What goal do the payment processors have for doing things like this, is it just that they like knowing that they have the ability to control what you are and aren’t allowed to enjoy? I ask this because normally, when services change their policies, it’s done to improve profits. But from what I can tell, the payment processors can only lose money because they are eliminating potential revenue sources.
I will admit that I have no interest in any of the games that were removed, I’ve never even heard of them before today, but I don’t agree with payment processors having the ability to sensor content over some schizo bullshit.
It could also be the result of government pressure. Which government? No idea, but it may be easier to implement it system wide than try to build a regional filter to ban payments in one country but allow it in others.
Porn-related transactions have a higher than average rate of chargebacks. Maybe post-nut clarity motivates people to say “wait hold on I shouldn’t have spent that money, I must’ve been hacked.” Or maybe it’s people saving face when confronted with a transaction log from their spouse or other family members. Or maybe it’s just the type of transaction that actual card fraudsters gravitate towards, so that there really is a higher percentage of unauthorized transactions.
Gambling-related merchants also have a similar problem with payment processors. For many of them, it’s just straightforward business concerns, not any kind of ethical issue in itself.
The problem with that is that, at least with PayPal, they charge a fee to the service provider (Steam, in this case) for chargebacks. And, from what I’ve heard, that fee is significantly more than the original cost.
Every credit card company charges large fees to the service provider for charge backs. It’s standard practice. This is also leads to service providers straight up perma-banning customers who initiate charge backs instead of resolving a dispute with the provider.
You can literally just “buy” stuff, and put whatever your currency is, in your wallet. so the transaction was already made, to no specific product. How are they able to track that, is utter nonsense. This is just the companies forcing them to do their bidding. I mean if those games have questionable content (and by that I mean pedophilia or zoophilia), I do agree with that, and I feel that is a responsibility from Valve itself, not other companies.
I think it’s not that easy. From what I understand, the payment providers enforce that for the whole store, otherwise they don’t want to be involved. Quite shitty, but they have enough weight to pull shit like that off.
So what you’re saying is we need a religious themed sex game? I think I follow. You have to fight your way through the 12 apostles and then you and Jesus bang. Its like Mortal Kombat, but with sandals and a lot of baby oil.
New market opportunity! Steam has been banned from participating, meaning even a crappy quality platform can now compete. Though, payment processing will be the hitch, I would guess…
This is so annoying. Even though I’m not a fan of porn games on the whole, it is extremely irritating that payment systems can decide how and when you can spend your own fucking money. We’re not seven, anymore. We can take care of ourselves.
It smacks of the idiotic “babyproofing” of clearly adult spaces everywhere except bars, these days. Antiquated moral panics, just like 1954’s lavender scare all over again.
This explains why I can’t buy games right now. I tried to use PayPal and it failed but now my account seems to be blocked from any purchase. Not even direct card. When I asked support they demanded a screenshot of my cart.
Dude, Gabe, I just want to play outer wilds. There’s no tits, let alone incest in Outer wilds. I’ve never bought a porn game in my life. Why am I being punished for a billionaire company’s moral panic?
It’s funny, Patreon cracked down years ago on Incest content forcing indie porn devs to do *nudge *nudge *wink she’s your “Landlady” stuff. I guess paypal just assumed Steam was cleaner until now.
Because many “players” are refunding after a fap, which is logged and reviewed. Also, suspicious or new transactions are often flagged and reviewed. So a lot of such side content is being pushed in front of the banks and payment processors by horny clients who unwittingly expose their kinks.
Seem like an easy solution would be to have certain transactions be nonrefundable.
I say easy, but I guess it would involve quite a bit of software changes, and then you’d also have to deal with angry customers who ignored numerous warnings that a purchase would be final.
That’s even less consumer friendly.
If you purchase a game and it turns out to be shovelware that barely works and has a bunch of gamed reviews on the store page? Oh too bad sap, you got conned this is non-refundable.
Consumers had to fight for games that do refundable, I don’t think we should be quick to consider loopholes.
I can’t imagine buying a porn game on Steam. And even if I did, incest holds no interest to me.
Even so, I absolutely fucking hate this crap. Payment processors are killing off content despite the producers and consumers of the content being completely fine with it. This should be a Net Neutrality issue. But I’m not seeing anywhere near the same outrage over it that there was over ISPs doing the exact same thing.
