111–120 of 178 posts
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Maybe N26 / Revolut would work in your case?
Those banks also use Visa / Mastercard for payments.
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There are better arguments to make than this one. Every law, order, rule, and regulation is captured by this argument. It needs to provide a scissor to be meaningful.
Point being that even though this time the takedown targets were reasonable, the next time they might not be, but the mechanism will be already in place.
In addition:
> (and that should've not been on Steam to begin with)
Where do you believe that they should have been sold? Are you proposing a separate "Steam: After Dark" store that only adult humans are permitted to browse and purchase from?
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For desktop gaming, GOG should be prioritized above Steam.
GOG is in bed with Amazon. I have over 130 games via GOG, only a handful I paid for -- right now I can only think of the Yakuza 0-6 collection that was priced so low I had to do it even though I played them all on a friend's xbox before. The rest are from Amazon's gifting of them to me via having a Prime account and Twitch account. Many are games I already bought and played on Steam, they're good games they're not ju…
In any case, often with these free deals the developer is compensated according to how many installs the game gets. Number of installs during sales is also a metric that helps gain funding for future titles.
So if Epic/GOG give away a game you already have and like, taking the time to add it to your collection, installing and running it briefly may help the developer out.
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I bought a game on Epic over Steam for the better price once and I'll never do it again. Steam is just too good of a platform and Epic has a lot to work out. Valve has also earned my trust way more than Epic has. Epic comes off as a company of the people sometimes when they drop a suit against Apple or something, but they're exactly the same when it suits them (like their dark patterns for in-game purchases). There h…
Epic is scummy as hell. They try to play folk hero when it suits them, but someone who actually cared about individual well-being wouldn't lock Linux players out of their flagship games, or use dark patterns like artificial scarcity to get people to spend more time/money in their ecosystem.
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For desktop gaming, GOG should be prioritized above Steam.
GOG is in bed with Amazon. I have over 130 games via GOG, only a handful I paid for -- right now I can only think of the Yakuza 0-6 collection that was priced so low I had to do it even though I played them all on a friend's xbox before. The rest are from Amazon's gifting of them to me via having a Prime account and Twitch account. Many are games I already bought and played on Steam, they're good games they're not ju…
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There are 3 issues being commingled within this. First, the networks have brand protection stipulations for any partner that uses the network. None of them want to be known as the porn brand. Second, porn (and other similar categories) have a different risk profile than other charges. Specifically chargeback risk goes through the roof. None of the members of the network want to deal with sales of things that spike ch…
This is not true. Here's a page from Collective Shout, the group mentioned in the article: https://www.collectiveshout.org/steam_campaign_history
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As someone who’s using steam daily for probably 50-75% of their lifetime now: I don’t love them, but it’s the lesser evil for sure. Sure, if GOG had even 20% of steams catalog and useability, it be no. 1 without question. But since we‘re sadly limited to this one reality, there is no alternative. XBOX GamePass is a trap I expect to spring every day, Uplay and EA Origin are just a splash screen I see when starting a g…
I’ll never get over the hypocrisy of people loving steam and its exclusives while hating EGS and its exclusives. I’ve never seen an almost purely tech-focused crowd pull so hard for a monopoly before.
To the second line, systems with a network effect tend to clump people together.
It's a stupid situation that banks and payment processors force their ethics upon while other companies take the blame (valve in this case). They should just dommoney transfers and as long as the transfer itself is legal should not have any opinion on the parties or product involved in the transaction.
There are 3 issues being commingled within this. First, the networks have brand protection stipulations for any partner that uses the network. None of them want to be known as the porn brand. Second, porn (and other similar categories) have a different risk profile than other charges. Specifically chargeback risk goes through the roof. None of the members of the network want to deal with sales of things that spike ch…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are 3 issues being commingled within this. First, the networks have brand protection stipulations for any partner that uses the network. None of them want to be known as the porn brand. Second, porn (and other similar categories) have a different risk profile than other charges. Specifically chargeback risk goes through the roof. None of the members of the network want to deal with sales of things that spike ch…
> none of this is an ethics issue A puritanical activist group circumvents the law/courts and successfully pressures the handful of companies that control the vast majority of transactions to remove content they find distasteful - content that is 100% legal - but this isn’t an ethics discussion?
That phrasing makes it sound somehow illegal, but all the activists did was exercise their right to engage in political speech. I don't particularly agree with their cause, but there's nothing untoward about their methods.
The real problem for society isn't the fact that political groups can raise a ruckus about things we personally don't agree with, but rather the fact that payment processors are such a narrow choke point, ideal for putting up gates and thereby giving a small group of people way too much control. The solution is to address the choke point, not to play wack-a-mole trying to slap down activist groups whenever they vie for control of the choke point (which will inevitably continue to happen as long as the choke point exists.)
If valve can escape the Microsoft store, it can handle a few payment processors. what would happen if Valve accepted Cryptocurrency? in turn, what might happen if valve decided to become a cryptocurrency exchange exclusive to the gaming community? EDIT: another solution is to use a load-wallet based system to shroud transactions from your financial nanny. money in, money out, no explicit evidence of a purchase.
people already are trying to use all kind of vectors to launder money, including steam
and cryptocurrency systems in general don't do the legal due diligence of a payment processor/bank
so you now have the problem of being partially responsibility to do that legal due diligence yourself and make your service more attractive to be abused as in money laundering schemes
but if things get worse they could consider creating a payment processor sub company, the issue with that is I think there are a lot of way Visa can mess with them in the US and it seems not necessary in the EU (as due to side effects of pushing/forcing banking payment system improvements you technically have a wide choice of alternatives to PayPal or Credit Card payment for only payment, it's just many solutions are niche so most sides don't bother for now (but things are changing))