Tap for spoilerCOMPLETELY BIGLY FAKE STORY THE EXAMPLE IS LITERAL FAKE NEWS TO SHOW AN EXAMPLE NEWS STORY of what CHILLING CONSEQUENCES THIS COULD HAVE (so don’t get mad at me if you can’t read)
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”
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.
So what you're saying is we need a religious themed sex game? I think I follow. You have to fight your way through the 12 apostles and then you and Jesus bang. Its like Mortal Kombat, but with sandals and a lot of baby oil.
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.
You can literally just “buy” stuff, and put whatever your currency is, in your wallet. so the transaction was already made, to no specific product. How are they able to track that, is utter nonsense. This is just the companies forcing them to do their bidding. I mean if those games have questionable content (and by that I mean pedophilia or zoophilia), I do agree with that, and I feel that is a responsibility from Valve itself, not other companies.
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 types 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
In Germany we usually use Debit bank cards for payment (if something like a credit card isnt included).
The GiroCard is standard across all banks and usually every shop accepts that method.
Problem is: They don’t work on the interwebz.
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.
Every company is headquartered somewhere, or has some market that it cannot afford to withdraw from, and that makes them all ultimately subject to said governments. No business decision is made free from pressure when it comes to governments.
Again, the issue is this is an American company setting American content policy internationally.
Storefronts and brands can set up local branches and sell through those using the local digital payment provider without getting in trouble with their headquarter’d country. They can’t do that with a private entity that’s decided to set their global content policy to align with America’s.
Again, the issue is this is an American company setting American content policy internationally.
That is not the issue. That may be the subset of the issue that you have a problem with, but the actual issue is a payment provider setting purchase restrictions period. That it is happening in the US is not uniquely bad; it would be equally bad happening anywhere else.
Interpreting the international impact to be “the issue” would mean that if this were only affecting Americans, this would be fine, which is absolutely not the case.
Storefronts and brands can set up local branches and sell through those using the local digital payment provider without getting in trouble with their headquarter’d country.
To set up and sell in that country, they then have to comply with the local payment providers. Which shouldn’t be deciding whether people can purchase something, just as Visa shouldn’t be.
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.
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.
Did PayPal actually make valve remove them or did PayPal just say they didn’t want to provide payment processors for them and valve couldn’t be bothered to come up with a solution?
I can’t see why Paypal would care one way or the other if the games were available on the platform as long as PayPal don’t have to process the payment.
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.
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.
Right, that would be you arguing moral grounds. If you were to argue that Nazis are covered under hate speech, that is fine because hate speech is illegal. There’s the difference, right? Depicting Nazis isn’t illegal (in most places), and could be allowed, but hate speech is illegal.
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.
And next they will come for other labels deemed “against the rules” without elaborating. Porn is the canary. You can “lol incest” but this is about taking down what folks cant argue with first then the next will be porn at all, then queer stuff, just like tumblr
Yeah, but I like paying people to make things, and it’s not their fault. This will ultimately mean less of these things get made. For incest games, that’s no great loss, but I hate the precedent.
Because many "players" are refunding after a fap, which is logged and reviewed. Also, suspicious or new transactions are often flagged and reviewed. So a lot of such side content is being pushed in front of the banks and payment processors by horny clients who unwittingly expose their kinks.
Seem like an easy solution would be to have certain transactions be nonrefundable.
I say easy, but I guess it would involve quite a bit of software changes, and then you’d also have to deal with angry customers who ignored numerous warnings that a purchase would be final.
That’s even less consumer friendly. If you purchase a game and it turns out to be shovelware that barely works and has a bunch of gamed reviews on the store page? Oh too bad sap, you got conned this is non-refundable.
Consumers had to fight for games that do refundable, I don’t think we should be quick to consider loopholes.
I can’t imagine buying a porn game on Steam. And even if I did, incest holds no interest to me.
Even so, I absolutely fucking hate this crap. Payment processors are killing off content despite the producers and consumers of the content being completely fine with it. This should be a Net Neutrality issue. But I’m not seeing anywhere near the same outrage over it that there was over ISPs doing the exact same thing.
I remember someone had a reply on something that touched on incest porn and they where like. I see it all the time but when you put in blond big boobed blowjob and the title is mom son its like who cares or such. So much porn seems to just get relabeled when it comes to incest porn. This is now a brother and sister or mom/son or father/daughter. It is wierd how that seemed to just blow up in popularity. I mean I think its been that way for a few years but I swear I did not see so much like pre covid.
