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Funny, it turns out it is more brand damaging not to sell adult games, than to sell them....
Yeah before all this if you told me "MasterCard is selling incest and rape games!" I would have said no, Steam is doing that. But now I feel like they want to have a heavier hand.
Ultimately I think it's pressure from the Trump admin/project 2025 on companies to eventually make porn illegal
"Unlawful" based on what? American law?
These are global payment companies, they can't just have a "we don't allow payment for illegal content" cause that varies by country (and by state even).
What an absolutely nothing statement.
We should demand mastercard shut down all payments to everyone, as their very business model clearly falls afoul of the laws of the People's Republic of North Korea.
Now this is the kind of movement I can get behind.
Exactly in the US I can buy an assault rifle. Something that would be a crime in most other countries.
They're obviously basing it on the local laws of the business and customer. That varies from each transaction to the next. They're just saying that they don't restrict anything that they aren't legally required to restrict.
I don't think that's accurate because they asked Dlsite before them to restrict their content based on American Law. They tried to remove access to content from outside Japan that Visa was complaining about and Visa still told them to remove the content (I guess cause people were using VPNs) so they had to remove the ability to pay with visa and Mastercard entirely.
From the article
So this seems like Mastercard are basically saying "it's not us".
Publicly, they're saying we don't want to get sued for allowing the purchase of illegal content, We have no problem with legal content.
That's not to say that's how they are phrasing it too the publishers.
By that reasoning they should not accept payments for alcohol, as that's illegal in some countries...
MasterCard's and Valve's statements seems to point at Stripe and PayPal as the ones who folded to the pressure. These payment processors then cited MasterCard's rules to back up their change in policy.
MasterCard now clarifying that the payment processors are over-interpreting the rules and anything legal is ok seems a very good thing here. Valve should be able to go back to Stripe and PayPal with this and say: "Hey, you've misunderstood the rules you are quoting; MasterCard themselves say anything legal is ok, and that is the exact policy we've been using!"
I love how they form a consortium that stays in lockstep to maintain their oppressive control over everyone else.
So Valve says the processors - such as Stripe and PayPal - pressed the issue based on pressure from MasterCard (and possibly Visa). MasterCard says they had nothing to do with it. Itch says that Stripe was directly responsible in their case with a blanket ban on anything generally sexy, but that Stripe blamed their banking partners.
So Stripe, at least, is directly responsible but insists they are under outside pressure. This means the pressure is coming from one or more actual banks. Since we don’t have names, we have to do some research to find out who Stripe works with. The possibilities I was able to dig up on a quick search include:
It seems clear that this has nothing to do with legality in any jurisdiction and that some powerful financial institution is forcing their twisted, puritanical morality on anyone they can at the behest of like-minded authoritarian terrorists. One or more of the above institutions are most likely at fault.
Shittygroup
Hellsfargo
Nutglaze
Oldball sacks
Devolve bank mistrust
This is all still project 2025
Donald Trump is on the Epstein list and is a child rapist
I have a hunch this goes one step higher than the private banks.
Sure. Let them whatabout. But to us, consumers, it shouldn't matter.
We know the stores aren't responsible, so we shouldn't attack them.
The processors are. For Visa and MasterCard it's pretty obvious. Itch, as you said, puts direct blame on Stripe, and I think we can trust that.
As much as processors need banks, banks also need processors. It's a sort of symbiosis. Damage to one actually trickles onto the other. So pressing onto processors isn't a mistake. It'd be foolish at best and malicious at worst to suggest that.
Now that we have leverage as users and consumers, having started a push which made way and caused a response (first the prepared phone statement and now a press release), the absolute wrong thing to do is bacl down and say "sorry, we were wrong, it was B after all and not you, A".
And look at it this way: There's less payment processors and they're smaller than banks. If you suddenly turn to banks, you won't accomplish anything because to them, a few consumers who aren't their customers doesn't cause them even an itch. But if payment processors come to them it might.
There's been two decades worth of lawsuits because PayPal has a history of withholding revenue and blocking small e-commerce stores.
I'm talking about e-commerce sites selling a board game, making $40k in sales through paypal, and PayPal refuses to give them money.
PayPal's stance has been, "Fuck you sue us."
I'm not saying this because I think Peter Thiel, who was one of the creators of Paypal, is a fucking evil villain.
It was an Elon company. Does it surprise anyone that it’s corrupt as fuck?
Silicon Valley used to call the founding staff of PayPal the PayPal Mafia
By that standard, I ought not be able to use the card to buy booze (might give it to a minor or use for a Molotov Cocktail) a gun (obviously could use for crime) , and probably a million other things they let people buy with cards.
If this is true then I honestly hope Steam and Itch go "ok, then, PayPal and Stripe are banned from the store as payment forms until we can figure out a way of limiting content you can pay with them". Honestly I don't think enough people use either of those payments forms, and even if they do currently they almost assuredly have a card they can use instead, and are more likely to switch payment methods than to stop buying games.
IIRC Stripe is the main payment processor. If you’re paying with a visa or mastercard online, it’s usually via stripe. Hence, the immediate censorship.
Paypal can go fuck itself and die
Stripe can also go fuck itself and die, thanks
Ah, if that's the case then MC statement is kind of pointless, so it's not them putting the pressure, but you still have to go through the people putting the pressure to get to them. I thought that if you put your card number on steam it had some more direct form of charging than going through stripe.
Unfortunately they are indeed big players, Stripe where people use credit cards and PayPal everywhere else. Both horrible companies that we'd be a lot better off if replaced with privacy-respecting alternatives.
I mainly use PayPal as a necessary evil so I don't have to pull out my wallet and put the card info in every time I want to buy a game. I dunno maybe I SHOULD go back to that because then only the games that are worth the effort of getting up off the couch are the ones I'd buy.
You can just save your card info in steam. No need for paypal for that.
Honeslty i am not sure what paypal is even for anymore
Ive literally never used PayPal. I didnt trust it in the early days, and by the time online shopping was normal there were far easier alternatives.
It's time for Steam to launch their own payment processing company, and apply pressure directly on the card networks and the future competition.
It won't be nearly as profitable as their current business model, but sometimes industries need a shakeup.
That's not a statement. It's just a lame excuse and attempt to escape the blame for their behavior.
Has anyone else noticed that the MasterCard logo kinda looks like a butt?
A fuckable butt at that.
Porn will always win.
just ask betamax
And hddvd
I do kind of wonder of any of these game devs could go after these payment processing companies for loss of income? I'm not a lawyer, but I'd definitely be looking into it if I was a Dev that has been effected by this.