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The group responsible is “Collective Shout”, the same org has targeted Steam before.
There are calls on social media now to contact Mastercard, Visa and co. and file complaints.
First they came for the incest/rape games, which most people somewhat agree with (although the principle is still wrong)
Next up is all nsfw games.
After that, it’ll be mainstream and indie games altogether. This never stops with just one “victory” for these groups.
It’s going to come down to anything with even a whisper of LGBTQ+/minority/disability/etc representation, just like with books.
They start with the “egregious” content (not that it’s necessarily right to remove that either), then narrow it down until it shapes up into hegemonic conformity and systemic oppression via media (there’s a term for it, kind of like stochastic violence but not quite that I can’t remember atm).
BDSM games have been targeted as well for “sexual violence”. Only straight, vanilla PiV missionary for the express purposes of having children within the confines of marriage where nobody is enjoying it porn will be left.
it doesn’t even stop there - it will be used to punish people who do not exactly like it’s expected, with the mere accusation of playing/reading/watching/thinking something “unchristian” as reason.
Steam and Itch are both victims in this matter, their hands are tied. If the payment processors simply refuse to process any payments unless they comply, there’s no point in trying to put pressure on them. I’m pretty sure they were happy to take people’s money for these games and still would be, if they could so while saving face.
Everyone should read the open letter that’s linked in the itch statement, to have a fully informed opinion.
There definitely is a line. Everyone can choose were they draw it. You don’t have to draw it in a way where you end up defending things that are kinda messed up.
There is definitely a hill worth fighting on in that area. I don’t think it’s this exact one.
My line is: any kind of fictional content is ok. If nobodies hurt, then there is no crime. And in practice being maniac in games doesn’t translate to being maniac irl. There might be some exceptions of crazy people being inspired by games to do crimes, but they should be dealt with on case-by-case basis using just regular law and law enforcement.
I feel like there is nuance that is really getting lost on some people and that is the way that people engage with these games.
Let me try to explain: I like playing NSFW games - even with tags like Rape, Corruption or the occasional Incest. Without trying to go into too much detail, it’s simply erotic to me in the correct context.
Now, do I know that these topics are incredibly taboo and/or offensive in real life? Yes, of course. I keep these things private and never put them out in real life. I would rather noone knows about what I do privately in my own time at my own PC.
The way I see it, I simply paid an artist to draw something erotic and write a good story and/or program some gameplay attached to it. And once I stop engaging with the videogame, I also do not have any desire to recreate anything in real life. The same way that I don’t go around killing people after playing GTA, I also don’t go around assaulting women because I played a videogame where these things happen.
And that’s exactly what worries me - the people pushing this narrative, genuinely think I would want to start reenacting something I’ve seen in a videogame happen. That is complete nonsense.
The same way that I don’t go around killing people after playing GTA, I also don’t go around assaulting women because I played a videogame where these things happen.
Right. That’s fair and I’ll believe it.
Do you generally think there is any limit at all, in any type of media that crosses lines and shouldn’t exist? Think “liveleak” stuff from when that was around.
Or do you consider this game topic just not crossing that line?
The idea that what you see online has an effect on what you do offline, is not that far fetched is it? I mean, I don’t know if it’s true and I guess you could argue it could work in both directions too. Do people blow off steam online so they don’t have to enact their darkest fantasties IRL. Or does the online material encourage or normalize these things? It could also be so that this works different for different people. It let’s one person blow of steam, while it pushes someone else over the edge to do something horrendous. And if that is the case, is it fair to take it away from those who are not negatively influenced by it, to prevent those in whom it inspires bad actions from seeing it. I guess we’d need research on the matter, I don’t know if it exist or how reliable it is. But I don’t think it’s a nonsensical question to ask what the effects are.
Jesus Christ we can’t be back to this old chestnut.
We cannot, and do not, standardize society’s guard rails around the most extreme edge cases.
Leave it back with Jack Thompson in the late 90s-early 00s where it belongs. The horse has already been jellied by repeated blunt force trauma more than a decade ago. You’re just punching a horse shaped divot into the dirt at this point.
The question is if it’s edge cases. People suffer sexual trauma in very large numbers and working in psychiatry has taught me how incredibly harmful it can be. If this kind of material could help prevent sexual trauma, we should definitely allow it. If research shows that it makes problems far worse, we should consider limiting access to it. I am not saying either is the case, I am saying I don’t understand what is wrong with the question itself.
This restated question is not the problem directly.
The problem is the entire discussion/concept of “exposure to a dangerous idea in a pretend context maybe might maybe make someone more likely to emulate it in reality” when there has been little to no evidence found supporting that concept. Additionally the non-proportional amount of concern given to videogames in relationship to this concept as compared to literally any other form of media.
If there was even one iota of connection between “exposure to horrible things in media” (or even “pretending to do horrible things in a pretend context”) and “doing horrible things in real life”, the world would already look considerably different than it does. Militaries would be using these games as “exposure therapy” for soldiers. We’d be seeing crime rates of all sorts shifting in accordance with the media industries. There would already be measurable impacts after the decades of these things existing.
