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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

#561

Post by rendall »

PicassoCTs wrote: post #503
herbst wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just one of the ways the US forces it's weird morals onto the world.

Sexual self-denial always was the driving force behind the western cultural success. You can not have hyper-specialization and rule of law, without some members of society sacrificing a "normal" life. From the monk in the monastry to Turing hyper-focused on an enigma there is clear line. Its a ugly recipe, but its working, unlike all those other societies out there, who are currently eating themselves. A judge doesn'…

It's fun when posters inadvertently reveal far more about themselves than whatever they are discussing, such as "Western cultural success" as here.

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

#562

Post by mrkramer »

noduerme wrote: post #441
root_axis wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a wise business model. Enforcement can return at any time if the political winds shift.

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.

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

#563

Post by Integer »

ranger_danger wrote: post #3

What can be done to loosen card companies' grip on this? It has been a constant problem now for decades.

In Europe, Wero[1] has a chance to become the de-facto payment system, once it's supported by more banks in more countries and adds online payments functionality.

[1]https://wero-wallet.eu/

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

#564

Post by devilbunny »

atq2119 wrote: post #550
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And the idea that physical money primarily aids social fraud, money washing and other illegal activities is pretty well established. They even killed the 500€ bank note, because it was almost exclusively used by criminals and most normal people never even touched one, much less used one for legit transactions. At least in Germany in particular older people prefer to pay cash if possible - this gives the banks also…

> I am honestly surprised all the time that a lot of US-Americans who are so freedom-loving and distrust the government concerning the restrictions of civil rights are not in love of cash I suspect it's a combination of factors, one of them being that US cash has absolutely awful usability compared to the Euro.

> absolutely awful usability compared to the Euro

In what way? One unpleasant discovery I made in Portugal (and also saw to some extent in Spain) was that ATM’s - every one I could find, including those that were bank-owned at physical branches - had a limit of EUR200 per transaction regardless of my own bank limit (at USD1000/day, that should have been at least EUR800).

And while convenience stores, fast food, etc., won’t take a bill over $20 (which is understandable but really a trifling sum when you consider inflation - it’s a fast-food breakfast for three people), many other businesses are happy to do so. Nothing above $100 is in circulation anymore, and inflation means that $100 in 1980 is worth over $400 in today’s money even by government figures. A $20 bill 45 years ago was worth almost $100 in today’s money. And, of course, cash declaration rules have not updated the amounts to reflect this.

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

#565

Post by Jolter »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #391
raincole wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do that currently. Steam already supports the exact process you described: top up your steam wallet and buy games with steam wallet balance. Actually, there are things you can only buy this way (some in-game items, not sure if it's to workaround gambling accusation or just coded so for no reason). The issue is Visa/Mastercard/whoever is pressuring Valve isn't happy about the very existence of incest games. Th…

So are they banning erotic fiction books too or what? I guess the tradwifes actually secretly read that stuff though…

If there was a prominent online marketplace for homegrown literature, I would bet there would be corporate pushback against selling incest themed porn on it. But I don’t think there is such a marketplace so it’s a very hypothetical question.

If a book publisher was selling erotic fiction about children online, you could bet your ass they would have a hard time with payment processors.

I’m not sure you have a case with this argument.

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

#566

Post by mrkramer »

richrichardsson wrote: post #539
9dev wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since many people in Germany neither trust the banks nor the government anymore, acting this way is very rational. Speak for yourself, this is either heavily overstated or a fringe opinion, luckily. Most people definitely do trust both government and banks to a sensible degree, even if they don’t like some decisions. Some people like you apparently also don’t appreciate the immense freedom of SEPA transactions. Sur…

Croatian banks didn't get the memo about SEPA; I get charged to receive a SEPA transfer!

I'm from Croatia but I don't send money abroad, I only use credit cards and banks locally. As far as I can see from our local banks' websites, they implement SEPA standards. There must be some sort of misunderstanding or error.

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

#567

Post by staunton »

vintermann wrote: post #538
terminalshort wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The leverage is that the activists will potentially be able to draw the ire of the government. Visa and MC get away with absolute murder in terms of the size of the fees that they charge in the US. Most developed countries don't allow that. The US government could easily regulate them (as they already do with debit card fees) or use anti-trust law against the obvious duopoly charging exorbitant prices. Because of thi…

Yes - and Japanese gay porn games are an easy soft target before they go on to ban things they really want to ban. We've been through this before in the 70s-90s.

> We've been through this before in the 70s-90s.

What do you mean?

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

#568

Post by saghm »

louthy wrote: post #467
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…

> People keep saying "Puritans" like it answers all questions, but Puritans were hundreds of years ago. We had our own share of people with peculiar attitudes back then. We literally had Puritans in Europe [1] ” The Puritans were English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who sought to rid the Church of England of what they considered to be Roman Catholic practices, maintaining that the Church of England had…

Yeah, and then most of them left and came here, which the article cites as having caused a "radical" divergence:

> Almost all Puritan clergy left the Church of England after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the Act of Uniformity 1662. Many continued to practise their faith in nonconformist denominations, especially in Congregationalist and Presbyterian churches.[2] The nature of the Puritan movement in England changed radically. In New England, it retained its character for a longer period.

It's not crazy to think that this could have had an outsized influence on the US given how influential New England was in the early days. Even 120-130 years after the point that the quoted section mentions, when the colonies were transitioning into what's now the United States, close to a third of them were part of New England.

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

#569

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#570

Post by Neil44 »

ACCount36 wrote: post #559
Neil44 wrote: post #554

The discussion seems to be mostly about the moral issues, but it seems likely that the titles being a 'magnet for scams and chargebacks' is more likely the cause.

No. That's an often-repeated bullshit excuse. Payment processors have ways of passing some of the chargeback risks onto the stores, and it's not like Steam itself is chargeback central. If you just want free games, pirating them is extremely easy, and trying to abuse chargebacks gets you banned.

It's not as straightforward as that. It's more like scammers getting other people to buy gift cards which are redeemed in steam and other games then the value getting moved around as in-game currency between game accounts (game-bucks, special items) before being cashed out again to make tracing very hard. Essentially laundering. I assume certain titles attract scammers because people will not want to pursue the claims due to embarrassment. Why would Mastercard give a hoot that a game has boobs in it? They care about loosing money.
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