I don’t care about incest specifically, but I have to wonder where they’re drawing the line and why. If the games are depicting consenting adults, and only adults can download them, I don’t see the harm.
Did they target incest because it’s “icky?” What if they decide other perfectly legal things are icky? Shouldn’t legality be the line?
It’s not illegal to depict incest, the same as it is not illegal to depict many types of acts that many would consider immoral or even acts that are explicitly illegal, like bestiality, necrophilia, or rape. There might be an argument for regulating content that depicts illegal acts on the grounds that it normalizes or potentially glorifies these acts, but that isn’t likely the reason for this. I think it is mostly a corporate choice and partially a legal issue.
I am against this partially because it is arbitrary but mostly because I don’t like a precedent set towards banning things on moral grounds.
Paypal and other payment processors are wellknown to set up arbitrary rules. They held the money of an 100% legal and fine erotica author hostage for months, for example. Incest games vanishing is just step 1 of their censorship.
At the workplace if anybody says “we’ve always done it this way” during a meeting where we tackle a problem, that means it’s time to change the hubris because it clearly doesn’t work for us anymore.
Right. It’s a system of economic exchange, not a moral position. There are ways around this system, but they’re time consuming and annoying to accomplish. So the vendors tend to take the path of least resistance when setting their internal policies. You were taught about Free Markets as this perfect, frictionless vacuum of interactions between buyers and sellers, but it doesn’t work that way and never did.
For some reason, people seem to confuse being naive and gullible with being moral and upstanding.
Luckly I. can buy anime porn games straight from source dev. Just checked and my Treasure Hunter Claire is still in my library, so guess this affects only unbought games? But I also bought the game direct too.
The problem isn’t that they’re private, the problem is that there’s not many to choose from. Visa gets to throw their weight around, because they have a stranglehold on a huge swath of banks and businesses. MasterCard has another big chunk, and the rest go to AmEx and Discover.
If there were more providers to choose from, this would be a non-issue, but that wouldn’t be very capitalist (/s), and I doubt the big names would simply allow new competition.
The reason there’s so few is because people don’t want to have to figure out beforehand whether or not they can use the payment provider they have at the store they want to go to.
I’ve seen this happen multiple times especially in Japan when the barcode payment craze started. There were like 13 competing payment providers and now there are 2. Because people don’t want to have to carry around 13 different types of card or payment typed and have 13 different types of payments. They want one that works everywhere.
It’s why there needs to be sovereign digital payment systems that are legally enforced.
Yeah, like what need is there for these intermediaries in the first place? I get that there was probably a need once upon a time, but that seems superfluous now
where do we think we would be at at this point if electronic payments were handled by government entities? Not trying to defend Visa or Mastercard, just genuinely curious what others think.
We’d be in the same place. It’s not any better or worse for a private versus a public entity to do harm.
Also, the government is already part of this. If the DOJ told Visa, “hey, stop fucking around with that, you don’t need to be trying to control legal agreements between parties, that’s our purview” (or if they even thought the DOJ might), they’d drop this behavior in an instant. They are doing this in large part because they believe it is in line with the government’s ideology. Preemptive compliance.
Wed probably be in a similar place, but the advantage of a private entity being that it can bridge the already existing digital payments, so if a store big enough like steam had the option to, they could integrate with that country’s digital payments directly.
I think it’s not that easy. From what I understand, the payment providers enforce that for the whole store, otherwise they don’t want to be involved. Quite shitty, but they have enough weight to pull shit like that off.
i really hope this won't affect yaoi and sapphic visual novels they're not really p*rn but given the way governments are using censorship to crack down on lgbtq communities and spaces i'm worried.
After the CEO of Visa met with President Trump, Visa has announced that they will no longer allow payments from gaming storefronts that host “obscene” content and media content that run afoul of the vision that the Trump Administration has for America. As such all games that feature LGBTQ, DEI, and “anti-american sentiment” will be removed from sale on Steam. Visa CEO says that “we need to be better as a collective whole” and that “this filth” has no place in being in circulation.
He added that “we look forward to working with the Trump Administration to make America and the rest of the world great.” Trump added on Truth Social that “I am working with Visa to make sure that DEI and WOKENESS ARE NEVER ACCEPTED AND DON’T COME BACK TO OUR GREAT NATION. WOKEISM IS NOW DEAD WITH VIDEO GAMES…” He also said the "radical left in Hollywood would “be next.”
Thousands of independent game developers including award winning games such as Celeste and “Undertale” have decried on X and social media that these “chilling” policies as some said this are “pure authoritarianism of free thought”
Excited to see a new game from the Mario Odyssey team, and excited that this one seems to have turned out well! I wish i had anything else to say about this game, but it literally just came out today. I usually don’t play new releases and I never buy a console in the first year of release, so…I look forward to playing this on a Switch 2 or emulator in 5 years. lol
What goal do the payment processors have for doing things like this, is it just that they like knowing that they have the ability to control what you are and aren’t allowed to enjoy? I ask this because normally, when services change their policies, it’s done to improve profits. But from what I can tell, the payment processors can only lose money because they are eliminating potential revenue sources.
I will admit that I have no interest in any of the games that were removed, I’ve never even heard of them before today, but I don’t agree with payment processors having the ability to sensor content over some schizo bullshit.
Porn-related transactions have a higher than average rate of chargebacks. Maybe post-nut clarity motivates people to say “wait hold on I shouldn’t have spent that money, I must’ve been hacked.” Or maybe it’s people saving face when confronted with a transaction log from their spouse or other family members. Or maybe it’s just the type of transaction that actual card fraudsters gravitate towards, so that there really is a higher percentage of unauthorized transactions.
Gambling-related merchants also have a similar problem with payment processors. For many of them, it’s just straightforward business concerns, not any kind of ethical issue in itself.
The problem with that is that, at least with PayPal, they charge a fee to the service provider (Steam, in this case) for chargebacks. And, from what I’ve heard, that fee is significantly more than the original cost.
It could also be the result of government pressure. Which government? No idea, but it may be easier to implement it system wide than try to build a regional filter to ban payments in one country but allow it in others.
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