And more so than any of that: This discussion has literally been happening for longer than any of us here have been alive. I’m tired of having it.
Please stop letting the vague idea of “but it might help” override the logic of “but there’s no evidence to support that except a vague gut feeling”.
Moral judgement or suppression of fiction/artistic expression is deeply and profoundly unethical. How you or I or anyone else feels about something that isn’t “real” is inconsequential. If you allow any line to be crossed in this, then every line can and will be crossed.
I’m pretty sure I can find fictional things immoral? Why would it be unethical to have an opinion on fictional things?
Factually, all the lines that you allow to be crossed are crossed and all lines that are collectively defended are usually not crossed. That’s culture. It’s arbitrary and not absolute.
I am specifically saying this, because my democratic country has laws that would also cover these things the letter mentions and would also deem them wrong. The people normally charged with upholding that law, are just dumb, “not from the internet” and overworked with other stuff.
Please check what laws your country has around the topic of glorification of crime and violence.
We also don’t know what the payment processors told itch and steam.
Itch and steam are doing what they are doing as a blanket move, to create a situation where they can stay in business for now and deal with the problem at all.
My bet would be that they “allowed nsfw stuff”, turned a blind eye, and now suddenly noticed they actually have a really big legal problem, with actual laws and the fact that it was an NGO and not an official legal institution that started this, was dumb luck and now they mostly need time and cover their own arse.
And I fully support the opinion that it shouldn’t be the payment processors forcing these sorts of things. But reality is messy and if this was the path of least resistance to get something done, such is life.
If GTA V is allowed, I’m pretty certain most of what we’ve seen from NSFW games is as well. Regardless, a payment company should not be acting as judge for such things, just as media companies should not act as judge on copyright infringement on YouTube.
There are specific games in steam’s case I’m very ok with getting removed, but at the same time its very fucked up that we’re in a situation where the world is beholden to payment processors. Ideally this would be a case where they go directly to Valve and say “hey we think you should take a look at your content policy and at these specific games” and Valve makes the call from there on where they want to draw the line.
The main stuff I saw removed was related to incest and rape, not in a “it contains it” way. Somehow Corruption of Champions 2 escaped the ban hammer which makes me think those games probably took things pretty far, or were basically built to simulate assaulting people.
For reference, CoC2 is uh… Well when you lose in combat the enemy fucks you, and vice versa. It’s like a lot of fetish stuff too. So not that I know exactly what’s in the games, but I feel like you have to really be trying to outdo CoC2.
Edit: I’m not criticizing CoC2 btw, it’s fine. Its… I don’t wanna say tasteful but non con is like one of 90 things you can or cannot opt into. Idk how to put it. It’s an actual game that happens to have non con content I guess is what I mean.
In childhood and teenage years I played a lot of games like Carmageddon, Postal, Grand Theft Auto. In first two games slaughtering innocent people en masse is part of gameplay loop. Yet I somehow didn’t grow up to be maniac, and mostly didn’t even hurt anyone physically in my whole life. It’s games, fiction, you’re not supposed to take any of that seriously or to project it onto your real life.
I’m aware, I promise you that, I’m not saying games make you violent or awful. That argument has been annoying me to hell and back my whole life. To be honest I’ve not heard the argument for video games made for porn games before, but yeah, fair. So yeah. I don’t like those specific rape/incest games, they’re kinda yuck to me, but you do you.
Out of curiosity do you think there should be a line? Where would it be? Maybe like only explicitly illegal content is ever removed? (I wanna say thats how ao3 works) Or is steam having final say your preference? What if steam decided to make changes on its own?
If I had my way, I’d just have filters and tags, and let steam manage their storefront. I might disagree on how they do it, but that’s up to them(or it should be). It just feels weird and loopholey that a payment processor is making this sort of overarching decision.
Out of curiosity do you think there should be a line? Where would it be? Maybe like only explicitly illegal content is ever removed?
For me the line would be fictional-vs-non-fictional. So if a game contains photos or videos of actual people being hurt or abused IRL, that is illegal. But anything fictional is fine. For shocking/kinky stuff, there might be some special tags, and tag-based extra warnings like “this game contains scenes of …, do you want to open the page?”. So when you find and open any game with certain tag you get a warning corresponding to this tag. After confirmation it might remember your consent and enable some flags in the options to not bother you next time. But you can go into the options any moment and hide it all again if you decide you don’t want to see this kind of stuff in future. Also, before you enable/consent to this content, it probably shouldn’t be randomly recommended to you.
So I think that’s all pretty fair, of course including the fact that it should all be legal too.
Does the paradox of tolerance concern you at all? The idea that if you let shitty people have a say they’ll eventually use the bit of tolerance you give them as a tool to take away tolerance of others.
Basically, in theory if you let the nazis have a political party they might win and ban all the other parties, so to keep it fair arguably you should ban them first.
