The major credit cards are essentially infrastructure, and really should not have the right to refuse to serve a lawful business.
Everybody needs to also stop using Mastercard/Visa/Paypal.
yeah I’ll start bartering right now
Ummmm.
ACH is how you get your paycheck, and it’s being updated to FedNow.
Zelle is an independent network as well.
And of course, there is Discover and AmEx.
There is also cash, check, money order. They still work today, just people largely forgot how to use them.
IIRC some Brazilian network was getting very popular off of this. If you want to look at non-US options.
There are plenty of competitors to Visa/Mastercard/Paypal.
And use what instead? Swollen off PayPal is pretty easy because frankly it’s an awful service and businesses are better off not using it anyway so they tend to offer other options.
But MasterCard and visa are the only payment options. Everything requires MasterCard or Visa
There’s Discover and American Express if you’re in the US. I don’t know the porn policies of those companies but they are the alternatives.
So the ones that cost more? You think any of them have different policies? I doubt it .
I’m not in the US.
Amex works outside the US. I use it in Europe.
JCB?
A large digger? How’s that help?
Discover has an alliance with JCB. So that’s just Discover in the USA.
I love using my JCB to buy JBCs
Businesses are better of not using Paypal or Creditcards, both of the are a hassle and cost more time to process than a digital pin transaction or an old school bank transfer.
You have to use what is available in your country, a lot of countries have their own payment platform and they are being consolidated into one Wero.
As long as people keep using Mastercard or Visa they will have this power.
Yeah people keep using them because there are no other options. That’s the point that’s why they’re powerful because they have a monopoly.
The thing is the only alternative is to use cash and steam won’t take a bank transfer.
In North America there are no other options it seems, but outside that yes other options exist.
Also gift cards
Is there any good reason why shops/Vendors dont really offer any kind of Crypto? Like I genuinely dont get it aren’t you paying way more for using Visa/Mastercard etc. as a shop?
I know it’s downvote central, but I’ve been on the “No Porn on Steam” train forever. Ever since the introduction to the service it has inundated so much of the “Top Selling” “New & Trending” etc. Steam is for games, porn is for porn. Super annoying to sift through it when I’m looking for a new game, and I have my age settings so I can see adult games like GTA/Dishonored, not “Super Hentai Bejeweled 3000”.
Is it more about the porn or the shovelware for you? That is to ask: would you play a porn game that is sufficiently story-driven and acclaimed?
Ehat you said reminded me of Fate Stay Night, never played it, but the story was so good they made anime and manga for it, without the sex scenes of course.
Would I play a game that has sex/nudity in it? Yes. Do I want games that are specifically pornography on steam. No.
Do I want games that are specifically pornography on steam. No.
Well, some people do want that.
So, in compromise, Steam gives you the option of not seeing pornography. It even sets that option by default.
The only way you’re ever going to see pornography is if you specifically check the ‘Show Adult Only Sexual Content’ in the Mature Content Filtering of Store Preferences in your Account Settings.
Excuse me sir, but Super Hentai Bejeweled 3000 is one of the best games of our times.
/S
Just turn the adult stuff off yo.
… and I have my age settings so I can see adult games like GTA/Dishonored, not “Super Hentai Bejeweled 3000”.
The former belong to the M rated category while the hypothetical latter would belong to the Adults Only category. As others have pointed out, you can hide adult games and still see other games with violence and mature themes. Steam classifies M-rated games and AO-rated games differently.
Certainly there should be better search tools and personal curation on Steam. If you don’t want to see it you should be able to easily filter it.
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steam is for games… no, it isn’t really. steam has been distributing non game software for ages.
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porn games are games so even if steam is for games it should have porn games.
i don’t care for porn games but I’ve filtered them out so who cares what others do with their time
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“I’ll know it when I see it” has gotta be the most vibes way to tell people they’re degenerates.
I understand the principle but why do gamers always choose the worst examples of something to rally behind. The stop killing games petition rallying around The Crew, which lasted 10 years and was a very average game, and now this with getting behind porn games to protest censorship.
Is there really no better examples than those?
The goal is to stop them building up any momentum. If the credit companies get used to flexing their power like this, and steam gets used to folding to it, then things will escalate.
Right now it’s porn games. Who the hell would defend them. But it won’t end there. You honestly don’t think they would go after games that mock religion, or are trans positive?
