Mastercard has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms, contrary to media reports and allegations.
Our payment network follows standards based on the rule of law. Put simply, we allow all lawful purchases on our network. At the same time, we require merchants to have appropriate controls to ensure Mastercard cards cannot be used for unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content.
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Seth Eisen
Is this why it appeared Steam only took down Incest and other spicy things?
Or did all the reporting just read the top of the list, and that had all the incest front loaded?
That’s what it started with but it seems to have quickly expanded to include a lot of more mundane things. Initial reporting was only on the first wave of censored games and didn’t include the stuff that was removed later on.
Ah, I didn’t hear that Valve did the take downs in waves.
But I did hear itch.io took down everything, including things with labels that happen to frequently overlap with porn, but are not in-fact, porn.
I’m interested in seeing reporting on the different stages of take downs. Anyone have a link? My Google fu is failing me.
I don’t know that anyone has put together a complete list of games taken down specifically because of this, but you can look at steam-tracker.com and sort by date to see what has been removed recently. It doesn’t show why a game was removed, but you can usually infer a lot from the title and cover art.
Also I should clarify it wasn’t specifically multiple large waves, there was a large initial group, but the remainder have been slowly trickling in. I’d guess there’s someone going through Steams catalog slowly flagging games to remove. The first group was likely an easy keyword search, while the rest are being evaluated on a case by case basis most likely.
All of those titles make me really worried about Redemption of Li Wei…
Why doesn’t valve simply restore games back then? Tell payment processors MC is OK with them (as evident by this statement) and tell them to come back with a reply from MC?
But what was “illegal”? I mean, if we’re applying real life laws to video games, that completely removed any game where violence is portrayed, GTA, Sonic the hedgehog, animal cruelty in super Mario. That’s why they are GAMES.
dumbasses. All of them.
No more RISK. Too violent. Should probably ban Clue while we’re at it.
So let’s say you’re in the market for a credit card. You can choose from:
iChar-Jit: We are ethical. We don’t sell to Nazis. You (and your kids) will be safe from buying questionable products or from questionable sources.
MoneySLAM Our card is usable by anyone, for anything, anywhere. Bangladesh; In orbit around Jupiter; Russia; Sex; Drugs; Bombs.¹
1. Some products may be dangerous or unethically sourced; Please spend safely and exercise good judgement.
Assuming all other factors (interest rate, online accessibility, confused foreign sales reps etc.) are more or less equal, which card will you get?
ETA Interactive services absolutely should be more focused on equal accommodations (making sure everyone is served evenly, even if they want a gay wedding cake) than on whether or not the transactions involve questionable crap.
Though if the money exchange market is capitulating to activists, it’d be interesting to see if environmentalist causes could pressure them as well. Because fossil-fuel based products are killing the human species (and most of all the others). Stop allowing transactions for diamonds and chocolate.
If they’re more hesitant about other kinds of unethical transaction then it’s because the company officials think furry porn and queer content is icky, not from activist pressure.
oh they have damaged the brand alright
Can I still use visa or MasterCard on a dildo? And can I pay for it in cash… Dollars? Is my money accepted at the local adult bookstore?
I’d love Valve to spend their extra billions on opening a payment processor. Fuck the big 3.
The Drip Card from Valve incoming!
There’s multiple steps to this sadly, including the payment gateway, processor, acquirer and this is before even Mastercard, VISA, Amex or other card companies come into the picture.
It’s not impossible, but Valve would need to convince the card issuers that they are a valid processor and then also make deals with banks all over the world for GWs. Or they could just act like Stripe and own the full stack and bully their way through the fintech world.
They already support local payment processing schemes such as Bancontact, iDEAL, JCB, Pix, etc. A good chunk of their international customer base already isn’t dependent on the big American payment processors.
The way towards undermining Visa/MC’s power is for more governments/Central Banks to push for indigenous alternatives which abide by local regulations rather than foreign puritanism. This is already a desirable goal for most both from a geopolitical POV (reduce American control over world finance) and a financial one (VISA/MasterCard charge outrageous transaction fees).
American consumers are fucked whichever way things go though, it’s not like the regime is going to make a move to break up the monopoly nor to push for less censorship in media. If Valve somehow goes through with this and makes deal with all major American banks, they’ll be done just in time for the Save The Children From Pedostanic Video Games Act or whatever the fuck that will force them to purge all thought crime from their platform.
