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One factor is the ongoing campaigns from number of moral crusading groups who lobby them to cut off payment processing for things they don't approve of. NCOSE h

• devmor 1y ago
  Another factor is the board members and other investors of the institutions themselves. I have been privy to two specific instances where pressure to either ban or reject providing support for specific content was handed down from beyond the executive level at a major financial network player that my client was doing business with.
• SJC_Hacker 1y ago
  They tried to do the same to OnlyFans, but lost that battle
  • terminalshort 1y ago
    Onlyfans actually made financial sense, though, because chargeback rates are very high. This move makes no financial sense at all.
    • qingcharles 1y ago
      This is absolutely not true. OF's chargeback rates are incredibly low. Vastly lower than, say, Amazon. I have this directly from friends who work in this space. Do you have a citation that shows otherwise?
  • morkalork 1y ago
    Didn't onlyfans severely limit the type of content creators could make and distribute through the platform, just like valve here?
    • thaumasiotes 1y ago
      > Didn't onlyfans severely limit the type of content creators could make and distribute through the platform, just like valve here? Well, this coverage identifies two restrictions that Valve is enforcing: (1) No video footage of humans. Animation only. (2) No incest. Onlyfans clearly hasn't implemented restriction (1). If they've implemented (2), that seems like much less of a problem as applied to onlyfans than to animated content on Steam. But even in the case of Steam, there just isn't a constituency for being pro-incest. This is the last political fight you'd want to get into.
      • aleph_minus_one 1y ago
        > But even in the case of Steam, there just isn't a constituency for being pro-incest. This is the last political fight you'd want to get into. Of course the constituency that is openly pro-incest is small. On the other hand, I believe the constituency for a quite encompassing freedom of speech has to be taken seriously.
        • mango7283 1y ago
          I think the matter here is the activists are being strategic now and chipping away by targeting very specific content to get delisted. As you rightly said, most people are not going to sign their name to defend a incest/non-con fringe game specifically, so the counter petition is necessarily going to be on a broad ideal and therefore diffuse
          • LorenPechtel 1y ago
            Yeah. I find sex games have basically zero appeal to me, period. But either show me the victim or leave them legal.
• mapt 1y ago
  Targeting them with what? What could possibly hold enough leverage that Visa would jeopardize their sweet gig as an ideology-neutral, essential piece of American infrastructure siphoning 1-2% off of every dollar of consumer spending?
  • cogman10 1y ago
    Threats of exposure and boycotting/blacklisting the card making room for competitors. Plenty of religious groups have the money to be able to start the "holy card". And there's plenty of businesses that'd be giddy to accept Jesus card. Consider, for example, companies like hobby lobby or Chick-fil-A banning visa and promoting Jesus card. It also wouldn't take much for such a card to advertise itself as kid friendly. Thinking about it, I'm a little surprised this hasn't happened already.
    • kwanbix 1y ago
      What competitors? You mean a "Jesus Card" issued by Visa or Mastercard? At this point, it's basically an oligopoly. The only other real player is Amex, and they're a very distant third.
      • lxgr 1y ago
        Amex isn't really a competitor, since they're both card issuer and network in one. (I believe they have a few third party issued cards these days, but it's not a significant part of their business. The same goes for Discover.)
    • Retric 1y ago
      Let’s be real, Chick-fil-A banning Visa would likely result in its bankruptcy. Starting a holy card that doesn’t work at gas stations etc is an extremely uphill battle.
      • aetherson 1y ago
        Yeah, 30 years ago this might've been able to get off the ground. Today? Not a prayer.
• fragmede 1y ago
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/01/visa-mindgeek-liable-payment-processors/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/01/visa-mind... Visa being responsible for CSAM isn't a theoretical lawsuit they're afraid about. (2022)
  • rockskon 1y ago
    What relevance does that have to incest-themed video games?
• cornholio 1y ago
  It's easy to dismiss all such campaigns as religious prudes and moral crusaders, especially on a site with the demographics and political leanings of YC News. But often time such campaigns are waged by former victims of trafficking. It's well documented that trafficking, prostitution and pornography are closely interlinked - this modern notion of a fully liberated "sexual worker" controlling their careers, choices and finance is substantially a fiction of the pornographic industry. So there is real merit în the anti porn stance. Of course, once the camping is set in motion, it takes a life of its own, that has nothing to do with the concerns of the victims and more with prudishness; the religious circus will join hands and demand the removal of synthetic pornography etc.
  • fn-mote 1y ago
    I’m willing to listen if you’re willing to provide sources. Otherwise, your claims run counter to more credible sources I have read. (Which I am not willing to search up for this post.)
• atemerev 1y ago
  The US obsession with sex (both positive and negative) is something else. Here in Europe, sex is a normal part of human life. Not a center of everything, nor a sin to be avoided. Sex art is normal. Sex games are fine. There are no moral crusaders here, because sex is moral. We tell sex jokes at work and nobody faints. We are constantly perplexed why American culture is so different from other Western cultures in that regard. People keep saying "Puritans" like it answers all questions, but Puritans were hundreds of years ago. We had our own share of people with peculiar attitudes back then. Today is 2025, not 1785.
