi wants cake. Store owner is refusing to transact based on his own personal moral code. Just like any other business.
Contrary wise, consider a Jewish payment processor who wants to knock off a Nazi store. You can’t have it both ways.
Payment processor is the infrastructure, not the merchant itself. They neither make cakes nor eat them.
Bigger problem is that for most real world problems who is Nazi and who is Jewish depends on who you ask. Sucks to be Jewish in a Nazi world where even payment processors hate you.
We can, via laws. In the US, there are anti discrimination laws for protected classes in some areas. You won't find that Nazis are a protected class, but if you would like them to be you can run for office and try to pass a bill and see how the free market plays that one out for you.
> It’s a perfectly good comparison. Nazi wants cake. Store owner is refusing to transact based on his own personal moral code.
It's clearly not the case at all. Valve wants to sell third party games. Third party game developers want to sell their games. Customers want to buy third party games through Valve. Do you understand this bit?
A payment processor company is far excluded from the process. Users want to pay Valve money. Valve wants to receive the user's money. All fine, right? Except a payment company somehow feels entitled to tell Valve which products in their product line they can sell. WTF?
Going back to your far-fetched example, it would be like a supermarket selling all sorts of products their customers want to buy, but the Nazi bank somehow feels entitled to tell the supermarket they should not sell any product related with Jews. Does that make sense to you?
In that case, I don’t buy a phone from that manufacturing company. Maybe I want that on purpose in a different way, to prevent my kids from taking nudes.
Exactly. With the bakers we have competing interests of the guy who wants the Nazi cake and the baker who doesn't want to make one. Personally, I come down on the side of whether it requires any creative effort on the part of the baker. "Print this .jpeg on a cake"--content doesn't matter. "Draw me a Nazi flag on the cake"--content matters.
There's no human looking at each transaction, there's nobody to be bothered about the content of the game, and no justification for not processing offensive stuff.
Related to this, here's an ACLU filing with the FTC that lays out the content that the credit card companies don't like and how they pressure companies to remove it.
I think it’s hilarious we allow stuff like Postal or Soldier of Fortune without a question, where the whole focus is on going crazy and murdering a whole bunch of people.
But try to show a sensual human body, instead of one that’s ripped into small pieces, and oh my god, this is going too far!
Gender of who is murdered has a lot to do with it too. I don't think you'll find a video game where you predominantly kill women. The most infamous scene of murder in video games is the Call of Duty mission "No Russian" where you optionally commit terrorism at an airport. If you pay attention you'll notice they kill much more men than women, and made sure that despite pleasant weather none of the women were wearing dresses or skirts. Murder of men is a lot more digestible.
This genuinely baffles me. Who cares! It's a video game. It's pixels on a screen. True crime podcasts and movies are a-okay but when its a video game that's where the line is drawn?
I suspect all new frontiers are like this. There was probably a similar outcry over violence in films. And maybe violence in fictional books too. Both long lost from living memory.
It does feel different in a video game, because you're the one pulling the trigger. I played that CoD mission when the game came out, and I felt a bit sick in my stomach playing that mission out. But I'd probably have exactly the same feeling from violence in films if I wasn't so desensitised to it after growing up watching american movies and tv shows.
The people who care signed their names[1]. It's not a secret or anything.
Most of the signatories are associated with Australian anti sex trafficking and exploitation groups, although there are several UK signatories and a couple Americans.
A publication[2] by one of the signatories connects the dots. It's driven by the core idea:
"Pornography Use Shapes and Changes Sexual Tastes"[3] which is supported by "In a survey of men involved in online sexual activities, 47% reported being involved in practice or seeing pornography which previously was not interesting to or even disgusted them."[4]
I'm trying to steelman when I say I believe that the authors would agree that this also applies to games with sexual content.
To address your comment specifically, while I see the appeal of consistent moral framework. I personally believe that moral frameworks trade consistency for completeness and rarely accomplish either. You have to assume the value-perspective of the other in order to understand why consistency might take a back seat to some other value we could only speculate on.
It really should be obvious that the natural objection to "if they banned this then why not X" is "they haven't gotten around to it yet" and that the reason they can be more successful is also that they have put their money where their mouth is and also named themselves, something a counter petition will probably struggle with.
1) Why haven't they banned porn game X when they banned porn game Y? -> it's just a matter of time, they've already established that they can pressure to get game x banned, they'll get to game y eventually - also, note that it should be obvious it's much easier to rally support to ban "niche incest/non-con game X" than to rally support to ban "borderline mainstream harem game Y". This is what I was referring to specifically.
2) Why haven't they banned all porn games then they banned porn game X? -> it takes a lot more effort to move the needle here. It's not for lack of trying or lack of will, it's that it's obviously much harder to get traction when you've expanded now to an entire category that includes borderline mainstream titles that will finally get defenders willing to put in the same effort as them.
3) Why haven't they banned GTA when they've banned porn game X? -> First, they've tried!. 2nd, again, same principle -> activists aren't stupid, they know they can win the battle one game at a time, and that they can't win it in one gigantic decisive swoop (conveniently enough though, you can leverage this as well to ensure you have a nice long runway to continue to do your activism and keep it as a wedge issue to push at for a nice long time)
4) Why not ban true crime podcasts when they've banned porn game X? -> see again, look, many. many people listen to true crime podcasts, and many people have also objected to them as exploitative. but why does porn game x get banned and true crime podcast Z not? because, well, duh, again, the amount of effort needed to move the needle on something many people enjoy is that much more! i don't think they don't want to, mind you, but again, it's going to take a lot more effort to get to true crime podcasts when they have a thousand other porn game XYZ's they can to work on
And lets not pretend people aren't also trying to get books banned, again, it's being done at a more selective pace, book by book, not category by category. Why is <random niche hentai> banned and not <50 shades of grey>? well, who is published by a mainstream big publishier and who is published by a niche publisher that doesn;t want to get the whole hammer on them?
I'm still looking at the thread and see people bringing up other titles that haven't been banned as if that's a gotcha and it just baffles me. Like what do they think the activists would respond if they were called out on it?
"Oh we don't care about that we only had a grudge on this game in particular"
Or more likely
"Thank you for bringing this title to our attention, we will certainly try to have it taken down as well as it too is against the values we are fighting for"
Well this is exactly how it should work for any cause.
Perhaps there was a misunderstanding. I'm saying the fact that they've succeeded in getting some games removed while others of the same type still exist or that other similar things still exist is not because they are morally inconsistent but because they can't do this all at once
There are still taboos even for pixels on a screen, even for video games. It's a good thing. There should be.
Perhaps you're just saying that you're mostly comfortable with the depiction of some forms of violence in some contexts. But what about other scenarios though? Would you feel the same about a game where the player runs around raping women, or capturing and lynching escaped slaves? It's just pixels!
What if it's a story but with very detailed descriptions? What if that short story is adapted into a video game but it's only a text adventure? What if we add artwork to it, but it's just pixel art? etc etc.
The ability and the freedom to explore the darkest parts of our psyche in a safe, controlled, and fictitious environment IS important. Even if we find certain aspects or fetishes repugnant and distasteful.
I find the idea that payment processors have enough power to dictate the morality of a game market concerning. Given the number of other NSFW fetishistic stuff that is still being permitted on Steam I don't buy the "chargeback" rational AT ALL.
>But what about other scenarios though? Would you feel the same about a game where the player runs around raping women, or capturing and lynching escaped slaves?
Yes and yes. We have worse stuff in literature already.
> Would you feel the same about a game where the player runs around raping women, or capturing and lynching escaped slaves? It's just pixels!
Yeah. Same thing. Should be ignored. If someone feels an urge to run around raping women and lynching slaves, I'd much rather they were sitting around at home playing videogames than doing anything else in their spare time. What do you want them to be doing, the traditional creep move of figuring out how to get into positions of power and influence?
In addition taxpayers shouldn't be footing the bill in the war on pixels; if the banks are taking a firm moral stand then clearly the government is involved and that means they're probably spending money on expunging victimless non-crimes which is a low.
What do you think is occurring when a player defeats one of the other cultures in Civilization by conquering their last city or conducts orbital bombardment on a enemy planet in Master of Orion until the population is zero? That's genocide as gameplay.
I disagree. there shouldnt be any taboos for pixels on a screen
i mean, i can understand a child porn game would be disallowed but we already have anime games where characters that look like children are nearly naked
GTA, Elder Scrolls and Fallout series all allow for violence against women and not just the mutual violence of combat or whatever. One small example in one game from a long-ass time ago isn't really a broader trend (not to say that society at large doesn't view violence against men and women differently in different contexts)
Then you have an open world game where you can do all sorts of insane stuff, but everyone loses their shit specifically over feeding suffragettes to alligators.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
See cryptocurrency payments. So the good news in this direction is that bitcoin et al are very much making progress at these businesses. As far as I can see, many - perhaps even most - such businesses now accept 2-5 forms of cryptocurrencies as payment. That took long enough but we are finally getting there.
The bad news is that essentially ALL such businesses still believe that it is essential for them to accept credit card payments - and that means they must still implement whatever agenda these are pushing. On their entire customer base, even if paying by crypto. For now.
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.
> 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.
Utterly amoral people would need even more reason to not serve basically anyone. Since I know I don’t give a shit, the only thing I can assume is that it’s people that generally oppose what I think is perfectly acceptable.
Since the processors don’t actually care, they must simply believe that dealing with these annoying people is not worth the effort, compared to just not serving stupidly marginal markets.
But the thing is, the people upset about the sex aren’t upset about the killing, which I think is ridiculous.
What Thomas is hinting at is that these products are unprofitable for the payment processors.
So it’s not even that the controversy is not worth the effort. It’s that it literally costs them money to deal with.
The sex taboo may not make sense, but it exists. And it makes people behave in ways that creates problems for lending to them, specifically fraud and chargeback rates are demonstrably higher.
Disputed charges by the user. I know of one payment processor that specifically seeks out these high-risk businesses. Consider one of many possible scenarios would be that of a spouse who is alarmed at a charge to a clearly risque service and says "What the heck is that??" and the offender says "What the heck I don't know. Cancel the charge!"
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
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.
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...
> there's really nothing puritan about American business culture. [...] utterly amoral.
What? Puritanism is not about some kind of blanket purity to be recognized or expressed from any angle, perspective or religion. And in American business is both extreme and extremely selective.
It's also very much about appearances and image projected. You have to accept a difference between anybody's personal values (in so far as these can show through the mess of corporate decisions), and the image that businesses believe they much display.
You're talking about a culture that freely and enthusiastically sold opiates for decades. If they're cracking down on porn, it's because porn is costing them money, probably because people are disputing charges.
That's super interesting but a trivial Google search shows that chargebacks are a huge problem for this space so I'm not sure why I would care about that history.
The difference I see is that the player is getting sexual pleasure from what is being simulated in porn type games. I.e. they are trying to simulate the feeling of doing that in real life.
Where as in violent games like soldier of fortune I doubt most players are trying to achieve the feeling of brutally killing another human being.
Yes and often with pornography it involves the abuse of women and girls, and depicting this as a positive action. It's probably not the main reason why payment processors are banning and restricting purchases, but it should be.
Adult content is considered a high risk merchant category - meaning it is susceptible to high chargeback and fraud rates. This is because after someone pays for and consumes adult content, a certain level of "clarity" overcomes them resulting in the execution of chargebacks against the merchant.
It has nothing to do with any sort of puritanical premise.
I don't think that can explain why they're only targeting certain sub-categories of porn, and it's also contradictory to the public statements by Valve:
> We were recently notified that certain games on Steam may violate the rules and standards set forth by our payment processors and their related card networks and banks
Individual games violating "rules and standards" doesn't really fit with prohibiting a category because of high rates of fraud.
That sounds like a reasonable argument. We should force them to make it publicly with data. Maybe even force them to release aggregate statistics every quarter going forward.
That seems disingenuous. (1) in this case, this is a not a tiny fly-by-night wannabe game company. (2) which is good for paying back (or never seeing) the money of chargebacks.
For a new company, the risk of chargebacks might rest on a credit card company (for a little while anyway). But not for a long established one.
> Adult content is considered a high risk merchant category
> It has nothing to do with any sort of puritanical premise.
But I have no problem with the parent poster. I'm here hoping for conversation. The argument though is one we hear now and then and like I point out, how can it make sense? Like many things, it looks more like a vaguely possible, plausible explanation or chain of arguments... which on closer look doesn't fly. How can Valve, a long established, apparently solid merchant, be a serious risk for the credit card infrastructure? Should there be chargebacks, they can handle chargebacks. This is not limited to Valve. Many of us have run into the issue. The credit card infrastructure goes out of its way to refuse solid business.
> But I have no problem with the parent poster. I'm here hoping for conversation.
If you don’t have a problem with them and you were hoping for conversation, then starting out by accusing them of being disingenuous is a strange way of showing it.
> how can it make sense?
Why didn’t you ask this to begin with instead of assuming they were being deceitful? You know “disingenuous” doesn’t just mean “I disagree”, right?
Mastercard and Visa needs some serious competition. How come a payment company decides who to partner with and dictates what people use their system for. Ridiculous bullshite.
At the same time those "games" that were affected, well, who on earth pays for that seriously fucked up crap? People need to get a grip. I'd rather send a psycho team to evaluate people who pay for these games...
note: PCGAMER the epitome of games journalism. They didn't even checked which were the affected banned games.
I agree with the fact there is hypocricy. I disagree that either should be banned. (Maybe you didn't mean it that way but somebody with us the argument that way)
If group A wants to control group or person B, they should prove with very high certainty that group B's behavior is harmful to someone who is not B.
It's like we've collectively decided that digital gore is fine for teens, but a boob requires a Senate hearing. The irony is, one actually mirrors real-world trauma a lot more closely than the other
This isn’t about “trying to show a sensual human body”, it seems to be about incest porn specifically. There are still plenty of pornographic games available on Steam, even absurdly offensive ones such as the multi-part “Sex with Hitler” series.
To be fair, Postal and SOF haven’t been relevant in almost 20 years, though your point stands.
I wonder how a modern implementation of these two games would look given the vast visual improvements since then. I assume UE5 or 6 already comes with a Ghoul-esque framework ready to go. Though I hope they would feature a curmudgeon caricature of Jack Thompson.
I think this is a bit of a strawman. The market for people who get addicted to gruesome gore and are willing to pay money to see it is several orders of magnitude smaller than people willing to pay to see porn or OnlyFans. There is simply far more risk with adult content as a result and a lot more chargebacks from disatisfied customers with a post nut clarity.
The GP highlights a classic observation: America's nearly unique cultural contradiction, where nudity and sex are considered highly offensive, while gore and violence are widely accepted.
This holds true in most other countries as well. Gore/ chopping of appendages is happily accepted and enjoyed (in movies, games etc) by all of India, whilst a simple kiss can be a taboo/ issue.
Japan has some of the weirdest/inconsistent rules around this stuff. Black lines or mozaic partial censorship of genitals, incest/stuff with minors widely available, and then you have some pretty violent uncensored movies, manga/anime, and games (though while it's mostly a China thing, sometimes the blood gets censored to be white instead of red which doesn't actually make it better (also sometimes done for urine)), GTA5 is as popular there as anywhere, but game franchises like Mortal Kombat are banned.
And of course, even in America, we tend to like our violence and gore more over-the-top and simulated. Most people didn't care for liveleak type content, even fewer for not so hard to find footage from ongoing wars.
Japan runs custom scratch-built implementation of ethics reverse engineered from Western cultures. That's all. Consistence is key, but it's consistent only with itself, and nothing else, and explicitly not aligned to Christian religious scripts. Nothing Japanese is compatible with anything unless and until it is the sole dominant standard, like Sony storage media or Apple hardware. Always has been.
> There is simply far more risk with adult content as a result and a lot more chargebacks from disatisfied customers with a post nut clarity.
Do you have any evidence to back this wild claim? I've never heard this argument about chargebacks made before.
I don't think it's about this at all. I think it's about policing content, but then the observation of GP's comment applies: why is violence ok, but sex is not?
So grotesque violence appeals to fewer people, but banning gets focused on material more people find acceptable, even desirable?
This really is a culture/posture driven issue.
It is not as if many people think (emphasis on "think", as in being honest, reasoning carefully and being scientific about evidence) that banning sexy curves in a video game is going to impact the prevalence of sexy curve imagery, or "save" anyone from anything.
Imagine if financial companies required their employees to sign a legal statement committing to not "use porn, escorts, blow ... or spicy video games!" So strange that they don't do that!!
Financial companies like to make a show of having "high standards" when it comes to "controversial" segments of the market, or unfortunate individuals who don't fit the mold, when that gets them a lot of showy theatre for being hard asses to their audience of regulators.
While keeping very quiet, and not looking into things too hard, when it comes to tens of billions of sketchy dollars going through their systems associated with very high net worth criminal actors, organizations and corrupt governments.
There was a callout of multiple types of bank hypocrisy. Contrasting bank's "concerns" about small time erotic material vs. their lack of concern about employees use of erotic material, and the blind eyes they turn for major criminals, include prolific trafficking/pedophilic billionaires.
Are you saying porn buyers regret and that gore buyers do not? (As a broad generalization). Are you also asserting that's built in to risk-profole that payment gateways have?
I don’t have time for o look at the stats and provide quotes / cite sources but it does seem from what I’ve read on the topic that the more people play gore games the less violence there is in society.
If that’s true, maybe it’s also true that the more people have access to adult content the less babies we create as a society.
The US had more TVs per capita than Congo, and a higher life expectancy. Sending more TVs to Congo probably won't do much for their life expectancy though.
Similarly, I suspect the increase in violent video games and reduction of actual violence is just a side effect of an increasingly technology driven society.
For those thinking is only related to chargebacks and fraud, it is not.
VISA and Mastercard have been banning a lot of content that is not porn but has political values that are disapproved by certain billionaires and investors. There is a bunch of links I wanted to post about, such as US billionaires bragging he personally called VISA CEO to ban content on PH or japanese politicians mad at the censorship of japanese art with certain values because of these companies. But I am on phone walking home so if anyone else has such links please post.
They've colluded with the US federal government in the past on those issues as well. "Operation Choke Point" was ostensibly about fraud, but included transactions related to firearms in its scope. As a result, several major banks and payment processors dropped legitimate firearms dealers. For a while it got to the point that I was helping a couple of local gun stores contract with "high risk" payment processors that also serve the porn industry and get set up.
To this day if you're on a gun forum and mention that you use Bank of America, people will pile on to tell you horror stories of both companies and individuals having their accounts closed and funds held for weeks or months after completely legal transactions. In one case in particular, they claimed it happened after buying a backpack at a gun store.
Again, these are 100% legitimate and legal businesses. Federally licensed (FFL) gun stores had trouble for years even keeping a working business account. It was clearly not about fraud, at least not in practice.
Politics completely aside, the financial landscape for gun stores today looks a lot like the cannabis industry: a few institutions are quietly known in those communities to allow them to operate, but many choose to do business only in cash and most prefer it if given the option. The porn industry is similar from what I can see.
Try buying a second hand car and you want cash from the bank. Used to be very easy, but now you need to declare what your spending your money on.
You sold your car. O, its over 7 or 10k, well, this is getting reported to the local IRS. Where is that cash coming from, questions, questions?
Over here they are even cracking down on stuff like ebay, amazon because some people run a business on those sites and do not report the taxes. Result: If you make over 3k in the year on ebay, you need to provided your tax number, or ebay closes your account. And above 3k, it get reported to the IRS.
But wait, what happens if your a foreign national from some specific Asian countries and want to open a bank account? Refused, refused, refused... But you need a bank account for a lot of basic things. Well, tough luck. Lets not talk account closing issues.
And that is the EU, and just normal people. Nothing tax evasion, guns, or whatever. Just everybody putting up umbrella's to be sure, not understanding that when everybody does it, it really screws with people.
They are going crazy with this over regulation. Yes, i understand you want to fight black money but the people who get the big amounts will have ways to hide it. Your just hurting the normal people wanting to know what everybody is doing exactly with every cent.
You see this gradual effort to slowly phase out cash. Cashless payment are getting encouraged, cash withdrawals cost your money more and more, more questions regarding origins (so you say f it, and use bank deposits with release approvals).
Its not a surprise that we seen the increase in cryto usage (and the efforts of governments to control that also).
Also not in the US, i am using the term IRS because people are very used to it on the internet.
Banks in the US and EU are legally required to report large transactions. I know for a fact that in Europe, that cash handeling over 10.000 euro gets reported.
That includes withdrawals and deposits. The later gets even more questions asked regarding the "origins" of the money.
There are other fun events that we have seen, like transferring 15.000 euro from my wife to her brother (between countries), that had the money blocked as the bank needed to investigate the origin of the money. So the bank starts calling you to figure out what the money is, what is it used for, where does it come from, bla bla bla...
Why are you giving 15.000 to your brother. Is it a GIFT!!! Translation: Can we TAX it! I suspect that banks in some EU countries get a cut from reported money that can be taxed by the tax office (that is just my speculation).
No, it was his money that he loaned to us for a house buying, and that we returned, but they really tried to push the "gift" narrative. Large money transfers (above 10k), triggers investigations.
And as you can guess, large cash deposits or withdraws get even more questions.
Here is a fun tip: Just transfer or deposited money in small amounts, whenever you feel like it. Avoids the questioning like your some kind of criminal.
So ironically, you perform actions like a criminal (will do to avoid detection), just to avoid getting questioned like your a criminal. Hahahaha...
I feel like we have no more privacy in our lives with everything being monitored and checked. Your browser spies on you, your OS spies on you (W11 Recall even worse), your smartphone, you get tracked by Wifi signal in the streets, your customer store card (that they push and push) is to track your buying habits, the banks track your every movement for the tax office, you can not even freaking sell stuff on ebay and get reported.
Like 3000 Euro is nothing. You sell a few piece of PC hardware and you hit that limit. And Amazon/Ebay/... report your behind. And now its about backdoors in encryption because you may be hiding something. What, you do not want to share your talks on XYZ platform to your wife, family. What are you saying, illegal stuff????
We are really moving to a dystopian world and have been for a long time.
> Here is a fun tip: Just transfer or deposited money in small amounts, whenever you feel like it. Avoids the questioning like your some kind of criminal.
Breaking up deposits into smaller amounts is a crime called structuring.
I wouldn't recommend doing this as an alternative to dealing with the reports and scrutiny on larger transactions.
Your bank will file a report with FinCEN that says that you withdrew (or deposited, or transferred, or whatever) the money. They can/will also separately report suspicious transactions, including patterns of transactions that seem designed to evade the reporting requirements.
Not sure. Apparently walmart you can cash up to 7500 for half the year and 5000 other half for tax return purposes I guess. Still maybe you can get paid weekly instead of biweekly.
Of course it's not. Steam already has a very generous refund policy. It's hard to imaging the chargeback rate would be that high even for nsfw games when you can simply refund. Refund takes about 3~4 clicks on steam website; Chargeback takes a phone call with your bank and can get your steam account locked.
And people who laundry money out stolen cards won't do that with nsfw games. They'll do that with CSGO knifes.
Trump changed banking regulations so that "reputation" can no longer be a reason for banks to "derisk" customers after crypto industry outcry, but the reason to exit customers must be factual money laundering or similar reason. But the change does concern cards, as payments are not under FDIC surveillance.
"In 2020, following a complaint from the Hamburg/Schleswig-Holstein Media Authority, Valve blocked all titles that were labeled as “adult” and did not have an age rating. To be able to offer them, the US company would have to integrate a reliable age verification system into Steam in Germany. Because Valve has not yet implemented such a system, sex games remain blocked in Germany."
So, I hear Europe doesn't have these problems about puritanical censorship in games......
I am saying that someone who wants incest porn games reinstated on Steam (the GGP commenter) should create that petition.
I’m not that someone; I don’t think Valve has any moral obligation to platform ”any content, as long as it is not illegal”. They have the freedom to choose what they publish. Petition away, see if anyone cares!
Valve clearly doesn't want to play content cop, but when the payment processors start squeezing, they have no real choice. What's wild is how much unaccountable power Visa and Mastercard wield over digital expression
Denmark has seen a trend where their national card network (Dankort, operating at the equivalent level to Visa and Mastercard) is seeing reduced usage.
Dane here, and I just don't see the point of using Apple or Google pay. Aside from not wanting American tech interfering in, or data harvesting, my finances, it's not any easier to use. I just touch my card to the terminal and payment happens. Some times, or if the amount is over some limit, I have to enter a pin. I cringe every time I see someone contorting their arm to pay with their watch. It's tech for the sake of tech.
Adult business is legitimate business in many parts of the world and companies using their monopoly to suppress it should be a case for an Investigation.
Instant payment systems that go direct from bank to bank, assuming the banks, the government or any other intermediaries don't also decide to not allow it.
Unironically, crypto? It might seem like an annoying hurdle now, but as more and more things are banned by puritans, the crypto experience will surely rise to meet the need.
In Europe, Wero[1] has a chance to become the de-facto payment system, once it's supported by more banks in more countries and adds online payments functionality.
Those solutions might work for some people in some countries, but I would argue that it's not acceptable for the vast majority of customers, and they would lose a very significant portion of revenue.
There's now Ethereum, Base and Solana featuring US dollar stablecoins and significantly cheaper fees. If you want to go a step further and eliminate the stablecoin issuer's counterparty risk you could even pay in the base asset of ETH. Shopify allows payments from crypto now, so Steam should try it again.
Even stablecoins aren't so great for the environment. Proof of stake isn't as bad, but also doesn't offer much beyond traditional systems once KYC is needed.
Stablecoins are great. The only way to be debanked is if the stablecoin issuer explicitly blacklists your address, which is a public act which they will be forced to justify.
And Ethereum's Proof of Stake algorithm is highly censorship resistant. That's why it took seven years to design.
The simple fact is, Visa/MC don't want to deal with porn because the number of chargebacks and fraud from porn purchases is significant and a huge outlier compared to most other charges. Their crusade against processing charges for adult material isn't about purity, it's simply business.
I'm not sure I buy the chargeback angle. It's commonly trotted out as a reason card companies would enforce censorship, but it doesn't make sense with the actions they take. Chargeback fees are paid by the merchant regardless of the chargeback's success, and are supposed to cover the costs of administering it (and then some). The very selective rules applied here are pretty odd from that angle too, if adult content chargebacks/fraud is the issue, then all of it should be the issue, not small niches.
Fraud is likely more realistic of an issue, but that's probably an issue with games in general, not just adult titles.
There are already high-risk merchant accounts with higher fees and cash reserve requirements, but AFAIK companies like Valve aren't being given any options other than comply or be destroyed.
I doubt it. If that were the case, I think they would only be complaining to Valve about the number of chargebacks issued from the Steam store. Not about genres-that-are-correlated-with-chargebacks-in-other-contexts.
Given Valve's generous refund policies, and the fact that a steam store purchase on your credit card statement looks quite innocent, and that the credit card companies didn't complain to Valve about chargebacks but about content, my guess is there are hardly any chargebacks, and this is just about moral purity.
Their generous refund policy, and more importantly their very-non-generous chargeback policy. If you chargeback a Steam purchase, your account is locked.
That's not true, anti-sex work and anti-porn activists have specifically been pressuring payment processors to assume these policies. The processors as the critical control point of this whole thing was identified decades ago and conservative christian think tanks have been pursuing this path since then.
This is part of a long-term plan to de facto ban lgbtq content without having to deal with first amendment protections. First have the payment processors ban explicit content, then have queer content categorized as explicit.
Seems like this could be easily solved with legislation without having to invent new currencies. Just make it a law that payment processors are not allowed to discriminate between legitimate goods and services. If the government thinks that sugary water or porn magazines are fine to buy and sell, why should MasterCard have anything to say about it? Payment processors are basically natural monopolies, so they should be able to be regulated.
It's about time that credit cards were treated like money and this kind of behaviour forbidden. When you pay with cash the notes and coins don't refuse to be handed over because the issuing bank has an opinion about what you are buying, it should be the same for all payment methods.
Let's just remember that this is a ballot-box issue, not a payment-type issue.
A lot of folks I'm sure will say this is what crypto is for, but if that ever gained enough traction then (the US) congress would clamp down on it. They'd probably call it "money laundering" or something like that. Remember the guy that went to jail for exchanging crypto for fiat?
Are you mad at Visa/Mastercard? They don't care about porn, they care about not having congress smash them.
You want regulations that would prevent MC/Visa from doing this? You've got it backwards. Regulation is on the side of surveillance and morality police.
I just can't see it. Do I vote for right-winger puritans who ban games because they show trans characters? Or do I vote for left-winger perception-is-realityists who ban games because they show guns?
The monetary layer is not the one where bad behavior should be policed. Being able to send and receive money is a basic utility that no government or bank should be able to deprive someone of. That's why I support cryptocurrency.
Tangent, but each of those events should be a reminder of why we must fight to never, ever live in a cashless society.
Because once big entities control the pipeline of what you can buy and you have no alternative, they basically can dictate what you can and can't do.
We saw that during the wikileak story when visa prevented Europeans to give to the org despite the fact it was perfectly legal to do so on their soil.
Just like data handled by an Apple device is not really your data since they can prevent you from doing what you want with it, money handled by Visa is only your money until they don't like what you do with it.
If Valve limited credit card purchases to PG games, but let customers purchase other games via crypto, then payment processors couldn’t complain about alleged high chargeback rates or association with adult content.
I imagine payment processors wouldn’t love this solution, but at that point they’re just asking for full editorial control, and we should resist.
Not necessary. They could just keep almost everything as-is with normal credit card processors, but for adult stuff, just use the same kind of processors other adult sites use. Those have a lot worse rates from what I hear, but still way more accessible than crypto
That one must be defended, since it was abuse of real people happening at scale and with full knowledge thereof, and PornHub's status-quo response was at best "do nothing and hope it goes away". Mind, the Justice Department also went after them (and won), so we can't even resort to "CC networks shouldn't be the ones enforcing this." At what stage of a court case is it appropriate to expect third parties to start breaking their business relationships with the defendant?
The weird part about the first-world sexual liberation mindset (usually said about feminism, but not limited thereto) is that it actively ignores how massively abusive sexual liberties very often and easily become.
To all the people saying "fraud" is the reason - think that through.
Do you really, really think fraud and chargebacks for games covering specific fetishes on Steam have even the tiniest iota of relevance here?
Steam readily offers refunds for a multitude of scenarios!
Valve is also large enough to make itself known to payment processors to not be erroneously lumped in with seedy merchants.
From my understanding, VISA and Mastercard have relatively vague rules that payment processors must follow and payment processors must interpret that based on their own risk tolerance of adverse action being undertaken against them by VISA and/or Mastercard for not following the vague rules in the manner VISA/Mastercard interpret them as at a given point in time.
This is how you end up with situations where both payment processors and the big credit card networks point at each other when politicians ask "why are you withholding financial services from (insert company here)?" and, technically, both entities are correct at pointing the fingers at each other.
There's other factors with respect to contract law in a global economy spanning varied jurisdictions that add additional wrinkles, but I'm skeptical they're the culprit in this specific case
The games that got banned this time, even before considering their depiction of incest, are often of such poor quality that it's difficult to even call them 'games.' Valve itself should have removed them from Steam long before payment processors had to step in. Defending these kinds of games is like equating Blue is the Warmest Color with a random PornHub video, simply because they both contain sexual acts. If Baldur's Gate 3 ever gets banned, then you can truly make a fuss.
They're saying that if things have come to the point that activists can successfully pressure a AAA title like BG3 to be delisted from steam, then they'll worry.
What do BG3 and the title in question have in common? "incest" (though, not non-con, I don't think BG3 has such)
What does BG3 have that the other title doesn't? Critical acclaim and the support of the mainstream. THis is the same issue with GOT.
Why does BH3 have critical acclaim and mainstream support and the other title doesn't? Is this a difficult topic to grasp?
If you think they should delist it then by all means, raise a petition or bring it to their attention. Perhaps the activist group simply has not had the resources to target this particular title yet.
You already know VISA and/or Mastercard will respond if an activist group raises enough of a concern so what's stopping you?
Ah right, you think if they got one game removed on a petition, they should somehow also be able to remove every single other game that may or may not meet the same criteria even though it probably took them significant effort to the the first game removed and this is some sort of "gotcha" on their moral inconsistency rather than a simple limitation of resources to try to get their will done all at once?
It looks like the affected games are all rated "Adult Only" on Steam.