Yeah I’m surprised they are not on board with Interac Debit in Canada.
Weird, either there’s some backroom drama with Interac or now might be the time for you to ask their support about it.
In America I think you also either literally or effectively (to compete) have to own some banks as well.
That, and I’m like 70% sure that as a payment processor you can’t take your own payments in the way that valve would need to.
Unfortunately Taler still needs a lot of maturing, but having a distributed payment system not running on that horrendous waste of time and energy that is the block chain is promising!
I’d never heard of this before. I hope Liberapay adds support for it. I don’t think all itch.io developers would be interested. I’m not sure it quite solves all the problems that Steam has with getting payments to game publishers.
Quite interesting; thanks for the link!
Honestly, wouldn’t be surprised, they have spent god knows how much to push linux to unshackle themselves from Windows and Microsoft
They are a fucking payment processor; the only brand that matters is reliability and confidency, which they damaged now.
They’re not talking about with Steam customers though, but rather with the religious idiots who have decided to crusade against porn, feel emboldened by recent age-ID bills and are now pursuing the “MasterCard funds filth” angle.
I’m kinda wondering what the ratio of anti-porn religious knobs is you gamers. There’s a lot of religious folk but many of them also enjoy porn so …
There are less puritans than gooners, if a corpo is backing the puritans is because that corpo is ran by one of those demons.
Direct link: Mastercard rule 5.12.7 Illegal or Brand-damaging Transactions
Tweet of their attempt to deny responsibility: great opportunity to wreck their brand.
Wtf are all these rules that I didn’t agree to when getting a bank card?
Of course, because when everyone buy a game on steam the FIRST thing it comes to their mind is the credit card brand they used. What a load of bullock.
FFS I don’t even remember which one of my credit card I have saved on steam.
MasterCard can go fuck themselves. Great job saving your brand
I use Paypal and they charge my Discover (Novus network, IIRC). No MC policy issue, let me buy what I want.
I don’t have any credit cards saved on steam. I only use PayPal for steam purchases.
😬
I’d rather pay with my actual blood than use PayPal.
Choose your poison.
It’s purely because steam hasn’t been able to keep my login info secure for almost a decade. I’ve changed emails, passwords, both, and yet I will always get random 2FA attempts from other places. I just don’t trust them to keep my bank info safe either.
I’m looking at this and I am just wondering… Did you also check the computers your using?
It’s quite a bit easier to get in the pc of a normal user than it is to get into the computers of valve, or at least that’s to hope.
check your email addresses, then check for malware on your system.
that’s definitely not normal…
Interesting. I’ve been using steam for decades and the only time my account was compromised was due to my own machine getting some malware. It was easy enough to clean up, reset password and reset all my steam sessions.
Now my blizzard account on the other hand… I got so tired of defending it that I’ve cleared all my CC and personal info from the account and just decided to let the hackers have it. Their shit leaks bad.
A bullock is a steer. You wanted bollocks.
Seriously rediculous, most people don’t even know if their card is Visa or Mastercard, nor do they care (because they dont know what they are or what they mean).
(This is from my experience with people i know)
Mastercard have changed their design so that it no longer says Mastercard on it, and it’s just the two circles. I bloody hate it, MasterCard thought they were able to get away with it because they thought they had brand recognition but literally no one cares about them.
Also they’ve been fine with porn games up until now and literally no one cared.
Oh I’m so glad that their brand isn’t being damaged. It’d be terrible if that were to happen.
More people should watch this:
The Secret War To Censor The Internet
The CC companies have religious morons contained within their executives but they’re mainly being puppeted by outside religious evangelical organizations with a long history of wanting to destroy all sex work or erotica art.
It’s been going on since the start of the internet pretty much. Web hosts do the same thing. though they are much more forgiving. Middlemen saying what you can and can’t talk about, share, and consume online.
I expected nothing less from them. They did pretty much the same exact thing when Japan tried confronting them after they started blocking Japanese retailers from trading internationally. I can’t find the article anymore but IIRC, Japan’s Prime Minister tried having an in person interview with them about it but it was cut short because he stormed out of the room after Visa tried denying everything. I don’t think that the payment processors will ever take responsibility for their actions.
Why would they? Everybody’s going to keep using them anyway.
They forgot the part of their TOS about “damaging the brand”.
They realized that this news getting out damaged their brand worse.
