MC: It’s not us.
Steam & Itch: It’s the payment processors.
Gee, I wonder who people are going to believe.
They are both telling the truth, which is how the best lies work.
Mastercard: “It’s all good as long as it is legal”.
Religious zealots: “Games depict sex with children!!!”
Steam/Itch: “Which games?”
Zealots: “Yes”
Mastercard: “Sex with children is illegal. Get rid of those games.”
Steam/Itch: “Which games???”
Mastercard: “That’s a you problem. Figure it out and get rid of them or lose the ability to process payments.”
Steam/Itch: *pulls most NSFW games while they figure out “which games”
Wouldn’t it be nice if the payment processors required more than being really annoying to get something classified as possibly illegal?
The United States is a VERY litigious country. The biggest motivator in America is profit, and the possibility of lawsuits is contrary to profit. Fucking over indie devs selling niche games that makes a few bucks on Steam is a lot cheaper than the legal expenses of a lawsuit and the bad press of “Mastercard funds child pornography”.
It isn’t about fairness. It’s about profit.
Kind of off topic, but this just activated one of my trap card rants,
The problem is not that we’re a litigious society, the problem is we make litigation artificially costly and time consuming by restricting the number of lawyers and judges we create and only trying to address the bottleneck that creates by making courts harder to access (e.g. increasing filing fees, giving defendants more ability to force things into arbitration kangaroo courts, etc.).
Especially in light of how our courts have been just making up bullshit to let cops/soldiers/Republicans do whatever the fuck they since circa 1968/2001/2025, you can’t tell me that people need as many years of education to practice law as we require in this country.
Also, private bar associations are fucking weird, feudal era anti-democratic bullshit that ought to get replaced with proper public licensing agencies that are accountable to democratic systems and accessible to the public
/end rant
Thing is…I think both claims are correct.
Mastercard and Visa are not the only middle-men; the only “payment processors” involved in making sales.
Next time you check out at a cafe, look at the branding of the tablet/software the cashier is using. Chances are, it wasn’t developed by the cafe owners, or by MC/Visa. That’s a payment processor. There’s some big ones out there that can be hard to avoid.
Practically no one in the world who accepts payments for their online business directly integrates with visa or Mastercard. It’s all 3rd party companies who integrate (because it’s fucking hard and tedious) and then resell it in a nice easy package.
In almost all cases, any talk about payment processors, is them, not visa/Mastercard.
I remember seeing a graphic that was about every layer of companies that are interacted with when you use a credit card. Must have been at least like 6 layers of companies each taking a fee from a company that took fees higher up the chain closer to the consumer. Similar when I read an explanation of, when you buy a stock through a company like Fidelity where is the stock actually held and that was layers of public/private companies/corporations
buy a stock through a company like Fidelity where is the stock actually held and that was layers of public/private companies/corporations
All of those devices are child companies of either Banks or Credit Card companies. Or, like Square, owe their continued existence to banking and wall st firms dumping cash on them.
The one outlier I know about is Canada’s Interac system, which was started by Canadian banks, but now is its own thing
From what I understand it wasn’t actually mastercard and visa?
Itch statements made it very clear the issue was PayPal and Stripe.
Steam even disabled PayPal payments for a while, a couple days before the purge. While direct card payments with Visa/Mastercard still worked fine.
Well, everyone discussing this seems to have been confused about it. Is it fucking PayPal and Stripe or fucking Mastercard and Visa?
We’ll probably never get the whole story. Itch’s update from yesterday points the finger at stripe, others could still be involved.
It’s been pretty widely reported that it’s PayPal and Stripe(mostly Stripe) that have been the ones that were requiring them to remove the NSFW material.
Instead of linking the actual statement, we have a 3 and a half paragraph “article”. Here is the actual statement from MC
Mastercard has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms, contrary to media reports and allegations.
Our payment network follows standards based on the rule of law. Put simply, we allow all lawful purchases on our network. At the same time, we require merchants to have appropriate controls to ensure Mastercard cards cannot be used for unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content.
Good point, I also forgot the footer.