The games you mention are all sold without adult content on Steam, and the customer has to visit the publisher's website to download a patch restoring said content
This is the kind of thing that crypto gets around. Surely the CC companies will allow folks to use their cards to buy crypto then in the same 1 minute that newly bought crypto could be used to buy the game and valve if they converted the btc to usd at the same day or very quick could mitigate the volatility of the asset
there are 2 solutions to this:
1. steam accepts eth and other cryptos; most people associate btc with crypto because it is the original but it is now technically vastly inferior.
2. the seven seas (nobody ever turns your free transaction down and you get to keep whatever it is forever with no fancy license/tos/eulas attached)
I'll never understand what is these payment processors' problem with adult content.
If someone wants to sell something and someone else wants to buy something, it should be nobody else's business to police it as long as two parties are settled.
That's why I want to see crypto take over and get rid of the middleman and regulators.
i think it's a mix of conservative/religious lobbying (getting them ire from the government), and chargebacks by embarrassed customers with post-nut clarity being common
My understanding is that it's not just the processor, but Visa/Mastercard themselves have rules against certain types of merchants/products... they really have a monopoly on credit cards in general so you have to play by their rules.
You're right, but it's slightly more complicated than that.
My understanding is that payment processors are obligated to follow the policies of Visa/MasterCard, AmEx, and Discover, but that those parties' policies don't explicitly ban these specific things for sale. Instead, they "strongly encourage" processors to ban them in their user agreements under the implicit threat of their risk level being increased, which in turn impacts the fees they pay to the credit card companies.
I've not been deep in this world since ~2014, but at that time the only processor I could find that wasn't specific to the porn industry, offered physical terminals, had reasonable (if high) fees, and didn't ban legal transactions in their user agreement was PAI ("Payment Alliance International"). A quick look at their site today shows that they seem to have been acquired by Brinks, so that may no longer be the case.
If they continued to carry any of the games that were singled out for removal by Visa and Mastercard, they would not be able to accept credit card payments for anything else in their store. This same drama has played out the same way with countless other online services.
Controversial games being restricted to purchase only with Steam Points. The credit card is only ever charged to buy points, which can then be used to purchase items on the store. Similar to fortnite.
They could support a stablecoin like USDC and start pushing people to that. No censorship and lower fees. Valve broke ground with Steam, they could do it again.
The problem with that is that you usually end up using traditional payment rails (e.g. a Visa debit card) to "invisibly" buy the stablecoin and then you're subject to their rules and fees again.
Is it the case the Mastercard/Visa will reject a site that has such content even if you can only purchase it using ValveBucks or PayPal or something? That seems plausible.
You need to be more specific. Conflating "adult content" with porn is both problematic is masks the real issue. A large majority of games Valve sells are adult content. But as you can imagine grand theft auto is not causing a lot of political backlash, despite the objectionable content.
But is there a good reason to do a chargeback if you can easily refund it? Yes if someone stole the CC and used it buy something on Steam, but is that the concern or that someone buys something with a CC on their own account, and then chargebacks instead of refunding?
The fact that these were specifically incest games makes me think a title was somehow involved in distributing CSAM, which is often why Visa/MC crack down on porn websites.
But it is possible that Visa sensibly and correctly said "anyone who makes or purchases such a game is a despicable scumbag, and we shouldn't assume the financial risk of dealing with them."
That's a pretty wild idea for what someone would be putting on steam as a visual novel. And why would they need to be pressured into removing horrible illegal content?
Or you think one person did that and it made the credit cards decide any story with incest would be the same? That would be ridiculous on their part.
I think the government should be the one deciding what makes someone qualify as a despicable scumbag, not a private payment processor that is essentially acting as a utility provider. For the same reason, I also don't think an electric company should be allowed to shut cancel your building's electricity if they don't like your mismatched socks.
They did the same to Dlsite, a while ago, made them rename all the tags and then delist lolige, but more notably alot of games with sailor uniforms and/or high school character/settings.
If you think it's illegal under PROTECT then you should enforce the law, not use credit card companies to force people to use a VPN. And if it's illegal it should be illegal everywhere, not just where people are paying rather than sharing. Clearly if many people are paying for a work it's less likely to be obscene
Why not just make it not purchasable with that payment option/store credit?
In many countries Steam supports plenty of alternative payment options that do not use VISA or mastercard.
Thinking about it, if a platform as enormous as Steam just completely stopped accepting VISA and mastercard, they'd a) probably still be fine b) VISA and mastercard would probably cave - few companies will prioritize outworn politics over literally billions of revenue. In fact I'd expect these two to be the last to do that. Valve would be more the type to put principles first. Too bad they didn't this time.
Can someone please explain why we still have chargebacks in 2025? Don't accept cards without 3DS, problem solved. If not, why not? Are some important consumer segments still stuck with cards that don't have it?
Chargebacks aren't just for stolen credit cards, but also fraudulent merchants.
If I buy a physical good with a credit card, and the merchant either never sends me anything, or sends me an empty box and ignores my emails, well, that's a use-case for chargebacks. 3DS doesn't help with that.
Also for merchants that are just too dysfunctional to do the right thing. A while back, I ordered a phone online from Best Buy, and they shipped me a different model from what I ordered. I contacted their customer service, who told me to mail the phone back for a refund. I did so, and then they mailed it right back to me with a note saying they couldn't accept the return because I'd sent them a different item from the one I ordered. (No shit: that's why I needed to return it!) They didn't have fraudulent intent, I'm sure; one hand just didn't know what the other was doing. A chargeback resolved that situation, and I'm very glad I had the option.
Chargeback is not just for when your card is stolen. It’s also for e.g. when you never received your order, or your order is substantially different from what’s promised. It’s basically a last resort customer service option.
This is not an issue oof payment processors. It is an issue of Visa and Mastercard duopoly, whom use payment processors as middlemen in order to be able to push their own "rules" onto businesses and get away clean.
The good old USA, when you can show someone bashing someone else's head with brain spilling out and it might get an R rating. But show a nipple and holy shit we have crossed the line.
So the outlast trials latest villain is a pair of incestuous elderly conjoined twins. The game features intense violence, lots of genitals, kills via explicit mutilation of those genitals, lots of rape threats. One guy in particular gets turned into a human sex toy via mutilation and wax.
Doesn't matter if anyone actually buys content or products the networks object to per their policies. If it's being offered and payment is accepted on a checkout that shows the networks' logos, merchants and their payment service providers can get into trouble.
The day I will be informed that Valve delisted anything after being pressured by a credit card company is the last day I buy a game on it. Personally I pay with my own country's payment system that's unrelated to these companies.
Given the pc gamer article mentions "keep it in the family", I think they mean incest. Why on earth did valve have this on their platform on in the first place?
I live in a red state in the South. I'd say about 2/3 of the women I know well enough to be confident of their politics to that degree of detail would describe themselves as both feminists and anti-abortion/pro-life.
If you want to put a name to it, they're basically second-wave feminists with a few third-wave beliefs tacked on.
The real lesson here is that politics are nuanced, and the US party dichotomy doesn't come close to covering it.
I consider myself an AnCap (shocking given my username, I know), but grew up here surrounded by Republicans. I fit in well enough overall because this is where I developed my "social mask" in the first place. I lived in a community with nearly directly opposite politics (Charlottesville, VA) for a few years and found that I fit in pretty well with that crowd as well.
I share enough with both parties that I can have conversations on things that I agree with them on and connect to the point that they assume that I'm "one of them". Invariably, once conversation turns to other topics I'm accused of being a member of the other party. It's to the point that it amuses me when it happens, and I frankly enjoy being in a place where I can connect with most everyone and serve as a sort of translator: I've spent enough time "in enemy territory" from their perspectives that I can explain the other side's position fairly and with empathy while explicitly not holding that position. It makes for stimulating conversation with little risk of offense.
> Because "anti-abortion/pro-life" removes a right from women. Trading the rights of a developed adult for the rights of a hypothetical future person.
Their perspective is that abortion is killing a human being. Given that, it’s entirely consistent.
> What does ancapistanism have to do with it?
Nothing, other than that I was providing some context on where I’m coming from.
> Is there a non-religious reason to be against the right to choose abortion up to 24 weeks of pregnancy?
While religion is certainly a factor for a lot of these people, this question doesn’t make sense to me. Is there a non-religious reason to be against killing any person, regardless of age?
The base difference in perspective is that the other side here believes that the fetus is a human being, with all the rights that come with it.
> Is there a non-religious reason to be against the right to choose abortion up to 24 weeks of pregnancy?
Of course there is. It's not hard to construct an argument to that effect either. For example: let's agree for the sake of argument that a newborn has moral rights, and that gametes do not. It doesn't make much sense to give the fetus moral rights only based on its physical location, therefore at some point between conception and birth the fetus gains moral rights. No matter what point n we choose, the objection "why is one day earlier any better" seems pretty persuasive. Therefore, by induction, the only point for assigning rights which can't be argued against in that way is at conception. Thus, we should disallow abortion so we aren't depriving the fetus of its rights.
I'm not saying that's a bulletproof argument. Indeed the argument doesn't even need to be correct for my point. My point is that nothing about that argument requires any religious belief whatsoever. So it is possible. I'm also quite certain that a cleverer person than I could construct a better argument which still doesn't require any religious dogma. This is an ethical topic, not a religious one. Obviously religion has a lot to say on ethics, but that's no reason to believe that secular arguments against abortion can't exist.
> It doesn't make much sense to give the fetus moral rights only based on its physical location, therefore at some point between conception and birth the fetus gains moral rights.
A _lot_ more happens to a fetus during and immediately after birth than just moving a few feet. You're minimizing it here, but if you give it the significance it merits your induction thing falls apart.
One grain of sand is a small amount of sand. Two grains of sand is a small amount of sand. Therefore, by induction, any amount of grains of sand is a small amount of sand. The Sahara contains a small amount of sand.
"For example: let's agree for the sake of argument that a newborn has moral rights, and that gametes do not. It doesn't make much sense to give the fetus moral rights only based on its physical location, therefore at some point between conception and birth the fetus gains moral rights. No matter what point n we choose, the objection "why is one day earlier any better" seems pretty persuasive. Therefore, by induction, the only point for assigning rights which can't be argued against in that way is at conception. Thus, we should disallow abortion so we aren't depriving the fetus of its rights."
That's roughly my position, as an atheist libertarian. although I don't back it up all the way to conception, just to a point in early pregnancy where it seems overwhelmingly clear the fetus has no attributes which could reasonably demand respect for rights.
Abortion has been conflated with feminism, like how, say, tariffs are conflated with Republicans right now, but there's no ideological necessity for that. Just cultural trends.
> although I don't back it up all the way to conception, just to a point in early pregnancy where it seems overwhelmingly clear the fetus has no attributes which could reasonably demand respect for rights.
Sounds like you're not actually using that deeply flawed argument then. You're making the distinction that not every day has the same effect.
And could you estimate how many weeks you put that point at?
> No matter what point n we choose, the objection "why is one day earlier any better" seems pretty persuasive. Therefore, by induction
That's not persuasive at all. It's not just not "bulletproof", it's blatantly wrong. Also you can make the same argument in the other direction.
> Indeed the argument doesn't even need to be correct for my point. My point is that nothing about that argument requires any religious belief whatsoever.
They wanted someone to give a plausible argument that isn't religious.
> no reason to believe that secular arguments against abortion can't exist
I care about the merits of positions that people actually have, not theoretical positions.
And in the general case, if nobody can be found that has a simple position, that is a reason to believe it's not a coherent position.
Well social/religious conservatives often think the child has rights even during pregnancy so it's not as simple as the mothers rights.
The libertarian view tends to much more favour the parents rights to make choices for their children if I remember correctly, and obviously favour the option where the government isn't deciding for them.
My personal belief is that life begins at conception. As a result, I’m opposed to abortion in all cases.
… but I’m also an anarchist, and therefore believe it is emphatically not the state’s role to make these types of decisions for people.
I don’t think there is a “right answer” here in terms of policy. Some large portion of the people will see it as a violation of their rights no matter how extreme or nuanced the line is drawn.
Part of the coalition directing ESG which direct BlackRock and Vanguard which then threaten Visa/Mastercard… has been extremely successful in making people believe this is a crusade only by Visa/Mastercard.
It’s the S. And so very few people have any idea. Visa/MC doesn’t actually hate money.
They have better argument fiduciary defense accept porn money than deny it - unless they don’t and no one asks or thinks about it.
Honestly, this whole Visa/Mastercard control thing feels a lot like realizing you’ve been following rules that don’t really fit you. It’s tough to break out of it. But FedNow is an interesting option. It lets banks move money instantly, 24/7, with no card networks involved, so less hassle with the content policing. It’s not a magic fix (still early days, only works in the US), but it shows there’s another way if you’re willing to step outside the old patterns. Sometimes that’s what you need to actually move forward. And no I'm not a Fednow shill. Has anyone tried Kagi btw? ;)
The discussion seems to be mostly about the moral issues, but it seems likely that the titles being a 'magnet for scams and chargebacks' is more likely the cause.
Payment processors have ways of passing some of the chargeback risks onto the stores, and it's not like Steam itself is chargeback central. If you just want free games, pirating them is extremely easy, and trying to abuse chargebacks gets you banned.
It's not as straightforward as that. It's more like scammers getting other people to buy gift cards which are redeemed in steam and other games then the value getting moved around as in-game currency between game accounts (game-bucks, special items) before being cashed out again to make tracing very hard. Essentially laundering. I assume certain titles attract scammers because people will not want to pursue the claims due to embarrassment.
Why would Mastercard give a hoot that a game has boobs in it? They care about loosing money.
The obscure porn games Valve delisted have no in-game items or currencies, and have zero second market value.
People launder money in the way you describe do that via extremely popular titles (so they can sell the whole account later) or rare items in online games like CSGO or Dota. Not "Incest Simulator 2023".
Just a reminder that when still using cash, you are allowed to buy whatever you want that is legal without asshole bankers or institutions deciding for you!
It is a shame that it takes payment processors to get Valve to do even the bare minimum curation of their store. IMO the thousands of outright bad games and ai slop asset flips and weirdo porn that verges on outright illegal content in many countries should have never been allowed in the first place. All of this leads back to various executives at Valve essentially doing no actual work and refusing to hire anybody because a huge part of their corporate culture is to keep headcount low while chasing constant growth.
Sorry but ancaps are not allowed to complain - it's a 'free market' and the credit card companies are bigger than gabe newell - end of story, cry is free.
In ancap logic I think the fault here is all on gabe for not lobbying the government enough and/or for not having been able to gather enough force to fight against those companies somehow.
It's interesting that Valve sort of put themselves in this situation by opting not to police their store anymore.
I'm personally a fan of fewer restrictions on content in video games and fewer "gatekeepers" but it's kind of inevitable that people would get upset when you chose to allow people to sell games like "Sex With Hitler" and "Pimp Life: Sex Simulator". Deciding to allow that content on your store and simultaneously not going to bat for it is weird, it's like they decided to just get the porn money while they could as a short-term boost to revenue.
Itch.io still has fewer restrictions but I assume they'll eventually have to clamp down too once payment processors cut them off - they don't have the financial resources to fight it like Valve or Epic do.
Interestingly Nintendo has as of late relaxed their restrictions too, you can find porn-adjacent shovelware on the Switch eShop despite their history of being very censorious. I wonder if payment processors will successfully push them around too or if Nintendo is too big to get pushed around.
> it's kind of inevitable that people would get upset when you chose to allow people to sell games like "Sex With Hitler" and "Pimp Life: Sex Simulator".
The problem isn't some people being upset, it's that a single digit number of companies effectively control the ability for anyone else in the world to do business with them. Those companies get lobbied as much as politicians but with no accountability and any overreach being far less visible. And no freedom of speech rules.
Simulated "immoral" activity could be considered a moral gray area. If nothing else, morality is subjective.
So I think it's reasonable to argue for private, individual consumption of morally subjective material (not least of which is the logistical difficulty of preventing such things), as well as the right to create and sell such things. (You or I might approve of or oppose those things, but that's a different argument from what I make below.)
Aside from that, I don't think Valve or a payment processor is obligated to be a neutral party. Whether it might come from collective consumer backlash or whoever makes decisions for an organization deciding what they will or will not allow to flow through their system, I think they too should have the right to allow or ban things. If publishers and consumers want their morally gray content, so be it, but don't feel entitled to have Steam and VISA along for the ride if they don't want to be.
Hypothetically, Valve might prefer Steam be neutral, because money. But then they have the option to fight their payment processor or look for alternatives, rather than "forcing" their payment processor to be a part of something that the payment processor opposes.
TL;DR when a morally subjective issue involves a lot of parties, every party should have the right to "opt out" if they are morally opposed. (in my opinion)
Payment processors banning companies from using them for anything other than illegal use or fraud issues seems like pretty egregious overreach to me.
They shouldn't be able to leverage their nigh monopoly on modern payment processing to choose winners and losers in the marketplace.
They are using pornography as a wedge issue to establish that they get to dictate what companies are allowed to exist in the modern distributed market.
It would be entirely reasonable to legally require them to act blindly towards retailers, with restrictions needing to be based on universally applied financial criteria.
Card payments have become inseparable from modern life.
Regulate them as a financial utility. The electric company or water company can't refuse to hook up a business just because the owner doesn't like that business.
I think the trouble here stems from the lack of alternatives to the small group of payment processors. The near-monopoly allows their choices to override the choice of all the other involved groups, and almost no viable alternatives exist for Valve to move to if they disagree.
well, something like this can't be fixed overnight. I think Valve have more than earned a benefit of the doubt with this kind of stuff. I don't know if they are thinking on ways around this issue or not, but I would bet highly that they are. Problem is the credit card companies have them (and everyone else) by the balls because any attempt to continue hosting those gmaes but accept alternative payments for them would be retaliated against and MC et al might cut them off entirely, which would be devastating. I'm not sure there is a good solution to this that doesn't involve change of law/regulation i.e. lobbying
In the early 2000's kink.com put together a coalition and told the credit card companies to stick their censorship rules where the sun don't shine, and they are still taking credit card payments... The video game industry is plenty big enough to wield similar influence.
The ISPs, web services, payment services, and advertisers are all in a Mexican standoff right now - with every small move for domination throwing a volley of bullets at the customer from all sides.
The card companies are cutting off all the low hanging fruit to establish precedence (steam is not the only one affected). One it's established that they can ban certain things, then they've established they get to control the purchase of literally any idea, cause, or product they want. The card companies want to control and starve anything or anybody they don't like - especially their competition and regulators. They'll control the spice.
Net neutrality regulation would have prevented this and forced them to play nice with each other, with the side effect of a net benefit to society instead of tearing it apart.
We all warned you the free and open Internet, and by extension irl, as we knew it would unravel.
Fundamental property rights are now dead; we just watched it happen.
Payments companies successfully got valve to stop purveying weapons grade incest/child-porn/rape themed smut that is barely a game?
Nabokov was a great author and Lolita was the work of a great author who turned his pen/typewriter to a detestable subject leading to innumerable questions about art.
These guys are just z-graders who get off on non-consensual sexual interactions involving children.
Valve absolutely should not be publishing this stuff.
I don't know how bad these specific games were, but meanwhile, OnlyFans pornographers continue to use sites like Twitch to advertise their work to teens, and Pornhub continues to operate, despite claims that they profit from sex trafficking amongst other things (https://traffickinghubpetition.com/)
Seems strange to go after obscure videogames (which presumably don't feature real human beings) in this way. Unless they really are unusually extreme?
Most of your comment I agree with, if Visa has this power they should be using it against people involved in human trafficking. But:
> which presumably don't feature real human beings
I don't really care. As soon as you've created something people will pleasure themselves to you've created the negative feedback loop on the pleasure but the positive feedback loop on the real thing IMO.
Agree that Visa shouldn't have the power but the fact is,this isn't it.
The civil liberties guys always jump in one too early to defend the guys who want to fuck kids.
Slippery slope arguments are fallacious. I am ready to destroy Visa/Mastercard as soon as it's not child abuse or erotic depictions of child abuse they are censoring.
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.
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-...
Targeting them with what?
What could possibly hold enough leverage that Visa would jeopardize their sweet gig as an ideology-neutral, essential piece of American infrastructure siphoning 1-2% off of every dollar of consumer spending?
The leverage is that the activists will potentially be able to draw the ire of the government. Visa and MC get away with absolute murder in terms of the size of the fees that they charge in the US. Most developed countries don't allow that. The US government could easily regulate them (as they already do with debit card fees) or use anti-trust law against the obvious duopoly charging exorbitant prices. Because of this situation, Visa and MC have a very strong incentive to crack down on things the government doesn't like.
The unspoken arrangement is that the government allows them to keep charging a de facto sales tax on a massive portion of the economy as long as they cooperate and de facto ban things that the government wants banned but can't ban themselves due to that pesky constitution.
Tbh that's quite alarming what you've just said, and I'm not saying about government. I'm saying about an additional huge sales tax. I understand that wiring money or sending them in an envelope is the thing of past, but e.g. in my country and in whole EU the digital payment is promoted as the only righteous, because "cash is only used by gangsters and human traffickers" etc. And this is really playing against us and pushing us to the duopoly you've mentioned
Credit cards are much less heavily relied on in Europe than in the USA. Europe basically runs on debit cards that every kid can have and where the fees are minuscule. There are countless banks providing the service and everything is highly regulated. On top of that, Europe still curbed Visa and Mastercard several times for antitrust behaviour. And the idea that physical money primarily aids social fraud, money laundering and other illegal activities is pretty well established. They even killed the 500€ bank note, because it was almost exclusively used by criminals and most normal people never even touched one, much less used one for legit transactions.
> And the idea that physical money primarily aids social fraud, money washing and other illegal activities is pretty well established. They even killed the 500€ bank note, because it was almost exclusively used by criminals and most normal people never even touched one, much less used one for legit transactions.
At least in Germany in particular older people prefer to pay cash if possible - this gives the banks also less leverage with respect to abhorent fees. Since many people in Germany neither trust the banks nor the government anymore, acting this way is very rational.
Also the arguments concerning cash restrictions are seen very differently by the population: since there existed two oppressive regimes on German soil in the 20th century, a lot of people realize that the restrictions on cash are just another step towards restrictions of the citizen's freedoms (thus I am honestly surprised all the time that a lot of US-Americans who are so freedom-loving and distrust the government concerning the restrictions of civil rights are not in love of cash).
Thus, in Germany there exists the saying "Bargeld ist gelebte Freiheit" [cash is lived freedom].
The Bafin (german banking regulator) seems to want to restrict that freedom. I have worked for a company where the business model is related to cash and the Bafin tries to find reasons to make it harder every couple of years, stating that the money could come from anywhere and because people are not fully KYCed (as it is only legally required for payments of 1000 EUR or more within 24h) there is no way to know. The business model is legal, but they can also make it harder to operate by putting more pressure and scrutiny to banks the company worked with.
It's not so much that only criminals use cash, it's more that crash makes it incredibly easy to evade taxes. The archetype is a cash-only restaurant: it's trivial to both launder money by claiming more sales than you actually made and to evade taxes by reporting fewer sales. This is why many countries have strict laws about paper trails for cash sales.
> At least in Germany in particular older people prefer to pay cash if possible
Sure, but that's for small, everyday amounts. For values upwards of 500€, I think the familiarity of paying cash would be swamped by the nervousness of carrying way too much money with you, what if it gets stolen?
> this gives the banks also less leverage with respect to abhorent fees
The only time my bank has ever charged me a per-transaction fee was, ironically, when I withdrew cash abroad using my credit card.
When I bought a piece of furniture in Germany, I had to pay 1/3 right there in the store. They accepted various cards. When it was delivered, I had to pay the remaining balance (four digits) in cash. No other option.
Also, I believe when buying used cars and such, most people still prefer cash transactions.
That's pretty common in the US too though the cash balance is usually in the form of a check. Historically you'd often get a cashier's check from your bank but I was surprised the dealership accepted a regular personal check a couple years ago. I guess there are control systems in place these days that provide assurances for places like dealerships.
For a dealership I feel like there's less risk; they can do a quick background/credit check on you before accepting the personal check, and it's probably easier for them to track down someone who gives them a bad check. They also have better ability to absorb the loss, in the worst case. I'm sure they've modeled everything and have decided that taking personal checks is worth it financially to them.
(I remember reading long ago that if if a potential customer has to leave the dealership to go secure the proper form of payment, a significant percent just don't come back at all. They want to keep you there until you buy something, fairly standard sales tactic.)
But for a regular person just trying to sell their own car directly to someone else, they're absolutely going to want a cashier's check or cash. (Even the cashier's check can be risky; I doubt your average person is an expert in detecting a fraudulent one.)
When I’m selling a car I insist that we finalize the transaction at a brick and mortar bank, where I can watch them either get a bank draft or withdraw cash.
(In Canada, I’ve never actually seen a certified/cashier’s cheque used for anything. My house downpayment and vehicle purchase were both done via bank draft.)
and even if you do want to carry that much cash, surely you'd want a fatter wad with smaller bills, right?
The Euro uses larger bills for larger amounts, so if showing off the cash is actually something you want, a single €500 note would have worked well.
there's a psychological bonus for heftier things
maybe if it was larger, thicker, and a more dense material. most of those matter more to the person holding it, rather than an observer, though
> Since many people in Germany neither trust the banks nor the government anymore, acting this way is very rational.
Speak for yourself, this is either heavily overstated or a fringe opinion, luckily. Most people definitely do trust both government and banks to a sensible degree, even if they don’t like some decisions.
Some people like you apparently also don’t appreciate the immense freedom of SEPA transactions. Sure it’s good to have cash as an escape hatch for the occasional transaction off the record, but for almost everything else bank transfers are safe, inaccessible to third parties, free from fees, and easy to use. And above all else, we have a working democracy and not an oppressive regime? This whole debate often feels very disconnected and overblown in Germany.
> And above all else, we have a working democracy and not an oppressive regime? This whole debate often feels very disconnected and overblown in Germany.
Well as you can see from the US currently, a country that is now free and democratic, might not continue to do so in the future. But once you've given up the ability to use cash because you didn't need it then, how are you going to get it back when you do need it?
Not a single western democracy has really turned yet, so I’m not convinced this is imminent danger.
Besides, I’m not advocating for the abolishment of cash, but against dramatic claims of an evil scheme to control and spy on citizens. That’s a right-wing narrative in Germany, but nonsense nonetheless.
Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Brazil, Chile, Argentina -- most within living memory.
Hell even France, everyone's just lucky that de Gaulle wasn't much into dictatorship.
Germany, Spain, and Italy were no western democracies in any sense of the word before the rise of fascism, Japan, Brazil, and Chile are no western democracies per definition.
I’m talking about the post-WW2 order, which has been remarkably solid. Until Trump showed up, that is. But even the USA are still a working democracy, despite all the fear of an authoritarian regime. So I would at least argue for a bit of calm and reason before proclaiming the end of freedom due to discontinued 500€ notes.
I would like to know where you draw the line for "working democracy".
The German Democratic Republic had elections, it even had political mechanisms that allowed other parties to participate (which the East CDU made plenty of use of btw). It even had a lower rate of incarceration than the US and a far more primitive surveillance system.
Pre-WW2 Germany was a working democracy for the most part despite its court system still having being extremely biased in favor of monarchists and anti-leftism. Most of the violence committed by the Nazis at the time resulted in prosecutions even if many were excused for "being motivated by patriotism". Hitler even went to prison for attempting a coup before being pardoned - and the punishment succeeded in changing the NSDAP's strategy to mostly remain within the limits of the law. Hitler's absolute power was even legally granted through the Enabling Act, passed with the help of the government coalition partners including the ideological precursor to the modern CDU/CSU, the Christian (Catholic) conservative "Center" party.
Post-WW2 West Germany under Adenauer (who btw was a massive antisemite to the point of explaining the necessity of zionism with the need to appease the "very powerful" international Jewish community) on the other hand had the government pressuring its constitutional court to ban political parties, reinstate the Nazi era crime of "high treason" to criminalize any political attempts at reunification other than outright annexation and cracked down on pacifists and opponents to the remilitarization as desired by the US to have a regional power base in the Cold War. It also ran a system of rubber stamp courts to rehabilitate former NSDAP members, even when it required a re-trial after the destruction of incriminating evidence from prior unfavorable rulings.
And of course even after Adenauer German policing only ever-so-incrementally moved away from the traditional authoritarian "peace through power" approach following the bloodshed in its handling of the student protests in the 1960s (which led to the formation of the RAF terrorist group) although German federal and state governments still oppose any outside investigations into police violence nowadays even when it's evident enough to make international news headlines like in Lüzerath. Meanwhile corruption in the federal government has become so rampant there are literally score lists available for each political party showing how many of their representatives are tied up in legal corruption scandals with Jens Spahn probably being the most widely talked about case for funnelling government funds into his pockets during the pandemic only followed by former chancellor Schroeder's close business relations to Gazprom and Olaf Scholz's deliberate intervention in investigations of never seen before amounts of massive tax fraud (i.e. the Cum Ex scandal).
And that's just Germany. So: if interwar Germany and pre-reunification East Germany were not "working democracies" but every "western" democracy (I presume this means anything this side of the Cold War iron curtain) post-WW2 is - what's your yardstick? Where do you draw the line?
> Most people [in Germany] definitely do trust both government and banks to a sensible degree, even if they don’t like some decisions.
The major far-right fundamentalist opposition party has built its unprecedented success on a narrative of low government trust, and has been gaining ground in both polls and elections for years and years now.
So perhaps we shouldn't dismiss the parents' perspective entirely.
> Some people like you apparently also don’t appreciate the immense freedom of SEPA transactions.
If you include the wrong words in the transaction description, your account will almost certainly be cancelled. In a truly free payment system that safeguards democratic freedoms, these descriptions would be encrypted from end to end. (Just in the same way all personal communication should be protected.) This will, of course, never happen.
> And above all else, we have a working democracy and not an oppressive regime? This whole debate often feels very disconnected and overblown in Germany.
Any data we collect will probably be misused at some point in the future. Why take a risk with German institutions if we don't have to?
Germany recently experimented with greater financial control over some parts of the population, and it wasn't a total disaster in terms of control. In terms of freedom, however, it is a disaster.
Unfortunately, the source is German-language: https://netzpolitik.org/2024/faq-was-bezahlkarten-fuer-geflu...
Despite cash being a pillar of freedom and democracy in an open society, there is still no good anonymous alternative to it that is usable by normal people on a daily basis.
> The major far-right fundamentalist opposition party has built its unprecedented success on a narrative of low government trust, and has been gaining ground in both polls and elections for years and years now.
And yet, that is very far from the majority.
> If you include the wrong words in the transaction description, your account will almost certainly be cancelled.
That isn’t true. If you put "murder contract + 2kg heroin" in the description, at most a bank clerk will call to ask you to avoid that. The description is reviewed to detect fraud, and protects a lot of people from illicit transactions. We have that for the same reason we have KYC regulations; you may disagree with it, but it protects a lot of people, right now. If you need to obfuscate the description, you’re free to use an encrypted string or a numeric reference without any trouble.
> Any data we collect will probably be misused at some point in the future. Why take a risk with German institutions if we don't have to?
There are valid arguments against widespread cash usage; money handling is one of the top expenses in retail, for example. There also is fraud potential actively being used for sure. Yet, I don’t hear anyone working on completely abolishing cash, which is just not going to happen. Still, even Germans could benefit from questioning our ways from time to time.
> And yet, that is very far from the majority.
Remember that our parent said, "Many people in Germany neither trust the banks nor the government." You denied that, and I suggested that the turnout for the AfD might be a useful proxy for institutional distrust. I don't know how the reference to majorities fits here or what argument it is intended to support. Presumably, there are also people in other parties who distrust public institutions, right? Why are we talking about majorities now?
I argued that the SEPA system has several flaws, one of which is the lack of privacy surrounding transaction descriptions. This can have consequences far more serious than receiving a call from a bank. While banks do check flagged transactions, if a certain number of criteria are met, they will definitely escalate your transaction to the authorities. This is a legal requirement, by the way — it's not specific to any particular bank. This can be mitigated almost entirely by using cash.
As you did not answer my question about why to gamble on institutional consistency, I wonder: Would you actively argue in favour of greater surveillance of the payment sector?
This would align with your seemingly tongue-in-cheek suggestion to manually encrypt transaction descriptions. Payment privacy can only foster democratic resilience if it is enabled by default. It's like saying an instant messaging app doesn't need end-to-end encryption for personal communication because users can encrypt the text by hand.
> There are valid arguments against widespread cash usage; money handling is one of the top expenses in retail, for example.
Liberty is not usually defined in monetary terms. For instance, regular elections are costly. We still do not eliminate them for economic benefit. Similarly, I think the idea of removing the option of payment privacy to reduce transaction costs is cynical, or very radical.
