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.
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.
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?
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.
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