Valve gets pressured by payment processors with a new rule for game devs and various adult games removed
Valve gets pressured by payment processors with a new rule for game devs and various adult games removed
25 Comments
There’s no way processors give a damn as long as they are making money. I’m willing to bet anything this is pressure from the American government and their “christian” agenda.
Granny told me that porn rots the brain. 🧠
Only arguments i have seen against this is slippery slope, which is textbook fallacious reasoning, or people actually being all about rape/incest sims.
Moral racketeering is so stupid. Have needed protections against this for a long time. Either break up these payment processor monopolies or make them utilities that can’t break service unless something illegal has occurred.
Yeah, this is concerning. The good news is that it doesn’t look like anything of real value was removed here – mostly just asset flip garbage about questionable themes.
We’ve seen other situations where a payment processor has pressured a platform into removing adult content wholesale (Gumroad, for example), and while that hasn’t happened on Steam yet, it’s definitely worth discussing.
Payment processors are scum who wield far more power than any company should be able to wield.
Seriously does not cost or require that much effort to create a clone just for adult content. If they don’t want to deal with these problems, that’s the way. But adults will whine like babies to defend the state of things, even though they will also be the type to have no shortage of accounts on adult only websites.
Who gives a shit what paypal wants? Just ignore them and let them pull out.
Valve is an free country company, but this happens? They also have heavy gambling.
I could understand if Valve made this decision on their own but idea that some random company that is processing my payment decides what I can and can’t buy is ridiculous. Just take your processing fees and let me buy my Sex with Hitler game in peace please.
Sweet so Valve is going to create its own payment processor now?
There has been a ongoing war against porn in recent years for whatever reason.
Lobby groups are trying to get governments to ban sites like pornhub, add mandatory age verification checks, etc.
A number of japanese stores removed their visa/mastercard payment option because of similar demands. (I wanted to link for reference but apparently automod doesnt allow it)
Regardless of your stands on porn, seeing a payment processor regulate the content of a store feels pretty overreaching, and this can help competing fintech solutions from other countries like China gain grounds.
Maybe sooner or later Visa will try to wage war against reddit and twitter on adult content.
Given that the porn industry is worth roughly $100B a year, I really do wonder *why* payment processors are so stingy about 18+ media. Like, this is one of the easiest revenue streams to exploit, and will probably NEVER not be profitable. You’d think that, given historical precedent, most companies that like having money would always pick the profitable course of action over the needlessly-moralizing one.
Tbh, nothing of worth has been lost. But yes, what a ridiculous rule. I’m surprised Valve went with it.
Why isn’t valve fighting back? This is practically corporate blackmail for censorship.
Why isn’t valve fighting back? This is practically corporate blackmail for censorship.
People need to contact steam about this and not let them get away with this. Gooner games both mild and dark fantasy like rape/incest have been on steam for YEARS, why all of a sudden so they care? Are they gonna go after the porn sites next where 80% of the content is incest or rapes fantasies? They all use major payment processors too.
Steam should take crypto payments if they don’t already.
I hope this will encourage valve to add crypto as a form of payment
So it’s not exactly payment processors, it’s the payment networks themselves (i.e. Visa, Mastercard, AmEx, Discover) that make up the rules and are cracking down.
Pirating games becomes more ok by the minute at this rate. If I can’t even buy the game anymore, I can only get it through other means.
This is the censorship people said wouldn’t happen.
Your bank or payment provider SHOULD NEVER be able to deny a legal payment.
Why doesn’t valve just only allow these specific games to be purchased with crypto or something? They used to accept Bitcoin but they could just accept whatever crypto they wanted. I’m guessing people who want these games would circumvent the payment processors if that’s what was required. I guess these games don’t collectively make up enough of the market to motivate valve to do this. I don’t even like these types of games but it’s really lame that Valve has to cater to payment processors, who should honestly be neutral.
If they had a separate Steam balance for some sort of stablecoin then this entire issue would be gone. Valve is one of the few companies I’d trust to make their own payment processing system with crypto or something.
steams till doesnt have age verification so we dont have any adult games here anyways
and because old games and some indies dont have an age rating at all, they all got removed here as well
One more strike against toward the death of capitalism. Cyberpunk corporatism, here we come.