> Yet, I don’t hear anyone working on completely abolishing cash, which is just not going to happen.
I don't know why intention would be relevant here. The use of cash has been declining in Germany (and the EU) for quite some time now. This basic fact is not new or disputed by anyone in this field. To deny the decline of cash as a proportion of overall payments would be counterfactual.
Problems arising from reduced cash usage, such as the vulnerability of civil society and the reduced resilience of democratic institutions, occur regardless of whether someone is actively working to abolish cash payments.
Croatian banks didn't get the memo about SEPA; I get charged to receive a SEPA transfer!
I'm from Croatia but I don't send money abroad, I only use credit cards and banks locally. As far as I can see from our local banks' websites, they implement SEPA standards. There must be some sort of misunderstanding or error.
Perhaps is because it's a payment to an OBRT account?
Banking in Croatia is like UK banking 40 years ago, or at least it is with Erste. Charged even just to have the account.
They even charge me to send me an email to tell me I logged in to the online banking.
They charge for pretty much everything, even for running your bank account. But now they will not be allowed by law to charge you "bank account operating cost fees" for bank accounts that are used for receiving salary and/or pension.
> Speak for yourself, this is either heavily overstated or a fringe opinion, luckily.
I know quite a lot of people in Germany who think this way. In particular during the time when there was a risk of negative interest on savings (when this topic was brought up by politicians and banksters) these people were much more open in shouting out their political opinions.
Also the anti-corona measures separated the population into two groups:
1. Those who were in favour of the anti-corona measures also became more open with respect to paying with cards (well, to help avoiding the spread the virus)
2. Those who were against it became much more distrusting towards politicians (for obvious reasons) and banks afterwards. Why also banks? Because various groups at that time brought up idea that anti-vaxxers should be de-banked.
So, I am quite sure I'm not overstating. But if you only hang up with specific groups of people, it is in my opinion eather easy not to get in contact to those who think this way.
> I am honestly surprised all the time that a lot of US-Americans who are so freedom-loving and distrust the government concerning the restrictions of civil rights are not in love of cash
I suspect it's a combination of factors, one of them being that US cash has absolutely awful usability compared to the Euro.
> absolutely awful usability compared to the Euro
In what way? One unpleasant discovery I made in Portugal (and also saw to some extent in Spain) was that ATM’s - every one I could find, including those that were bank-owned at physical branches - had a limit of EUR200 per transaction regardless of my own bank limit (at USD1000/day, that should have been at least EUR800).
And while convenience stores, fast food, etc., won’t take a bill over $20 (which is understandable but really a trifling sum when you consider inflation - it’s a fast-food breakfast for three people), many other businesses are happy to do so. Nothing above $100 is in circulation anymore, and inflation means that $100 in 1980 is worth over $400 in today’s money even by government figures. A $20 bill 45 years ago was worth almost $100 in today’s money. And, of course, cash declaration rules have not updated the amounts to reflect this.
I went last year to Lisbon and Barcelona, from Brazil with 0 cash in any currency.
I had a debit card with some hundreds of EUR already charged, but I ended up using it with an NFC enabled smartphone.
No issues at all, even going in far places outside Barcelona. Everyone very receptive in BCN.
I looked at ATM terminals and they seemed full of rules and complications. I tried to get some cash just to collect the notes as a souvenir, but I gave up.
Again, everyone accepted my NFC enabled smartphone, I tested my debit NFC card and my local bank CC NFC card as well
So I think ATMs present a lot of friction for sure.
Same this year - I went through Spain, France, and Portugal last month and did not have to take money out of ATM for anything including eating, shopping for groceries, paying for gas or sightseeing.
ApplePay connected to my no forex transaction credit card earning 3% cashback covered 95% of these transactions and a few times I had to use that credit card directly.
How did you manage without cash in France? Many places here don’t accept anything but cash for amounts less than 5 or 10 Euros. If I just want to buy a coffee or a baguette, I often need cash.
I spent a few days in French Basque Country and restaurants and fresh markets all accepted credit cards and Apple Pay.
I was traveling with family so spending limits were higher than 5 euros
Okay, but OP specifically said that USD are inferior to EUR for cash. Never had issues spending with card in PT or ES.
> that US cash has absolutely awful usability compared to the Euro.
Euro bills differ clearly in color and size, which means they are quickly identified.
Also the Euro coins differ in shape and size quite a lot, which is easy to identify blind even when handled individually. More than U.S. coins which are more similar.
I don't know about an objective difference caused by the fact that 1€ and 2€ are coins and bills start only at 5€ whereas the one dollar coin isn't much used in favor of the one dollar bill.
A vocal minority are freedom loving. A significant number are hooked on consumer debt. I feel like any sweeping generalization is going to be wrong… especially when referencing the USA which is basically 50 countries and has a population exceeding all of Western Europe.
> especially when referencing the USA which is basically 50 countries and has a population exceeding all of Western Europe.
Germany is basically 16 countries (federal states [Bundesländer]). Europe is a whole countinent - here a suitable American analogue miht be USA+Canada+Middle America. Or if we talk about the EU, a suitable analogue would be NAFTA (the EU also started as a set of free trade agreements).
> especially when referencing the USA which is basically 50 countries and has a population exceeding all of Western Europe.
So, you compare the whole USA to only a part of Europe? Why is that?
And they counted an even lower percentage of Eurasia. It might matter for a given conversation. It might not. What's your point (i.e., what are you actually trying to ask)?
> thus I am honestly surprised all the time that a lot of US-Americans who are so freedom-loving and distrust the government concerning the restrictions of civil rights are not in love of cash
I think there are a lot of Americans who distrust government/banks and try to deal in cash as much as they can. And there are a lot of people here who have bad credit and can't get a credit card, and quite a few unbanked lower-income folks who don't have bank accounts or debit cards.
But I think maybe as someone from another country you're misinterpreting the whole "individual freedom" thing that a lot of Americans push. I don't think cash vs. credit cards is really a big part of that, for whatever reason. While it is more common in some places in the US these days for some businesses to not take cash at all, still the vast majority of businesses do take cash, and everyone has a choice in how they'll pay.
There's also a financial engineering component, as most credit cards in the US offer some kind of rewards program or cash back for purchases made. For example, a credit card I have, when used for Lyft rides, gives me the equivalent of 7.5% off (I have to use the savings for travel costs through the credit card's travel site, but that's fine and worth it for me). Some cards are simple and just offer 1% or 2% back and that's it, but some have categories (like "3% cash back for gasoline purchases"), and some people get into the "game" of trying to match a credit card with a purchase to get the most cash back.
And even for people who don't get into the "game", they certainly won't mind a "free" 1% or 2% discount on everything just for using a credit card. Some businesses offer a discount for paying cash, or a surcharge for using a credit card, but many do not, so if you pay with cash, you're essentially overpaying, since the cost of credit card fees is built into the prices. (This is of course another way that poor people who can't get credit cards get screwed.)
I guess often enough, convenience and saving money wins over the whole "freedom" thing for people here.
Finally, I think there's also a bit of separation. Many credit cards don't even feel like they're associated with a bank. Many larger retail stores offer a branded credit card that of course has a Visa or MasterCard logo on it, but you have to dig to find mention of an actual bank. So even Americans who might distrust government and banks just don't see a strong association there when it comes to credit cards.
I also just don't think there's that much bank distrust going on in the US. Sure, people are still sore about the financial crisis of 2008, but also consider that was 17 years ago. We haven't had big bank issues in the US where banks devalue currency, or follow government orders to across-the-board steal money from citizens, at least not in widespread ways. People generally love to rag on banks when it comes to fees and penalties and hidden costs and crap like that, but many of those things have been made illegal, and, again, even for a bank-issued credit card, I think many people just don't make that association. It's just an easier way to make payments, without the risk of carrying cash around (and with protection if the card gets stolen and used), and sometimes you get discounts and cash back... what's not to like?
> the idea that physical money primarily aids social fraud, money washing and other illegal activities is pretty well established
I think that's very hyperbolic. In france most people I know carry cash and use it regularly (not as much as cards), the gen X and older tend to find it strange to pay for small sums (eg bread) with card. Germany is infamously almost cash-only. In many Central Europe countries, shops taking card is not a given (Bulgaria, Hungary).
> Germany is infamously almost cash-only.
Let's not exaggerate. While I am often enough exasperated at how often certain restaurants or bars will still only accept cash (or sometimes EC card), I'm still able to do about 90% of my transactions by card.
In the US, cash-only businesses usually attract auditors from the IRS (or did, until they gutted the agency).
Interesting! As a tourist, almost all my transactions had to be cash: but ofc a tourist and a resident don't have the same spending patterns (mostly bars and restaurant for me)
Supermarkets and most stores where you'd buy everyday stuff (clothes, electronics, books, ...), especially if they're chains, will take card. It's really mostly independently owned kiosks, bars and restaurants that are holdouts, and even there the card acceptance rate is increasing.
> Germany is infamously almost cash-only.
COVID caused a major boost in shops adding card payments. Most shops now accept them even for small payments.
There are places which don't take cards, many of them also don't print receipts without asking, which might indicate than an tax audit might give interesting results ...
Some shops try to go towards "card only"
In Hungary by law every seller that has a cash register also has to accept cards. So I guess you were here some years ago.
Where may I read about anything supporting your statement "cash is primarily used for illegal activities"? I highly doubt that this is the case, unless there are more illegal activities out there than legal ones.
I would assume the metric isn’t number of transactions, but total transaction value. It’s really uncommon to pay for really expensive things (e.g., houses, cars, boats) in cash, and doing so almost always means that the duffel bag of cash came from shady means.
OK, but look at the original statement, that cash is mainly used for illegal activities. I do not think that is true.
Now, check this out:
> Cash was the most frequently used payment method at the POS in the euro area and was used in 52% (59%) of transactions, but the share of cash payments has declined.
> Cash was the most frequently used payment method for small-value payments at the POS, in line with previous surveys. For payments over €50, cards were the most frequently used payment method.
> Cash was the dominant means of payment in P2P transactions, accounting for 41% of such payments. Cards and mobile apps were used for 33%, credit transfers for 9% and instant payments for 6% of P2P transactions.
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/ecb_surveys/space/html/ecb.s...
This is to be expected though:
> The most frequently used instrument for online payments was cards, representing 48% (51%) of transactions. The share of e-payment solutions, i.e. payment wallets and mobile apps, was 29% (26%).
> The large majority of recurring payments were made using direct debit, with credit transfers ranking in second place.
Regarding privacy:
> A majority of euro area consumers (58%) said they were concerned about their privacy when performing digital payments or other banking activities.
I think they genuinely care about privacy and are not thugs.
Not sure if "mainly" means in terms of total value, number of transactions or people using it. If I would be to guess it would be total value.
Now, these guys might be biased, but to quote: "The EUR 500 note alone accounts for over 30% of the value of all banknotes in circulation (1)." (https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/cash...).
That would suggest to me that at least 30% of the value of cash is used for "shady" stuff (I mean I don't know anybody that would use 500 eur bills).
The fact that cash would be used mostly for illegal activities by value (I don't know if it is really the case), does not imply that "people that use cash use if for illegal activities".
I do not pretend that I know either, to be honest.
That said, there is "For payments over €50, cards were the most frequently used payment method.", which means they primarily use cash below 50 EUR, and you cannot do much illegal purchases with 50 EUR, it is such a small amount.
Technically they said,
> And the idea that physical money primarily aids social fraud, money laundering and other illegal activities is pretty well established.
Another plausible reading could be that this is just a widely believed incorrect thing (or most exactly, they are just saying it is widely believed, and not anything about the underlying truthfulness of the belief). This seems easy for somebody to observe about the society around them (although I bet it is a regional thing, or something like that) and less likely for there to be hard data on. Perception is also more likely than actual facts to drive behavior, right?
> They even killed the 500€ bank note, because it was almost exclusively used by criminals and most normal people never even touched one, much less used one for legit transactions.
This, on the other hand, seems like a specific action taken by the government to solve a specific problem, so I’d expect it to be well documented…
Here for example: https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/cash...
I'm not sure which European country you're talking about, but in France most transaction are now done by card. Yes it's mostly debit cards, but they're still handled almost exclusively by Visa and Mastercard.
Many banks have tried to start other electronic payments independent from those 2 (for example Wero) but it doesn't really get any traction.
So I don't see how the duopoly is any less powerful here.
I think France is a bit of an exception because there's the CB network[1]. Most cards here are either CB/Mastercard or CB/Visa and a lot of stuff uses CB by default if I understand it correctly. According to their website the network accounts for 65% percent of national transactions[2] but I'm not sure of how to interpret their wording.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CB_Bank_Card_Group
[2] https://www.cartes-bancaires.com/cb/chiffres/
Cards and transfers are different things though. What I have seen from Wero (released to the public) are Peer to Peer transfers, so if you don't need to transfer money to a person, Wero will not help you for now.
Some card fees are capped by the EU: https://www.visa.co.uk/about-visa/visa-in-europe/fees-and-in..., quoting "From 9 December 2015, European regulation on interchange fees (Regulation (EU) 2015/751 of the European Parliament and of the European Council of 29 April 2015 on interchange fees for card-based transactions, “the IFR”) imposes interchange fee caps on most product types within the European Economic Area (EEA).".
It is true though that French banks have huge fees even for debit (0.20%) compared to, for example The Netherlands (0.02 eur).
So the doupoly is not as powerful everywhere, but I have no clue why the difference.
Businesses can also accept Wero payment by QR code. Although I don't think many do.
In Poland there is Blik which got huge traction
...which is why saying "in Europe" makes no sense. There are so many differences between countries.
> They even killed the 500€ bank note, because it was almost exclusively used by criminals and most normal people never even touched one, much less used one for legit transactions
I wonder what is the source for this information?
In my country it's perfectly legal to request your payment in cash. And it should be paid to you in cash if you request it. Therefore, 500 banknotes make perfect sense, making however any payment with it really stressful for you and the teller
> And the idea that physical money primarily aids social fraud, money laundering and other illegal activities is pretty well established.
I'd rather have that than a complete loss of privacy.
Debit cards are really common in the US as well. Pretty much every bank gives you one with a checking account and they’re accepted everywhere. You’ll have no problem never getting a credit card, aside from a couple of very specific cases such as renting a car where they’ll require a substantial deposit if you don’t use a credit card.
But it’s irrelevant to this issue, because the debit cards are still handled by Visa or Mastercard.
> because it was almost exclusively used by criminals and most normal people never even touched one, much less used one for legit transactions.
thats BS. most people have indeed had such, and while not frequent, it was fully legit.
The real reason they want to do away with cash is so they can monitor everything you buy, and in time, perhaps more
The U.S. consumer economy functions primarily on debt from start to end these days, complete with debt collectors who buy it pennies on the dollar and then con grieving relatives into voluntarily accepting duty towards those debts that would otherwise have been discharged by death. So there are quite a lot of people these days who couldn’t use the European debit methods because they don’t have the cash and likely never will, what with one quarter of the country’s households unable to afford housing on effectively poverty wages. The federal government can’t crack down on this because they’d have to replace that consumer debt with public assistance. The puritanical / religious orgs control majority voting blocs that haven’t aged out as they used to and so are a continued threat to elected officials. So the threat those groups are holding over Visa/MC is triple-pronged: not only will they boycott (they can afford to), they can also leverage politicians (enforce our will or get ejected from office) and threaten capitalism (better economic armageddon than unpalatable sexual expressions). Valve can’t hold a candle to that kind of leverage, not without giving up the neutral-apolitical stance that most tech corporations prefer. They would essentially have to promote a counter-bloc of voters to counter-pressure the U.S. House and Senate into passing payment provider neutrality laws through elections. Valve is vanishingly unlikely to do this, and so their only choice is to prostrate to Visa/MC (or stop accepting USD) until the puritan bloc ages out in two or three decades. They can certainly afford to wait, especially given that these incremental religious bans advance slower than their revenues.
I always found this principle odd because it offends across the political spectrum.
Every hassle the porn industry gets, the gun industry gets too, and that obviously has a very different political footprint. I'd also expect some industries with politically powerful friends (supplements, MLMs in general) to be offended by policies that put some merchants into higher risk/higher cost/higher rejection categories.
I had hoped something like FedNow would take off-- a government-backed payment rail with a formal mandate to service any legal business, so neither side could complain about being deplatformed.
The Durbin amendment (regulating debit interchange in the US) and its EU equivalent aren't regulating Visa and Mastercard scheme fees, but rather interchange fees, which Visa and Mastercard set, but issuing banks earn.
Of course scheme fees are ultimately at least partially paid from interchange, but lower interchange is primarily a problem for issuing banks, not the networks.
The Durbin amendment in particular was also supposed to foster competition between networks (by mandating each debit issuer to support at least two unaffiliated networks per card), but given that only very few places accept only debit cards, that didn't work out quite as well as intended in terms of bringing down both interchange and scheme fees via market forces.
Yes - and Japanese gay porn games are an easy soft target before they go on to ban things they really want to ban. We've been through this before in the 70s-90s.
The initial ban wave was against incest games.
Almost certainly won't end there without significant consumer pushback against the payment processor Valve uses as well as both VISA and Mastercard.
> We've been through this before in the 70s-90s.
What do you mean?
sounds like the fix is counter activism to remove the leverage these interest groups have
The fix is legislation that ensures that payment processors aren't allowed to extra-legally moderate transactions based on "I don't like it". They need to be forced to process all legal transactions. Because these entities are nearly irreplaceable and are the cornerstone of many consumer industries, it seems like a reasonable compromise to me.
Just pushing back is neither guaranteed to succeed nor last for any serious amount of time. The ideological crazies can throw their entire existence at ensuring the fact that the "impure, corrupting filth" is squashed. People who oppose it might like the things that get censored, but none are religiously attached to the cause, not to an extent that would lead to a serious amount of organizing, anyway.
Rather, we remove the leverage by doing what these activists threaten to do, without all the hysterics. If the exorbitant fees give so much leverage to activists, fix the fees. and you know, allow the market to be freer and all that.
The problem comes from "legal transactions".
The Pornhub problem came from going after the payment processors for facilitating supposedly illegal transactions--namely, underage porn. The crusaders (in every direction) keep looking for ways to undermine the protections (Section 230 in this case) and all too often the government doesn't fight back.
As for keeping it in the family games--we still have "obscenity" on the books and such games fall afoul of it. I find the concept of "obscenity" bonkers amongst consenting adults.
> Targeting them with what?
> What could possibly hold enough leverage that Visa would jeopardize their sweet gig as an ideology-neutral, essential piece of American infrastructure siphoning 1-2% off of every dollar of consumer spending?
The US courts.
Visa was specifically pulled into the lawsuit against PornHub; here's Visa's official statement on the matter: https://corporate.visa.com/en/sites/visa-perspectives/compan...
The lawsuit is still ongoing.
Because Visa's revenue is not dependent upon ideological neutrality.
They're half of a duopoly.
Pressure campaigns could lead to laws regulating the card industry, self regulation prevents some of that (see movies and games ratings agencies, which avoid government ratings coming in and potentially connecting an 18+ rating with outright bans like we’ve seen in the UK and Australia in the past)
Threats of exposure and boycotting/blacklisting the card making room for competitors.
Plenty of religious groups have the money to be able to start the "holy card". And there's plenty of businesses that'd be giddy to accept Jesus card.
Consider, for example, companies like hobby lobby or Chick-fil-A banning visa and promoting Jesus card.
It also wouldn't take much for such a card to advertise itself as kid friendly.
Thinking about it, I'm a little surprised this hasn't happened already.
What competitors? You mean a "Jesus Card" issued by Visa or Mastercard? At this point, it's basically an oligopoly. The only other real player is Amex, and they're a very distant third.
Amex isn't really a competitor, since they're both card issuer and network in one. (I believe they have a few third party issued cards these days, but it's not a significant part of their business. The same goes for Discover.)
Let’s be real, Chick-fil-A banning Visa would likely result in its bankruptcy.
Starting a holy card that doesn’t work at gas stations etc is an extremely uphill battle.
Don't know about that. Costco banned Mastercard and they're doing fine.
They wouldn’t need to create a new payment processor if they could just swap to Mastercard. Thus it was also implicitly excluded by Chick-fil-A in their proposal.
I looked this up, they still accept visa. So not quite the same
> would likely result in its bankruptcy.
Maybe? Depends on how customers are sold on the mission. If it's sold as protecting children I could see a number of people ditching their cards.
> Starting a holy card that doesn’t work at gas stations etc is an extremely uphill battle.
True. It'd take a large amount of initial capital and would likely need a targeted and regional rollout with some nice incentives to the merchants.
Yeah, 30 years ago this might've been able to get off the ground. Today? Not a prayer.
I use my debit card at gas stations
Do you mean like Greenlight?
You are not allowed to be ideologically neutral anywhere today.
One thing to notice is the group that claims responsibility for this is some kind of funky radfem puritan mixture from Australia. They campaigned against titles like GTA V, Detroit Become Human AND abortion pills.
Since they ran a campaign to ban GTA V from stores I can say for sure they are not stopping on fringe content like eroge porn shovelware.
I wonder how this type of pressuring can be made illegal. To be clear: I certainly think this has to be made illegal, and even attempt to coerce a payment network to force a business to do something should be a serious crime. If the product is not illegal, you can sell it, either on your platform, or on a third party platform (Steam), if the platfrom is ok with selling your product. It's arguable, but perfectly reasonable to say that Steam can also choose to not sell it if it doesn't want to. But then, of course, it doesn't seem like a huge leap to say that a payment network can choose to not handle transactions for some type of business if it doesn't want to. Sure, you can appeal to it being a de-facto monopoly, but isn't Steam a de-facto monopoly as well? I mean, I have some trouble formally drawing a line here, yet it clearly seems not right to me, that a payment network can choose at all if they want to handle this or not.
And, as I said, attempt to apply pressure on a payment network, in order to apply pressure on its customer, in order to apply pressure on their customers... well, I think it's pretty obvious why this is a problem, and that things are not supposed to work this way.
I don’t think it should be made illegal, it should be made impractical.
One way would be to ensure proper competition in the payments space. If there were dozens of options then some of them would decide that it’s a competitive advantage to ignore the busybodies and cater to people who want to buy this stuff. We see this at work with hosting. There’s a multitude of options and it doesn’t seem like adult sites have much trouble finding a host that will allow them, even if others might reject them.
Another would be to regulate payment processors like common carriers and require them to serve everyone equally regardless. We see this model with the Post Office. As long as you’re not sending something that will compromise the safety of the workers, they’ll ship it.
VISA/MC duopoly have like 60% margins, they are essentially a rent seeking feudal lord on the entirety global commerce.
Pure leeches, that are now engaged in censorship
It shouldn't ve hard to replace them but any other new service (like Wise) end up issuing a Visa/MC card. Why can't we have an open protocol which works between any machine with NFC?
the problem is over time they erected a giant moat that is regulation and captive customer base.
I dont understand how anti-trust regulation lets Visa/MC duopoly exist (at least with current rates), they must be heaviest donors to politicians.
and once you understand how 2-3 big corporations establish oligopoly and engage in rent seeking, protected by mountains of regulations, and share some of their wealth with politicians - you understand how American extractive institutions work.
The only hope is some giant like Apple/Google completely unseat visa with their own secure payment solutions that gets around VISA/MC card system
The trouble is that you either need cryptocurrency or you need some prearranged entity that both parties trust. With current credit cards, that prearranged entity is Visa/MC/Amex/Discover. I don't see cryptocurrency being practical for this use, or ever widely accepted even if somehow practical. Maybe the new FedNow could serve as that foundation with card processing built on top.
But then you have issues like, what about disputes and fraud? With existing credit cards, buyer and seller have both agreed in advance to abide by certain rules. With an open standard, I as a buyer could stand up my own service that makes the payment and then retracts it, or if FedNow doesn't allow retracting payments then I as a seller could make one that refuses to refund the money and I can just not give the buyer their item. (And yeah, this is already illegal, but we see plenty of nefarious activity like this online anyway.)
It would be great if it was impractical, but I still think it has to be made illegal. I think it is not only "bad" because it's bad for Valve of whoever wants to sell or buy these games, this is "bad" on its own, because it is simply another elaborate form of blackmail. It is as close as it gets to violence without actually beating one up: you are forced to do something not because you are required by law or by nature, but because I want you do that, and I have power over you. This isn't a unique situation in that sense, of course, this pattern appears a lot in life. This one is unique only in that sense that it targets a very narrow bottleneck. If you have power to influence a payment system, and it has legal right to choose to write regulations like that, then you have power over virtually anyone and everyone. Lobbying a policy clause for Mastercard is basically as good (or maybe even better) than lobbying a law. Which, yes, is a problem on its own, but this problem is rather "an unfortunate situation" than a malicious act.
Also, on the matter of the latter problem — fixing that is much easier said than done. Cryptocurrencies in a way were an attempt to fix that, but governments around the world do not want this problem to be fixed. And of course they don't. The field is highly regulated, because, as I've said, having control over the payment network is not that very much different from having a physical army to physically beat you up.
As an aside, I was especially surprised by:
> We see this at work with hosting.
Do we, though? It's another topic of course, but I actually share the sentiment that the current trend is the opposite one: good old days of the Free Web are gone, and the reality is that in the days of Gmail (and other major mail providers), Cloudflare (and other major CDNs) the Internet is inherently not a decentralized structure anymore. It takes a few powerful friends to reach an agreement with each other, and everyone else has to follow.
So, anyway, what I had in mind was exactly that:
> to regulate payment processors like common carriers and require them to serve everyone equally regardless
But, as I've said, I don't quite see how to draw the line here. After all, it would be somewhat unfair to payment networks to trip them from making any choices. Both because formally they are just a business, not a commodity (which may actually be the root of the problem, I think), and they should have some right to choose how they want to operate; and also because different customers and products objectively carry different risks. So they have to be able to produce some policies, these policies just have to… to be restricted to what's necessary somehow.
Unfairness would be something to care about if it was a rich market with several small companies competing in it. It's not something to care about corporate monopolies.
No, they should not have the right to choose how they want to operate. All those risks you mention only exist because they choose to keep them around as an excuse to why they are necessary. They refuse to modernize their systems so it works, and they should not be allowed to keep that option.
(Honestly, IMO they should just be terminated and replaced by some public service. But if you want to keep them, they shouldn't have that kind of freedom.)
Hosting is a very different landscape. Cloudflare and AWS and such are enormous and can exert a lot of control. But you can still ignore them and just do your own thing and it works fine. There are plenty of smaller cloud providers you can use instead. You can still colocate your own hardware in a data center. If nobody in your country wants your money, you can host your service in some other country that doesn't care so much about whatever morality is at issue.
This demonstrably works. There are plenty of porn sites out there, plenty of pirate sites, plenty of places selling illegal stuff, even Wikileaks is still up.
To your last paragraph, I think we can draw the line at "allow any transaction that you reasonably believe is actually authorized by the people who own the accounts." I don't care about being fair to payment networks. If we're going the regulatory route then we've decided that this stuff is critical infrastructure and the needs of the many etc. If individual people at the company don't like handling transaction for porn or whatever, they're free to find a new job. Different risks do make it trickier, but I think we can add some language to allow holding on to money for a certain period before paying it out, or requiring deposits, with some limits on what criteria they can use to make those determinations and how long/large the period/deposit can be.
I don't quite care about if a payment network feels it's fair to them when they can dictate what speech entire nations are allowed to engage in.
When it's the speech of the many vs the speech of the few, I'm going to err towards the speech of the many.
The pressure all counts under free speech. I don't think making it illegal to criticize a company for its customers is a good idea.
Another factor is the board members and other investors of the institutions themselves.
I have been privy to two specific instances where pressure to either ban or reject providing support for specific content was handed down from beyond the executive level at a major financial network player that my client was doing business with.
They tried to do the same to OnlyFans, but lost that battle
Onlyfans actually made financial sense, though, because chargeback rates are very high. This move makes no financial sense at all.
This is absolutely not true. OF's chargeback rates are incredibly low. Vastly lower than, say, Amazon. I have this directly from friends who work in this space. Do you have a citation that shows otherwise?
Didn't onlyfans severely limit the type of content creators could make and distribute through the platform, just like valve here?
Yep. Even showing lactation gets you banned now.
Any animal or just human?
I would hope using animals in OF content is illegal and banned anyway
I was talking about human lactation. OF was forced to ban it because these same groups perceived it as "obscene" which is truly nonsensical
So as a farmer I wouldn’t be allowed to be on OF showing how to milk a cow?
Haha, dunno, someone will have to find out
That's a weird thing to ban.
Yes, recently they put in place a ban on fursuits and other animal-wear since the payment processors determined that it would promote bestiality. I am not joking.
> 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.
?
Claiming you need to be pro-incest to support the existance of incest themed video games is as absurd as claiming you need to be pro-murder to support much of the entire Action movie genre.
> 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.
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
Yeah. I find sex games have basically zero appeal to me, period. But either show me the victim or leave them legal.
For Steam, it looks like Collective Shout, NCOSE, and Exodus Cry are behind this particular push. [1]
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/group-behind-steam-censorshi...
https://web.archive.org/web/20250719204151/https://www.vice....
Interesting that it's 404? Fact check? Retract? Lawsuit?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/01/visa-mind...
Visa being responsible for CSAM isn't a theoretical lawsuit they're afraid about. (2022)
What relevance does that have to incest-themed video games?
To be clear, these campaigns seem to be grounded in fear, not any sense of morality.
As usual, the actual “cancel culture” comes from the conservatives.
Collective Shout (who pushed for this) is not a conservative group, but rather a feminist activist group based in Australia.
They're responsible for numerous other calls for bans against games like Detroit: Become Human, GTA, etc.
This ban has nothing to do with the call to ban incestual rape games (which is what you refer to), but comes from MasterCard, which has a long story of puritan censorship.
(It's clear in the article, btw).
Collective Shout is the activist group that put pressure on MasterCard to make this decision. They're claiming and celebrating the work they did to make this happen on their own X account.
The US obsession with sex (both positive and negative) is something else.
Here in Europe, sex is a normal part of human life. Not a center of everything, nor a sin to be avoided. Sex art is normal. Sex games are fine. There are no moral crusaders here, because sex is moral. We tell sex jokes at work and nobody faints. We are constantly perplexed why American culture is so different from other Western cultures in that regard.
People keep saying "Puritans" like it answers all questions, but Puritans were hundreds of years ago. We had our own share of people with peculiar attitudes back then. Today is 2025, not 1785.
>Here in Europe
No, Europe is not a monolithic bloc, stop treating it as such, stop saying here in Europe or European here. You'd get annoyed if a yank generalised all of europe with a not take so don't do it yourself. State what country/countries you're talking about because social attitudes and norms vary massively across this continent!
Of course one can generalize using the colloquial "Here in Europe". And generalization is useful -- one cannot go into all the complexity and details all the time, at some point one has to summarize/generalize an argument.
Yes, Europe is not a monolithic bloc, but there is a large fraction that is less sex focused, it's a fair generalization and comment to express that.
Of course, it doesn't help anyone to generalise. Europe has a wide demographic. But, one thing that doesn't happen is its attitude to sex affecting worldwide commerce or other worldwide issues.
Here in the UK religion and sex are not part of the national conversation. A politician mentioning their love of god would seem weird to us. The only way it enters the national conversation are when right-wing religious zealots, from the US, try to affect our laws: I'm thinking of abortion laws and trans rights. These are entirely imported issues from US religious hangups. It's quite tedious, because mostly we were on a path of reasonable discourse with relation to sex, sexuality, relationships (marriage), etc. but with the advent of social media you see pockets of society being dragged into it.
I have friends in much of Europe (Sweden, Norway, France, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Croatia, Slovakia, Poland, Romania, Greece) and have travelled to those destinations extensively. I still can't speak for all of Europe, but I think when it comes to sex and religion we're kinda similar. The only one that stands out to me was the Greek Orthodox church used to have an out-sized role, but even that doesn't seem to be the case any more (I just came back from visiting friends in Greece a few weeks back and we discussed this).
So whilst we can't say all of Europe is the same, we can say that it's not causing global problems due to its sexual and religious hangups.
Yeah when I went to the UK and tried to view adult content using a prepaid SIM, it was blocked and required verifying that I was an adult, and this was done at the ISP level. And I know for a fact that the UK has much stricter limits on kink and BDSM in adult content as well. What gives with people claiming it's just the US?
> required verifying that I was an adult
Log in to your account and toggle the “I want porn” option? It’s annoying, but not onerous.
