Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games | Hacker News Reader

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

pcgamer.com

948 pointsfreedomben900 comments

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 to sanctions.

Some of these games seem completely abhorrent, and probably illegal in more restrictive jurisdictions, but not the United States. And I've not seen any suggestion they're funding terrorism or something. So I'm perplexed.

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-blamed-on...

[3] https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstreams/761eb6c3-9377-...

Targeting them with what?

What could possibly hold enough leverage that Visa would jeopardize their sweet gig as an ideology-neutral, essential piece of American infrastructure siphoning 1-2% off of every dollar of consumer spending?

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 reasonable to say that Steam can also choose to not sell it if it doesn't want to. But then, of course, it doesn't seem like a huge leap to say that a payment network can choose to not handle transactions for some type of business if it doesn't want to. Sure, you can appeal to it being a de-facto monopoly, but isn't Steam a de-facto monopoly as well? I mean, I have some trouble formally drawing a line here, yet it clearly seems not right to me, that a payment network can choose at all if they want to handle this or not.

And, as I said, attempt to apply pressure on a payment network, in order to apply pressure on its customer, in order to apply pressure on their customers... well, I think it's pretty obvious why this is a problem, and that things are not supposed to work this way.

One thing to notice is the group that claims responsibility for this is some kind of funky radfem puritan mixture from Australia. They campaigned against titles like GTA V, Detroit Become Human AND abortion pills.

Since they ran a campaign to ban GTA V from stores I can say for sure they are not stopping on fringe content like eroge porn shovelware.

Another factor is the board members and other investors of the institutions themselves.

I have been privy to two specific instances where pressure to either ban or reject providing support for specific content was handed down from beyond the executive level at a major financial network player that my client was doing business with.

They tried to do the same to OnlyFans, but lost that battle

For Steam, it looks like Collective Shout, NCOSE, and Exodus Cry are behind this particular push. [1]

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/group-behind-steam-censorshi...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/01/visa-mind...

Visa being responsible for CSAM isn't a theoretical lawsuit they're afraid about. (2022)

To be clear, these campaigns seem to be grounded in fear, not any sense of morality.

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

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 regard.

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. Today is 2025, not 1785.

It's easy to dismiss all such campaigns as religious prudes and moral crusaders, especially on a site with the demographics and political leanings of YC News.

But often time such campaigns are waged by former victims of trafficking. It's well documented that trafficking, prostitution and pornography are closely interlinked - this modern notion of a fully liberated "sexual worker" controlling their careers, choices and finance is substantially a fiction of the pornographic industry. So there is real merit în the anti porn stance.

Of course, once the camping is set in motion, it takes a life of its own, that has nothing to do with the concerns of the victims and more with prudishness; the religious circus will join hands and demand the removal of synthetic pornography etc.

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 statement will lie and run chargebacks too.

In the case of Valve, a lot of chargebacks would drastically increase the processing rates demanded by the payment providers for all transactions across the board, not just those related to adult games.

There's probably a great market opportunity here for a game store focused on adult games and willing to take on that risk.

Often it's because of secret government requirements.

Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point .

Somehow, it's forbidden for the government to oppress pornographers directly, but it's perfectly fine to impose legal sanctions on banks who maintain business relationships with them.

Does Valve actually have a high risk of chargebacks? I was under the impression that moreso than other platforms, most Valve customers would rather go through Valve's own refund system. I understand that chargebacks is supposedly the reason for adult-only platforms.

This is the correct answer. There are many merchant categories, adult being just one of them, that are susceptible to high chargeback rates which result in payment processors banning them.

Isn't it a little odd that Visa/Master isn't out there making that argument? Why would we assume them having the best of intentions of they aren't even willing to argue those intentions themselves?

> people whose spouses catch a XXX video or game on their card statement will lie and run chargebacks too.

I don't understand this claim. Steam doesn't list specific games on credit card bills- why would chargebacks be higher for a bill that says "9.99 - STEAMPOWERED.COM (WA)" than for one that says "9.99 - STEAMPOWERED.COM (WA)" just because the latter was used to pay for Undertale and the former was used to pay for Sex Simulator 25?

That's the problem though. The risk means the market for those riskier credit transactions is literally categorically not a great market. You think JP Morgan gives a shit about Japanese titty games? Hah. No. They care that these games get charged back way more often.

If there is a market opportunity, it's probably in a processor for debit-based transactions that are harder to reverse. But then that makes fraud harder to combat, and one of the reasons everyone loves credit cards so much is because consumers are far more confident to buy from random shops if they know they can always get their money back if the shop scams them.

So - this whole system's lucratively is entirely predicated on easy credit and low risk meaning low fees. Anyone who wants to play in the mud that's leftover by these companies taking the good business are inherently playing a low margin risky game.

itch.io already serves this purpose no?

Visa/MC still make a decent amount of money on chargebacks - the fee is $15 or so, of which the platform keeps a big chunk.

I think the biggest issue here is that somewhere down the line we gave payment processors the responsibility of policing for crime and terrorism. Our governments and regulators punish those institutions for "not doing enough" to prevent such things from happening.

You might think I'm defending the multibillion company but here comes the catch: all of this is expensive so when you are doing something funky even though not illegal they just cut you out. You are a small dev or merchant and it's not worth running a whole monitoring apparatus over your activities.

Then we get into this situation where borderline cartel activity like this happens and we have a sort of shadow government enacting their own regulations. This raises some eyebrows dont you think? It will probably continue until governments realize this is happening.

> we gave payment processors the responsibility of policing for crime and terrorism

Mirrors what Marc Andreessen said on Lex's podcast.

The problem isn’t just regulatory overreach, it’s delegated enforcement w/out accountability.

Financial institutions are now playing judge and jury, not because they want to, but because the cost of scrutiny or punishment is too high.

It’s soft censorship by infrastructure...

The responsibility ended up with payment processors and other financial institutions because otherwise they would be forced to give access to all their customer / transaction data to governments and law enforcement.

I really wish we had a push for payment neutrality. Financial transactions are infrastructure and infrastructure should be dumb and neutral. Why does everyone have to suffer slow and expensive transfers just to maybe occasionally catch some bad guys (and they're not actually caught, just mildly inconvenienced)? And of course once you're already doing it, there's inevitably overreach, as evidenced by Visa here.

And before someone chimes in about how crypto will solve this: yes, crypto has already solved this for the criminal class. But most of the rest of people still have to suffer all the fincrime policing every time they move money or pay for something.

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 giving the company “proof” that same transactions are very illegal, eg leaks or underage or duress etc. This forces them in the position of being complicit which means they have to step back.

>we gave payment processors the responsibility of policing for crime and terrorism

Maybe is time to do a reboot of the economy, what about everyone goes to the bank and withdraw all their money, and when everybody has his money, we put the money back in the bank? Would be funny to see how banks would react :)

> Some of these games seem completely abhorrent

Why would you consider those abhorrent while games where you can slaughter people, or commit all kinds of crimes like any random GTA, are widely considered normal?

I'll never understand American morals. What's clear is that we need non-US payment processors so that the values of a given culture aren't imposed worldwide.

Say what you want about crypto, but it does solve this problem at least.

