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

Post by tkj922 » Mon, Jul 21, 2025, 3:29 PM UTC

kabdib wrote: post #158

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am genuinely curious who can actually threaten Visa (I do not think it is Valve). Amazon, Walmart, Target and then increasingly unsure.

IBM was not able to. Story from a friend-who-claimed-to-be-there: In days of yore, Visa did processing on IBM iron. The iron in question took a while to boot, and time is very definitely money to Visa and they wanted to speed up reboots (e.g., after a crash). Saving seconds = $$$. Visa to IBM: "Please give us the source code for the , it's costing us money." IBM: LOL Visa to some big banks: "Please tell IBM to give u…

Post by dartharva » Mon, Jul 21, 2025, 5:48 PM UTC

bji9jhff wrote: post #59

It is sad that in 2025 this needs to be repeated: fiction is not real. This statement imply that: * Simulated violence is not violence. * Simulated sex is not sex. * Simulated sorcery is not sorcery

Post by mrkramer » Tue, Jul 22, 2025, 9:57 PM UTC

mrkramer wrote: post #769

Levitz wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how this makes any sense. A reason for the creation of Bitcoin was offering less service than traditional methods? "Financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes" is nonsense, they "can't" because it's constantly demanded by their clients, attempting to sell that as a bug rather than a feature is preposterous.

Satoshi wanted to bypass banks and make P2P direct payments with no trusted party besides Bitcoin protocol hence >no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party And crypto community speculated that Satoshi or team behind Bitcoin worked at the internet gambling industry and what use to happen is that angry customers would chargeback the money they lost at the internet casino…

Post by mafuy » Wed, Jul 23, 2025, 5:17 AM UTC

noduerme wrote: post #444

mafuy wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might be a good idea. This is so curious. The US has a weird fetish with privatizing things that the government should handle, like consumer protection. If there were a reasonably robust infrastructure for this outside of payment processors in the US, there would be far less pressure on porn providers to comply with fucked up morals about porn. What we have here is an instance of late stage capitalism, and half the p…

I'm not sure about that. Late stage capitalism would involve the government bailing out credit card companies if there were fraud. I kind of prefer for them to deal with it themselves. And whether they deal with fraud themselves or the government does, they're going to classify certain types of transactions as riskier than others. My point was that this is probably not a "moral" decision, just a business decision. It…

Post by Bratmon » Thu, Jul 24, 2025, 12:37 AM UTC

noduerme wrote: post #200

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…

My guess is it's simply a chargeback risk. It's the reason casinos and adult sites have trouble getting credit card processing and are charged much higher basic rates, even under the best of circumstances when the casino or adult site is operating entirely within the law in the jurisdictions it allows. Punters run a lot of chargebacks on casinos, and people whose spouses catch a XXX video or game on their card statem…