Under the guidelines imposed by payment processors which were recently clarified by itch.io, Baldur’s Gate 3 would be banned, as it contains moments of non-consensual sex and bestiality.
"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."
-Martin Niemöller, 1952
Obviously banning porn games isn’t comparable to the holocaust, but the principle of defiance is the same. If we don’t want credit card companies to ban stuff we like, then we should also oppose them when they ban stuff we don’t care about.
They didnt ban anything, they said they’d stop doing business with steam and itch. I dont want to force companies to do business with other companies.
would you rather them do nothing? realistically for the vast majority of people they don’t care enough to do more than this, and it’s atleast SOMETHING to get the ball rolling
We knew in the aughts that this was going to be an issue when the charging companies defunded Wikileaks and Julian Assange¹ and were allowed to do so, defying public accommodations laws.
1. Yes, Assange is a git and a Russian asset (or at least has been before) but he did serve as a whistleblower against evil shit done by Bush and Obama administrations and the general aristocratic corruption at play in US federal politics. As with Chelsea Manning, he embarrassed politicians using their positions of power inappropriately, revealing that the state was not serving the public. Incidentally, ACLU in its early years was funded by USSR to cause trouble against the US state (which it was doing anyway and still does), which makes it historically (and debatably) a Soviet asset. Strange bedfellows and all that.
This is a tale that keeps repeating itself, and is why protections by the fourth, fifth, and sixth amendments of the Constitution of the United States have been carved out like a holiday turkey by the US Supreme Court. We found it easy to deny unreasonable search and seizure protections from major crimes suspects, only to find that every black citizen with a gram of cannabis now no longer has those protections.
So it is with monopolies that decide they can be selective with their accommodations.
If we can’t pressure the transaction services to obey public accommodation rules since they have monopolistic power, it may be time to circumvent the issue, and support black market tactics ( Archie comic and bag of sawdust, $20, comes with free incest porn! )
These days, when discussing the usenet alt.* heirarchy, its acronym ( Anarchists, Lunatics, and Terrorists ) is now considered a backronym, a joke. I was there, and it belied a serious point: The worst of us deserve free speech, as per Larry Flynt, knowing that Hustler magazine is legally published in all its (raunchy) glory means that whatever you’re releasing to the public is safe from moral guardians and critics because they have worse stuff to shout at.
But we’re in an era of book burning, which means those would-be moral guardians are emboldened to try to reshape society in their image, in contrast to the principles of liberty and free thought. And soon ICE will expand its POI list to include liberals and wrongthinkers.
It may be time for bricks in windows and direct action against high-ranking company officials, but such behaviors carry high risks of consequences. So be careful and thorough.
In the meantime, write petitions of your grievances and sign those others have written. And remind them at this moment the public presumes petitioning them for redress of grievances will be acknowledged and acted upon. And if that turns out not to be the case, the outraged public will not simply disappear and keep to its place.
Petitions like this are meaningless unless they come with a viable solution to the duopoly in payment processing that is Visa and Mastercard.
It doesn’t matter what Valve agrees with, if they want to survive as a business they have to ultimately do what the only 2 companies that handle the payment processing tells them to do.
You’re missing the point. This is not aimed at Valve, but at Visa and MasterCard. They are businesses. They primarily care about profit, not censorship. Especially when that pisses people off. They made the mistake of listening to the vocal minority of Collective Shout, so we have to let them know that. This isn’t the 80’s anymore, gaming is mainstream and there are far, far more gamers than puritanical Quakers that get the vapors at the sight of anything mature or complicated. And worst-case scenario, they are not the only payment processors, just the most convenient ones for customers and businesses. For now…
Valve is a big enough company that they could conceivably start their own payment provider to bypass this.
For example they could sell adult games under credits only and take CC or PayPal for credits.
This way you’re not buying adult titles with CC at all. Same way AAA deal with gambling with lootboxes.
Can’t people do this already? Just load up your Steam Wallet, and then use those funds however you want?
Cant use the steam wallet when they delist the game.
Yes but the payment processors didn’t say “you’re not allowed to sell this game with our service” they said “you’re not allowed to sell this game period or we walk”.
There’s the bullshit right there.
Come on, Gabe. You know you wanna.