Europeans thought they had finally gotten rid of the Puritans when the Mayflower set sail. But four centuries later their overzealous character still haunts them.

At least at one time, part of the answer would have been Operation Choke Point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point

However, that's clearly not all that's going on -- it doesn't seem like the government is still doing this.

> Why do payment processors do stuff like this? Is there some regulation that requires them to?

Generally no, but they exist in a regulatory morass where it's impossible to do what they do without arguably or perhaps technically being in violation of hundreds of regulations at any given time.

The US government then uses their power to selectively enforce the voluminous mess of bad regulations to coerce parties to undertake actions which it would be flatly illegal for the government to perform directly such as cutting off sexually explicit content from payment rails.

e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point

The practice isn't limited to payment processors but they're a particularly good vector given the level of regulation they're subjected to. Choke Point (and Choke point 2) are just specific examples of a general tactic to end run around the public's rights that has been used by the US government for decades. In most cases the abuse isn't so well organized that it has a project name you can point at.

Congress and the whitehouse leaning on social media companies to suppress lawful opinions on covid policy is another example of that kind of abuse that has received some public scrutiny. Most cases, however, go without notice particularly since the ultimate victims of the actions generally have no way to know the cause.

It could be a holdover from Operation Choke Point, an Obama-administration arm-twisting initiative that would subject banks to more regulatory scrutiny and possible disciplinary action if they did business with certain "high-risk businesses" including firearm and pornography sellers. Ostensibly the initiative was ended in 2017, but banks are probably still afraid to be handed the black spot for doing business with the "wrong" sorts of people.

It's not just games.

Payment processors ban many things that are completely legal, even foods and dietary supplements. It's ridiculous. They have too much power.

I have no trouble seeing why a payment processor would want to avoid doing business with dietary supplement companies.

There are or have been rules about which colours a dildo can have.

It definitely sounds like Christian morals being forced on us.

The USA is extremely litigious, rules are decided not by the legislature usually but instead by people suing each other to establish case law, and anyone with a bone to pick could sink you in legal fees and proceedings at a whim. So probably people who don’t like the idea of adult content can use the courts to make payment processors’ lives painful and they decide to just forgo that business.

US courts are too easy to use as a tool of abuse.

This is an oft-repeated misconception. Germany is almost twice as litigious as the US. Sweden and Austria are also more litigious than the US.

> anyone with a bone to pick could sink you in legal fees and proceedings at a whim

This is FUD, not reality. While it’s “possible” for anyone in any country to try to sue, it simply doesn’t happen in the US more often than elsewhere. The relatively high number of US lawsuits are filled with corporate litigation, contract disputes, bankruptcy filings, car accidents, and appeals, among many other things, and not people suing each other for minor grievances.

“Coffee spills, Pokemon class actions, tobacco settlements. American courts have made a name for themselves as a wild lottery and a money machine for lucky few lawyers. At least in part, however, the reputation is unfounded. American courts seem to handle routine contract and tort disputes as well as their peers in other wealthy democracies.

“More generally, Americans do not file an unusually high number of law suits. They do not employ large numbers of judges or lawyers. They do not pay more than people in comparable countries to enforce contracts. And they do not pay unusually high prices for insurance against routine torts.

“Instead, American courts have made the bad name for themselves by mishandling a few peculiar categories of law suits. In this article, we use securities class actions and mass torts to illustrate the phenomenon, but anyone who reads a newspaper could suggest alternatives.

“The implications for reform are straightforward: focus not on the litigation as a whole; focus on the specifically mishandled types of suits.”

http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center/papers/pdf/R...

Aside from the moral clamor, if something has a higher likelihood of fraud, there's a direct relationship with the increase of its cost. Both legal fees and labor cost to deal with these claims could add up more than we outsiders may realize. It's very possible that some risk-averse analyst "ran the numbers", and decided this wasn't worth it. I would also speculate that there may be a certain hidden coat of false fraud claims. Certain folks buying something in the moment, then shamefully claiming they didn't after the fact, which in turn could carry the costs associated with processing a new card & number or conversely fighting false claims.

As for the morality angle though, while I definitely agree that these companies' main motivation has to be increasing revenue and profit, and that their only reason for doing anything is cost-driven; you never know what middle-manager who is swayed by what belief is actually making these decisions. So as much as the monolithic goal of the organization is more money, there are still emotional (and financially fallible) people pulling the levers.

The fraud thing explains why they might avoid an entirely adult storefront for it, but for steam? who has their own refund policies and support system that presumably shields the payment processor from charge backs most of the time?

There are also large anti porn lobbying groups applying pressure to the payment processors, so that angle creates costs in a different way.

If I remember correct from the hot money podcast https://www.ft.com/content/762e4648-06d7-4abd-8d1e-ccefb74b3... part of the problem for the credit card companies is figuring what are the boundaries of legality. Countries have very different laws. Things like representing homosexuality or age of consent are very different and credit cards feel that it is a risky business because of that.

This makes little sense with even the tiniest amount of probing.

This is a solvable geo regulation issue, solvable like many other geo regulatory issues

Control. People get a kick out of controlling others and stopping them doing things that don't effect them in any way. It's like how being a practising gay was illegal or how using certain drugs still is.

So true. People love meddling into other people's lives, control their actions, etc.

> Is there some regulation that requires them to?

There isn’t. Even worse, there’s no legislation prohibited them from doing so.

Payment processors (eg: Mastercard, Visa) are the ultimate deciders of whether you can sell something online or not, regardless of whether it is legal.

They haven’t just blocked adult content, they’ve also blocked non-profits with which they disagree in the past.

We need much stronger legislation around this. Private entities shouldn’t be capable of deciding that a given organisation can’t charge online. Only institutions which represent the public’s interests should have this level of influence.

This is one of the ways the government can censor people despite the first amendment. It’s absolutely by design. The regulators “express concern” about certain financial activity and then the companies remove it.

this is such small potatoes compared to the results of everything going on right now though

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

This originated from an Australian-based feminist activist group called "Collective Shout", who put pressure on the payment processors to censor digital content.

They claimed it as their own victory on X this week.

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't dress like a priest for no reason.

Sexual caste slavery or anarchy- thats the choices.

Get this - they power the payments infrastructure for OnlyFans, which to many people is arguably more degenerate than a few adult-themed games.

People can also buy TV shows and movies in which their content is far more grusome and disturbing than the video-games targeted by the activist groups putting pressure on payment processors.

I noticed someone else posted a list of other groups, but another one is called "Collective Shout", who censors their own ads because their subject matter is considered harmful.

I suspect Valve is blaming the credit card companies for something they really wanted for themselves. Steam is a big store open to everyone and you’re going to scare away a big chunk of seniors, Christians, etc with stuff like incest, ageplay, and rape just so that a small minority uses you instead of…itch.io? Better to keep the big safe names like Being a Dik and Eternum on Steam and flush the rest so that you can have the best of both worlds.

I think that for better or worse Valve is genuinely committed to lassies faire moderation, they have historically been very hesitant to remove really heinous games. I don't think they're using this as cover.

Valve made the conscious choice to allow porn games in the first place, they knew what they were getting into imo

> I suspect

Based upon what evidence?

