Steam Users Rally Behind Anti-Censorship Petition

The major credit cards are essentially infrastructure, and really should not have the right to refuse to serve a lawful business.

Everybody needs to also stop using Mastercard/Visa/Paypal.

yeah I'll start bartering right now
- Ummmm.
  ACH is how you get your paycheck, and it's being updated to FedNow.
  Zelle is an independent network as well.
  And of course, there is Discover and AmEx.
  There is also cash, check, money order. They still work today, just people largely forgot how to use them.
  IIRC some Brazilian network was getting very popular off of this. If you want to look at non-US options.
  There are plenty of competitors to Visa/Mastercard/Paypal.
- can i ~~offer~~ trade you a nice egg in this trying time?
And use what instead? Swollen off PayPal is pretty easy because frankly it's an awful service and businesses are better off not using it anyway so they tend to offer other options.
But MasterCard and visa are the only payment options. Everything requires MasterCard or Visa
- There's Discover and American Express if you're in the US. I don't know the porn policies of those companies but they are the alternatives.
- JCB?
- Businesses are better of not using Paypal or Creditcards, both of the are a hassle and cost more time to process than a digital pin transaction or an old school bank transfer.
  You have to use what is available in your country, a lot of countries have their own payment platform and they are being consolidated into one Wero.
  As long as people keep using Mastercard or Visa they will have this power.
The death grip that they have over everything is more than anything in history.
- Well, banks here in NL have been using VISA and Mastercard cards, but that is more so people can use them in America/Canada and some other countries which are still behind on chipped cards.
  But over the years I have seen 40-50 different payment platforms and most of them do not use Visa or Mastercard.
How else are you supposed to buy something on Steam? You just listed every available option.
- Did I though? Also giftcards exist
anti-censorship international credit union owned by members that can conduct transactions internally without having to ask for visa or mastercard's FUCKING permission when?????
I'm saying we should build Dual Power and go around them.
- I would hate to see that credit union comply with the financial regulations of EVERY country.
Sure. But they are pretty much the only options in a lot of places. Yes they are shitty companies, but I personally can't think of a good way to get away from them.
- Local/national banks with their bankcards and payment platforms? Buying steam gift cards using cash or by pinning? Even if your bank cards are halfway towards visa or mastercard using it through another party is still better.
i wish gnu taler was widespread
- Welllllllll, Taler is actually exactly the wrong suggestion for this usecase, because Taler requires all spends to be redeemed from Vendor to Issuer non-anonymously, which gives the Issuer 100% control and say which vendors are allowed, which is exactly the thing Visa and Mastercard are using to exert control.
  If there were competing Taler networks and Steam supported all of them, that might be okay because one of them might happen to not be dicks, but if there's just one or two then Taler is designed from the ground-up specifically to enable this bad outcome. It's actually one of their features!
  Sorry.
- Something like that will kinda work, but using it will flag your transactions if you use it as a business. That's the issue with a lot of these things is that we need to have some kind of balance between privacy and authorities being able to do anything against terrorism etc. And yes you can find terrorists based on transactions.
Is there any good reason why shops/Vendors dont really offer any kind of Crypto? Like I genuinely dont get it aren't you paying way more for using Visa/Mastercard etc. as a shop?
- Because crypto isn't really a currency as much as it is a volatile asset. Businesses require stability to run coherently, and utilizing something like crypto currency which could massively increase or decrease in value following a breaking news report isn't something that large organizations can really tolerate.

I sort of think that the only way to make visa/mastercard reverse course is to boycott the fuck out of them. Go back to using cash to make EVERY purchase. Purchase physical copies of games every time with cash. (I've been able to link games to my steam account purchased this way.) No longer buy skins and loot crates, and battle passes. Same goes with media. Go back to hard CDs for music/movies. Starve them of income any place you can, which would fuck with the business models of so many other companies that want your debit and cc on file for streaming services and subscriptions.

The article is saying the petition is targeting steam, but the actual linked petition is addressing credit card companies. The text of the petition doesn't mention steam or valve. I don't know what the author of the article thinks is happening here, and they've explained it very badly.

