Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games

If they continued to carry any of the games that were singled out for removal by Visa and Mastercard, they would not be able to accept credit card payments for anything else in their store. This same drama has played out the same way with countless other online services.

Yep, they are a just a modern day mafia. "Would be a real shame if you didn't take down these games. Then we couldn't do business with you anymore."

nah. USDC funds can be frozen by Circle on demand/request.

God lord you people are still trying to make this happen. Consumers don't want cryptocurrency. It has been irredemably tainted by scammers, grifters, human traffickers, drug dealers and despotic regimes.

There are no other payment processors that can replace Visa/Mastercard*.

There are other payment processors in India/Japan/China/Brazil/etc. But none of them is internationally adopted like Visa/Mastercard.

In some countries there are other systems. It's high time the modern world adopted something similar like Pix in Brazil.

There are national issuers like JCB or UnionPay.

People say that a lot but I haven't seen actual statistics, and sites that have established low chargeback rates face the same issues.

Also that's not a reason to ban certain genres/kinks, which is what's happening here.

You need to be more specific. Conflating "adult content" with porn is both problematic is masks the real issue. A large majority of games Valve sells are adult content. But as you can imagine grand theft auto is not causing a lot of political backlash, despite the objectionable content.

Which makes less sense when you consider Steam will refund you game if you dont want it.

The fact that these were specifically incest games makes me think a title was somehow involved in distributing CSAM, which is often why Visa/MC crack down on porn websites.

But it is possible that Visa sensibly and correctly said "anyone who makes or purchases such a game is a despicable scumbag, and we shouldn't assume the financial risk of dealing with them."

Seeing reduced use partially because only a few banks support using it in Apple Pay. And Google Pay can't support it at all currently

I'm not sure I buy the chargeback angle. It's commonly trotted out as a reason card companies would enforce censorship, but it doesn't make sense with the actions they take. Chargeback fees are paid by the merchant regardless of the chargeback's success, and are supposed to cover the costs of administering it (and then some). The very selective rules applied here are pretty odd from that angle too, if adult content chargebacks/fraud is the issue, then all of it should be the issue, not small niches.

Fraud is likely more realistic of an issue, but that's probably an issue with games in general, not just adult titles.

There are already high-risk merchant accounts with higher fees and cash reserve requirements, but AFAIK companies like Valve aren't being given any options other than comply or be destroyed.

I doubt it. If that were the case, I think they would only be complaining to Valve about the number of chargebacks issued from the Steam store. Not about genres-that-are-correlated-with-chargebacks-in-other-contexts.

Given Valve's generous refund policies, and the fact that a steam store purchase on your credit card statement looks quite innocent, and that the credit card companies didn't complain to Valve about chargebacks but about content, my guess is there are hardly any chargebacks, and this is just about moral purity.

Can you link a reliable source for this claim? I personally couldn't find anything with substance.

I can't imagine people are risking their steam accounts to ripoff a $5 adult game

Visa charge a fee for processing chargebacks, and this will be a tiny fraction of Steam sales. I doubt it's their concern.

That's not true, anti-sex work and anti-porn activists have specifically been pressuring payment processors to assume these policies. The processors as the critical control point of this whole thing was identified decades ago and conservative christian think tanks have been pursuing this path since then.

This is part of a long-term plan to de facto ban lgbtq content without having to deal with first amendment protections. First have the payment processors ban explicit content, then have queer content categorized as explicit.

And you could indeed use Bitcoin on Steam for a while!

But then the blocks got full, fees and wait times skyrocketed, and in response to the customer backlash Steam removed Bitcoin.

Meanwhile Bitcoiners were (and still are) only focused on number go up instead of other, more productive, use cases.

Such a waste.

Exactly. It's really a tragedy that crypto becomes a speculator's tool, and the real problem didn't even get solved.

Those solutions might work for some people in some countries, but I would argue that it's not acceptable for the vast majority of customers, and they would lose a very significant portion of revenue.

PayPal has also been involved in this.

which is relevant how exactly?

merchants don't deal with mastercard, they deal with an acquiring bank

of which there are hundreds

no doubt one of which will be happy to take the business