Same with movies. Piles of dead bodies are OK for children to watch but naked skin would be highly damaging.
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> Republicans literally argue it's better for the country to have school shooters and for survivors and parents to live with PTSD for the rest of their lives than to limit access to military-grade weapons.
Can you quote any Republican who has “literally argued” this or are you just spreading lies that make it easier for you to vilify and dehumanize people who disagree with you politically?
If by “people involved” you mean folks who consume this kind of content then id totally agree. As soon as you offer crypto or even mildly sexual content your cc abuse rate goes through the roof. Which i suspect is the sole reason for processors getting upset in this case
Is that not a similar or higher percentage for games with loot boxes or other sorts of gambling?
I bet it has higher chargeback percentage too and they probably pay higher fees. iirc if merchant is getting close to 2% fraud to sales ratio, they can get banned for life. It's probably different rules when you're the size of Valve though...
Because they are on the hook for fraudulent transactions, until they get to merchant to refund. Otherwise they wouldn't care. Which is why some merchants get effectively blacklisted if they have too many fraudulent transactions
No, I get it. Give me a "Freedom Card" or whatever that generates a one-time use number/cvv combo, backed by cash, that I'm fully responsible for. If I give a guy on the corner $5 cash and he walks off with it, that's between me and him. We don't need to resort to crypto. I don't care if there's a paper trail, I don't need to be anonymous. I just don't want money people to have any say in how people choose to spend t…
Thats not exactly a credit card at that point. And with a credit card, you're explicitly not spending your money.
Though i agree with the idea of a debit card that doesn't allow chargebacks, but without so many annoying restrictions.
I think it’s hilarious we allow stuff like Postal or Soldier of Fortune without a question, where the whole focus is on going crazy and murdering a whole bunch of people. But try to show a sensual human body, instead of one that’s ripped into small pieces, and oh my god, this is going too far!
You could just ask, "why do payment processors pressure content vendors not to offer this kind of content". You're starting from the premise that there's some weird puritan thing happening, but there's really nothing puritan about American business culture. There are other explanations! You can get a long ways just by assuming that the people involved in these transactions are utterly amoral .
Or I suspect in this case there are Puritans with a lot of money who will sue the payment providers if the providers don't block things they think are bad.
Yes the payment provider is making a simple money based business decision, or possibly there is a threat of sanctions against the directors so a personal decision as well.
If there was ever an argument for the need of cryptocurrency, it is this. Dethrone the payment processors or they get to decide what is and is not allowed to be sold.
Seems like this could be easily solved with legislation without having to invent new currencies. Just make it a law that payment processors are not allowed to discriminate between legitimate goods and services. If the government thinks that sugary water or porn magazines are fine to buy and sell, why should MasterCard have anything to say about it? Payment processors are basically natural monopolies, so they should be able to be regulated.
The article calls out “certain adult games” which is vague. It is interesting to note that most of the delisted games were themed specifically around incest. https://bsky.app/profile/steamdb.info/post/3lu32vdlsmg27 Wondering if this will be a slippery slope towards pulling more anodyne stuff.
Yes, I don't know if selling those games is legal or not.
Thus I can imagine that they don't want to become criminally responsible if that's illegal.
Payment processors(Visa, Master) , payment gateways(Stripe, Paypal...) and payment hosts (Patreon, Gumroad...) are a huge pain to deal with even when you're selling something which is legal and risk free just because their algorithm or employees are often overcautious, anything out of mundane they'll ban first and then ask questions(if you're lucky). I have a FOSS project called Open Payment Host[1] which removes the…
Have you looked in to "PSD2 and Open Banking regulation in Europe" ?
My guess is it's simply a chargeback risk. It's the reason casinos and adult sites have trouble getting credit card processing and are charged much higher basic rates, even under the best of circumstances when the casino or adult site is operating entirely within the law in the jurisdictions it allows. Punters run a lot of chargebacks on casinos, and people whose spouses catch a XXX video or game on their card statem…
Isn't it a little odd that Visa/Master isn't out there making that argument? Why would we assume them having the best of intentions of they aren't even willing to argue those intentions themselves?
They don't need to make an argument for anything. They tell Valve: "Hey, if 1% of your transactions are for smut and incur smut-level-chargebacks, we're going to just treat all your transactions as smut", and Valve says, "no problem, we'll pull those games." It's not like Valve stands to profit by holding the line for free speech here or something. Valve gives as little a shit about an indie porn game as it does about anything else. Honestly, why should they pay the extra percentage across the board to defend it anyway? This is why I'm saying a separate X-rated platform would get a lot of traction.