Not suprising, and given the nature of most of the games removed, debatably reasonably, but it still highlights the need to reduced reliance on the few big American payment processors like PayPal when they can effectively regulate what can and cannot be sold online.
Concur. I’m still banned from PayPal and I have been since the early 2000’s because I used it to buy a “high capacity magazine,” which PayPal declared was “illegal activity” with no appeal.
…An airsoft magazine. Not a single state in the union where that’s illegal (or at least certainly not at the time).
Payment processors attempting to police the nature of online transactions should expose them to liability, not the other way around.
Inb4 they start flagging 3D printers because you can print mags with them.
I thought by payment processor, they were talking about Visa, MasterCard, etc.
Same thing applies, but the article suggests that its probably PayPal in this case.
what the fuck is with all these payment processors trying to curtail adult entertainment?
it’s fucking weird. they should stop being weird about what people do with their own money.
This made me think. For an European, are there any good alternatives to Visa/Mastercard/Paypal? Seems like we’re dependent on US payment systems
Monero
Time for Steam to make their own payment process then!
Maybe time for some to start a adult only game store that uses crypto to settle payments?
Nutaku exists but I don’t think they use crypto?
Also you can buy adult games on itch.io, again, don’t think they do crypto though.
The whole problem with … you know, actually using crypto for retail…
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transaction times are abysmally, orders of magnitude more slow than using PayPal or Visa or MC,
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crypto is exceptionally volatile, way, way less price stable than actual currencies,
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transaction fees tend to be way, way worse than using traditional payment processors, because what you are actually doing is closer to a realtime forex currency conversion service,
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or, if 3 is not the case, that means the retailer themself is directly holding a crypto wallet, which means they have massive financial risk and instability due to the extreme volatility of crypto, when all their other expenses are in USD or w/e
There are reasons why basically every single retailer that has ever tried to directly accept crypto either cancels that after a year or two, or goes bankrupt, or both.
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They… kind of sort of already have.
You can just throw money into your Steam account, via the mechanism they came up with for Steam Gift cards.
So, buy a physical gift card, or just give Steam your bank/card info, take money out of bank, give to your Steam Gift balance.
So uh, presumably, that Steam Gift Balance doesn’t exist in a bank anymore, beyond being a withdrawl from your account, its now just … a $USD value associated with your Steam account, that you csn now buy anything with, and your original bank/card company has no visibility into that second transaction.
So… they could theoretically use what I just described above as a ‘workaround’, you just make the offending games only purchaseable via
goongift balance.Won’t work. I imagine PayPal’s stance here is along the lines of “we will not allow any payment to go through to Valve as long as there is content we don’t want on Steam”.
If PayPal only stopped payments towards the content they don’t like, Valve wouldn’t have done anything. The fact Valve is removing content means that PayPal must have told them to remove the content or else they would stop allowing payments to Valve altogether. I can’t imagine a reality where this is not the case.
Ah.
That’s true.
In fairness, I was trying to assess the capability of Valve to just make their own payment processing system, which they still largely could do.
Granted, this would be a bit of an endeavor…
But uh, fintech stuff is pretty common these days, Valve has a lot of money, and they could easily poach or hire some experts to guide the process of making their own version of something like Plaid or Chime or CashApp or Remitly, etc. but only for their ecosystem, not allow actual user to user direct cash txns, and work that into their own pre-existing Steam and Steam Mobile frontends.
Valve does kinda know a thing or two about servers and server code, I’ve worked a bit on both game network code (as an enthusiast/mod maker/etc) and on import/export transactions amd dbs (professionally)… the actual coding involved in a video game server stack is way, way more complex imo… Valve really only need help with the legalities and regulations of setting up a compliant psuedo bank and payment systems in different countries and such.
Then they could tell PayPal to go fuck themselves.
I am not saying this is likely to happen, just saying it is hypothetically possible… and Valve is kind of known for innovating the gaming space, pushing the envelope, raising the bar, as they say.
But, that being said… all that effort vs just delisting some shitty RenPy smut e-novels based on incest?
Yeah, I’d just can the goonslop too.
I’m seeing about 7000 ‘adult only’ games on the store right now… so… its not like they’ve just banned porn games.
Absolutely. I suspect Valve might do just that if / when processors try to slip down the slippery slope. What if PayPal demands all adult games to be gone? What if they demand games with LGBT+ themes to be gone? At some point Valve will have to draw a line and tell them to fuck off if this happens.
But since there are only a handful of payment processors, what if they all collude and do this?
I imagine that if they weren’t already, this event has likely spawned a payment processor independence project internally.
PayPal wouldn’t dare attack Steam for accepting external payment methods with rules they don’t agree with and can’t change because they don’t own those companies. In addition to opening them up to potential lawsuits, it could catastrophically backfire if Valve simply said “fine, we don’t accept PayPal anymore, but we do accept crypto now.”
PayPal would die in a week. The investors would drag out a guillitine by the next earnings call.
I think that’s a naïve view. PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe are all american companies that are either happy or feel compelled to comply the administration of the fascist-in-command.
Sure maybe this is PayPal doing their own thing, or maybe it’s part of a more organized scheme in which potential lawsuits don’t really matter.
As much as I like Valve’s work, I don’t think thats a good fit for them. Their staff seem to enjoy working on difficult technical tasks, and lose interest very fast when it comes to mundane maintenance, thus their numerous underutilized and unmaintained features throughout Steam and their games. A payment processor seems like exactly the sort of thing that would get forgotten about a month or two after it gets finished.
What’s the appeal of a porn game over just watching a video? Seems like the interaction is a hassle
I’d imagine it’s sort of like reading porn rather than watching porn. Different people are activated by different things.
I imagine to some its sort of like gambling? Hard to say.
If this means I won’t have to scroll through endless pages of garbage porn “games” then I’m all for it. WAY too much trash cluttering up their store as it is.
Huh, more creepy incels in this community than I expected. Oh well.