  • Jimerty 1y ago
    >Here in Europe No, Europe is not a monolithic bloc, stop treating it as such, stop saying here in Europe or European here. You'd get annoyed if a yank generalised all of europe with a not take so don't do it yourself. State what country/countries you're talking about because social attitudes and norms vary massively across this continent!
    • atemerev 1y ago
      They sure do, just like there are different states in the US with vastly different attitudes to life and everything. And yet, you can take an averaged vector of all US states and all European countries and meaningfully compare those. Or extract some things that are common through all Europe as compared through all US. I had a privilege of living for some time in Italy, Denmark, Spain and Switzerland (I still live in Switzerland). They are all really different, and yet there is something common compared to the US.
    • louthy 1y ago
      Of course, it doesn't help anyone to generalise. Europe has a wide demographic. But, one thing that doesn't happen is its attitude to sex affecting worldwide commerce or other worldwide issues. Here in the UK religion and sex are not part of the national conversation. A politician mentioning their love of god would seem weird to us. The only way it enters the national conversation are when right-wing religious zealots, from the US, try to affect our laws: I'm thinking of abortion laws and trans rights. These are entirely imported issues from US religious hangups. It's quite tedious, because mostly we were on a path of reasonable discourse with relation to sex, sexuality, relationships (marriage), etc. but with the advent of social media you see pockets of society being dragged into it. I have friends in much of Europe (Sweden, Norway, France, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Croatia, Slovakia, Poland, Romania, Greece) and have travelled to those destinations extensively. I still can't speak for all of Europe, but I think when it comes to sex and religion we're kinda similar. The only one that stands out to me was the Greek Orthodox church used to have an out-sized role, but even that doesn't seem to be the case any more (I just came back from visiting friends in Greece a few weeks back and we discussed this). So whilst we can't say all of Europe is the same, we can say that it's not causing global problems due to its sexual and religious hangups.
• irusensei 1y ago
  One thing to notice is the group that claims responsibility for this is some kind of funky radfem puritan mixture from Australia. They campaigned against titles like GTA V, Detroit Become Human AND abortion pills. Since they ran a campaign to ban GTA V from stores I can say for sure they are not stopping on fringe content like eroge porn shovelware.
• littlestymaar 1y ago
  As usual, the actual “cancel culture” comes from the conservatives.
  • docmars 1y ago
    Collective Shout (who pushed for this) is not a conservative group, but rather a feminist activist group based in Australia. They're responsible for numerous other calls for bans against games like Detroit: Become Human, GTA, etc.
    • littlestymaar 1y ago
      This ban has nothing to do with the call to ban incestual rape games (which is what you refer to), but comes from MasterCard, which has a long story of puritan censorship. (It's clear in the article, btw).
      • docmars 1y ago
        Collective Shout is the activist group that put pressure on MasterCard to make this decision. They're claiming and celebrating the work they did to make this happen on their own X account.
• MangoToupe 1y ago
  To be clear, these campaigns seem to be grounded in fear, not any sense of morality.
• krick 1y ago
  I wonder how this type of pressuring can be made illegal. To be clear: I certainly think this has to be made illegal, and even attempt to coerce a payment network to force a business to do something should be a serious crime. If the product is not illegal, you can sell it, either on your platform, or on a third party platform (Steam), if the platfrom is ok with selling your product. It's arguable, but perfectly reasonable to say that Steam can also choose to not sell it if it doesn't want to. But then, of course, it doesn't seem like a huge leap to say that a payment network can choose to not handle transactions for some type of business if it doesn't want to. Sure, you can appeal to it being a de-facto monopoly, but isn't Steam a de-facto monopoly as well? I mean, I have some trouble formally drawing a line here, yet it clearly seems not right to me, that a payment network can choose at all if they want to handle this or not. And, as I said, attempt to apply pressure on a payment network, in order to apply pressure on its customer, in order to apply pressure on their customers... well, I think it's pretty obvious why this is a problem, and that things are not supposed to work this way.
  • wat10000 1y ago
    I don’t think it should be made illegal, it should be made impractical. One way would be to ensure proper competition in the payments space. If there were dozens of options then some of them would decide that it’s a competitive advantage to ignore the busybodies and cater to people who want to buy this stuff. We see this at work with hosting. There’s a multitude of options and it doesn’t seem like adult sites have much trouble finding a host that will allow them, even if others might reject them. Another would be to regulate payment processors like common carriers and require them to serve everyone equally regardless. We see this model with the Post Office. As long as you’re not sending something that will compromise the safety of the workers, they’ll ship it.
    • slt2021 1y ago
      VISA/MC duopoly have like 60% margins, they are essentially a rent seeking feudal lord on the entirety global commerce. Pure leeches, that are now engaged in censorship
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• ijk 1y ago
  For Steam, it looks like Collective Shout, NCOSE, and Exodus Cry are behind this particular push. [1] [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/group-behind-steam-censorship-policies-have-powerful-allies-and-targeted-popular-games-with-outlandish-claims/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/group-behind-steam-censorshi...
  • gsf_emergency_2 1y ago
    https://web.archive.org/web/20250719204151/https://www.vice.com/en/article/group-behind-steam-censorship-policies-have-powerful-allies-and-targeted-popular-games-with-outlandish-claims/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250719204151/https://www.vice.... Interesting that it's 404? Fact check? Retract? Lawsuit?