Now applying that to games that are pretty obviously hate games, like the ones the other commenter mentioned, the raping women into obedience game, or a game where you kill a bunch of gay people, the implication is that those games should be banned.
I kinda just wanted your thoughts on the concept. Like for example a game where you play as a school shooter. All good?
Sorry if this is a little philosophical, I just honestly wonder where the line should be for the least amount of harm.
not OP, but for example the first game collective shout went after a few months ago (“no mercy”) was explicitly a game about raping women to make them obedient. this is bad not because its NSFW, it’s bad because it’s rape apologia, and a misogynistic hate game.
to me, it’s not much different than “chad vs the gay nazis”, another hate game (with a pretty self-explanatory name) that was released around the same time and was also quickly delisted.
I wouldn’t be surprised if other games that just got delisted were as bad as no mercy. but also, the blanket banning of anything NSFW (or even just kinky) sets a terrible precedent.
What kills me is in most cases you have to pay for the game, then you have to download the game, then install it and finally play it. It’s not.like the game is going to one day pop into your computer and then force you to play it.
Bottom line. If the game bothers ornoffends you just move on.
And it won’t happen because companies won’t allow them to ban a trillion dollar industry, you knob. Banning adult games isn’t remotely comparable. Most video games rely on violence and it’s too big of an industry to fail, adult games have a tiny following and were an easy target.
They banned adult games?! That means they’ll ban all violent media! They’ll eventually come for all media, they’ll come for our computers, they’ll trap us in cages! It’s a slippery slope!
Meanwhile, on my feed there’s a post directly below this one about a compiler that will give you BSDM messages for good and bad coding and can even be hooked up to a remote butt plug to pleasure you when you compile a successful program.
It’s not just happening recently with Steam and Itch.io, it’s been happening for a while.
Some smutty art creators on Patreon have been chased off that platform because of payment processors telling patreon they’d pull the plug if Patreon kept that type of art on the platform. Those same artists have then reported being unable to set up, for instance, Stripe for their paywalls.
Porn stars have complained about being unable to set up accounts with payment processors.
Same with ad companies that are deathly afraid of being seen next to NSFW images, so for instance Imgur has cracked down on them.
I don’t even understand how they give a shit. Seems like the perfect place for shareholders to want them to make as much money as possible, it’s a limited market.
the payment processors didn’t randomly wake up this week and decide to ban NSFW video games on a power trip.
they are being financially pressured in some way to threaten game platforms that they’ll remove their services completely. the implication of that is they’re worried about losing even more money than they make from payments on game platforms.
from the payment processors perspective, they’re thinking, “okay this is not a hill we want to die on and it’s a small percentage of our business anyway.”
Steam has no power. They are beholden to a very particular monopoly that can get away with anything it wants and is currently being manipulated by unethical evangelical fascists.
The amount of money Valve rakes in with Steam is insane. If itch had even 0.1% of that it would be a much bigger website. Itch had to limit dynamic filtering (like searching for Arcade + Fantasy) to just a few preset tags because of the server load. I wouldn’t be surprised if the number compared to Steam is less than 0.01%. People who want DRM free games generally go to GOG. Hell a lot of DRM free indie/AAA/retro games don’t even get listed on itch, so they get only the tiniest portion of the pie.
That’s why they’re first going after such cases. In Hungary we named this tactic the “goose liver method”. Goose liver is often created by overfeeding geese, which is abuse. A lot of smaller political party, instead of regulating farming, decided to campaign on banning goose liver entirely, while bashing the food item as a “luxury only the rich can afford”.
I know this is more of a serious thing, but I was thinking that I kinda hope these payment processors try to ban some big European company over some puritanical bullshit and then Europe responds with threatening a complete ban on them to put them in line. Ain’t no way any payment processor would ever risk being banned in one of the largest markets in the world.
There are a few smaller EU payment processors. I’d love to see them move into the space Visa/Mc leave behind here but I’m not sure they are “big” enough for it.
This is exactly what it was designed to solve before cryptobros turned it into a pump and dump scheme.
If you want to buy something from seller X that is between you and X and no one else. No goverment, payment processor or other third party can get a cut or stop it for any reason.
So do regular fiat payment processors that are beholden to citizens and not faceless shareholders. Wero and Pix for instance.
Democratic governments are supposed to safeguard your ability to exchange legal tender for legal goods and services. The fact that Visa/MC have a duopoly and a stranglehold on the entire online economy is a major governance failure that needs to be rectified ASAP.
Crypto goes a lot further and says no-one, not even the government, should be able to prevent a transaction from taking place. Not necessarily an invalid idea but it does come with some huge unanswered challenges, such as “what happens when someone makes 1B€ through fraud and refuses to hand over the coins” and “how do we even prevent large-scale fraud in the first place”.
Still, it further highlights just how much power over law payment processors have - a worrying thought that the morality of a company (influenced by problem life nuts) dictates international law.
Edit - autocorrect turned pro life into problem life. I am ok with this.
