Tl;dr: Mastercard says they didn’t “force” Valve to remove nsfw games. Tery just told them that if they didn’t remove the games that were complained about by Collective Shout, they’ll block them.
If they do, that includes them. Decision makers at all levels, nobody gets to say "hey I didn't make Mastercard act this way." Because the status quo would have been to carry on processing video game payments, even in the face of a minority faction like Collective Shout.
Up to the third comma, yes, but all the rest seems to go beyond that pretty arbitrarily.
When they say anything that “may damage the goodwill of the corporation”, and qualify that with “in the sole discretion of the Corporation” that just means “anything we don’t want to be associated with, and we will be the judge of that”.
That’s what makes it so vague, how is a Merchant or an Acquirer supposed to know what Mastercard might find damaging to the goodwill? They have to guess, or use trial and error*. Most will just err on the side of caution, which means customers get blocked from even more purchases, just to be safe.
Or talk to Mastercard, which Valve apparently tried, but they wouldn’t respond.
It’s much worse than that. How they word it is “if it may damage the public image of mastercard”. And they don’t review the content, they review the means used to prevent the damage to their brand.
So valve doesn’t even need to have anything that actually damage mastercard brand, it just need to be that mastercard is not comfortable enough with the measures used to prevent it.
Yeah, right up until assholes start posting “MASTERCARD SELLS SMUT INCEST HENTAI GAMES” on TikTok. Then it’s a problem, and MasterCard considers that damaging to the brand.
Except that’s entirely false. Even now they are pretending they do nothing, it’s the intermediaries who force things.
Mastercard sells absolutely nothing. And they have no responsibility for anything sold. And no one ever thought it was mastercard selling or even allowing to sell illegal things.
In fact, most people will believe no one sound of mind will buy something illegal with a credit card because mastercard and the likes will give your identity to the police.
So it’s not about illegal things, and it’s not about their image.
In a statement to Kotaku, a spokesperson for Valve said that while Mastercard did not communicate with it directly, concerns did come through payment processor and banking intermediaries
Spoken like someone that doesn’t understand language or communication.
There is literally a name for this type of response, and yet you’re out here accusing people who are apparently more knowledgeable than you of insanity.
As someone who does not take amex they want to charge me between 7% and 14%. Maybe if I did more sales they would not charge as much, but the reason amex is not taken in as many places as mastercard or visa is the 7% to 14%.
I am in Canada, and amex is famous for charging way too much in merchant fees. They also charge it under a silly system based on the type of card used (the more “elite” the more the merchant pays).
This might just be my insomnia talking, but I thought a reasonable idea might be to call and reduce the available credit by however much is comfortable. For me, it would be fairly reasonable to reduce it by 50%. I assume they use some kind of magicians handshake to value their company based on how much potential credit is out there… Maybe it’d do nothing though. Anyone know?
I am not a financial guru so hopefully someone will correct me if I’m wrong about this, but your credit score is affected positively the more available credit you have. So by voluntarily lowering your available credit, you’re actually hurting yourself way more than the card companies. At least I think that’s how it works, or rather one of many factors.
You guys use them for actual credit? To me it seems that in Europe they are mostly used as a debit card directly charging your account, but compatible with the global payment processing of them.
Flexibility to keep cash in an account earning higher interest until payment is due.
Not having to constantly check enough cash is in your low interest checking account (which you’ll keep low so your cash earns more interest elsewhere & to minimize losses in case of unauthorized debits).
Well think of it like this. I keep an amount in my checking account (basically no interest) to cover the credit card bills. Extra I move out to an online savings account that does have a ddcent interest rate. By having a date when the CC bill comes due, I can check once a month (7 days before due) and move money if needed to cover the bill. So while the checking has practically no interest, I was getting close to 5% on the savings for a while. Still a far stretch from the 12% cds I got as a kid, but it’s something.
“Nonconsensual mutilation of a person or body part” includes just about every fighter or shooter game. They really want to have COD delisted over this?
“The sale of a product… which is patently offensive and lacks serious artistic value… (such as… images of… Nonconsensual mutilation of a person or body part”
insert joke about COD lacking artistic value, but clearly there is more to COD than just body mutilation.
“Patently offensive” and “lacks serious artistic value” are entirely subjective classifications. With those restrictions, any game with country music should be delisted.
Unironically, COD getting delisted would probably get mainstream media coverage and legitimate outrage from people who “don’t play video games” but actually do.
Fuckers are just propagating the fury without providing a fix. Are the censored games back or not? Because right now they aren’t. Put them back and make Mastercard do something about it now that they have staged their position. Collective Shout is playing both sides.
so it was about potential brand damage that doesn’t exist? and/or has this actually brand damaged visa and mastercard more than ignoring collective shout?
