Valve gets pressured by payment processors with a new rule for game devs and various adult games removed
Valve gets pressured by payment processors with a new rule for game devs and various adult games removed
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.
Yeah I don’t get it here. I kinda get them not wanting to deal with porn when you can’t verify consent and age of the performers, but the games don’t make sense because there aren’t live performers to worry about.
Mostly that stuff annoys me on Steam because it’s always at the top when I’m sorting by trending/popular, but I don’t think it needs to be removed either.
A lot of them want to use your financial data (what you buy, for how much and when) to sell to advertisers etc.
Maybe adding porn stuff in there taints the data?
Time for Steam to make their own payment process then!
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 goon gift balance.
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.
Implementing direct debit shouldn’t be too hard and straining. Most of their staff is maintaining an e-commerce platform, they‘d do fine.
Yeah, also its less "valve staff get bored and dont do mundane tasks" iirc thier pay is based on what thier coworkers think the value of thier work was, which is usually in how visible/noticeable which discourages long projects thay take more than a year and mundane tasks that are not very clear and visible
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...
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.
I guess it could work if you convince game devs/publishers to directly accept payment in crypto...?
But that still seems kinda unlikely.
Also kinda like it would immediately be flooded with NFT/cryptobro scamslop, you know, like every single crypto basdd or crypto funded game, literally ever?
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wero_(payment)
Very limited market.
I am interested to see how it's going to develop (considering the lagacy of paydirect
Monero
In Spain you can use bizum, which is a system made by Spanish banks. I've been reading that it's supposed to be interoperative with other european systems but I've never used that way personally.
The ECB have been working in the digital euro for ages, which is supposed to allow payments directly processed by the ECB. But it is taking ages....
I think Wero is supposed to become the replacement for all of that, though I'm not sure if it's gonna have similar features. For now it's only available in a few countries unfortunately.
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.
Fair enough
More role play I suppose?
Immersion and customizability
People like porn involving characters they like. Look at all the rule 34 content. Games give you a chance to engage with the characters before the fucking.
There is also a bit of T&D as you build anticipation while playing the game.
I imagine to some its sort of like gambling? Hard to say.
Love to have life dictated by puritanical religious nuts that like to blame their own urges on porn so everybody’s worse off in the end!
There's literally multiple filters to block adult and NSFW games from being shown in the store. If you're seeing porn games, then you haven't turned them on
You have to opt in to see porn games. You’re seeing them because you chose to.
Huh, more creepy incels in this community than I expected. Oh well.
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.
you would have to declare them as internet utilities.
I got banned as well, and I'm still not sure why. I've never sold anything, and I've only bought a handful of things and sent money for rent a few times.
I think someone hacked my account, because I hadn't used it for ~10 years before noticing that I was banned when I tried logging in again.
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.