Visa/MC make up most of their income. They were given the ultimatum of either banning a small group of games, or losing the ability to process payments almost entirely. Itch is not the problem here.
Short term profits? How are they supposed to make any profits if payment processors refuse to process payments to them? They can’t just spin up their own fucking payment processor.
Beyond that, how does limiting the sale of any products make them money?
I swear, were none of you people paying attention when this happened to the right wing ghouls in the lead up to the 2016 election? Nothing of value was lost (or would have been), but Visa, Mastercard, etc have already shown they aren’t above using their position in the transfer of money to enforce their will.
Edit: Can’t believe I forgot about the payment processors playing games with Wikileaks. For shame. Would have been a much better example.
The short term profits of going SFW only to appease payment processors vs. keeping everything but making it crypto only, which in the short term would be disastrous for income, but in the long term it would recover and they’d have independence from censorship.
Instead they chose to keep bigger profits and start deleting accounts.
Tell me again how you’ve not actually read up on the issues with crypto as payment processor.
This shit has already been tried and the issues discussed at length. I think it was Mullvad that stopped accepting BTC and did an extensive writeup on why.
In short: the constantly shifting conversion rates make this unsustainable, as even if they accepted payment in crypto, they have to pay their bills in fiat currency. So their choices are to have crypto prices change literally every page load to reflect the exchange rate, or to just eat extra costs when suddenly 0.51btc goes from being worth $5 when the user pays to being worth $1 when they try to use it for anything else. Even with constantly updating prices, the shifting rates screwing them will still happen. The costs associated with even offering it as a payment type outweigh the actual revenue generated by an extreme order of magnitude, and even privacy/crypto oriented storefronts see something like under 1% of users using the option when it’s available.
And that’s my understanding of the short version.
There’s a big difference between “prioritizing short term profit” and “committing commercial/financial suicide to make a point”.
not really. Russia made their own payment processor because of being kicked out from SWIFT but using their system would be immoral.
it would be interesting if the EU makes their own payment processor.
some people were peddling crypto as a way to regain autonomy but most consumers don’t have the skills to buy it using cash and sideline Visa/MasterCard. it’s also not as accessible to people without technical skills.
Payment processors should not get to police what kind of legal transactions people use their services for. No matter how much you dislike the particular product. And especially since they have an effective monopoly. If we let them go through with this, it would open the gateway for them to enact the kind of control over our consumption that should be exclusive to elected officials.
While i agree the notion its not that black and white.
Payment processors are companies. Where you would draw the line when company can and cant decite how they want to manage their product? In the end its their decition.
We already do it for utilities. A financial company should not be deciding what its users are allowed to spend their own money on except within the confines of law.
This has been happening forever in the adult video space. Certain kinks are verboten and disallowed by payment processors, which leads to a kind of underground gray market where you have to use certain euphemisms to avoid getting flagged.
Hell, if extwitter gets banned, it’d be hilarious because then there would probably be laws changed to ensure only the government can select what gets banned. Though, not so hilarious in the current state of the world.
Tbf it should be banned for being ridiculous but not from a morality standpoint from the payment processors, just bc it’s cringe and has nothing to do with that social media format. That being said, Twitter is getting worse and worse
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First they came for the incest/rape games, which most people somewhat agree with (although the principle is still wrong) Next up is all nsfw games. After that, it’ll be mainstream and indie games altogether. This never stops with just one “victory” for these groups.
It’s going to come down to anything with even a whisper of LGBTQ+/minority/disability/etc representation, just like with books.
They start with the “egregious” content (not that it’s necessarily right to remove that either), then narrow it down until it shapes up into hegemonic conformity and systemic oppression via media (there’s a term for it, kind of like stochastic violence but not quite that I can’t remember atm).
BDSM games have been targeted as well for “sexual violence”. Only straight, vanilla PiV missionary for the express purposes of having children within the confines of marriage where nobody is enjoying it porn will be left.
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it doesn’t even stop there - it will be used to punish people who do not exactly like it’s expected, with the mere accusation of playing/reading/watching/thinking something “unchristian” as reason.
So what do I, a common shlub, do to resist this? Boycott Steam and itch.io until they reinstate the games?
Steam and Itch are both victims in this matter, their hands are tied. If the payment processors simply refuse to process any payments unless they comply, there’s no point in trying to put pressure on them. I’m pretty sure they were happy to take people’s money for these games and still would be, if they could so while saving face.
So what useful action can I take to push back against this censorship?
This is gonna be down vote central but use crypto to pay for games whatever that looks like.
Yes, but.
Everyone should read the open letter that’s linked in the itch statement, to have a fully informed opinion.
There definitely is a line. Everyone can choose were they draw it. You don’t have to draw it in a way where you end up defending things that are kinda messed up.
There is definitely a hill worth fighting on in that area. I don’t think it’s this exact one.
My line is: any kind of fictional content is ok. If nobodies hurt, then there is no crime. And in practice being maniac in games doesn’t translate to being maniac irl. There might be some exceptions of crazy people being inspired by games to do crimes, but they should be dealt with on case-by-case basis using just regular law and law enforcement.
