First they came for the incest/rape games, which most people somewhat agree with (although the principle is still wrong) Next up is all nsfw games. After that, it’ll be mainstream and indie games altogether. This never stops with just one “victory” for these groups.
Everyone should read the open letter that’s linked in the itch statement, to have a fully informed opinion.
There definitely is a line. Everyone can choose were they draw it. You don’t have to draw it in a way where you end up defending things that are kinda messed up.
There is definitely a hill worth fighting on in that area. I don’t think it’s this exact one.
I am specifically saying this, because my democratic country has laws that would also cover these things the letter mentions and would also deem them wrong. The people normally charged with upholding that law, are just dumb, “not from the internet” and overworked with other stuff.
Please check what laws your country has around the topic of glorification of crime and violence.
We also don’t know what the payment processors told itch and steam.
Itch and steam are doing what they are doing as a blanket move, to create a situation where they can stay in business for now and deal with the problem at all.
My bet would be that they “allowed nsfw stuff”, turned a blind eye, and now suddenly noticed they actually have a really big legal problem, with actual laws and the fact that it was an NGO and not an official legal institution that started this, was dumb luck and now they mostly need time and cover their own arse.
And I fully support the opinion that it shouldn’t be the payment processors forcing these sorts of things. But reality is messy and if this was the path of least resistance to get something done, such is life.
If GTA V is allowed, I’m pretty certain most of what we’ve seen from NSFW games is as well. Regardless, a payment company should not be acting as judge for such things, just as media companies should not act as judge on copyright infringement on YouTube.
I feel like there is nuance that is really getting lost on some people and that is the way that people engage with these games. Let me try to explain: I like playing NSFW games - even with tags like Rape, Corruption or the occasional Incest. Without trying to go into too much detail, it’s simply erotic to me in the correct context.
Now, do I know that these topics are incredibly taboo and/or offensive in real life? Yes, of course. I keep these things private and never put them out in real life. I would rather noone knows about what I do privately in my own time at my own PC. The way I see it, I simply paid an artist to draw something erotic and write a good story and/or program some gameplay attached to it. And once I stop engaging with the videogame, I also do not have any desire to recreate anything in real life. The same way that I don’t go around killing people after playing GTA, I also don’t go around assaulting women because I played a videogame where these things happen.
And that’s exactly what worries me - the people pushing this narrative, genuinely think I would want to start reenacting something I’ve seen in a videogame happen. That is complete nonsense.
The idea that what you see online has an effect on what you do offline, is not that far fetched is it? I mean, I don't know if it's true and I guess you could argue it could work in both directions too. Do people blow off steam online so they don't have to enact their darkest fantasties IRL. Or does the online material encourage or normalize these things? It could also be so that this works different for different people. It let's one person blow of steam, while it pushes someone else over the edge to do something horrendous. And if that is the case, is it fair to take it away from those who are not negatively influenced by it, to prevent those in whom it inspires bad actions from seeing it. I guess we'd need research on the matter, I don't know if it exist or how reliable it is. But I don't think it's a nonsensical question to ask what the effects are.
Jesus Christ we can’t be back to this old chestnut.
We cannot, and do not, standardize society’s guard rails around the most extreme edge cases.
Leave it back with Jack Thompson in the late 90s-early 00s where it belongs. The horse has already been jellied by repeated blunt force trauma more than a decade ago. You’re just punching a horse shaped divot into the dirt at this point.
The question is if it's edge cases. People suffer sexual trauma in very large numbers and working in psychiatry has taught me how incredibly harmful it can be. If this kind of material could help prevent sexual trauma, we should definitely allow it. If research shows that it makes problems far worse, we should consider limiting access to it. I am not saying either is the case, I am saying I don't understand what is wrong with the question itself.
This restated question is not the problem directly.
The problem is the entire discussion/concept of “exposure to a dangerous idea in a pretend context maybe might maybe make someone more likely to emulate it in reality” when there has been little to no evidence found supporting that concept. Additionally the non-proportional amount of concern given to videogames in relationship to this concept as compared to literally any other form of media.
