Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand
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American Payment Processors really need more competition. They can not be trusted to act in a free market sense and not drift into a chaindog for political ideas.
Would it be possible to build a FOSS alternative to all this?
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It feels to me like payment processing has a similar function to physical currency. Like all of those security features on the bills are used to ensure the transaction is trusted.
Point being, I've long thought that payment processors are essentially doing a job that should be done by the government.
There are strange gaps where physical services have digital analogues but are completely ignored by the government.
I don't understand why the treasury doesn't process payments or why the post office doesn't issue email addresses, for another example.
Anyways, back to the point, physical currency specifically says that it is valid for all debts. If they applied the same logic to payment processing, then this would never happen.
Probably because government and the people in charge of government are largely tech illiterate and being literate or seeking policy advice from literate people isn't expected.
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Mastercard has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms, contrary to media reports and allegations.
Our payment network follows standards based on the rule of law. Put simply, we allow all lawful purchases on our network. At the same time, we require merchants to have appropriate controls to ensure Mastercard cards cannot be used for unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content.
Media contact
Seth Eisen
Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand
Steam and Itch.io are worried about trouble with their payment processors, and Mastercard is not a payment processor.
PC Gamer (www.pcgamer.com)
Is this why it appeared Steam only took down Incest and other spicy things?
Or did all the reporting just read the top of the list, and that had all the incest front loaded?
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so this is a game of telephone between activists, payment cards, payment processors, and vendors.
Also TIL mastercard HQ is located in Purchase, NY.
Yet everyone initially confidently reported on who was to blame.
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I don't see any reason to trust the credit industry more than the government, though.
The main reason is that the credit industry isn't in the business of running an intelligence service or part of law enforcement. That said, what they are connected to is almost the same as an intelligence service, that being the advertising industry, and there's literally nothing stopping them from selling or even being forced to give their data to law enforcement. The only reason it doesn't happen more I'd say is just the optics of it.
Ultimately what's needed is a digital payment system that's at least somewhat anonymous, but that's an incredibly hard nut to crack. Bitcoin tried it, but largely failed to do so (and immediately got corrupted by speculators that wanted to use it as a forex instead of currency). A couple of the other crypto currencies that have come out since then have claimed to be better but I'm still incredibly skeptical that there's any real anonymity there.
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Would it be possible to build a FOSS alternative to all this?
They're trying with GNU Taler, but it's pretty much a pipe dream at this point.
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The issues here are trust, security, adoption and so forth. It's not easy to start a competition here I'd say.
It's a catch 22. You need a phenomenal amount of capital to stand up a payment network with all those criteria, but anyone with that amount of capital can't actually be trusted not to abuse their position in exactly the same way the existing banking networks have.
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Is this why it appeared Steam only took down Incest and other spicy things?
Or did all the reporting just read the top of the list, and that had all the incest front loaded?
That's what it started with but it seems to have quickly expanded to include a lot of more mundane things. Initial reporting was only on the first wave of censored games and didn't include the stuff that was removed later on.
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Mastercard has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms, contrary to media reports and allegations.
Our payment network follows standards based on the rule of law. Put simply, we allow all lawful purchases on our network. At the same time, we require merchants to have appropriate controls to ensure Mastercard cards cannot be used for unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content.
Media contact
Seth Eisen
Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand
Steam and Itch.io are worried about trouble with their payment processors, and Mastercard is not a payment processor.
PC Gamer (www.pcgamer.com)
mastercard you are hurting your brand by doing this
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That's what it started with but it seems to have quickly expanded to include a lot of more mundane things. Initial reporting was only on the first wave of censored games and didn't include the stuff that was removed later on.
Ah, I didn’t hear that Valve did the take downs in waves.
But I did hear itch.io took down everything, including things with labels that happen to frequently overlap with porn, but are not in-fact, porn.
I’m interested in seeing reporting on the different stages of take downs. Anyone have a link? My Google fu is failing me.
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Mastercard has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms, contrary to media reports and allegations.
Our payment network follows standards based on the rule of law. Put simply, we allow all lawful purchases on our network. At the same time, we require merchants to have appropriate controls to ensure Mastercard cards cannot be used for unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content.
Media contact
Seth Eisen
Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand
Steam and Itch.io are worried about trouble with their payment processors, and Mastercard is not a payment processor.
PC Gamer (www.pcgamer.com)
I expected nothing less from them. They did pretty much the same exact thing when Japan tried confronting them after they started blocking Japanese retailers from trading internationally. I can't find the article anymore but IIRC, Japan's Prime Minister tried having an in person interview with them about it but it was cut short because he stormed out of the room after Visa tried denying everything. I don't think that the payment processors will ever take responsibility for their actions.
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American Payment Processors really need more competition. They can not be trusted to act in a free market sense and not drift into a chaindog for political ideas.
Have you tried Discover or American Express?
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Valves statement also matches with the claims of Itch.io, Stripe, and what Collective Shout themselves have claimed. So we've got two different claims, on one side are Visa and Mastercard, and on the other we've got literally everyone else. I feel pretty confident about which one is a load of bullshit.
