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

601–610 of 967 posts

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

#601

Post by fn-mote »

noduerme wrote: post #574
kergonath wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

1. Thank you for the first hand experience post.

2. I think the argument being made is that the credit card companies are not actually experiencing higher risk (from Steam). Not that they have any qualms about putting a business into a “high risk” classification.

In this case, I suppose the argument is that Steam is a large enough entity that they should be able to “self-insure”. If the US had a relatively open way to become a payment processor, the free market would take care of this. Unfortunately that isn’t the case and also is very unlikely to change.

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

#602

Post by Geee »

cess11 wrote: post #481
atemerev wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lmao. Socialism is pseudo-scientific bollocks, like flat earth theory.

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

#603

Post by delusional »

noduerme wrote: post #439
delusional wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 abou…

How would Visa/Master know? Steam doesn't include information about which games are purchased in the receipt (at least as far as I know). Unless they have some sort of back-channel they wouldn't know what's being charged back.

If Valve was getting a complaint from Visa/Master about charge back rates of certain games, I believe they'd be more forthcoming with that information. What we're seeing here is more consistent with Visa/Master taking offense with what the platform offers.

In either case, I find the lack of communication from Visa/Master deafening. If Visa/Master was seeing high chargeback rates from incest games on steam. Why would they not eagerly offer that data?

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

#604

Post by mango7283 »

AlexandrB wrote: post #314
Retric wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s be real, Chick-fil-A banning Visa would likely result in its bankruptcy. Starting a holy card that doesn’t work at gas stations etc is an extremely uphill battle.

Don't know about that. Costco banned Mastercard and they're doing fine.

I looked this up, they still accept visa. So not quite the same

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

#605

Post by FpUser »

Retric wrote: post #268
cogman10 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Threats of exposure and boycotting/blacklisting the card making room for competitors. Plenty of religious groups have the money to be able to start the "holy card". And there's plenty of businesses that'd be giddy to accept Jesus card. Consider, for example, companies like hobby lobby or Chick-fil-A banning visa and promoting Jesus card. It also wouldn't take much for such a card to advertise itself as kid friendly.…

Let’s be real, Chick-fil-A banning Visa would likely result in its bankruptcy. Starting a holy card that doesn’t work at gas stations etc is an extremely uphill battle.

I use my debit card at gas stations

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

#606

Post by mango7283 »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #526
thaumasiotes wrote: post #285

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? 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.

I think the matter here is the activists are being strategic now and chipping away by targeting very specific content to get delisted. As you rightly said, most people are not going to sign their name to defend a incest/non-con fringe game specifically, so the counter petition is necessarily going to be on a broad ideal and therefore diffuse

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

#607

Post by aaaja »

louthy wrote: post #507
Jimerty wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Here in Europe No, Europe is not a monolithic bloc, stop treating it as such, stop saying here in Europe or European here. You'd get annoyed if a yank generalised all of europe with a not take so don't do it yourself. State what country/countries you're talking about because social attitudes and norms vary massively across this continent!

Of course, it doesn't help anyone to generalise. Europe has a wide demographic. But, one thing that doesn't happen is its attitude to sex affecting worldwide commerce or other worldwide issues. Here in the UK religion and sex are not part of the national conversation. A politician mentioning their love of god would seem weird to us. The only way it enters the national conversation are when right-wing religious zealot…

> trans rights. These are entirely imported issues from US religious hangups.

No, in the UK it was left-wing feminists who led the opposition to gender identity policies long before any conservatives got involved, on the basis of this being harmful to women's rights.

Just look at the recent For Women Scotland win in the Supreme Court, it's nothing to do with US religious groups at all, and everything to do with protecting sex-based rights and sexual orientation in law.

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

#608

Post by braiamp »

hungmung wrote: post #194
miiiiiike wrote: post #191

Look. Ignore the content. Why the fuck do we allow credit card companies have a say in how we spend our money? Fraud? Abuse? Fine, let me put cash onto a card and if that card gets stolen, oh well, my loss. Mastercard should have no say in what what speech is considered acceptable outside of their offices. We don't care what execs at a water company think? Why do we care about the people at Mastercard?

It's because Visa got sued, lost, and it was found out they knowingly processed payments for illegal adult content, so they basically avoid the sector entirely now. Economist had an article about it maybe two years ago and came to much the same conclusion you did. IIRC, the failure in their mind was government not stepping in to make a law so things are less ambiguous in the future. Now payment processing cos get to…

> It's because Visa got sued, lost, and it was found out they knowingly processed payments for illegal adult content

Got any source for that? What they got sued for? Aiding human trafficking?

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

#609

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

maxbond wrote: post #161

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…

> Some of these games seem completely abhorrent

Why would you consider those abhorrent while games where you can slaughter people, or commit all kinds of crimes like any random GTA, are widely considered normal?

I'll never understand American morals. What's clear is that we need non-US payment processors so that the values of a given culture aren't imposed worldwide.

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

#610

Post by louthy »

aaaja wrote: post #607
louthy wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, it doesn't help anyone to generalise. Europe has a wide demographic. But, one thing that doesn't happen is its attitude to sex affecting worldwide commerce or other worldwide issues. Here in the UK religion and sex are not part of the national conversation. A politician mentioning their love of god would seem weird to us. The only way it enters the national conversation are when right-wing religious zealot…

> trans rights. These are entirely imported issues from US religious hangups. No, in the UK it was left-wing feminists who led the opposition to gender identity policies long before any conservatives got involved, on the basis of this being harmful to women's rights. Just look at the recent For Women Scotland win in the Supreme Court, it's nothing to do with US religious groups at all, and everything to do with prote…

That was waaaay after it had become an 'issue' in the US and exported. I also doubt they would describe themselves as "left-wing feminists". That language is incorrect at best and inflammatory at worst.

In 2014, Time magazine declared trans rights as "America's next civil rights frontier" [1]. For Women Scotland was formed in 2018 [2].

(Just looked at your comment history. Just, wow... is the trans issue the only one you care about?)

[1] https://time.com/135480/transgender-tipping-point/

[2] https://forwomen.scot/about/

Post reply on HN