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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

#851

Post by irusensei »

LorenPechtel wrote: post #826
wood_spirit wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a generalisation it seems sensible that it should be illegal to knowingly handle illegal things and the proceeds of illegal things. It’s hard to say that it’s ok to profit from someone else’s crime. If I sell you a bike cheap, no questions asked, then you ought be as culpable as me as you don’t have reasonable doubt that it’s stolen. Etc. This can be weaponised. The lobbies go after visa and Mastercard etc by givi…

Yeah, but there should be a concept of what level of scrutiny is warranted. Pornhub had a legitimate problem in that in permitting user content they made it extremely hard to keep their system from being used for improper purposes (underage, revenge.) But neither would I expect any system to be 100%. Should you have known? If so, you're wrong. Things look reasonable? No fault.

Pornhub issue involved real exploitation of real people. Gaming characters are not real. I would think this is as reasonable as it can be.

The content might be illegal in some countries and thats fair if we can assume the people who pushed for these rules were voted for. No one voted for Visa and Mastercard.

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

#852

Post by spauldo »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #394
tptacek wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever returned a pack of cigarettes? They basically do what you expect them to do.

I figured the reason was not wanting to support something harmful to the customer like a fake diet pill. Call me naive for letting that assumption of even a glimmer of empathy affect my guestimation. I should have known it was pure greed all the way down and due to something like this instead.

I would take pure greed over a company imposing its morals on me.

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

#853

Post by wat10000 »

krick wrote: post #844
wat10000 wrote: post #824

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it should be made illegal, it should be made impractical. One way would be to ensure proper competition in the payments space. If there were dozens of options then some of them would decide that it’s a competitive advantage to ignore the busybodies and cater to people who want to buy this stuff. We see this at work with hosting. There’s a multitude of options and it doesn’t seem like adult sites have mu…

It would be great if it was impractical, but I still think it has to be made illegal. I think it is not only "bad" because it's bad for Valve of whoever wants to sell or buy these games, this is "bad" on its own, because it is simply another elaborate form of blackmail. It is as close as it gets to violence without actually beating one up: you are forced to do something not because you are required by law or by natur…

Hosting is a very different landscape. Cloudflare and AWS and such are enormous and can exert a lot of control. But you can still ignore them and just do your own thing and it works fine. There are plenty of smaller cloud providers you can use instead. You can still colocate your own hardware in a data center. If nobody in your country wants your money, you can host your service in some other country that doesn't care so much about whatever morality is at issue.

This demonstrably works. There are plenty of porn sites out there, plenty of pirate sites, plenty of places selling illegal stuff, even Wikileaks is still up.

To your last paragraph, I think we can draw the line at "allow any transaction that you reasonably believe is actually authorized by the people who own the accounts." I don't care about being fair to payment networks. If we're going the regulatory route then we've decided that this stuff is critical infrastructure and the needs of the many etc. If individual people at the company don't like handling transaction for porn or whatever, they're free to find a new job. Different risks do make it trickier, but I think we can add some language to allow holding on to money for a certain period before paying it out, or requiring deposits, with some limits on what criteria they can use to make those determinations and how long/large the period/deposit can be.

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

#854

Post by pjc50 »

krick wrote: post #821
ijk wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wonder how this type of pressuring can be made illegal. To be clear: I certainly think this has to be made illegal, and even attempt to coerce a payment network to force a business to do something should be a serious crime. If the product is not illegal, you can sell it, either on your platform, or on a third party platform (Steam), if the platfrom is ok with selling your product. It's arguable, but perfectly reaso…

The pressure all counts under free speech. I don't think making it illegal to criticize a company for its customers is a good idea.

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

#855

Post by miiiiiike »

healsjnr1 wrote: post #587
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…

The problem that seems to be being missed here is that while fraud is one reason Visa has say over what they accept, the much much much bigger issue is ATF, Money laundering and Sanctions. Cards like the Freedom card will never fly with either the Networks or the Issuing Banks as these kinds of payment instruments are immediately used to wash illicit funds. Visa's stance with Steam is bollocks, and it is another exam…

You can still look for suspicious activity without having any leverage over what legitimate merchants offer.

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

#856

Post by draw_down »

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?

[dead]

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

#857

Post by hansvm »

generic92034 wrote: post #739
natbobc wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A vocal minority are freedom loving. A significant number are hooked on consumer debt. I feel like any sweeping generalization is going to be wrong… especially when referencing the USA which is basically 50 countries and has a population exceeding all of Western Europe.

> especially when referencing the USA which is basically 50 countries and has a population exceeding all of Western Europe. So, you compare the whole USA to only a part of Europe? Why is that?

And they counted an even lower percentage of Eurasia. It might matter for a given conversation. It might not. What's your point (i.e., what are you actually trying to ask)?

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

#858

Post by marcosdumay »

krick wrote: post #844
wat10000 wrote: post #824

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it should be made illegal, it should be made impractical. One way would be to ensure proper competition in the payments space. If there were dozens of options then some of them would decide that it’s a competitive advantage to ignore the busybodies and cater to people who want to buy this stuff. We see this at work with hosting. There’s a multitude of options and it doesn’t seem like adult sites have mu…

It would be great if it was impractical, but I still think it has to be made illegal. I think it is not only "bad" because it's bad for Valve of whoever wants to sell or buy these games, this is "bad" on its own, because it is simply another elaborate form of blackmail. It is as close as it gets to violence without actually beating one up: you are forced to do something not because you are required by law or by natur…

Unfairness would be something to care about if it was a rich market with several small companies competing in it. It's not something to care about corporate monopolies.

No, they should not have the right to choose how they want to operate. All those risks you mention only exist because they choose to keep them around as an excuse to why they are necessary. They refuse to modernize their systems so it works, and they should not be allowed to keep that option.

(Honestly, IMO they should just be terminated and replaced by some public service. But if you want to keep them, they shouldn't have that kind of freedom.)

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

#859

Post by wtfwhateven »

barbazoo wrote: post #845
wtfwhateven wrote: post #809

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would hope using animals in OF content is illegal and banned anyway I was talking about human lactation. OF was forced to ban it because these same groups perceived it as "obscene" which is truly nonsensical

So as a farmer I wouldn’t be allowed to be on OF showing how to milk a cow?

Haha, dunno, someone will have to find out

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

#860

Post by OhioMan2943 »

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…

How can you not see the pattern yet? They've been putting the industry into deliberate managed decline for the last 2 years. Simply because it made people happy and that is a threat to the valueless deeducated world that they are trying to impose.
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