It's also worth noting that Visa
and Mastercardare playing semantic games with their statements. Nobody ever claimed they were "refusing legal transactions", rather what they're doing is threatening to stop working with any business that doesn't implement censorship that they're happy with. It's a subtle but important difference and they've never denied that's what they're doing.Edit: rereading Mastercards statement they are claiming they don't restrict how businesses operate (although they do weasel around a little bit about illegal content), although Visa still hasn't denied that. They may also be playing games with that statement because porn is illegal in some countries that Mastercard operates in so they may be trying to claim porn is an illegal transaction despite businesses not selling it in the countries it's illegal in.
Edit 2: It just occurred to me this could also be about the UK and some US states new (and horrible) porn ID laws. I'm not aware of Valve doing anything to implement the strict age verification those laws are requiring for sites that distribute porn, and Visa/Mastercard could be trying to argue that without that in place any porn games Valve sells are "illegal transactions". In theory Steam does have age gating, but it's the same "are you over 18?" easily bypassed check that porn sites have always used.
Isn't owning a credit card age gating anyway? I don't think you can legally own a credit card in the UK.
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Effecting the brand?? Who in their right mine would associate them with anything but payments? That's ridiculous
This is actually ruining their brand. I now associate MC and Visa with Christian oppression
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Ah, I didn’t hear that Valve did the take downs in waves.
But I did hear itch.io took down everything, including things with labels that happen to frequently overlap with porn, but are not in-fact, porn.
I’m interested in seeing reporting on the different stages of take downs. Anyone have a link? My Google fu is failing me.
I don't know that anyone has put together a complete list of games taken down specifically because of this, but you can look at steam-tracker.com and sort by date to see what has been removed recently. It doesn't show why a game was removed, but you can usually infer a lot from the title and cover art.
Also I should clarify it wasn't specifically multiple large waves, there was a large initial group, but the remainder have been slowly trickling in. I'd guess there's someone going through Steams catalog slowly flagging games to remove. The first group was likely an easy keyword search, while the rest are being evaluated on a case by case basis most likely.
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Isn't owning a credit card age gating anyway? I don't think you can legally own a credit card in the UK.
You would think, but I believe the law(s) require verification of a photo ID. I haven't looked too closely into the UK one, but the way the laws are written for a couple of the US states a credit card doesn't meet the requirements. There's also the fact that many of the preview images and videos for porn games on Steam show nudity and/or sex and you can access those without needing to purchase the game (just the birthday question to "verify" your age).
Edit: also steam gift cards are a thing, so you can purchase without using a credit card technically.
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It feels to me like payment processing has a similar function to physical currency. Like all of those security features on the bills are used to ensure the transaction is trusted.
Point being, I've long thought that payment processors are essentially doing a job that should be done by the government.
There are strange gaps where physical services have digital analogues but are completely ignored by the government.
I don't understand why the treasury doesn't process payments or why the post office doesn't issue email addresses, for another example.
Anyways, back to the point, physical currency specifically says that it is valid for all debts. If they applied the same logic to payment processing, then this would never happen.
It is fucking wild that we don't have INTERAC credit cards here in Canada
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Effecting the brand?? Who in their right mine would associate them with anything but payments? That's ridiculous
The astonishingly hypocritical part:
Guess who does payment processing for OnlyFans?
Visa.
And MasterCard.
=D
All you need to verify your id is a credit card!
Then you get all the pr0n you want!
Hope you didn't borrow one from your parents!
No child has ever thought of that before!
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Mastercard has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms, contrary to media reports and allegations.
Our payment network follows standards based on the rule of law. Put simply, we allow all lawful purchases on our network. At the same time, we require merchants to have appropriate controls to ensure Mastercard cards cannot be used for unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content.
Media contact
Seth Eisen
Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand
Steam and Itch.io are worried about trouble with their payment processors, and Mastercard is not a payment processor.
PC Gamer (www.pcgamer.com)
Mastercard: worried about damaging brand
ALSO Mastercard: torpedos brand harder than the titan submersible implosion -
Nobody on any side has cited any sections of any agreement specifically. The closest we've got is the statement from Stripe who is the payment processor who recently had to turn down business with a womens sexual education charity (despite spending months trying to get to an agreement) and the reason they cited was contractual obligations with banking networks including Visa and Mastercard. They stated they want to be able to process payments for porn companies, and that they're exploring other options, but they couldn't at this time.
From an article posted yesterday
“Mastercard did not communicate with Valve directly, despite our request to do so,” Valve’s statement sent over email to Kotaku reads. “Mastercard communicated with payment processors and their acquiring banks. Payment processors communicated this with Valve, and we replied by outlining Steam’s policy since 2018 of attempting to distribute games that are legal for distribution. Payment processors rejected this, and specifically cited Mastercard’s Rule 5.12.7 and risk to the Mastercard brand.”