If there was even one iota of connection between “exposure to horrible things in media” (or even “pretending to do horrible things in a pretend context”) and “doing horrible things in real life”, the world would already look considerably different than it does. Militaries would be using these games as “exposure therapy” for soldiers. We’d be seeing crime rates of all sorts shifting in accordance with the media industries. There would already be measurable impacts after the decades of these things existing.
And more so than any of that: This discussion has literally been happening for longer than any of us here have been alive. I’m tired of having it.
Please stop letting the vague idea of “but it might help” override the logic of “but there’s no evidence to support that except a vague gut feeling”.
The same way that I don’t go around killing people after playing GTA, I also don’t go around assaulting women because I played a videogame where these things happen.
Right. That’s fair and I’ll believe it.
Do you generally think there is any limit at all, in any type of media that crosses lines and shouldn’t exist? Think “liveleak” stuff from when that was around.
Or do you consider this game topic just not crossing that line?
My line is: any kind of fictional content is ok. If nobodies hurt, then there is no crime. And in practice being maniac in games doesn’t translate to being maniac irl. There might be some exceptions of crazy people being inspired by games to do crimes, but they should be dealt with on case-by-case basis using just regular law and law enforcement.
Moral judgement or suppression of fiction/artistic expression is deeply and profoundly unethical. How you or I or anyone else feels about something that isn’t “real” is inconsequential. If you allow any line to be crossed in this, then every line can and will be crossed.
I’m pretty sure I can find fictional things immoral? Why would it be unethical to have an opinion on fictional things?
Factually, all the lines that you allow to be crossed are crossed and all lines that are collectively defended are usually not crossed. That’s culture. It’s arbitrary and not absolute.
There are specific games in steam’s case I’m very ok with getting removed, but at the same time its very fucked up that we’re in a situation where the world is beholden to payment processors. Ideally this would be a case where they go directly to Valve and say “hey we think you should take a look at your content policy and at these specific games” and Valve makes the call from there on where they want to draw the line.
The main stuff I saw removed was related to incest and rape, not in a “it contains it” way. Somehow Corruption of Champions 2 escaped the ban hammer which makes me think those games probably took things pretty far, or were basically built to simulate assaulting people.
For reference, CoC2 is uh… Well when you lose in combat the enemy fucks you, and vice versa. It’s like a lot of fetish stuff too. So not that I know exactly what’s in the games, but I feel like you have to really be trying to outdo CoC2.
Edit: I’m not criticizing CoC2 btw, it’s fine. Its… I don’t wanna say tasteful but non con is like one of 90 things you can or cannot opt into. Idk how to put it. It’s an actual game that happens to have non con content I guess is what I mean.
In childhood and teenage years I played a lot of games like Carmageddon, Postal, Grand Theft Auto. In first two games slaughtering innocent people en masse is part of gameplay loop. Yet I somehow didn’t grow up to be maniac, and mostly didn’t even hurt anyone physically in my whole life. It’s games, fiction, you’re not supposed to take any of that seriously or to project it onto your real life.
I’m aware, I promise you that, I’m not saying games make you violent or awful. That argument has been annoying me to hell and back my whole life. To be honest I’ve not heard the argument for video games made for porn games before, but yeah, fair. So yeah. I don’t like those specific rape/incest games, they’re kinda yuck to me, but you do you.
Out of curiosity do you think there should be a line? Where would it be? Maybe like only explicitly illegal content is ever removed? (I wanna say thats how ao3 works) Or is steam having final say your preference? What if steam decided to make changes on its own?
If I had my way, I’d just have filters and tags, and let steam manage their storefront. I might disagree on how they do it, but that’s up to them(or it should be). It just feels weird and loopholey that a payment processor is making this sort of overarching decision.
Out of curiosity do you think there should be a line? Where would it be? Maybe like only explicitly illegal content is ever removed?
For me the line would be fictional-vs-non-fictional. So if a game contains photos or videos of actual people being hurt or abused IRL, that is illegal. But anything fictional is fine. For shocking/kinky stuff, there might be some special tags, and tag-based extra warnings like “this game contains scenes of …, do you want to open the page?”. So when you find and open any game with certain tag you get a warning corresponding to this tag. After confirmation it might remember your consent and enable some flags in the options to not bother you next time. But you can go into the options any moment and hide it all again if you decide you don’t want to see this kind of stuff in future. Also, before you enable/consent to this content, it probably shouldn’t be randomly recommended to you.