"Completely abhorrent" is subjective. If you want it banned, show me the victims that would be saved. Otherwise, what happens behind closed doors is none of our business.

And the legality of them--we still have obscenity statutes on the books. Garbage as far as I'm concerned, but they're still there.

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

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.

I'm more curious why PCGamer did not publish the name of the games that were removed. There are some incredibly perverse titles in there and if they are advocating to normalize this kind of content, they should have no shame doing so.

It’s funny that you read it as calling for normalization. That’s actually never mention. It’s all in your head.

Jesus christ it’s not advocating for its normalization, it’s the idea that payment processors aren’t the arbiters of societies morals. You want to ban some weird porn game you use the government.

Another factor is that credit providers (i.e. banks) are increasingly using customer transaction data to assess customer behaviour as part of its risk scoring.

If a customer is regularly purchasing adult material that would be definitely be a red flag.

Red flag for what?

A regular purchaser of adult entertainment almost certainly has enough cash flow to pay their bills. And they'll have a hard time claiming it's not them when it matches their previous activity. Having an interest in sex doesn't in the slightest suggest a person is bad--if anything, the apparent lack of interest would be more worrisome. (Not that purchase history can be used to discern this.) Some of the ones who don't are asexuals, but some are those who are repressing their sexuality--and that's more likely to show up in unacceptable ways.

A first time purchaser of adult entertainment is another matter--that's going to have a lot of spouse-found-out chargebacks.

A red flag of what?

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

Cyberpunk is coming for us.

See Bill Ackman and his crusade against PornHub.

Who runs Mastercard, are they linked to some American prudes?

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 gate keep people's speech, which means everything is basically a civil suit away from getting blacklisted.

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.

> It's because Visa got sued, lost, and it was found out they knowingly processed payments for illegal adult content

Got any source for that? What they got sued for? Aiding human trafficking?

Seems rather weird that Visa out of all the parties involved got hit by this, that's like suing the national bank for printing cash currency that gets used in illegal ways? Or suing the pavement for allowing a heist getaway car to drive away. Or the gas station where they last filled it up.

> Why the fuck do we allow credit card companies have a say in how we spend our money?

Because sadly 80% of people are sheep. Same reason we allow a company to decide what we can and cannot install on our smartphones.

No, don’t follow the underdog fallacy. What are you doing against it? How are you different from the other sheep? Merely complaining doesn’t make you any better.

When I buy an iPhone I am dealing with Apple. I know what I am buying and what I can or cannot do with the device. And if I am not happy there are alternatives.

When I buy stuff on Steam I am in no way making a contract with Visa. When Visa strong arms Valve to delist games I lose even if I never had any relation with Visa ever.

It really is not comparable.

Because they are on the hook for fraudulent transactions, until they get to merchant to refund. Otherwise they wouldn't care.

Which is why some merchants get effectively blacklisted if they have too many fraudulent transactions

No, I get it. Give me a "Freedom Card" or whatever that generates a one-time use number/cvv combo, backed by cash, that I'm fully responsible for. If I give a guy on the corner $5 cash and he walks off with it, that's between me and him. We don't need to resort to crypto. I don't care if there's a paper trail, I don't need to be anonymous. I just don't want money people to have any say in how people choose to spend their money.

The card networks are never on the hook for fraudulent transactions (nor for any other type of chargeback for that matter). If anything, it's the merchant's payment service provider/card acquirer that absorbs the loss if the merchant can't pay.

that wouldn't apply in this case, because the vendor, Valve, would be on the hook for fraudulent purchases and they would definitely have the deep pockets to pay out. The cc companies only have to worry about the small, fly by night companies that might disappear after a bunch of fraud.

No they aren't. Fraudulent card not present transactions are fully on the backs of merchants. The networks and banks don't lose a dime of them. In fact, they make more money now, charging additional fees when disputes are filed, and additional fees when they are challenged.

Well your comment tells us why-- as is the law in the US is that credit card companies are almost entirely responsible for fraud. It's part of why they and their dubiously usurious practices are allowed to exist in the US at all.

If it were the case that the payment rail censorship were limited just to cases where there was an obvious elevated fraud risk-- then that would be the whole of the story. -- and there would be an obvious answer: use a payment mechanism where the fraud responsibility is entirely on the user, such as Bitcoin.

But their censorship exists where no such elevated fraud risk exists too, due to abusive conduct by the government to indirectly suppress activity that would be plainly unlawful for them to directly suppress. And the governments out of control abuse of its regulatory power is not limited to fraud-responsible payment rails, and get applied just as or even more extensively on Bitcoin payment processors.

Well, credit is not really "your money". The danger of course is if this gets extended to debit cards and they become the only option (ie. no cash). Every time you use your card you are giving them the power to do this.

> credit is not really "your money"

Unless it's a prepaid credit card or a debit card, both of which are serviced by MC and Visa and fairly common in Europe.

Fuck that. Why do we need credit card processors AT ALL? For that matter, why are debit cards tied to credit card networks? Unless and until people realize that these things are useless outmoded and antiquated, it's a waste of time trying to improve them. Do you want a faster horse, or the automobile?

Payment processors(Visa, Master) , payment gateways(Stripe, Paypal...) and payment hosts (Patreon, Gumroad...) are a huge pain to deal with even when you're selling something which is legal and risk free just because their algorithm or employees are often overcautious, anything out of mundane they'll ban first and then ask questions(if you're lucky).

I have a FOSS project called Open Payment Host[1] which removes the payment hosts from the equation and removes the technical hassle of integrating multiple payment gateways but it does not solve the pain of having to deal with the payment gateways and by extension payment processors and banks.

My long term plan is to integrate direct banking API where ever it's available.

Is there any bank from any country which provides direct banking API to end customers for plain savings bank account (I've seen some provide for current accounts).

[1] https://github.com/abishekmuthian/open-payment-host

I built a cool tool the last week's. I spent more time on evaluating payment processor than the code itself.

I have ~5 projects in my shelf I did never launch because I didn't find a payment solution.

Got instantly banned with all of them, had to write them an email wait for days to get some response.

I usually just use crypto whenever it makes sense. And still have a hard time to believe that I can move as much as crypto as I want but a single payment from a Dubai account can get my bank account frozen for days ...

This is what i settled on as well. I maintain a side project that is completely legal and above board but i refuse to go through the nonsense i was forced to go through the last time i had to integrate with a credit card payment gateway (another side project that went belly up).

If someone wants to buy something from me badly enough, they'll figure out how to get some bitcoin.

I don't have the time and energy to deal with their arbitrary bullshit anymore.

Have you looked in to "PSD2 and Open Banking regulation in Europe" ?

I haven't, I will definitely explore it. Quick read on it seems very promising.

Have you or anyone here any API in EU for getting payments directly to your bank account? I have started a discussion on this on OPH[1], I welcome any information on direct banking API in Europe in that discussion.

[1] https://github.com/abishekmuthian/open-payment-host/discussi...

I use Ko-fi but 95% of the fees go to Stripe and their processors (Visa etc).

The article calls out “certain adult games” which is vague. It is interesting to note that most of the delisted games were themed specifically around incest.

https://bsky.app/profile/steamdb.info/post/3lu32vdlsmg27

Wondering if this will be a slippery slope towards pulling more anodyne stuff.