As of July 16, Steam's new guidelines state that game publishers should avoid releasing titles that may violate the terms and conditions of its payment processors. In other words, the storefront is asking creators to not only follow the platform's rules but also submit to potential oversight from companies like MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal.
and from the petition
MasterCard and Visa have increasingly used their financial control to pressure platforms into censoring legal fictional content
Steam is enforcing MasterCard's, Visa's, and PayPal's policies. From Steam's Rules and Policies:
What you shouldn’t publish on Steam: ... 15. Content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers. In particular, certain kinds of adult only content.
Point number 15 was not there in a Snapshot from February on the wayback machine. If anything, the solution should just be to remove the payment method for those games (which would still hurt the creators substantially).
There is a line that is confusing:
In response to this censorship, some fans have launched a petition on Change.org urging Valve to revert its policies
There may be petitions about reverting Valve's policy, but it's not the main petition against Visa and MasterCard (which is the one they linked).
- Replying my same comment from elsewhere to you as well:
  Yes but the payment processors didn't say "you're not allowed to sell this game with our service" they said "you're not allowed to sell this game period or we walk".
- So yeah, being mad at Valve is stupid, people need to be mad st MC and Visa and probably also PayPal.
  Being mad at Valve is shooting the messenger.
  Fortunately the petition is at least correctly aimed at the payment processors.
  But also...
  If MC and Visa won't budge on their positions, well, if Valve then makes an alt payment system for adult only games...
  MC and Visa go, oh, hey, you're violating our guidelines, we no longer support Valve/Steam, now no one can buy any game.
  This is a MAD situation, Valve would have to come up with a comprehensive payment processing system for everything, in secret, and then deploy it all at once.

Petitions like this are meaningless unless they come with a viable solution to the duopoly in payment processing that is Visa and Mastercard.

It doesn't matter what Valve agrees with, if they want to survive as a business they have to ultimately do what the only 2 companies that handle the payment processing tells them to do.

You're missing the point. This is not aimed at Valve, but at Visa and MasterCard. They are businesses. They primarily care about profit, not censorship. Especially when that pisses people off. They made the mistake of listening to the vocal minority of Collective Shout, so we have to let them know that. This isn't the 80's anymore, gaming is mainstream and there are far, far more gamers than puritanical Quakers that get the vapors at the sight of anything mature or complicated. And worst-case scenario, they are not the only payment processors, just the most convenient ones for customers and businesses. For now...
- Are you calling them Quakers as a derogatory slur or are they actually Quakers/Religious Society of Friends people.
- I do still wait for an answer.
Valve is a big enough company that they could conceivably start their own payment provider to bypass this.
- For example they could sell adult games under credits only and take CC or PayPal for credits.
  This way you're not buying adult titles with CC at all. Same way AAA deal with gambling with lootboxes.
- Come on, Gabe. You know you wanna.
Consumers punting the accountability and responsibility of their demise to the next generation of consumers. I hate how feeble and weak willed we are all as a species.
- we have been like this lately, but humans are definitely not weak willed or feeble at all.
  shit, the right wing nuts are killing themselves over their beliefs rn.

We knew in the aughts that this was going to be an issue when the charging companies defunded Wikileaks and Julian Assange¹ and were allowed to do so, defying public accommodations laws.

1. Yes, Assange is a git and a Russian asset (or at least has been before) but he did serve as a whistleblower against evil shit done by Bush and Obama administrations and the general aristocratic corruption at play in US federal politics. As with Chelsea Manning, he embarrassed politicians using their positions of power inappropriately, revealing that the state was not serving the public. Incidentally, ACLU in its early years was funded by USSR to cause trouble against the US state (which it was doing anyway and still does), which makes it historically (and debatably) a Soviet asset. Strange bedfellows and all that.

This is a tale that keeps repeating itself, and is why protections by the fourth, fifth, and sixth amendments of the Constitution of the United States have been carved out like a holiday turkey by the US Supreme Court. We found it easy to deny unreasonable search and seizure protections from major crimes suspects, only to find that every black citizen with a gram of cannabis now no longer has those protections.