I feel like there is nuance that is really getting lost on some people and that is the way that people engage with these games. Let me try to explain: I like playing NSFW games - even with tags like Rape, Corruption or the occasional Incest. Without trying to go into too much detail, it’s simply erotic to me in the correct context.
Now, do I know that these topics are incredibly taboo and/or offensive in real life? Yes, of course. I keep these things private and never put them out in real life. I would rather noone knows about what I do privately in my own time at my own PC. The way I see it, I simply paid an artist to draw something erotic and write a good story and/or program some gameplay attached to it. And once I stop engaging with the videogame, I also do not have any desire to recreate anything in real life. The same way that I don’t go around killing people after playing GTA, I also don’t go around assaulting women because I played a videogame where these things happen.
And that’s exactly what worries me - the people pushing this narrative, genuinely think I would want to start reenacting something I’ve seen in a videogame happen. That is complete nonsense.
Right. That’s fair and I’ll believe it.
Do you generally think there is any limit at all, in any type of media that crosses lines and shouldn’t exist? Think “liveleak” stuff from when that was around.
Or do you consider this game topic just not crossing that line?
The idea that what you see online has an effect on what you do offline, is not that far fetched is it? I mean, I don’t know if it’s true and I guess you could argue it could work in both directions too. Do people blow off steam online so they don’t have to enact their darkest fantasties IRL. Or does the online material encourage or normalize these things? It could also be so that this works different for different people. It let’s one person blow of steam, while it pushes someone else over the edge to do something horrendous. And if that is the case, is it fair to take it away from those who are not negatively influenced by it, to prevent those in whom it inspires bad actions from seeing it. I guess we’d need research on the matter, I don’t know if it exist or how reliable it is. But I don’t think it’s a nonsensical question to ask what the effects are.
Okay, Jack Thompson
Jesus Christ we can’t be back to this old chestnut.
We cannot, and do not, standardize society’s guard rails around the most extreme edge cases.
Leave it back with Jack Thompson in the late 90s-early 00s where it belongs. The horse has already been jellied by repeated blunt force trauma more than a decade ago. You’re just punching a horse shaped divot into the dirt at this point.
The question is if it’s edge cases. People suffer sexual trauma in very large numbers and working in psychiatry has taught me how incredibly harmful it can be. If this kind of material could help prevent sexual trauma, we should definitely allow it. If research shows that it makes problems far worse, we should consider limiting access to it. I am not saying either is the case, I am saying I don’t understand what is wrong with the question itself.
This restated question is not the problem directly.
The problem is the entire discussion/concept of “exposure to a dangerous idea in a pretend context maybe might maybe make someone more likely to emulate it in reality” when there has been little to no evidence found supporting that concept. Additionally the non-proportional amount of concern given to videogames in relationship to this concept as compared to literally any other form of media.
If there was even one iota of connection between “exposure to horrible things in media” (or even “pretending to do horrible things in a pretend context”) and “doing horrible things in real life”, the world would already look considerably different than it does. Militaries would be using these games as “exposure therapy” for soldiers. We’d be seeing crime rates of all sorts shifting in accordance with the media industries. There would already be measurable impacts after the decades of these things existing.
And more so than any of that: This discussion has literally been happening for longer than any of us here have been alive. I’m tired of having it.
Please stop letting the vague idea of “but it might help” override the logic of “but there’s no evidence to support that except a vague gut feeling”.
Moral judgement or suppression of fiction/artistic expression is deeply and profoundly unethical. How you or I or anyone else feels about something that isn’t “real” is inconsequential. If you allow any line to be crossed in this, then every line can and will be crossed.
I’m pretty sure I can find fictional things immoral? Why would it be unethical to have an opinion on fictional things?
Factually, all the lines that you allow to be crossed are crossed and all lines that are collectively defended are usually not crossed. That’s culture. It’s arbitrary and not absolute.
My line is these payment processors being judge, jury and executioner about what material they deem valid. So I am fundamentally opposed.
I agree, but they aren’t.
I am specifically saying this, because my democratic country has laws that would also cover these things the letter mentions and would also deem them wrong. The people normally charged with upholding that law, are just dumb, “not from the internet” and overworked with other stuff.
Please check what laws your country has around the topic of glorification of crime and violence.
We also don’t know what the payment processors told itch and steam.
Itch and steam are doing what they are doing as a blanket move, to create a situation where they can stay in business for now and deal with the problem at all.
My bet would be that they “allowed nsfw stuff”, turned a blind eye, and now suddenly noticed they actually have a really big legal problem, with actual laws and the fact that it was an NGO and not an official legal institution that started this, was dumb luck and now they mostly need time and cover their own arse.
And I fully support the opinion that it shouldn’t be the payment processors forcing these sorts of things. But reality is messy and if this was the path of least resistance to get something done, such is life.
