Mastercard has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms, contrary to media reports and allegations.
Our payment network follows standards based on the rule of law. Put simply, we allow all lawful purchases on our network. At the same time, we require merchants to have appropriate controls to ensure Mastercard cards cannot be used for unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content.
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Seth Eisen
They forgot the part of their TOS about “damaging the brand”.
They realized that this news getting out damaged their brand worse.
More people should watch this:
The Secret War To Censor The Internet
The CC companies have religious morons contained within their executives but they’re mainly being puppeted by outside religious evangelical organizations with a long history of wanting to destroy all sex work or erotica art.
Oh I’m so glad that their brand isn’t being damaged. It’d be terrible if that were to happen.
Why doesn’t valve simply restore games back then? Tell payment processors MC is OK with them (as evident by this statement) and tell them to come back with a reply from MC?
I kill people in GTA 5. I don’t kill people in Hentai Incest Generator 3000. Yet someone prefers to see my transaction only for the first one, citing damages to “the brand”.
Hire prostitute in GTA, kill her, get money back - ✅
Have consensual sex with character in hentai game - 😤
Curiously, in our society, killing is less of a taboo than sex, especially in fiction.
Since the aughts, I feel it is a disservice we do to censor out the horror of warfare in games like Call of Duty or Medal of Honor. I haven’t seen what they did with Six Days In Fallujah (by a vet of the Iraq War who experienced Fallujah and wanted to share his experience) but we’d have more respect for the gravity of war if the tragedy and immediacy of combat was properly expressed. In the Arma series, it’s very easy to die, but it uses a similar engine used for training purposes.
It’s our Christian values (more specifically, our Paulinian values – he thought Christians should not have sex if they can abstain entirely¹ – which has turned into taboos against sex without strict licenses, that has made our society super-prudish.
1. Paul actually also prohibited having additional children, the end being [nigh] and all. Later biblical interpreters would have to deal with the world’s failure to end, and Christ’s failure to return in their lifetimes.
Well it’s Cain’s fault. He did the first murder and it was bad. Adam did the first fuck and it was good.
Such is the way of the lord
The only game that I know of that tackles war as a psychological thing is Spec Ops the Line which is a brilliant game that is now delisted on steam for reasons. Regardless I do think the reason war is rarely shown in such a way is that the artistry (for lack of a better term) is relatively hard to balance between story and gameplay. Not even getting into how hard it is to tell such a story, making True Grit 1969 is a lot easier than making True Grit 2010.
Of course, because when everyone buy a game on steam the FIRST thing it comes to their mind is the credit card brand they used. What a load of bullock.
FFS I don’t even remember which one of my credit card I have saved on steam.
MasterCard can go fuck themselves. Great job saving your brand
Seriously rediculous, most people don’t even know if their card is Visa or Mastercard, nor do they care (because they dont know what they are or what they mean).
(This is from my experience with people i know)
Mastercard have changed their design so that it no longer says Mastercard on it, and it’s just the two circles. I bloody hate it, MasterCard thought they were able to get away with it because they thought they had brand recognition but literally no one cares about them.
Also they’ve been fine with porn games up until now and literally no one cared.
I don’t have any credit cards saved on steam. I only use PayPal for steam purchases.
Ah yes PayPal the completely benign brand that Elon was trying to shove the fact that he registered X dot com down our throats with decades ago
e: didn’t realize it would link to that shithole
😬
I’d rather pay with my actual blood than use PayPal.
It’s purely because steam hasn’t been able to keep my login info secure for almost a decade. I’ve changed emails, passwords, both, and yet I will always get random 2FA attempts from other places. I just don’t trust them to keep my bank info safe either.
I’m looking at this and I am just wondering… Did you also check the computers your using?
It’s quite a bit easier to get in the pc of a normal user than it is to get into the computers of valve, or at least that’s to hope.
Yep, I’ve completely changed computers multiple times. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Interesting. I’ve been using steam for decades and the only time my account was compromised was due to my own machine getting some malware. It was easy enough to clean up, reset password and reset all my steam sessions.
Now my blizzard account on the other hand… I got so tired of defending it that I’ve cleared all my CC and personal info from the account and just decided to let the hackers have it. Their shit leaks bad.
Choose your poison.
so this is a game of telephone between activists, payment cards, payment processors, and vendors.
Also TIL mastercard HQ is located in Purchase, NY.
Their condition (both via and mastercard) include stuff which, when you read it attentively, boils down to “we only prevent illegal things. And stuff we deem bad.”.
It’s not even a game of telephone or anything, they have their conditions that says “yes we did” and their PR that says “we probably didn’t”. They could be playing alone and still losing this one.
A game of telephone involves the message changing from each person. In this case, everyone but Visa/MC are blaming Visa/MC (valve, game stores, and collective shout).
It’s more like a game of calvinball, only Calvin is claiming the rule they made up doesn’t exist
Yet everyone initially confidently reported on who was to blame.
I’d love Valve to spend their extra billions on opening a payment processor. Fuck the big 3.