So I think that’s all pretty fair, of course including the fact that it should all be legal too.
Does the paradox of tolerance concern you at all? The idea that if you let shitty people have a say they’ll eventually use the bit of tolerance you give them as a tool to take away tolerance of others.
Basically, in theory if you let the nazis have a political party they might win and ban all the other parties, so to keep it fair arguably you should ban them first.
Now applying that to games that are pretty obviously hate games, like the ones the other commenter mentioned, the raping women into obedience game, or a game where you kill a bunch of gay people, the implication is that those games should be banned.
I kinda just wanted your thoughts on the concept. Like for example a game where you play as a school shooter. All good?
Sorry if this is a little philosophical, I just honestly wonder where the line should be for the least amount of harm.
Does the paradox of tolerance concern you at all? The idea that if you let shitty people have a say they’ll eventually use the bit of tolerance you give them as a tool to take away tolerance of others.
Basically, in theory if you let the nazis have a political party they might win and ban all the other parties, so to keep it fair arguably you should ban them first.
I personally feel the correct way to deal with this in current society is to counter propaganda takes instead of trying to silence them. But even better would be to move away from nation-states altogether to more decentralized forms of societies. Compared to even 100 years ago, nowadays we have a lot of technology that makes off-the-grid living much more accessible: efficient solars, modular building, biotoilets, 3d printing, starlinks, etc. The biggest thing that still requires a lot of infrastructure and governing is healthcare imo.
Now applying that to games that are pretty obviously hate games, like the ones the other commenter mentioned, the raping women into obedience game, or a game where you kill a bunch of gay people, the implication is that those games should be banned.
I kinda just wanted your thoughts on the concept. Like for example a game where you play as a school shooter. All good?
Those are not necessarily hate games, but they can be. Rape can be a crime and it can be a kink. And it’s a very popular kink among women themselves. There are whole genres of consensual noncon porn, where people roleplay rape for fun. Big part of BDSM is also all about enjoying those twisted power dynamics. Yet something like this can definitely be a hate game as well done by someone having strong feeling of hatred towards certain groups of people: be it women, gay, trans, black, etc. I’m not sure I’ve ever played actual games like that, and I also would expect them to be low-quality slop, but either way, if you think someone’s trying to push some hateful propaganda through the game, you’re free to call them out, leave negative review, write a post or record a video criticizing it.
I gotcha, I get it being a kink, and you have a fair point in that public feedback helps call out the sort of things that aren’t made in good faith. I think I still like the idea of obvious hate games being taken down, but its always going to be somewhat subjective, so its hard to enforce that kind of thing without screwing over games that don’t deserve it.
Definitely not something payment processors should be in charge of lmao
mention of sexual assaultnot OP, but for example the first game collective shout went after a few months ago (“no mercy”) was explicitly a game about raping women to make them obedient. this is bad not because its NSFW, it’s bad because it’s rape apologia, and a misogynistic hate game. to me, it’s not much different than “chad vs the gay nazis”, another hate game (with a pretty self-explanatory name) that was released around the same time and was also quickly delisted. I wouldn’t be surprised if other games that just got delisted were as bad as no mercy. but also, the blanket banning of anything NSFW (or even just kinky) sets a terrible precedent.
What kills me is in most cases you have to pay for the game, then you have to download the game, then install it and finally play it. It’s not.like the game is going to one day pop into your computer and then force you to play it.
Bottom line. If the game bothers ornoffends you just move on.
It’s going to come down to anything with even a whisper of LGBTQ+/minority/disability/etc representation, just like with books.
They start with the “egregious” content (not that it’s necessarily right to remove that either), then narrow it down until it shapes up into hegemonic conformity and systemic oppression via media (there’s a term for it, kind of like stochastic violence but not quite that I can’t remember atm).
it doesn’t even stop there - it will be used to punish people who do not exactly like it’s expected, with the mere accusation of playing/reading/watching/thinking something “unchristian” as reason.
BDSM games have been targeted as well for “sexual violence”. Only straight, vanilla PiV missionary for the express purposes of having children within the confines of marriage where nobody is enjoying it porn will be left.