I think it has blown up in popularity because many more people nowadays have divorced parents and grew up in a blended family. I bet many guys have fantasized about fucking their step mom or older step sister and I bet even dads have fantasized about fucking the oldest step daughter who was already an adult when he married her mother.
You do realize that step family aren’t blood relatives right? A horny teenager who met his older step sister for the first time when he was 15 end she 17 doesn’t have a familial bond with her, it’s just another hot girl for him. So nothing Alabama about that.
One theory I heard is that during Covid, the outside world became scary and strangers unattainable. So the only accessible women are the ones that live with you. In many scenarios, people are step-siblings just to explain away why does a shut-in guy have a hot girl in his home.
My theory is that it’s because people who are into it must be really into it, but people who aren’t into it are very good at ignoring the fact that it’s titled like that or that there might be one or two throwaway lines implying it (especially when it’s “step”). So there’s an incentive for uploaders to title things like that and for creators to add a little nod in the video towards it (without adding too much incest roleplay) because it draws in a large audience and actively turns away very few.
Kind of cuts both ways though, doesn’t it? The reverse of this argument is saying that the payment processors must work with Valve no matter what they host. Agree it disagree with them, but don’t the payment processors get a say in what they do or do not want to process?
No, they should have zero say because they have weaseled themselves into a position that is the equivalent of a utility or whatever ISP are classified as. Their only involvement is whether they complete transactions between parties in a legal way.
I mean, when your service is fundamental enough to the economy, and centralized enough to make just going to an alternative a major hassle, if an alternative without a similar policy even exists, then why should they get that say? The power to effectively ban the sale of certain types of thing, or force media platforms to censor certain types of content, is the sort of power we generally reserve for governments, not private entities that can do whatever they want. Honestly they’re important enough these days that they should basically be treated like some sort of public utility in my view.
Well as long as they are independent businesses, why shouldn’t they?
If your argument seems to be “they are too crucial to be independent businesses,” I don’t think we’d disagree too much, but the fact is that they are right now.
I don’t think that businesses, not being individuals, should actually have the same rights as individuals I guess. I don’t really agree with the idea that a corporation should be able to do whatever it likes by default, simply because I think corporations in general have too much power to be trusted with such.
It was more like hyperbole on my part, I was using as a catch all for whatever kinds of things a business could abuse it’s position by doing. I didn’t want to just say “be able to do businesses or not do business with whoever they want”, because I wanted to say something more broad than just applying to payment processors, even if choosing not to do business with someone and thereby shutting them out of much of the economy is the way a payment processor would do this .
Sure, but there are so few payment processors that even a single one refusing to do business with you can be a real problem for a business. Even Valve, a big and influential company, has little choice but to capitulate to PayPal. Visa and Mastercard have even more power.
There are too many problems with crypto for it to be a viable alternative, but there’s no good way for me to pay a business (when cash isn’t an option) that doesn’t require the involvement of a third party. Limited competition means those third parties have too much power. I don’t know what it is, but there has to be a solution for that.
Agree it disagree with them, but don’t the payment processors get a say in what they do or do not want to process?
Absolutely not. Power companies don’t get a say in what the power they supply their users with is used for, same for water companies and even ISPs. If they really, really want to enforce rules on what they will and will not process payments for, they can accept legal responsibility when they process a payment on a gun someone uses to shoot up a school or what have you. But they cant have it both ways.
Power and water are public utilities (as is internet, in some parts of the world but not all). Payment processing is not. If you want to argue that it should be, we’d likely agree.
They may not be de jure be public utilities but they are de facto public utilities. It is essentially impossible to live in society without them, and outside their collusionist cabal there are no real alternatives.
In the US at least, they actually do, in many cases. If you are in a drought region, your water utilities can be shut off if you’re wasting it all on watering a lawn or filling a swimming pool, for example. ISPs cut people off all the time for torrenting, sometimes even if it’s not pirated content (though it was ruled not long ago that ISPs aren’t utilities anyways).
They’re saying that is the reverse argument, not the state of things today. As in, the only solution to the above would be to force payment processors to do business with anyone and everyone.
This doesn’t directly affect me, either, but does anyone know if it applies to all of the Interactive Sex - Futanari Incest DLC, too!? For Episodes 1-4!? Like, if any of my friends have large amounts of FutaCoinz from years of Season Passes, I wonder if they’ll still be able to spend them…?
bin.pol.social
Gorące