In Spain you can use bizum, which is a system made by Spanish banks. I’ve been reading that it’s supposed to be interoperative with other european systems but I’ve never used that way personally.
The ECB have been working in the digital euro for ages, which is supposed to allow payments directly processed by the ECB. But it is taking ages…
I think Wero is supposed to become the replacement for all of that, though I’m not sure if it’s gonna have similar features. For now it’s only available in a few countries unfortunately.
Yeah I don’t get it here. I kinda get them not wanting to deal with porn when you can’t verify consent and age of the performers, but the games don’t make sense because there aren’t live performers to worry about.
Mostly that stuff annoys me on Steam because it’s always at the top when I’m sorting by trending/popular, but I don’t think it needs to be removed either.
I doesn’t need to be removed completly, just removed for those that don’t opt in to seeing it. The damn porn titles make it impossible to use steam since I have young kids that don’t need to see that shit. Just let me browse your store without being overrun by half naked anime girls.
Couldn’t they just restrict these games to be purchased with steam wallet credit only? You can’t buy a porn game on a card, fine. But you can top up your account with €50. Afterwards, the payment processor is out of the equation.
People like porn involving characters they like. Look at all the rule 34 content. Games give you a chance to engage with the characters before the fucking.
There is also a bit of T&D as you build anticipation while playing the game.
There’s literally multiple filters to block adult and NSFW games from being shown in the store. If you’re seeing porn games, then you haven’t turned them on
I’m sure no one will miss those incest games, but letting payment processors decide what speech people are allowed to exchange is nuts. These are middlemen. They don’t need to exist. I want more countries to hurry up and adopt GNU Taler and make all these middlemen superfluous.
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.
As much as I like Valve’s work, I don’t think thats a good fit for them. Their staff seem to enjoy working on difficult technical tasks, and lose interest very fast when it comes to mundane maintenance, thus their numerous underutilized and unmaintained features throughout Steam and their games. A payment processor seems like exactly the sort of thing that would get forgotten about a month or two after it gets finished.
Yeah, also its less “valve staff get bored and dont do mundane tasks” iirc thier pay is based on what thier coworkers think the value of thier work was, which is usually in how visible/noticeable which discourages long projects thay take more than a year and mundane tasks that are not very clear and visible
From what I understand, they’ve moved on from that structure. I believe that was one of the things talked about after the release of HL:A, with one of the employees saying that it was part of the reason the game actually got finished. That said, its been a while and even assuming I’m not misremembering information rarely leaves Valve, so I could be wrong.
GeekWire: So you’ve been working on this (HL Alyx) full-steam since 2016?
Robin Walker: We started in February of 2016, I think, with a small team, and we brought out a small prototype. Then people started to play that, understood what we were trying to do afterward, and started joining up.
We had 80 people on the team when we were about midway through. The exact size of the team I wouldn’t be able to tell you. The way things work at Valve, people organically join once they’ve finished up what they were doing before, and if what you’re doing makes sense to them.
So it was always full steam ahead, I guess, but not in the sense that all 80 people were there from day one.
Also I’m just gonna LOL at Valve making HL Alyx, basically the first ever AAA VR game, in 4 years, with a max team size of 80, compared to uh, Concord, Skull and Bones, Marathon, etc.
Fucking lol.
Literally almost all Valve has to do is nothing and just watch half of their competition implode around them due to their unimaginable stupidity.
I have never heard anything from any Valve interview to the effect of how specific pay rates for specific employees are actually set.
I think (as in, this is my semi-informed speculation) it is closer to:
You get hired to fill a specific role, with a specific pay rate (Valve still like, lists specific job openings with specific role requirements), and then uh, you have tasks within that realm that are fairly clearly your responsibility… but at the same time, everything going on at the company is essentially one big github issues list, a whole bunch of feature requests and bug reports, and everyone can contribute to any of those, assuming they’ve got their core responsibilities covered as well.
(This is appealing to anyone who has ever worked in a tech corp or really any corp ever, because the standard way this works, at least in American corps… is you get hired for a role, that often has an exceptionally all encompassing job desc, or an absurd number of requirements… and then your boss and their boss just continuously, hierarchically, assign you new and more ever growing responsibilities…ie, your job has ‘scope creep’ the way a poorly developed game does. Valve inverts this and makes the ‘scope creep’ much, much more voluntary for the employee.)