> The article calls out “certain adult games” which is vague.

A Quick Look at the list has me wishing I hadn’t thought to look at the list.

I suspect the vague “certain adult games” was chosen because it makes it sound more controversial. If the headline was “Valve removed incest-themed games under pressure” there would be a lesser reaction.

Why? Incest is more objectionable than murder or rape?

Collective Shout, the group behind this petition, has previously gone after more mainstream games, like Detroit Becomes Human, for spurious reasons. I have no doubt they'll use this win and mealy-mouthed language to push for more censorship.

Specifically incest, rape, and child abuse-themed games.

Ah, like a video game version of "Game of Thrones"? None of the payment processors had any issues with taking money for that series. And that was live action.

Games/hentai about these topics are not illegal, even if they are in bad taste.

And I’m willing to bet some content removed does not fall in these categories

Visa and Mastercard generally don't like anything with incest, rape, and/or underage participants.

But they are strangely okay with murder.

Unless it's a TV show depicting it with live action. Then it's fine.

Yes, I don't know if selling those games is legal or not.

Thus I can imagine that they don't want to become criminally responsible if that's illegal.

Nekopara and Sabbat of the Witch are safe... for now.

Hopefully they don't know about the little-sister route in Making Lovers.

Payment processors should be regulated like utilities. Permissionless and agnostic to anything you do.

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

Violence is still considered ok in games, last time I checked.

Which is possibly because violence is not as awkward to watch with your family as sex is.

Sure, but simulation does give you exposure. And too much exposure (from the simulations going mainstream) begets normalization, something you definitely do NOT want with content like that. We are already suffering enough from pop media making many kinds of abhorrent behavior mainstream.

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.

Let's simulate playing detective to reveal the true identities of the dead

Let's simulate grave digging

Let's simulate blackmailing the dead for an eternity

For fun AND for profit

It's a slippery slope. It's not real but can certainly, by definition, create a situation that mimics reality to the point of assisting someone at committing a real crime that they couldn't possibly commit without the simulation.

So funny how people think this is a moral crusade. You should read articles around the tech stack for payment processing at any adult site. People try to do chargebacks all of the time on these kind of services. "Hunny what is this transaction on our account for BigBussomsCom?" .. "Oh must be some kind of fraud" "then let's call the bank and straighten it out". It's variations of this, over and over that lead to the high chargeback rates. I seem to recall that chargebacks are an order of magnitude higher for adult-oriented transactions. Unless you have a system of countering this with a team devoted to it, you will have a lot of successful chargebacks. I doubt Valve has the specialized team needed to deal with the amount of chargebacks, this the CC companies trying to avoid the headache.

It's so funny that people think it's about chargeback.

If you buy smut game on Steam, your bank statement won't show the name of the game. It looks exactly like any other transaction you make on Steam.

> "Hunny what is this transaction on our account for BigBussomsCom?" .. "Oh must be some kind of fraud" "then let's call the bank and straighten it out"

This is a scenario that literally can't happen in the Steam case. It could happen with Pornhub but not with Steam.

And Steam has a very generous refund policy. If your playtime is less than 2hr you can ask for a refund with a few mouse clicks. No phone call or email needed. Actually in my experience if your playtime is just over 2hr for a bit they'll still refund you.

If you chargeback you can get your whole steam account suspended.

To add: AFAIK most adult content websites bill under a different, innocuous name as well. You don't get a charge on your credit card from BigBussomsCom, you get a charge from SuperCard or something like that. (uh... I know because of a friend...)

If what you said were true then they would ban all porn and not just rape/incest/bestiality porn. They're banning specific genres of porn which makes it an obvious morality issue.

I can't back this up with facts but the chargeback myth smells of an old astroturfing campaign to justify the moral policing on porn in general. But nowadays porn is more commonly accepted so they're shifting to more specific genres.

The new myth seems to be that payment processors can he held legally liable for facilitating illegal transactions, but the only lawsuits vs payment processors I can find is about child pornography, which has always been banned on steam.

When added that there was an advocacy group that sent an open letter to payment processors a week ago for this same exact issue[1], then the chargeback excuse has zero merit.

So yeah, it's 100% a moral crusade. Which side you sit on the crusade it up to you.

[1] https://www.collectiveshout.org/open-letter-to-payment-proce...

You actually believe this yourself?

Just came here to ask. Is it a norm to not have any personal fund cache while in a relationship? I would not like anyone, spouse included, to question me about my purchases of (redacted), nor would I want to question them on purchases of the newest (redacted) or whatnot. What's the purpose?

Okay so is Steam enough of a money printer for Valve to say "well fuck you guys, we'll make our own credit card with hookers and bingo"? And hold out Half-Life 3 (only purchasable with the ValveCard) as a carrot?

Practically impossible.

To replace visa/mastercard you need to have thousands of banks support ValveCard across the world. It's hard to imagine how it's going to happen. Players will not switch to another (probably foreign) bank just to buy Half-Life 3. They'll pirate it.

By the way, Gabe has a very famous quote:

> Piracy is a service problem.

He knows it very well that if it's hard for players to buy something they'll just get it free anyway. You can say he's probably the first person in the world who realized this idea profoundly enough to turn it into a business. It's very risky for Steam to make buying games even slightly harder.

I am genuinely curious who can actually threaten Visa (I do not think it is Valve).

Amazon, Walmart, Target and then increasingly unsure.

That's basically what gift cards are isn't it?

> Leaked internal slides peg Steam’s net revenue last fiscal year at just under $10 billion

https://www.simplymac.com/games/3-5m-per-employee-how-valve-...

My first thought is: obviously not. But if 10 years ago you'd asked me if Valve would be able to turn Linux into a serious gaming platform, I'd have answered the same.

All that stemmed from an unlikely but existential fear that Microsoft could lock-down software distribution on Windows. My suspicion is that SteamOS sales and Steam Decks aren't actually profitable, they're just too valuable as a bargaining chip not to invest in. And Valve can invest in them, because they're rich and private.

While Valve bigwigs probably aren't losing sleep over the missed revenue from incest games, having the rest of their revenue stream threatened might make them seek another form of insurance.

The problem is if visa/etc say no, valve instantly loses ~70% of their sales. So it’s a bet they won’t win

I’m fairly certain they could but it wouldn’t exactly be fun right?

I mean, if there's one company that I believe could pull that off is Valve. And maybe Amazon. Maybe the two together. It would be one hell of a JV for both parties.

Nope. Even a company such as valve would be intimidated by the regulation of setting up their own company payment network outside the traditional banking system.

Maybe crypto is an option but I haven’t seen use in retail. Only speculation instrument.

Apple tried. Failed. Google tried. Failed. Only thing that works is partnering up with existing bank

oh yes

I mean a bank is literally a money printer.

Related to this, here's an ACLU filing with the FTC that lays out the content that the credit card companies don't like and how they pressure companies to remove it.

https://www.aclu.org/documents/federal-trade-commission-comp...

If you don't like it, start another payment processor that doesn't cave to pressure. Where are all the free market proselytizers at?

