Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games • Hacker News Board

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

#521

Post by sapphicsnail » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 8:54 AM UTC

PicassoCTs wrote: post #503

herbst wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just one of the ways the US forces it's weird morals onto the world.

Sexual self-denial always was the driving force behind the western cultural success. You can not have hyper-specialization and rule of law, without some members of society sacrificing a "normal" life. From the monk in the monastry to Turing hyper-focused on an enigma there is clear line. Its a ugly recipe, but its working, unlike all those other societies out there, who are currently eating themselves. A judge doesn'…

> You can not have hyper-specialization and rule of law, without some members of society sacrificing a "normal" life.

Sex freaks hyper specialize in things all the time. Monks and priests also had reputations as horny perverts in Medieval literature. Also, there are plenty of non-Western countries that have been functional. This is such an out of touch, ahistorical take.

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

#522

Post by mango7283 » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 8:54 AM UTC

lmz wrote: post #273

fendy3002 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though unpopular, I'd say China is able to

1) They already have that (Unionpay). 2) I don't think they are less prone to censoring things.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c056nle2drno

China would never! /s

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

#523

Post by mango7283 » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 8:55 AM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #107

1970-01-01 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a slippery slope. It's not real but can certainly, by definition, create a situation that mimics reality to the point of assisting someone at committing a real crime that they couldn't possibly commit without the simulation.

Should also ban GTA then. /s

You say this like they haven't already tried.

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

#524

Post by globular-toast » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 8:59 AM UTC

abcd_f wrote: post #505

globular-toast wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, credit is not really "your money". The danger of course is if this gets extended to debit cards and they become the only option (ie. no cash). Every time you use your card you are giving them the power to do this.

> credit is not really "your money" Unless it's a prepaid credit card or a debit card, both of which are serviced by MC and Visa and fairly common in Europe.

Yes, I mentioned debit cards in the second of the three sentences in my comment.

It's an important distinction to make. Credit is very much not something you should feel entitled to and issuer can and should be selective about who and what they issue credit for. Or course the credit industry itself is disgusting, but that's another issue (this was covered almost 20 years ago in a documentary Maxed Out).

This shouldn't be conflated with payments in general which is (imo) a much bigger problem. You should be entitled to spend the money you earn on exactly what you want, and to do it anonymously.

You can fight back: don't spend on credit and refuse to use a card when cash would suffice. We are losing, though. For stuff like Steam you have no other option (as far as I know).

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

#525

Post by alexp2021 » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 8:59 AM UTC

soysaucy wrote: post #501

noduerme wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 abou…

But can't they just block buying those games with visa/mc and only allow using steam wallet credit? Some Japanese sites have been having these issues for a while and that's what they ended up doing (or just closing shop entirely).

That would be a nice solution.

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

#526

Post by aleph_minus_one » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 8:59 AM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #285

morkalork wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't onlyfans severely limit the type of content creators could make and distribute through the platform, just like valve here?

> Didn't onlyfans severely limit the type of content creators could make and distribute through the platform, just like valve here? Well, this coverage identifies two restrictions that Valve is enforcing: (1) No video footage of humans. Animation only. (2) No incest. Onlyfans clearly hasn't implemented restriction (1). If they've implemented (2), that seems like much less of a problem as applied to onlyfans than to a…

> But even in the case of Steam, there just isn't a constituency for being pro-incest. This is the last political fight you'd want to get into.

Of course the constituency that is openly pro-incest is small. On the other hand, I believe the constituency for a quite encompassing freedom of speech has to be taken seriously.

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

#527

Post by 9dev » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 9:04 AM UTC

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #518

sigmoid10 wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 launde…

> And the idea that physical money primarily aids social fraud, money washing 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. At least in Germany in particular older people prefer to pay cash if possible - this gives the banks also…

> Since many people in Germany neither trust the banks nor the government anymore, acting this way is very rational.

Speak for yourself, this is either heavily overstated or a fringe opinion, luckily. Most people definitely do trust both government and banks to a sensible degree, even if they don’t like some decisions.

Some people like you apparently also don’t appreciate the immense freedom of SEPA transactions. Sure it’s good to have cash as an escape hatch for the occasional transaction off the record, but for almost everything else bank transfers are safe, inaccessible to third parties, free from fees, and easy to use. And above all else, we have a working democracy and not an oppressive regime? This whole debate often feels very disconnected and overblown in Germany.

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

#528

Post by 9dev » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 9:05 AM UTC

johnisgood wrote: post #508

sigmoid10 wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 launde…

Where may I read about anything supporting your statement "cash is primarily used for illegal activities"? I highly doubt that this is the case, unless there are more illegal activities out there than legal ones.

I would assume the metric isn’t number of transactions, but total transaction value. It’s really uncommon to pay for really expensive things (e.g., houses, cars, boats) in cash, and doing so almost always means that the duffel bag of cash came from shady means.

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

#529

Post by Hamuko » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 9:06 AM UTC

jhanschoo wrote: post #506

jhanschoo wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Valve actually have a high risk of chargebacks? I was under the impression that moreso than other platforms, most Valve customers would rather go through Valve's own refund system. I understand that chargebacks is supposedly the reason for adult-only platforms.

Sorry, I should clarify my question: does Valve actually face a significantly increased risk of chargebacks if it should be more liberal in its adult game rules. I suppose that if consumer behavior is to have their adult game purchases and conventional game purchases on separate accounts, and the Steam platform allows for that, then that may be so.

These days Steam allows hiding games from your public profile by marking them as "private", meaning that people can't see that you own the game and can't see that you are playing the game (which is presumably what you would want if you were a fan of "Sex Adventures - Incest Family - Episode 9"). I imagine this is good enough for people so that they won't bother having a separate Steam account just for porn games, as having a single account is more convenient. There's a reason why people hate having multiple game launchers on PC.

https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/1150-C06F-4D62-49...

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

#530

Post by BiteCode_dev » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 9:08 AM UTC

Tangent, but each of those events should be a reminder of why we must fight to never, ever live in a cashless society.

Because once big entities control the pipeline of what you can buy and you have no alternative, they basically can dictate what you can and can't do.

We saw that during the wikileak story when visa prevented Europeans to give to the org despite the fact it was perfectly legal to do so on their soil.

Just like data handled by an Apple device is not really your data since they can prevent you from doing what you want with it, money handled by Visa is only your money until they don't like what you do with it.