And it won't happen because companies won't allow them to ban a trillion dollar industry, you knob. Banning adult games isn't remotely comparable. Most video games rely on violence and it's too big of an industry to fail, adult games have a tiny following and were an easy target.
They banned adult games?! That means they'll ban all violent media! They'll eventually come for all media, they'll come for our computers, they'll trap us in cages! It's a slippery slope!
Steam and Itch are both victims in this matter, their hands are tied. If the payment processors simply refuse to process any payments unless they comply, there’s no point in trying to put pressure on them. I’m pretty sure they were happy to take people’s money for these games and still would be, if they could so while saving face.
I don’t even understand how they give a shit. Seems like the perfect place for shareholders to want them to make as much money as possible, it’s a limited market.
the payment processors didn’t randomly wake up this week and decide to ban NSFW video games on a power trip.
they are being financially pressured in some way to threaten game platforms that they’ll remove their services completely. the implication of that is they’re worried about losing even more money than they make from payments on game platforms.
from the payment processors perspective, they’re thinking, “okay this is not a hill we want to die on and it’s a small percentage of our business anyway.”
It’s not just happening recently with Steam and Itch.io, it’s been happening for a while.
Some smutty art creators on Patreon have been chased off that platform because of payment processors telling patreon they’d pull the plug if Patreon kept that type of art on the platform. Those same artists have then reported being unable to set up, for instance, Stripe for their paywalls.
Porn stars have complained about being unable to set up accounts with payment processors.
Same with ad companies that are deathly afraid of being seen next to NSFW images, so for instance Imgur has cracked down on them.
Honestly I’m really happy with how itch.io is handling it. Making sure they still get their money, but quickly reintroducing the games, and telling us the exact reason why they had to disable those games in the first place. Great management.
Agreed, I am genuinely impressed by this, this is unironically a better run, better organized response to a situation like this than most billion dollar + companies that trade on the stock market would pull off.
I think itch is doing a much better job now. I think they still completely removed things from people’s accounts (sort of. It is still there, we just can’t access it. Maybe) and cut off a LOT of developers’ entire income source with absolutely zero warning outside of some whinging in a discord. I want to say it was almost a full day later before any official statements were released?
They are course correcting and hopefully this goes somewhere. But the trust thermocline is breached and no developers are there by choice anymore. Similarly, as (primarily) a consumer, I genuinely don’t feel comfortable buying games on itch that I am not planning to fully back up myself.
Its a lot like with the Unity shitshow a few years back. Game dev can’t pivot overnight but mastodon was lit up with “so… what else is out there” from the more vocal devs and bsky is the same for storefronts.
I empathize with the developers because unannounced interruptions to their revenue streams are not good. I don’t know why itch made the initial decision to implement their changes the way they did, but my guess is they got a series of strongly worded letters out of the blue from payment processors and were given a timeline of “IMMEDIATELY OR ELSE” and had to shut off the tap and adjust or risk their own ability to receive ANY payments.
Even if they handled it badly, which maybe they did, it’s a better measure of a company/person in how they address mistakes or bad moves. They aren’t perfect but they seem to be trying to address concerns and be transparent, at least as transparent as they feel they can be in an uncertain situation where they have to protect themselves legally and operate from a position where every official statement they make will be blown up by media. So they need to be very, very careful how they communicate to risk further damage.
Remember, itch IS NOT the bad guy here, it’s the payment processors. Do not lose sight of that.
I can absolutely understand why people who have had their livelihoods disrupted are unhappy but I empathize with the position that itch is in and I care a lot more about how they course correct and manage fallout, even if they make bad decisions when faced with requirement to take immediate action (and I can’t even say whether they did or not, nobody can, because nobody but them has the facts), than I care about whether they made a bad decision in the moment.
People, good people, fuck up all the time. How they manage the mistake matters more than the mistake itself.
If they keep doing the same shit over and over it’s a different story.
PS: I have no dog in this fight except I think what the payment processors are doing is wrong, but it doesn’t explicitly affect me at all. I’m also not particularly educated on this except for what I read in the news, I’ve never used itch at all. I just don’t think payment processors should be in the business of casting moral judgments on legal transactions. IMO it should be ILLEGAL for them to deny services for LEGAL goods and services.
