Live data from Hacker News

Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games

pcgamer.com

481–490 of 967 posts

Re: Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games

#481
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One factor is the ongoing campaigns from number of moral crusading groups who lobby them to cut off payment processing for things they don't approve of. NCOSE has been working for decades on the project, and targeting credit card companies has been a successful tactic for them for a decade or so. [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/visa-and-mastercard-ar... [2] https://www.newsweek.com/why-visa-mastercard-being…

The US obsession with sex (both positive and negative) is something else. Here in Europe, sex is a normal part of human life. Not a center of everything, nor a sin to be avoided. Sex art is normal. Sex games are fine. There are no moral crusaders here, because sex is moral. We tell sex jokes at work and nobody faints. We are constantly perplexed why American culture is so different from other Western cultures in that…

The US is largely theocratic and has in part because of this managed to resist socialism and other forms of scientific governance to a much larger degree.

Using religious leaders as power brokers is a clever strategy, they'll never budge due to the better argument or scientific reason, hence making it almost impossible for non-violent progressive movements to having an effect at the macro level.

Re: Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games

#483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hereby declare that everything you like should be banned.

[flagged]

Why would having games on steam be the same as a person being an incest-child molester?

Re: Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games

#486
you can start to gamble NFTs on Steam starting from age 13

but they'll tell you that they got pressured to ban "adult content" from steam

HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA

Who's kid is obsessed with microtransactions and cs:go cases gamba on steam?

Psyop and propaganda, calling them out gets you a ban

Re: Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games

#487

Why do payment processors do stuff like this? Is there some regulation that requires them to? I get that they don't want to process fraudulent transactions, but I'd think the response to a higher percentage of fraud from some industry would be to charge them more. It doesn't make sense to me why they would be concerned about the content of games, as long as everything is legal and the parties concerned aren't subject…

I think the biggest issue here is that somewhere down the line we gave payment processors the responsibility of policing for crime and terrorism. Our governments and regulators punish those institutions for "not doing enough" to prevent such things from happening.

You might think I'm defending the multibillion company but here comes the catch: all of this is expensive so when you are doing something funky even though not illegal they just cut you out. You are a small dev or merchant and it's not worth running a whole monitoring apparatus over your activities.

Then we get into this situation where borderline cartel activity like this happens and we have a sort of shadow government enacting their own regulations. This raises some eyebrows dont you think? It will probably continue until governments realize this is happening.

Re: Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games

#488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The leverage is that the activists will potentially be able to draw the ire of the government. Visa and MC get away with absolute murder in terms of the size of the fees that they charge in the US. Most developed countries don't allow that. The US government could easily regulate them (as they already do with debit card fees) or use anti-trust law against the obvious duopoly charging exorbitant prices. Because of thi…

Tbh that's quite alarming what you've just said, and I'm not saying about government. I'm saying about an additional huge sales tax. I understand that wiring money or sending them in an envelope is the thing of past, but e.g. in my country and in whole EU the digital payment is promoted as the only righteous, because "cash is only used by gangsters and human traffickers" etc. And this is really playing against us and…

Credit cards are much less heavily relied on in Europe than in the USA. Europe basically runs on debit cards that every kid can have and where the fees are minuscule. There are countless banks providing the service and everything is highly regulated. On top of that, Europe still curbed Visa and Mastercard several times for antitrust behaviour. And the idea that physical money primarily aids social fraud, money laundering and other illegal activities is pretty well established. They even killed the 500€ bank note, because it was almost exclusively used by criminals and most normal people never even touched one, much less used one for legit transactions.

Re: Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games

#490
post #183

Why do payment processors do stuff like this? Is there some regulation that requires them to? I get that they don't want to process fraudulent transactions, but I'd think the response to a higher percentage of fraud from some industry would be to charge them more. It doesn't make sense to me why they would be concerned about the content of games, as long as everything is legal and the parties concerned aren't subject…

One factor is the ongoing campaigns from number of moral crusading groups who lobby them to cut off payment processing for things they don't approve of. NCOSE has been working for decades on the project, and targeting credit card companies has been a successful tactic for them for a decade or so. [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/visa-and-mastercard-ar... [2] https://www.newsweek.com/why-visa-mastercard-being…

One thing to notice is the group that claims responsibility for this is some kind of funky radfem puritan mixture from Australia. They campaigned against titles like GTA V, Detroit Become Human AND abortion pills.

Since they ran a campaign to ban GTA V from stores I can say for sure they are not stopping on fringe content like eroge porn shovelware.

Post reply on HN