(If you’ve never worked a software dev focused or adjacent role, you would be amazed at how often and regularly management and C Suite just demand you learn and do things entirely not in your job description, just treat you as a ‘computer person’, as if a heart surgeon is also a brain surgeon and also a metabolic expert and also a pharmaceutical designer.)
Like, there are probably still yearly reviews / the ability to try to negotiate yourself a raise… but I don’t think there is some kind of… formal, everyone votes in some sense on how much everyone else should be paid.
Valve is still a private company, not an actual worker cooperative that votes up or down an entire business budget for the whole year or w/e.
They are just a lot more flat of an organizational hierarchy, have a lot more unconventional work culture, but still ultimately a private corp.
They may have moved on from the structure they had ~10 years ago but there was documentation and interviews about that internal structure. yes it worked similar to that, there where tasks to be done but employees could largely choose whatever they want to work on, there where no formal managers but plenty de facto managers, there was base pay scales but most of the pay was bonuses, that where indeed based on the reviews of your coworkers based on how much work/value you appeared to make for the company. Because valve is private is why it had such a unique structure. Alot of former employees spoke about how that pay structure killed alot of projects and deincetivised maintenance tasks. Then because there was no formal management, if you wanted to work on larger projects you had to convince coworkers to work with you there was no assigned teams or bosses, and if your project took longer then the year, it would be likely there would be no fruit of your labor and you would likely be rated lower, i.e. less pay. Of course no formal bosses does not mean there was not cliques employees that had been there longer and/or had more influence with more coworkers had more power to form teams and trusted when working longer projects, also employees would connect with coworkers so that the work they did would be noticed. Who completed your employee review would be basically random, so you had to hope/ensure everyone knew what you where doing.
Obviously there are alot of issues with this, I hope they have since moved on but last I heard there wasn’t much traction to change it. There is no board to appease and Gabe is the one who made the system, change is difficult for valve.
You can just throw money into your Steam account, via the mechanism they came up with for Steam Gift cards.
So, buy a physical gift card, or just give Steam your bank/card info, take money out of bank, give to your Steam Gift balance.
So uh, presumably, that Steam Gift Balance doesn’t exist in a bank anymore, beyond being a withdrawl from your account, its now just … a $USD value associated with your Steam account, that you csn now buy anything with, and your original bank/card company has no visibility into that second transaction.
So… they could theoretically use what I just described above as a ‘workaround’, you just make the offending games only purchaseable via goon gift balance.
Won’t work. I imagine PayPal’s stance here is along the lines of “we will not allow any payment to go through to Valve as long as there is content we don’t want on Steam”.
If PayPal only stopped payments towards the content they don’t like, Valve wouldn’t have done anything. The fact Valve is removing content means that PayPal must have told them to remove the content or else they would stop allowing payments to Valve altogether. I can’t imagine a reality where this is not the case.
In fairness, I was trying to assess the capability of Valve to just make their own payment processing system, which they still largely could do.
Granted, this would be a bit of an endeavor…
But uh, fintech stuff is pretty common these days, Valve has a lot of money, and they could easily poach or hire some experts to guide the process of making their own version of something like Plaid or Chime or CashApp or Remitly, etc. but only for their ecosystem, not allow actual user to user direct cash txns, and work that into their own pre-existing Steam and Steam Mobile frontends.
Valve does kinda know a thing or two about servers and server code, I’ve worked a bit on both game network code (as an enthusiast/mod maker/etc) and on import/export transactions amd dbs (professionally)… the actual coding involved in a video game server stack is way, way more complex imo… Valve really only need help with the legalities and regulations of setting up a compliant psuedo bank and payment systems in different countries and such.
Then they could tell PayPal to go fuck themselves.
I am not saying this is likely to happen, just saying it is hypothetically possible… and Valve is kind of known for innovating the gaming space, pushing the envelope, raising the bar, as they say.
But, that being said… all that effort vs just delisting some shitty RenPy smut e-novels based on incest?
Yeah, I’d just can the goonslop too.
I’m seeing about 7000 ‘adult only’ games on the store right now… so… its not like they’ve just banned porn games.
