I don't think it's realistically viable to compete with Steam (or Itch) without access to Mastercard and Visa.
(For anyone thinking crypto: we have a different idea of what it means to be either "realistically viable" or to "compete with Steam")
Even if somebody thinks certain speech should be censored, I doubt they'd want what they consider unsavory speech being driven to use a payment system like Bitcoin, and for that to become the norm, it would open up much more potential for abuse.
They seem totally fine with the age checks many states are enacting for porn sites. The Republican Party loves slagging pedophiles (real or imagined) and hating on LGBTQIA+ people or trying to make their lives as difficult/horrible as possible.
Yeah some games delisted were horrible. One of the main offenders had already been pulled as soon as Steam (or was it Itch) was notified. But they still used it as evidence. The platforms were policing themselves well.
But not only did gratuitous porn games and abuse games get delisted, lots of games on related to inclusiveness of LGBTQIA+ did too from what I’m seeing from developers on social media.
I suspect if anything the administration would be happy to let people use this as yet another hammer in their culture war against such people existing.
That’s why.
Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
eliminate central promotion of abortion; comprehensive
sexuality education; and the new woke gender ideologyThis way, abusers can disagree about what constitutes abuse in private, but can form a bloc in public, unifying around the common ground that the boss's whims should be respected in matters where the bandying about of facts is taboo. Might makes right, etc.
Does that term still have any meaning?
Now what?
If you’re visible, you’re a target. If you’re not, you don’t matter.
If it’s not a credit card, it’s what debit? Different countries do it differently, so that’s a big hassle for the storefront. Sure you can use a payment processor, but look it’s someone to pressure to prevent you from taking money again.
Maybe Crypto? How do people buy that crypto? Probably want to use credit cards. Oops. Or debit. See above. How do you turn your crypto into currency to pay your employees? That’s an institution to pressure to block you again.
If your new system interacts with the old system at all there is an attack point. So unless you can bootstrap an entire alternate financial system where people can live without needing to access the old one you’re in trouble.
And if you do succeed, the law and the same groups will come knocking.
You can’t get away from the banking system. The only solution to this is regulation, and I don’t see that happening.
Yes but no. Currently the issue is that these two payment systems - both credit/debit card networks - (1) have the power to decide with impunity, because they have critical mass. And (2) have visibility into who each vendor is and what they are selling. If there is one case of abusing market dominance, this is it - and for all we frequently hear, this is REALLY not all that common. (And it's "funny" that we hear a lot about Apple's app store - but not about their anti-adult content rules!)
For example, right now a bank would have a VERY hard time preventing you from paying for $OBJECTIONABLE_CONTENT with crypto. That bank would have no visibility into who you are paying with that crypto. There are other crypto intermediaries but they are "diffuse". Nobody in there has both visibility and power.
For example, right now some vendors accept gift cards as payment. Buy a Home Depot gift card in cash at your local store and use it to pay for $OBJECTIONABLE_CONTENT. Obviously this is not a very efficient payment infrastructure but it exists.
But yes of course, imposing to credit card networks to be content-blind would be helpful and soooo much more efficient.
Terrorism, money laundering, illegal things like drugs, whatever.
If it’s hard enough to get crypto, then it doesn’t matter if it’s technically an option.
You could make it possible to buy this stuff with Fruity Pebbles box tops. They’d have no visibility into that either. And roughly no one would do it.
They just have to make this stuff hard enough. And that’s currently very easy.
Step 4 gets you thrown in jail for violating AML.
The problem with alternatives to things like OnlyFans is that the performers who work through OnlyFans want to go where people can find them. They can dumb down their acts - and have lots of paying traffic, or they can do what they would prefer - and have hardly any paying traffic. That's tough.
Pretty soon (in the U.S.) all porn and sexual-adjacent content is going to be illegal. The christo-fascists currently in power said they were going to do it, and they will.
They could not allow those games to be sold through those particular payment processors and require wire transfers instead. More cumbersome payment method, but better than outright banning them.
If the payment processors try to dictate what content these sites may host even when it involves competing processors that sounds quite anti-competitive practice.
Probably the only way around it is to spin up a completely different corporate entity which only allows for payments via wire transfer, ACH, or perhaps some of the various payment apps available.
> (For anyone thinking crypto: we have a different idea of what it means to be either "realistically viable" or to "compete with Steam")
Wow, not crypto, but GP fucking nailed it.
Yes, a small business in the 90s may have been able to make it work, but it's not the 90s anymore.
At least I hope that USPS is forbidden from not (eventually) delivering legal packages ?
> Bezos: We got an order from somebody in Bulgaria, and this person sent us cash through the mail to pay for their order. And they sent us two crisp $100 bills. And they put these two $100 bills inside a floppy disk. And then they put a note on the cover of the floppy disk, and they mailed this whole thing to us. And the note on the cover of the floppy disk said, "The money is inside the floppy disk. The customs inspectors steal the money, but they don't read English." That shows you the effort to which people will go to be able to buy things.
It shows you the effort that some people will go to be able to buy things if they also don't have good alternatives.
But if we're talking about a hypothetical Steam competitor, then Steam still exists and takes credit cards.
They're not "targeting" payment processors. Payment processors have to deal with significantly more problems due to the nature of porn games and chargebacks. Fix those problems and the payment processors won't have a reason anymore to ban porn (or anything). What's the point of a capitalist economy if not for startups to target market needs like these?
Charge backs, etc... can be effectively solved by appropriately pricing in such risks (or not offering those services at all).
This isn't a payment processor issue, it's a political choice.
This is commonly repeated, but doesn't hold up. Chargeback fees (especially for card-not-present transactions) are paid by the merchant and are simply increased (with reserves required) for high-risk accounts. It also wouldn't make sense to target hyper-specific niches if it were really about chargebacks, they would go after all of it, and go after things like the CS marketplace.
But the biggest giveaway IMO is that they do not allow, e.g., Steam selling these games crypto-only. It's either remove them entirely or remove credit cards entirely. If it was really about specific titles having high fraud/chargeback rates, selling them some other way would be fine.
The problem is that they aren't being told "we won't let people buy this through us", they're told "this needs to go entirely or no more credit cards for you".
You can't even realistically have a F2P game that requires a high spec machine because of how the market works.
That don't use Visa/Mastercard? The bans aren't coming from the platforms but from the payment processors.
The problem isn't just "the Payment Processor doesn't want to support this game" but also "this game shows Guilt-By-Association that your platform's money might go to 'criminals' or 'sinners'."
Guilt-By-Association is real gross, but a large part of the current fight, too, especially looking at itch.io's payment processor-required actions, not just Steam's.
All of those are still prone to censorship if the attacking group is motivated enough. Even crypto, which should be the ideal solution to this problem, is not ideal because most transactions are performed through centralized exchanges which can easily blacklist whatever transactions they want.