I empathize with the developers because unannounced interruptions to their revenue streams are not good.
You can emphasize with suddenly telling companies to get fucked and figure it out themselves during a time of REALLY big economic certainty (seriously, game dev is a wasteland) and think it is “not good”? Good for you!
given a timeline of “IMMEDIATELY OR ELSE” and had to shut off the tap and adjust or risk their own ability to receive ANY payments.
That REALLY isn’t how things work and that still doesn’t excuse silence outside of whinging on discord.
Remember, itch IS NOT the bad guy here, it’s the payment processors. Do not lose sight of that.
There are multiple “bad guys” here.
People, good people, fuck up all the time. How they manage the mistake matters more than the mistake itself.
Say it with me: Corporations are not people.
Good, itch fucked up. Really great that absolutely nobody else has been impacted except for John Itch. Oh… wait…
Like, seriously, read what you fucking posted. “I can understand how companies might have been afraid that they would be forced to fire everyone they work with and go bankrupt but, really, isn’t the important thing that itch learned a lesson?”. Like… the only thing missing was a ukelele.
It definitely can be. I haven’t dealt with payment processors in this way, but I’ve had (spurious) DCMA takedowns that required my service providers to act immediately, or else they’d get sued. They did notify me, but gave me about 2h to figure something else out.
A payment processor is in full control of payments across your entire site (unless you have multiple, I guess). They can pull the rug with no notice if they want. Doesn’t seem nice, but nice isn’t part of the business model.
Pretty much this. Back when this went down the good people of Bluesky, who are totally not like Twitter users, called for itch.ios blood. Calling them sellouts, betrayers and whatnot. Big brain move right there.
This is exactly what it was designed to solve before cryptobros turned it into a pump and dump scheme.
If you want to buy something from seller X that is between you and X and no one else. No goverment, payment processor or other third party can get a cut or stop it for any reason.
So do regular fiat payment processors that are beholden to citizens and not faceless shareholders. Wero and Pix for instance.
Democratic governments are supposed to safeguard your ability to exchange legal tender for legal goods and services. The fact that Visa/MC have a duopoly and a stranglehold on the entire online economy is a major governance failure that needs to be rectified ASAP.
Crypto goes a lot further and says no-one, not even the government, should be able to prevent a transaction from taking place. Not necessarily an invalid idea but it does come with some huge unanswered challenges, such as “what happens when someone makes 1B€ through fraud and refuses to hand over the coins” and “how do we even prevent large-scale fraud in the first place”.
It’s nice to see a more reasonable response in the comments on Fediverse. On the itch discussion board people are frothing at the mouth posting death threats and the like against itch staff.
The anger is completely misdirected. I wouldn’t be surprised if they decide to just let itch drop dead after this abuse from two sides simultaneously. Mega corps and rights groups at one side, and their very own users on the other.
Once this review is complete, we will introduce new compliance measures. For NSFW pages, this will include a new step where creators must confirm that their content is allowable under the policies of the respective payment processors linked to their account.
Itch is even willing to go for partial filtering, what more do you want. The only thing that will please these people is when itch waves their magic wand and keeps everything as is. Like folks here have said, accepting crypto payments might help, but who knows how soon that is going to get regulated.
It’s nice to see a more reasonable response in the comments on Fediverse. On the itch discussion board people are frothing at the mouth posting death threats and the like against itch staff.
Sounds like the bar is so low to be even comparing the two sites.
Like folks here have said, accepting crypto payments might help, but who knows how soon that is going to get regulated.
It’s kinda impossible to regulate technically. That’s the whole point of crypto. Or do you mean that the company itself might be legally prohibited to accept crypto by their local law? That’s possible I think. I guess we’re slowly but steadily approaching the demand to have actual darknet fully-crypto gaming platform operated by anonymous team.
Crypto goes somewhere that they don’t like? Crypto is seized when it reaches an exchange and they ask for ID and source of funds
I don’t understand. Lets say I have a normal bank card, I paid taxes for all the money I got there. Sometimes I buy crypto using p2p on some platform using this card. I trade this crypto with some other crypto on the same platform. Periodically I send crypto to my personal wallet from there. From my personal wallet I buy porn games for example. At which point someone comes in and seizes anything?