Absolutely. I suspect Valve might do just that if / when processors try to slip down the slippery slope. What if PayPal demands all adult games to be gone? What if they demand games with LGBT+ themes to be gone? At some point Valve will have to draw a line and tell them to fuck off if this happens.
But since there are only a handful of payment processors, what if they all collude and do this?
I imagine that if they weren’t already, this event has likely spawned a payment processor independence project internally.
But since there are only a handful of payment processors, what if they all collude and do this?
This is possible, but I kind of doubt that say, MasterCard and Visa are going to blanket ban all kinds of ‘adult’ charges… at least right now.
Like uh, ever been to a strip club?
Its not like Visa and MC don’t know that the ATMs there are infact at strip clubs, and even those ATMs are still ultimately using Visa or MC as a payment processor.
I imagine that if they weren’t already, this event has likely spawned a payment processor independence project internally.
I’d say probably not full fledged, ‘we are actively developing this’ project, but it may have at least spawned some discussion along the lines I above described.
The way large tech corps tend to work is that a whole bunch of at least high level, general concept plans are drawn up, considered in meetings, sorta like cards pulled out of a deck, into your hand… and then there is deliberation as to whether or not to actually ‘play’ said card.
The way I know that above paragraph is that uh, hah, like GabeN, I used to work for MSFT, and a few other companies/nonprofits with a significant tech aspect.
But at the same time, I’ve not worked for Valve, I have no special, specific insight in that sense, and they are also rather notorious for being quite opaque about things they aren’t ready to full throatedly publically endorse… my guess there is that part of their culture largely stems from the notorious HL2 Beta/Alpha hack, way way back.
PayPal wouldn’t dare attack Steam for accepting external payment methods with rules they don’t agree with and can’t change because they don’t own those companies. In addition to opening them up to potential lawsuits, it could catastrophically backfire if Valve simply said “fine, we don’t accept PayPal anymore, but we do accept crypto now.”
PayPal would die in a week. The investors would drag out a guillitine by the next earnings call.
I think that’s a naïve view. PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe are all american companies that are either happy or feel compelled to comply the administration of the fascist-in-command.
Sure maybe this is PayPal doing their own thing, or maybe it’s part of a more organized scheme in which potential lawsuits don’t really matter.
Also you can buy adult games on itch.io, again, don’t think they do crypto though.
The whole problem with … you know, actually using crypto for retail…
transaction times are abysmally, orders of magnitude more slow than using PayPal or Visa or MC,
crypto is exceptionally volatile, way, way less price stable than actual currencies,
transaction fees tend to be way, way worse than using traditional payment processors, because what you are actually doing is closer to a realtime forex currency conversion service,
or, if 3 is not the case, that means the retailer themself is directly holding a crypto wallet, which means they have massive financial risk and instability due to the extreme volatility of crypto, when all their other expenses are in USD or w/e
There are reasons why basically every single retailer that has ever tried to directly accept crypto either cancels that after a year or two, or goes bankrupt, or both.
I guess it could work if you convince game devs/publishers to directly accept payment in crypto…?
But that still seems kinda unlikely.
Also kinda like it would immediately be flooded with NFT/cryptobro scamslop, you know, like every single crypto basdd or crypto funded game, literally ever?
You raise good points. It’s great that other store fronts still exist where you can sell adult games. But I do worry if credit card companies will come for them too one day.
Re: crypto. Some of what you said is true. Transaction fee are comparatively expensive (but also note credit card companies charge transaction fees too, just not directly to the consumer). But other points aren’t necessarily true. Transaction times have improved a lot, there are networks designed for fast transaction times, and usually the payment can complete in seconds. The volatility problem is solved by stable coins, which have their values fixed relative a currency. (Of course stable coins can, and have failed in the past. But that only concerns you if you keep your money as stable coin. For one-off payments this shouldn’t matter). Retailers don’t have to hold cryptos if they don’t want to. Crypto markets have pretty good liquidity nowadays, it’s not hard to get rid of the coins immediately after you get them (well to be fair if you are getting Valve volumes it could be a problem, should be fine for smaller stores).
Crypto is a fast evolving field, so problems are being solved by the day.
Transaction times have improved a lot, there are networks designed for fast transaction times, and usually the payment can complete in seconds.
Hrm, well, if that is true, then that is a considerable improvement.