So it is with monopolies that decide they can be selective with their accommodations.

If we can't pressure the transaction services to obey public accommodation rules since they have monopolistic power, it may be time to circumvent the issue, and support black market tactics ( Archie comic and bag of sawdust, $20, comes with free incest porn! )

These days, when discussing the usenet alt.* heirarchy, its acronym ( Anarchists, Lunatics, and Terrorists ) is now considered a backronym, a joke. I was there, and it belied a serious point: The worst of us deserve free speech, as per Larry Flynt, knowing that Hustler magazine is legally published in all its (raunchy) glory means that whatever you're releasing to the public is safe from moral guardians and critics because they have worse stuff to shout at.

But we're in an era of book burning, which means those would-be moral guardians are emboldened to try to reshape society in their image, in contrast to the principles of liberty and free thought. And soon ICE will expand its POI list to include liberals and wrongthinkers.

It may be time for bricks in windows and direct action against high-ranking company officials, but such behaviors carry high risks of consequences. So be careful and thorough.

In the meantime, write petitions of your grievances and sign those others have written. And remind them at this moment the public presumes petitioning them for redress of grievances will be acknowledged and acted upon. And if that turns out not to be the case, the outraged public will not simply disappear and keep to its place.

Need to petition Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and American Express. I don't think trying to get Valve to reverse these recent changes will necessarily be effective, since they are being pressured by the payment processors and they definitely aren't going to risk not being able to effectively do business at all.

Yeah, nah.
Petition these people:
https://www.collectiveshout.org/partners
Collective Shout is sustained by a small number of Australian partners. These are not big groups, and would quickly pull funding under any sort of pressure.
Collective Shout has a deep history with Christofascism and TERFs, so highlighting those angles is the way to go to get them pariahed. Once CS is out of the picture, we can work on undoing the damage they did.
- Petitioning people to do something that is against their entire purpose doesn't seem like it would be effective.
- This is incredibly shortsighted.
  If you get Collective Shout to stop, another group might pick up where they left off.
  The problem needs to be fixed, what you're suggesting is just making the people currently abusing it stop doing so. That's not a long term solution.
- Archived page: https://archive.ph/Ttyr5
  Just in case.
The petition is directed at Visa and MasterCard. I'm not sure why the article says it's a petition directed at Steam, because it's not.
i would expect the multi billionaire owners of the largest gaming platform on PC to have the ability to not fold like paper mache. I can also be mad at payment processors and valve at the same time
- Kinda hard to stay at the top if you literally get blacklisted from doing financial transactions. Big as they are, they're nowhere near the same level as the payment processors.
Exactly, petitioning steam doesn't help, their hands are tied. It's the behavior of the payment processors that needs to change. If they wimp out over every complaint, then we all live at the whims of the whiniest prudes in the world.
Under what arguments would we be able to push back on something like this? Most people would agree that these games where distasteful so arguing for them to be put back to not start a slippery slope isn't that easy it seems.
- Mainly that the companies controlling nearly all digital financial transactions across the entire globe should not be the arbiters of what is morally acceptable. If they must exist at all, they should just be handling the transfer of funds regardless of what is being bought and sold*.
  *illegal shit would not be protected.
  They are parasitic middle men that don't need to exist in the first place, though.
- Most people would agree that these games where distasteful
  Regardless, tasteless people have the right to pay for them and play, so... no?
  This is about payment processors censoring shit just 'cos they can. They stick to handling money instead of dictating how that money is used.
- See, THAT is not the slippery slope. STARTING to ban ANYTHING at all from legal transactions is the slippery slope. What happens when they decide R-rated films are distasteful? Or birth control?
  Payment processors should have ABSOLUTELY no role in making ANY decisions about what legal transactions they process. Period.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1r5VtCUwPw
  Show people that game that was delisted because of them. The idea that they only took down pornographic games is wrong, they went after things that didn't fit their christofash narrative.

IANAL - Can credit card companies coordinate like this? This seems like price fixing but the other way around. Like one company wouldn't do this alone cause it would drive customers away so they agree to do it together. Does that coordinated monopolistic behavior have president?