They would not, but you would not be anonymous this way. You get problems when:
The crypto you received is through a shady source (it could be any individual which pays you with dirty coins)
You engaged in pro-privacy activity, which links you with illegal activity, like coin mixers to blur the origin and destination of crypto
You received more crypto than you bought
As long as you stay with centralized exchanges and directly send crypto to some websites, you should in theory always be fine (as long as you don’t send them to criminal or pro-privacy services), but that’s not the original goal of crypto
Apart from that, some countries straight up force you to declare every transaction you make with crypto, which isn’t doable for most people and puts them in illegality
You don’t have to send crypto directly to websites. You can send it to your external wallet (outside of any platform), and spend from there. And no one’s ever going to be able to prove that wallet belongs to you.
No, they don’t know who that wallet belongs to and even though they may hypothesize its yours they don’t have any way to prove it. Moreover, anyone, including sellers can use unlimited amount of wallets and register them at rate 1000x faster than even the advanced CIA group would be able to tie even a single address to a particular person/company. So if Steam operated in crypto, it would take days/weeks of some of the most advanced feds in the world to try to prove that you bought something from Steam using your crypto. And they might even fail at that if you or Steam’s wallet are handled carefully, and they wouldn’t even know what exactly you bought.
Who is gonna ask? It is not your bank account, there are no rules where you send your crypto and you don’t have to explain to anyone. And there are no ways to enforce any of this. Also, a lot of crypto payment services and exchanges automatically generate unique intermediate wallets for every transaction. There is a technique to wallet management called “Hierarchical Deterministic Wallet (HD Wallet)” which seems to be golden standard nowadays, not only it makes it hard to compute your total balance, it also makes it easier to achieve “public address changes with every transaction”. So this is what most exchanges use for those intermediate addresses I assume.
Ofc KYC is everywhere. But that is only relevant to inputting fiat to crypto. Are there precedents of exchange asking its user about the address where he sent his crypto? Even then, what exactly happens if you answer them with whatever, like you donated to some guy, or it was a present? Regular money laws don’t apply to crypto -> crypto transfers, they are not subject to whatever taxes for presents, charity, etc, and even if they were, that wouldn’t be for the sending side.
Well, I don’t really know what exactly they’re doing, but there are people like Elon Musk that probably have ways of converting cosmic volumes of crypto back and forth to/from fiat. I’d just assume that crypto -> fiat is more of a problem for individuals currently but huge businesses and corps can make it work in high volumes. So maybe Steam could make it work too for games. And then crypto becomes massively backed by games. And then maybe someone else big jumps in. And then someone smaller can also jump in, and then one day crypto might be backed by so many things that you don’t even need to leave ecosystem, because you can already buy pretty much anything there. But again, this is just assumption, I don’t know how exactly this should work. Perhaps big corps can register a crypto-branch of their business somewhere crypto-friendly.
Yea crypto -> fiat is easy for businesses that declare their income. It’s still a pain to do, but they’re used to having an entire service dedicated to that already
A full crypto ecosystem is what crypto enthusiasts are wanting to achieve. It would be amazing.
Also, do you realize that even if all exchanges are taken down, this doesn’t in any way harm crypto in general or any of your independent wallets? I mean, you should only look at exchanges as places to input and forex trade crypto, but you should always output it to your external wallets in the end for long-term storage. If some day some exchange suddenly asks any of its users to explain why they did send money to a certain address, that would be the death of this exchange. You don’t need to explain, it is not bank, there are no taxes to pay (you already paid all the taxes before you converted your money to crypto), there are no laws that could make this demand legal. Move to the next exchange.
If exchanges close, websites stop accepting them, and you can’t withdraw to fiat
Regulation can easily kill most of the cryptocurrency market
Trading on non CEX is a massive pain as well
Storing for long time on cold wallets makes you vulnerable to volatility, which isn’t good for high amounts. It’s essentially investing on a high risk asset.