I expect all of you complaining about this to never once complain on legal grounds about Apple's 30% tax in the app store or when a bakery refuses to sell a cake to a gay person.

This is what unrestricted freedom for every entity looks like.

And this is why we need laws and regulations that are actually enforced. Because companies and larger organisms do not necessarily operate on timescales that are able to be reasonably responded to within a human lifespan.

> If you don't like it, start another payment processor that doesn't cave to pressure.

Or, gosh, use bitcoin et al.

It's interesting that when people ask "what's the use case for cryptos?", "being an alternative to Visa and Mastercard" is not often mentioned. That alone is a good enough reason to support it.

Civitai has been recently forced by payment processors to crack down on AI-generated porn. Since then, given that the processors told them that they may want do restrict them even more, they have added ability to use cryptos to pay for their services.

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 of the rent seeking and monetary policy that seems to just make the whole problem worse.

> I expect all of you complaining about this to never once complain on legal grounds about Apple's 30% tax in the app store

People complain that 24/7. The absolute majority of HN comments sided with Epic when they challenged that.

> or when a bakery refuses to sell a cake to a gay person.

It didn't happen. What happened was the bakery refused to make a cake for gay wedding. It's established that you can't refuse to sell something existing to someone just because of their sexuality.

IME people who propose absolute freedom in any regard (speech, use of power, use of money,...) fundamentally don't understand the difference of power between individuals, let alone individuals and organizations.

This is why anarcho- anything can't work. Some people specialize in building thing, since in providing a service, some specialize in making money and grabbing power. When the builders and providers don't unite to hold them back (like... forming a government) those people end up forming a mafia. Of course the state is a mafia too. You gotta pick your evils.

> proselytizers

Off topic: I heard this word for the first time last night and now I’m seeing it here. Funny how that works sometimes.

Okay. I walk into a Jewish bakery and want a red cake with a Nazi flag on it.

I think it’s hilarious we allow stuff like Postal or Soldier of Fortune without a question, where the whole focus is on going crazy and murdering a whole bunch of people.

But try to show a sensual human body, instead of one that’s ripped into small pieces, and oh my god, this is going too far!

Gender of who is murdered has a lot to do with it too. I don't think you'll find a video game where you predominantly kill women. The most infamous scene of murder in video games is the Call of Duty mission "No Russian" where you optionally commit terrorism at an airport. If you pay attention you'll notice they kill much more men than women, and made sure that despite pleasant weather none of the women were wearing dresses or skirts. Murder of men is a lot more digestible.

Same with movies. Piles of dead bodies are OK for children to watch but naked skin would be highly damaging.

You could just ask, "why do payment processors pressure content vendors not to offer this kind of content". You're starting from the premise that there's some weird puritan thing happening, but there's really nothing puritan about American business culture. There are other explanations!

You can get a long ways just by assuming that the people involved in these transactions are utterly amoral.

The difference I see is that the player is getting sexual pleasure from what is being simulated in porn type games. I.e. they are trying to simulate the feeling of doing that in real life.

Where as in violent games like soldier of fortune I doubt most players are trying to achieve the feeling of brutally killing another human being.

Adult content is considered a high risk merchant category - meaning it is susceptible to high chargeback and fraud rates. This is because after someone pays for and consumes adult content, a certain level of "clarity" overcomes them resulting in the execution of chargebacks against the merchant.

It has nothing to do with any sort of puritanical premise.

Mastercard and Visa needs some serious competition. How come a payment company decides who to partner with and dictates what people use their system for. Ridiculous bullshite.

At the same time those "games" that were affected, well, who on earth pays for that seriously fucked up crap? People need to get a grip. I'd rather send a psycho team to evaluate people who pay for these games...

note: PCGAMER the epitome of games journalism. They didn't even checked which were the affected banned games.

TBF that’s US media culture going back several decades.

I agree with the fact there is hypocricy. I disagree that either should be banned. (Maybe you didn't mean it that way but somebody with us the argument that way)

If group A wants to control group or person B, they should prove with very high certainty that group B's behavior is harmful to someone who is not B.

I also find it hilarious. Killing people in movies and video games get a lower age rating than sex.

And religious groups talking about protecting children (while raping them) is hypocrisy at its finest.

This isn’t about “trying to show a sensual human body”, it seems to be about incest porn specifically. There are still plenty of pornographic games available on Steam, even absurdly offensive ones such as the multi-part “Sex with Hitler” series.

To be fair, Postal and SOF haven’t been relevant in almost 20 years, though your point stands.

I wonder how a modern implementation of these two games would look given the vast visual improvements since then. I assume UE5 or 6 already comes with a Ghoul-esque framework ready to go. Though I hope they would feature a curmudgeon caricature of Jack Thompson.

I think this is a bit of a strawman. The market for people who get addicted to gruesome gore and are willing to pay money to see it is several orders of magnitude smaller than people willing to pay to see porn or OnlyFans. There is simply far more risk with adult content as a result and a lot more chargebacks from disatisfied customers with a post nut clarity.

For those thinking is only related to chargebacks and fraud, it is not.

VISA and Mastercard have been banning a lot of content that is not porn but has political values that are disapproved by certain billionaires and investors. There is a bunch of links I wanted to post about, such as US billionaires bragging he personally called VISA CEO to ban content on PH or japanese politicians mad at the censorship of japanese art with certain values because of these companies. But I am on phone walking home so if anyone else has such links please post.

Yep.

They've colluded with the US federal government in the past on those issues as well. "Operation Choke Point" was ostensibly about fraud, but included transactions related to firearms in its scope. As a result, several major banks and payment processors dropped legitimate firearms dealers. For a while it got to the point that I was helping a couple of local gun stores contract with "high risk" payment processors that also serve the porn industry and get set up.

To this day if you're on a gun forum and mention that you use Bank of America, people will pile on to tell you horror stories of both companies and individuals having their accounts closed and funds held for weeks or months after completely legal transactions. In one case in particular, they claimed it happened after buying a backpack at a gun store.

Again, these are 100% legitimate and legal businesses. Federally licensed (FFL) gun stores had trouble for years even keeping a working business account. It was clearly not about fraud, at least not in practice.

Politics completely aside, the financial landscape for gun stores today looks a lot like the cannabis industry: a few institutions are quietly known in those communities to allow them to operate, but many choose to do business only in cash and most prefer it if given the option. The porn industry is similar from what I can see.

Of course it's not. Steam already has a very generous refund policy. It's hard to imaging the chargeback rate would be that high even for nsfw games when you can simply refund. Refund takes about 3~4 clicks on steam website; Chargeback takes a phone call with your bank and can get your steam account locked.

And people who laundry money out stolen cards won't do that with nsfw games. They'll do that with CSGO knifes.

Visa/MasterCard porn ban was driven by American extremist Christian organisation called Exodus Cry, which is also anti-gay, etc.

https://screenshot-media.com/politics/human-rights/pornhub-p...

Exodus Cry leader was later fired for sexual misconduct

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-commentary/anti...

Trump changed banking regulations so that "reputation" can no longer be a reason for banks to "derisk" customers after crypto industry outcry, but the reason to exit customers must be factual money laundering or similar reason. But the change does concern cards, as payments are not under FDIC surveillance.

