Visa/Mastercard can, conceivably, just tell Steam "if X content is available on the platform at all, regardless of payment method, we will no longer process your payments."
If I were Steam, I would not call that bluff.
As long as VISA and MasterCard are only targetting adult content they are pretty much free to do whatever they want because no politician is going to go out and defend pornography.
Steam has a large and dedicated user base. They are one of the companies that has access to enough users to conceivably build their own payment processor with enough volume to be profitable from the start.
Industry giants are often toppled by companies who started out in some niche the giant is ignoring/avoiding.
The Proton / Steam deck play was a decade long strategic play that has clearly paid dividends and made Steam much less dependent on Microsoft. It would not be surprising to me if Valve in 10 years time has positioned itself to be much more independent of Visa and Mastercard than it is today.
I'm quite sure it would cause a massive amount of people to start paying using bank transfer.
Valve also have an extremely loyal customer base. If they have to open an account at the Bank of Gaben to get their fix of smutty games, they just might.
the topic up chain was " if they block whole Steam, it will create way larger outrage. I am sure they will dare not.". But it seems Valve doesn't want to take the gamble there.
I think Visa/MC very much would dare.
Valve isn't ready for this battle ... yet.
I imagine they are girding for it, though. It simply wasn't a feasible battle until probably this year. FedNow and other things are just coming online. I suspect that Valve will begin incentivizing using that system rather than Visa/MC extremely strongly.
It's more like huge companies have a lot of internal politics, so public dramas are good occasion to fire a few managers here and there by their opponents.
In China, where more than two competitors exist, many are willing to subsidize their customers just to have their service used.
In any case, as it stands right now, Steam losing Visa/MC processing entirely would be catastrophic to their business.
(payments are adjacent to my day gig, and I have to talk to FiServ and other FIs occasionally on the topic of moving money at a fintech)
That will vary by country, and the Federal Reserve is also US-specific. There are gamers in more countries than just the US :).
But yes, I certainly agree that the duopoly of Visa/MC needs to go.
But this is getting a bit into the weeds, I think. The point is that as it stands right now, today, Visa/MC is what Steam runs on. It would take a long time (months, if not years) for Steam to roll out support for every country that has their own system (Interac, Pix, etc.). We also can't forget that not every country has systems like that.
The most reasonable course of action today is to hope that Visa/MC can be forced into providing payment processing for all legal goods and services. Meanwhile, Steam will hopefully roll out other payment methods, other countries will adopt non-Visa/MC systems, and the duopoly can slowly be broken.