> And I know for a fact that the UK has much stricter limits on kink and BDSM in adult content as well.
I know what you’re referring to, but don’t know the full details. I believe it’s around violent porn (rape, etc). We certainly have a “think of the children” brigade. I still think the discourse is significantly more civilised than that of the US, which feels like it’s approaching virtual civil war levels. When these subjects are debated, it's usually in parliament and doesn't turn into some societal ideological divide.
I think some of the policies you mention are more artefacts of the politicians not understanding the technological future we’re in, rather than ideology. Many of them think they can make the internet a safe space for kids through policy. It’s naive, for sure, but usually not dogmatic.
> What gives with people claiming it's just the US?
It’s not just the US, but when the people standing outside of UK abortion clinics harassing women are funded by US ‘pro life’ religious groups then you know there’s a problem. Puritanism is a US export.
The vitriolic political divisions in the US, which leads to all sorts of fringe issues becoming mainstream (trans rights, for example), is leaking out into the rest of the western democracies, poisoning the debate everywhere.
The Visa issue is just one more of these puritanical US exports.
> It’s annoying, but not onerous.
So government regulating stuff like that does go against much of the thing you said in the comment above?
> doesn't turn into some societal ideological divide.
When governments try to introduce mass surveillance of personal communications to "protect the children" liek ChatControl maybe it should turn into one. Instead of everyone just handwaving and ignoring it...
>> It’s annoying, but not onerous.
> So government regulating stuff like that does go against much of the thing you said in the comment above?
It isn't law. But even if it was, that doesn't contradict what I am talking about. I'm talking about the export of puritanism. If you think having to turn the porn button from 'off' to 'on' in your phone contract's options is the same, then I don't know what to say.
> When governments try to introduce mass surveillance of personal communications to "protect the children" liek ChatControl maybe it should turn into one.
Yeah maybe, but that's not the topic of conversation here. The topic was about puritanical beliefs in the US and how its export affects the world (like the Visa issue).
> I'm talking about the export of puritanism
Sure, technically its government imposed domestic puritanism which isn't exported. I agree its a completely different thing.
> The topic was about puritanical beliefs in the US and how its export affects the world
Yes, US has its quirks but it's not that exceptional as you are implying. e.g. when it comes to banning/regulated video games Australia is inarguable much more restrictive.
Germany also has a history of banning violent video games and its again much worse than the US e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/ki12if/steam_now_reg...
Post "Online Safety Act" UK is not that much better either.
US is very tame and less "puritanical" by your definition than those countries. The core difference being that the government can't really regulate it directly so credit card companies might be acting as some sort of a proxy.
Or are you implying that US somehow turned Germany and Australia more "puritanical" than itself and there would be no domestic support for censorship there otherwise?
So how does the US deal with age restricted games? I find this much more related to actually willing to implement a rule, rather than having rules for the sake of it (like the US buying alcohol rule - it is forbidden for people under 21 to drink but 40% of the people between 18 and 21 drink ?! source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_consumption_by_youth_i...).
Not sure I get it. And it's different in Europe?
e.g. 20% of all 15 year old in the UK have at least one drink each week:
https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/sta...
Despite the legal age being 18.
Also what does this have to do with anything? e.g. adult-only games are simply unavailable on Steam in Germany. It doesn't matter at all how old you are.
It means there is a law, and Germany makes a reasonable effort to apply it. Germany asks for Steam to use a different system than "Asking the age to the user" (which in my opinion is hilarious and obviously a joke), Steam decides to not sell the games. (source: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Steam-Payment-providers-force-V...)
It's not like "Germany wants to ban sex games altogether", which seems to be what some other private groups would prefer.
> trans rights. These are entirely imported issues from US religious hangups.
No, in the UK it was left-wing feminists who led the opposition to gender identity policies long before any conservatives got involved, on the basis of this being harmful to women's rights.
Just look at the recent For Women Scotland win in the Supreme Court, it's nothing to do with US religious groups at all, and everything to do with protecting sex-based rights and sexual orientation in law.
That was waaaay after it had become an 'issue' in the US and exported. I also doubt they would describe themselves as "left-wing feminists". That language is incorrect at best and inflammatory at worst.
In 2014, Time magazine declared trans rights as "America's next civil rights frontier" [1]. For Women Scotland was formed in 2018 [2].
(Just looked at your comment history. Just, wow... is the trans issue the only one you care about?)
[1] https://time.com/135480/transgender-tipping-point/
[2] https://forwomen.scot/about/
For Women Scotland wasn't the start of the opposition to gender identity policy in the UK. It was founded, by four women who met on Mumsnet, specifically to address policy in Scotland.
Feminist women opposed to the Tory government's plans to introduce "gender self-id" law and similar policy had already started organising by this point. Groups like Woman's Place UK and Fair Play For Women. This had nothing whatsoever to do with religious arguments from the US.
There's also significant liberal opposition to all this in the US, again not linked to religion but, like the UK, on the basis of women's rights.
Keep moving those goalposts!
Look, you have the right to believe whatever you want, but making every single discussion you have on here about how much you hate trans people is not really something I want to get involved with. Good day.
Religion is a factor in Polish politics.
Absolutely. Italy too. I think a better way to phrase it: There are many countries in Europe where a right wing party uses the rise of Islam due to immigrants as a political issue.
They sure do, just like there are different states in the US with vastly different attitudes to life and everything.
And yet, you can take an averaged vector of all US states and all European countries and meaningfully compare those. Or extract some things that are common through all Europe as compared through all US.
I had a privilege of living for some time in Italy, Denmark, Spain and Switzerland (I still live in Switzerland). They are all really different, and yet there is something common compared to the US.
Eh? Not really. There's a gradient between North and South and East and West, and then there's UK, but some things are more or less in-common. What GP is saying is one of those things.
This boycott was run by Collective Shout, an Australian non-profit.
They aren't targeting all sex games on Steam, they were targeting rape, incest, and child abuse.
> They aren't targeting all sex games on Steam, they were targeting rape, incest, and child abuse.
https://www.collectiveshout.org/campaigns includes a number of campaigns against porn in general, so yes, they absolutely are targeting all sex games - simulated rape, incest, and child abuse are merely their first victory.
Its ridiculous that your comment that has factual information is downvoted while on top of you there's a bunch of comments going on random tangents not based at all on reality.
One of the games they are also going after is Detroit: Become Human, and they have gone after things like GTA in the past. Just because they claim they are going after things for those reasons doesn't mean that's actually an accurate claim as to what they are trying to go after. Though it's good to point out who is actually (supposedly) responsible.
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Steam-Payment-providers-force-V...
Please explain.
"In 2020, following a complaint from the Hamburg/Schleswig-Holstein Media Authority, Valve blocked all titles that were labeled as “adult” and did not have an age rating. To be able to offer them, the US company would have to integrate a reliable age verification system into Steam in Germany. Because Valve has not yet implemented such a system, sex games remain blocked in Germany. "
Hm. Okay, you are right. Worse than I thought.
> People keep saying "Puritans" like it answers all questions, but Puritans were hundreds of years ago. We had our own share of people with peculiar attitudes back then.
We literally had Puritans in Europe [1]
” The Puritans were English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who sought to rid the Church of England of what they considered to be Roman Catholic practices, maintaining that the Church of England had not been fully reformed and should become more Protestant.[1] Puritanism played a significant role in English and early American history, especially in the Protectorate in Great Britain, and the earlier settlement of New England.”
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puritans
Yeah, and then most of them left and came here, which the article cites as having caused a "radical" divergence:
> Almost all Puritan clergy left the Church of England after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the Act of Uniformity 1662. Many continued to practise their faith in nonconformist denominations, especially in Congregationalist and Presbyterian churches.[2] The nature of the Puritan movement in England changed radically. In New England, it retained its character for a longer period.
It's not crazy to think that this could have had an outsized influence on the US given how influential New England was in the early days. Even 120-130 years after the point that the quoted section mentions, when the colonies were transitioning into what's now the United States, close to a third of them were part of New England.
If you’re looking at the geographical distribution of their influence, isn’t it weird that the place where the puritans settled (“New England”) is arguably the least puritanical region of the US?
New England is perceived as less religious than the South, but one reason for that is that New England's moral perceptions had a strong influence on US political beliefs. In other words, the Puritans morphed into the Congregationalists who morphed into the Unitarians, who basically took over (in the 19th Century) US political thinking (or at least the Left side of it), giving the appearance that New England does not having any particular or special moral or religious beliefs (at least to those on the Left half of the US political divide).
I grew up in New England and have lived in the South and in California, and IMHO morality is a bigger determinant of the behavior of the average person in New England than it is in the other places I've lived (all in the US). The South and California are more pragmatic, less moralistic.
That's a good point. When something is within the usual for someone's experience, it's not going to be as obvious, so it becomes the baseline that's used to compare other things to. For stuff like religion, it's easy to assume that your amount is normal, and having more (if you don't feel like you have much) or less (if you do feel like you have a lot) is unusual.
I don't have any experience living outside of the northeast (although not New England specifically since high school), but I definitely agree that there's certainly more religion in New England than might be obvious from the outside (more Catholic than the rest of the country, which also might explain some of the differences).
Nowadays, sure, but keep in mind that the "US" didn't extend beyond the east coast when the Puritans first settled here. You might be able to make an argument that there's no cultural influence from the colonial days that lasted until today (although I'd disagree with that sentiment), but otherwise, where would you expect any cultural influence in the rest of the US to have come from?
(To be clear, I'm not saying that there weren't existing cultures there before the US expanded out further west, but I imagine most people would agree that the US today isn't culturally as influenced by them as much as from the the colonies and pre-expansion US.)
> Church of England
Doesn't mean that continental Europe wasn't full of puritanical nutjobs.
Calvin himself ran a dystopian theocratic state\hellhole in Geneva yet hardly anyone references that when talking about conservativism in Switzerland.
> Even 120-130 years after the point
There was a significant generational backlash towards puritanism and a push towards pluralism/secularism by the late 1700s. IMHO Second/Third "Great Awakenings" had a much bigger impact than a handful of Puritans inhabiting New England in the 1600s.
> Doesn't mean that continental Europe wasn't full of puritanical nutjobs.
I believe English puritans were also in Holland and France for a while.
Yes the Pilgrims for instance emigrated from Holland and not England. Of course the Plymouth Colony was quite "progressive" compared to the oppressive theocracy in Massachusetts. At least they weren't hanging quakers, dissenters and didn't burn a single witch during the panic..
Anyway I don't think that the English Puritans/etc. were somehow particularly exceptional (besides the fact that they emigrated to North America) compared to other similar groups in Europe.
> Calvin himself ran a dystopian theocratic state\hellhole in Geneva yet hardly anyone references that when talking about conservativism in Switzerland.
I'm not familiar with Swiss politics, but if there's a significant Christian element to it, it seems like it would be pretty reasonable to wonder about whether the historical basis for this is related to Calvinism. If it's not significantly Christian, then it's not surprising it doesn't get mentioned.
> There was a significant generational backlash towards puritanism and a push towards pluralism/secularism by the late 1700s. IMHO Second/Third "Great Awakenings" had a much bigger impact than a handful of Puritans inhabiting New England in the 1600s.
Sure, but those those were backlashes themselves to the backlash to the secularism that you mentioned happened beforehand. I'm not saying that there weren't Puritan-like influences elsewhere, or that there were no other developments in between the Puritans and modern Christian conservatism in the US, but there's a clear historical tradition of Christian conservatism in US politics, so I don't know why you don't think it's unreasonable to recognize how that has influenced what we see today.
To explain at a higher level where I'm coming from: I don't see historical analysis as making claims about the state we're in today as being a deterministic outcome based on the events that happen in the past because that's not any more possible than predicting exactly what will happen in the future based on the knowledge we have today. The most we can do to explain why things are the way they are now is to look at what things in the past have influenced where we are today.
Not inherently disagreeing with you at all. I'm not just sure whether we should look as far back as the 1600s. Yes some American colonies were founded by religious extremists.
But the divergence between US and Europe didn't happen until the late 1800s if not the early 1900s.
e.g. according to the census of 1851 ~40% of people in Britain were regularly attending religious services. No hard figures for the US from the time but from what I can find the proportion in the US was comparable. Except while mid 1800s was pretty much the peak in Britain in US it kept rising and reached its highest point in the 1950s while in UK religious participation had almost reached current levels by then.
IMHO the rise of political secularism, socialiam and the near societal collapse across much of Europe during and after WW1 and WW2 had a much bigger impact than whatever happened 400 years ago.
It's due to the difference in Christian values, the US has a hard on for believing that ignorance is a virtue when it comes to sin or adult topics.
Like for instance the outrage if you have a sign on your lawn stating that x president is a rapist to the economy, people will say that children should not be "exposed" to such words.
The US is largely theocratic and has in part because of this managed to resist socialism and other forms of scientific governance to a much larger degree.
Using religious leaders as power brokers is a clever strategy, they'll never budge due to the better argument or scientific reason, hence making it almost impossible for non-violent progressive movements to having an effect at the macro level.
Are you sure it’s a good thing to be so small minded that reason won’t reach you, just because you happened to avoid those big ideas that turned out to not work?
Lmao. Socialism is pseudo-scientific bollocks, like flat earth theory.
My healthcare, pension and workers protection proves you wrong.
Any not just pull off the bandaid and tell us you don't really understand what socialism is.
It's easy to dismiss all such campaigns as religious prudes and moral crusaders, especially on a site with the demographics and political leanings of YC News.
But often time such campaigns are waged by former victims of trafficking. It's well documented that trafficking, prostitution and pornography are closely interlinked - this modern notion of a fully liberated "sexual worker" controlling their careers, choices and finance is substantially a fiction of the pornographic industry. So there is real merit în the anti porn stance.
Of course, once the camping is set in motion, it takes a life of its own, that has nothing to do with the concerns of the victims and more with prudishness; the religious circus will join hands and demand the removal of synthetic pornography etc.
I’m willing to listen if you’re willing to provide sources.
Otherwise, your claims run counter to more credible sources I have read. (Which I am not willing to search up for this post.)
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.
Often it's because of secret government requirements.
Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point .
Somehow, it's forbidden for the government to oppress pornographers directly, but it's perfectly fine to impose legal sanctions on banks who maintain business relationships with them.
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.
Yes. Steam used to have card declines if your address did not match exactly.
Card not present was and still is higher risk than in person shopping. Now that most US customers have chip cards in their wallets fraud has shifted from in person to CNP. Digital goods are high risk because a customer could theoretically download and enjoy the digital good or save a copy and then chargeback. There's no shipping tracking number to prove delivery. Or a fraudster could go on a spending spree from the comfort of their home in another country. Adult-only games are even higher risk because a customer might have to explain to a spouse what the Steam charges were for.
Of course copy protection and the prospect of a ban of their whole Steam account blunts the most obvious customer cheating of keeping a copy and charging back. Steam games cannot be resold. Digital goods that can be easily resold are magnets for fraud. Such as cloud GPUs or international long distance calls.
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.
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...
Chargebacks of legitimate purchases on most large platforms are extremely rare. Most will be from stolen cards. On most large platforms, if you start a chargeback you can expect your account to get locked. Do you want to give up your entire account just for a refund on one purchase? Luckily these large platforms typically have their own refund process.
>Chargebacks of legitimate purchases on most large platforms are extremely rare. Most will be from stolen cards.
I never used ecommerce back in the day on the internet but I can imagine that ecommerce fraud was widespread. And that's why excluding other reasons Satoshi invented Bitcoin[0].
I wonder if cryptocurrencies didn't exist would someone nowadays burn the midnight oil to figure out P2P crypto coin since modern payment solutions are fairly good.
Tbh I think Satoshi invented technology around which he wanted to build products unlike Steve Jobs who said that you first need to figure out the product then build technology.
[0] "Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for nonreversible services. With the possibility of reversal, the need for trust spreads. Merchants must be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need. A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable. These costs and payment uncertainties can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party" https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
I don't see how this makes any sense. A reason for the creation of Bitcoin was offering less service than traditional methods?
"Financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes" is nonsense, they "can't" because it's constantly demanded by their clients, attempting to sell that as a bug rather than a feature is preposterous.
Satoshi wanted to bypass banks and make P2P direct payments with no trusted party besides Bitcoin protocol hence >no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party
And crypto community speculated that Satoshi or team behind Bitcoin worked at the internet gambling industry and what use to happen is that angry customers would chargeback the money they lost at the internet casino and cause numerous problems for "merchants" or in this case internet entrepreneurs.
worked in the internet gambling industry*
Late grammar correction :/
The owner of a stolen number is going to use a chargeback.
> people whose spouses catch a XXX video or game on their card statement will lie and run chargebacks too.
I don't understand this claim. Steam doesn't list specific games on credit card bills- why would chargebacks be higher for a bill that says "9.99 - STEAMPOWERED.COM (WA)" than for one that says "9.99 - STEAMPOWERED.COM (WA)" just because the latter was used to pay for Undertale and the former was used to pay for Sex Simulator 25?
This is the correct answer. There are many merchant categories, adult being just one of them, that are susceptible to high chargeback rates which result in payment processors banning them.
This is nonsense. If you want us to believe this you need to show that Steam with erotic games is more of a risk than Steam without them. Comparing Steam with things like “adult merchants” like Onlyfans or a porn streaming service does not sound very appropriate.
It's not nonsense. I've hosted, moderated and managed sites that were only obliquely related to porn or gambling, and you wouldn't believe the level of rejection for running ads or getting payment processing that they are faced with. And I ran a casino for 4 years. I coded it and I ran it 24/7, and believe me, I did everything by the book. The CC companies do not give a shit as long as they make money. Chargebacks cost them a lot in time more than in actual cash, and they have categories of risk for every merchant who may expose them to that risk. The highest categories of risk are porn and gambling.
Any entity that uses a CC gateway and has any exposure to either of those risks is exposing itself to all the risk. The CC companies almost certainly told Valve that they would be considered a porn site and face a 1.5%-2% higher processing fee for every transaction.
No nonsense involved, that's how it works.
> I've hosted, moderated and managed sites that were only obliquely related to porn or gambling, and you wouldn't believe the level of rejection for running ads or getting payment processing that they are faced with. And I ran a casino for 4 years. I coded it and I ran it 24/7, and believe me, I did everything by the book. The CC companies do not give a shit as long as they make money.
It is not really comparable. Steam is not a casino, and it is largely the same platform with or without perfectly legal porn. The presence of a few (not even that popular) adult games does not change the overall demographics that much, or the risk profile. I am not even ready to accept without proof that the risks are higher than with all the other, non-porn shovelware.
Sure, if Steam turned into an adult-only platform, then the risk profile could change significantly. But that is not what happened.
Also, as many people pointed out, Steam really does not incentive customers to ask for chargebacks. All the available information points to Valve managing its platform quite well for everyone involved.
1. Thank you for the first hand experience post.
2. I think the argument being made is that the credit card companies are not actually experiencing higher risk (from Steam). Not that they have any qualms about putting a business into a “high risk” classification.
In this case, I suppose the argument is that Steam is a large enough entity that they should be able to “self-insure”. If the US had a relatively open way to become a payment processor, the free market would take care of this. Unfortunately that isn’t the case and also is very unlikely to change.
> that's how it works. On Steam specifically? But nothing you said shows proves that.
Valve already has a very generous refund policy and a chargeback would likely result in your account being banned.
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?
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.
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?
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).
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.
That would be a nice solution.
That's the problem though. The risk means the market for those riskier credit transactions is literally categorically not a great market. You think JP Morgan gives a shit about Japanese titty games? Hah. No. They care that these games get charged back way more often.
If there is a market opportunity, it's probably in a processor for debit-based transactions that are harder to reverse. But then that makes fraud harder to combat, and one of the reasons everyone loves credit cards so much is because consumers are far more confident to buy from random shops if they know they can always get their money back if the shop scams them.
So - this whole system's lucratively is entirely predicated on easy credit and low risk meaning low fees. Anyone who wants to play in the mud that's leftover by these companies taking the good business are inherently playing a low margin risky game.
I wouldn't scoff at the leftovers. You're talking about maybe a trillion dollar industry that struggles to find payment solutions. This is why I gave up on credit card processing for my startup casino in 2010 and just went to taking Bitcoin and other crypto. I originally planned to just take Visa. I wasn't looking to skirt the law. Card companies are looking out for themselves, and they don't really even need regulatory capture to shaft anyone running a business that the public could consider shady or immoral. There's plenty of demand out there, and in my opinion they're leaving money on the table. But their business model makes it difficult to take on the risk, especially in the case of something like Valve where they can't pick each transaction apart and evaluate the risk separately. So yeah... a globally accepted porn and gambling card? That would be a home run if the bills showed up never to someone's spouse, and it won't happen. Using a combination of crypto and higher CC fees to sell the content, though, there's a lot of pent-up demand.
>This is why I gave up on credit card processing for my startup casino in 2010 and just went to taking Bitcoin and other crypto.
And how many customers you lost in 2010 because of that? Probably more than 90%. Even now people are reluctant to use crypto but tbh crypto crowd is so big that you can perhaps succeed in opening crypto only business.
Yes, about 90%. I would have had maybe the 6th or 7th biggest online casino in the world - let's say that my software was about 5th (somewhere between Galewind and Microgaming) - but I ended up being one which catered only to early adopters of cryptocurrency, who were not necessarily gamblers on roulette or blackjack but had nothing better to do with their coins. It was an interesting experience, and it didn't leave me as wealthy as I could have been if the barriers to entering the larger market hadn't already been negotiated between CC companies and governments. That said, at least I'm not in prison like a lot of people who followed and tried to do what I did.
> No. They care that these games get charged back way more often.
I highly doubt that's true. Buying porn games on game platforms is a very different demographic than normal porn/gambling platforms.
With the CFPB under threat, there may be room for payment processors which don’t protect consumers from fraud. (Regulation is only as strong as its enforcement)
Not a wise business model. Enforcement can return at any time if the political winds shift.
Yes, and it's been tried before. LibertyCoin, I think.
Write a Steam knockoff platform that's trustworthy enough for people to download, and load it up with dirty games. Put the premium on the customers if they want to use credit card transactions, otherwise push them towards crypto payments. Maybe you won't be an oligarch, but you'll probably end up with a reasonably sized yacht.
[edit] hell, in a few years if the winds shift you might be DraftKings.
>Write a Steam knockoff platform that's trustworthy enough for people to download, and load it up with dirty games. Put the premium on the customers if they want to use credit card transactions, otherwise push them towards crypto payments.
Easier said than done. It is hard to earn trust....you would probably need to jumpstart the platform with quite a few indie devs so people start trusting the site and using it.
I remember having to redo all the art for a game because Apple's store rejected it. Six months. It would have been more fun with the original art. I'm sure there's many an indie dev in the same position who'd love a gray market for putting up games like that.
Might be a good idea. This is so curious.
The US has a weird fetish with privatizing things that the government should handle, like consumer protection. If there were a reasonably robust infrastructure for this outside of payment processors in the US, there would be far less pressure on porn providers to comply with fucked up morals about porn. What we have here is an instance of late stage capitalism, and half the people are too narrowminded to see how it hurts their freedom.
I'm not sure about that. Late stage capitalism would involve the government bailing out credit card companies if there were fraud. I kind of prefer for them to deal with it themselves. And whether they deal with fraud themselves or the government does, they're going to classify certain types of transactions as riskier than others. My point was that this is probably not a "moral" decision, just a business decision. It would be a lot worse if it were the government mandating it, and worse still if they were mandating it because it conflicted with the moral code of some plurality of voters. That's not the case here, and I'm glad it's not. I wouldn't want the government to control consumer protection to the degree that voters in Texas could decide whether to protect certain consumers or not.
This is not at all what I was talking about and reads like a tangent.
itch.io already serves this purpose no?
I guess so. I haven't spent that much time checking out the darker corners of it. I wonder what their situation is with the credit card companies.
Visa/MC still make a decent amount of money on chargebacks - the fee is $15 or so, of which the platform keeps a big chunk.
I think the biggest issue here is that somewhere down the line we gave payment processors the responsibility of policing for crime and terrorism. Our governments and regulators punish those institutions for "not doing enough" to prevent such things from happening.
You might think I'm defending the multibillion company but here comes the catch: all of this is expensive so when you are doing something funky even though not illegal they just cut you out. You are a small dev or merchant and it's not worth running a whole monitoring apparatus over your activities.
Then we get into this situation where borderline cartel activity like this happens and we have a sort of shadow government enacting their own regulations. This raises some eyebrows dont you think? It will probably continue until governments realize this is happening.
> we gave payment processors the responsibility of policing for crime and terrorism
Mirrors what Marc Andreessen said on Lex's podcast.
The problem isn’t just regulatory overreach, it’s delegated enforcement w/out accountability.
Financial institutions are now playing judge and jury, not because they want to, but because the cost of scrutiny or punishment is too high.
It’s soft censorship by infrastructure...
The responsibility ended up with payment processors and other financial institutions because otherwise they would be forced to give access to all their customer / transaction data to governments and law enforcement.
I really wish we had a push for payment neutrality. Financial transactions are infrastructure and infrastructure should be dumb and neutral. Why does everyone have to suffer slow and expensive transfers just to maybe occasionally catch some bad guys (and they're not actually caught, just mildly inconvenienced)? And of course once you're already doing it, there's inevitably overreach, as evidenced by Visa here.
And before someone chimes in about how crypto will solve this: yes, crypto has already solved this for the criminal class. But most of the rest of people still have to suffer all the fincrime policing every time they move money or pay for something.
> and they're not actually caught, just mildly inconvenienced
I read somewhere that criminal organizations and individuals love KYC and AML because they have the resources to go around it and it makes their operations look legit.
As a generalisation it seems sensible that it should be illegal to knowingly handle illegal things and the proceeds of illegal things.
It’s hard to say that it’s ok to profit from someone else’s crime.
If I sell you a bike cheap, no questions asked, then you ought be as culpable as me as you don’t have reasonable doubt that it’s stolen. Etc.
This can be weaponised. The lobbies go after visa and Mastercard etc by giving the company “proof” that same transactions are very illegal, eg leaks or underage or duress etc. This forces them in the position of being complicit which means they have to step back.
Yeah, but there should be a concept of what level of scrutiny is warranted. Pornhub had a legitimate problem in that in permitting user content they made it extremely hard to keep their system from being used for improper purposes (underage, revenge.) But neither would I expect any system to be 100%. Should you have known? If so, you're wrong. Things look reasonable? No fault.
Pornhub issue involved real exploitation of real people. Gaming characters are not real. I would think this is as reasonable as it can be.
The content might be illegal in some countries and thats fair if we can assume the people who pushed for these rules were voted for. No one voted for Visa and Mastercard.
>we gave payment processors the responsibility of policing for crime and terrorism
Maybe is time to do a reboot of the economy, what about everyone goes to the bank and withdraw all their money, and when everybody has his money, we put the money back in the bank? Would be funny to see how banks would react :)
That’s literally impossible. There’s not enough cash in the system for that.
> Some of these games seem completely abhorrent
Why would you consider those abhorrent while games where you can slaughter people, or commit all kinds of crimes like any random GTA, are widely considered normal?
I'll never understand American morals. What's clear is that we need non-US payment processors so that the values of a given culture aren't imposed worldwide.
Say what you want about crypto, but it does solve this problem at least.
Yes, stable-coins do. But if you have a crypto where the entire point seems to be "it should be worth more tomorrow than today", then it is stupid to use it to transact in rather than to hoard.
On the other hand, stable-coins suffer the same problems as visa. They're centralised, and subject to zealous regulations.
> On the other hand, stable-coins suffer the same problems as visa. They're centralised, and subject to zealous regulations.
Not all stablecoins are the same. There exists 2 main categories: Fiat-backed (as initially described), & collateral-backed.
(There also exists hybrid versions, but they're a combination of the 2, and as such will be covered by just mashing the 2 categories together.)
Fiat-backed stablecoins (USDC, USDT) are centralized: Their connection to external cash/bonds requires them to have an accountable name to be attached to.
Collateral-backed stablecoins (GHO, DAI/USDS) don't have to be centralized. A primitive form of this is a stablecoin (S) that can take in any other token as collateral and return $X amount of S stablecoins, up to a limit of (total_token_value * collateral_limit). However, it is known that this structure is inefficient capital-wise, when compared to fiat-backed stablecoins.
If there merely exists anything which is more valuable tomorrow than today, it is also equally "stupid" to have cash instead of whatever that thing is... and like, that isn't even theoretical: you are generally encouraged to hold more random assets than cash (if you are allowed to and if you can handle the volatility, of course).
The reality is that, even if the stocks you own are going to the moon, if you need food or want a television, it isn't at all "stupid" to sell some of your hoard to buy stuff.
> They're centralised, and subject to zealous regulations.
The currency wouldn't have to meet any particular definition of a stablecoin as long as it is inflationary. It could be exactly like Bitcoin but with a different mining algorithm.
I expect my index funds to be worth more tomorrow than today (on average), but still manage to pay for things with USD.
If buying, selling and transacting fees are low enough, I don't see why bitcoin's (to pick one) value changes would matter much.
Well that's the point isn't it? You don't buy an index fund in order to transact in it.
On-ramp has costs, then transaction has costs. And in my country at least, selling crypto (which is what you're doing when you buy something with it) is a taxable transaction. So now I have to keep all my transactions and report them to HMRC each year if I do that.
It's not going to happen. If people wanted to transact in crypto, they'd be doing it by now, it has had more than enough time.
Well, people do transact in crypto, especially in sectors that face censorship from payment processors, like the currently mentioned Japanese porn games.
I pay my VOIP bill in crypto. It's just easier and I usually pay a year or two at a time.
I've had to pay my DNS registration in crypto from time to time too. I don't know why but sometimes the anti-fraud AI at the bank gets triggered by my DNS provider and that's literally the only method I have for paying them.
It doesn't "solve" the problem, it's just not regulated the same way. If governments decided to extend the same regulations to crypto transactions, what recourse would a person have?
The difference is that a government or company can't ban you from using a cryptocurrency. They can only make it more difficult by banning your access to certain exchanges or something similar.
I'm not some crypto evangelist, but as far as I know, crypto at its foundation is a lot less "watertight" in terms of ascertaining who is who. Your government could pass laws to pressure your local money-to-crypto exchange service into complying with whatever regulation is needed. But they can't force the entire network of crpyto transactions to have real names tied to accounts, demand reasons for payment, discriminate based on what's being paid for, etc. So, circumventing payment processors' "grassroots" self-moderation requires finding a way to bypass basically the entire payment pipeline. Circumventing a hypothetical highly-regulated crypto environment just requires finding a way to sneak your money into the system. And there will probably be foreign or grey market services that don't care about what your specific country thinks.
Europeans thought they had finally gotten rid of the Puritans when the Mayflower set sail. But four centuries later their overzealous character still haunts them.
To be fair they were also puritans, they just were a little more open and disliked the church hierarchy.
At least at one time, part of the answer would have been Operation Choke Point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
However, that's clearly not all that's going on -- it doesn't seem like the government is still doing this.
> Why do payment processors do stuff like this? Is there some regulation that requires them to?
Generally no, but they exist in a regulatory morass where it's impossible to do what they do without arguably or perhaps technically being in violation of hundreds of regulations at any given time.
The US government then uses their power to selectively enforce the voluminous mess of bad regulations to coerce parties to undertake actions which it would be flatly illegal for the government to perform directly such as cutting off sexually explicit content from payment rails.
e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
The practice isn't limited to payment processors but they're a particularly good vector given the level of regulation they're subjected to. Choke Point (and Choke point 2) are just specific examples of a general tactic to end run around the public's rights that has been used by the US government for decades. In most cases the abuse isn't so well organized that it has a project name you can point at.
Congress and the whitehouse leaning on social media companies to suppress lawful opinions on covid policy is another example of that kind of abuse that has received some public scrutiny. Most cases, however, go without notice particularly since the ultimate victims of the actions generally have no way to know the cause.
It could be a holdover from Operation Choke Point, an Obama-administration arm-twisting initiative that would subject banks to more regulatory scrutiny and possible disciplinary action if they did business with certain "high-risk businesses" including firearm and pornography sellers. Ostensibly the initiative was ended in 2017, but banks are probably still afraid to be handed the black spot for doing business with the "wrong" sorts of people.
It's not just games.
Payment processors ban many things that are completely legal, even foods and dietary supplements. It's ridiculous. They have too much power.
I have no trouble seeing why a payment processor would want to avoid doing business with dietary supplement companies.
No issues buying Marlboro reds with the credit card of course.
