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.
If Steam or someone went to crypto just to kick the processors out, that might be one thing that would actually make me look at crypto with something other than derision.
I spent ages buying games on steam with Bitcoin years ago. They dropped it when transaction fees got bigger than the game cost (I don’t think they ever supported crypto other than Bitcoin, and that was through a specific payment processor that took the Bitcoin and gave Valve real money).
They’d never do that, as it would severely limit their userbase. Throwing out a couple games, especially when it’s ultra-niche stuff like “futanari incest” games, is the much easier and more sensible move for Valve.
That was originally one of the intended purposes of cryptocurrency, or at least claimed to be. Too bad we can’t have anything without needing to make it an investment engine.
Huh? Investment people definitely didn’t wait for that classification to start turning it into a speculations market. The SEC actions were largely reactive.
My local bank’s investment and wealth management bros were already all about crypto long before regulations.
Gov can’t really do anything about it. Bitcoin was designed to be gov agnostic. They can tell you it’s illegal but there’s also really no way for them to know (if you’re not dumb).
Hell there are entire unregulated black markets on the dark web.
Also with the orangutan in chief being something of a crypto grifter himself, it’s not likely to be regulated at all.
Well yes, this was the original intent of crypto. Putting payment in the hands of the people. It’s only been made terrible by tech bros and greed the same way the Internet has.
They accepted BTC for a while but stopped. The other comment here mentioned the transaction fees being a problem for purchases on the scale of steam game prices, but it wasn’t just that. A big problem was crypto volatility and transaction processing time. They found that very often by the time a transaction cleared the value had swung enough that they were getting amounts that failed to align with the actual prices of the games people were buying.
It’s more stable now, so maybe that would be less of a problem, but I feel it highlights a big problem with crypto in general and that is that even when you do find places that accept crypto nothing is priced in crypto. It’s basically always just a proxy for USD using whatever its current market value is.
Stable coins exist to counter that very problem. There’s several out there that are pegged to the value of the dollar, and are mostly used as intermediaries when trading between other coins.
That’s what Backpage tried to do when the cc processors pulled out. The owners of Backpage were at some point charged with money laundering among many many other crimes. The years of legal battles that started in 2018 drove one of them to suicide. Would not recommend.
No, they were not directly involved and no, pimping minors was not proven in court. Money laundering and conspiracy to facilitate prostitution were the charges that stuck. In fact, prosecutors claiming they were involved in child sex trafficking caused a mistrial apnews.com/…/business-trials-3b1c9d3e59e90cd60764…
The point is not about what they did or didn’t do, it’s that if you try to go outside the system you get hammered.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 🙃
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