Link for the petition and its signers.

https://www.collectiveshout.org/open-letter-to-payment-proce...

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Steam-Payment-providers-force-V...

Reverse petition where?

From heise

"In 2020, following a complaint from the Hamburg/Schleswig-Holstein Media Authority, Valve blocked all titles that were labeled as “adult” and did not have an age rating. To be able to offer them, the US company would have to integrate a reliable age verification system into Steam in Germany. Because Valve has not yet implemented such a system, sex games remain blocked in Germany."

So, I hear Europe doesn't have these problems about puritanical censorship in games......

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

Denmark has seen a trend where their national card network (Dankort, operating at the equivalent level to Visa and Mastercard) is seeing reduced usage.

They're aiming to reverse that trend.

https://cphpost.dk/2025-06-28/general/new-political-agreemen...

Not all European countries still have these independent networks.

Regulation and anti cartel laws.

Adult business is legitimate business in many parts of the world and companies using their monopoly to suppress it should be a case for an Investigation.

Instant payment systems that go direct from bank to bank, assuming the banks, the government or any other intermediaries don't also decide to not allow it.

Or cryptocurrency, I guess.

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/

Unironically, crypto? It might seem like an annoying hurdle now, but as more and more things are banned by puritans, the crypto experience will surely rise to meet the need.

Choose a payment system by a company that is not as opinionated. Apple pay, for example.

Use ACH/Zelle/Paypal/etc.

The permanent solution is a federal government operated electronic money system operated as a utility with constitutionally protected rights.

Bitcoin was supposed to solve this.

in a word, regulation.

Likely nothing.

The simple fact is, Visa/MC don't want to deal with porn because the number of chargebacks and fraud from porn purchases is significant and a huge outlier compared to most other charges. Their crusade against processing charges for adult material isn't about purity, it's simply business.

Visa and Mastercard are the defacto world judges of the limits of porn.

they have their own banned topics lists and if you fuck up you lose your income

yup, the traditional banking system as a whole really

If there was ever an argument for the need of cryptocurrency, it is this.

Dethrone the payment processors or they get to decide what is and is not allowed to be sold.

Seems like this could be easily solved with legislation without having to invent new currencies. Just make it a law that payment processors are not allowed to discriminate between legitimate goods and services. If the government thinks that sugary water or porn magazines are fine to buy and sell, why should MasterCard have anything to say about it? Payment processors are basically natural monopolies, so they should be able to be regulated.

It's about time that credit cards were treated like money and this kind of behaviour forbidden. When you pay with cash the notes and coins don't refuse to be handed over because the issuing bank has an opinion about what you are buying, it should be the same for all payment methods.

The monetary layer is not the one where bad behavior should be policed. Being able to send and receive money is a basic utility that no government or bank should be able to deprive someone of. That's why I support cryptocurrency.

Let's just remember that this is a ballot-box issue, not a payment-type issue.

A lot of folks I'm sure will say this is what crypto is for, but if that ever gained enough traction then (the US) congress would clamp down on it. They'd probably call it "money laundering" or something like that. Remember the guy that went to jail for exchanging crypto for fiat?

Are you mad at Visa/Mastercard? They don't care about porn, they care about not having congress smash them.

You want regulations that would prevent MC/Visa from doing this? You've got it backwards. Regulation is on the side of surveillance and morality police.

I just can't see it. Do I vote for right-winger puritans who ban games because they show trans characters? Or do I vote for left-winger perception-is-realityists who ban games because they show guns?

If Valve limited credit card purchases to PG games, but let customers purchase other games via crypto, then payment processors couldn’t complain about alleged high chargeback rates or association with adult content.

I imagine payment processors wouldn’t love this solution, but at that point they’re just asking for full editorial control, and we should resist.

Not necessary. They could just keep almost everything as-is with normal credit card processors, but for adult stuff, just use the same kind of processors other adult sites use. Those have a lot worse rates from what I hear, but still way more accessible than crypto

Tangent, but each of those events should be a reminder of why we must fight to never, ever live in a cashless society.

Because once big entities control the pipeline of what you can buy and you have no alternative, they basically can dictate what you can and can't do.

We saw that during the wikileak story when visa prevented Europeans to give to the org despite the fact it was perfectly legal to do so on their soil.

Just like data handled by an Apple device is not really your data since they can prevent you from doing what you want with it, money handled by Visa is only your money until they don't like what you do with it.

credit card companies (Mc?) did the same with mindgeek. No due process. Just revoked their access to CC networks.

mindgeek then wiped all _unconfirmed_ content regardless of whether it was revenge porn or not.

That one must be defended, since it was abuse of real people happening at scale and with full knowledge thereof, and PornHub's status-quo response was at best "do nothing and hope it goes away". Mind, the Justice Department also went after them (and won), so we can't even resort to "CC networks shouldn't be the ones enforcing this." At what stage of a court case is it appropriate to expect third parties to start breaking their business relationships with the defendant?

The weird part about the first-world sexual liberation mindset (usually said about feminism, but not limited thereto) is that it actively ignores how massively abusive sexual liberties very often and easily become.

Avoiding this was the initial promise of crypto and crypto pundits abandoned all their principals because line goes up.

You can track the list of banned games here: https://bannedgames.netlify.app

The games that got banned this time, even before considering their depiction of incest, are often of such poor quality that it's difficult to even call them 'games.' Valve itself should have removed them from Steam long before payment processors had to step in. Defending these kinds of games is like equating Blue is the Warmest Color with a random PornHub video, simply because they both contain sexual acts. If Baldur's Gate 3 ever gets banned, then you can truly make a fuss.

I can’t tell what your argument is here.

BG3 does feature an incest sex scene. You can fuck the drow twins.

Are you saying that BG3 should be ok because it’s a good game? Or BG3 is only ok because it doesn’t show much of the incest sex?

Removing and having something exist with the whatever amount of visibility it is able to earn with its quality are entirely different.

So, just to review the hypocrisy here:

Full-on murder simulators: OK.

Exchanging consensual pleasure with the wrong person: NOT OK.

To all the people saying "fraud" is the reason - think that through.

Do you really, really think fraud and chargebacks for games covering specific fetishes on Steam have even the tiniest iota of relevance here?

Steam readily offers refunds for a multitude of scenarios!

Valve is also large enough to make itself known to payment processors to not be erroneously lumped in with seedy merchants.

From my understanding, VISA and Mastercard have relatively vague rules that payment processors must follow and payment processors must interpret that based on their own risk tolerance of adverse action being undertaken against them by VISA and/or Mastercard for not following the vague rules in the manner VISA/Mastercard interpret them as at a given point in time.

This is how you end up with situations where both payment processors and the big credit card networks point at each other when politicians ask "why are you withholding financial services from (insert company here)?" and, technically, both entities are correct at pointing the fingers at each other.

There's other factors with respect to contract law in a global economy spanning varied jurisdictions that add additional wrinkles, but I'm skeptical they're the culprit in this specific case

They went after no-name games instead of Summer Memories or Treasure Hunter Claire? Weak.

They should have at least aimed at Living With Sister: Monochrome Fantasy.