Cigarette purchasers aren’t filing chargebacks when their partner checks the billing history, claiming their card got stolen.
Are dietary supplement purchasers doing so?
Extremely, infamously, yes.
Have you ever returned a pack of cigarettes? They basically do what you expect them to do.
Like I said above, they are banning foods, not companies. Foods that do exactly what the vendors claim they do. Foods that are regulated by he FDA as foods. Foods that are listed in the Codex Alimentarius.
I figured the reason was not wanting to support something harmful to the customer like a fake diet pill. Call me naive for letting that assumption of even a glimmer of empathy affect my guestimation. I should have known it was pure greed all the way down and due to something like this instead.
I would take pure greed over a company imposing its morals on me.
I get the well-founded distrust of dietary supplement companies (the OG snake oil salesmen), but they've started banning kava, a completely legal food.
So... not dietary supplement companies, but a particular food that is completely legal and regulated as a food by the FDA.
You have a business selling food? Are you a bar? A restaurant? Well if you start selling this particular food we don't like, you will be debanked.
It has nothing to do with legality.
I mean I wouldn't do business with them, I think the supplements industry is infrastructure for grifters, quacks, and pyramid schemes to fleece the desperate, but what's the problem for Visa? Is it a brand safety thing? My presumption would be that payment processors are amoral and have no problem processing payments for Consolidated Baby Kickers if it were legal to do so, is that a misconception?
"Not as advertised" chargebacks. That industry is also full of subscription scams (e.g. someone thinks they're ordering a supplement for $5.99, but they're actually getting signed up for $39.99/month...).
> That industry is also full of subscription scams
Visa / MC are the ones who enable subscription scams and benefit from them. They implemented "convinience" option of "updating" your credit card data with replacement card. So even if you cancel and replace card charges continue to pass.
They also totally able to see all the places where your card been tokenised, but they dont push banks to expose this to you.
In Canada at least, you can opt out of having your new card number shared when you replace a card.
Also the products don't work!
I don't think the credit card networks would care about that if it weren't for the risk of chargebacks. Credit card networks have no problem with processing payments for churches!
Right, no, I'm just saying: that drives a lot of chargebacks.
There are or have been rules about which colours a dildo can have.
It definitely sounds like Christian morals being forced on us.
Aside from the moral clamor, if something has a higher likelihood of fraud, there's a direct relationship with the increase of its cost. Both legal fees and labor cost to deal with these claims could add up more than we outsiders may realize. It's very possible that some risk-averse analyst "ran the numbers", and decided this wasn't worth it. I would also speculate that there may be a certain hidden coat of false fraud claims. Certain folks buying something in the moment, then shamefully claiming they didn't after the fact, which in turn could carry the costs associated with processing a new card & number or conversely fighting false claims.
As for the morality angle though, while I definitely agree that these companies' main motivation has to be increasing revenue and profit, and that their only reason for doing anything is cost-driven; you never know what middle-manager who is swayed by what belief is actually making these decisions. So as much as the monolithic goal of the organization is more money, there are still emotional (and financially fallible) people pulling the levers.
The fraud thing explains why they might avoid an entirely adult storefront for it, but for steam? who has their own refund policies and support system that presumably shields the payment processor from charge backs most of the time?
There are also large anti porn lobbying groups applying pressure to the payment processors, so that angle creates costs in a different way.
Steam’s refund policy and support system doesn’t eliminate the possibility of someone buying on steam with their CC and then calling their CC and claiming fraud.
The USA is extremely litigious, rules are decided not by the legislature usually but instead by people suing each other to establish case law, and anyone with a bone to pick could sink you in legal fees and proceedings at a whim. So probably people who don’t like the idea of adult content can use the courts to make payment processors’ lives painful and they decide to just forgo that business.
US courts are too easy to use as a tool of abuse.
This is an oft-repeated misconception. Germany is almost twice as litigious as the US. Sweden and Austria are also more litigious than the US.
> anyone with a bone to pick could sink you in legal fees and proceedings at a whim
This is FUD, not reality. While it’s “possible” for anyone in any country to try to sue, it simply doesn’t happen in the US more often than elsewhere. The relatively high number of US lawsuits are filled with corporate litigation, contract disputes, bankruptcy filings, car accidents, and appeals, among many other things, and not people suing each other for minor grievances.
“Coffee spills, Pokemon class actions, tobacco settlements. American courts have made a name for themselves as a wild lottery and a money machine for lucky few lawyers. At least in part, however, the reputation is unfounded. American courts seem to handle routine contract and tort disputes as well as their peers in other wealthy democracies.
“More generally, Americans do not file an unusually high number of law suits. They do not employ large numbers of judges or lawyers. They do not pay more than people in comparable countries to enforce contracts. And they do not pay unusually high prices for insurance against routine torts.
“Instead, American courts have made the bad name for themselves by mishandling a few peculiar categories of law suits. In this article, we use securities class actions and mass torts to illustrate the phenomenon, but anyone who reads a newspaper could suggest alternatives.
“The implications for reform are straightforward: focus not on the litigation as a whole; focus on the specifically mishandled types of suits.”
http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center/papers/pdf/R...
I can also pull out numbers and statistics that make it sound like the US is more litigous than other nations, like how it spends way more than any country as a fraction of GDP on litigation [1] as well as how litigation is used frivolously to prevent projects by weaponizing environmental regulation like NEPA and CEQA, to prevent the construction of practically anything in the USA.
But all that aside, taking that Harvard law article at face value, there are specifically mishandled types of suits, and those include those that are intended to inflict cost on payments processors to get them to reject customers that otherwise aren't doing anything illegal, but just operate in an industry that those suing don't like.
[1] https://instituteforlegalreform.com/wp-content/uploads/media...
What point are you trying to make now? This has little to do with citizens suing each other, and doesn’t demonstrate that US litigation is either frivolous nor widely abused.
The cost of litigation doesn’t prove the US is more litigious, it only demonstrates litigation is expensive in the US. The fact that Germany is the most litigious and that multiple other countries are more litigious than the US is extremely easy for you to verify.
The Institute for Legal Reform is a group that historically denied climate change, and they are funded by and run entirely in the interests of the US’s largest corporations. Personally, I like clean air and water, and US corporations don’t have a great track record of telling the truth about their impacts on the environment. Forgive me if I don’t readily put a lot of stock in their complaints. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Chamber_of_Comme...
If I remember correct from the hot money podcast https://www.ft.com/content/762e4648-06d7-4abd-8d1e-ccefb74b3... part of the problem for the credit card companies is figuring what are the boundaries of legality. Countries have very different laws. Things like representing homosexuality or age of consent are very different and credit cards feel that it is a risky business because of that.
This makes little sense with even the tiniest amount of probing.
This is a solvable geo regulation issue, solvable like many other geo regulatory issues
Control. People get a kick out of controlling others and stopping them doing things that don't effect them in any way. It's like how being a practising gay was illegal or how using certain drugs still is.
So true. People love meddling into other people's lives, control their actions, etc.
> Is there some regulation that requires them to?
There isn’t. Even worse, there’s no legislation prohibited them from doing so.
Payment processors (eg: Mastercard, Visa) are the ultimate deciders of whether you can sell something online or not, regardless of whether it is legal.
They haven’t just blocked adult content, they’ve also blocked non-profits with which they disagree in the past.
We need much stronger legislation around this. Private entities shouldn’t be capable of deciding that a given organisation can’t charge online. Only institutions which represent the public’s interests should have this level of influence.
This is one of the ways the government can censor people despite the first amendment. It’s absolutely by design. The regulators “express concern” about certain financial activity and then the companies remove it.
this is such small potatoes compared to the results of everything going on right now though
I don't think so, it is death by a thousand cuts which is why we are in such a shitty place right now. Out rights have been attacked on all side for decades, little by little, but all together it is a huge loss.
the problem of Visa and Mastercard being against porn just seems like a such a small cut next to the US President forcing a comedian off the air for making critical remarks
They don't just block porn but many other things according to comments here.
No institutionalized censorship of harmless content is small potatoes.
the other potatoes are really big
This is a long ongoing issue tho and one of the main reasons many European sex stores don't take credit card at all. Visa and master do enforce irrational morals
Just one of the ways the US forces it's weird morals onto the world.
This originated from an Australian-based feminist activist group called "Collective Shout", who put pressure on the payment processors to censor digital content.
They claimed it as their own victory on X this week.
Sexual self-denial always was the driving force behind the western cultural success. You can not have hyper-specialization and rule of law, without some members of society sacrificing a "normal" life.
From the monk in the monastry to Turing hyper-focused on an enigma there is clear line. Its a ugly recipe, but its working, unlike all those other societies out there, who are currently eating themselves. A judge doesn't dress like a priest for no reason.
Sexual caste slavery or anarchy- thats the choices.
> You can not have hyper-specialization and rule of law, without some members of society sacrificing a "normal" life.
Sex freaks hyper specialize in things all the time. Monks and priests also had reputations as horny perverts in Medieval literature. Also, there are plenty of non-Western countries that have been functional. This is such an out of touch, ahistorical take.
> Also, there are plenty of non-Western countries that have been functional.
And there are plenty of western countries that do not work like that, as well.
> Sexual self-denial always was the driving force behind the western cultural success.
It is a feature of a subset of the culture in some countries. It is far less universal as you say.
> You can not have hyper-specialization and rule of law, without some members of society sacrificing a "normal" life.
This really does not follow. How does the existence of laws prevent someone to live a normal life? In a liberal democracy, laws fundamentally guarantee that we can do so, as long as someone’s fundamental individual freedom does not cause unacceptable harm to someone else. In that framework, what we do in private with consenting adults is absolutely nobody’s business. Rule of law does not change this.
> From the monk in the monastry to Turing hyper-focused on an enigma there is clear line.
What line is this? In which way was Turing’s persecution a requirement for him being a genius? How do we benefit from him killing himself instead of leaving him be and make other contributions to our intellectual development?
> It’s an ugly recipe, but it’s working, unlike all those other societies out there, who are currently eating themselves.
It is not. What you are advocating is a theocracy and there are many examples in History and around the world that show that it is a terrible idea.
> A judge doesn't dress like a priest for no reason.
All I can say is LOL. Ceremonial clothing is more nuanced than that.
> Sexual caste slavery or anarchy- thats the choices.
The fact that you only see these possibilities says a lot more about you than the way human beings work.
It's fun when posters inadvertently reveal far more about themselves than whatever they are discussing, such as "Western cultural success" as here.
> Turing hyper-focused on an enigma
I don't know if he had major active relationships specifically while working on Enigma (other than the short engagement to Joan Clarke in 1941), but Turing famously did have sexual relationships since the discovery of one eventually led to criminal prosecution of both him and his partner, his chemical castration and eventually possibly suicide.
Paul Erdős might be a better example, though I don't think he was deliberately self-denying and more just a huge oddball. Newton also never showed much interest, apparently, though an engagement was rumoured.
Many of the biggest and best-known brains in maths, engineering, physics and computing did marry: as a quick random survey: Euler, Chandrasekhar, Faraday, Maxwell, Watt, Babbage, Einstein, Dijkstra, Wiles, Hopper, Hamilton, Knuth, even Ramanujan and the Woz (4 times, even).
This BTW is 100% the reason why americans still perform circumcison and still radically cling to it.
Men must have their sexuality attacked and stymed from the very beginning of birth, or else they will waste their brain power on promiscuity. That's the only thinking anyway that explains why over half this country still circumcises.
Kant and I think Newton were famously virgins and a whole lot of moral crusaders in this world get extremely angry at the idea that people in this world have enjoyable sexual relations. A lot of people want a lot more sexual frustration to exist in this world, as it's good for capitalist exploitation.
That's absolutely not the reason. It started out that way, sure, but it's not why it's done now.
It's done now out of basic tradition (father is circumcised, so son is too), conformity (his peers are all circumcised, we don't want him made fun of), doctor advice (fewer infections, easier to keep clean), and plain old cultural inertia. It's slowly dying out but I expect it to stick around another several decades.
Get this - they power the payments infrastructure for OnlyFans, which to many people is arguably more degenerate than a few adult-themed games.
People can also buy TV shows and movies in which their content is far more grusome and disturbing than the video-games targeted by the activist groups putting pressure on payment processors.
I noticed someone else posted a list of other groups, but another one is called "Collective Shout", who censors their own ads because their subject matter is considered harmful.
I suspect Valve is blaming the credit card companies for something they really wanted for themselves. Steam is a big store open to everyone and you’re going to scare away a big chunk of seniors, Christians, etc with stuff like incest, ageplay, and rape just so that a small minority uses you instead of…itch.io? Better to keep the big safe names like Being a Dik and Eternum on Steam and flush the rest so that you can have the best of both worlds.
I think that for better or worse Valve is genuinely committed to lassies faire moderation, they have historically been very hesitant to remove really heinous games. I don't think they're using this as cover.
That changed with Hatred in 2015. There have been a number of them since. It seems that anything that gives Valve bad press is on its shit list, even if the premise theme has been done before by a bigger or more well-known company stateside. If the upcoming Grand Theft Auto game has full frontal nudity and realistically depicted sex scenes, I doubt Valve would give it a second look.
That was ten years ago, there have been tons of really objectionable games on Steam in recent years. Eg I just checked and the game where you roleplay as Kyle Rittenhouse shooting protestors is still on Steam.
Per Wikipedia:
> [Hatred] was shortly removed by Valve from their Steam Greenlight service due to its extremely violent content but was later brought back with a personal apology from [Valve's co-founder] Gabe Newell.
The fact that it was removed at all was a sea-change from Valve's previous stance. Temporary or not, it set a precedent for other removals. For example, Valve had unceremoniously prevented the publication of Super Seducer 3 and retroactively de-published its prequels as a result of a campaign launched by a group of British feminists. (https://happymag.tv/super-seducer-3-steam/)
Valve made the conscious choice to allow porn games in the first place, they knew what they were getting into imo
> I suspect
Based upon what evidence?
"Completely abhorrent" is subjective. If you want it banned, show me the victims that would be saved. Otherwise, what happens behind closed doors is none of our business.
And the legality of them--we still have obscenity statutes on the books. Garbage as far as I'm concerned, but they're still there.
The US government has deputized payment processors to impose restrictions on commerce when it suits them.
How can you not see the pattern yet? They've been putting the industry into deliberate managed decline for the last 2 years. Simply because it made people happy and that is a threat to the valueless deeducated world that they are trying to impose.
I'm more curious why PCGamer did not publish the name of the games that were removed. There are some incredibly perverse titles in there and if they are advocating to normalize this kind of content, they should have no shame doing so.
It’s funny that you read it as calling for normalization. That’s actually never mention. It’s all in your head.
Jesus christ it’s not advocating for its normalization, it’s the idea that payment processors aren’t the arbiters of societies morals. You want to ban some weird porn game you use the government.
Another factor is that credit providers (i.e. banks) are increasingly using customer transaction data to assess customer behaviour as part of its risk scoring.
If a customer is regularly purchasing adult material that would be definitely be a red flag.
Red flag for what?
A regular purchaser of adult entertainment almost certainly has enough cash flow to pay their bills. And they'll have a hard time claiming it's not them when it matches their previous activity. Having an interest in sex doesn't in the slightest suggest a person is bad--if anything, the apparent lack of interest would be more worrisome. (Not that purchase history can be used to discern this.) Some of the ones who don't are asexuals, but some are those who are repressing their sexuality--and that's more likely to show up in unacceptable ways.
A first time purchaser of adult entertainment is another matter--that's going to have a lot of spouse-found-out chargebacks.
A red flag of what?
Defaulting on their credit card bill. Or the account ends up having been started by an identity fraudster. Which also ends in default.
That seems backward. The people I’ve known that spend a lot of money on adult entertainment are exactly the group that pays their bills.
This. I dont know who do you need to be in order to pay for the porn that you can pirate for free. In case of games or music or movies there is collecting and convinience, but porn is pretty much opposite.
But at the same time chance of "oops it's not mine" charbacks likely much higher compared to other spending.
Then why would they want to stop getting these red flags?
The Thielesque climate in the US will grow even more of those scams while simultaneously destroying the justice apparatus.
Cyberpunk is coming for us.
I think they'd rather overcorrect than risk reputational damage
See Bill Ackman and his crusade against PornHub.
Who runs Mastercard, are they linked to some American prudes?
Look. Ignore the content. Why the fuck do we allow credit card companies have a say in how we spend our money?
Fraud? Abuse? Fine, let me put cash onto a card and if that card gets stolen, oh well, my loss. Mastercard should have no say in what what speech is considered acceptable outside of their offices. We don't care what execs at a water company think? Why do we care about the people at Mastercard?
It's because Visa got sued, lost, and it was found out they knowingly processed payments for illegal adult content, so they basically avoid the sector entirely now. Economist had an article about it maybe two years ago and came to much the same conclusion you did. IIRC, the failure in their mind was government not stepping in to make a law so things are less ambiguous in the future. Now payment processing cos get to gate keep people's speech, which means everything is basically a civil suit away from getting blacklisted.
I wonder what are the odds of Visa being succesfully sued for processing payments to such a huge brand like Steam.
Steam has its virtual wallet and marketplace as well, so Visa is twice removed from where the money will actually go once it enters Steam ecosystem.
Even as an abundance of caution, this doesn’t make sense to me.
> It's because Visa got sued, lost, and it was found out they knowingly processed payments for illegal adult content
Got any source for that? What they got sued for? Aiding human trafficking?
It's not quite that specific, but close enough:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/01/business/dealbook/pornhub...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/08/california-court...
>This week, US District Judge Cormac Carney of the US District Court of the Central District of California decided that there's reason to believe that Visa knowingly processed payments that allowed MindGeek to monetize "a substantial amount of child porn." To decide, the court wants to know much more about Visa's involvement, calling for more evidence of legal harms caused during a jurisdictional discovery process extended through December 30, 2022.
According to Court Listener, the case is still ongoing - https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/59992265/serena-fleites...
Seems rather weird that Visa out of all the parties involved got hit by this, that's like suing the national bank for printing cash currency that gets used in illegal ways? Or suing the pavement for allowing a heist getaway car to drive away. Or the gas station where they last filled it up.
> Why the fuck do we allow credit card companies have a say in how we spend our money?
Because sadly 80% of people are sheep. Same reason we allow a company to decide what we can and cannot install on our smartphones.
No, don’t follow the underdog fallacy. What are you doing against it? How are you different from the other sheep? Merely complaining doesn’t make you any better.
My GNU/Linux phone (Librem 5) doesn't restrict what I can install on it.
youre allowed to be critical of things while still using said things. i have 8 million things going on in my life and the hill i die on isnt going to be the working conditions of humans that make iphones
Sure you are, but don’t call others out for being complacent then.
Why not? Being hypocritical doesn't mean you're wrong...
When I buy an iPhone I am dealing with Apple. I know what I am buying and what I can or cannot do with the device. And if I am not happy there are alternatives.
When I buy stuff on Steam I am in no way making a contract with Visa. When Visa strong arms Valve to delist games I lose even if I never had any relation with Visa ever.
It really is not comparable.
Following your argument ... then don't choose Steam, there are plenty of alternatives! /s
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Traitor...
No, you misread. I have a commercial relation with Steam and I am happy for them to chose what game they sell and what game they don’t (and as a matter of fact I buy more games on gog than on Steam). I don’t have a relation with Visa and I object to them exercising any control over what I can or cannot buy.
When I buy an Apple phone, it is my phone and Apple should not be able to exercise any control over who I do business with on said phone.
However, I get the eerie feeling that I didn't buy a product even though I paid for it and I subscribed to some service instead.
Again, that is not the point I am making. I am not even necessarily disagreeing with you on that point. I am merely pointing out that I am perfectly able to make a rational compromise and that it does not mean that I accept a random company interfering with my life. If you have something to say on that, fine. Otherwise, what is the point?
There aren't, because all of them have no choice but to use Visa, Mastercard, etc. The monopoly isn't Steam, it's Visa et al.
Because they are on the hook for fraudulent transactions, until they get to merchant to refund. Otherwise they wouldn't care.
Which is why some merchants get effectively blacklisted if they have too many fraudulent transactions
No, I get it. Give me a "Freedom Card" or whatever that generates a one-time use number/cvv combo, backed by cash, that I'm fully responsible for. If I give a guy on the corner $5 cash and he walks off with it, that's between me and him. We don't need to resort to crypto. I don't care if there's a paper trail, I don't need to be anonymous. I just don't want money people to have any say in how people choose to spend their money.
If you have a central authority which is keeping track of the ledger, they always have the ability to disallow any given transaction at their discretion or at the behest of some more powerful organization, e.g governments
This is one of the problems that crypto was attempting to solve (if implemented properly and used correctly). There is a third party(the "network"), but its decentralized and at least for "proper" networks, no one organization has a controlling interest in the network
Now any given miner/producer does not necessarily have to accept any random transaction. In practice however, for mature networks such as Bitcoin there are so many different miners/producers, its unlikely they would all conspire to disallow certain accounts or types of transactions.
Now this is certainly possible for a crypto exchanges and therein lies the rub with cryptos - if you want to get the cryptocoin, you generally have to buy it with good old fashioned hard currency. Conversely if you want to convert the cryptocoin back into hard currency. And exchanges nowadays are facing increasing regulations from governments. Which means practically you are still largely under the thumb of those powerful organizations without some real gymnastics involved, such as trading crypto for cash with a real person in a back alley somewhere, or vice versa
Thats not exactly a credit card at that point. And with a credit card, you're explicitly not spending your money.
Though i agree with the idea of a debit card that doesn't allow chargebacks, but without so many annoying restrictions.
> Thats not exactly a credit card at that point. And with a credit card, you're explicitly not spending your money.
That point is not the problem though. They could just pressure Valve to refuse credit cards for all or some games. The financial aspect simply does not make sense, regardless of how you look at it (and many people had different takes in this thread).
The only angles that make sense are an ideological crusade and the risk of being sued. The first is unacceptable and the second is an utter failure on the part of the legal system.
Yeah, a "Freedom Card". Our money, they move it, no moralizing. We don't need crypto to fix this, just common sense legislation.
No company or individual should be denied the right to receive funds digitally without due process.
Companies should be free to transact with or exclude anyone, but there should be neutral infrastructure that facilitates the flow of money, with multiple players each with differing rules and risk profiles setup to help people and companies access it.
No one financial institution should be able to dictate the speech allowed on a platform.
What's the status of FedNow?
You think that common sense legislation is a more realistic solution than crypto?
You can never rely on governments or corporations to have reasonable policies. Any payment system that is centrally controlled will inevitably be corrupted.
That's really at this point that's back to where I am with crypto. Through all the speculation and cruft, there is still a shot at owning our own payments, or rather no one owning them.
The payment networks have power, and if you can twist the arm of the gatekeepers, people subvert that power.
The only thing I don't know about these days is with the stablecoins, how do you avoid the government sinking their claws into you if you intrinsically (esp. if successful) have to hold that much in cash or short-term instruments? Or you have something like tether, which leaving aside anything else, you can definitely say is comically opaque for an entity that is nominally running $160B.
The problem that seems to be being missed here is that while fraud is one reason Visa has say over what they accept, the much much much bigger issue is ATF, Money laundering and Sanctions.
Cards like the Freedom card will never fly with either the Networks or the Issuing Banks as these kinds of payment instruments are immediately used to wash illicit funds.
Visa's stance with Steam is bollocks, and it is another example of the monopoly they hold over payment processing. They shouldn't have the ability to impact a legit merchants catalogue.
But the idea that we can have a Freedom card also doesn't checkout. The less known about what the money is spent on the higher the risk. And cost of complying with Suspicious Activity Reports regulations is really high (as the costs of you breach the requirements), so any attempts to create / run this kind of thing often don't stack up.
You can still look for suspicious activity without having any leverage over what legitimate merchants offer.
> just common sense legislation.
I think you underestimate just how much governments like the ability to control financial transactions within their borders, and in some cases (cough US) outside of it
The card networks are never on the hook for fraudulent transactions (nor for any other type of chargeback for that matter). If anything, it's the merchant's payment service provider/card acquirer that absorbs the loss if the merchant can't pay.
True until the acquiring (merchant side) bank is insolvent. Then the network pays. Source: worked at Visa for years.
It's why it's so hard to become an acquiring bank on the network.
True – I was debating whether I should mention that edge case :)
I think the general idea is that acquiring banks are hopefully large enough to absorb any single merchant insolvency, but there are obviously limits to that. Airlines and event tickets are notorious example of that, since they usually take payment weeks or months ahead of providing the underlying service but want to get paid immediately.
that wouldn't apply in this case, because the vendor, Valve, would be on the hook for fraudulent purchases and they would definitely have the deep pockets to pay out. The cc companies only have to worry about the small, fly by night companies that might disappear after a bunch of fraud.
No they aren't. Fraudulent card not present transactions are fully on the backs of merchants. The networks and banks don't lose a dime of them. In fact, they make more money now, charging additional fees when disputes are filed, and additional fees when they are challenged.
Well your comment tells us why-- as is the law in the US is that credit card companies are almost entirely responsible for fraud. It's part of why they and their dubiously usurious practices are allowed to exist in the US at all.
If it were the case that the payment rail censorship were limited just to cases where there was an obvious elevated fraud risk-- then that would be the whole of the story. -- and there would be an obvious answer: use a payment mechanism where the fraud responsibility is entirely on the user, such as Bitcoin.
But their censorship exists where no such elevated fraud risk exists too, due to abusive conduct by the government to indirectly suppress activity that would be plainly unlawful for them to directly suppress. And the governments out of control abuse of its regulatory power is not limited to fraud-responsible payment rails, and get applied just as or even more extensively on Bitcoin payment processors.
No, I get it. Give me a "Freedom Card" or whatever that generates a one-time use number/cvv combo, backed by cash, that I'm fully responsible for. If I give a guy on the corner $5 cash and he walks off with it, that's between me and him.
Well, credit is not really "your money". The danger of course is if this gets extended to debit cards and they become the only option (ie. no cash). Every time you use your card you are giving them the power to do this.
> credit is not really "your money"
Unless it's a prepaid credit card or a debit card, both of which are serviced by MC and Visa and fairly common in Europe.
Yes, I mentioned debit cards in the second of the three sentences in my comment.
It's an important distinction to make. Credit is very much not something you should feel entitled to and issuer can and should be selective about who and what they issue credit for. Or course the credit industry itself is disgusting, but that's another issue (this was covered almost 20 years ago in a documentary Maxed Out).
This shouldn't be conflated with payments in general which is (imo) a much bigger problem. You should be entitled to spend the money you earn on exactly what you want, and to do it anonymously.
You can fight back: don't spend on credit and refuse to use a card when cash would suffice. We are losing, though. For stuff like Steam you have no other option (as far as I know).
Nobody voted for them, there's no accountability, and yet here we are
Fuck that. Why do we need credit card processors AT ALL? For that matter, why are debit cards tied to credit card networks? Unless and until people realize that these things are useless outmoded and antiquated, it's a waste of time trying to improve them. Do you want a faster horse, or the automobile?
Payment processors(Visa, Master) , payment gateways(Stripe, Paypal...) and payment hosts (Patreon, Gumroad...) are a huge pain to deal with even when you're selling something which is legal and risk free just because their algorithm or employees are often overcautious, anything out of mundane they'll ban first and then ask questions(if you're lucky).
I have a FOSS project called Open Payment Host[1] which removes the payment hosts from the equation and removes the technical hassle of integrating multiple payment gateways but it does not solve the pain of having to deal with the payment gateways and by extension payment processors and banks.
My long term plan is to integrate direct banking API where ever it's available.
Is there any bank from any country which provides direct banking API to end customers for plain savings bank account (I've seen some provide for current accounts).
[1] https://github.com/abishekmuthian/open-payment-host
I built a cool tool the last week's. I spent more time on evaluating payment processor than the code itself.
I have ~5 projects in my shelf I did never launch because I didn't find a payment solution.
Got instantly banned with all of them, had to write them an email wait for days to get some response.
I usually just use crypto whenever it makes sense. And still have a hard time to believe that I can move as much as crypto as I want but a single payment from a Dubai account can get my bank account frozen for days ...
This is what i settled on as well. I maintain a side project that is completely legal and above board but i refuse to go through the nonsense i was forced to go through the last time i had to integrate with a credit card payment gateway (another side project that went belly up).
If someone wants to buy something from me badly enough, they'll figure out how to get some bitcoin.
I don't have the time and energy to deal with their arbitrary bullshit anymore.
Exactly. Same boat here, fully legal normal business. My main issue is literally having customers from middle east. I've had bank accounts frozen, PayPal reverting my business account to personal without notice, fees, crazy amount of fees everywhere ... So much pain for no benefit compared to crypto.
Have you looked in to "PSD2 and Open Banking regulation in Europe" ?
I haven't, I will definitely explore it. Quick read on it seems very promising.
Have you or anyone here any API in EU for getting payments directly to your bank account? I have started a discussion on this on OPH[1], I welcome any information on direct banking API in Europe in that discussion.
[1] https://github.com/abishekmuthian/open-payment-host/discussi...
Lunar Bank.
I don’t have any experience integrating to their API myself but Lunar is a relatively new Danish (so EU) 100% digital bank. See https://www.lunar.app/en/personal/what-is-lunar
They have an Open API: https://developer.openbanking.prod.lunar.app/home
Edit: “new” in finance terms - started 2015.
This is great! Thank you.
If I understood it correctly, Open Payment Host can register as a TPP and offer direct banking to its users. But a customer of lunar bank can't access the API directly?
It sounds like you're about to reinvent Sofort, a (now defunct, or sold off at least) payment system that first worked on reverse engineered online banking and then PSD2 to mutually verify direct bank transfers.
Thanks for the information, Seems like Klarna the company which acquired Sofort and shut it down offers a similar service called "pay in full".
I use Ko-fi but 95% of the fees go to Stripe and their processors (Visa etc).
The article calls out “certain adult games” which is vague. It is interesting to note that most of the delisted games were themed specifically around incest.
https://bsky.app/profile/steamdb.info/post/3lu32vdlsmg27
Wondering if this will be a slippery slope towards pulling more anodyne stuff.
> The article calls out “certain adult games” which is vague.
A Quick Look at the list has me wishing I hadn’t thought to look at the list.
I suspect the vague “certain adult games” was chosen because it makes it sound more controversial. If the headline was “Valve removed incest-themed games under pressure” there would be a lesser reaction.
Why? Incest is more objectionable than murder or rape?
Collective Shout, the group behind this petition, has previously gone after more mainstream games, like Detroit Becomes Human, for spurious reasons. I have no doubt they'll use this win and mealy-mouthed language to push for more censorship.
Specifically incest, rape, and child abuse-themed games.
Ah, like a video game version of "Game of Thrones"? None of the payment processors had any issues with taking money for that series. And that was live action.
Yep, those games were exactly the same thing as Game of Thrones.
I mean by the content they were yeah. Precisely the problem with rules declaring what content is and isn’t acceptable.
Exactly. By content, here is a book on Amazon[1] where the author openly tells stories of rape and incest and somehow it's all Ok. Pretty much the same as Game of Thrones and those Steam games.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Body-Keeps-Score-Healing-Trauma/dp/01...
Seems like we’re in agreement - I read your prior comment differently
You are not in agreement. The person you are replying to is being sarcastic. They feel that a HBO produced tv show with incest is art that needs to be protected while an indie dev game with incest is trash that needs to be censored.
The fact of the matter is you will find more people willing to publicly bat for GOT than you will find people willing to bat for an "indie incest non-con game". And it's not like GOT has not received criticism for its content or that people haven't tried.
The movements here (the pro-censorship movement & the anti-sexuality movement) are mainly driven by religious beliefs, and as such, it comes as no surprise that they do not want to apply censorship in a fair or even logically consistent way; they merely want to ban things they personally do not like.
As I pointed out earlier, it's also valid that they are savvy enough to pick their battles and divide and conquer - you can't take down a critical mainstream success like GOT or GTA, but you can go after fringe games with content most people would be uncomfortable publicly defending.
The very same group did try to take down GTA V : https://www.collectiveshout.org/prostitution_survivors_call_...
Sure, but GTA is still on steam.
Sure, I can see that being part of it (I didn't see this implication in your earlier post)
Ah sorry I meant elsewhere in the thread
Games/hentai about these topics are not illegal, even if they are in bad taste.
And I’m willing to bet some content removed does not fall in these categories
That’s exactly the point: getting Valve to remove illegal content would not have caused any headlines. These themes go against common moral standards and so Visa et al don’t want to be seen selling them.
You can find the list of removed titles if you go looking for it. Feel free to point out which ones you think are collateral damage. I’m not looking at that list with my eyeballs though. I need them for later.