The volatility problem is solved by stable coins, which have their values fixed relative a currency. (Of course stable coins can, and have failed in the past. But that only concerns you if you keep your money as stable coin. For one-off payments this shouldn’t matter).
But it absolutely does matter if you are a retailer that builds or uses a payment processor system around a ‘stable’ coin that suddenly flatlines one day.
There goes your ability to sell things!
Or, even worse, if the retailer does hold a standing balance in the ‘stable’ balance, or pays the sellers directly in a crypto… welp, theres, what, half of a months operating revenue, poof, gone, all the sellers? Now totally broke, unless they’re also active crypto traders at the same time as being people who make things to sell.
Crypto markets have pretty good liquidity nowadays, it’s not hard to get rid of the coins immediately after you get them (well to be fair if you are getting Valve volumes it could be a problem, should be fine for smaller stores).
I mean, you kind of showed a major flaw right there.
Yep, volume is much better.
But… not sufficient for actual large scale retail, or many, many small to mid size retailers.
Also, to the best of my knowledge… no ‘stable’ coin has anywhere near the volume of say BTC or ETH.
Crypto is a fast evolving field, so problems are being solved by the day.
No, hard disagree.
Most coins haven’t even figured out how to actually be significantly, meaningfully untraceable, other than XMR.
Even a tornado blender thing can be unwound… or it can just steal some of your money.
What else has crypto figured out in almost 20 years now?
Well, aside from being an optimal vector for scamming people…
A new verification paradigm that still leaves it orders of magnitude more energy intensive than traditional payment processors?
NFTs? Who cares, its the least efficient FTP protocol ever devised, quite easy to poison or social hack.
I guess if payment processing speeds are now comparable to existing payment processors… wow, crypto is slightly less useless than what proceeded it?
I’ve beem following this shit since before Mt Gox opened the first online trading market.
Crypto has managed to become the most speculative, fundamental-less investment ‘asset class’ of all known human history.
It still isn’t really private, and you still can’t generally buy things with it, barring a few niche exceptions.
…
You can send a check, a digital eCheck, as payment for many, many things, thats been around longer than crypto.
If you are running an adult video game store, just accept that, can paypal.
Might be slow, but its very, very simple, and cheap for a store to implement.
I don’t think there’s a way for Valve to avoid this. Like I don’t think it would be enough to mark games as only available for purchase without support from the major payment processors/rails. Like disable those and add crypto payment support and only use those for those games. Those games being on the store that major payment processors support, they’ll not want those on a store they support
This is a case where probably should be another store that doesn’t use major payment processors but until alternative payment rails became popular, it’d be a low sales volume store. I know cryptocurrency has negative connotations because of the community, but I think those currencies are the only long term solution for people making porn games or whatever type of content that may have rich/powerful groups wanting to suppress
Doesn’t even need crypto support. Steam sells steam gift cards so they could just take the Pokemon approach for games where it can only be redeemed with credits.
I think that’ll still be the problem with it being in the storefront at all. Some parents org makes large enough fuss about porn games on Steam and payment processors demand stronger moderation rather than have their brands associated with Steam and whatever may be released on it
At that point only solution is for Steam to become their own payment processor, since I don’t see any huge company choosing to lose money by abandoning mainstream methods of payment customers use.
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.
Not suprising, and given the nature of most of the games removed, debatably reasonably, but it still highlights the need to reduced reliance on the few big American payment processors like PayPal when they can effectively regulate what can and cannot be sold online.
Concur. I’m still banned from PayPal and I have been since the early 2000’s because I used it to buy a “high capacity magazine,” which PayPal declared was “illegal activity” with no appeal.
…An airsoft magazine. Not a single state in the union where that’s illegal (or at least certainly not at the time).
Payment processors attempting to police the nature of online transactions should expose them to liability, not the other way around.
I got banned as well, and I’m still not sure why. I’ve never sold anything, and I’ve only bought a handful of things and sent money for rent a few times.
I think someone hacked my account, because I hadn’t used it for ~10 years before noticing that I was banned when I tried logging in again.
I got perma’d I think because of my account having a small (<20) negative balance on it (due to some fuckery they tried to pull on their/eBay’s end awhile back) and they had no way to get payment from me.
Only found out I was banned over a decade later when I was trying to login to transfer some money to a friend. Can’t even make a new account it just gets locked and recovery options don’t do shit, oh well 🙃
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.
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