Yeah it seems to fit the description of a cartel... Not that it matters.
- Yeah, I don't expect the US Federal Government to do anything pro-consumer except to lower the cost of concentration camps and tear gas.

Make your own payment processor, Gaben. It's the way.

actually what you want is card network, but even then that won’t do it
i gave a whole big rundown of why this is all way harder than everyone expects here
payments is an absolute minefield with so many layers of BS that gets closer to arcane wizardry and back room deals the deeper you go
Then people would have to get specific cards or crypto or whatever that aren't Visa/MasterCard in order to buy Steam games. That, of course, is if you can get banks to agree to carry "Steam cards". Either that, or everyone would need to buy Steam gift cards as an exclusive form of payment.
All of these are much less convenient than keeping your existing debit/credit card to pay for Steam games, and less convenience means less sales.
- They would have to roughly make their own form of PayPal, alongside their own bank.
  If you didn't know, PayPal technically isn't a bank, it and Venmo use Synchrony Bank... which is an actual bank.
  If they did something like that, it could work, but it would have to be at a similar scale as PayPal, that is to say, massive....
  Because doing this would/could basically be the nuclear option:
  MC and Visa and PayPal would/could drop them.
  So, they'd have to basically develop a massive project, in total secrecy.
  ... Which is something Valve has arguably done a number of times, they are notoriously opaque as a company.
  ......
  Sort of as you mention, they already have a barebones backend framework to scale up from the steam gift card / user gift card balance system.
  I am... uncertain if their backend for that already does or does not include an actual legally defined bank though.
  ...
  Problem is that this would necessitate a massively costly undertaking, as well as ongoing maintenance costs, and Valve is also notorious for basically running on what most other firms would consider a skeleton crew for the size and scope of what they do.
- Or you could just transfer funds to a steam card, then with that, buy all you want.
- Yeah, but SteamPay is the future
- Steam does not have to only accept steampay. Tho? You fear visa and mastercard will blaclist steam?
Is that kinda what PayPal is, or was intended to be?
- Yeah but PayPal's awful. They literally arbitrarily deny you access to your own funds. At least the banks have rules.
  If someone wants to pay me something they can use it literally anything other than PayPal. I don't trust them they've stolen money from me before.
- PayPal is almost as pornphobic as MastercardVisa
- Yes
Just open bank in every country should do.

But we have to oppose CollectiveShout as well, as in destroy them. They're way worse than I thought

So, I wanted to see if I could find a list of games that were removed. I found this https://steam-tracker.com/ which is not specific to this event, but useful to keep track.

I wish it was feasible to hve a large scale boycott of visa and mastercard. american express is already useless so it wouldn't help much to include it...

Or a decentralized alternative that isn't just used to scam people, that doesn't eat up insane amounts of electricity to process, and is as convenient as regular money.
In reality, private corporations should not have control over money at all. Money is printed by the local government and should be controlled by the local government. Governments generally have better free speech protections than private corporations, which have none. Obviously, free speech protections are not universal, but countries can already ban content in other ways.
- Alternatives are not so hard, if you allow everyone to exchange and use every currency. Then, well, you need to pay someone selling in currency A - you pay your B's to buy some A's and you pay with them.
  But there are lots of limitations on banking, some in good faith, and some to prevent mobility and make everything tracked. Possibility to track means possibility to decide who gets to do what.
  I think that's why gold standard was dropped in the first place. When all money is guaranteed with gold, and gold (still does) buy money, you do have a universal currency hard to track.
  With decentralized electronic currencies the problem is - you need consensus. There's no way around it at all. You can devise something to separate one consensus into a tree of subspaces, to make it more efficient in case an operation with a coin "123456" depends only on operations with coins from "123*" subspace, or something like that. Partitioned system. So then you don't need consensus on subspaces untouched by your operation. But you still can't have such an offline currency, because that depends on the finite amount of gold, while with electronic currencies double spending exists.
  And I don't know if it's possible to make such an electronic currency anonymous for outside spectators. Zero-knowledge and other buzzwords are good, but I don't know how one can do this.
- Money is not printed by the local government at all. Money is created by private banks through extending credit. And it shouldn't be controlled by the government either, that's a terrible idea.
  I agree with the rest though.

