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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

#741

Post by vladms »

eloisant wrote: post #693
sigmoid10 wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cards and transfers are different things though. What I have seen from Wero (released to the public) are Peer to Peer transfers, so if you don't need to transfer money to a person, Wero will not help you for now.

Some card fees are capped by the EU: https://www.visa.co.uk/about-visa/visa-in-europe/fees-and-in..., quoting "From 9 December 2015, European regulation on interchange fees (Regulation (EU) 2015/751 of the European Parliament and of the European Council of 29 April 2015 on interchange fees for card-based transactions, “the IFR”) imposes interchange fee caps on most product types within the European Economic Area (EEA).".

It is true though that French banks have huge fees even for debit (0.20%) compared to, for example The Netherlands (0.02 eur).

So the doupoly is not as powerful everywhere, but I have no clue why the difference.

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

#742

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

0xcafefood wrote: post #388
bfg_9k wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There are still taboos even for pixels on a screen, even for video games. It's a good thing. There should be. Perhaps you're just saying that you're mostly comfortable with the depiction of some forms of violence in some contexts. But what about other scenarios though? Would you feel the same about a game where the player runs around raping women, or capturing and lynching escaped slaves? It's just pixels!

What do you think is occurring when a player defeats one of the other cultures in Civilization by conquering their last city or conducts orbital bombardment on a enemy planet in Master of Orion until the population is zero? That's genocide as gameplay.

It _is_ just pixels.

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

#743

Post by Der_Einzige »

wavemode wrote: post #93
raincole wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a "pro-life feminist" What. Seriously what? I thought pro-choice is a core tenet of feminism?

You could have clicked the link embedded in the very text you're quoting, to read an explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-abortion_feminism

Peoples extremely poor understanding of ideology, the mapping of it, and power in general is sad and leads to radical evil time and time again.

Stuff like this is why Autism is probably the next form of human evolution.

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

#744

Post by Der_Einzige »

maplant wrote: post #16
blibble wrote: post #4

if I was doing a couple of billion a year in transactions then the payment processor would be told where to shove it

Okay, then you'd go from a billion a year to zero. Congratulations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un4p-6lzIpI

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

#745

Post by boldlybold »

gmd63 wrote: post #707
idiotsecant wrote: post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been a crypto evangelist since it was a weird nerd hobby nobody knew about for this exact reason. It should be nobody's business who I transfer value to or why. The corpo-state has had control of the levers and dials of currency for way too long. They can still enforce laws, and if I'm causing some illegal event to occur by paying money to someone, that event is still illegal. Arrest me for that. But get rid o…

I don't understand this assumption that crypto transactions are nobody's business. That's a feature of cash payments, which from what I understand can only be emulated in crypto by transferring control over a non-custodial wallet, which is cumbersome to the average person. If you're crypto banking with a third party that muddles your wallet's transactions you've already added one of the institutions you claim to be a…

We need to change this perception. Setting up a hot wallet on a phone only takes a few minutes and is perfect for holding a small amount of crypto.

Projects like monero (https://www.getmonero.org/) ensure privacy and fungibility of the crypto you hold.

It should still be easier, but let's not pretend this is technology only available to those with deep tech experience.

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

#746

Post by Krasnol »

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…

The Thielesque climate in the US will grow even more of those scams while simultaneously destroying the justice apparatus.

Cyberpunk is coming for us.

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

#747

Post by unethical_ban »

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…

The US government has deputized payment processors to impose restrictions on commerce when it suits them.

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

#748

Post by gimmeThaBeet »

welshwelsh wrote: post #669
miiiiiike wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, a "Freedom Card". Our money, they move it, no moralizing. We don't need crypto to fix this, just common sense legislation. No company or individual should be denied the right to receive funds digitally without due process. Companies should be free to transact with or exclude anyone, but there should be neutral infrastructure that facilitates the flow of money, with multiple players each with differing rules and…

You think that common sense legislation is a more realistic solution than crypto? You can never rely on governments or corporations to have reasonable policies. Any payment system that is centrally controlled will inevitably be corrupted.

That's really at this point that's back to where I am with crypto. Through all the speculation and cruft, there is still a shot at owning our own payments, or rather no one owning them.

The payment networks have power, and if you can twist the arm of the gatekeepers, people subvert that power.

The only thing I don't know about these days is with the stablecoins, how do you avoid the government sinking their claws into you if you intrinsically (esp. if successful) have to hold that much in cash or short-term instruments? Or you have something like tether, which leaving aside anything else, you can definitely say is comically opaque for an entity that is nominally running $160B.

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

#749

Post by mango7283 »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #702
mango7283 wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I pointed out earlier, it's also valid that they are savvy enough to pick their battles and divide and conquer - you can't take down a critical mainstream success like GOT or GTA, but you can go after fringe games with content most people would be uncomfortable publicly defending.

Sure, I can see that being part of it (I didn't see this implication in your earlier post)

Ah sorry I meant elsewhere in the thread

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

#750

Post by like_any_other »

jibe wrote: post #477
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…

This boycott was run by Collective Shout, an Australian non-profit. They aren't targeting all sex games on Steam, they were targeting rape, incest, and child abuse.

> They aren't targeting all sex games on Steam, they were targeting rape, incest, and child abuse.

https://www.collectiveshout.org/campaigns includes a number of campaigns against porn in general, so yes, they absolutely are targeting all sex games - simulated rape, incest, and child abuse are merely their first victory.

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