I remember someone had a reply on something that touched on incest porn and they where like. I see it all the time but when you put in blond big boobed blowjob and the title is mom son its like who cares or such. So much porn seems to just get relabeled when it comes to incest porn. This is now a brother and sister or mom/son or father/daughter. It is wierd how that seemed to just blow up in popularity. I mean I think its been that way for a few years but I swear I did not see so much like pre covid.
I think it has blown up in popularity because many more people nowadays have divorced parents and grew up in a blended family. I bet many guys have fantasized about fucking their step mom or older step sister and I bet even dads have fantasized about fucking the oldest step daughter who was already an adult when he married her mother.
One theory I heard is that during Covid, the outside world became scary and strangers unattainable. So the only accessible women are the ones that live with you. In many scenarios, people are step-siblings just to explain away why does a shut-in guy have a hot girl in his home.
You do realize that step family aren’t blood relatives right? A horny teenager who met his older step sister for the first time when he was 15 and she 17 doesn’t have a familial bond with her, it’s just another hot girl for him. So nothing Alabama about that.
My theory is that it’s because people who are into it must be really into it, but people who aren’t into it are very good at ignoring the fact that it’s titled like that or that there might be one or two throwaway lines implying it (especially when it’s “step”). So there’s an incentive for uploaders to title things like that and for creators to add a little nod in the video towards it (without adding too much incest roleplay) because it draws in a large audience and actively turns away very few.
Kind of cuts both ways though, doesn’t it? The reverse of this argument is saying that the payment processors must work with Valve no matter what they host. Agree it disagree with them, but don’t the payment processors get a say in what they do or do not want to process?
No, they should have zero say because they have weaseled themselves into a position that is the equivalent of a utility or whatever ISP are classified as. Their only involvement is whether they complete transactions between parties in a legal way.
Agree it disagree with them, but don’t the payment processors get a say in what they do or do not want to process?
Absolutely not. Power companies don’t get a say in what the power they supply their users with is used for, same for water companies and even ISPs. If they really, really want to enforce rules on what they will and will not process payments for, they can accept legal responsibility when they process a payment on a gun someone uses to shoot up a school or what have you. But they cant have it both ways.
In the US at least, they actually do, in many cases. If you are in a drought region, your water utilities can be shut off if you’re wasting it all on watering a lawn or filling a swimming pool, for example. ISPs cut people off all the time for torrenting, sometimes even if it’s not pirated content (though it was ruled not long ago that ISPs aren’t utilities anyways).
Power and water are public utilities (as is internet, in some parts of the world but not all). Payment processing is not. If you want to argue that it should be, we’d likely agree.
They may not be de jure be public utilities but they are de facto public utilities. It is essentially impossible to live in society without them, and outside their collusionist cabal there are no real alternatives.
I mean, when your service is fundamental enough to the economy, and centralized enough to make just going to an alternative a major hassle, if an alternative without a similar policy even exists, then why should they get that say? The power to effectively ban the sale of certain types of thing, or force media platforms to censor certain types of content, is the sort of power we generally reserve for governments, not private entities that can do whatever they want. Honestly they’re important enough these days that they should basically be treated like some sort of public utility in my view.
Well as long as they are independent businesses, why shouldn’t they?
If your argument seems to be “they are too crucial to be independent businesses,” I don’t think we’d disagree too much, but the fact is that they are right now.
I don’t think that businesses, not being individuals, should actually have the same rights as individuals I guess. I don’t really agree with the idea that a corporation should be able to do whatever it likes by default, simply because I think corporations in general have too much power to be trusted with such.
It was more like hyperbole on my part, I was using that as a catch all for whatever kinds of things a business could abuse it’s position by doing. I didn’t want to just say “be able to do businesses or not do business with whoever they want”, because I wanted to say something more broad than just applying to payment processors, even if choosing not to do business with someone and thereby shutting them out of much of the economy is the way a payment processor would do this .
Sure, but there are so few payment processors that even a single one refusing to do business with you can be a real problem for a business. Even Valve, a big and influential company, has little choice but to capitulate to PayPal. Visa and Mastercard have even more power.