Petition: https://www.change.org/p/tell-mastercard-visa-activist-groups-stop-controlling-what-we-can-watch-read-or-play

Signed, thanks for the link <3

We want our pron and we want it now!

What is a gooner that cannot goon? This is murder.
Give me the whole tiddy or give me death
~~pron~~ porn
Self censorship is not appreciated here mate
- I am ashamed, brother. Forgive me for I have sinned.

Valve please fix

*Develops an open online payment system that isn't a scam.
- I keep seeing this suggested and while I think that would be amazing I really don't think its likely. These incumbents are set up to make things difficult for new entrants to their market. With political will and engagement it would be possible, but in the current world political environment these payment processors would simply buy the right politicians & court officials to ensure that any legislative challenges would be killed in the nest.
  In the world we are in right now we need to instead focus on making the payment processors bend to the will of the majority not a vocal minority.
  We also need to start finding strategies to fight back against paedophilia as an accepted permission slip to let the worst people in the world get away with whatever they want. If its not a disqualifying status for the office of president of the US, then why does the existence of paedophiles mean we (vast majority not paedophiles I hope) have to sacrifice our rights, our privacy, and our free speech?

"Hi there, would you like to sign the petition?"

I know it's downvote central, but I've been on the "No Porn on Steam" train forever. Ever since the introduction to the service it has inundated so much of the "Top Selling" "New & Trending" etc. Steam is for games, porn is for porn. Super annoying to sift through it when I'm looking for a new game, and I have my age settings so I can see adult games like GTA/Dishonored, not "Super Hentai Bejeweled 3000".

You can disable showing adult games from the store in the store preferences.
https://store.steampowered.com/account/preferences
This setting is apparently disabled by default, so at some point you enabled it.
- Yeah, I think he enabled it. It never showed porn games for me.
One of the biggest problems is "what is porn?". Time and again a clear definition eludes us and it comes down to personal perception. What one group of people think is porn is not to a different group. Also something to think and reflect about, why are you okay with a store selling intense and graphic violence, but not sex?
Then we get to the fact that it isn't Steam calling the shots on this, not really. It is payment processors. The real outrage here is that Steam is not getting to decide what they do and don't sell, and it isn't a legal problem either. It is an arbitrary choice by the middle man monopoly. And there is nothing stopping their rules removing your ability to buy GTA or Dishonored next.
I think the backlash would be a lot less if this was truly a Steam decision. There would be people upset still, but I don't think to the same degree. The massive outrage is that stores all over, including as big as Steam, are being blackmailed into making these changes.
- I believe this group tried to remove GTA V and Detroit become human.
Is it more about the porn or the shovelware for you? That is to ask: would you play a porn game that is sufficiently story-driven and acclaimed?
- Ehat you said reminded me of Fate Stay Night, never played it, but the story was so good they made anime and manga for it, without the sex scenes of course.
- Would I play a game that has sex/nudity in it? Yes. Do I want games that are specifically pornography on steam. No.
So turn off the check box that shows you porn games....
... and I have my age settings so I can see adult games like GTA/Dishonored, not “Super Hentai Bejeweled 3000”.
The former belong to the M rated category while the hypothetical latter would belong to the Adults Only category. As others have pointed out, you can hide adult games and still see other games with violence and mature themes. Steam classifies M-rated games and AO-rated games differently.
Excuse me sir, but Super Hentai Bejeweled 3000 is one of the best games of our times.
/S
Just turn the adult stuff off yo.
steam is for games... no, it isn't really. steam has been distributing non game software for ages.
porn games are games so even if steam is for games it should have porn games.
i don't care for porn games but I've filtered them out so who cares what others do with their time
Certainly there should be better search tools and personal curation on Steam. If you don't want to see it you should be able to easily filter it.
Or its sequel, Futanari Tentacle Schoolgirl 4000
"I'll know it when I see it" has gotta be the most vibes way to tell people they're degenerates.

