Oh, interesting! I know the poem. But I find it a harsh comparison to the situation about Valve's new regulation. And I did not see it as such a highly-charged political topic. But apparently it is.
To me it does not look like "a monolitic corporation", as you can still buy games elsewhere. But I surely see the influence that the big banks/transactors have on Valve here. - But how would you limit this? Any technical solutions?
On the other hand, if Valve would have implemented stricter rules for critical games themselves earlier, we would not have that problem/discussion now. (Please also see my other answer below.)
Edit: Typo

To be clear, I'm talking primarily about Visa and Mastercard, the payment processors, not Valve. Those two companies have a pretty big stranglehold on the payment processing industry outside of possibly east Asia? I heard japan has their own payment processor, I assume it isn't limited to just Japan.

How to use Debit or e-transfer to pay for Steam games?

CC companies have a really easy retort in that they operate in jurisdictions where these things are illegal

I think people are mostly upset about some bank telling them how they are allowed to spend their money (by restricting what is available for sale). What if those big banks decide that, say, R-rated movies are too much of a liability for them and demand retailers stop carrying them? I'm not sure what an alternative would be, but allowing a bank to decide what you can spend your money on is a bad precedent given that everyone is basically required to have a bank account these days.

Ok, yes. They are quite "heavy-wheight". And I might agree with their action now, but maybe another time it might be problematic for me. Also, that's how Capitalism works: The one with the money decide. But then, we should put pressure on them and not Valve! And the question remains: How would you solve that technically? (This is what the community is about. And I am looking for solutions, not problems here.)

And the easy retort to that is that they don’t apply Chinese censorship globally. Only in China. Regional laws only apply regionally.

The article mischaracterized the petition. If you read the change.org petition it's about protesting Visa, Mastercard, and moral advocacy groups. The petition even goes as far as to point out the hypocrisy of the decision.

These same payment processors allowed platforms like OnlyFans to operate with minimal oversight, despite multiple credible reports and lawsuits alleging the presence of real sexual abuse content involving real-life minors. That is a criminal failure of responsibility. Yet, when it comes to entirely fictional depictions, these same companies act swiftly — shutting down creators, restricting access, and acting as global censors.

I wish I had a technical solution but I really don't. As much as I can't stand cryptocurrency in the way that it's being implemented, this is the kind of problem blockchain technology could potentially eliminate. I think the bigger problem is social - people trust credit card companies because of things like charge backs and fraud protection. Shopping in a store is one thing but when you're buying from a faceless digital store front people seem to want a third-party to secure things and protect their money.

We want our pron and we want it now!

They have regional pricing already, regional content bans should be easy enough.

Worth also noting is that Monero also, not too long ago...

They specifically rewrote/updated the uh, block solver problem that miners solve for a reward...

They updated it to make ASIC mining basically not work.

Because they do not want it to be feasible for some rich assholes to build an ASIC mining farm.

They want mining to be distributed, done by individuals, in remotely collectivized mining pools.

Yes, it is individually, not as energy efficient as PoS system... but if you have a PoW system, that is specifically difficult to scale a large scale mining operation for...

Well, then basically no one does that.

Go lookup how much power gets thrown into Bitcoin or Eth., vs Monero.

Yep, they have much larger transaction volumes, but they are also way, way, way more energy intensive due to at least in significant part, it being profitable to run a large scale mining op.

And, not having people able to run huge mining ops, also just keeps things more stable on the value/price/txn speed front.

Monero is the least worst of all cryptocurrencies in terms of being an actual, private, secure currency.

Everything else is to a different degree, some kind of a speculative investment asset, the major ones also all happen to be orders of magnitude worse at overall energy consumption, which is largely used to just do crypto forex trading... people still do not really buy anything tangible with BTC or ETH, outside of either basically, or just actually, some kind of scam.

actually what you want is card network, but even then that won’t do it

i gave a whole big rundown of why this is all way harder than everyone expects here

payments is an absolute minefield with so many layers of BS that gets closer to arcane wizardry and back room deals the deeper you go

I keep seeing this suggested and while I think that would be amazing I really don't think its likely. These incumbents are set up to make things difficult for new entrants to their market. With political will and engagement it would be possible, but in the current world political environment these payment processors would simply buy the right politicians & court officials to ensure that any legislative challenges would be killed in the nest.

In the world we are in right now we need to instead focus on making the payment processors bend to the will of the majority not a vocal minority.

We also need to start finding strategies to fight back against paedophilia as an accepted permission slip to let the worst people in the world get away with whatever they want. If its not a disqualifying status for the office of president of the US, then why does the existence of paedophiles mean we (vast majority not paedophiles I hope) have to sacrifice our rights, our privacy, and our free speech?

Just open bank in every country should do.

They would have to roughly make their own form of PayPal, alongside their own bank.

If you didn't know, PayPal technically isn't a bank, it and Venmo use Synchrony Bank... which is an actual bank.

If they did something like that, it could work, but it would have to be at a similar scale as PayPal, that is to say, massive....

Because doing this would/could basically be the nuclear option:

MC and Visa and PayPal would/could drop them.

So, they'd have to basically develop a massive project, in total secrecy.

... Which is something Valve has arguably done a number of times, they are notoriously opaque as a company.

......

Sort of as you mention, they already have a barebones backend framework to scale up from the steam gift card / user gift card balance system.

I am... uncertain if their backend for that already does or does not include an actual legally defined bank though.

...

Problem is that this would necessitate a massively costly undertaking, as well as ongoing maintenance costs, and Valve is also notorious for basically running on what most other firms would consider a skeleton crew for the size and scope of what they do.

Unless I'm mistaken, I thought Debit is usually through visa or MasterCard, for security.

Unless you mean like... A direct line to your bank account. Which is extremely risky.

So yeah, being mad at Valve is stupid, people need to be mad st MC and Visa and probably also PayPal.

Being mad at Valve is shooting the messenger.

Fortunately the petition is at least correctly aimed at the payment processors.

But also...

If MC and Visa won't budge on their positions, well, if Valve then makes an alt payment system for adult only games...

MC and Visa go, oh, hey, you're violating our guidelines, we no longer support Valve/Steam, now no one can buy any game.

This is a MAD situation, Valve would have to come up with a comprehensive payment processing system for everything, in secret, and then deploy it all at once.

MC and Visa go, oh, hey, you’re violating our guidelines

No, that is not how that would work. People cannot buy games that violate MasterCard's and Visa's policies using MasterCard or Visa. If someone buys the game using a different payment method, crypto or a direct bank link, it would not violate MasterCard or Visa's policies because they had no part of the transaction.

Being mad at Valve is shooting the messenger.

Being mad at Valve is reasonable, because they did not have to ban all games that their payment processors disagree with. They would need to remove the option to pay with those for certain games, and the process of filtering them out and deciding would take a lot of time, money, and labor. It's easier for valve to just ban it outright, but it is not the right thing to do. Valve is not the reason it started, but there is reason to be mad at Valve as well.

Are you sure you're from lemmy.ml...?

So, I wanted to see if I could find a list of games that were removed. I found this https://steam-tracker.com/ which is not specific to this event, but useful to keep track.