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These conservative groups aren't pressuring Steam and Itch directly, they're targeting payment processors. I don't think it's realistically viable to compete w

by mwill 1y ago

These conservative groups aren't pressuring Steam and Itch directly, they're targeting payment processors. I don't think it's realistically viable to compete with Steam (or Itch) without access to Mastercard and Visa. (For anyone thinking crypto: we have a different idea of what it means to be either "realistically viable" or to "compete with Steam")

magicmicah85 1y ago
You don't need to compete with Steam or Itch for games that they can't sell, you're in your own market.
- josh_p 1y ago
  being discoverable on the existing markets is extremely valuable.
- MBCook 1y ago
  And as soon as people find out you exist, they get the payment processors to shut you down too as part of their crusade. Now what? If you’re visible, you’re a target. If you’re not, you don’t matter.
  - creer 1y ago
    The suggestion is new start businesses that do not need credit card processors.
    - MBCook 1y ago
      We’re back to chicken and egg. If it’s not a credit card, it’s what debit? Different countries do it differently, so that’s a big hassle for the storefront. Sure you can use a payment processor, but look it’s someone to pressure to prevent you from taking money again. Maybe Crypto? How do people buy that crypto? Probably want to use credit cards. Oops. Or debit. See above. How do you turn your crypto into currency to pay your employees? That’s an institution to pressure to block you again. If your new system interacts with the old system at all there is an attack point. So unless you can bootstrap an entire alternate financial system where people can live without needing to access the old one you’re in trouble. And if you do succeed, the law and the same groups will come knocking. You can’t get away from the banking system. The only solution to this is regulation, and I don’t see that happening.
      - creer 1y ago
        > If your new system interacts with the old system at all there is an attack point. Yes but no. Currently the issue is that these two payment systems - both credit/debit card networks - (1) have the power to decide with impunity, because they have critical mass. And (2) have visibility into who each vendor is and what they are selling. If there is one case of abusing market dominance, this is it - and for all we frequently hear, this is REALLY not all that common. (And it's "funny" that we hear a lot about Apple's app store - but not about their anti-adult content rules!) For example, right now a bank would have a VERY hard time preventing you from paying for $OBJECTIONABLE_CONTENT with crypto. That bank would have no visibility into who you are paying with that crypto. There are other crypto intermediaries but they are "diffuse". Nobody in there has both visibility and power. For example, right now some vendors accept gift cards as payment. Buy a Home Depot gift card in cash at your local store and use it to pay for $OBJECTIONABLE_CONTENT. Obviously this is not a very efficient payment infrastructure but it exists. But yes of course, imposing to credit card networks to be content-blind would be helpful and soooo much more efficient.
        MBCook 1y ago
        The big credit/debit networks can easily justify killing buying crypto. Terrorism, money laundering, illegal things like drugs, whatever. If it’s hard enough to get crypto, then it doesn’t matter if it’s technically an option. You could make it possible to buy this stuff with Fruity Pebbles box tops. They’d have no visibility into that either. And roughly no one would do it. They just have to make this stuff hard enough. And that’s currently very easy.
      - GoblinSlayer 1y ago
        Some people kinda already live in an alternative financial system where only a part of their salary is in money.
- chipsa 1y ago
  What you need for running a site that people might not like: 1. Your own servers 2. Your own network 3. Your own CDN 4. Your own payment processor Step 4 gets you thrown in jail for violating AML.
- creer 1y ago
  It's hard for the big companies which want to stay big - and so feel that they can't live without credit cards. But indeed that's not an issue for newcomers. The problem with alternatives to things like OnlyFans is that the performers who work through OnlyFans want to go where people can find them. They can dumb down their acts - and have lots of paying traffic, or they can do what they would prefer - and have hardly any paying traffic. That's tough.
hungmung 1y ago
If we don't get a section 230 for payment processors we're looking at serious consequences for 1A because everything will be a civil suit away from getting blacklisted. Economist reported that adult performers are having trouble keeping bank accounts open -- as soon as a bank or payment processor finds out it's porn-related it gets nuked. Now that this is established practice, what's going to happen when Visa/MC gets sued for handling payments to do with disagreeable political speech? Our right to freedom of speech is currently only as strong as what Visa/MC are willing to defend in court, or you'd better be willing to live without any access to the banking system -- even if you're a gazillionaire who doesn't have to work, you've got to keep your money somewhere (and satisfy KYC). Even if somebody thinks certain speech should be censored, I doubt they'd want what they consider unsavory speech being driven to use a payment system like Bitcoin, and for that to become the norm, it would open up much more potential for abuse.
- MBCook 1y ago
  This is not the administration to ask for that.
  - qball 1y ago
    Why not? Payment processors have done it to guns just as much as they've done it to porn, both under the Obama administration.
    - MBCook 1y ago
      I think they would be far more likely to support a gun exception than a general “no moralizing” rule. They seem totally fine with the age checks many states are enacting for porn sites. The Republican Party loves slagging pedophiles (real or imagined) and hating on LGBTQIA+ people or trying to make their lives as difficult/horrible as possible. Yeah some games delisted were horrible. One of the main offenders had already been pulled as soon as Steam (or was it Itch) was notified. But they still used it as evidence. The platforms were policing themselves well. But not only did gratuitous porn games and abuse games get delisted, lots of games on related to inclusiveness of LGBTQIA+ did too from what I’m seeing from developers on social media. I suspect if anything the administration would be happy to let people use this as yet another hammer in their culture war against such people existing. That’s why.