How to use Debit or e-transfer to pay for Steam games?

Hell, you can buy with cash. Walk to a local big box store and buy a steam wallet/gift card. That is assuming you live somewhere that has that option, of course.
Unless I'm mistaken, I thought Debit is usually through visa or MasterCard, for security.
Unless you mean like... A direct line to your bank account. Which is extremely risky.
- Online, usually. Though you can technically use debit in some places.
- In Canada, it can be done through Interac.

I understand the principle but why do gamers always choose the worst examples of something to rally behind. The stop killing games petition rallying around The Crew, which lasted 10 years and was a very average game, and now this with getting behind porn games to protest censorship.

Is there really no better examples than those?

The goal is to stop them building up any momentum. If the credit companies get used to flexing their power like this, and steam gets used to folding to it, then things will escalate.
Right now it's porn games. Who the hell would defend them. But it won't end there. You honestly don't think they would go after games that mock religion, or are trans positive?
- Under the guidelines imposed by payment processors which were recently clarified by itch.io, Baldur's Gate 3 would be banned, as it contains moments of non-consensual sex and bestiality.
"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."
-Martin Niemöller, 1952
Obviously banning porn games isn't comparable to the holocaust, but the principle of defiance is the same. If we don't want credit card companies to ban stuff we like, then we should also oppose them when they ban stuff we don't care about.
- They didnt ban anything, they said they'd stop doing business with steam and itch. I dont want to force companies to do business with other companies.
would you rather them do nothing? realistically for the vast majority of people they don't care enough to do more than this, and it's atleast SOMETHING to get the ball rolling

I completely understand wanting to fight Visa and MasterCards position in the market. That's fine.

But for the love of God. Do not involve Steam and various porn games into it. That is not going to help your case.

I get the whole. "Just because I'm killing someone in a game, doesn't mean I'll kill someone in real life".

But that's not going to hold up as an argument here. Depictions of CP, even if it's a drawing with crayons, is still highly illegal in so many places. Same logic can be applied regarding other depictions of illegal behavior in the same category (pornogrophy). Such as incest. I'm not saying that depictions of incest is illegal in many places. Because I honestly don't know. But there would be a precedence for it.

Personally, I find it utterly disgusting that Steam even allowed such titles to begin with. I welcome their removal of them. But I wish it was because of other reasons than payment processors having an issue with it.

They removed Detroit: Become Human, dude... That is not a porn game.
If I had to guess, it's probably because of the scene with the lesbian android couple.
- That's great, not great that they removed it but a great example of something you can bring up that doesn't hurt the case.
  I just really wish people would leave actual porn games out of it. Because that is not going to be helpful to their case.
That's the problem.
Valve already had a process to flag titles as illegal in specific jurisdictions, and as far as anyone can tell, was doing an okay job at that (not perfect, obviously), but they were forced to add an extra clause of, 'oh, plus anything visa et al. don't like' the extra layer is adding minimal protection and is rife for abuse.
Additionally, let's talk about what makes porn. Does "https://yakuza.fandom.com/wiki/Be_My_Baby" of Yakuza 2 count? Or does it get a free pass because it's a large publisher?
What if players take the elements of the game to create something the developers didn't prevent? Like if a map contains a baby on one side of a map and an orgy (in another office) on the other side of the map, is it CP if a player picks up the baby and brings it into the orgy room? Is this something you want the banks deciding? Couldn't we - have therapists or other behavioral health development experts make this call?
Most importantly is the recorded history of how these systems are routinely shown to be used against smaller publishers, and assorted minorities (including LGBT people) have a woman show a boob, it's polite adult fun, but if their twin brother shows a pre-op trans boob, now it's magically porn.
- What if players take the elements of the game to create something the developers didn’t prevent? Like if a map contains a baby on one side of a map and an orgy (in another office) on the other side of the map, is it CP if a player picks up the baby and brings it into the orgy room? Is this something you want the banks deciding?
  I said I wish removal of titles would be because of other reasons than payment processors having an issue with it. So to be clear. The answer to your question of if it should be up to banks to decide, is "No".
  Additionally, let’s talk about what makes porn. Does “https://yakuza.fandom.com/wiki/Be_My_Baby%E2%80%9D of Yakuza 2 count? Or does it get a free pass because it’s a large publisher?
  We don't need to talk about what makes porn. Though it may have been unclear, the titles I spoke of, was the ones Steam removed after PayPal wasn't authorizing payments. The "Incest porn games". I don't know what the law says where you live. But in my part of the world. Incest is illegal. And I do not think games where incest is the goal and depicted as a fetish have any place on steam.
  It's ok if you want incest games on steam. That's your opinion. I just said I welcome their removal. But wish they would have been removed due to other reasons.