Look, when you use some platform with KYC, they indeed can tie that id information you give them to your internal addresses you use on the same platform. But the moment you send it to your external wallet that link is lost. They can see the transaction but they don’t know and can’t check if that destination address belongs to you, or it’s a person who sold you something, or it’s your friend/relative, or someone you donated to, etc.
yes, even without KYC, one opsec fail and they can get quite a info on you, things like usage patterns and eventually potentially a profile, upon which will probablycreate a “credit score” of sorts and probably sell advertising data too because why not!?
Then explain how exactly is this incorrect. If you buy and smuggle weapons for example, feds do undercover operation and pretend to sell guns, they set their own wallet, they track transactions, they co-operate with exchanges and have access to KYC data, they see you sent from exchange to wallet X, and then wallet X payed for weapons to their undercover wallet Y. What they achieve here is: they just see there is some chance that wallet X also belongs to you and maybe it’s you who are buying those weapons, but they can’t use this as proof of anything, what they can do is start spying on you from other vectors: your regular bank accounts, your social media, or even IRL to check if they can find any real evidence. That’s basically all. This is not at all a concern for people who don’t run international multibillion crime syndicates, etc. And also this all is extremely irrelevant to original topic. Because those games aren’t even illegal, it’s basically just a fkin preference of payment processors to demand Steam and Itch to take them down. If Steam operated in crypto, no amount of transaction tracking would make it possible to enforce something like this, because this is not law enforcement to begin with, it’s not illegal games and they are not taken down due to any legal concerns.
Crypto is great. As long as you stay within its ecosystem
Making crypto backed by more and more things (like games) makes staying within its ecosystem more comfortable in the long run.
Not to mention your still beholden to the traditional payment processors the moment you want to get your money out of crypto and back into an actual usable form.
the moment you need to sit on the line where you’re transferring in and out real money to crypto crypto to real money on a small scale with frequent processes. You just end up right back where you started.
Yeah, but there are already tons of widely-known legal services everybody uses like Coinbase, Binance, etc, which make it easy to P2P from card to crypto and it’s impossible to control money flows after it turns into crypto, which means controlling how people spend their money like this would be impossible. But yeah, regarding big players like Steam adopting crypto and converting into/from real money on large scale - and what payment processors can do about this if they are pissed off - this is something I have no idea about. But people like Elon Musk probably do this a lot with incredible volumes of money.
Once this review is complete, we will introduce new compliance measures. For NSFW pages, this will include a new step where creators must confirm that their content is allowable under the policies of the respective payment processors linked to their account.
kind of a clever way to say “hey don’t give us grief, if you want to change this go complain to visa and mastercard.”
The fact that they hold the keys to the kingdom. Online retailers and businesses rely on credit card processors to be able to do business, which is all the leverage they need to exert tremendous pressure on the businesses they service.
This is something that really should be getting legislated against, but good luck in the US under the current administration. Maybe the EU has a shot.
It’s not about morals. It’s purely about money. Porn sites are labeled as high risks because things like chargebacks, stolen credit cards etc happen more often at these adult websites. Not to mention the thin line between legal and illegal content. Therefore payment processors charge companies in the high risk category a higher fee since they need to audit these companies more frequently and deal with these chargebacks etc. more.
So either Itch.io goes into the high risk category and pay more for transactions or they remove porn. Maybe itch.io should just create a separate company to host these adult games.
maybe it’s because itch mostly sells non-porn games so they probably flew under the radar since they could have less fraudulent transaction or chargebacks as a porn site. Or the payment processors didn’t care too much that itch broke the compliance rules until someone reminded them of their duties. Like PornHub was showing illegal content for years and the payment processors only gave a shit about it until someone went to the news.
Meanwhile, on my feed there’s a post directly below this one about a compiler that will give you BSDM messages for good and bad coding and can even be hooked up to a remote butt plug to pleasure you when you compile a successful program.
Still, it further highlights just how much power over law payment processors have - a worrying thought that the morality of a company (influenced by problem life nuts) dictates international law.
Edit - autocorrect turned pro life into problem life. I am ok with this.
While this is far from some kind of total victory, that a conversation is happening at all is much better than that not being the case.
I am guessing payprocs did not have any fucking clue the extent of backlash they would receive from just being extremely vauge / heavy handed.
Hopefully this can at least result in some more concrete and specific definitions of what they will and will not allow, so that existing platforms at least have an idea of what the actual rules are, and then from there, potentially a more targeted public pressure campaign could manifest.