jacobsimon 1y ago
Maybe a silly idea, but here’s a solution to prevent financial censorship: make the game free. Or monetize via another way—ads, subscriptions, credits. There’s actually a lot of options for Steam if they aren’t being pressured directly to remove the content.
- gs17 1y ago
  > if they aren’t being pressured directly to remove the content. The problem is that they aren't being told "we won't let people buy this through us", they're told "this needs to go entirely or no more credit cards for you".
  - jacobsimon 1y ago
    Fair enough - so in reality they _are_ being pressured directly to remove the content and it has nothing to do with selling the products. A slippery slope indeed!
    - gs17 1y ago
      And it proves that it's not about these games having high risks of fraud and chargebacks.
- pfisch 1y ago
  F2P games are very different in design from regular games(and far worse imo) You can't even realistically have a F2P game that requires a high spec machine because of how the market works.
  - zer0tonin 1y ago
    There's quite a few F2P games requiring high spec machines, Throne & Liberty for example.
- jandrese 1y ago
  > Or monetize via another way—ads, subscriptions, credits That don't use Visa/Mastercard? The bans aren't coming from the platforms but from the payment processors.
madaxe_again 1y ago
Just get people to mail you cash. Sounds stupid, but that’s how I built my first ecommerce business in the 90’s, and it was a pretty normal way to pay for stuff online. Cash, money order, bank cheque, whatever.
- FranchuFranchu 1y ago
  You can't realistically target anyone outside the US with this.
  - TulliusCicero 1y ago
    You can't even realistically target people inside the US with this. How many people are gonna mail cash to buy digital games? Gimme a fucking break. Yes, a small business in the 90s may have been able to make it work, but it's not the 90s anymore.
  - TimorousBestie 1y ago
    You can’t realistically target anyone inside the US with it either. USPS is allowed to seize cash in packages if it believes it’s being used for illegal purposes.
    - BlueTemplar 1y ago
      We are discussing legal purchases though, not illegal ones. At least I hope that USPS is forbidden from not (eventually) delivering legal packages ?
  - veeti 1y ago
    Back in the days we used to mail cash in an envelope all the way to Britain just for some RuneScape membership time.
  - efskap 1y ago
    It worked for Amazon.com in 1995! > Bezos: We got an order from somebody in Bulgaria, and this person sent us cash through the mail to pay for their order. And they sent us two crisp $100 bills. And they put these two $100 bills inside a floppy disk. And then they put a note on the cover of the floppy disk, and they mailed this whole thing to us. And the note on the cover of the floppy disk said, "The money is inside the floppy disk. The customs inspectors steal the money, but they don't read English." That shows you the effort to which people will go to be able to buy things.
the8472 1y ago
> I don't think it's realistically viable to compete with Steam (or Itch) without access to Mastercard and Visa. They could not allow those games to be sold through those particular payment processors and require wire transfers instead. More cumbersome payment method, but better than outright banning them. If the payment processors try to dictate what content these sites may host even when it involves competing processors that sounds quite anti-competitive practice.
- mywittyname 1y ago
  The impression I get is allowing them to be purchased at all is grounds for the payment processor to suspend their account. So this solution is a no-go. Probably the only way around it is to spin up a completely different corporate entity which only allows for payments via wire transfer, ACH, or perhaps some of the various payment apps available.
  - the8472 1y ago
    Like I said, that smell like anti-competitive behavior. It basically means the payment processor denies competitors a business opportunity for cases they don't want to service.
  - GoblinSlayer 1y ago
    FWIW https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fednow_about.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fednow_about.h...
jimbob45 1y ago
they're targeting payment processors They're not "targeting" payment processors. Payment processors have to deal with significantly more problems due to the nature of porn games and chargebacks. Fix those problems and the payment processors won't have a reason anymore to ban porn (or anything). What's the point of a capitalist economy if not for startups to target market needs like these?
- jdasdf 1y ago
  Those problems are artificially created by regulation. There is nothing inherent to these topics that makes servicing them physically impossible. Charge backs, etc... can be effectively solved by appropriately pricing in such risks (or not offering those services at all). This isn't a payment processor issue, it's a political choice.
- gs17 1y ago
  > Payment processors have to deal with significantly more problems due to the nature of porn games and chargebacks. This is commonly repeated, but doesn't hold up. Chargeback fees (especially for card-not-present transactions) are paid by the merchant and are simply increased (with reserves required) for high-risk accounts. It also wouldn't make sense to target hyper-specific niches if it were really about chargebacks, they would go after all of it, and go after things like the CS marketplace. But the biggest giveaway IMO is that they do not allow, e.g., Steam selling these games crypto-only. It's either remove them entirely or remove credit cards entirely. If it was really about specific titles having high fraud/chargeback rates, selling them some other way would be fine.
zahlman 1y ago
Most of the people I've seen advocating for this kind of pressure, for the purpose of suppressing this sort of content in video games, would describe themselves as very much the opposite of "conservative". But perhaps it's for the better that they are recognized as such. Because it really is a conservative instinct, no matter what American party politics might currently be dictating.
leptons 1y ago
>These conservative groups aren't pressuring Steam and Itch directly Pretty soon (in the U.S.) all porn and sexual-adjacent content is going to be illegal. The christo-fascists currently in power said they were going to do it, and they will.

