I understand they will not be paid since the payment processors are refusing to do so. But can’t they still advertise the game but insist the payment be made with credits that are purchased separately?
I understand they will not be paid since the payment processors are refusing to do so. But can’t they still advertise the game but insist the payment be made with credits that are purchased separately?
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Because visa will not allow you to sell credits if the credits are to buy “bad things”.
No. The main reason is that if Steam or Itch would do that then the payment processors would just stop their service to steam.
The payment processor said “we aren’t going to process any transactions for you at all unless you take the boobies down”
They could, but:
You are a coffee shop, one day VISA comes to you and says, you can’t sell blueberry muffins anymore. You think, that’s odd, but you don’t sell a lot anyway and you sell way more coffee. You could maybe come up with a legal loophole to sell the muffins, but it is not worth your time. Plus, the folks who buy blueberry muffins are not the clientele you really want. They seem a bit too into their muffins.
I would imagine that if the money (profit) was there, they figure out a way. It’s obviously not, so why bother. They are just companies at the end of the day.
In the long run it might be possible for those game platforms to adjust their systems to work around restrictions imposed by credit card companies. But in the immediate term, their software and user interface wasn’t designed to discriminate between different sources of money as to what it can purchase.
Plus, even if they did rewrite the code so that some games can’t be bought with some payments, that might not be good enough for the anti-sex activists. The activists might claim that payment companies need to avoid Steam so long as any objectionable material is included anywhere on the platform.
They essentially had a choice: Pull all of the most popular payment processors, locking millions of people out of the ability to buy from them, or take down/delist a bunch of games.
It makes sense, what they did. I’m not too angry at them, but the power of these payment processors, especially when they cooperate like this, is ridiculous.
It’s also a bit hypocritical, because I’m pretty sure they offer payment for porn websites.
Maybe they can, but it’s important to understand that STEAM IS A COMPANY and it would have thought it through and decided not to for… reasons.
Like all for-profit companies, Steam’s job is to make money while minimizing risk. And whatever internal processes it used to review an alternate adult-games option found it to not be compatible with either or both of the company”s level of risk acceptance and level of profit made.
For example, if Steam goes ahead and starts selling adult games, there is a RISK that the news will blow up in the presses and give it bad publicity, and the right-and-proper fussdoodle-type crowds will start screeching about it.
Or there might be a RISK that companies that process payments will start refusing to do business with Steam because of their connection to adult games.
Or there might be simply be NOT ENOUGH PROFIT in doing it for Steam to keep doing it and they found that the cost of running that alternate payment mechanism would exceed the revenue it generated.
Or it could be a mix of several of these and other factors.
Until and unless Steam announces (or have announced) a reason why they didn’t take this tack, and they may never do so, their reasons are their own, and every answer here is by extension going to be a guess.
They should’ve called Visa + Mastercard’s bluff… they’re not gonna want to take the backlash of pulling out of Steam completely.
Gabe really wants all the money, he will figure it out, on a long enough timeline. But this just happened, he needs time to cook.
steam sells alot of adult games??
Since when?
Steam sells adult games. Steam sells pornographic games. I stumbled upon some before. There’s been articles about them.
Is this new?
Steam can still sell most adult games, you can go to their store page and find a bunch of them.
There was a small subset of games that they ended up removing. According to the screenshot in https://www.ign.com/articles/valve-pulls-adult-only-games-from-steam-as-it-tightens-rules-to-appease-payment-partners it was mostly incest adult games.
Itchio did pull all of their NSFW games temporarily, but they said they’ll restore some of them later.
The payment processors don’t wanna be known for being used to buy incest games, it seems. Maybe some other categories as well.
Because the payment processors are being targeted by evangelical activists that don’t want adult content to exist as much as possible, and the cost to defend themselves from the attacks is much more than the money they can make from processing the payments for adult content.
And there are a very few instances where the activists have a point, but they use those as a wedge to ban as much as possible.
Great video with more depth on the answer than anyone can give in a post:
https://youtu.be/SmHHnPLllUk?si=j8vJBSevhlcLxFKO
So i still see adult games on my feed. Is it not enacted yet?