In the US they are criminally illegal https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1466A
You crossed two categories together, and made a new category I didn’t say: “Depictions of sexual assault of children”
Are you claiming that the content removed was encroaching on this law?
Visa and Mastercard generally don't like anything with incest, rape, and/or underage participants.
But they are strangely okay with murder.
It's kind of fucked up that we are almost used to murder in various media (movies, games, etc.), meanwhile even slightly explicit sex is much more taboo. I do vaguely understand why this is (religious beliefs that formed our understanding of what is acceptable and what-not), but I am still surprised that this is how it is even with the rise of Atheism in recent decades.
That's american values for you.
Unless it's a TV show depicting it with live action. Then it's fine.
Yes, I don't know if selling those games is legal or not.
Thus I can imagine that they don't want to become criminally responsible if that's illegal.
Nekopara and Sabbat of the Witch are safe... for now.
Hopefully they don't know about the little-sister route in Making Lovers.
Payment processors should be regulated like utilities. Permissionless and agnostic to anything you do.
So funny how people think this is a moral crusade. You should read articles around the tech stack for payment processing at any adult site. People try to do chargebacks all of the time on these kind of services. "Hunny what is this transaction on our account for BigBussomsCom?" .. "Oh must be some kind of fraud" "then let's call the bank and straighten it out". It's variations of this, over and over that lead to the high chargeback rates. I seem to recall that chargebacks are an order of magnitude higher for adult-oriented transactions. Unless you have a system of countering this with a team devoted to it, you will have a lot of successful chargebacks. I doubt Valve has the specialized team needed to deal with the amount of chargebacks, this the CC companies trying to avoid the headache.
It's so funny that people think it's about chargeback.
If you buy smut game on Steam, your bank statement won't show the name of the game. It looks exactly like any other transaction you make on Steam.
> "Hunny what is this transaction on our account for BigBussomsCom?" .. "Oh must be some kind of fraud" "then let's call the bank and straighten it out"
This is a scenario that literally can't happen in the Steam case. It could happen with Pornhub but not with Steam.
And Steam has a very generous refund policy. If your playtime is less than 2hr you can ask for a refund with a few mouse clicks. No phone call or email needed. Actually in my experience if your playtime is just over 2hr for a bit they'll still refund you.
If you chargeback you can get your whole steam account suspended.
To add: AFAIK most adult content websites bill under a different, innocuous name as well. You don't get a charge on your credit card from BigBussomsCom, you get a charge from SuperCard or something like that. (uh... I know because of a friend...)
Yeah. Never dealt with an adult content website, but in my admittedly limited experience adult products always come in innocent packaging and generally bill under innocuous names.
If what you said were true then they would ban all porn and not just rape/incest/bestiality porn. They're banning specific genres of porn which makes it an obvious morality issue.
I can't back this up with facts but the chargeback myth smells of an old astroturfing campaign to justify the moral policing on porn in general. But nowadays porn is more commonly accepted so they're shifting to more specific genres.
The new myth seems to be that payment processors can he held legally liable for facilitating illegal transactions, but the only lawsuits vs payment processors I can find is about child pornography, which has always been banned on steam.
When added that there was an advocacy group that sent an open letter to payment processors a week ago for this same exact issue[1], then the chargeback excuse has zero merit.
So yeah, it's 100% a moral crusade. Which side you sit on the crusade it up to you.
[1] https://www.collectiveshout.org/open-letter-to-payment-proce...
You actually believe this yourself?
Just came here to ask. Is it a norm to not have any personal fund cache while in a relationship? I would not like anyone, spouse included, to question me about my purchases of (redacted), nor would I want to question them on purchases of the newest (redacted) or whatnot. What's the purpose?
It is sad that in 2025 this needs to be repeated: fiction is not real.
This statement imply that:
* Simulated violence is not violence.
* Simulated sex is not sex.
* Simulated sorcery is not sorcery
Violence is still considered ok in games, last time I checked.
Which is possibly because violence is not as awkward to watch with your family as sex is.
Violence has no religious morality baggage - religions were extremely violent. Sex, however, has all the baggage from all the angles. Even if we aren't religious, it doesn't matter, religion still dictates huge chunks of our lives and our mindsets. It has thousands of years of inertia.
Abrahamic religion is prudish about sex none of the pagan or Buddhism is prudish.
Buddhism literally teaches celibacy. Mostly for monks but if you get serious about your practice the advice is always to become celibate in order to make progress. It makes sense as you're trying to remove your desires.
Buddhism teaches moderation in what you do, of course you can interpret it as removal of desire If you let said desire be above you.
i think peoppe would probably have much better sex in general if it wasnt so taboo, and so people could get outside feedback on how theyre doing
I could do without Jeff from accounting showing off his latest proud performance with the wife to the coworkers like it's his golf swing.
Something tells me Jeff from accounting can still freely show photos of him "hunting" with some dead wild animals and few will consider it gross.
Sure, but simulation does give you exposure. And too much exposure (from the simulations going mainstream) begets normalization, something you definitely do NOT want with content like that. We are already suffering enough from pop media making many kinds of abhorrent behavior mainstream.
And yet it is possible to make simulations extreme enough I would not opposed to banning them. There are some things that should not be normalized in society.
It shouldn’t be payment processors doing it unilaterally, I’ll grant that. But I’m not (and I’m sure a great many more of a silent majority) wholly opposed to the outcome.
> There are some things that should not be normalized in society.
That attitude has recently become normalized, and I find it Concerning(TM).
Yeah, who gets to decide whats too far?
There's a similar issue with free speech - the moment you ban certain speech the door to banning your political opposition opens.
> There's a similar issue with free speech - the moment you ban certain speech the door to banning your political opposition opens.
There is TONS of speech that is banned, even in America. There isn't a single place on the planet that has no limits on speech.
> Yeah, who gets to decide whats too far?
The ruling ethnic group, of course, as is tradition.
From what I can tell, only one country in the world has free speech. Actual free speech. USA.
I don't know what your definition of "actual" free speech is but there are certainly limits to free speech even in the US[0].
And those are just explicit limits. Try supporting Palestine on a college campus or mentioning women or gay people in any government funded scientific publication, or finding a book portraying pro-LGBT content in a library or a school curriculum that portrays slavery in a way that "makes white people feel victimized" in the South.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
The limits to speech (in USA) depends (roughly) on if it's intended to incite imminent lawless action and is likely to do so.
Actual speech is communicating ideas or opinions, even distasteful or unpopular ones. The fact that university morons throw a riot if anyone disagrees with them (many such cases), does not affect your right to do so.
Denmark passed a law in 2023 that makes public burning, tearing, stepping on, or defiling holy texts illegal. It's informally called the Quran Law, because everyone knows who doesn't tolerate any criticism of their religion at all. This is one of many limits on speech in Denmark. In my view, speech is either free or it isn't, hence my argument that only USA has free speech.
thats a historical view, but not the most useful now that the second american revolution has happened.
things that lightly annoyed the president is now the decider between legal and illegal speech in the US, and the punishment is death, because nothing the president does that could be part of their regular responsibilities like talking to secret service assasins, can be considered in court proceedings.
Are the assassins in the room with us right now?
Supporting Palestine would get you deported to El Salvador (or worse) :)
Isn't freedom of speech just "you're allowed to say whatever you want", and not "you're entitled to the use of taxpayer dollars to help distribute your message" or "you're entitled to have the government force children to read your message"?
having a green card or visa stripped because you said something is not "having the government force children to read your message"
Thanks for this mate, REALLY needed this laugh on this fine end-of-grinding-workweek… Fantastic!!
Its dying fast. The Late Show was just cancelled because it was a massive thorn to the POTUS.
I love a good “POTUS” conspiracy as much as the next guy but The Late Show cancelation is a simple money game, the show was bleeeding money. If the show was profitable the chance of it being cancelled are same as me dating Beyonce
Technically yes, but the money game was CBS losing a massive lawsuit to POTUS.
I would agree with this if this was factual, the money cbs paid via 60 minutes nonsense is same if you were fined a dime for something you did today. so not “massive” but whatever is the exact opposite of massive
The show itself was losing viewership cause who the F watches late night TV these days?
is said late night TV actually expensive though? they have a payong audience, and the whole thing is an ad for whoever is selling a book or movie release.
whats gonna replace that slot that people are gonna watch? a blank screen?
if you have a car that is a money pit you and your family keep bleeding money on to make repairs, would you keep making repairs or get another car? all of TV is a simple money game, shows get canceled, new ones spruce up, they get canceled, some are super successful but run their course, others stink from the get-go. what is going to replace the late show? not sure but whatever it does it better make money for cbs or the same faith awaits it
Interesting, do you have a source for that claim? Mallen Baker [1] says it was gaining viewers.
[1]: https://youtu.be/KMLZAE4okWs
It's both. A merger is happening in two weeks and this helps. It was going off of the air in a year or two anyways. Easy way to give Trump a win.
That’s the tricky bit.
Recently? Such a sentiment has existed since the dawn of human society.
Recently? Hasn't society always topics they thought shouldn't be normalized?
You should make a petition. Maybe we can exclude pro-exclusion websites from payment processors.
This is not okay, and we need to take a strong moral stance here. Some views should not be acceptable in a society.
Personally, I won't miss these games either, but it just seems like such a slippery slope to normalize achieving societal/political goals through exerting pressure on infrastructure companies instead of through democratic means.
I totally support this type of pressure being exerted on companies involved in editorializing and providing an audience (e.g. I don't think Valve should be required by law to carry any form of content, just like a publisher can't be forced to print any content it doesn't agree with). But infrastructure, due to being both fundamental to doing business and generally living in a society and very often being at least regionally monopolistic in nature, should be open to anybody that's acting within the law.
And conversely, if something seems ethically or morally unacceptable to a rule-based society, what ought to change is the law.
That's all assuming a functioning democratic and political process, of course, but it generally seems to be possible even in the US, with its strong protections of speech, to limit certain types of speech under obscenity laws, so I don't really get the desire to outsource this inherently political process to private corporations.
> ethically or morally unacceptable
What does that mean?
For example if something can be shown to cause actual harm to innocent individuals, i find it morally unacceptable.
But some people will tell you anything banned by their favorite fairytale or their upbringing is morally unacceptable.
That's a complicated question I'd like to see settled via legislation and in courts interpreting (and sometimes overturning) these laws rather than in a private corporation's compliance and/or PR department.
It definitely should not be determined by corporations because they not elected and almost untouchable by the individuals affected.
The state is a less bad alternative but bad (unintentionally harmful) and malicious (intentionally harmful) decisions are generally not punished either.
When people set rules which affect others, they should also be held accountable.
And in general, rules limiting a person's behavior should only exist when that behavior can be _proven_ to be harmful.
They should be determined by individuals capable of critical and logical thinking and without anything personal to gain from the rules.
They should not be determined by individuals who have antisocial traits or who are indoctrinated into various belief systems which are founded on preferential treatment (such as religion).
The term “silent majority” has a very specific political meaning.
But, in what way do you think those opposing “extreme” content being consumed by their fellow citizens are silent? State governments across the country are clamoring to censor all sorts of things, presumably to satisfy their constituents.
There is a world of nuance separating "normalizing" and "banning" something though, that's simply a false dichotomy.
I'd wager most "normal" people would recoil at the idea of eating excrement and, for all my open-mindedness, it's probably not something I'd actively endorse. But banning it is on a whole other leaf. Things can and should be allowed to exist on the fringe.
Otherwise we're moving towards the subject of the T.S. Eliot quote where "everything that is not forbidden will be compulsory, and everything not compulsory will be forbidden."
> There are some things that should not be normalized in society.
Who gets to decide these things and based on what?
Normalization is a fake argument that sounds fancy, not a real thing.
For the people who disagree: would you really be interested in seeing Child Grooming Simulator 25 on steam? I think we can almost all reasonably agree that at least this sort of content should not be sold on there.
I don't have to be "interested" in seeing something on steam to disagree with nkrisc. I don't care about 99.9%+ of the games on steam, that doesn't mean I want them gone.
>would you really be interested in seeing Child Grooming Simulator 25 on steam?
If we are going down this path there's a lot of literature popular with women about to be banned
Won’t somebody please think of the children?
Correction: Won't somebody please think of the pixels?
When we start saying "no content restrictions besides illegal stuff", your hyperbolic question becomes legitimate in a way that it's not when we're talking about Doom.
there are already hundreds, if not thousands of anime lolicon porn games on steam.
the people making a stink about this know this but are pretending that they don't because it would overtly out them as pedophiles.
Are you saying the people who are petitioning Steam to remove porn games are playing the porn games themselves and simultaneously pretending porn games don't exist on Steam?
That doesn't make sense.
It's possible he means people saying steam should not delist anything due to pressure from activists are tacitly condoning sketchy lolicon games.
Oh good point. "the people making a stink about this" could easily refer to people on either side.
Nothing you said here is true.
Let's simulate playing detective to reveal the true identities of the dead
Let's simulate grave digging
Let's simulate blackmailing the dead for an eternity
For fun AND for profit
It's a slippery slope. It's not real but can certainly, by definition, create a situation that mimics reality to the point of assisting someone at committing a real crime that they couldn't possibly commit without the simulation.
The slippery slope is in banning speech. If you want to make the claim that simulated sex leads to crimes we have been over this a thousand times with violence in games. There is no connection, you are without a leg to stand on except your own religious indoctrination.
>There is no connection, you are without a leg to stand on except your own religious indoctrination.
Flagging my reply is gross (you state that, not me!) and grounds for ban. I'll just leave this 2nd rebuttal here as I take back both my legs to stand on and yours as well :P
https://www.pcmag.com/news/take-it-down-act-deepfake-revenge...
Should also ban GTA then. /s
You say this like they haven't already tried.
And all Hollywood studios as well.
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?
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.
What if you used your mastercard to buy valvebucks you spend on whatever the hell you want in the steam store?
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.
So are they banning erotic fiction books too or what? I guess the tradwifes actually secretly read that stuff though…
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.
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.
There's a book of Satan?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Satanic_Bible
Enjoy.
Eh yeah the Levayen Satanist book exists but I thought they were referring to a religious book from the archaic Bible ages. That'd be much more interesting to read!
if there is, im buying it
So she read it? I tried but stopped at 10% or so :)
Why does ValveCard need to work anywhere other than Steam? Privacy.com manages to issue card numbers somehow. How does that work?
Visa and Mastercard are called card _networks_ for a reason. Wherever you are in the world, or in any site anywhere, if your card says Visa and the merchant’s POS machine (or payment gateway) take Visa, both parties know the transaction is good. The merchant gets his money and you get the product.
You get your card from your issuing bank, so the consumer’s last mile is the bank’s problem. The merchant get their POS/gateway from the acquirers. Your bank and the merchants acquirer don’t know each other.
Visa and Mastercard are intermediaries. There’s no way a NatWest card in the UK is connected to whatever POS is in Chile or whatever. They all route through the card brands.
This is why it’s so tough to break this monopoly.
Privacy.com issues cards from the Visa and Mastercard networks.
You can’t run your own card network easily because you would have to convince all of the merchant banks that take card transactions to do business with you.
Digital money movement requires an operating agreement between at least two financial entities - but most of the time there’s a lot more. Depending on the type of transaction you may have two or more gateways, facilitators, processors, issuers and underlying banks involved.
It’s a very fragmented system that relies on many, many different entities all having agreements and contracts with eachother.
> Privacy.com manages to issue card numbers somehow. How does that work?
Through Visa and Mastercard
They work with Visa and MasterCard to issue cards in systems run by both of them.
It needs to work with banks in different countries. It doesn't need to work everywhere, like being able to pay your dinner with it, obviously.
You have to offset negative ValveCard balances with USD in everyone's banks, and there's a convenient middleman called Visa who does exactly that by tying store accounts to bank accounts through the universally accepted membership card they issue.
By not working outside the US.
Entirely possible if you're JP Morgan Chase. They're big enough to have both merchants and consumers in their ecosystem, and they tried it, and Visa put a stop to that.
I am genuinely curious who can actually threaten Visa (I do not think it is Valve).
Amazon, Walmart, Target and then increasingly unsure.
IBM was not able to. Story from a friend-who-claimed-to-be-there:
In days of yore, Visa did processing on IBM iron. The iron in question took a while to boot, and time is very definitely money to Visa and they wanted to speed up reboots (e.g., after a crash). Saving seconds = $$$.
Visa to IBM: "Please give us the source code for the <boot path stuff>, it's costing us money."
IBM: LOL
Visa to some big banks: "Please tell IBM to give us the source code for this, it's costing you money."
IBM, a little later: "Here's a tape. Need any help?"
Factually correct, I in fact even was that tape at the time
> I am genuinely curious who can actually threaten Visa (I do not think it is Valve).
Visa is a clearing house whose members are banks. Think of it like a payment router between issuers (banks) and processors (banks).
Only sponsored organizations can directly use the "Visa rails", where "sponsor" is defined as a bank, a bank subsidiary, or an entity previously sponsored by one of the other two.
This is also the case for MasterCard and Discover. "Traditional" American Express is different though.
> Amazon, Walmart, Target and then increasingly unsure.
Those merchants use banks or one of their subsidiaries for processing credit card transactions. Most large merchants do as well in order to minimize their discount rate as well as other transaction fees. Smaller merchants often use ISO's or VAR's for business specific reason, knowing both ultimately transact with a bank or one of a bank's subsidiaries.
I thought Venmo was trying the most with their card offers, as well as PayPal, Cash, Google Pay and several others too
> I thought Venmo was trying the most with their card offers, as well as PayPal, Cash, Google Pay and several others too
I know at least two of the above used to use a specific US bank for the credit card transactions backing their payment services. For others, if service usage requires a verified credit card or debit card backed by a credit card network, they too use a processor owned/operated by a bank, bank subsidiary, or an entity sponsored by same.
EDIT:
For payment services which do not require a credit card or debit card backed by a credit card network, they almost certainly use the ACH[0] network. This is a more intimate financial relationship and best used with a dedicated bank account not linked to any others, as fund transfers can be bidirectional.
0 - https://www.sofi.com/learn/content/ach-vs-check/
That seems an overly fine line to draw, when a check is basically just a plain piece of paper with your ACH number printed on it, and anyone with your ACH number can go get checks printed. A credit card is also bidirectional, so the question was just if alternatives exist to VISA processing, not if you necessarily would use them. I meant to mention Zelle and Plaid too, since they integrate with many (most?) banks already to allow transfers via your online account login authentication credentials instead of traditional ACH
> A credit card is also bidirectional ...
From a card holder's perspective regarding a transaction being voided or refunded, sure. What I was talking about are services where the account holder can equally perform purchases as well as receive payments.
> I meant to mention Zelle and Plaid too, since they integrate with many (most?) banks already to allow transfers via your online account login authentication credentials instead of traditional ACH
For the purposes of bidirectional fund transfers, the mechanism for how it is implemented is moot. The net effect and account access (intimacy) is functionally the same.
Cashapp cards for me, for example, are backed by Sutton Bank Ltd out of Chicago.
Any coalition of banks can. Replacing Visa is a daunting task, but rolling out PoS support and the technical challenges are peanuts compared to actually getting banks onboard. Visa itself was started by a single bank, and Mastercard was started by a coalition of banks. They can do it again.
Interac[1] is Canada's debit system, originally created as a non-profit by our largest banks way back in '84, and these days is supported everywhere. The large banks are already used to bullying their way through political or bureaucratic challenges, and a single Canadian bank typically has trillion(s) in managed assets - they _can_ bully Visa.
Zelle[2] (2016) is a limited (etransfer only) clone for the American market, UPI (2016) in India, UnionPay (2002) in China, carte Bleue (1967) in France, etc etc. What's missing is cooperation between national systems like these, as well as lending as they typically only do debit instead of credit.
Any cooperation between these systems would likely get spun out as a separate entity, which would eventually just turn into a new Visa or Mastercard - but 3 choices is better than 2.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interac [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zelle [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface
Zelle won't become that. Zelle was designed to offload liability onto consumers using the carrot of instant transfers.
Other payment processors, mostly. So other credit card companies (e.g. JCB [1]), government run payment services like Pix in Brazil [2], theoretically crypto, etc.
[1] as a random example: https://archive.kyivpost.com/technology/japanese-payment-sys...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pix_(payment_system)
Likely Apple currently has the deepest finance industry roots.
If you consider the minutiae of percentage apple shaves off transactions with Apple Pay. Sure.
But they have partnered with GS and MC. Far from any sort of "finance industry roots".
They essentially offer a fancy UI on top of GS products and other traditional banks.
Apple Cash -> Green Dot or some other no name bank
Apple Card -> Goldman Sachs
Apple Pay -> some very small percentage of the bank and network fees charged to merchants
>> I am genuinely curious who can actually threaten Visa (I do not think it is Valve).
> Likely Apple currently has the deepest finance industry roots.
Apple used a very large bank headquartered in the US for its credit card processing as of about ten years ago. Given that the cost of change is significant once these processes are put in place, it is likely this remains the case.
Note that this is not the same as what Apple Pay supports.
Honestly, with how prevalent iPhones and Androids are today, specially among newer humans, if Apple and Google made a payment system that just transferred money between iPhone/Android, it could practically replace cash & cards for a lot of people.
In some countries the vast majority of payments are done via phone apps for national payment systems already, bypassing Visa/Mastercard etc. entirely. Even kids pay for candy by phone.
> Amazon, Walmart, Target
Those are all US companies so subject to the same puritan pressures. Their cards would still be good for buying ultra violent games but not sex games...
Walmart was very supportive of fedNow for the express purpose of removing MasterCard from cashless purchases. And for a long time the only way to pay by phone was to allow them to debit via ACH. out of all of them they get it the most.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36012866
And really, even banking isn't a safe harbor. I am pretty sure they were at the forefront of the rise in neobanks and products like green dot cards.
It will be an ID number based payment service built on top of FedNow. In other countries similar services are used with QR codes to do easy payments.
Though unpopular, I'd say China is able to
1) They already have that (Unionpay). 2) I don't think they are less prone to censoring things.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c056nle2drno
China would never! /s
There's also the gaming time limits[1] and the proposed(?) spending limit[2]. Probably a good thing, if you ask me...
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58384457
[2]: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-issues-draft-rules...
Only the USG.
Mastercard?
That's basically what gift cards are isn't it?
> Leaked internal slides peg Steam’s net revenue last fiscal year at just under $10 billion
https://www.simplymac.com/games/3-5m-per-employee-how-valve-...
Steam gift cards are funded by traditional banking products and partnerships. They can’t live without the invisible hand of the banking and credit card industry.
I like this (ab)use of the invisible hand meme. But in economics the “invisible hand” is more of a benevolent deity than a predictable mechanism. I propose “hidden hand” for what credit (card and rating) companies do.
it really is the same invisible hand. the economics invisible hand is doing whatever the capital owners want the economy to do. weighing influence by capital is what makes visa have that power
My first thought is: obviously not. But if 10 years ago you'd asked me if Valve would be able to turn Linux into a serious gaming platform, I'd have answered the same.
All that stemmed from an unlikely but existential fear that Microsoft could lock-down software distribution on Windows. My suspicion is that SteamOS sales and Steam Decks aren't actually profitable, they're just too valuable as a bargaining chip not to invest in. And Valve can invest in them, because they're rich and private.
While Valve bigwigs probably aren't losing sleep over the missed revenue from incest games, having the rest of their revenue stream threatened might make them seek another form of insurance.
The problem is if visa/etc say no, valve instantly loses ~70% of their sales. So it’s a bet they won’t win
Visa needs to be broken up.
trying: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
I’m fairly certain they could but it wouldn’t exactly be fun right?
I mean, if there's one company that I believe could pull that off is Valve. And maybe Amazon. Maybe the two together. It would be one hell of a JV for both parties.
Nope. Even a company such as valve would be intimidated by the regulation of setting up their own company payment network outside the traditional banking system.
Maybe crypto is an option but I haven’t seen use in retail. Only speculation instrument.
Apple tried. Failed. Google tried. Failed. Only thing that works is partnering up with existing bank
I have seen crypto used for payments, particularly if its overseas companies
Did Apple try? I don't recall.
> Only thing that works is partnering up with existing bank
Could Visa just reject payments from this bank and kill your whole thing?
oh yes
I mean a bank is literally a money printer.
On a serious side note, only certain banks get to print money.
They don't physically print the notes, but they do magically add money to a person's account when they take a loan. That kind of thing is where most "money" (in banks, anyway) comes from.
It's just like matter and antimatter being created at the same time, money and anti-money (debt) are created at the same time and when they meet, they cancel each other out.
So borrowing literally creates money (and debt), and repaying debts literally deletes money (and debt).
How does interest fit in here? Isn’t that what creates money AKA inflation?
No, interest is a typical zero-sum transaction where the borrower spends and the lender earns. The loan itself represents a temporary net increase in the money supply, appearing from nothing and then vanishing when it is paid back.
I'm a bit unsure what happens when a borrower defaults on their loan. The money that was borrowed remains out in circulation, but what happens to the debt (anti-money)?
Does the bank itself use its own money to pay off the debt (deleting some of their own money), or do they simply delete the debt?
I'm commiting the faux paus of providing a chat-gpt answer, but I've worked in fintech (annuities though) and I can confirm that this answer is broadly correct. https://chatgpt.com/share/687bbde1-4ba8-800c-92e5-93edd49b01...
In principle, it is 'the bank uses its own money to pay off the debt', as long as you accept that the bank's own 'credit worthiness reputation' and other assets count as 'money'. The hit is _ultimately_ taken by the capital shareholders in the bank, which is the important part.
What the poster you're replying to is talking about is called fractional reserve banking. That's how they "create" money.
If you don't like it, start another payment processor that doesn't cave to pressure. Where are all the free market proselytizers at?
I expect all of you complaining about this to never once complain on legal grounds about Apple's 30% tax in the app store or when a bakery refuses to sell a cake to a gay person.
This is what unrestricted freedom for every entity looks like.
And this is why we need laws and regulations that are actually enforced. Because companies and larger organisms do not necessarily operate on timescales that are able to be reasonably responded to within a human lifespan.
> If you don't like it, start another payment processor that doesn't cave to pressure.
Or, gosh, use bitcoin et al.
It's interesting that when people ask "what's the use case for cryptos?", "being an alternative to Visa and Mastercard" is not often mentioned. That alone is a good enough reason to support it.
Civitai has been recently forced by payment processors to crack down on AI-generated porn. Since then, given that the processors told them that they may want do restrict them even more, they have added ability to use cryptos to pay for their services.
I have been a crypto evangelist since it was a weird nerd hobby nobody knew about for this exact reason. It should be nobody's business who I transfer value to or why. The corpo-state has had control of the levers and dials of currency for way too long. They can still enforce laws, and if I'm causing some illegal event to occur by paying money to someone, that event is still illegal. Arrest me for that. But get rid of the rent seeking and monetary policy that seems to just make the whole problem worse.
I don't understand this assumption that crypto transactions are nobody's business. That's a feature of cash payments, which from what I understand can only be emulated in crypto by transferring control over a non-custodial wallet, which is cumbersome to the average person.
If you're crypto banking with a third party that muddles your wallet's transactions you've already added one of the institutions you claim to be against.
If you transact on the blockchain, you're broadcasting who your wallet transacts with on levels that are far more publicly transparent than how fiat is traded via institutions.
We need to change this perception. Setting up a hot wallet on a phone only takes a few minutes and is perfect for holding a small amount of crypto.
Projects like monero (https://www.getmonero.org/) ensure privacy and fungibility of the crypto you hold.
It should still be easier, but let's not pretend this is technology only available to those with deep tech experience.
The Monero download page requires me to choose my system architecture to get an installer, and insists that I absolutely must "verify the hashes" of the "archive". When I ran the installer, it first identified as "monero-gui-install-win-x64-v0.18.4.0" published by "Unknown", then as "Monero Fluorine Fermi GUI Wallet", and about 3/4 of the way through the setup my antivirus popped up to block it.
I don't think this is effectively available to anyone without deep tech experience, and any non-technical user who's willing to click through this kind of thing is definitely drowning in malware that will steal their crypto.
That is true in very unsophisticated systems. It's not true in zksnark based systems and it's not true on monero.
In any case, that's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying with crypto I need not ask permission to make a transaction. Whether that transaction should be open to government inspection after the fact is another matter entirely.
> I expect all of you complaining about this to never once complain on legal grounds about Apple's 30% tax in the app store
People complain that 24/7. The absolute majority of HN comments sided with Epic when they challenged that.
> or when a bakery refuses to sell a cake to a gay person.
It didn't happen. What happened was the bakery refused to make a cake for gay wedding. It's established that you can't refuse to sell something existing to someone just because of their sexuality.
IME people who propose absolute freedom in any regard (speech, use of power, use of money,...) fundamentally don't understand the difference of power between individuals, let alone individuals and organizations.
This is why anarcho- anything can't work. Some people specialize in building thing, since in providing a service, some specialize in making money and grabbing power. When the builders and providers don't unite to hold them back (like... forming a government) those people end up forming a mafia. Of course the state is a mafia too. You gotta pick your evils.
> fundamentally don't understand the difference of power between individuals,
Or they really do understand and are of the opinion that they will be the beneficiaries. That they are in a position to exploit this difference.
Absolutely. Some are really just sympathizers. I've known people who weren't rich by any means but acted and pretended to be and they supported greater inequality, less consumer protections, etc.
Same goes with abusive individuals and flying monkeys. Some people wanna be like those strong successful abusers so they take their side.
Absolute freedom can be achieved - as long as you're the one holding the gun. Other than that, it's social contracts all the way down (which are more or less letting someone else hold the gun)
Payment processors aren't some plucky startups
> proselytizers
Off topic: I heard this word for the first time last night and now I’m seeing it here. Funny how that works sometimes.
Baader–Meinhof if you want to find more about this phenomenon.
Off topic, but when I was looking at cars when my old one died, I started noticing way more of the models I had been considering on the road. Funny how the mind works.
Okay. I walk into a Jewish bakery and want a red cake with a Nazi flag on it.
> Okay. I walk into a Jewish bakery and want a red cake with a Nazi flag on it.
This isn't a very good comparison, as this involves a payment processing company. An apt comparison would be the payment processor company demanding that you stop doing business with a Jewish store because that goes against their Nazi values.
It’s a perfectly good comparison. Nazi wants cake. Store owner is refusing to transact based on his own personal moral code. Just like any other business.
Contrary wise, consider a Jewish payment processor who wants to knock off a Nazi store. You can’t have it both ways.
Payment processor is the infrastructure, not the merchant itself. They neither make cakes nor eat them.
Bigger problem is that for most real world problems who is Nazi and who is Jewish depends on who you ask. Sucks to be Jewish in a Nazi world where even payment processors hate you.
We can, via laws. In the US, there are anti discrimination laws for protected classes in some areas. You won't find that Nazis are a protected class, but if you would like them to be you can run for office and try to pass a bill and see how the free market plays that one out for you.
> It’s a perfectly good comparison. Nazi wants cake. Store owner is refusing to transact based on his own personal moral code.
It's clearly not the case at all. Valve wants to sell third party games. Third party game developers want to sell their games. Customers want to buy third party games through Valve. Do you understand this bit?
A payment processor company is far excluded from the process. Users want to pay Valve money. Valve wants to receive the user's money. All fine, right? Except a payment company somehow feels entitled to tell Valve which products in their product line they can sell. WTF?
Going back to your far-fetched example, it would be like a supermarket selling all sorts of products their customers want to buy, but the Nazi bank somehow feels entitled to tell the supermarket they should not sell any product related with Jews. Does that make sense to you?
At least in your example there are some bakers to empathize with. They would have to manually bake the cake.
Now imagine your phone refuses to take a picture of the Nazi flag, because the owners of the phone manufacturing company have a certain moral code.
In that case, I don’t buy a phone from that manufacturing company. Maybe I want that on purpose in a different way, to prevent my kids from taking nudes.
Exactly. With the bakers we have competing interests of the guy who wants the Nazi cake and the baker who doesn't want to make one. Personally, I come down on the side of whether it requires any creative effort on the part of the baker. "Print this .jpeg on a cake"--content doesn't matter. "Draw me a Nazi flag on the cake"--content matters.
There's no human looking at each transaction, there's nobody to be bothered about the content of the game, and no justification for not processing offensive stuff.
Related to this, here's an ACLU filing with the FTC that lays out the content that the credit card companies don't like and how they pressure companies to remove it.
https://www.aclu.org/documents/federal-trade-commission-comp...