Hey, Summer Memories got an official shout out on their twitter once, someone must have a real weak spot for that one at valve.

It looks like the affected games are all rated "Adult Only" on Steam.

The games you mention are all sold without adult content on Steam, and the customer has to visit the publisher's website to download a patch restoring said content

They went after incest and non-con (for now).

But I don't know about the last game you mentioned... the "sister" part sounds sus.

Considering their volume, I find it hard to believe that Valve couldn't find another, more lenient payment processor with similar fees.

My understanding is that it's not just the processor, but Visa/Mastercard themselves have rules against certain types of merchants/products... they really have a monopoly on credit cards in general so you have to play by their rules.

It complicates things to have some games that can be purchased with credit cards and some games that can only be purchased with crypto.

Controversial games being restricted to purchase only with Steam Points. The credit card is only ever charged to buy points, which can then be used to purchase items on the store. Similar to fortnite.

They could support a stablecoin like USDC and start pushing people to that. No censorship and lower fees. Valve broke ground with Steam, they could do it again.

There are no other payment processors.

Adult content has a high chargeback rate and high fraud rates so payment processing for adult content has higher fees.

Bring back crypto payments Valve.

I'm not sure why the payment processors can't just be excluded for the offending games during checkout instead.

well well well

there are 2 solutions to this: 1. steam accepts eth and other cryptos; most people associate btc with crypto because it is the original but it is now technically vastly inferior. 2. the seven seas (nobody ever turns your free transaction down and you get to keep whatever it is forever with no fancy license/tos/eulas attached)

This is the kind of thing that crypto gets around. Surely the CC companies will allow folks to use their cards to buy crypto then in the same 1 minute that newly bought crypto could be used to buy the game and valve if they converted the btc to usd at the same day or very quick could mitigate the volatility of the asset

I'll never understand what is these payment processors' problem with adult content.

If someone wants to sell something and someone else wants to buy something, it should be nobody else's business to police it as long as two parties are settled.

That's why I want to see crypto take over and get rid of the middleman and regulators.

The only viable end-game in scale for crypto is what happens in China. I am not sure if I want that.

i think it's a mix of conservative/religious lobbying (getting them ire from the government), and chargebacks by embarrassed customers with post-nut clarity being common

This is not an issue oof payment processors. It is an issue of Visa and Mastercard duopoly, whom use payment processors as middlemen in order to be able to push their own "rules" onto businesses and get away clean.

Can someone please explain why we still have chargebacks in 2025? Don't accept cards without 3DS, problem solved. If not, why not? Are some important consumer segments still stuck with cards that don't have it?

Chargebacks aren't just for stolen credit cards, but also fraudulent merchants.

If I buy a physical good with a credit card, and the merchant either never sends me anything, or sends me an empty box and ignores my emails, well, that's a use-case for chargebacks. 3DS doesn't help with that.

Chargeback is not just for when your card is stolen. It’s also for e.g. when you never received your order, or your order is substantially different from what’s promised. It’s basically a last resort customer service option.

Why not just make it not purchasable with that payment option/store credit?

In many countries Steam supports plenty of alternative payment options that do not use VISA or mastercard.

Thinking about it, if a platform as enormous as Steam just completely stopped accepting VISA and mastercard, they'd a) probably still be fine b) VISA and mastercard would probably cave - few companies will prioritize outworn politics over literally billions of revenue. In fact I'd expect these two to be the last to do that. Valve would be more the type to put principles first. Too bad they didn't this time.

This is why crypto needs to rule the world

They did the same to Dlsite, a while ago, made them rename all the tags and then delist lolige, but more notably alot of games with sailor uniforms and/or high school character/settings.

If you think it's illegal under PROTECT then you should enforce the law, not use credit card companies to force people to use a VPN. And if it's illegal it should be illegal everywhere, not just where people are paying rather than sharing. Clearly if many people are paying for a work it's less likely to be obscene

The good old USA, when you can show someone bashing someone else's head with brain spilling out and it might get an R rating. But show a nipple and holy shit we have crossed the line.

If I'm going to be gracious to payment processors, what they need to do is lobby congress for a "DMCA-like safe harbor" for themselves.

The whole history of how credit card companies came about being the controller of adult content is very well laid out in podcast hot money season 2. It’s a fascinating story https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hot-money-agent-of-cha...

Does valve even leak the game titles you purchase to card processors? Don't they have some plausible deniability here?

Doesn't matter if anyone actually buys content or products the networks object to per their policies. If it's being offered and payment is accepted on a checkout that shows the networks' logos, merchants and their payment service providers can get into trouble.

So the outlast trials latest villain is a pair of incestuous elderly conjoined twins. The game features intense violence, lots of genitals, kills via explicit mutilation of those genitals, lots of rape threats. One guy in particular gets turned into a human sex toy via mutilation and wax.

Why is that above the bar then?

The day I will be informed that Valve delisted anything after being pressured by a credit card company is the last day I buy a game on it. Personally I pay with my own country's payment system that's unrelated to these companies.

You mean yesterday? Valve already did that.

so.. today?

Given the pc gamer article mentions "keep it in the family", I think they mean incest. Why on earth did valve have this on their platform on in the first place?

> I think they mean incest.

Oh god they delisted Crusader Kings???!

Similar pressures are placed on: porn, cannabis, and gun industries. Not only by payment processors but also, for example, by text message carriers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melinda_Tankard_Reist#Collecti...

> a "pro-life feminist"

What.

Seriously what? I thought pro-choice is a core tenet of feminism?

Honestly glad to see this has sparked larger talks about this again. Surprised to see Valve is just now getting impacted by this.

Does anyone know if UPI solves this problem?

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.

A couple of billion is an insignificant fraction of the $10000bn MasterCard processes every year.

You clearly think in small terms then. Trillion dollar fish eat billion dollar fish

Part of the coalition directing ESG which direct BlackRock and Vanguard which then threaten Visa/Mastercard… has been extremely successful in making people believe this is a crusade only by Visa/Mastercard.

It’s the S. And so very few people have any idea. Visa/MC doesn’t actually hate money.

They have better argument fiduciary defense accept porn money than deny it - unless they don’t and no one asks or thinks about it.

So why don't they make a second company, SteamyAdult? There is a market for it, so it seems.

you can start to gamble NFTs on Steam starting from age 13

but they'll tell you that they got pressured to ban "adult content" from steam

HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA

Who's kid is obsessed with microtransactions and cs:go cases gamba on steam?

Psyop and propaganda, calling them out gets you a ban

Valve should also delete its chat app. You can send a game if it's that important.

Honestly, this whole Visa/Mastercard control thing feels a lot like realizing you’ve been following rules that don’t really fit you. It’s tough to break out of it. But FedNow is an interesting option. It lets banks move money instantly, 24/7, with no card networks involved, so less hassle with the content policing. It’s not a magic fix (still early days, only works in the US), but it shows there’s another way if you’re willing to step outside the old patterns. Sometimes that’s what you need to actually move forward. And no I'm not a Fednow shill. Has anyone tried Kagi btw? ;)

Without a horse in this race, this precedent makes me deeply uncomfortable.

Is it really a fact that porn transactions attract higher amount of fraud?