If GTA V is allowed, I’m pretty certain most of what we’ve seen from NSFW games is as well. Regardless, a payment company should not be acting as judge for such things, just as media companies should not act as judge on copyright infringement on YouTube.
There are specific games in steam’s case I’m very ok with getting removed, but at the same time its very fucked up that we’re in a situation where the world is beholden to payment processors. Ideally this would be a case where they go directly to Valve and say “hey we think you should take a look at your content policy and at these specific games” and Valve makes the call from there on where they want to draw the line.
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The main stuff I saw removed was related to incest and rape, not in a “it contains it” way. Somehow Corruption of Champions 2 escaped the ban hammer which makes me think those games probably took things pretty far, or were basically built to simulate assaulting people.
For reference, CoC2 is uh… Well when you lose in combat the enemy fucks you, and vice versa. It’s like a lot of fetish stuff too. So not that I know exactly what’s in the games, but I feel like you have to really be trying to outdo CoC2.
Edit: I’m not criticizing CoC2 btw, it’s fine. Its… I don’t wanna say tasteful but non con is like one of 90 things you can or cannot opt into. Idk how to put it. It’s an actual game that happens to have non con content I guess is what I mean.
In childhood and teenage years I played a lot of games like Carmageddon, Postal, Grand Theft Auto. In first two games slaughtering innocent people en masse is part of gameplay loop. Yet I somehow didn’t grow up to be maniac, and mostly didn’t even hurt anyone physically in my whole life. It’s games, fiction, you’re not supposed to take any of that seriously or to project it onto your real life.
I’m aware, I promise you that, I’m not saying games make you violent or awful. That argument has been annoying me to hell and back my whole life. To be honest I’ve not heard the argument for video games made for porn games before, but yeah, fair. So yeah. I don’t like those specific rape/incest games, they’re kinda yuck to me, but you do you.
Out of curiosity do you think there should be a line? Where would it be? Maybe like only explicitly illegal content is ever removed? (I wanna say thats how ao3 works) Or is steam having final say your preference? What if steam decided to make changes on its own?
If I had my way, I’d just have filters and tags, and let steam manage their storefront. I might disagree on how they do it, but that’s up to them(or it should be). It just feels weird and loopholey that a payment processor is making this sort of overarching decision.
For me the line would be fictional-vs-non-fictional. So if a game contains photos or videos of actual people being hurt or abused IRL, that is illegal. But anything fictional is fine. For shocking/kinky stuff, there might be some special tags, and tag-based extra warnings like “this game contains scenes of …, do you want to open the page?”. So when you find and open any game with certain tag you get a warning corresponding to this tag. After confirmation it might remember your consent and enable some flags in the options to not bother you next time. But you can go into the options any moment and hide it all again if you decide you don’t want to see this kind of stuff in future. Also, before you enable/consent to this content, it probably shouldn’t be randomly recommended to you.
So I think that’s all pretty fair, of course including the fact that it should all be legal too.
Does the paradox of tolerance concern you at all? The idea that if you let shitty people have a say they’ll eventually use the bit of tolerance you give them as a tool to take away tolerance of others.
Basically, in theory if you let the nazis have a political party they might win and ban all the other parties, so to keep it fair arguably you should ban them first.
Now applying that to games that are pretty obviously hate games, like the ones the other commenter mentioned, the raping women into obedience game, or a game where you kill a bunch of gay people, the implication is that those games should be banned.
I kinda just wanted your thoughts on the concept. Like for example a game where you play as a school shooter. All good?
Sorry if this is a little philosophical, I just honestly wonder where the line should be for the least amount of harm.
The only line is depictions involving real people without their consent. A flexible line is a exploitable one.
It is very clear that MasterVisa will use any and all excuses to eliminate queerness from existence, and my perverse games will be the excuse.
mention of sexual assault
not OP, but for example the first game collective shout went after a few months ago (“no mercy”) was explicitly a game about raping women to make them obedient. this is bad not because its NSFW, it’s bad because it’s rape apologia, and a misogynistic hate game.
to me, it’s not much different than “chad vs the gay nazis”, another hate game (with a pretty self-explanatory name) that was released around the same time and was also quickly delisted.
I wouldn’t be surprised if other games that just got delisted were as bad as no mercy. but also, the blanket banning of anything NSFW (or even just kinky) sets a terrible precedent.
What kills me is in most cases you have to pay for the game, then you have to download the game, then install it and finally play it. It’s not.like the game is going to one day pop into your computer and then force you to play it.
Bottom line. If the game bothers ornoffends you just move on.
Isnt itch.io only indie games?
Once they get rid of the sex they’ll come for the violence.
They’re not going to ban 90% of video games, not everything is a slippery slope
They’ve been trying to ban violent video games for several decades, you knob. They absolutely will come for them.
And it won’t happen because companies won’t allow them to ban a trillion dollar industry, you knob. Banning adult games isn’t remotely comparable. Most video games rely on violence and it’s too big of an industry to fail, adult games have a tiny following and were an easy target.