I think it’s hilarious we allow stuff like Postal or Soldier of Fortune without a question, where the whole focus is on going crazy and murdering a whole bunch of people.
But try to show a sensual human body, instead of one that’s ripped into small pieces, and oh my god, this is going too far!
Gender of who is murdered has a lot to do with it too. I don't think you'll find a video game where you predominantly kill women. The most infamous scene of murder in video games is the Call of Duty mission "No Russian" where you optionally commit terrorism at an airport. If you pay attention you'll notice they kill much more men than women, and made sure that despite pleasant weather none of the women were wearing dresses or skirts. Murder of men is a lot more digestible.
This genuinely baffles me. Who cares! It's a video game. It's pixels on a screen. True crime podcasts and movies are a-okay but when its a video game that's where the line is drawn?
I suspect all new frontiers are like this. There was probably a similar outcry over violence in films. And maybe violence in fictional books too. Both long lost from living memory.
It does feel different in a video game, because you're the one pulling the trigger. I played that CoD mission when the game came out, and I felt a bit sick in my stomach playing that mission out. But I'd probably have exactly the same feeling from violence in films if I wasn't so desensitised to it after growing up watching american movies and tv shows.
Its just new.
Now i imagine control concerned mothers rallying against papyrus which ruins the youth for healthy outdoor activities like warfare, sieges and murder.
The people who care signed their names[1]. It's not a secret or anything.
Most of the signatories are associated with Australian anti sex trafficking and exploitation groups, although there are several UK signatories and a couple Americans.
A publication[2] by one of the signatories connects the dots. It's driven by the core idea:
"Pornography Use Shapes and Changes Sexual Tastes"[3] which is supported by "In a survey of men involved in online sexual activities, 47% reported being involved in practice or seeing pornography which previously was not interesting to or even disgusted them."[4]
I'm trying to steelman when I say I believe that the authors would agree that this also applies to games with sexual content.
To address your comment specifically, while I see the appeal of consistent moral framework. I personally believe that moral frameworks trade consistency for completeness and rarely accomplish either. You have to assume the value-perspective of the other in order to understand why consistency might take a back seat to some other value we could only speculate on.
1. https://www.collectiveshout.org/open-letter-to-payment-proce...
2. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/391732869_Not_A_Fan...
3. ibid. pg 30
4. ibid
It really should be obvious that the natural objection to "if they banned this then why not X" is "they haven't gotten around to it yet" and that the reason they can be more successful is also that they have put their money where their mouth is and also named themselves, something a counter petition will probably struggle with.
Trying to connect the dots here. GP mentioned also banning true-crime podcasts and you comment to that was "they haven't gotten around to it yet"?
How defensible do you feel this position is?
1) Why haven't they banned porn game X when they banned porn game Y? -> it's just a matter of time, they've already established that they can pressure to get game x banned, they'll get to game y eventually - also, note that it should be obvious it's much easier to rally support to ban "niche incest/non-con game X" than to rally support to ban "borderline mainstream harem game Y". This is what I was referring to specifically.
2) Why haven't they banned all porn games then they banned porn game X? -> it takes a lot more effort to move the needle here. It's not for lack of trying or lack of will, it's that it's obviously much harder to get traction when you've expanded now to an entire category that includes borderline mainstream titles that will finally get defenders willing to put in the same effort as them.
3) Why haven't they banned GTA when they've banned porn game X? -> First, they've tried!. 2nd, again, same principle -> activists aren't stupid, they know they can win the battle one game at a time, and that they can't win it in one gigantic decisive swoop (conveniently enough though, you can leverage this as well to ensure you have a nice long runway to continue to do your activism and keep it as a wedge issue to push at for a nice long time)
4) Why not ban true crime podcasts when they've banned porn game X? -> see again, look, many. many people listen to true crime podcasts, and many people have also objected to them as exploitative. but why does porn game x get banned and true crime podcast Z not? because, well, duh, again, the amount of effort needed to move the needle on something many people enjoy is that much more! i don't think they don't want to, mind you, but again, it's going to take a lot more effort to get to true crime podcasts when they have a thousand other porn game XYZ's they can to work on
And lets not pretend people aren't also trying to get books banned, again, it's being done at a more selective pace, book by book, not category by category. Why is <random niche hentai> banned and not <50 shades of grey>? well, who is published by a mainstream big publishier and who is published by a niche publisher that doesn;t want to get the whole hammer on them?
Repeat at nauseam.
How do you think activism should work?
Replying here since we hit the nesting limit.
Thanks for understanding.
I'm still looking at the thread and see people bringing up other titles that haven't been banned as if that's a gotcha and it just baffles me. Like what do they think the activists would respond if they were called out on it?
"Oh we don't care about that we only had a grudge on this game in particular"
Or more likely
"Thank you for bringing this title to our attention, we will certainly try to have it taken down as well as it too is against the values we are fighting for"
Well this is exactly how it should work for any cause.
Perhaps there was a misunderstanding. I'm saying the fact that they've succeeded in getting some games removed while others of the same type still exist or that other similar things still exist is not because they are morally inconsistent but because they can't do this all at once
Thanks for clarifying. Appreciate it! I had my wires crossed
> 47% reported being involved in practice or seeing pornography which previously was not interesting to or even disgusted them
Yeah, right.
The source[1] for the statistic is referenced. Was there a particular part of it that you found incorrect?
1. https://www.academia.edu/27521992/Online_sexual_activities_A...
I think it's about the simulation and agency that video games afford the consumer.
You’re risking potential revenue.
There are still taboos even for pixels on a screen, even for video games. It's a good thing. There should be.
Perhaps you're just saying that you're mostly comfortable with the depiction of some forms of violence in some contexts. But what about other scenarios though? Would you feel the same about a game where the player runs around raping women, or capturing and lynching escaped slaves? It's just pixels!
What if it's a story but with very detailed descriptions? What if that short story is adapted into a video game but it's only a text adventure? What if we add artwork to it, but it's just pixel art? etc etc.
The ability and the freedom to explore the darkest parts of our psyche in a safe, controlled, and fictitious environment IS important. Even if we find certain aspects or fetishes repugnant and distasteful.
I find the idea that payment processors have enough power to dictate the morality of a game market concerning. Given the number of other NSFW fetishistic stuff that is still being permitted on Steam I don't buy the "chargeback" rational AT ALL.
> Would you feel the same about a game where the player runs around raping women, or capturing and lynching escaped slaves? It's just pixels!
If we are already okay with mass murder in video games, then absolutely yes.
>But what about other scenarios though? Would you feel the same about a game where the player runs around raping women, or capturing and lynching escaped slaves?
Yes and yes. We have worse stuff in literature already.
> Would you feel the same about a game where the player runs around raping women, or capturing and lynching escaped slaves? It's just pixels!
Yeah. Same thing. Should be ignored. If someone feels an urge to run around raping women and lynching slaves, I'd much rather they were sitting around at home playing videogames than doing anything else in their spare time. What do you want them to be doing, the traditional creep move of figuring out how to get into positions of power and influence?
In addition taxpayers shouldn't be footing the bill in the war on pixels; if the banks are taking a firm moral stand then clearly the government is involved and that means they're probably spending money on expunging victimless non-crimes which is a low.
What do you think is occurring when a player defeats one of the other cultures in Civilization by conquering their last city or conducts orbital bombardment on a enemy planet in Master of Orion until the population is zero? That's genocide as gameplay.
It _is_ just pixels.
I disagree. there shouldnt be any taboos for pixels on a screen
i mean, i can understand a child porn game would be disallowed but we already have anime games where characters that look like children are nearly naked
But your heart is not pixels.
GTA, Elder Scrolls and Fallout series all allow for violence against women and not just the mutual violence of combat or whatever. One small example in one game from a long-ass time ago isn't really a broader trend (not to say that society at large doesn't view violence against men and women differently in different contexts)
and never children.
Then you have an open world game where you can do all sorts of insane stuff, but everyone loses their shit specifically over feeding suffragettes to alligators.
Same with movies. Piles of dead bodies are OK for children to watch but naked skin would be highly damaging.
I mean, these films usually get rated 15 or 18 in the UK, so I’d not say it’s “OK for children to watch.”
I think that's the classic US/UK culture split though.
US is strict on language and nudity, but comparatively lax on violence (except blood).
UK is lax on nudity and language (comparatively), but very strict on violence.
UK being the country that considered the word "ninja" too violent for children, for example.
I’m pretty sure GTA has never been rated below M which, as I recall, is 17+. Not a massive difference between that and BBFC’s 18 rating…
Violence is pretty okay in the middle east, which makes it socially acceptable by inheritance in the uk.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
See cryptocurrency payments. So the good news in this direction is that bitcoin et al are very much making progress at these businesses. As far as I can see, many - perhaps even most - such businesses now accept 2-5 forms of cryptocurrencies as payment. That took long enough but we are finally getting there.
The bad news is that essentially ALL such businesses still believe that it is essential for them to accept credit card payments - and that means they must still implement whatever agenda these are pushing. On their entire customer base, even if paying by crypto. For now.
Hopefully this progress continues.
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.
> 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.
Utterly amoral people would need even more reason to not serve basically anyone. Since I know I don’t give a shit, the only thing I can assume is that it’s people that generally oppose what I think is perfectly acceptable.
Since the processors don’t actually care, they must simply believe that dealing with these annoying people is not worth the effort, compared to just not serving stupidly marginal markets.
But the thing is, the people upset about the sex aren’t upset about the killing, which I think is ridiculous.
What Thomas is hinting at is that these products are unprofitable for the payment processors.
So it’s not even that the controversy is not worth the effort. It’s that it literally costs them money to deal with.
The sex taboo may not make sense, but it exists. And it makes people behave in ways that creates problems for lending to them, specifically fraud and chargeback rates are demonstrably higher.
> 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?
Because, in expectation, they're going to lose money.
Sure, but why?
Disputed charges by the user. I know of one payment processor that specifically seeks out these high-risk businesses. Consider one of many possible scenarios would be that of a spouse who is alarmed at a charge to a clearly risque service and says "What the heck is that??" and the offender says "What the heck I don't know. Cancel the charge!"
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
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.
Is that not a similar or higher percentage for games with loot boxes or other sorts of gambling?
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...
> there's really nothing puritan about American business culture. [...] utterly amoral.
What? Puritanism is not about some kind of blanket purity to be recognized or expressed from any angle, perspective or religion. And in American business is both extreme and extremely selective.
It's also very much about appearances and image projected. You have to accept a difference between anybody's personal values (in so far as these can show through the mess of corporate decisions), and the image that businesses believe they much display.
You're talking about a culture that freely and enthusiastically sold opiates for decades. If they're cracking down on porn, it's because porn is costing them money, probably because people are disputing charges.
The history of the US and "adult materials" goes so much further than potential disputed credit card charges.
That's super interesting but a trivial Google search shows that chargebacks are a huge problem for this space so I'm not sure why I would care about that history.
The difference I see is that the player is getting sexual pleasure from what is being simulated in porn type games. I.e. they are trying to simulate the feeling of doing that in real life.
Where as in violent games like soldier of fortune I doubt most players are trying to achieve the feeling of brutally killing another human being.
Yes and often with pornography it involves the abuse of women and girls, and depicting this as a positive action. It's probably not the main reason why payment processors are banning and restricting purchases, but it should be.
Adult content is considered a high risk merchant category - meaning it is susceptible to high chargeback and fraud rates. This is because after someone pays for and consumes adult content, a certain level of "clarity" overcomes them resulting in the execution of chargebacks against the merchant.
It has nothing to do with any sort of puritanical premise.
I don't think that can explain why they're only targeting certain sub-categories of porn, and it's also contradictory to the public statements by Valve:
> We were recently notified that certain games on Steam may violate the rules and standards set forth by our payment processors and their related card networks and banks
Individual games violating "rules and standards" doesn't really fit with prohibiting a category because of high rates of fraud.
They should instead charge a higher transaction fee on those items to cover that risk
Do you think this happened because Valve was getting lots of chargebacks? I don't.
That sounds like a reasonable argument. We should force them to make it publicly with data. Maybe even force them to release aggregate statistics every quarter going forward.
Just plain wrong and a puritanical group already claimed responsibility for this
That seems disingenuous. (1) in this case, this is a not a tiny fly-by-night wannabe game company. (2) which is good for paying back (or never seeing) the money of chargebacks.
For a new company, the risk of chargebacks might rest on a credit card company (for a little while anyway). But not for a long established one.
> That seems disingenuous.
Why are you assuming bad faith? There’s no indication parent is being insincere at all.
> Adult content is considered a high risk merchant category
> It has nothing to do with any sort of puritanical premise.
But I have no problem with the parent poster. I'm here hoping for conversation. The argument though is one we hear now and then and like I point out, how can it make sense? Like many things, it looks more like a vaguely possible, plausible explanation or chain of arguments... which on closer look doesn't fly. How can Valve, a long established, apparently solid merchant, be a serious risk for the credit card infrastructure? Should there be chargebacks, they can handle chargebacks. This is not limited to Valve. Many of us have run into the issue. The credit card infrastructure goes out of its way to refuse solid business.
> But I have no problem with the parent poster. I'm here hoping for conversation.
If you don’t have a problem with them and you were hoping for conversation, then starting out by accusing them of being disingenuous is a strange way of showing it.
> how can it make sense?
Why didn’t you ask this to begin with instead of assuming they were being deceitful? You know “disingenuous” doesn’t just mean “I disagree”, right?
Mastercard and Visa needs some serious competition. How come a payment company decides who to partner with and dictates what people use their system for. Ridiculous bullshite.
At the same time those "games" that were affected, well, who on earth pays for that seriously fucked up crap? People need to get a grip. I'd rather send a psycho team to evaluate people who pay for these games...
note: PCGAMER the epitome of games journalism. They didn't even checked which were the affected banned games.
TBF that’s US media culture going back several decades.
I agree with the fact there is hypocricy. I disagree that either should be banned. (Maybe you didn't mean it that way but somebody with us the argument that way)
If group A wants to control group or person B, they should prove with very high certainty that group B's behavior is harmful to someone who is not B.
It's like we've collectively decided that digital gore is fine for teens, but a boob requires a Senate hearing. The irony is, one actually mirrors real-world trauma a lot more closely than the other
I also find it hilarious. Killing people in movies and video games get a lower age rating than sex.
And religious groups talking about protecting children (while raping them) is hypocrisy at its finest.
This isn’t about “trying to show a sensual human body”, it seems to be about incest porn specifically. There are still plenty of pornographic games available on Steam, even absurdly offensive ones such as the multi-part “Sex with Hitler” series.
To be fair, Postal and SOF haven’t been relevant in almost 20 years, though your point stands.
I wonder how a modern implementation of these two games would look given the vast visual improvements since then. I assume UE5 or 6 already comes with a Ghoul-esque framework ready to go. Though I hope they would feature a curmudgeon caricature of Jack Thompson.
I think this is a bit of a strawman. The market for people who get addicted to gruesome gore and are willing to pay money to see it is several orders of magnitude smaller than people willing to pay to see porn or OnlyFans. There is simply far more risk with adult content as a result and a lot more chargebacks from disatisfied customers with a post nut clarity.
The GP highlights a classic observation: America's nearly unique cultural contradiction, where nudity and sex are considered highly offensive, while gore and violence are widely accepted.
This holds true in most other countries as well. Gore/ chopping of appendages is happily accepted and enjoyed (in movies, games etc) by all of India, whilst a simple kiss can be a taboo/ issue.
Japan has some of the weirdest/inconsistent rules around this stuff. Black lines or mozaic partial censorship of genitals, incest/stuff with minors widely available, and then you have some pretty violent uncensored movies, manga/anime, and games (though while it's mostly a China thing, sometimes the blood gets censored to be white instead of red which doesn't actually make it better (also sometimes done for urine)), GTA5 is as popular there as anywhere, but game franchises like Mortal Kombat are banned.
And of course, even in America, we tend to like our violence and gore more over-the-top and simulated. Most people didn't care for liveleak type content, even fewer for not so hard to find footage from ongoing wars.
Japan runs custom scratch-built implementation of ethics reverse engineered from Western cultures. That's all. Consistence is key, but it's consistent only with itself, and nothing else, and explicitly not aligned to Christian religious scripts. Nothing Japanese is compatible with anything unless and until it is the sole dominant standard, like Sony storage media or Apple hardware. Always has been.
This really isn't unique to America.
In the "western" world it is.
> There is simply far more risk with adult content as a result and a lot more chargebacks from disatisfied customers with a post nut clarity.
Do you have any evidence to back this wild claim? I've never heard this argument about chargebacks made before.
I don't think it's about this at all. I think it's about policing content, but then the observation of GP's comment applies: why is violence ok, but sex is not?
So grotesque violence appeals to fewer people, but banning gets focused on material more people find acceptable, even desirable?
This really is a culture/posture driven issue.
It is not as if many people think (emphasis on "think", as in being honest, reasoning carefully and being scientific about evidence) that banning sexy curves in a video game is going to impact the prevalence of sexy curve imagery, or "save" anyone from anything.
Imagine if financial companies required their employees to sign a legal statement committing to not "use porn, escorts, blow ... or spicy video games!" So strange that they don't do that!!
Financial companies like to make a show of having "high standards" when it comes to "controversial" segments of the market, or unfortunate individuals who don't fit the mold, when that gets them a lot of showy theatre for being hard asses to their audience of regulators.
While keeping very quiet, and not looking into things too hard, when it comes to tens of billions of sketchy dollars going through their systems associated with very high net worth criminal actors, organizations and corrupt governments.
Epstein did not lack for financial services.
What a gross endorsement of Jeffery Epstein.
Perhaps re-read with more care?
There was no endorsement of Epstein.
There was a callout of multiple types of bank hypocrisy. Contrasting bank's "concerns" about small time erotic material vs. their lack of concern about employees use of erotic material, and the blind eyes they turn for major criminals, include prolific trafficking/pedophilic billionaires.
Are you saying porn buyers regret and that gore buyers do not? (As a broad generalization). Are you also asserting that's built in to risk-profole that payment gateways have?
I don’t have time for o look at the stats and provide quotes / cite sources but it does seem from what I’ve read on the topic that the more people play gore games the less violence there is in society.
If that’s true, maybe it’s also true that the more people have access to adult content the less babies we create as a society.
A society shrinking causes a number of issues.
Correlation is not causation.
The US had more TVs per capita than Congo, and a higher life expectancy. Sending more TVs to Congo probably won't do much for their life expectancy though.
Similarly, I suspect the increase in violent video games and reduction of actual violence is just a side effect of an increasingly technology driven society.
You must be American if you think very violent games are not extremely popular.
I think they are referring to actual gore. For example, bull fighting.
They’re extremely popular in America.
For those thinking is only related to chargebacks and fraud, it is not.
VISA and Mastercard have been banning a lot of content that is not porn but has political values that are disapproved by certain billionaires and investors. There is a bunch of links I wanted to post about, such as US billionaires bragging he personally called VISA CEO to ban content on PH or japanese politicians mad at the censorship of japanese art with certain values because of these companies. But I am on phone walking home so if anyone else has such links please post.
Yep.
They've colluded with the US federal government in the past on those issues as well. "Operation Choke Point" was ostensibly about fraud, but included transactions related to firearms in its scope. As a result, several major banks and payment processors dropped legitimate firearms dealers. For a while it got to the point that I was helping a couple of local gun stores contract with "high risk" payment processors that also serve the porn industry and get set up.
To this day if you're on a gun forum and mention that you use Bank of America, people will pile on to tell you horror stories of both companies and individuals having their accounts closed and funds held for weeks or months after completely legal transactions. In one case in particular, they claimed it happened after buying a backpack at a gun store.
Again, these are 100% legitimate and legal businesses. Federally licensed (FFL) gun stores had trouble for years even keeping a working business account. It was clearly not about fraud, at least not in practice.
Politics completely aside, the financial landscape for gun stores today looks a lot like the cannabis industry: a few institutions are quietly known in those communities to allow them to operate, but many choose to do business only in cash and most prefer it if given the option. The porn industry is similar from what I can see.
Unfortunately, cash is slowly getting phased out.
Try buying a second hand car and you want cash from the bank. Used to be very easy, but now you need to declare what your spending your money on.
You sold your car. O, its over 7 or 10k, well, this is getting reported to the local IRS. Where is that cash coming from, questions, questions?
Over here they are even cracking down on stuff like ebay, amazon because some people run a business on those sites and do not report the taxes. Result: If you make over 3k in the year on ebay, you need to provided your tax number, or ebay closes your account. And above 3k, it get reported to the IRS.
But wait, what happens if your a foreign national from some specific Asian countries and want to open a bank account? Refused, refused, refused... But you need a bank account for a lot of basic things. Well, tough luck. Lets not talk account closing issues.
And that is the EU, and just normal people. Nothing tax evasion, guns, or whatever. Just everybody putting up umbrella's to be sure, not understanding that when everybody does it, it really screws with people.
They are going crazy with this over regulation. Yes, i understand you want to fight black money but the people who get the big amounts will have ways to hide it. Your just hurting the normal people wanting to know what everybody is doing exactly with every cent.
You see this gradual effort to slowly phase out cash. Cashless payment are getting encouraged, cash withdrawals cost your money more and more, more questions regarding origins (so you say f it, and use bank deposits with release approvals).
Its not a surprise that we seen the increase in cryto usage (and the efforts of governments to control that also).
>You sold your car. O, its over 7 or 10k, well, this is getting reported to the local IRS. Where is that cash coming from, questions, questions?
(I'm not in the US)
I'm curious about how does that happen. Do they reach out to you? Your bank?
In the US, it’s a “Currency Transaction Report”: https://www.fdic.gov/news/financial-institution-letters/2021...
The bank collects the information necessary to submit that form at the time of transaction.
You’re also required as an individual to file IRS Form 8300 if you accept >$10k in payment: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
Also not in the US, i am using the term IRS because people are very used to it on the internet.
Banks in the US and EU are legally required to report large transactions. I know for a fact that in Europe, that cash handeling over 10.000 euro gets reported.
That includes withdrawals and deposits. The later gets even more questions asked regarding the "origins" of the money.
There are other fun events that we have seen, like transferring 15.000 euro from my wife to her brother (between countries), that had the money blocked as the bank needed to investigate the origin of the money. So the bank starts calling you to figure out what the money is, what is it used for, where does it come from, bla bla bla...
Why are you giving 15.000 to your brother. Is it a GIFT!!! Translation: Can we TAX it! I suspect that banks in some EU countries get a cut from reported money that can be taxed by the tax office (that is just my speculation).
No, it was his money that he loaned to us for a house buying, and that we returned, but they really tried to push the "gift" narrative. Large money transfers (above 10k), triggers investigations.
And as you can guess, large cash deposits or withdraws get even more questions.
Here is a fun tip: Just transfer or deposited money in small amounts, whenever you feel like it. Avoids the questioning like your some kind of criminal.
So ironically, you perform actions like a criminal (will do to avoid detection), just to avoid getting questioned like your a criminal. Hahahaha...
I feel like we have no more privacy in our lives with everything being monitored and checked. Your browser spies on you, your OS spies on you (W11 Recall even worse), your smartphone, you get tracked by Wifi signal in the streets, your customer store card (that they push and push) is to track your buying habits, the banks track your every movement for the tax office, you can not even freaking sell stuff on ebay and get reported.
Like 3000 Euro is nothing. You sell a few piece of PC hardware and you hit that limit. And Amazon/Ebay/... report your behind. And now its about backdoors in encryption because you may be hiding something. What, you do not want to share your talks on XYZ platform to your wife, family. What are you saying, illegal stuff????
We are really moving to a dystopian world and have been for a long time.
> Here is a fun tip: Just transfer or deposited money in small amounts, whenever you feel like it. Avoids the questioning like your some kind of criminal.
Breaking up deposits into smaller amounts is a crime called structuring.
I wouldn't recommend doing this as an alternative to dealing with the reports and scrutiny on larger transactions.
Your bank will file a report with FinCEN that says that you withdrew (or deposited, or transferred, or whatever) the money. They can/will also separately report suspicious transactions, including patterns of transactions that seem designed to evade the reporting requirements.
What if you cash your paychecks at the grocery store?
What grocery store is cashing checks in the 7-10k range?
Not sure. Apparently walmart you can cash up to 7500 for half the year and 5000 other half for tax return purposes I guess. Still maybe you can get paid weekly instead of biweekly.
Of course it's not. Steam already has a very generous refund policy. It's hard to imaging the chargeback rate would be that high even for nsfw games when you can simply refund. Refund takes about 3~4 clicks on steam website; Chargeback takes a phone call with your bank and can get your steam account locked.
And people who laundry money out stolen cards won't do that with nsfw games. They'll do that with CSGO knifes.
Visa/MasterCard porn ban was driven by American extremist Christian organisation called Exodus Cry, which is also anti-gay, etc.
https://screenshot-media.com/politics/human-rights/pornhub-p...
Exodus Cry leader was later fired for sexual misconduct
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-commentary/anti...
Trump changed banking regulations so that "reputation" can no longer be a reason for banks to "derisk" customers after crypto industry outcry, but the reason to exit customers must be factual money laundering or similar reason. But the change does concern cards, as payments are not under FDIC surveillance.
Link for the petition and its signers.
https://www.collectiveshout.org/open-letter-to-payment-proce...
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Steam-Payment-providers-force-V...
From heise
"In 2020, following a complaint from the Hamburg/Schleswig-Holstein Media Authority, Valve blocked all titles that were labeled as “adult” and did not have an age rating. To be able to offer them, the US company would have to integrate a reliable age verification system into Steam in Germany. Because Valve has not yet implemented such a system, sex games remain blocked in Germany."
So, I hear Europe doesn't have these problems about puritanical censorship in games......
Reverse petition where?
Seconded.
Regards: Game dev who cares about conservation and doesn't like chilling effects.
All eyes on you.
Agree or disagree, it won't matter. When you let gamers vote with their wallets, the answer speaks for itself.
I wonder what else we should just keep to voting on with our wallets?
Probably most matters of free speech, here in America.
Go ahead! I dare you. In your own real name.
Sure, do you have a link?
I am saying that someone who wants incest porn games reinstated on Steam (the GGP commenter) should create that petition.
I’m not that someone; I don’t think Valve has any moral obligation to platform ”any content, as long as it is not illegal”. They have the freedom to choose what they publish. Petition away, see if anyone cares!
Valve clearly doesn't want to play content cop, but when the payment processors start squeezing, they have no real choice. What's wild is how much unaccountable power Visa and Mastercard wield over digital expression
What can be done to loosen card companies' grip on this? It has been a constant problem now for decades.
Denmark has seen a trend where their national card network (Dankort, operating at the equivalent level to Visa and Mastercard) is seeing reduced usage.
They're aiming to reverse that trend.
https://cphpost.dk/2025-06-28/general/new-political-agreemen...
Not all European countries still have these independent networks.
Seeing reduced use partially because only a few banks support using it in Apple Pay. And Google Pay can't support it at all currently
Dane here, and I just don't see the point of using Apple or Google pay. Aside from not wanting American tech interfering in, or data harvesting, my finances, it's not any easier to use. I just touch my card to the terminal and payment happens. Some times, or if the amount is over some limit, I have to enter a pin. I cringe every time I see someone contorting their arm to pay with their watch. It's tech for the sake of tech.
Sincerely, Ted K.
Regulation and anti cartel laws.
Adult business is legitimate business in many parts of the world and companies using their monopoly to suppress it should be a case for an Investigation.
Instant payment systems that go direct from bank to bank, assuming the banks, the government or any other intermediaries don't also decide to not allow it.
Or cryptocurrency, I guess.
Unironically, crypto? It might seem like an annoying hurdle now, but as more and more things are banned by puritans, the crypto experience will surely rise to meet the need.
In Europe, Wero[1] has a chance to become the de-facto payment system, once it's supported by more banks in more countries and adds online payments functionality.
[1]https://wero-wallet.eu/
Choose a payment system by a company that is not as opinionated. Apple pay, for example.
AHA AHAHAAH AAHAHAAHA nice one
Use ACH/Zelle/Paypal/etc.
The permanent solution is a federal government operated electronic money system operated as a utility with constitutionally protected rights.
PayPal has also been involved in this.
Those solutions might work for some people in some countries, but I would argue that it's not acceptable for the vast majority of customers, and they would lose a very significant portion of revenue.
Bitcoin was supposed to solve this.
And you could indeed use Bitcoin on Steam for a while!
But then the blocks got full, fees and wait times skyrocketed, and in response to the customer backlash Steam removed Bitcoin.
Meanwhile Bitcoiners were (and still are) only focused on number go up instead of other, more productive, use cases.
Such a waste.
They built the lightning network, it's meant for this use case.
Unfortunately it's shit at it. The user experience of using another currency or hell even just Bitcoin is far superior.
There's now Ethereum, Base and Solana featuring US dollar stablecoins and significantly cheaper fees. If you want to go a step further and eliminate the stablecoin issuer's counterparty risk you could even pay in the base asset of ETH. Shopify allows payments from crypto now, so Steam should try it again.
Good luck censoring purchases on ETH.
There are plenty of alternatives to Bitcoin payments in the crypto space.
The problem isn't technical, the problem is getting people to care.
Even stablecoins aren't so great for the environment. Proof of stake isn't as bad, but also doesn't offer much beyond traditional systems once KYC is needed.
Am I missing something?
Stablecoins are great. The only way to be debanked is if the stablecoin issuer explicitly blacklists your address, which is a public act which they will be forced to justify.
And Ethereum's Proof of Stake algorithm is highly censorship resistant. That's why it took seven years to design.
Exactly. It's really a tragedy that crypto becomes a speculator's tool, and the real problem didn't even get solved.
You can get Pornhub subscription with Bitcoin, but not credit card.
in a word, regulation.
Likely nothing.
The simple fact is, Visa/MC don't want to deal with porn because the number of chargebacks and fraud from porn purchases is significant and a huge outlier compared to most other charges. Their crusade against processing charges for adult material isn't about purity, it's simply business.
I'm not sure I buy the chargeback angle. It's commonly trotted out as a reason card companies would enforce censorship, but it doesn't make sense with the actions they take. Chargeback fees are paid by the merchant regardless of the chargeback's success, and are supposed to cover the costs of administering it (and then some). The very selective rules applied here are pretty odd from that angle too, if adult content chargebacks/fraud is the issue, then all of it should be the issue, not small niches.
Fraud is likely more realistic of an issue, but that's probably an issue with games in general, not just adult titles.
There are already high-risk merchant accounts with higher fees and cash reserve requirements, but AFAIK companies like Valve aren't being given any options other than comply or be destroyed.
I doubt it. If that were the case, I think they would only be complaining to Valve about the number of chargebacks issued from the Steam store. Not about genres-that-are-correlated-with-chargebacks-in-other-contexts.
Given Valve's generous refund policies, and the fact that a steam store purchase on your credit card statement looks quite innocent, and that the credit card companies didn't complain to Valve about chargebacks but about content, my guess is there are hardly any chargebacks, and this is just about moral purity.
> Given Valve's generous refund policies,
Their generous refund policy, and more importantly their very-non-generous chargeback policy. If you chargeback a Steam purchase, your account is locked.
That's not true, anti-sex work and anti-porn activists have specifically been pressuring payment processors to assume these policies. The processors as the critical control point of this whole thing was identified decades ago and conservative christian think tanks have been pursuing this path since then.
This is part of a long-term plan to de facto ban lgbtq content without having to deal with first amendment protections. First have the payment processors ban explicit content, then have queer content categorized as explicit.
Can you link a reliable source for this claim? I personally couldn't find anything with substance.
I can't imagine people are risking their steam accounts to ripoff a $5 adult game
Visa charge a fee for processing chargebacks, and this will be a tiny fraction of Steam sales. I doubt it's their concern.
Visa and Mastercard are the defacto world judges of the limits of porn.
they have their own banned topics lists and if you fuck up you lose your income
yup, the traditional banking system as a whole really
If there was ever an argument for the need of cryptocurrency, it is this.
Dethrone the payment processors or they get to decide what is and is not allowed to be sold.
Seems like this could be easily solved with legislation without having to invent new currencies. Just make it a law that payment processors are not allowed to discriminate between legitimate goods and services. If the government thinks that sugary water or porn magazines are fine to buy and sell, why should MasterCard have anything to say about it? Payment processors are basically natural monopolies, so they should be able to be regulated.
If the last decade is proof of anything, legislation is far too fluid to be a reliable source of any sort of protection for anything.
We need real protections, that don't and can't change with the winds of political power.
