I really hope the EU will step in to stop this, it’s a despicable practice, and it makes me sad that Valve doesn’t stand their ground. They’re big enough that they should be able to exert pressure on Visa and MC, who seemingly push this forward the most.
What Visa and MC are doing is despicable and something should be done about them, but Valve is not in a position to do anything but bend over and spread the cheeks.
The EU will sooner ban all adult games from Steam. Seriously, check out any porn game on steamdb.info and look for “restricted_countries” in the Metadata section. Notice a certain large EU country there?
Beyond Pornhub, the anti-porn lobby is calling for all credit card companies to stop taking payments from all porn sites. Jessie Sage, sex worker and co-founder of the Peepshow Podcast, and I discussed the effects of this crisis on laborers—a subject she unpacks with sex workers on her newest episode. Jessie told me, “I believe that this will have ripple effects on our industry that extend far beyond Pornhub. Mindgeek [Pornhub’s parent company] is the largest company in the industry, and if Visa/Mastercard is willing to pull its financial services from them, the smaller companies are not far behind.”
Stokely also said UK-based Metro Bank had closed OnlyFans’ corporate account in 2019 with short notice and highlighted how many sex workers, including OnlyFans creators, were struggling to access basic financial services.
“JPMorgan Chase is particularly aggressive in closing accounts of sex workers or . . . any business that supports sex workers,” he said.
But the decision to remove OnlyFan’s most popular product was not a result of legal pressure, according to the company. The decision was made in order “to comply with the requests of our banking partners and payout providers,” an OnlyFans spokesperson wrote by email.
The change marks a growing trend where financial services firms such as credit card and payment processors effectively decide what content is allowed or prohibited on internet platforms. For creators who depend on internet platforms for their income, especially adult performers, the sudden change represents a cautionary tale as the gatekeepers of the creator economy take shape.
There’s the reason. Anti-porn/religious groups will lobby payment providers and bans to stop payments being made to adult content creators. Is there problematic adult content on Steam? For sure. However, there is also problematic political content on Steam which seems not affect banks/payment providers interest.
We all should care cause adult content is the first to get censored. Then the censor bar will move to include other topics and more topics.
Not that most ‘adult’ games on steam are worth it, they’re mostly objectifying shit that wouldn’t know what consent and boundaries were if it kissed them on the mouth and they felt uncomfortable with it.
Nor would they know what good writing, acting or realistic sex etc is either.
Oh look fascism ruining things yet. Again. Can’t make steam stop doing certain things. Force it on them by giga corporations outside there control. Don’t want no diversity anywhere.
I doubt that it has anything to do with social preferences of anyone internal to payment processors. They won’t care.
Putting pressure on payment processors is a useful way to put pressure on any commercial service. The commercial service may operate in another country, but it needs the payment processor, and the payment processors don’t want to be ejected from countries. The payment processor can be a lever for laws passed elsewhere.
Every payment processor on steam is a publicly traded company, not privately owned. So it wouldn’t really be up to any one individual’s moral preference about such things. Personal preference would only count in to it if one of the shareholders had enough shares to push the board around, but the only one where I could see that being the case would be PayPal from people like Theil and Andreessen. Like they’re both jack wads for other beliefs, but I wouldn’t exactly call them bible thumpers.
I don’t know how much truth there is to it, but one compelling reason I’ve heard is that adult content has a considerably higher chargeback rate than other content, making the risk much higher for payment processors. This makes sense - I could absolutely see some horny person buying some adult content, getting off to it, then doing a chargeback in their moment of introspection.
The problem with that is that all of these platforms also use the same big payment providers, meaning they’re just as likely to be forced to remove these sorts of games.
Patreon has similar restrictions. I’m not sure about itch. They all rely mostly on stripe for payments. Stripe gets to set a lot of terms, and switching platforms doesn’t usually change that.
It’s been mostly abandoned for some time now. It was my main entrance into game dev in middle school, and I used to be really active in the blender artists forums, so it is kinda sad.
I have tried 4 times to download the Windows .zip from blenderstudio.itch.io/dogwalk. Three attempts failed around the 90% downloaded point, and once around 25-30%. Guess I won’t be seeing this game.
gamingonlinux.com
Aktywne