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.

Nice excuse but we can see who censors behind this are and how they are gloating. https://xcancel.com/CollectiveShout

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 a great precedent, that's for sure.

It’s not a precedent, its been the status quo for half a century

Just get JCB cards. Done.

Does Steam offer different types of content to customers depending on their payment card brand?

Just a reminder that when still using cash, you are allowed to buy whatever you want that is legal without asshole bankers or institutions deciding for you!

It is a shame that it takes payment processors to get Valve to do even the bare minimum curation of their store. IMO the thousands of outright bad games and ai slop asset flips and weirdo porn that verges on outright illegal content in many countries should have never been allowed in the first place. All of this leads back to various executives at Valve essentially doing no actual work and refusing to hire anybody because a huge part of their corporate culture is to keep headcount low while chasing constant growth.

The puritanical elites in America have been ruining everyone’s fun for decades. So tired of their double standards and overreach.

Maybe now is the time to rethink accepting crypto again? But this time stablecoins not volatile coins like BTC and ETH.

Over 15 years from the Bitcoin Pizza Day, yet we're still dealing with this shit. What was the point.

It should be unlawful in every developed country, it's an assault on the freedom of speech and freedom of information by Visa.

They blacklisted games that feature incest. Good riddance. This trash should never have been allowed on Steam.

Clearly Steam disagreed. I don't see any publishers who were angry.

Sorry but ancaps are not allowed to complain - it's a 'free market' and the credit card companies are bigger than gabe newell - end of story, cry is free.

In ancap logic I think the fault here is all on gabe for not lobbying the government enough and/or for not having been able to gather enough force to fight against those companies somehow.

the global game industry is mostly corrupt, they could close valve down and we'd likely be better off.

It's interesting that Valve sort of put themselves in this situation by opting not to police their store anymore.

I'm personally a fan of fewer restrictions on content in video games and fewer "gatekeepers" but it's kind of inevitable that people would get upset when you chose to allow people to sell games like "Sex With Hitler" and "Pimp Life: Sex Simulator". Deciding to allow that content on your store and simultaneously not going to bat for it is weird, it's like they decided to just get the porn money while they could as a short-term boost to revenue.

Itch.io still has fewer restrictions but I assume they'll eventually have to clamp down too once payment processors cut them off - they don't have the financial resources to fight it like Valve or Epic do.

Interestingly Nintendo has as of late relaxed their restrictions too, you can find porn-adjacent shovelware on the Switch eShop despite their history of being very censorious. I wonder if payment processors will successfully push them around too or if Nintendo is too big to get pushed around.

Most Japanese adult game publishers had (some of) their games rejected from Steam.

Steam does police their store. It's just that Visa/Mastercard don't approve of how they police it.

What does "police" mean? They don't allow illegal content, that's policing no? You want more policing like morality police?

The question is: has "kill in the name of Hitler" also been banned, or is that okay with Visa/MC?

> it's kind of inevitable that people would get upset when you chose to allow people to sell games like "Sex With Hitler" and "Pimp Life: Sex Simulator".

The problem isn't some people being upset, it's that a single digit number of companies effectively control the ability for anyone else in the world to do business with them. Those companies get lobbied as much as politicians but with no accountability and any overreach being far less visible. And no freedom of speech rules.

Simulated "immoral" activity could be considered a moral gray area. If nothing else, morality is subjective.

So I think it's reasonable to argue for private, individual consumption of morally subjective material (not least of which is the logistical difficulty of preventing such things), as well as the right to create and sell such things. (You or I might approve of or oppose those things, but that's a different argument from what I make below.)

Aside from that, I don't think Valve or a payment processor is obligated to be a neutral party. Whether it might come from collective consumer backlash or whoever makes decisions for an organization deciding what they will or will not allow to flow through their system, I think they too should have the right to allow or ban things. If publishers and consumers want their morally gray content, so be it, but don't feel entitled to have Steam and VISA along for the ride if they don't want to be.

Hypothetically, Valve might prefer Steam be neutral, because money. But then they have the option to fight their payment processor or look for alternatives, rather than "forcing" their payment processor to be a part of something that the payment processor opposes.

TL;DR when a morally subjective issue involves a lot of parties, every party should have the right to "opt out" if they are morally opposed. (in my opinion)

Payment processors banning companies from using them for anything other than illegal use or fraud issues seems like pretty egregious overreach to me.

They shouldn't be able to leverage their nigh monopoly on modern payment processing to choose winners and losers in the marketplace.

They are using pornography as a wedge issue to establish that they get to dictate what companies are allowed to exist in the modern distributed market.

It would be entirely reasonable to legally require them to act blindly towards retailers, with restrictions needing to be based on universally applied financial criteria.

Card payments have become inseparable from modern life.

Regulate them as a financial utility. The electric company or water company can't refuse to hook up a business just because the owner doesn't like that business.

I think the trouble here stems from the lack of alternatives to the small group of payment processors. The near-monopoly allows their choices to override the choice of all the other involved groups, and almost no viable alternatives exist for Valve to move to if they disagree.

I guess Gabe's commitment to freedom of speech on his platform extended as far as nazis, but not as far as porn...

well, something like this can't be fixed overnight. I think Valve have more than earned a benefit of the doubt with this kind of stuff. I don't know if they are thinking on ways around this issue or not, but I would bet highly that they are. Problem is the credit card companies have them (and everyone else) by the balls because any attempt to continue hosting those gmaes but accept alternative payments for them would be retaliated against and MC et al might cut them off entirely, which would be devastating. I'm not sure there is a good solution to this that doesn't involve change of law/regulation i.e. lobbying

The ISPs, web services, payment services, and advertisers are all in a Mexican standoff right now - with every small move for domination throwing a volley of bullets at the customer from all sides.

The card companies are cutting off all the low hanging fruit to establish precedence (steam is not the only one affected). One it's established that they can ban certain things, then they've established they get to control the purchase of literally any idea, cause, or product they want. The card companies want to control and starve anything or anybody they don't like - especially their competition and regulators. They'll control the spice.

Net neutrality regulation would have prevented this and forced them to play nice with each other, with the side effect of a net benefit to society instead of tearing it apart.

We all warned you the free and open Internet, and by extension irl, as we knew it would unravel. Fundamental property rights are now dead; we just watched it happen.

You gave up the fight. You voted for it. Twice.

Payments companies successfully got valve to stop purveying weapons grade incest/child-porn/rape themed smut that is barely a game?

Nabokov was a great author and Lolita was the work of a great author who turned his pen/typewriter to a detestable subject leading to innumerable questions about art.

These guys are just z-graders who get off on non-consensual sexual interactions involving children.

Valve absolutely should not be publishing this stuff.

I don't know how bad these specific games were, but meanwhile, OnlyFans pornographers continue to use sites like Twitch to advertise their work to teens, and Pornhub continues to operate, despite claims that they profit from sex trafficking amongst other things (https://traffickinghubpetition.com/)

Seems strange to go after obscure videogames (which presumably don't feature real human beings) in this way. Unless they really are unusually extreme?

Even if I agree that this stuff shouldn’t be sold, it’s wrong that Visa has the power to force Valve to. The end does never justify the means.

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