You do know what happens to Valve Time any time someone tells Gabe to hurry up, right?
deleted by creator
IANAL - Can credit card companies coordinate like this? This seems like price fixing but the other way around. Like one company wouldn’t do this alone cause it would drive customers away so they agree to do it together. Does that coordinated monopolistic behavior have president?
Yeah it seems to fit the description of a cartel… Not that it matters.
Yeah, I don’t expect the US Federal Government to do anything pro-consumer except to lower the cost of concentration camps and tear gas.
So, I wanted to see if I could find a list of games that were removed. I found this https://steam-tracker.com/ which is not specific to this event, but useful to keep track.
Make your own payment processor, Gaben. It’s the way.
Then people would have to get specific cards or crypto or whatever that aren’t Visa/MasterCard in order to buy Steam games. That, of course, is if you can get banks to agree to carry “Steam cards”. Either that, or everyone would need to buy Steam gift cards as an exclusive form of payment.
All of these are much less convenient than keeping your existing debit/credit card to pay for Steam games, and less convenience means less sales.
They would have to roughly make their own form of PayPal, alongside their own bank.
If you didn’t know, PayPal technically isn’t a bank, it and Venmo use Synchrony Bank… which is an actual bank.
If they did something like that, it could work, but it would have to be at a similar scale as PayPal, that is to say, massive…
Because doing this would/could basically be the nuclear option:
MC and Visa and PayPal would/could drop them.
So, they’d have to basically develop a massive project, in total secrecy.
… Which is something Valve has arguably done a number of times, they are notoriously opaque as a company.
…
Sort of as you mention, they already have a barebones backend framework to scale up from the steam gift card / user gift card balance system.
I am… uncertain if their backend for that already does or does not include an actual legally defined bank though.
…
Problem is that this would necessitate a massively costly undertaking, as well as ongoing maintenance costs, and Valve is also notorious for basically running on what most other firms would consider a skeleton crew for the size and scope of what they do.
Or you could just transfer funds to a steam card, then with that, buy all you want.
Steam does not have to only accept steampay. Tho? You fear visa and mastercard will blaclist steam?
Steam removed games because visa and mastercard threatened to blacklist it, so yeah. That’s the whole point.
Yeah, but SteamPay is the future
Is that kinda what PayPal is, or was intended to be?
Yeah but PayPal’s awful. They literally arbitrarily deny you access to your own funds. At least the banks have rules.
If someone wants to pay me something they can use it literally anything other than PayPal. I don’t trust them they’ve stolen money from me before.
I don’t trust them they’ve stolen money from me before
Same. They stole a small amount (~10 USD), but at that time that was 2-3 days worth of groceries where I live (which would have helped a lot)
There was an obviously fraudulent charge on my PayPal account and I submitted a request for a refund that got rejected by their automated system. I had to email back and forth PayPal support directly as well as the business involved, showing evidence of multiple address info change requests in quick succession and other strange things about the purchase. When things stalled I threatened to bring the issue to the FTC consumer protection bureau and finally that put the fire under their asses. Eventually I got my money back but it took considerable effort to get them to do the right thing.
Needless to say after all that I deleted my PayPal account.
they’ve actually paid me after I was scammed by fake stock broker. without fussing about it too. Really easy to get payments reversed.
Either way I’d be happy to also switch to another method of payment if it were an option.
Yeah because in your case they didn’t have your money. They’re only real pain about trying to get money back, they always support businesses never customers.
So if I pay for a product and never receive it PayPal always takes the business’s side.
Even Amazon has better customer support.
So if I pay for a product and never receive it PayPal always takes the business’s side.
waves widely to above said post
That’s what I said happened to me. It was a scam. They still just ate the cost and paid me the money I lost.
Now I don’t know if maybe it was the amount, I don’t keep money on pp or I just did something different than anyone else did; I keep every piece of paper, email, name all contact information and detail(it’s kinda in line with my job)it was pretty undeniable I got scammed. Even showed I contacted a consumer bureau over it.
But either way I said I’d be open to a different way.
Yes
Just open bank in every country should do.
We want our pron and we want it now!
pronpornSelf censorship is not appreciated here mate
I am ashamed, brother. Forgive me for I have sinned.
What is a gooner that cannot goon? This is murder.