by mwill 1y ago

magicmicah85 1y ago

You don't need to compete with Steam or Itch for games that they can't sell, you're in your own market.

josh_p 1y ago
being discoverable on the existing markets is extremely valuable.
MBCook 1y ago
And as soon as people find out you exist, they get the payment processors to shut you down too as part of their crusade. Now what? If you’re visible, you’re a target. If you’re not, you don’t matter.
- creer 1y ago
  The suggestion is new start businesses that do not need credit card processors.
  - MBCook 1y ago
    We’re back to chicken and egg. If it’s not a credit card, it’s what debit? Different countries do it differently, so that’s a big hassle for the storefront. Sure you can use a payment processor, but look it’s someone to pressure to prevent you from taking money again. Maybe Crypto? How do people buy that crypto? Probably want to use credit cards. Oops. Or debit. See above. How do you turn your crypto into currency to pay your employees? That’s an institution to pressure to block you again. If your new system interacts with the old system at all there is an attack point. So unless you can bootstrap an entire alternate financial system where people can live without needing to access the old one you’re in trouble. And if you do succeed, the law and the same groups will come knocking. You can’t get away from the banking system. The only solution to this is regulation, and I don’t see that happening.
    - creer 1y ago
      > If your new system interacts with the old system at all there is an attack point. Yes but no. Currently the issue is that these two payment systems - both credit/debit card networks - (1) have the power to decide with impunity, because they have critical mass. And (2) have visibility into who each vendor is and what they are selling. If there is one case of abusing market dominance, this is it - and for all we frequently hear, this is REALLY not all that common. (And it's "funny" that we hear a lot about Apple's app store - but not about their anti-adult content rules!) For example, right now a bank would have a VERY hard time preventing you from paying for $OBJECTIONABLE_CONTENT with crypto. That bank would have no visibility into who you are paying with that crypto. There are other crypto intermediaries but they are "diffuse". Nobody in there has both visibility and power. For example, right now some vendors accept gift cards as payment. Buy a Home Depot gift card in cash at your local store and use it to pay for $OBJECTIONABLE_CONTENT. Obviously this is not a very efficient payment infrastructure but it exists. But yes of course, imposing to credit card networks to be content-blind would be helpful and soooo much more efficient.
      - MBCook 1y ago
        The big credit/debit networks can easily justify killing buying crypto. Terrorism, money laundering, illegal things like drugs, whatever. If it’s hard enough to get crypto, then it doesn’t matter if it’s technically an option. You could make it possible to buy this stuff with Fruity Pebbles box tops. They’d have no visibility into that either. And roughly no one would do it. They just have to make this stuff hard enough. And that’s currently very easy.
    - GoblinSlayer 1y ago
      Some people kinda already live in an alternative financial system where only a part of their salary is in money.
chipsa 1y ago
What you need for running a site that people might not like: 1. Your own servers 2. Your own network 3. Your own CDN 4. Your own payment processor Step 4 gets you thrown in jail for violating AML.
creer 1y ago
It's hard for the big companies which want to stay big - and so feel that they can't live without credit cards. But indeed that's not an issue for newcomers. The problem with alternatives to things like OnlyFans is that the performers who work through OnlyFans want to go where people can find them. They can dumb down their acts - and have lots of paying traffic, or they can do what they would prefer - and have hardly any paying traffic. That's tough.

