Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

pcgamer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

571–580 of 967 posts

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

#571

Post by nkrisc »

Hizonner wrote: post #89
nkrisc wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet it is possible to make simulations extreme enough I would not opposed to banning them. There are some things that should not be normalized in society. It shouldn’t be payment processors doing it unilaterally, I’ll grant that. But I’m not (and I’m sure a great many more of a silent majority) wholly opposed to the outcome.

> There are some things that should not be normalized in society. That attitude has recently become normalized, and I find it Concerning(TM).

Recently? Such a sentiment has existed since the dawn of human society.

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

#572

Post by nkrisc »

miningape wrote: post #92
Hizonner wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are some things that should not be normalized in society. That attitude has recently become normalized, and I find it Concerning(TM).

Yeah, who gets to decide whats too far? There's a similar issue with free speech - the moment you ban certain speech the door to banning your political opposition opens.

That’s the tricky bit.

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

#573

Post by johnisgood »

9dev wrote: post #528
johnisgood wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OK, but look at the original statement, that cash is mainly used for illegal activities. I do not think that is true.

Now, check this out:

> Cash was the most frequently used payment method at the POS in the euro area and was used in 52% (59%) of transactions, but the share of cash payments has declined.

> Cash was the most frequently used payment method for small-value payments at the POS, in line with previous surveys. For payments over €50, cards were the most frequently used payment method.

> Cash was the dominant means of payment in P2P transactions, accounting for 41% of such payments. Cards and mobile apps were used for 33%, credit transfers for 9% and instant payments for 6% of P2P transactions.

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/ecb_surveys/space/html/ecb.s...

This is to be expected though:

> The most frequently used instrument for online payments was cards, representing 48% (51%) of transactions. The share of e-payment solutions, i.e. payment wallets and mobile apps, was 29% (26%).

> The large majority of recurring payments were made using direct debit, with credit transfers ranking in second place.

Regarding privacy:

> A majority of euro area consumers (58%) said they were concerned about their privacy when performing digital payments or other banking activities.

I think they genuinely care about privacy and are not thugs.

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

#574

Post by noduerme »

kergonath wrote: post #533
thallium205 wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the correct answer. There are many merchant categories, adult being just one of them, that are susceptible to high chargeback rates which result in payment processors banning them.

This is nonsense. If you want us to believe this you need to show that Steam with erotic games is more of a risk than Steam without them. Comparing Steam with things like “adult merchants” like Onlyfans or a porn streaming service does not sound very appropriate.

It's not nonsense. I've hosted, moderated and managed sites that were only obliquely related to porn or gambling, and you wouldn't believe the level of rejection for running ads or getting payment processing that they are faced with. And I ran a casino for 4 years. I coded it and I ran it 24/7, and believe me, I did everything by the book. The CC companies do not give a shit as long as they make money. Chargebacks cost them a lot in time more than in actual cash, and they have categories of risk for every merchant who may expose them to that risk. The highest categories of risk are porn and gambling.

Any entity that uses a CC gateway and has any exposure to either of those risks is exposing itself to all the risk. The CC companies almost certainly told Valve that they would be considered a porn site and face a 1.5%-2% higher processing fee for every transaction.

No nonsense involved, that's how it works.

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

#575

Post by Tainnor »

williamdclt wrote: post #515
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…

> the idea that physical money primarily aids social fraud, money washing and other illegal activities is pretty well established I think that's very hyperbolic. In france most people I know carry cash and use it regularly (not as much as cards), the gen X and older tend to find it strange to pay for small sums (eg bread) with card. Germany is infamously almost cash-only. In many Central Europe countries, shops takin…

> Germany is infamously almost cash-only.

Let's not exaggerate. While I am often enough exasperated at how often certain restaurants or bars will still only accept cash (or sometimes EC card), I'm still able to do about 90% of my transactions by card.

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

#576

Post by noduerme »

mrkramer wrote: post #558
noduerme wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't scoff at the leftovers. You're talking about maybe a trillion dollar industry that struggles to find payment solutions. This is why I gave up on credit card processing for my startup casino in 2010 and just went to taking Bitcoin and other crypto. I originally planned to just take Visa. I wasn't looking to skirt the law. Card companies are looking out for themselves, and they don't really even need regulat…

>This is why I gave up on credit card processing for my startup casino in 2010 and just went to taking Bitcoin and other crypto. And how many customers you lost in 2010 because of that? Probably more than 90%. Even now people are reluctant to use crypto but tbh crypto crowd is so big that you can perhaps succeed in opening crypto only business.

Yes, about 90%. I would have had maybe the 6th or 7th biggest online casino in the world - let's say that my software was about 5th (somewhere between Galewind and Microgaming) - but I ended up being one which catered only to early adopters of cryptocurrency, who were not necessarily gamblers on roulette or blackjack but had nothing better to do with their coins. It was an interesting experience, and it didn't leave me as wealthy as I could have been if the barriers to entering the larger market hadn't already been negotiated between CC companies and governments. That said, at least I'm not in prison like a lot of people who followed and tried to do what I did.

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

#577

Post by Jolter »

monkeyelite wrote: post #321
eddythompson80 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specifically incest, rape, and child abuse-themed games.

Games/hentai about these topics are not illegal, even if they are in bad taste. And I’m willing to bet some content removed does not fall in these categories

That’s exactly the point: getting Valve to remove illegal content would not have caused any headlines. These themes go against common moral standards and so Visa et al don’t want to be seen selling them.

You can find the list of removed titles if you go looking for it. Feel free to point out which ones you think are collateral damage. I’m not looking at that list with my eyeballs though. I need them for later.

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

#578

Post by noduerme »

mrkramer wrote: post #562
noduerme wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and it's been tried before. LibertyCoin, I think. Write a Steam knockoff platform that's trustworthy enough for people to download, and load it up with dirty games. Put the premium on the customers if they want to use credit card transactions, otherwise push them towards crypto payments. Maybe you won't be an oligarch, but you'll probably end up with a reasonably sized yacht. [edit] hell, in a few years if the w…

>Write a Steam knockoff platform that's trustworthy enough for people to download, and load it up with dirty games. Put the premium on the customers if they want to use credit card transactions, otherwise push them towards crypto payments. Easier said than done. It is hard to earn trust....you would probably need to jumpstart the platform with quite a few indie devs so people start trusting the site and using it.

I remember having to redo all the art for a game because Apple's store rejected it. Six months. It would have been more fun with the original art. I'm sure there's many an indie dev in the same position who'd love a gray market for putting up games like that.

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

#580

Post by Msurrow »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #446
flimflamm wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you looked in to "PSD2 and Open Banking regulation in Europe" ?

I haven't, I will definitely explore it. Quick read on it seems very promising. Have you or anyone here any API in EU for getting payments directly to your bank account? I have started a discussion on this on OPH[1], I welcome any information on direct banking API in Europe in that discussion. [1] https://github.com/abishekmuthian/open-payment-host/discussi...

Lunar Bank.

I don’t have any experience integrating to their API myself but Lunar is a relatively new Danish (so EU) 100% digital bank. See https://www.lunar.app/en/personal/what-is-lunar

They have an Open API: https://developer.openbanking.prod.lunar.app/home

Edit: “new” in finance terms - started 2015.

Post reply on HN