Steam is cracking down on porn games, to keep Payment Processors happy.
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Dude SWIFT has more financial power and sway than visa and mastercard. They're the folks who manage the network that allows bank transfers to happen nigh instantaneously. So if they block you, you are fucked.
the network that allows bank transfers to happen nigh instantaneously.
Ah, so I guess Canada doesn't use them! Haha
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This is gold!! I'd love to read more about it!! It's very fascinating how payment system can control the type of content that is available for consumers
It was pretty wild. I wish I still had the list of visa/MC "no-nos"
I mean honestly the US government was more lax. all they wanted was us to ensure we were following the 2257 stuff and documenting all the talent.
surprisingly though American Express was a lot more "liberal" with this stuff. guess those dudes were just kinkier.
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That is exactly why I don't understand why they have an issue with it.
They do not know if someone is using the store to buy porn games. So why care? Their concern should be profit, not national driven policies.
They care because someone could see that it is possible to buy porn games in the steam interface (they could even make screenshots of a steam checkout page with both the name of a porn game and the visa/MasterCard/PayPal logos visible at the same time) and that would RUIN, RUIN I say, their good reputation..
Because bank's and payment provider do anything to keep their good reputation with the important people... advertisement companies and other Mc Scrounges -
No, they were created to facilitate pyramid schemes and scams.
That's true for all non precious metal currencies.
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Payment processors don't know which game you bought. That's not the concern.
Their concern is that the store they do business with provides services to content they deem inappropriate. Frankly, I'm surprised they allowed this much for so long given the past.
Why credit card processors are puritans, I have no idea. But MC, Visa and PayPal have historically always been super anti-porn.
They act puritan to help facilitate business in more restricted cultures like China or Vietnam. Allowing everything that is allowed in the most liberal countries wouldn't loose them their marketshare in those countries. Disallowing it though, that opens those foreign markets with minimal negative effect to their processing volume. How many people are going to blame visa for this? Most will just blame Steam who is just conforming to the standards the processors set.
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My VPN, VPS, phone bill, bunch of games and license keys, steam points, sms verification services all directly for crypto. I also buy gift cards to grocery stores, takeout delivery apps and the local equivalent of Amazon all for crypto and use them to do most of my shopping. Other things I used it for is donating to foss projects I use and some just for fun penny gambling/predictions. Once I even got paid in crypto for some freelance work I did. If you count the gift cards most of my spending is done in crypto, usually monero.
Have a look at monerica.com and xmrbazaar.com if you're looking for places to spend your crypto.
Buying gift cards, which are in fiat currency, defeats the whole point lol
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They act puritan to help facilitate business in more restricted cultures like China or Vietnam. Allowing everything that is allowed in the most liberal countries wouldn't loose them their marketshare in those countries. Disallowing it though, that opens those foreign markets with minimal negative effect to their processing volume. How many people are going to blame visa for this? Most will just blame Steam who is just conforming to the standards the processors set.
Wouldn't that still falls under steam responsibilities? If China doesn't like porn games, they would/should go after steam allowing the sale of such games in their market, not Visa which has no means to know what games you purchased
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A rare L for Steam.
Not exactly their fault, but I wonder what changed that made them start caring.
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Things of questionable moral value have been available for sale for as long as money has existed. It’s not like this is new. Payment processors got into this business knowing perfectly well that some purchases may not align with their moral values. In fact, they’ve been profiting off it for decades. They don’t get to suddenly clutch their pearls now.
To be clear, I won’t miss the incest games. I just don’t like the precedent this is setting.
Processors don't even deserve the right to even learn what morals even are. They are business entities, and shouldn't have any rights at all, honestly. They're just there to move money and shouldn't get any say at all in what that means. None.
Honestly, (to your last point) fuck anyone who is into that shit in any kind of practical way.(if they wanna goon about it, that's another discussion. But even with adding "step", it's kinda close to that vanta black color on the sunniest day.
But if having erotic software keeps them out of their siblings and parents and kids' beds, then more power to em.
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I think a better example would be net neutrality. The whole purpose of the payment provider is to move money from Person A to Person B. Just like how ISP is meant to get you from Website A to Website B.
It would be like your ISP going "Woah there buckeroo. You can't go to Duck, Duck Go to search. We only let you go to Google."
Ahh man, Australia have tried DNS blocking websites via our ISPs however running your own or changing your DNS (on your local machine or your modem if it's not locked down) completely dumpsters this strategy.
From memory torrent websites were blocked and some rom / game piracy sites.
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Buying gift cards, which are in fiat currency, defeats the whole point lol
Obviously I'd prefer to pay in crypto directly but some of the stores I shop in don't accept it yet. In person I can pay in cash but shopping privately online is a different story. Gift cards are the next best option, and thanks to them I can use the self checkout scanner and online stores without my purchasing history being tracked. It also allows me to store my savings in a hard asset that can't be easily confiscated, frozen, inflated or stolen, that I can permissionlessly spend whenever I need to, that no one knows how much of or if I have, that if needs be I can flee the country with in an instant without worry that it will be sized or lost. And it gives me the freedom to not be at the mercy of the banking system and just take their debit card fee, debit card issuance fee, debit card replacement fee, transfer fee, deposit fee, overdraft fee, underdraft fee, too little money fee, account having fee, fuck you what you gonna do fee...
