Steam, Itch.io are pulling ‘porn’ games. Critics say it's a slippery slope

Doesn't sound like you support free speech at all then if this is your red line. Criticism of politicians is needed to keep them in line. Being about to criticize the US government is true freedom.

Visa and Mastercard have too much power, and are too willing to capitulate.

I ran an online porn website for almost 20 years. For 15 years it was my primary source of income.

I'm in Canada which, compared to the USA is extremely progressive.

In 2022, after a decade of doing business with a certain bank as this business, never having hidden anything about what we did, my wife and I received an urgent, signature required, overnighted letter from our bank informing us that they were terminating our accounts and that we had one month until we would no longer have access to any funds.

The way this played out was that we had an incoming wire transfer get flagged and they phoned us to ask us questions about the wire. We answered everything on the phone honestly and transparently. We were doing nothing wrong.

A few months later we get another phone call from our branch asking us to come in in person, urgently, and do an "extreme due diligence" check. During this process we had to answer an insane amount of questions about our business activities. They saw a credit card transaction from JetBrains, for example, and asked us to explain who JetBrains was and why we were doing business with them etc.

A couple of weeks later we were informed about the termination with a brief letter explaining that we fell outside of their "risk appetite."

We managed to get an extension on the closure, and for two months we tried in vain to find any banking in Canada that would take us... and we ultimately ended up shutting down a business that represented two decades of our lives.

During that time we reached out to industry insiders, some of which we happened to know were in Canada. They all told us that they bank in the USA.

One branch manager at a bank we met with was extremely empathetic but obviously couldn't put her own job on the line, and she explained exactly what was going on.

The issue is "Know Your Customer" regulations that are coming into effect that are meant to target things like money laundering. These regulations force banks to ask questions that they never really cared about before. This branch manager explained that a local strip club used to say they were a "banquet hall", and everyone at the branch knew exactly what they were but it was "don't ask / don't tell."

But once they start digging into these details because the government is forcing them to, then these things get to their compliance departments. And the policies exist because they're afraid of things like human trafficking and other things.

And our major banks have foreign investors from all around the world. Including from countries where porn is actually illegal.

While you point the finger at puritanism in the USA ... consider that in countries like Iceland, producing porn can land you in jail. Now consider MAJOR investments originating in countries like Saudi Arabia etc. and consider how that might impact your bottom line if they all pull out due to nonsense morality conflicts.

> Do you really want to compel selling access to rape games?

> Do you really want to compel selling access to incest games?

So ban the things you believe are the problem instead of blanket banning everything.