Give me the whole tiddy or give me death
But we have to oppose CollectiveShout as well, as in destroy them. They’re way worse than I thought
I wish it was feasible to hve a large scale boycott of visa and mastercard. american express is already useless so it wouldn’t help much to include it…
Or a decentralized alternative that isn’t just used to scam people, that doesn’t eat up insane amounts of electricity to process, and is as convenient as regular money.
In reality, private corporations should not have control over money at all. Money is printed by the local government and should be controlled by the local government. Governments generally have better free speech protections than private corporations, which have none. Obviously, free speech protections are not universal, but countries can already ban content in other ways.
Alternatives are not so hard, if you allow everyone to exchange and use every currency. Then, well, you need to pay someone selling in currency A - you pay your B’s to buy some A’s and you pay with them.
But there are lots of limitations on banking, some in good faith, and some to prevent mobility and make everything tracked. Possibility to track means possibility to decide who gets to do what.
I think that’s why gold standard was dropped in the first place. When all money is guaranteed with gold, and gold (still does) buy money, you do have a universal currency hard to track.
With decentralized electronic currencies the problem is - you need consensus. There’s no way around it at all. You can devise something to separate one consensus into a tree of subspaces, to make it more efficient in case an operation with a coin “123456” depends only on operations with coins from “123*” subspace, or something like that. Partitioned system. So then you don’t need consensus on subspaces untouched by your operation. But you still can’t have such an offline currency, because that depends on the finite amount of gold, while with electronic currencies double spending exists.
And I don’t know if it’s possible to make such an electronic currency anonymous for outside spectators. Zero-knowledge and other buzzwords are good, but I don’t know how one can do this.
There is already a PoW crypto that is actually private called Monero. It uses ring signatures to sign transactions and rotating public keys to keep public keys private. It also happens to be relatively stable since it’s basically the only crypto that people use as a currency (generally to buy illegal contraband online). It’s PoW though, so has the energy consumption issues.
Since it’s PoW, though, it still consumes buckets. Something I thought looked cool was Chia coin, which somehow uses hard drive space as a consensus algorithm which saves a ton of electricity, but I haven’t read the whitepaper on that, so I don’t fully understand it.
Worth also noting is that Monero also, not too long ago…
They specifically rewrote/updated the uh, block solver problem that miners solve for a reward…
They updated it to make ASIC mining basically not work.
Because they do not want it to be feasible for some rich assholes to build an ASIC mining farm.
They want mining to be distributed, done by individuals, in remotely collectivized mining pools.
Yes, it is individually, not as energy efficient as PoS system… but if you have a PoW system, that is specifically difficult to scale a large scale mining operation for…
Well, then basically no one does that.
Go lookup how much power gets thrown into Bitcoin or Eth., vs Monero.
Yep, they have much larger transaction volumes, but they are also way, way, way more energy intensive due to at least in significant part, it being profitable to run a large scale mining op.
And, not having people able to run huge mining ops, also just keeps things more stable on the value/price/txn speed front.
Monero is the least worst of all cryptocurrencies in terms of being an actual, private, secure currency.
Everything else is to a different degree, some kind of a speculative investment asset, the major ones also all happen to be orders of magnitude worse at overall energy consumption, which is largely used to just do crypto forex trading… people still do not really buy anything tangible with BTC or ETH, outside of either basically, or just actually, some kind of scam.
Money is not printed by the local government at all. Money is created by private banks through extending credit. And it shouldn’t be controlled by the government either, that’s a terrible idea.
I agree with the rest though.
Are you sure you’re from lemmy.ml…?
It’s just the first instance I found when I signed up, I didn’t know anything about its reputation.
Did some quick search and it turns out: There was controversy about revisionism and right-wing talking by the original lemmy.ml admins (and founders). Hence, everyone coming from there with fresh accounts immediately get’s the “idiot label”, is insulted and downvoted. Not a very welcoming gesture in such a supposed open, liberal and new community of geeks. - It seems, we can either change instaces, delete our accounts or ignore it.
Tbh, I never cared about it much, mine isn’t exactly a new account and I haven’t experienced what you describe very often. I mostly use lemmy via the voyager app and here I can’t even see what instance someone is on, unless I search for them specifically (or I’m too much of a noob and don’t know how). So if some people want to base their judgment on that, whatever.
Valve please fix
*Develops an open online payment system that isn’t a scam.