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Steam is gonna look mighty empty if every game with violence is removed tho.
Meanwhile, on my feed there’s a post directly below this one about a compiler that will give you BSDM messages for good and bad coding and can even be hooked up to a remote butt plug to pleasure you when you compile a successful program.
The Rust community just knows what’s up.
cargo mommy reference
Gives a new meaning to the term “code smell”.
I hope those “Payment processors” get vored alive!
Ew no. Not vore.
Oh, suddenly it’s not ok when it’s not your thing? Yes, vore!
“My thing” is vanilla. But of all the weird yet somehow socially acceptable kinks out there, I will go out of my way to kinkshame vore.
Understandable. Yet it’s such a shame. You can never have what I can have. You can never imagine it.
Puritanical US based payment processors need to stop getting their panties twisted.
It’s an Australian organisation pressuring the payment processors.
It’s not just happening recently with Steam and Itch.io, it’s been happening for a while.
Some smutty art creators on Patreon have been chased off that platform because of payment processors telling patreon they’d pull the plug if Patreon kept that type of art on the platform. Those same artists have then reported being unable to set up, for instance, Stripe for their paywalls.
Porn stars have complained about being unable to set up accounts with payment processors.
Same with ad companies that are deathly afraid of being seen next to NSFW images, so for instance Imgur has cracked down on them.
I don’t even understand how they give a shit. Seems like the perfect place for shareholders to want them to make as much money as possible, it’s a limited market.
They give a shit because they are being pressured into giving a shit by religious nutjobs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morality_in_Media
Why are they capitulating though?
That hasn’t ever stopped other companies from pursuing profits at all other costs.
You’re still thinking within reason. Megalomania doesn’t.
It’s not about money, but power. “The world bent its knee at our word.” Simple as that. People can be and are that crazy.
People with a lot of money doesn’t really want just money. They want power to impose their views over the rest. Money is just a mean to do so.
The shareholders aren’t the ones pressuring the payment processors.
the payment processors didn’t randomly wake up this week and decide to ban NSFW video games on a power trip.
they are being financially pressured in some way to threaten game platforms that they’ll remove their services completely. the implication of that is they’re worried about losing even more money than they make from payments on game platforms.
from the payment processors perspective, they’re thinking, “okay this is not a hill we want to die on and it’s a small percentage of our business anyway.”
Oh wow. Itch is also involved even though I would assume they have less than 1% of Steam’s gross revenues.
I guess they can’t push back like steam can, they’re much smaller. But if they could, would they?
Neither can Steam. Visa and Mastercard make up 90% of all online purchases outside China. If they cut off Steam then Steam is effectively dead.
Just add SEPA payments from Europe and I won’t touch Visa or MC ever again.
Steam didn’t push back at all though…
Steam has no power. They are beholden to a very particular monopoly that can get away with anything it wants and is currently being manipulated by unethical evangelical fascists.
The amount of money Valve rakes in with Steam is insane. If itch had even 0.1% of that it would be a much bigger website. Itch had to limit dynamic filtering (like searching for Arcade + Fantasy) to just a few preset tags because of the server load. I wouldn’t be surprised if the number compared to Steam is less than 0.01%. People who want DRM free games generally go to GOG. Hell a lot of DRM free indie/AAA/retro games don’t even get listed on itch, so they get only the tiniest portion of the pie.
That sounds rough. I follow a few devs/projects on Itch, but I don’t really use their discovery features.
That’s why they’re first going after such cases. In Hungary we named this tactic the “goose liver method”. Goose liver is often created by overfeeding geese, which is abuse. A lot of smaller political party, instead of regulating farming, decided to campaign on banning goose liver entirely, while bashing the food item as a “luxury only the rich can afford”.
I know this is more of a serious thing, but I was thinking that I kinda hope these payment processors try to ban some big European company over some puritanical bullshit and then Europe responds with threatening a complete ban on them to put them in line. Ain’t no way any payment processor would ever risk being banned in one of the largest markets in the world.
There are a few smaller EU payment processors. I’d love to see them move into the space Visa/Mc leave behind here but I’m not sure they are “big” enough for it.
What else do people use itch.io for?
game jams and indie games. there’s no fee for publishing your game there, so it’s the go-to place for indiedevs
Safe and clean games like my own Diarrhea 4.
I never thought I would say this, but cryptocurrency might have a use after all.
This is exactly what it was designed to solve before cryptobros turned it into a pump and dump scheme.
If you want to buy something from seller X that is between you and X and no one else. No goverment, payment processor or other third party can get a cut or stop it for any reason.
Buying drugs and gooner games. That’s the satoshi dream.
So do regular fiat payment processors that are beholden to citizens and not faceless shareholders. Wero and Pix for instance.
Democratic governments are supposed to safeguard your ability to exchange legal tender for legal goods and services. The fact that Visa/MC have a duopoly and a stranglehold on the entire online economy is a major governance failure that needs to be rectified ASAP.
