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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

#691

Post by aranelsurion »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #676
motorest wrote: post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Okay. I walk into a Jewish bakery and want a red cake with a Nazi flag on it. This isn't a very good comparison, as this involves a payment processing company. An apt comparison would be the payment processor company demanding that you stop doing business with a Jewish store because that goes against their Nazi values.

It’s a perfectly good comparison. Nazi wants cake. Store owner is refusing to transact based on his own personal moral code. Just like any other business. Contrary wise, consider a Jewish payment processor who wants to knock off a Nazi store. You can’t have it both ways.

Payment processor is the infrastructure, not the merchant itself. They neither make cakes nor eat them.

Bigger problem is that for most real world problems who is Nazi and who is Jewish depends on who you ask. Sucks to be Jewish in a Nazi world where even payment processors hate you.

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

#692

Post by gmd63 »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #676
motorest wrote: post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Okay. I walk into a Jewish bakery and want a red cake with a Nazi flag on it. This isn't a very good comparison, as this involves a payment processing company. An apt comparison would be the payment processor company demanding that you stop doing business with a Jewish store because that goes against their Nazi values.

It’s a perfectly good comparison. Nazi wants cake. Store owner is refusing to transact based on his own personal moral code. Just like any other business. Contrary wise, consider a Jewish payment processor who wants to knock off a Nazi store. You can’t have it both ways.

We can, via laws. In the US, there are anti discrimination laws for protected classes in some areas. You won't find that Nazis are a protected class, but if you would like them to be you can run for office and try to pass a bill and see how the free market plays that one out for you.

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

#693

Post by eloisant »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #488
p0w3n3d wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tbh that's quite alarming what you've just said, and I'm not saying about government. I'm saying about an additional huge sales tax. I understand that wiring money or sending them in an envelope is the thing of past, but e.g. in my country and in whole EU the digital payment is promoted as the only righteous, because "cash is only used by gangsters and human traffickers" etc. And this is really playing against us and…

Credit cards are much less heavily relied on in Europe than in the USA. Europe basically runs on debit cards that every kid can have and where the fees are minuscule. There are countless banks providing the service and everything is highly regulated. On top of that, Europe still curbed Visa and Mastercard several times for antitrust behaviour. And the idea that physical money primarily aids social fraud, money launde…

I'm not sure which European country you're talking about, but in France most transaction are now done by card. Yes it's mostly debit cards, but they're still handled almost exclusively by Visa and Mastercard.

Many banks have tried to start other electronic payments independent from those 2 (for example Wero) but it doesn't really get any traction.

So I don't see how the duopoly is any less powerful here.

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

#694

Post by HPsquared »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #387
mulmen wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does interest fit in here? Isn’t that what creates money AKA inflation?

No, interest is a typical zero-sum transaction where the borrower spends and the lender earns. The loan itself represents a temporary net increase in the money supply, appearing from nothing and then vanishing when it is paid back.

I'm a bit unsure what happens when a borrower defaults on their loan. The money that was borrowed remains out in circulation, but what happens to the debt (anti-money)?

Does the bank itself use its own money to pay off the debt (deleting some of their own money), or do they simply delete the debt?

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

#695

Post by Levitz »

cool_dude85 wrote: post #156
nkrisc wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet it is possible to make simulations extreme enough I would not opposed to banning them. There are some things that should not be normalized in society. It shouldn’t be payment processors doing it unilaterally, I’ll grant that. But I’m not (and I’m sure a great many more of a silent majority) wholly opposed to the outcome.

For the people who disagree: would you really be interested in seeing Child Grooming Simulator 25 on steam? I think we can almost all reasonably agree that at least this sort of content should not be sold on there.

>would you really be interested in seeing Child Grooming Simulator 25 on steam?

If we are going down this path there's a lot of literature popular with women about to be banned

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

#696

Post by littlestymaar »

docmars wrote: post #656
littlestymaar wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As usual, the actual “cancel culture” comes from the conservatives.

Collective Shout (who pushed for this) is not a conservative group, but rather a feminist activist group based in Australia. They're responsible for numerous other calls for bans against games like Detroit: Become Human, GTA, etc.

This ban has nothing to do with the call to ban incestual rape games (which is what you refer to), but comes from MasterCard, which has a long story of puritan censorship.

(It's clear in the article, btw).

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

#697

Post by aranelsurion »

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…

I wonder what are the odds of Visa being succesfully sued for processing payments to such a huge brand like Steam.

Steam has its virtual wallet and marketplace as well, so Visa is twice removed from where the money will actually go once it enters Steam ecosystem.

Even as an abundance of caution, this doesn’t make sense to me.

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

#699

Post by Keyframe »

Jimerty wrote: post #460
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…

>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!

Eh? Not really. There's a gradient between North and South and East and West, and then there's UK, but some things are more or less in-common. What GP is saying is one of those things.

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

#700

Post by martin-t »

lxgr wrote: post #323
nkrisc wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet it is possible to make simulations extreme enough I would not opposed to banning them. There are some things that should not be normalized in society. It shouldn’t be payment processors doing it unilaterally, I’ll grant that. But I’m not (and I’m sure a great many more of a silent majority) wholly opposed to the outcome.

Personally, I won't miss these games either, but it just seems like such a slippery slope to normalize achieving societal/political goals through exerting pressure on infrastructure companies instead of through democratic means. I totally support this type of pressure being exerted on companies involved in editorializing and providing an audience (e.g. I don't think Valve should be required by law to carry any form o…

> ethically or morally unacceptable

What does that mean?

For example if something can be shown to cause actual harm to innocent individuals, i find it morally unacceptable.

But some people will tell you anything banned by their favorite fairytale or their upbringing is morally unacceptable.

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