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

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

#401

Post by Mikhail_Edoshin »

bfg_9k wrote: post #368
oatmeal1 wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gender of who is murdered has a lot to do with it too. I don't think you'll find a video game where you predominantly kill women. The most infamous scene of murder in video games is the Call of Duty mission "No Russian" where you optionally commit terrorism at an airport. If you pay attention you'll notice they kill much more men than women, and made sure that despite pleasant weather none of the women were wearing d…

This genuinely baffles me. Who cares! It's a video game. It's pixels on a screen. True crime podcasts and movies are a-okay but when its a video game that's where the line is drawn?

But your heart is not pixels.

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

#402

Post by chii »

stale2002 wrote: post #359
tptacek wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could just ask, "why do payment processors pressure content vendors not to offer this kind of content". You're starting from the premise that there's some weird puritan thing happening, but there's really nothing puritan about American business culture. There are other explanations! You can get a long ways just by assuming that the people involved in these transactions are utterly amoral .

> You're starting from the premise that there's some weird puritan thing happening Credit card processors don't have to be puritanical. Instead, puritanical people simply have to be smart enough to figure out that the best way to deplatform content that they disagree with is by putting pressure on their payment processor monopolistic vendors. Giving in to a pressure campaign by ideological people can be a completely…

> puritanical people ... deplatform content that they disagree

so that begs the question - what if the non-puritanical people also pressure the credit payment processors to stop curtailing to those puritanicals? Why is it effective one way, but not the other?

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

#403

Post by encom »

8note wrote: post #233
encom wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The limits to speech (in USA) depends (roughly) on if it's intended to incite imminent lawless action and is likely to do so. Actual speech is communicating ideas or opinions, even distasteful or unpopular ones. The fact that university morons throw a riot if anyone disagrees with them (many such cases), does not affect your right to do so. Denmark passed a law in 2023 that makes public burning, tearing, stepping on,…

thats a historical view, but not the most useful now that the second american revolution has happened. things that lightly annoyed the president is now the decider between legal and illegal speech in the US, and the punishment is death, because nothing the president does that could be part of their regular responsibilities like talking to secret service assasins, can be considered in court proceedings.

Are the assassins in the room with us right now?

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

#404

Post by swiftcoder »

freedomben wrote: post #63
swiftcoder wrote: post #39

I guess Gabe's commitment to freedom of speech on his platform extended as far as nazis, but not as far as porn...

well, something like this can't be fixed overnight. I think Valve have more than earned a benefit of the doubt with this kind of stuff. I don't know if they are thinking on ways around this issue or not, but I would bet highly that they are. Problem is the credit card companies have them (and everyone else) by the balls because any attempt to continue hosting those gmaes but accept alternative payments for them would…

In the early 2000's kink.com put together a coalition and told the credit card companies to stick their censorship rules where the sun don't shine, and they are still taking credit card payments... The video game industry is plenty big enough to wield similar influence.

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

#405

Post by cornholio »

ijk wrote: post #183
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…

One factor is the ongoing campaigns from number of moral crusading groups who lobby them to cut off payment processing for things they don't approve of. NCOSE has been working for decades on the project, and targeting credit card companies has been a successful tactic for them for a decade or so. [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/visa-and-mastercard-ar... [2] https://www.newsweek.com/why-visa-mastercard-being…

It's easy to dismiss all such campaigns as religious prudes and moral crusaders, especially on a site with the demographics and political leanings of YC News.

But often time such campaigns are waged by former victims of trafficking. It's well documented that trafficking, prostitution and pornography are closely interlinked - this modern notion of a fully liberated "sexual worker" controlling their careers, choices and finance is substantially a fiction of the pornographic industry. So there is real merit în the anti porn stance.

Of course, once the camping is set in motion, it takes a life of its own, that has nothing to do with the concerns of the victims and more with prudishness; the religious circus will join hands and demand the removal of synthetic pornography etc.

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

#406

Post by whycome »

bfg_9k wrote: post #368
oatmeal1 wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gender of who is murdered has a lot to do with it too. I don't think you'll find a video game where you predominantly kill women. The most infamous scene of murder in video games is the Call of Duty mission "No Russian" where you optionally commit terrorism at an airport. If you pay attention you'll notice they kill much more men than women, and made sure that despite pleasant weather none of the women were wearing d…

This genuinely baffles me. Who cares! It's a video game. It's pixels on a screen. True crime podcasts and movies are a-okay but when its a video game that's where the line is drawn?

You’re risking potential revenue.

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

#407

Post by arrowsmith »

simpaticoder wrote: post #305
deadbabe wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a bit of a strawman. The market for people who get addicted to gruesome gore and are willing to pay money to see it is several orders of magnitude smaller than people willing to pay to see porn or OnlyFans. There is simply far more risk with adult content as a result and a lot more chargebacks from disatisfied customers with a post nut clarity.

The GP highlights a classic observation: America's nearly unique cultural contradiction, where nudity and sex are considered highly offensive, while gore and violence are widely accepted.

This really isn't unique to America.

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

#408

Post by numpad0 »

Jach wrote: post #350
winchester6788 wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This holds true in most other countries as well. Gore/ chopping of appendages is happily accepted and enjoyed (in movies, games etc) by all of India, whilst a simple kiss can be a taboo/ issue.

Japan has some of the weirdest/inconsistent rules around this stuff. Black lines or mozaic partial censorship of genitals, incest/stuff with minors widely available, and then you have some pretty violent uncensored movies, manga/anime, and games (though while it's mostly a China thing, sometimes the blood gets censored to be white instead of red which doesn't actually make it better (also sometimes done for urine)),…

Japan runs custom scratch-built implementation of ethics reverse engineered from Western cultures. That's all. Consistence is key, but it's consistent only with itself, and nothing else, and explicitly not aligned to Christian religious scripts. Nothing Japanese is compatible with anything unless and until it is the sole dominant standard, like Sony storage media or Apple hardware. Always has been.

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

#409

Post by AStonesThrow »

mulmen wrote: post #172
xyst wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam gift cards are funded by traditional banking products and partnerships. They can’t live without the invisible hand of the banking and credit card industry.

I like this (ab)use of the invisible hand meme. But in economics the “invisible hand” is more of a benevolent deity than a predictable mechanism. I propose “hidden hand” for what credit (card and rating) companies do.

[dead]

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

#410

Post by AngryData »

fragmede wrote: post #294
ls612 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the ways the government can censor people despite the first amendment. It’s absolutely by design. The regulators “express concern” about certain financial activity and then the companies remove it.

this is such small potatoes compared to the results of everything going on right now though

I don't think so, it is death by a thousand cuts which is why we are in such a shitty place right now. Out rights have been attacked on all side for decades, little by little, but all together it is a huge loss.
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