Crypto goes a lot further and says no-one, not even the government, should be able to prevent a transaction from taking place. Not necessarily an invalid idea but it does come with some huge unanswered challenges, such as “what happens when someone makes 1B€ through fraud and refuses to hand over the coins” and “how do we even prevent large-scale fraud in the first place”.
Those ladies are really unpopular at the moment.
Still, it further highlights just how much power over law payment processors have - a worrying thought that the morality of a company (influenced by problem life nuts) dictates international law.
Edit - autocorrect turned pro life into problem life. I am ok with this.
Controlling the money means controlling the world.
RIP Itch.io
Choosing short term profits over long term userbase, it’s all downhill from here.
Visa/MC make up most of their income. They were given the ultimatum of either banning a small group of games, or losing the ability to process payments almost entirely. Itch is not the problem here.
Short term profits? How are they supposed to make any profits if payment processors refuse to process payments to them? They can’t just spin up their own fucking payment processor.
Beyond that, how does limiting the sale of any products make them money?
I swear, were none of you people paying attention when this happened to the right wing ghouls in the lead up to the 2016 election? Nothing of value was lost (or would have been), but Visa, Mastercard, etc have already shown they aren’t above using their position in the transfer of money to enforce their will.
Edit: Can’t believe I forgot about the payment processors playing games with Wikileaks. For shame. Would have been a much better example.
Itch players and devs turning against the itch staff instead of the payment processors is like the friggin ouroboros of activism.
Except an ouroboros can keep going round and round. What these people want would just implode the site in a day.
The short term profits of going SFW only to appease payment processors vs. keeping everything but making it crypto only, which in the short term would be disastrous for income, but in the long term it would recover and they’d have independence from censorship.
Instead they chose to keep bigger profits and start deleting accounts.
Tell me again how you’ve not actually read up on the issues with crypto as payment processor.
This shit has already been tried and the issues discussed at length. I think it was Mullvad that stopped accepting BTC and did an extensive writeup on why.
In short: the constantly shifting conversion rates make this unsustainable, as even if they accepted payment in crypto, they have to pay their bills in fiat currency. So their choices are to have crypto prices change literally every page load to reflect the exchange rate, or to just eat extra costs when suddenly 0.51btc goes from being worth $5 when the user pays to being worth $1 when they try to use it for anything else. Even with constantly updating prices, the shifting rates screwing them will still happen. The costs associated with even offering it as a payment type outweigh the actual revenue generated by an extreme order of magnitude, and even privacy/crypto oriented storefronts see something like under 1% of users using the option when it’s available.
And that’s my understanding of the short version.
There’s a big difference between “prioritizing short term profit” and “committing commercial/financial suicide to make a point”.
Heck even friggin Musk stopped accepting crypto to buy Teslas!
Can we force law banning money transactions to the churches and christian organisations?
Fight fire with fire (not literally, at least not yet, even if they did that long time ago already).
Is there an alternative to those payment processors? I feel like using those are just not good if they go down that road.
not really. Russia made their own payment processor because of being kicked out from SWIFT but using their system would be immoral.
it would be interesting if the EU makes their own payment processor.
some people were peddling crypto as a way to regain autonomy but most consumers don’t have the skills to buy it using cash and sideline Visa/MasterCard. it’s also not as accessible to people without technical skills.
This is literally why crypto was invented, as another user put it, “before crypto bros turned it into a pump n dump scheme”
it’s always been a pump and dump scheme, as all black markets are
I hate American Companies it will be a good time to start a new platform for NSFW games and payment platforms
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They should do Twitter next. Twitter has nsfw AI role play now and it should be banned by payment processors.
Edit: I say this because I want to bring up the hypocrisy of the advocacy. Why they get to choose what companies can do porn which cannot?
They list this as one of their main goals, right on their website.
Payment processors should not get to police what kind of legal transactions people use their services for. No matter how much you dislike the particular product. And especially since they have an effective monopoly. If we let them go through with this, it would open the gateway for them to enact the kind of control over our consumption that should be exclusive to elected officials.
While i agree the notion its not that black and white.
Payment processors are companies. Where you would draw the line when company can and cant decite how they want to manage their product? In the end its their decition.
We already do it for utilities. A financial company should not be deciding what its users are allowed to spend their own money on except within the confines of law.
This has been happening forever in the adult video space. Certain kinks are verboten and disallowed by payment processors, which leads to a kind of underground gray market where you have to use certain euphemisms to avoid getting flagged.
As we can see, they already have that kind of control, and what’s worse is that it’s not limited to just one country.
Maybe the OP has a point, and it’ll take them fucking with something else than “just” hobbies to get regulated.
Assuming we’re being facetious here, 100% agree.
Hell, if extwitter gets banned, it’d be hilarious because then there would probably be laws changed to ensure only the government can select what gets banned. Though, not so hilarious in the current state of the world.
Tbf it should be banned for being ridiculous but not from a morality standpoint from the payment processors, just bc it’s cringe and has nothing to do with that social media format. That being said, Twitter is getting worse and worse