Collective shout seems to have expanded its scope: games like cult classic Fear And Hunger have been removed from Itch.io, while horror game VILE: Exhumed has been delisted from Steam just a week after launch.
Collective shout seems to have expanded its scope: games like cult classic Fear And Hunger have been removed from Itch.io, while horror game VILE: Exhumed has been delisted from Steam just a week after launch.
I don’t get why the gaming platforms are removing games instead of removing the objecting payment providers as a payment option for purchasing those particular games.
If visa doesn’t want people to purchase game X with Visa, then remove Visa as payment option for buying game X.
I think the issue isn’t that the payment providers don’t want to support the purchase of those games with their card. They want to stop offering their services to a platform that sells those games.
It appears that in the future, Itch will allow creators to opt out of payment providers, meaning that it’s probably on a per game basis, not per platform. That Itch and Steam are not making a per game solution now, is most likely because their current software doesn’t allow it and they need time to rework it. Itch has promised various changes already, Steam has been mum afaik.
Source for Itch: “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.”. https://itch.io/updates/update-on-nsfw-content
Interesting! Maybe it’s a similar situation on Steam, but the payment providers demanded the platforms act immediately (or at least too soon for them to make such changes).
Or maybe Steam gets too many chargebacks on NSFW games and is ok with this? Lol
You overestimate the adaptability of the average software stack. I worked at companies where even adding another button to the cart screen was a monumental undertaking
This is what Steam will probably do in the future, and Itch.io is already looking into it. There’s a reason all this garbage hasn’t splashed GOG. GOG is based in Europe, where protection laws would slap silly any financial entity trying to pull this stunt on an European company (pressure groups have weaseled censorship and moral panics with other strategies though, just not this one), and they have so many more payment processors that PayPal, Visa and MC would just be dropped entirely and immediately for any of the other dozen or so alternatives. The issue is that in the US and Australia, the three headed shit dragon already lobbied governments to pull the ladder behind them, so no other payment processor could take their place or compete with them, establishing a legal oligopoly of the old money finance club. They won and have this power due to systemic and political failures decades in the making.
I only use Steam myself, so I hadn’t checked Itch Io’s communication yet. I don’t know the platform myself so it’s quite possible that I’m misinterpreting this, but to me it appears that Itch Io will allow creators to delist payment options that they are not compliant with: “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.”.
Source: https://itch.io/updates/update-on-nsfw-content