Collective shout seems to have expanded its scope: games like cult classic Fear And Hunger have been removed from Itch.io, while horror game VILE: Exhumed has been delisted from Steam just a week after launch.
Collective shout seems to have expanded its scope: games like cult classic Fear And Hunger have been removed from Itch.io, while horror game VILE: Exhumed has been delisted from Steam just a week after launch.
I don’t get why the gaming platforms are removing games instead of removing the objecting payment providers as a payment option for purchasing those particular games.
If visa doesn’t want people to purchase game X with Visa, then remove Visa as payment option for buying game X.
Yeah, that’s not what the payment processors are requesting. They aren’t saying they don’t want to be used to buy this content. They’re saying, if your platform hosts this content at all then they won’t process any payments. It doesn’t matter if the option is removed if the content is still there. They’re using their power of monopoly to police content.
Do you have a source of where they are saying that?
I have seen an article about the Australian political action group that was claiming credit for getting the games banned. The story behind the start of the controversy.
And I have seen an article about the communication from Steam that they were banning games which were in conflict with the rules of their payment providers. The result basically.
But I’ve only seen conjecture and speculation about what went on to get from the start to the result. I haven’t seen any article that spelled out exactly what the different payment providers demanded from the gaming platforms, nor anything about what they discussed in between them.
You overestimate the adaptability of the average software stack. I worked at companies where even adding another button to the cart screen was a monumental undertaking
And then use what?
I think the issue isn’t that the payment providers don’t want to support the purchase of those games with their card. They want to stop offering their services to a platform that sells those games.
Itch has come out and said it’s not Visa, it’s PayPal and Stripe.
Removing those payment options would cause a massive loss of revenue.
But removing them from the specific games they object to would not lose any more revenue than removing the games entirely, and reduce the backlash significantly, as long as they could find 1 obscure payment provider to handle the obscure games and keep some form of access.
According to the statement someone else linked now, they will ask devs about whether they comply with the payment processors’ terms, and it sounds like those processors will otherwise be unavailable. They just had to blanket remove like this for now because they don’t actually have sufficient knowledge about all the games’ content.
We’ll see what will happen, and if it turns out devs are getting screwed in the long run, someone will fill the new market niche anyway.