It's about time that credit cards were treated like money and this kind of behaviour forbidden. When you pay with cash the notes and coins don't refuse to be handed over because the issuing bank has an opinion about what you are buying, it should be the same for all payment methods.
Let's just remember that this is a ballot-box issue, not a payment-type issue.
A lot of folks I'm sure will say this is what crypto is for, but if that ever gained enough traction then (the US) congress would clamp down on it. They'd probably call it "money laundering" or something like that. Remember the guy that went to jail for exchanging crypto for fiat?
Are you mad at Visa/Mastercard? They don't care about porn, they care about not having congress smash them.
You want regulations that would prevent MC/Visa from doing this? You've got it backwards. Regulation is on the side of surveillance and morality police.
I just can't see it. Do I vote for right-winger puritans who ban games because they show trans characters? Or do I vote for left-winger perception-is-realityists who ban games because they show guns?
No.
The monetary layer is not the one where bad behavior should be policed. Being able to send and receive money is a basic utility that no government or bank should be able to deprive someone of. That's why I support cryptocurrency.
Tangent, but each of those events should be a reminder of why we must fight to never, ever live in a cashless society.
Because once big entities control the pipeline of what you can buy and you have no alternative, they basically can dictate what you can and can't do.
We saw that during the wikileak story when visa prevented Europeans to give to the org despite the fact it was perfectly legal to do so on their soil.
Just like data handled by an Apple device is not really your data since they can prevent you from doing what you want with it, money handled by Visa is only your money until they don't like what you do with it.
If Valve limited credit card purchases to PG games, but let customers purchase other games via crypto, then payment processors couldn’t complain about alleged high chargeback rates or association with adult content.
I imagine payment processors wouldn’t love this solution, but at that point they’re just asking for full editorial control, and we should resist.
Not necessary. They could just keep almost everything as-is with normal credit card processors, but for adult stuff, just use the same kind of processors other adult sites use. Those have a lot worse rates from what I hear, but still way more accessible than crypto
credit card companies (Mc?) did the same with mindgeek. No due process. Just revoked their access to CC networks.
mindgeek then wiped all _unconfirmed_ content regardless of whether it was revenge porn or not.
That one must be defended, since it was abuse of real people happening at scale and with full knowledge thereof, and PornHub's status-quo response was at best "do nothing and hope it goes away". Mind, the Justice Department also went after them (and won), so we can't even resort to "CC networks shouldn't be the ones enforcing this." At what stage of a court case is it appropriate to expect third parties to start breaking their business relationships with the defendant?
The weird part about the first-world sexual liberation mindset (usually said about feminism, but not limited thereto) is that it actively ignores how massively abusive sexual liberties very often and easily become.
Avoiding this was the initial promise of crypto and crypto pundits abandoned all their principals because line goes up.
You can track the list of banned games here: https://bannedgames.netlify.app
To all the people saying "fraud" is the reason - think that through.
Do you really, really think fraud and chargebacks for games covering specific fetishes on Steam have even the tiniest iota of relevance here?
Steam readily offers refunds for a multitude of scenarios!
Valve is also large enough to make itself known to payment processors to not be erroneously lumped in with seedy merchants.
From my understanding, VISA and Mastercard have relatively vague rules that payment processors must follow and payment processors must interpret that based on their own risk tolerance of adverse action being undertaken against them by VISA and/or Mastercard for not following the vague rules in the manner VISA/Mastercard interpret them as at a given point in time.
This is how you end up with situations where both payment processors and the big credit card networks point at each other when politicians ask "why are you withholding financial services from (insert company here)?" and, technically, both entities are correct at pointing the fingers at each other.
There's other factors with respect to contract law in a global economy spanning varied jurisdictions that add additional wrinkles, but I'm skeptical they're the culprit in this specific case
The games that got banned this time, even before considering their depiction of incest, are often of such poor quality that it's difficult to even call them 'games.' Valve itself should have removed them from Steam long before payment processors had to step in. Defending these kinds of games is like equating Blue is the Warmest Color with a random PornHub video, simply because they both contain sexual acts. If Baldur's Gate 3 ever gets banned, then you can truly make a fuss.
I can’t tell what your argument is here.
BG3 does feature an incest sex scene. You can fuck the drow twins.
Are you saying that BG3 should be ok because it’s a good game? Or BG3 is only ok because it doesn’t show much of the incest sex?
They're saying that if things have come to the point that activists can successfully pressure a AAA title like BG3 to be delisted from steam, then they'll worry.
What do BG3 and the title in question have in common? "incest" (though, not non-con, I don't think BG3 has such)
What does BG3 have that the other title doesn't? Critical acclaim and the support of the mainstream. THis is the same issue with GOT.
Why does BH3 have critical acclaim and mainstream support and the other title doesn't? Is this a difficult topic to grasp?
The argument seems centered on content though.
BG3 is fairly tame. Outlast trials has you mutilate genitals and has people threatening to rape you frequently.
If you think they should delist it then by all means, raise a petition or bring it to their attention. Perhaps the activist group simply has not had the resources to target this particular title yet.
You already know VISA and/or Mastercard will respond if an activist group raises enough of a concern so what's stopping you?
Ah right, you think if they got one game removed on a petition, they should somehow also be able to remove every single other game that may or may not meet the same criteria even though it probably took them significant effort to the the first game removed and this is some sort of "gotcha" on their moral inconsistency rather than a simple limitation of resources to try to get their will done all at once?
I’m saying precedent is concerning
Removing and having something exist with the whatever amount of visibility it is able to earn with its quality are entirely different.
So, just to review the hypocrisy here:
Full-on murder simulators: OK.
Exchanging consensual pleasure with the wrong person: NOT OK.
They went after no-name games instead of Summer Memories or Treasure Hunter Claire? Weak.
They should have at least aimed at Living With Sister: Monochrome Fantasy.
Hey, Summer Memories got an official shout out on their twitter once, someone must have a real weak spot for that one at valve.
It looks like the affected games are all rated "Adult Only" on Steam.
The games you mention are all sold without adult content on Steam, and the customer has to visit the publisher's website to download a patch restoring said content
They went after incest and non-con (for now).
But I don't know about the last game you mentioned... the "sister" part sounds sus.
This is the kind of thing that crypto gets around. Surely the CC companies will allow folks to use their cards to buy crypto then in the same 1 minute that newly bought crypto could be used to buy the game and valve if they converted the btc to usd at the same day or very quick could mitigate the volatility of the asset
well well well
there are 2 solutions to this: 1. steam accepts eth and other cryptos; most people associate btc with crypto because it is the original but it is now technically vastly inferior. 2. the seven seas (nobody ever turns your free transaction down and you get to keep whatever it is forever with no fancy license/tos/eulas attached)
Bring back crypto payments Valve.
I'm not sure why the payment processors can't just be excluded for the offending games during checkout instead.
I'll never understand what is these payment processors' problem with adult content.
If someone wants to sell something and someone else wants to buy something, it should be nobody else's business to police it as long as two parties are settled.
That's why I want to see crypto take over and get rid of the middleman and regulators.
The only viable end-game in scale for crypto is what happens in China. I am not sure if I want that.
i think it's a mix of conservative/religious lobbying (getting them ire from the government), and chargebacks by embarrassed customers with post-nut clarity being common
Considering their volume, I find it hard to believe that Valve couldn't find another, more lenient payment processor with similar fees.
My understanding is that it's not just the processor, but Visa/Mastercard themselves have rules against certain types of merchants/products... they really have a monopoly on credit cards in general so you have to play by their rules.
You're right, but it's slightly more complicated than that.
My understanding is that payment processors are obligated to follow the policies of Visa/MasterCard, AmEx, and Discover, but that those parties' policies don't explicitly ban these specific things for sale. Instead, they "strongly encourage" processors to ban them in their user agreements under the implicit threat of their risk level being increased, which in turn impacts the fees they pay to the credit card companies.
I've not been deep in this world since ~2014, but at that time the only processor I could find that wasn't specific to the porn industry, offered physical terminals, had reasonable (if high) fees, and didn't ban legal transactions in their user agreement was PAI ("Payment Alliance International"). A quick look at their site today shows that they seem to have been acquired by Brinks, so that may no longer be the case.
MasterCard have a specific restricted list that bans an awful lot of things in any adult context.
Some of how to interpret that is left up to the processor, but it is broadly under MCs and to a lesser extent Visa's control.
Yep, they are a just a modern day mafia. "Would be a real shame if you didn't take down these games. Then we couldn't do business with you anymore."
It complicates things to have some games that can be purchased with credit cards and some games that can only be purchased with crypto.
If they continued to carry any of the games that were singled out for removal by Visa and Mastercard, they would not be able to accept credit card payments for anything else in their store. This same drama has played out the same way with countless other online services.
Controversial games being restricted to purchase only with Steam Points. The credit card is only ever charged to buy points, which can then be used to purchase items on the store. Similar to fortnite.
Or similar to DLSite and Fantia, where it didn't work.
They could support a stablecoin like USDC and start pushing people to that. No censorship and lower fees. Valve broke ground with Steam, they could do it again.
nah. USDC funds can be frozen by Circle on demand/request.
You wouldn’t be buying or holding any USDC in your account. It would be invisible to you
The problem with that is that you usually end up using traditional payment rails (e.g. a Visa debit card) to "invisibly" buy the stablecoin and then you're subject to their rules and fees again.
Would you care to explain the process more? I'd be glad to see a useful application of crypto.
There are no other payment processors.
There are no other payment processors that can replace Visa/Mastercard*.
There are other payment processors in India/Japan/China/Brazil/etc. But none of them is internationally adopted like Visa/Mastercard.
Is it the case the Mastercard/Visa will reject a site that has such content even if you can only purchase it using ValveBucks or PayPal or something? That seems plausible.
In some countries there are other systems. It's high time the modern world adopted something similar like Pix in Brazil.
There are national issuers like JCB or UnionPay.
I'm getting a JCB card. Screw Visa.
Adult content has a high chargeback rate and high fraud rates so payment processing for adult content has higher fees.
People say that a lot but I haven't seen actual statistics, and sites that have established low chargeback rates face the same issues.
Also that's not a reason to ban certain genres/kinks, which is what's happening here.
You need to be more specific. Conflating "adult content" with porn is both problematic is masks the real issue. A large majority of games Valve sells are adult content. But as you can imagine grand theft auto is not causing a lot of political backlash, despite the objectionable content.
You say that but the same censors behind this also got GTA5 pulled from retail stores
Which makes less sense when you consider Steam will refund you game if you dont want it.
I don’t think you understand what’s being said. He’s not talking about the ability to refund
But is there a good reason to do a chargeback if you can easily refund it? Yes if someone stole the CC and used it buy something on Steam, but is that the concern or that someone buys something with a CC on their own account, and then chargebacks instead of refunding?
The fact that these were specifically incest games makes me think a title was somehow involved in distributing CSAM, which is often why Visa/MC crack down on porn websites.
But it is possible that Visa sensibly and correctly said "anyone who makes or purchases such a game is a despicable scumbag, and we shouldn't assume the financial risk of dealing with them."
That's a pretty wild idea for what someone would be putting on steam as a visual novel. And why would they need to be pressured into removing horrible illegal content?
Or you think one person did that and it made the credit cards decide any story with incest would be the same? That would be ridiculous on their part.
I think the government should be the one deciding what makes someone qualify as a despicable scumbag, not a private payment processor that is essentially acting as a utility provider. For the same reason, I also don't think an electric company should be allowed to shut cancel your building's electricity if they don't like your mismatched socks.
The whole history of how credit card companies came about being the controller of adult content is very well laid out in podcast hot money season 2. It’s a fascinating story https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hot-money-agent-of-cha...
They did the same to Dlsite, a while ago, made them rename all the tags and then delist lolige, but more notably alot of games with sailor uniforms and/or high school character/settings.
If you think it's illegal under PROTECT then you should enforce the law, not use credit card companies to force people to use a VPN. And if it's illegal it should be illegal everywhere, not just where people are paying rather than sharing. Clearly if many people are paying for a work it's less likely to be obscene
Why not just make it not purchasable with that payment option/store credit?
In many countries Steam supports plenty of alternative payment options that do not use VISA or mastercard.
Thinking about it, if a platform as enormous as Steam just completely stopped accepting VISA and mastercard, they'd a) probably still be fine b) VISA and mastercard would probably cave - few companies will prioritize outworn politics over literally billions of revenue. In fact I'd expect these two to be the last to do that. Valve would be more the type to put principles first. Too bad they didn't this time.
Can someone please explain why we still have chargebacks in 2025? Don't accept cards without 3DS, problem solved. If not, why not? Are some important consumer segments still stuck with cards that don't have it?
Chargebacks aren't just for stolen credit cards, but also fraudulent merchants.
If I buy a physical good with a credit card, and the merchant either never sends me anything, or sends me an empty box and ignores my emails, well, that's a use-case for chargebacks. 3DS doesn't help with that.
Also for merchants that are just too dysfunctional to do the right thing. A while back, I ordered a phone online from Best Buy, and they shipped me a different model from what I ordered. I contacted their customer service, who told me to mail the phone back for a refund. I did so, and then they mailed it right back to me with a note saying they couldn't accept the return because I'd sent them a different item from the one I ordered. (No shit: that's why I needed to return it!) They didn't have fraudulent intent, I'm sure; one hand just didn't know what the other was doing. A chargeback resolved that situation, and I'm very glad I had the option.
Chargeback is not just for when your card is stolen. It’s also for e.g. when you never received your order, or your order is substantially different from what’s promised. It’s basically a last resort customer service option.
This is not an issue oof payment processors. It is an issue of Visa and Mastercard duopoly, whom use payment processors as middlemen in order to be able to push their own "rules" onto businesses and get away clean.
This is why crypto needs to rule the world
The good old USA, when you can show someone bashing someone else's head with brain spilling out and it might get an R rating. But show a nipple and holy shit we have crossed the line.
If I'm going to be gracious to payment processors, what they need to do is lobby congress for a "DMCA-like safe harbor" for themselves.
It should be unlawful in every developed country, it's an assault on the freedom of speech and freedom of information by Visa.
So the outlast trials latest villain is a pair of incestuous elderly conjoined twins. The game features intense violence, lots of genitals, kills via explicit mutilation of those genitals, lots of rape threats. One guy in particular gets turned into a human sex toy via mutilation and wax.
Why is that above the bar then?
Does valve even leak the game titles you purchase to card processors? Don't they have some plausible deniability here?
Doesn't matter if anyone actually buys content or products the networks object to per their policies. If it's being offered and payment is accepted on a checkout that shows the networks' logos, merchants and their payment service providers can get into trouble.
The day I will be informed that Valve delisted anything after being pressured by a credit card company is the last day I buy a game on it. Personally I pay with my own country's payment system that's unrelated to these companies.
You mean yesterday? Valve already did that.
so.. today?
Given the pc gamer article mentions "keep it in the family", I think they mean incest. Why on earth did valve have this on their platform on in the first place?
> I think they mean incest.
Oh god they delisted Crusader Kings???!
Similar pressures are placed on: porn, cannabis, and gun industries. Not only by payment processors but also, for example, by text message carriers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melinda_Tankard_Reist#Collecti...
> a "pro-life feminist"
What.
Seriously what? I thought pro-choice is a core tenet of feminism?
You could have clicked the link embedded in the very text you're quoting, to read an explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-abortion_feminism
Peoples extremely poor understanding of ideology, the mapping of it, and power in general is sad and leads to radical evil time and time again.
Stuff like this is why Autism is probably the next form of human evolution.
Why would it be?
I live in a red state in the South. I'd say about 2/3 of the women I know well enough to be confident of their politics to that degree of detail would describe themselves as both feminists and anti-abortion/pro-life.
If you want to put a name to it, they're basically second-wave feminists with a few third-wave beliefs tacked on.
The real lesson here is that politics are nuanced, and the US party dichotomy doesn't come close to covering it.
I consider myself an AnCap (shocking given my username, I know), but grew up here surrounded by Republicans. I fit in well enough overall because this is where I developed my "social mask" in the first place. I lived in a community with nearly directly opposite politics (Charlottesville, VA) for a few years and found that I fit in pretty well with that crowd as well.
I share enough with both parties that I can have conversations on things that I agree with them on and connect to the point that they assume that I'm "one of them". Invariably, once conversation turns to other topics I'm accused of being a member of the other party. It's to the point that it amuses me when it happens, and I frankly enjoy being in a place where I can connect with most everyone and serve as a sort of translator: I've spent enough time "in enemy territory" from their perspectives that I can explain the other side's position fairly and with empathy while explicitly not holding that position. It makes for stimulating conversation with little risk of offense.
Because "anti-abortion/pro-life" removes a right from women. Trading the rights of a developed adult for the rights of a hypothetical future person.
What does ancapistanism have to do with it? Is there a non-religious reason to be against the right to choose abortion up to 24 weeks of pregnancy?
> Because "anti-abortion/pro-life" removes a right from women. Trading the rights of a developed adult for the rights of a hypothetical future person.
Their perspective is that abortion is killing a human being. Given that, it’s entirely consistent.
> What does ancapistanism have to do with it?
Nothing, other than that I was providing some context on where I’m coming from.
> Is there a non-religious reason to be against the right to choose abortion up to 24 weeks of pregnancy?
While religion is certainly a factor for a lot of these people, this question doesn’t make sense to me. Is there a non-religious reason to be against killing any person, regardless of age?
The base difference in perspective is that the other side here believes that the fetus is a human being, with all the rights that come with it.
> Is there a non-religious reason to be against the right to choose abortion up to 24 weeks of pregnancy?
Of course there is. It's not hard to construct an argument to that effect either. For example: let's agree for the sake of argument that a newborn has moral rights, and that gametes do not. It doesn't make much sense to give the fetus moral rights only based on its physical location, therefore at some point between conception and birth the fetus gains moral rights. No matter what point n we choose, the objection "why is one day earlier any better" seems pretty persuasive. Therefore, by induction, the only point for assigning rights which can't be argued against in that way is at conception. Thus, we should disallow abortion so we aren't depriving the fetus of its rights.
I'm not saying that's a bulletproof argument. Indeed the argument doesn't even need to be correct for my point. My point is that nothing about that argument requires any religious belief whatsoever. So it is possible. I'm also quite certain that a cleverer person than I could construct a better argument which still doesn't require any religious dogma. This is an ethical topic, not a religious one. Obviously religion has a lot to say on ethics, but that's no reason to believe that secular arguments against abortion can't exist.
(necro a little)
> It doesn't make much sense to give the fetus moral rights only based on its physical location, therefore at some point between conception and birth the fetus gains moral rights.
A _lot_ more happens to a fetus during and immediately after birth than just moving a few feet. You're minimizing it here, but if you give it the significance it merits your induction thing falls apart.
> Therefore, by induction,
One grain of sand is a small amount of sand. Two grains of sand is a small amount of sand. Therefore, by induction, any amount of grains of sand is a small amount of sand. The Sahara contains a small amount of sand.
This is fun.
cool, then sperm and eggs have moral rights
"For example: let's agree for the sake of argument that a newborn has moral rights, and that gametes do not. It doesn't make much sense to give the fetus moral rights only based on its physical location, therefore at some point between conception and birth the fetus gains moral rights. No matter what point n we choose, the objection "why is one day earlier any better" seems pretty persuasive. Therefore, by induction, the only point for assigning rights which can't be argued against in that way is at conception. Thus, we should disallow abortion so we aren't depriving the fetus of its rights."
That's roughly my position, as an atheist libertarian. although I don't back it up all the way to conception, just to a point in early pregnancy where it seems overwhelmingly clear the fetus has no attributes which could reasonably demand respect for rights.
Abortion has been conflated with feminism, like how, say, tariffs are conflated with Republicans right now, but there's no ideological necessity for that. Just cultural trends.
> although I don't back it up all the way to conception, just to a point in early pregnancy where it seems overwhelmingly clear the fetus has no attributes which could reasonably demand respect for rights.
Sounds like you're not actually using that deeply flawed argument then. You're making the distinction that not every day has the same effect.
And could you estimate how many weeks you put that point at?
> No matter what point n we choose, the objection "why is one day earlier any better" seems pretty persuasive. Therefore, by induction
That's not persuasive at all. It's not just not "bulletproof", it's blatantly wrong. Also you can make the same argument in the other direction.
> Indeed the argument doesn't even need to be correct for my point. My point is that nothing about that argument requires any religious belief whatsoever.
They wanted someone to give a plausible argument that isn't religious.
> no reason to believe that secular arguments against abortion can't exist
I care about the merits of positions that people actually have, not theoretical positions.
And in the general case, if nobody can be found that has a simple position, that is a reason to believe it's not a coherent position.
Well social/religious conservatives often think the child has rights even during pregnancy so it's not as simple as the mothers rights.
The libertarian view tends to much more favour the parents rights to make choices for their children if I remember correctly, and obviously favour the option where the government isn't deciding for them.
Exactly.
My personal belief is that life begins at conception. As a result, I’m opposed to abortion in all cases.
… but I’m also an anarchist, and therefore believe it is emphatically not the state’s role to make these types of decisions for people.
I don’t think there is a “right answer” here in terms of policy. Some large portion of the people will see it as a violation of their rights no matter how extreme or nuanced the line is drawn.
There is no unique dna at conception. I know this is fun to repeat but it really shows you ignore science. .
I didn’t say there was?
So no new life is created at conception like you said.
Right, is there a non-religious reason to be against the right to choose to abort early during pregnancy?
If you want population growth.
a moral reason
Honestly glad to see this has sparked larger talks about this again. Surprised to see Valve is just now getting impacted by this.
Does anyone know if UPI solves this problem?
Part of the coalition directing ESG which direct BlackRock and Vanguard which then threaten Visa/Mastercard… has been extremely successful in making people believe this is a crusade only by Visa/Mastercard.
It’s the S. And so very few people have any idea. Visa/MC doesn’t actually hate money.
They have better argument fiduciary defense accept porn money than deny it - unless they don’t and no one asks or thinks about it.
if I was doing a couple of billion a year in transactions then the payment processor would be told where to shove it
Okay, then you'd go from a billion a year to zero. Congratulations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un4p-6lzIpI
A couple of billion is an insignificant fraction of the $10000bn MasterCard processes every year.
which is relevant how exactly?
merchants don't deal with mastercard, they deal with an acquiring bank
of which there are hundreds
no doubt one of which will be happy to take the business
Mastercard appears to be involved in the pressuring. You can't avoid them.
certainly not explicitly mentioned in the article
and I very doubt it's the case, the card networks simply don't care, given you can buy adult entertainment from millions of websites
the acquirer will care if it pushes up their chargeback rate, but this is normally solved by the merchant by paying a couple of bps more
it's a negotiating tactic, nothing more
https://nationwidepaymentsystems.com/mastercards-policy-on-a...
You clearly think in small terms then. Trillion dollar fish eat billion dollar fish
So why don't they make a second company, SteamyAdult? There is a market for it, so it seems.
you can start to gamble NFTs on Steam starting from age 13
but they'll tell you that they got pressured to ban "adult content" from steam
HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA
Who's kid is obsessed with microtransactions and cs:go cases gamba on steam?
Psyop and propaganda, calling them out gets you a ban
Valve should also delete its chat app. You can send a game if it's that important.
Honestly, this whole Visa/Mastercard control thing feels a lot like realizing you’ve been following rules that don’t really fit you. It’s tough to break out of it. But FedNow is an interesting option. It lets banks move money instantly, 24/7, with no card networks involved, so less hassle with the content policing. It’s not a magic fix (still early days, only works in the US), but it shows there’s another way if you’re willing to step outside the old patterns. Sometimes that’s what you need to actually move forward. And no I'm not a Fednow shill. Has anyone tried Kagi btw? ;)
Is it really a fact that porn transactions attract higher amount of fraud?
Without a horse in this race, this precedent makes me deeply uncomfortable.
The discussion seems to be mostly about the moral issues, but it seems likely that the titles being a 'magnet for scams and chargebacks' is more likely the cause.
Nice excuse but we can see who censors behind this are and how they are gloating. https://xcancel.com/CollectiveShout
No. That's an often-repeated bullshit excuse.
Payment processors have ways of passing some of the chargeback risks onto the stores, and it's not like Steam itself is chargeback central. If you just want free games, pirating them is extremely easy, and trying to abuse chargebacks gets you banned.
It's not as straightforward as that. It's more like scammers getting other people to buy gift cards which are redeemed in steam and other games then the value getting moved around as in-game currency between game accounts (game-bucks, special items) before being cashed out again to make tracing very hard. Essentially laundering. I assume certain titles attract scammers because people will not want to pursue the claims due to embarrassment. Why would Mastercard give a hoot that a game has boobs in it? They care about loosing money.
The obscure porn games Valve delisted have no in-game items or currencies, and have zero second market value.
People launder money in the way you describe do that via extremely popular titles (so they can sell the whole account later) or rare items in online games like CSGO or Dota. Not "Incest Simulator 2023".
> It's not a great precedent, that's for sure.
It’s not a precedent, its been the status quo for half a century
Just get JCB cards. Done.
Does Steam offer different types of content to customers depending on their payment card brand?
No.
Just a reminder that when still using cash, you are allowed to buy whatever you want that is legal without asshole bankers or institutions deciding for you!
The puritanical elites in America have been ruining everyone’s fun for decades. So tired of their double standards and overreach.
It is a shame that it takes payment processors to get Valve to do even the bare minimum curation of their store. IMO the thousands of outright bad games and ai slop asset flips and weirdo porn that verges on outright illegal content in many countries should have never been allowed in the first place. All of this leads back to various executives at Valve essentially doing no actual work and refusing to hire anybody because a huge part of their corporate culture is to keep headcount low while chasing constant growth.
Maybe now is the time to rethink accepting crypto again? But this time stablecoins not volatile coins like BTC and ETH.
Over 15 years from the Bitcoin Pizza Day, yet we're still dealing with this shit. What was the point.
They blacklisted games that feature incest. Good riddance. This trash should never have been allowed on Steam.
Clearly Steam disagreed. I don't see any publishers who were angry.
Sorry but ancaps are not allowed to complain - it's a 'free market' and the credit card companies are bigger than gabe newell - end of story, cry is free.
In ancap logic I think the fault here is all on gabe for not lobbying the government enough and/or for not having been able to gather enough force to fight against those companies somehow.
the global game industry is mostly corrupt, they could close valve down and we'd likely be better off.
It's interesting that Valve sort of put themselves in this situation by opting not to police their store anymore.
I'm personally a fan of fewer restrictions on content in video games and fewer "gatekeepers" but it's kind of inevitable that people would get upset when you chose to allow people to sell games like "Sex With Hitler" and "Pimp Life: Sex Simulator". Deciding to allow that content on your store and simultaneously not going to bat for it is weird, it's like they decided to just get the porn money while they could as a short-term boost to revenue.
Itch.io still has fewer restrictions but I assume they'll eventually have to clamp down too once payment processors cut them off - they don't have the financial resources to fight it like Valve or Epic do.
Interestingly Nintendo has as of late relaxed their restrictions too, you can find porn-adjacent shovelware on the Switch eShop despite their history of being very censorious. I wonder if payment processors will successfully push them around too or if Nintendo is too big to get pushed around.
Most Japanese adult game publishers had (some of) their games rejected from Steam.
Steam does police their store. It's just that Visa/Mastercard don't approve of how they police it.
What does "police" mean? They don't allow illegal content, that's policing no? You want more policing like morality police?
Yes, people have other moral values than yours and will act upon them.
The question is: has "kill in the name of Hitler" also been banned, or is that okay with Visa/MC?
I don't need your 'what ifs' and 'could haves.' Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is actually available on Steam, and that's good enough.
Looks to me like you read the opposite of what i wrote though.
> it's kind of inevitable that people would get upset when you chose to allow people to sell games like "Sex With Hitler" and "Pimp Life: Sex Simulator".
The problem isn't some people being upset, it's that a single digit number of companies effectively control the ability for anyone else in the world to do business with them. Those companies get lobbied as much as politicians but with no accountability and any overreach being far less visible. And no freedom of speech rules.
Simulated "immoral" activity could be considered a moral gray area. If nothing else, morality is subjective.
So I think it's reasonable to argue for private, individual consumption of morally subjective material (not least of which is the logistical difficulty of preventing such things), as well as the right to create and sell such things. (You or I might approve of or oppose those things, but that's a different argument from what I make below.)
Aside from that, I don't think Valve or a payment processor is obligated to be a neutral party. Whether it might come from collective consumer backlash or whoever makes decisions for an organization deciding what they will or will not allow to flow through their system, I think they too should have the right to allow or ban things. If publishers and consumers want their morally gray content, so be it, but don't feel entitled to have Steam and VISA along for the ride if they don't want to be.
Hypothetically, Valve might prefer Steam be neutral, because money. But then they have the option to fight their payment processor or look for alternatives, rather than "forcing" their payment processor to be a part of something that the payment processor opposes.
TL;DR when a morally subjective issue involves a lot of parties, every party should have the right to "opt out" if they are morally opposed. (in my opinion)
Payment processors banning companies from using them for anything other than illegal use or fraud issues seems like pretty egregious overreach to me.
They shouldn't be able to leverage their nigh monopoly on modern payment processing to choose winners and losers in the marketplace.
They are using pornography as a wedge issue to establish that they get to dictate what companies are allowed to exist in the modern distributed market.
It would be entirely reasonable to legally require them to act blindly towards retailers, with restrictions needing to be based on universally applied financial criteria.
Card payments have become inseparable from modern life.
Regulate them as a financial utility. The electric company or water company can't refuse to hook up a business just because the owner doesn't like that business.
I think the trouble here stems from the lack of alternatives to the small group of payment processors. The near-monopoly allows their choices to override the choice of all the other involved groups, and almost no viable alternatives exist for Valve to move to if they disagree.
I guess Gabe's commitment to freedom of speech on his platform extended as far as nazis, but not as far as porn...
well, something like this can't be fixed overnight. I think Valve have more than earned a benefit of the doubt with this kind of stuff. I don't know if they are thinking on ways around this issue or not, but I would bet highly that they are. Problem is the credit card companies have them (and everyone else) by the balls because any attempt to continue hosting those gmaes but accept alternative payments for them would be retaliated against and MC et al might cut them off entirely, which would be devastating. I'm not sure there is a good solution to this that doesn't involve change of law/regulation i.e. lobbying
In the early 2000's kink.com put together a coalition and told the credit card companies to stick their censorship rules where the sun don't shine, and they are still taking credit card payments... The video game industry is plenty big enough to wield similar influence.
The ISPs, web services, payment services, and advertisers are all in a Mexican standoff right now - with every small move for domination throwing a volley of bullets at the customer from all sides.
The card companies are cutting off all the low hanging fruit to establish precedence (steam is not the only one affected). One it's established that they can ban certain things, then they've established they get to control the purchase of literally any idea, cause, or product they want. The card companies want to control and starve anything or anybody they don't like - especially their competition and regulators. They'll control the spice.
Net neutrality regulation would have prevented this and forced them to play nice with each other, with the side effect of a net benefit to society instead of tearing it apart.
We all warned you the free and open Internet, and by extension irl, as we knew it would unravel. Fundamental property rights are now dead; we just watched it happen.
You gave up the fight. You voted for it. Twice.
Payments companies successfully got valve to stop purveying weapons grade incest/child-porn/rape themed smut that is barely a game?
Nabokov was a great author and Lolita was the work of a great author who turned his pen/typewriter to a detestable subject leading to innumerable questions about art.
These guys are just z-graders who get off on non-consensual sexual interactions involving children.
Valve absolutely should not be publishing this stuff.
I don't know how bad these specific games were, but meanwhile, OnlyFans pornographers continue to use sites like Twitch to advertise their work to teens, and Pornhub continues to operate, despite claims that they profit from sex trafficking amongst other things (https://traffickinghubpetition.com/)
Seems strange to go after obscure videogames (which presumably don't feature real human beings) in this way. Unless they really are unusually extreme?
Most of your comment I agree with, if Visa has this power they should be using it against people involved in human trafficking. But:
> which presumably don't feature real human beings
I don't really care. As soon as you've created something people will pleasure themselves to you've created the negative feedback loop on the pleasure but the positive feedback loop on the real thing IMO.
Even if I agree that this stuff shouldn’t be sold, it’s wrong that Visa has the power to force Valve to. The end does never justify the means.
Agree that Visa shouldn't have the power but the fact is,this isn't it.
The civil liberties guys always jump in one too early to defend the guys who want to fuck kids.
Slippery slope arguments are fallacious. I am ready to destroy Visa/Mastercard as soon as it's not child abuse or erotic depictions of child abuse they are censoring.