CC companies have a really easy retort in that they operate in jurisdictions where these things are illegal

And the easy retort to that is that they don’t apply Chinese censorship globally. Only in China. Regional laws only apply regionally.
- Have you seen the NBA? China can apply its censorship globally lol
- They have regional pricing already, regional content bans should be easy enough.

After reading the article on gamerant.com, the many comments on here and looking at the petition, I really wonder if actually so many people are delusional and/or are just missing the core point here?! (Or it is just a small crowd with much noise?) IMHO, there are better places in the world to engage and petition for. (Local communities and regional politics, for example.) But if banning that little "funny" child incest game on Steam puts you up the tree, well, ...

Are you really that offended? And why, on point? How in the world can you defend publishing (and selling) games - mostly targeted at young folks - which are quite disturbing, derangend and morally wrong in the name of "freedom" or "independence"? And call that blatantly censorship, when there are instead public guidelines by Steam and their partners? Don´t you wish for (young) people to develop good values instead of becoming delusional with child pornography, incest, violence, gore and such? What are your values here?

It isn't about the actual games being targeted. It's everything about the implications of having a private company dictate what legal content I can buy with my own money. If they cave to lobby groups once, they will do it again. Next time it might be something you care about instead.
Also games made for adults are targeted at adults, not "young people". You can't even really see these games on steam unless you are an adult and explicitly turn on visibility of porn games. The average gamer is well up in their thirties at this point as well.
- Alright, I understand your point. But I only partially agree with it. Hear me out: You want a free marketplace to buy whatever you wish, without any dictations? - But any market or shops you can think of has some regulations and dependencies, right? The one who offers the platform dictates what and how it is traded, as far as it has been. And even more if banks or transaction processors are involved, who also have a say. Not ideal, I agree, but the norm. How do you want to technically solve this? By their own transaction service, like some suggest here? Not sure if that helps, because you might create a new monopoly.
  And at the same time, we discuss this here, people demand transparency and environmently responsability for all the delivery chains. Like for clothing or food. - Is that not what happens here? The banks as part of the service chain are pushing Valve to implement stricter rulings about critical content. For me, that looks like what people would ask for. Correct me, if I am wrong.
Don´t you wish for (young) people to develop good values...
Sounds like a fucking dog whistle for sure. Get off lemmy.
- "Dog whistle"? Like for right wing talk? That is not what I am or what I mean. What is wrong about developing values? Being supportive to people is one value or finding moral standards, for example. That's what I talk about.
It's about the danger posed by a monolithic government or corporation deciding what things get to be traded and sold. Like a fucked up capitalist version of that poem "First They Came".
- Oh, interesting! I know the poem. But I find it a harsh comparison to the situation about Valve's new regulation. And I did not see it as such a highly-charged political topic. But apparently it is. To me it does not look like "a monolitic corporation", as you can still buy games elsewhere. But I surely see the influence that the big banks/transactors have on Valve here. - But how would you limit this? Any technical solutions? On the other hand, if Valve would have implemented stricter rules for critical games themselves earlier, we would not have that problem/discussion now. (Please also see my other answer below.) Edit: Typo
An ml account wanting to have private companies decide what people are able to see and what not.
Guess you just want to live in an authoritarian world no matter who's ruling
- What does my account origin has to do with that? Please explain. No, I don't want to live in an authoritarian world. But I appreciate businesses following certain moral standards, like banning child porn in every aspect.