Honestly, wouldn’t be surprised, they have spent god knows how much to push linux to unshackle themselves from Windows and Microsoft
Unfortunately Taler still needs a lot of maturing, but having a distributed payment system not running on that horrendous waste of time and energy that is the block chain is promising!
The Drip Card from Valve incoming!
American Payment Processors really need more competition. They can not be trusted to act in a free market sense and not drift into a chaindog for political ideas.
It feels to me like payment processing has a similar function to physical currency. Like all of those security features on the bills are used to ensure the transaction is trusted.
Point being, I’ve long thought that payment processors are essentially doing a job that should be done by the government.
There are strange gaps where physical services have digital analogues but are completely ignored by the government.
I don’t understand why the treasury doesn’t process payments or why the post office doesn’t issue email addresses, for another example.
Anyways, back to the point, physical currency specifically says that it is valid for all debts. If they applied the same logic to payment processing, then this would never happen.
Probably because government and the people in charge of government are largely tech illiterate and being literate or seeking policy advice from literate people isn’t expected.
Payment processing is one of those things that really should have been treated as a public utility from the start. The same way we treat water, electricity, and phone lines. But even getting the internet treated as a utility has been a losing battle thus far.
Would it be possible to build a FOSS alternative to all this?
They’re trying with GNU Taler, but it’s pretty much a pipe dream at this point.
Does Bitcoin count?
With how volatile cryptocurrency has been in general in the last decade or so, I wouldn’t bet on it.
Crypto is ultimately a different form of money, as compared with fiat.
What I think people in this discussion are seeking is an electronic, FOSS , secure network that can facilitate economic transactions of fiat currency.
Of course the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive
Fiat currency is the problem
Does DAI count?
What’s DAI?
Have you tried Discover or American Express?
I live miles and/or kilometers away from the three business that accept either of those
Mastercard: worried about damaging brand
ALSO Mastercard: torpedos brand harder than the titan submersible implosion
Mastercard: We better not alienate our customers! Let’s cave to these religious lunatics from Australia.
Mastercard: Becomes hated by gamers all over the world.
mastercard you are hurting your brand by doing this
Effecting the brand?? Who in their right mine would associate them with anything but payments? That’s ridiculous
I associate them with religious pundites and discrimination of payments. A payment is a payment, for christ’s sake! If it’s illegal, report it to the relevant authorities.
This is actually ruining their brand. I now associate MC and Visa with Christian oppression
Like for real, the only reason I’m associating them with these games now is because they’ve actively brought it into the limelight, so we can see that
I wouldn’t have even thought anything of association if they hadn’t done so.
But now, anytime I see an NSFW game on Steam, I’m immediately associating it with Visa and MasterCard due to the fact that the news is that they’re trying to get rid of those games, which I assume is not what they wanted, but you know it’s what’s happening.
The astonishingly hypocritical part:
Guess who does payment processing for OnlyFans?
Visa.
And MasterCard.
=D
All you need to verify your id is a credit card!
Then you get all the pr0n you want!
Hope you didn’t borrow one from your parents!
No child has ever thought of that before!
Tbf in my day the children who thought of that and followed through got caught. Statements and such.
Those who didn’t get caught either stole it in magazine or VHS/DVD form straight from the store, or from an older relative, and then when internet happened, from free or pirate sites (pics at first that took forever on a 56k modem, then videos as tech progressed). Or if you were lucky someone would burn DVDs and sell them.
The trick is not actually buying anything.
Just using it for an id verification.
On a site that actually doesn’t cost anything.
It could be done, over a 56k modem, guess how I know?
Oh, that wasn’t even a thing back in my day. At first there was no age verification, then it became the familiar “Are you 18? [Yes] [No]” system we all know and love.
Well I suppose there was ID checks at the store, but ykwim.
IIRC, I genuinely, accidentally, first discovered internet porn on an elementary school computer, as a 5th grader.
Tried to go to the website for the whitehouse.
Turns out, the real website is whitehouse.gov, not whitehouse.com
At the time… yep, whitehouse.com was hardcore porn, this was way before school network admins… really even existed? muchless had any kind of url/ip blacklists.
So yep very old school, early days, near-miss or adjacent url hoarding… I think that would have been all the way back when expedia, yahoo, askjeeves were all still competetive search engines, and I am pretty sure I was using Netscape Navigator, hahahah!
Anyway, I was quite shocked, rofl, having grown up thus far literally going to church every weekend, being told by my parents that I couldn’t participate in the school Halloween festivities, as that was a ‘Satanic’ holiday.
Hooray fundamentalist upbringing!
Classic lmao!
They think they’re more than a money pipe.
A competitor to MasterCard and Visa could show up with double their combined budget and do what they do to massively disrupt this particular industry. The average Joe would not give half a shit and continue paying for stuff with whatever card their bank gave them just like they always have.
The specific brand of payment processor a card uses is just not a thing people care about unless they have an Amex and that’s essentially because places don’t always take it.
But what was “illegal”? I mean, if we’re applying real life laws to video games, that completely removes any game where violence is portrayed, GTA, Sonic the hedgehog, animal cruelty in super Mario. That’s why they are GAMES.
dumbasses. All of them.
No more RISK. Too violent. Should probably ban Clue while we’re at it.