hungmung 1y ago

If we don't get a section 230 for payment processors we're looking at serious consequences for 1A because everything will be a civil suit away from getting blacklisted. Economist reported that adult performers are having trouble keeping bank accounts open -- as soon as a bank or payment processor finds out it's porn-related it gets nuked. Now that this is established practice, what's going to happen when Visa/MC gets sued for handling payments to do with disagreeable political speech? Our right to freedom of speech is currently only as strong as what Visa/MC are willing to defend in court, or you'd better be willing to live without any access to the banking system -- even if you're a gazillionaire who doesn't have to work, you've got to keep your money somewhere (and satisfy KYC). Even if somebody thinks certain speech should be censored, I doubt they'd want what they consider unsavory speech being driven to use a payment system like Bitcoin, and for that to become the norm, it would open up much more potential for abuse.

MBCook 1y ago
This is not the administration to ask for that.
- qball 1y ago
  Why not? Payment processors have done it to guns just as much as they've done it to porn, both under the Obama administration.
  - MBCook 1y ago
    I think they would be far more likely to support a gun exception than a general “no moralizing” rule. They seem totally fine with the age checks many states are enacting for porn sites. The Republican Party loves slagging pedophiles (real or imagined) and hating on LGBTQIA+ people or trying to make their lives as difficult/horrible as possible. Yeah some games delisted were horrible. One of the main offenders had already been pulled as soon as Steam (or was it Itch) was notified. But they still used it as evidence. The platforms were policing themselves well. But not only did gratuitous porn games and abuse games get delisted, lots of games on related to inclusiveness of LGBTQIA+ did too from what I’m seeing from developers on social media. I suspect if anything the administration would be happy to let people use this as yet another hammer in their culture war against such people existing. That’s why.

jacobsimon 1y ago

Maybe a silly idea, but here’s a solution to prevent financial censorship: make the game free. Or monetize via another way—ads, subscriptions, credits. There’s actually a lot of options for Steam if they aren’t being pressured directly to remove the content.

gs17 1y ago
> if they aren’t being pressured directly to remove the content. The problem is that they aren't being told "we won't let people buy this through us", they're told "this needs to go entirely or no more credit cards for you".
- jacobsimon 1y ago
  Fair enough - so in reality they _are_ being pressured directly to remove the content and it has nothing to do with selling the products. A slippery slope indeed!
  - gs17 1y ago
    And it proves that it's not about these games having high risks of fraud and chargebacks.
pfisch 1y ago
F2P games are very different in design from regular games(and far worse imo) You can't even realistically have a F2P game that requires a high spec machine because of how the market works.
- zer0tonin 1y ago
  There's quite a few F2P games requiring high spec machines, Throne & Liberty for example.
jandrese 1y ago
> Or monetize via another way—ads, subscriptions, credits That don't use Visa/Mastercard? The bans aren't coming from the platforms but from the payment processors.

madaxe_again 1y ago

Just get people to mail you cash. Sounds stupid, but that’s how I built my first ecommerce business in the 90’s, and it was a pretty normal way to pay for stuff online. Cash, money order, bank cheque, whatever.