What I see is Mastercard hiding behind their generic rules for processors and being fine with the processors taking unilateral action that could damage their brand.
Mastercard should demand they rescind the decision based on a flawed interpretation of their rules since the content IS NOT ILLEGAL where Steam provides it, or drop those processors entirely due to the brand damage their unilateral decision has caused. If Mastercard lets this sit, that signals that they agree with this decision, regardless of what they say, and they should be treated as such.
Read mastercard’s actual rule that is literally in the OP. The processor’s interpretation isn’t flawed and in no way does Mastercard limit their rule to what is illegal.
The rule is so open ended and vague that it’s entirely on Mastercard (and Visa) that this shit happened.
It is intentionally vague, because companies want to be able to weasel out of any and all accountability whenever possible.
But Mastercard isn’t off the hook either way even if we accept the rules as they are currently. Before this incident, Mastercard has been starting to censor adult content in general with rules changes. To the point where there was already a petition on the ACLU site about this exact type of censorship.
Mastercard is trying to weasel their way out of this particular instance because they didn’t directly have a hand in this video game situation, even though they clearly would agree with it based on other recent changes. They’re trying to play both sides by assuming that people didn’t know they were already doing these things.
What I read is that it is not about illegal content. It is about the measures taken to prevent illegal content from being sold. It’s much more devious than simple censorship.
Takes it all back because A. There was no review bombing, people who left mixed reviews had reasonable and valid complaints, and B. He reversed course as soon as people started pointing out how he was protesting quite a lot about exactly nobody calling him a Nazi.
I assumed pretty immediately upon hearing him in a couple of interviews that he was exactly this right winger camoflaughing as a centralist. I gave the game the benefit of the doubt because I hadn’t seen any hard evidence but I’ll stop talking kindly about the game based on this info.
Politics is how we organize our society. Most of everything is political. When society starts organizing movements against groups of people, stripping away rights, and generally being Nazis you have to get more political to stop them. Taking no position is taking a position. Join the rebellion or support the empire, there is no in-between.
“These days, apparently anyone who doesn’t include five trans characters in their game and doesn’t let their products be influenced by political bullshit is a Nazi. What a world we live in.”
And like that I will not buy anything by this studio ever. Mahler is a whiny bitch baby.
Yeaaaah, I’m with you. What a wild comment to make. I was ready to give them the benefit of the doubt that the whole review bombing drama was just a case of having a bad day but this is something else.
I want to say we all found out he was a piece of shit in the lead up to Ori 2? Very much led to a lot of outlets doing the “The game is good but up to you if you want to support this kind of worker abuse”. And he just got worse and worse since.
I want to say we all found out he was a piece of shit in the lead up to Ori 2?
Eh, not necessarily? I’m sure there are plenty of people who just play the games and aren’t in the know of any drama going on behind the scenes. Heck, I’m pretty tuned in into what’s going on in the industry and while I remember hearing some of this stuff back in the day most of it faded away since I wasn’t particularly interested in the series.
I think it’s better to remind folks about these situations than assume everyone is familiar with what’s going on.
You already played the games, you enjoy them - it is what it is. There’s no point in beating yourself over (not) doing something without knowledge about the circumstances. No one is omnipotent and can avoid supporting every single shitty person out there. Just have fun with what you like and don’t support the guy in the future, that’s the best one can do in such situation in my opinion.
I don’t regret buying them, they are good games, but I don’t Condone shitty practices. If you restricted yourself to moral or ethic right companies only you would have nothing to buy sadly. You buying a game != you accepting the ideologies of the leadership of said game.
Just get games you know you enjoy, and ignore all the dramatics that are involved. Life’s to short to lock yourself down with it all.
Oof, yep this really does damage to my intention to buy his game more than ‘review bombing’ often you can tell if there is something fundamentally wrong with a game or not based on the actual content of reviews…Or if users are pushing for an adjustment. If there is a whisper of a trans or gay character in a game, there is so much pushback, so I don’t know what the fuck he is on about; Mahler is such a whiny snowflake, that probably needs to take his medication because his post history is looking a little sus. Like he unplugged from reality for a few minutes.
Blizzard probably allowed it because Overwatch is bleeding player count, and then can use the union as “proof” that that unions harm the bottom line.
I’m happy for them and I hope they can do something on even across other titles/teams, but I suspect Blizzard didn’t hire the Pinkertons like Amazon for a reason.
I think the OW team was already pretty good in that regard, and Jeff Kaplan tried to “protect” them, even if that didn’t always result in the best decisions for the game.
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