There are too many problems with crypto for it to be a viable alternative, but there’s no good way for me to pay a business (when cash isn’t an option) that doesn’t require the involvement of a third party. Limited competition means those third parties have too much power. I don’t know what it is, but there has to be a solution for that.
They’re saying that is the reverse argument, not the state of things today. As in, the only solution to the above would be to force payment processors to do business with anyone and everyone.
This doesn’t directly affect me, either, but does anyone know if it applies to all of the Interactive Sex - Futanari Incest DLC, too!? For Episodes 1-4!? Like, if any of my friends have large amounts of FutaCoinz from years of Season Passes, I wonder if they’ll still be able to spend them…?
Yeah, but I like paying people to make things, and it’s not their fault. This will ultimately mean less of these things get made. For incest games, that’s no great loss, but I hate the precedent.
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Payment processors and financial institutions sure do seem to hold disproportionate amounts of power.
payment providers are way to powerful
Any game featuring most kinds of animal, including people, is evidence that sex occurred. We should ban those too.
If a game exists, a person made it and that person exists because someone had sex. It’s disgusting how people pay to play that sort of filth.
What goal do the payment processors have for doing things like this, is it just that they like knowing that they have the ability to control what you are and aren’t allowed to enjoy? I ask this because normally, when services change their policies, it’s done to improve profits. But from what I can tell, the payment processors can only lose money because they are eliminating potential revenue sources.
I will admit that I have no interest in any of the games that were removed, I’ve never even heard of them before today, but I don’t agree with payment processors having the ability to sensor content over some schizo bullshit.
It could also be the result of government pressure. Which government? No idea, but it may be easier to implement it system wide than try to build a regional filter to ban payments in one country but allow it in others.
I guess so, most (if not all) governments do like abusing their power.
Porn-related transactions have a higher than average rate of chargebacks. Maybe post-nut clarity motivates people to say “wait hold on I shouldn’t have spent that money, I must’ve been hacked.” Or maybe it’s people saving face when confronted with a transaction log from their spouse or other family members. Or maybe it’s just the type of transaction that actual card fraudsters gravitate towards, so that there really is a higher percentage of unauthorized transactions.
Gambling-related merchants also have a similar problem with payment processors. For many of them, it’s just straightforward business concerns, not any kind of ethical issue in itself.
The problem with that is that, at least with PayPal, they charge a fee to the service provider (Steam, in this case) for chargebacks. And, from what I’ve heard, that fee is significantly more than the original cost.
Every credit card company charges large fees to the service provider for charge backs. It’s standard practice. This is also leads to service providers straight up perma-banning customers who initiate charge backs instead of resolving a dispute with the provider.
Chargebacks are incredibly expensive, yes.
Copy Epic’s model of selling “Sbucks” or similar, which you then spend on those games. Problem solved.
We already have Steam Marketplace. You can buy stuff with your Steam Wallet.
You can literally just “buy” stuff, and put whatever your currency is, in your wallet. so the transaction was already made, to no specific product. How are they able to track that, is utter nonsense. This is just the companies forcing them to do their bidding. I mean if those games have questionable content (and by that I mean pedophilia or zoophilia), I do agree with that, and I feel that is a responsibility from Valve itself, not other companies.
I think it’s not that easy. From what I understand, the payment providers enforce that for the whole store, otherwise they don’t want to be involved. Quite shitty, but they have enough weight to pull shit like that off.
This has ruined my life.
You don’t realize it yet, but you have been saavvveeeeddddd by these wonnerful deee-sigh-pulls of Jesus! Can I get an “AMEN,” brothers & sisters?!?
🙄
So what you’re saying is we need a religious themed sex game? I think I follow. You have to fight your way through the 12 apostles and then you and Jesus bang. Its like Mortal Kombat, but with sandals and a lot of baby oil.
That’d mean Jesus was at least bi, if not outright gay. Hmm… might just test the waters with him in order to watch MAGAts completely lose their shit…
I just want to jack off to video games and feel bad about it after. Why is the world intent on interfering with my tear jerking???
They want to that bad? Why not remove those payment options for those games? There are a load of other payment options besides VISA and Mastercard…
That’s not the threat. Payment processor says they have to form their entire store according to their whims or lose all credit card using customers.