About Mastercard
Mastercard powers economies and empowers people in 200+ countries and territories worldwide. Together with our customers, we’re building a resilient economy where everyone can prosper. We support a wide range of digital payments choices, making transactions secure, simple, smart and accessible. Our technology and innovation, partnerships and networks combine to deliver a unique set of products and services that help people, businesses and governments realize their greatest potential.
Yes, the statement is in the article, which gives background context.
“Unlawful” based on what? American law?
These are global payment companies, they can’t just have a “we don’t allow payment for illegal content” cause that varies by country (and by state even).
What an absolutely nothing statement.
We should demand mastercard shut down all payments to everyone, as their very business model clearly falls afoul of the laws of the People’s Republic of North Korea.
Now this is the kind of movement I can get behind.
By that reasoning they should not accept payments for alcohol, as that’s illegal in some countries…
They’re obviously basing it on the local laws of the business and customer. That varies from each transaction to the next. They’re just saying that they don’t restrict anything that they aren’t legally required to restrict.
I don’t think that’s accurate because they asked Dlsite before them to restrict their content based on American Law. They tried to remove access to content from outside Japan that Visa was complaining about and Visa still told them to remove the content (I guess cause people were using VPNs) so they had to remove the ability to pay with visa and Mastercard entirely.
Publicly, they’re saying we don’t want to get sued for allowing the purchase of illegal content, We have no problem with legal content.
That’s not to say that’s how they are phrasing it too the publishers.
Just because you don’t understand their response, doesn’t mean it’s a nothing statement.
“Unlawful”, based on the region that you and the vendor operate in. And yes, that does vary based on which region you and they are in. And yes, it can get very complicated. Welcome to the world of economics.
In short. Vendors can be considered unlawful in your region, even if they don’t offer the specific illegal service or product in your region, but do in others.
What MasterCard is saying here is. “If we’re not legally required to take any action. We won’t”
By that standard, I ought not be able to use the card to buy booze (might give it to a minor or use for a Molotov Cocktail) a gun (obviously could use for crime) , and probably a million other things they let people buy with cards.
Good for them. Just stop judging the platforms, take the payments. You’re making money no matter what.
So Valve says the processors - such as Stripe and PayPal - pressed the issue based on pressure from MasterCard (and possibly Visa). MasterCard says they had nothing to do with it. Itch says that Stripe was directly responsible in their case with a blanket ban on anything generally sexy, but that Stripe blamed their banking partners.
So Stripe, at least, is directly responsible but insists they are under outside pressure. This means the pressure is coming from one or more actual banks. Since we don’t have names, we have to do some research to find out who Stripe works with. The possibilities I was able to dig up on a quick search include:
- Citigroup
- Wells Fargo
- Barclays
- Goldman Sachs
- Evolve Bank & Trust
It seems clear that this has nothing to do with legality in any jurisdiction and that some powerful financial institution is forcing their twisted, puritanical morality on anyone they can at the behest of like-minded authoritarian terrorists. One or more of the above institutions are most likely at fault.
MasterCard’s and Valve’s statements seems to point at Stripe and PayPal as the ones who folded to the pressure. These payment processors then cited MasterCard’s rules to back up their change in policy.
MasterCard now clarifying that the payment processors are over-interpreting the rules and anything legal is ok seems a very good thing here. Valve should be able to go back to Stripe and PayPal with this and say: “Hey, you’ve misunderstood the rules you are quoting; MasterCard themselves say anything legal is ok, and that is the exact policy we’ve been using!”
I love how they form a consortium that stays in lockstep to maintain their oppressive control over everyone else.
If this is true then I honestly hope Steam and Itch go “ok, then, PayPal and Stripe are banned from the store as payment forms until we can figure out a way of limiting content you can pay with them”. Honestly I don’t think enough people use either of those payments forms, and even if they do currently they almost assuredly have a card they can use instead, and are more likely to switch payment methods than to stop buying games.
IIRC Stripe is the main payment processor. If you’re paying with a visa or mastercard online, it’s usually via stripe. Hence, the immediate censorship.
Paypal can go fuck itself and die
I do kind of wonder of any of these game devs could go after these payment processing companies for loss of income? I’m not a lawyer, but I’d definitely be looking into it if I was a Dev that has been effected by this.
Likely not, the devs don’t have an agreement of any kind with the processor.