If itch.io manages to get them to actually clarify the rules, this could lead to other platforms, Steam, Nutaku, etc, also reworking their allowed/not allowed games, now having more clarity and less fear of being totally nuked for violating vague guidelines.
True, this is good news. But, it should not have come down to the entire fucking government of Japan weighting in on the global impacts of this insane decision!
Is this truly the amount of mountain-moving we have to do to counteract a single organization’s opinion? There is a clear difference in effort required between one side and the other.
The issue isn’t the amount of effort required to undo one action.
It is the complete lack of effort every other time this is done. Gamers Rise Up STILL pretend this is some watershed moment that nobody could have foreseen. And while it is always dangerous to consider The Internet to be a monolith, you can even see threads here where people didn’t care when it was just “incest and furry shit” on Steam.
Let alone when it was basically the entirety of Pornhub a couple years back.
And that is the problem. This kind of shit happens. Why should a megacorp fight it when nobody will care one way or another and this avoids any bad press? Why should news outlets report on it when the outcome will be “Ugh, fucking scammer journalists. How fucking dare they put that behind a paywall or have ads”?
So they just kind of acquiesce to the loudest voice in the room until people DO care.
The lesson to take from this isn’t that we need government intervention every single time chuds do anything.
The lesson should be to ACTUALLY support independent journalism that covers shit like this. At the very least, shut the fuck up when you see a paywall from a blog run by some of the most established and prestigious investigative journalists in the tech space. Preferably consider throwing a buck or two their way so they can pay for legal fees.
And… ACTUALLY support good smut (that aligns with your preferences, morals, etc). Everyone (except some of the aces) likes to get a bit frisky with themselves every so often. Rather than always just pirate that shit consider throwing a few bucks at creators (and games) that do it right. You’ll find you get a LOT more of the stuff you like (see: The rise of “chick porn” in the late 00s/early 10s… and the overabundance of stepsister washing machine porn in the 20s…) AND it shows stores that there is actually a market for that and it might be a bad idea to kill it.
Because first they come for the smut. Then they come for the art.
Treats only flow by the arcane and abstract machinations of those with power, and those with power are fickle, greedy, and often do not busy themselves with the minutiae of the affairs of the hordes of useless eaters.
I agree with you, the power differential is absurdly vast, the situation is plainly ‘unfair’ by most viewpoints…
… but the question that matters is what are you going to do about that?
Posted this elsewhere so just going to copy paste here but with regards to Collective Shout:
I think we need to get this group to weigh in on the content of certain holy books. Surely as a secular organisation they will have no problem demanding that the bible and qur’an be banned (I bet I know which one they actually would like banned).
After all we don’t want kids exposed to books that contain incest, sex, violence, rape, etc. I’m sure there are some parts of Ezekiel they will want editted at the absolute minimum.
I imagine balkanisation would be one way to make them slightly less visible/insufferable, and you know they would love some factional infighting.
Every time they get brought up they should be forced to confront that the people pulling their strings are most likely engaging in all the things they want banned from culture (regardless of culture or intent). Once they are forced to start lobbying Visa and MasterCard to block transactions to religious bodies I will accept they genuinely believe in the drivel they leak. Until then its performative puritanism.
P.s. not a fan of religion of any stripe, but I would feel as violently opposed to censoring them as I am to censoring anything else, I will accept it if its the only responsible solution until then alternative can be found.
Well yea, but also no. I think a lot of their ability to operate is the veneer of legitimacy they have, my suggestion above, while funny, was mainly facetious, however if we could figure out a way of stripping that legitimacy away they might see more pushback from the next company they try to convince they represent a statistically large chunk of the population.
In this exact situation if Visa had just said to them: “We will take that under advisement.” Then filed the whole thing with the crayon scrawl “letters” they get from a certain “BLEACH BLONDE BAD BUILT BUTCH BODY” about not letting the Jews buy any more space lasers. Then no one would be getting rights taken away from them.
we already had that: Eurocard. they needed to pay mastercard in order to be compatible with their terminals, and that relationship ended with mastercard just absorbing them.
they were started for the exact same reason that we are talking about, to get a european alternative. so obviously the answer is not free market-based.
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