New market opportunity! Steam has been banned from participating, meaning even a crappy quality platform can now compete. Though, payment processing will be the hitch, I would guess…
That’s bad imo
This is so annoying. Even though I’m not a fan of porn games on the whole, it is extremely irritating that payment systems can decide how and when you can spend your own fucking money. We’re not seven, anymore. We can take care of ourselves.
It smacks of the idiotic “babyproofing” of clearly adult spaces everywhere except bars, these days. Antiquated moral panics, just like 1954’s lavender scare all over again.
This explains why I can’t buy games right now. I tried to use PayPal and it failed but now my account seems to be blocked from any purchase. Not even direct card. When I asked support they demanded a screenshot of my cart.
Dude, Gabe, I just want to play outer wilds. There’s no tits, let alone incest in Outer wilds. I’ve never bought a porn game in my life. Why am I being punished for a billionaire company’s moral panic?
It’s funny, Patreon cracked down years ago on Incest content forcing indie porn devs to do *nudge *nudge *wink she’s your “Landlady” stuff. I guess paypal just assumed Steam was cleaner until now.
And then they release an “unofficial patch”.
While this doesn’t directly affect me, I really hate that a payment processor I don’t even use can dictate what is and is not acceptable speech.
Wonder where they stand on The Witcher I?
Why do they even get to know which games people buy? It should just show them “Steam purchase” and nothing else.
Money laundering and anti terrorism laws would be my guess.
Those payment processors can just look at the store and see that it sells smut. Those payment processors do their own due diligence.
Because many “players” are refunding after a fap, which is logged and reviewed. Also, suspicious or new transactions are often flagged and reviewed. So a lot of such side content is being pushed in front of the banks and payment processors by horny clients who unwittingly expose their kinks.
The post nut clarity of realizing that buying that porn game was not such a great idea
If a large number of refunds came from a single source it seems like Steam would be the one addressing the issue, not payment processors.
Seem like an easy solution would be to have certain transactions be nonrefundable.
I say easy, but I guess it would involve quite a bit of software changes, and then you’d also have to deal with angry customers who ignored numerous warnings that a purchase would be final.
That’s even less consumer friendly. If you purchase a game and it turns out to be shovelware that barely works and has a bunch of gamed reviews on the store page? Oh too bad sap, you got conned this is non-refundable.
Consumers had to fight for games that do refundable, I don’t think we should be quick to consider loopholes.
I can’t imagine buying a porn game on Steam. And even if I did, incest holds no interest to me.
Even so, I absolutely fucking hate this crap. Payment processors are killing off content despite the producers and consumers of the content being completely fine with it. This should be a Net Neutrality issue. But I’m not seeing anywhere near the same outrage over it that there was over ISPs doing the exact same thing.
I remember someone had a reply on something that touched on incest porn and they where like. I see it all the time but when you put in blond big boobed blowjob and the title is mom son its like who cares or such. So much porn seems to just get relabeled when it comes to incest porn. This is now a brother and sister or mom/son or father/daughter. It is wierd how that seemed to just blow up in popularity. I mean I think its been that way for a few years but I swear I did not see so much like pre covid.
I think it has blown up in popularity because many more people nowadays have divorced parents and grew up in a blended family. I bet many guys have fantasized about fucking their step mom or older step sister and I bet even dads have fantasized about fucking the oldest step daughter who was already an adult when he married her mother.
One theory I heard is that during Covid, the outside world became scary and strangers unattainable. So the only accessible women are the ones that live with you. In many scenarios, people are step-siblings just to explain away why does a shut-in guy have a hot girl in his home.
And what about all the people who don’t live in Alabama trailer parks? Or they’re just so many of them that they provide an industry all on their own.
You do realize that step family aren’t blood relatives right? A horny teenager who met his older step sister for the first time when he was 15 and she 17 doesn’t have a familial bond with her, it’s just another hot girl for him. So nothing Alabama about that.
It’s seemed pretty popular to me since basically the beginning of the internet.
My theory is that it’s because people who are into it must be really into it, but people who aren’t into it are very good at ignoring the fact that it’s titled like that or that there might be one or two throwaway lines implying it (especially when it’s “step”). So there’s an incentive for uploaders to title things like that and for creators to add a little nod in the video towards it (without adding too much incest roleplay) because it draws in a large audience and actively turns away very few.
