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.
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 got perma’d I think because of my account having a small (<20) negative balance on it (due to some fuckery they tried to pull on their/eBay’s end awhile back) and they had no way to get payment from me.
Only found out I was banned over a decade later when I was trying to login to transfer some money to a friend. Can’t even make a new account it just gets locked and recovery options don’t do shit, oh well 🙃
Inb4 they start flagging 3D printers because you can print mags with them.
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.
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
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.
Monero
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
What’s the appeal of a porn game over just watching a video? Seems like the interaction is a hassle
More role play I suppose?
I’d imagine it’s sort of like reading porn rather than watching porn. Different people are activated by different things.
Fair enough
Immersion and customizability
I imagine to some its sort of like gambling? Hard to say.
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.
Time for Steam to make their own payment process then!
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.
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…
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transaction times are abysmally, orders of magnitude more slow than using PayPal or Visa or MC,
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crypto is exceptionally volatile, way, way less price stable than actual currencies,
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transaction fees tend to be way, way worse than using traditional payment processors, because what you are actually doing is closer to a realtime forex currency conversion service,
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or, if 3 is not the case, that means the retailer themself is directly holding a crypto wallet, which means they have massive financial risk and instability due to the extreme volatility of crypto, when all their other expenses are in USD or w/e
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?
Case in point, itch.io just wiped all adult games as well.
You raise good points. It’s great that other store fronts still exist where you can sell adult games. But I do worry if credit card companies will come for them too one day.
Re: crypto. Some of what you said is true. Transaction fee are comparatively expensive (but also note credit card companies charge transaction fees too, just not directly to the consumer). But other points aren’t necessarily true. Transaction times have improved a lot, there are networks designed for fast transaction times, and usually the payment can complete in seconds. The volatility problem is solved by stable coins, which have their values fixed relative a currency. (Of course stable coins can, and have failed in the past. But that only concerns you if you keep your money as stable coin. For one-off payments this shouldn’t matter). Retailers don’t have to hold cryptos if they don’t want to. Crypto markets have pretty good liquidity nowadays, it’s not hard to get rid of the coins immediately after you get them (well to be fair if you are getting Valve volumes it could be a problem, should be fine for smaller stores).
Crypto is a fast evolving field, so problems are being solved by the day.
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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
goongift balance.Won’t work. I imagine PayPal’s stance here is along the lines of “we will not allow any payment to go through to Valve as long as there is content we don’t want on Steam”.
If PayPal only stopped payments towards the content they don’t like, Valve wouldn’t have done anything. The fact Valve is removing content means that PayPal must have told them to remove the content or else they would stop allowing payments to Valve altogether. I can’t imagine a reality where this is not the case.
PayPal wouldn’t dare attack Steam for accepting external payment methods with rules they don’t agree with and can’t change because they don’t own those companies. In addition to opening them up to potential lawsuits, it could catastrophically backfire if Valve simply said “fine, we don’t accept PayPal anymore, but we do accept crypto now.”
PayPal would die in a week. The investors would drag out a guillitine by the next earnings call.
I think that’s a naïve view. PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe are all american companies that are either happy or feel compelled to comply the administration of the fascist-in-command.
Sure maybe this is PayPal doing their own thing, or maybe it’s part of a more organized scheme in which potential lawsuits don’t really matter.
Paypal has a reputation for this kind of thing from before Trump 2.0 though. They’ve ben doing this since at least 2003.
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.
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?
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.
I doesn’t need to be removed completly, just removed for those that don’t opt in to seeing it. The damn porn titles make it impossible to use steam since I have young kids that don’t need to see that shit. Just let me browse your store without being overrun by half naked anime girls.
you can filter them out by blocking the adult content tag, no?
edit: just checked: yes, you can filter it out under your account preferences. there’s a toggle there wether or not you want to see that in the store
Users shouldn’t have to hunt down the option to turn that shit off. It should be off by default.
it shouldn’t be dictated by card payment systems, which is the whole point.