FranchuFranchu 1y ago
You can't realistically target anyone outside the US with this.
- TulliusCicero 1y ago
  You can't even realistically target people inside the US with this. How many people are gonna mail cash to buy digital games? Gimme a fucking break. Yes, a small business in the 90s may have been able to make it work, but it's not the 90s anymore.
- TimorousBestie 1y ago
  You can’t realistically target anyone inside the US with it either. USPS is allowed to seize cash in packages if it believes it’s being used for illegal purposes.
  - BlueTemplar 1y ago
    We are discussing legal purchases though, not illegal ones. At least I hope that USPS is forbidden from not (eventually) delivering legal packages ?
- veeti 1y ago
  Back in the days we used to mail cash in an envelope all the way to Britain just for some RuneScape membership time.
- efskap 1y ago
  It worked for Amazon.com in 1995! > Bezos: We got an order from somebody in Bulgaria, and this person sent us cash through the mail to pay for their order. And they sent us two crisp $100 bills. And they put these two $100 bills inside a floppy disk. And then they put a note on the cover of the floppy disk, and they mailed this whole thing to us. And the note on the cover of the floppy disk said, "The money is inside the floppy disk. The customs inspectors steal the money, but they don't read English." That shows you the effort to which people will go to be able to buy things.

the8472 1y ago

> I don't think it's realistically viable to compete with Steam (or Itch) without access to Mastercard and Visa. They could not allow those games to be sold through those particular payment processors and require wire transfers instead. More cumbersome payment method, but better than outright banning them. If the payment processors try to dictate what content these sites may host even when it involves competing processors that sounds quite anti-competitive practice.

mywittyname 1y ago
The impression I get is allowing them to be purchased at all is grounds for the payment processor to suspend their account. So this solution is a no-go. Probably the only way around it is to spin up a completely different corporate entity which only allows for payments via wire transfer, ACH, or perhaps some of the various payment apps available.
- the8472 1y ago
  Like I said, that smell like anti-competitive behavior. It basically means the payment processor denies competitors a business opportunity for cases they don't want to service.
- GoblinSlayer 1y ago
  FWIW https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fednow_about.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fednow_about.h...

jimbob45 1y ago

they're targeting payment processors They're not "targeting" payment processors. Payment processors have to deal with significantly more problems due to the nature of porn games and chargebacks. Fix those problems and the payment processors won't have a reason anymore to ban porn (or anything). What's the point of a capitalist economy if not for startups to target market needs like these?

jdasdf 1y ago
Those problems are artificially created by regulation. There is nothing inherent to these topics that makes servicing them physically impossible. Charge backs, etc... can be effectively solved by appropriately pricing in such risks (or not offering those services at all). This isn't a payment processor issue, it's a political choice.
gs17 1y ago
> Payment processors have to deal with significantly more problems due to the nature of porn games and chargebacks. This is commonly repeated, but doesn't hold up. Chargeback fees (especially for card-not-present transactions) are paid by the merchant and are simply increased (with reserves required) for high-risk accounts. It also wouldn't make sense to target hyper-specific niches if it were really about chargebacks, they would go after all of it, and go after things like the CS marketplace. But the biggest giveaway IMO is that they do not allow, e.g., Steam selling these games crypto-only. It's either remove them entirely or remove credit cards entirely. If it was really about specific titles having high fraud/chargeback rates, selling them some other way would be fine.

zahlman 1y ago

Most of the people I've seen advocating for this kind of pressure, for the purpose of suppressing this sort of content in video games, would describe themselves as very much the opposite of "conservative". But perhaps it's for the better that they are recognized as such. Because it really is a conservative instinct, no matter what American party politics might currently be dictating.

leptons 1y ago

>These conservative groups aren't pressuring Steam and Itch directly Pretty soon (in the U.S.) all porn and sexual-adjacent content is going to be illegal. The christo-fascists currently in power said they were going to do it, and they will.