Well if you are having to watch on mute anyway, not like you even know the plot…
Of course you miss out on the narrative masterpiece of things like lemon stealing whores …
Dare I ask for context?
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/lemon-stealing-whores
Kind of cuts both ways though, doesn’t it? The reverse of this argument is saying that the payment processors must work with Valve no matter what they host. Agree it disagree with them, but don’t the payment processors get a say in what they do or do not want to process?
No, they should have zero say because they have weaseled themselves into a position that is the equivalent of a utility or whatever ISP are classified as. Their only involvement is whether they complete transactions between parties in a legal way.
Absolutely not. Power companies don’t get a say in what the power they supply their users with is used for, same for water companies and even ISPs. If they really, really want to enforce rules on what they will and will not process payments for, they can accept legal responsibility when they process a payment on a gun someone uses to shoot up a school or what have you. But they cant have it both ways.
In the US at least, they actually do, in many cases. If you are in a drought region, your water utilities can be shut off if you’re wasting it all on watering a lawn or filling a swimming pool, for example. ISPs cut people off all the time for torrenting, sometimes even if it’s not pirated content (though it was ruled not long ago that ISPs aren’t utilities anyways).
Power and water are public utilities (as is internet, in some parts of the world but not all). Payment processing is not. If you want to argue that it should be, we’d likely agree.
They may not be de jure be public utilities but they are de facto public utilities. It is essentially impossible to live in society without them, and outside their collusionist cabal there are no real alternatives.
I mean, when your service is fundamental enough to the economy, and centralized enough to make just going to an alternative a major hassle, if an alternative without a similar policy even exists, then why should they get that say? The power to effectively ban the sale of certain types of thing, or force media platforms to censor certain types of content, is the sort of power we generally reserve for governments, not private entities that can do whatever they want. Honestly they’re important enough these days that they should basically be treated like some sort of public utility in my view.
Well as long as they are independent businesses, why shouldn’t they?
If your argument seems to be “they are too crucial to be independent businesses,” I don’t think we’d disagree too much, but the fact is that they are right now.
I don’t think that businesses, not being individuals, should actually have the same rights as individuals I guess. I don’t really agree with the idea that a corporation should be able to do whatever it likes by default, simply because I think corporations in general have too much power to be trusted with such.
Come on, that’s a bit of a stawman because I’m not in any way suggesting that businesses should be able to do whatever they like.
It was more like hyperbole on my part, I was using that as a catch all for whatever kinds of things a business could abuse it’s position by doing. I didn’t want to just say “be able to do businesses or not do business with whoever they want”, because I wanted to say something more broad than just applying to payment processors, even if choosing not to do business with someone and thereby shutting them out of much of the economy is the way a payment processor would do this .
Sure, but there are so few payment processors that even a single one refusing to do business with you can be a real problem for a business. Even Valve, a big and influential company, has little choice but to capitulate to PayPal. Visa and Mastercard have even more power.
There are too many problems with crypto for it to be a viable alternative, but there’s no good way for me to pay a business (when cash isn’t an option) that doesn’t require the involvement of a third party. Limited competition means those third parties have too much power. I don’t know what it is, but there has to be a solution for that.
Lol what? They’re being forced to do business with Valve?
Yeah, nah… They could just not process payments for them anymore. Problem solved.
But that’s the entire crux of this situation. They are threatening to do that, and people are upset about that.
They’re saying that is the reverse argument, not the state of things today. As in, the only solution to the above would be to force payment processors to do business with anyone and everyone.
Agreed, this shit sucks. The credit card companies hold far too much power over what is considered viable commerce.
This doesn’t directly affect me, either, but does anyone know if it applies to all of the Interactive Sex - Futanari Incest DLC, too!? For Episodes 1-4!? Like, if any of my friends have large amounts of FutaCoinz from years of Season Passes, I wonder if they’ll still be able to spend them…?
I don’t know if I want to try to find out if that is satire or actual things…
yarrrr me maties.
Yeah, but I like paying people to make things, and it’s not their fault. This will ultimately mean less of these things get made. For incest games, that’s no great loss, but I hate the precedent.
Rip Sex Villagers
Damn it… I was really looking forward to Brother Mother Buttfucker 2.
Is that a new song from PSY?