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On the one hand, oh noz, the incest games. Who will live without the low effort AI goon crap?
On the other hand, why do the payment companies get to dictate what sales are made? It's my fucking money, or my fucking store. It's not the job of the payment processors to determine if I'm buying illegal goods, just that the money goes from me to the store.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I mean isn’t this effectively the problem bitcoin aimed to solve originally? Don’t get me wrong, crypto is fucked and I’m not advocating for it here per se. But a locally processed, secure, digital version of cash bypasses the need for any of this. Granted it bypasses the need for some of the most powerful institutions on the planet too, and so will never happen in a truly egalitarian sense.
Also just cause it’s bugging me, you understand that a credit card, or even a debit card or PayPal/venmo account, does not equate to ‘your money’ the way physical cash does, right?
Im not saying you shouldn’t have the right to privacy when making a purchase. But mandating the processors of that purchase ignore what that money is doing is a fools errand as that’s basically a core mechanism in their operation and generation of profit.
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Obviously I'd prefer to pay in crypto directly but some of the stores I shop in don't accept it yet. In person I can pay in cash but shopping privately online is a different story. Gift cards are the next best option, and thanks to them I can use the self checkout scanner and online stores without my purchasing history being tracked. It also allows me to store my savings in a hard asset that can't be easily confiscated, frozen, inflated or stolen, that I can permissionlessly spend whenever I need to, that no one knows how much of or if I have, that if needs be I can flee the country with in an instant without worry that it will be sized or lost. And it gives me the freedom to not be at the mercy of the banking system and just take their debit card fee, debit card issuance fee, debit card replacement fee, transfer fee, deposit fee, overdraft fee, underdraft fee, too little money fee, account having fee, fuck you what you gonna do fee...
Hate to be a party pooper, but unless you're going thru self checkout (and the store for that matter) fully masked, you've given up way more information than by using Visa.
I'll give you the access benefit.
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the network that allows bank transfers to happen nigh instantaneously.
Ah, so I guess Canada doesn't use them! Haha
Haha but also last I checked everyone but north Korea uses them and north Korea I'm just pulling out of my ass because it makes sense to me.
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A rare L for Steam.
Not exactly their fault, but I wonder what changed that made them start caring.
Probably the last tweet that was posted on this thread, if PayPal was denying purchases in certain regions than steam would get scared
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Probably the last tweet that was posted on this thread, if PayPal was denying purchases in certain regions than steam would get scared
That was kinda what I was alluding to. Apparently it worked before that, but they decided to make up extra rules or turned up enforcement.
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Well, they're not. Monerica is just a repository with links and short description of monero accepting businesses and monero related stuff. Xmrbazaar is a p2p craigslist/facebook marketplace/ebay like service that uses monero instead of FIAT.
::: spoiler Example listing
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You're even dumber I thought. Those sites mention (multiple times even) game account selling services (breaking TOS's all around), gambling and virtual phone numbers (used in scams almost exclusively). You really think you're going to get people using those sites?
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But they don't hold a monopoly. And at least for now, they are private businesses. If your argument is that they should be nationalized, that's a different conversation and I think we'd agree on more.
A duopoly or any oligopoly is effectively the same as a monopoly.
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You are still refusing to acknowledge that regional legislation can easily prohibit purchases from sources that facilitate illegal products.
I have never heard of a case where payment processors refuse to authorize payment of a legal product because they don't like the product.
Do you comprehend how big of a problem it is if a payment processor can't authorize payments to steam? That's not something they do for the fun of it. It's because there are legal hurdles. Everyday they can't authorize payments is lost revenue, and risk of losing customers.
I'm sorry, but you will just have to source your incest porn games from somewhere else.
And you're missing the point where payment processors aren't the police. They are not the ones to make any decisions like that, yet they do.
Point in case: hoe many payment processors allow legal porn?
It's easy to jump onto child pornography, but it's completely missing the point.
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And you're missing the point where payment processors aren't the police. They are not the ones to make any decisions like that, yet they do.
Point in case: hoe many payment processors allow legal porn?
It's easy to jump onto child pornography, but it's completely missing the point.
I'm not missing the point where payment processor aren't police. But they still need to follow legislation in the region they operate.
First of, it's not "Point in case", it's "Case in point".
Second, I can honestly say. I have no idea how many payment processors does or does not authorize payments regarding legal porn for various websites.
Feel free to link an article or source that investigates that particular topic.If you look at the post. They claim "Possibly related to PayPal because people in certain regions have not been able to use it to pay on Steam."
If this was PayPal taking a stand on a corporate level against porn games on steam. Why would only certain regions be affected instead of everyone?
The obvious answer, is that it's only certain regions, because of their legislation. If PayPal wish to do business in their region. They have to follow their laws for those customers.