I completely understand wanting to fight Visa and MasterCards position in the market. That’s fine.
But for the love of God. Do not involve Steam and various porn games into it. That is not going to help your case.
I get the whole. “Just because I’m killing someone in a game, doesn’t mean I’ll kill someone in real life”.
But that’s not going to hold up as an argument here. Depictions of CP, even if it’s a drawing with crayons, is still highly illegal in so many places. Same logic can be applied regarding other depictions of illegal behavior in the same category (pornogrophy). Such as incest. I’m not saying that depictions of incest is illegal in many places. Because I honestly don’t know. But there would be a precedence for it.
Personally, I find it utterly disgusting that Steam even allowed such titles to begin with. I welcome their removal of them. But I wish it was because of other reasons than payment processors having an issue with it.
They removed Detroit: Become Human, dude… That is not a porn game.
If I had to guess, it’s probably because of the scene with the lesbian android couple.
That’s great, not great that they removed it but a great example of something you can bring up that doesn’t hurt the case.
I just really wish people would leave actual porn games out of it. Because that is not going to be helpful to their case.
I dunno, I personally think respectability politics is garbage but ya know, To Each Their Own.
Could you elaborate on what “respectability politics” is? I’ve never heard that before.
Point is. Making a movement and using the removal of games that fetishize incest as the drop that made the cup overflow. Is simply not going to go the way you think it is. Unless you think it’s going to crash and burn. Then it’ll go exactly how you think it’ll go.
You can make at least 101 far better arguments against Visa and MasterCard using their monopolized position to morally dictate what people can and can not buy, than having to involve incest porn. Or porn at all for that matter.
Porn is art, there’s no compromising on that without throwing someone under the bus. Respectability politics == throwing people under the bus for not being “respectable” enough. It’s been a huge issue in LGBTQ advocacy for a really long time.
Porn is art, there’s no compromising on that without throwing someone under the bus.
Would you consider child pornography art as well? You don’t compromise, that’s what you said no?
You’re obviously just trying to twist my words. Porn has to be consensual, otherwise it’s just abuse material. Hence the term CSAM being advocated rather than CP these days.
That’s the problem.
Valve already had a process to flag titles as illegal in specific jurisdictions, and as far as anyone can tell, was doing an okay job at that (not perfect, obviously), but they were forced to add an extra clause of, ‘oh, plus anything visa et al. don’t like’ the extra layer is adding minimal protection and is rife for abuse.
Additionally, let’s talk about what makes porn. Does “https://yakuza.fandom.com/wiki/Be_My_Baby” of Yakuza 2 count? Or does it get a free pass because it’s a large publisher?
What if players take the elements of the game to create something the developers didn’t prevent? Like if a map contains a baby on one side of a map and an orgy (in another office) on the other side of the map, is it CP if a player picks up the baby and brings it into the orgy room? Is this something you want the banks deciding? Couldn’t we - have therapists or other behavioral health development experts make this call?
Most importantly is the recorded history of how these systems are routinely shown to be used against smaller publishers, and assorted minorities (including LGBT people) have a woman show a boob, it’s polite adult fun, but if their twin brother shows a pre-op trans boob, now it’s magically porn.
What if players take the elements of the game to create something the developers didn’t prevent? Like if a map contains a baby on one side of a map and an orgy (in another office) on the other side of the map, is it CP if a player picks up the baby and brings it into the orgy room? Is this something you want the banks deciding?
I said I wish removal of titles would be because of other reasons than payment processors having an issue with it. So to be clear. The answer to your question of if it should be up to banks to decide, is “No”.
Additionally, let’s talk about what makes porn. Does “https://yakuza.fandom.com/wiki/Be_My_Baby” of Yakuza 2 count? Or does it get a free pass because it’s a large publisher?
We don’t need to talk about what makes porn. Though it may have been unclear, the titles I spoke of, was the ones Steam removed after PayPal wasn’t authorizing payments. The “Incest porn games”. I don’t know what the law says where you live. But in my part of the world. Incest is illegal. And I do not think games where incest is the goal and depicted as a fetish have any place on steam.
It’s ok if you want incest games on steam. That’s your opinion. I just said I welcome their removal. But wish they would have been removed due to other reasons.
“Hi there, would you like to sign the petition?”