It’s an issue of litigation/liability. There are groups and countries out there that object to or have laws against explicit content. When it’s straight porn and that’s the point, everybody knows that’s the point, and they can avoid the sites or block the domains. When it’s a mixed storefront, those same groups and countries will come after the payment providers for violating their values or laws by presenting explicit material on a platform that’s ostensibly for general audiences.
If valve launched SteamX or some such to isolate the AO content, they’d probably be fine. Valve probably doesn’t net a huge share of revenue from adult stuff, so I doubt it’s a real loss for them. I can’t speak to itch, because I don’t know anything about them.
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Some Japanese platforms like dlsite have already gone this route. Options like this require time to plan and implement, and the credit card companies are not giving them that time. They have days to comply or have all sales stopped. The platforms’ commitment to their ideals will determine how much effort they put into implementing such work arounds in the future.
ELI5 – governments and lobbyists can’t legally ban adult games, but they can lean on the companies that process payments for those who sell them.
So wait; I can go to a bookstore and buy a playboy or hustler with my visa or Mastercard but I can’t do similar things on steam?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmHHnPLllUk
TL,DR: Conservative anti-porn activists who masquerade as anti-pedophile, anti-trafficking organization (in particular, Collective Shout that pretends to be a feminist) have managed to attack the legal basis that payment processors remain neutral utility service when it comes to porn (due to one legal case where the judge rejected this defense), making payment processors afraid and are starting to cave into the demands of said conservatives with Steam and Itch being the latest victims.
More will follow and this is by design of the tactics of these groups, lying and subverting legal processes to push through their will. Steam and Itch has basically no recourse because they are utterly dependent on these payment processors who are in a superior negotiating position. The policies of these payment processors are vague. Conservatives sincerely believe that if you remove all porn, people will stop having sex drives (or suddenly that sex drive will turn into an intense need to marry and have children), just like they believe that if you criminalize LGBT into illegality it will cease to exist.
Isn’t there tons of adult games on steam? Like new ones every week…
It depends on your location, does it not? I am in the UK and see plenty of adult games, including early access titles. I’ve purchased several too. So it must be in accordance with your local laws.
I have a statement followed by a question:
Evangelical, puritanical fascists not withstanding; and without commenting on the content itself; it’s insane that US-based payment processor’s have this type of power to limit what is clearly legal free expression.
I’ve heard the EU uses a different type if payment processing that’s more decentralized, faster and more convenient for both buisnesses and consumer’s, and if so, what kind of push would we need on this side of the pond to make that happen?
Tertiary question: since this change would overwhelmingly be beneficial for everyone on all sides, who would ever oppose it?
> payment be made with credits that are purchased separately?
How are they purchased separately?
You cannot use a visa or a mastercard to purchase these credits, that’s the payment processors we’re talking about.
So you would have to go to your bank, take cash out of your account, go to the store, buy a steam gift card, then drive home to redeem these credits. And now steam has to track these credits separately. It’s a massive hassle, and running the numbers, valve probably decided it’s just cheaper to can the games they don’t like.
Probably, also, most of these payment providers have contracts about sellable items as a whole. That if something is purchasable with their cards is listed next to content they don’t like, then that’s also breach.
The payment processors are called a duopoly for a reason. You do what they say or loose access to the service. Simple as that.
They can.
They do.
They have decided that it’s not worth the trouble to sell certain adult games that got a lot of negative attention.
What’s the difference? I can find boobs on Netflix.
A group called “Collective Shout” is making money by doing this.
WHAT IF steam creates its own payment processor, brings back adult games and makes sh!t ton of money from all this?
Because visa and master card who make up 95% of card transactions said take them down or you cant use visa or or Mastercard to pay for games anymore
What I don’t understand is why someone doesn’t start a payment processing company that allows porn? They’d instantly have a model for success if nobody else will process payments for that content.
This is why we just stop money becoming all digital, things like this will become more common. Credit cards should not be able to tell you what you can and cannot buy and it should be considered illegal.
Steam should start another company called MOIST that is a games and social hub for adult games.
um, im viewing adult games in the steam store right this second. what is this post even talking about?
this explains it pretty well. just a Christian conservative group forcing their values down everyone else’s throats. Nothing new here just typical Christianity.
Is this really up to the fucking card schemes to decide though?!!!