Valve gets pressured by payment processors with a new rule for game devs and various adult games removed
(www.gamingonlinux.com)
from byzxor@beehaw.org to gaming@beehaw.org on 16 Jul 10:27
https://beehaw.org/post/21125598
from byzxor@beehaw.org to gaming@beehaw.org on 16 Jul 10:27
https://beehaw.org/post/21125598
Valve have added a new rule to the Onboarding guide for game developers, noting that payment processors get a say in what stays on Steam.
Newly added rule is:
Content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers. In particular, certain kinds of adult only content.
Diff of the new terms github.com/…/fddd59b5395cc3c1c74574650dbf5784612d…
:/ payment processors strike again (slippery slope etc)
threaded - newest
If Steam or someone went to crypto just to kick the processors out, that might be one thing that would actually make me look at crypto with something other than derision.
I spent ages buying games on steam with Bitcoin years ago. They dropped it when transaction fees got bigger than the game cost (I don’t think they ever supported crypto other than Bitcoin, and that was through a specific payment processor that took the Bitcoin and gave Valve real money).
They’d never do that, as it would severely limit their userbase. Throwing out a couple games, especially when it’s ultra-niche stuff like “futanari incest” games, is the much easier and more sensible move for Valve.
Eww futanari incest? Get me back to shooting people in the head like a good christian.
That was originally one of the intended purposes of cryptocurrency, or at least claimed to be. Too bad we can’t have anything without needing to make it an investment engine.
Government essentially guaranteed that by classifying it as such, e.g. SEC regulating crypto
Huh? Investment people definitely didn’t wait for that classification to start turning it into a speculations market. The SEC actions were largely reactive.
My local bank’s investment and wealth management bros were already all about crypto long before regulations.
Gov can’t really do anything about it. Bitcoin was designed to be gov agnostic. They can tell you it’s illegal but there’s also really no way for them to know (if you’re not dumb).
Hell there are entire unregulated black markets on the dark web.
Also with the orangutan in chief being something of a crypto grifter himself, it’s not likely to be regulated at all.
Well yes, this was the original intent of crypto. Putting payment in the hands of the people. It’s only been made terrible by tech bros and greed the same way the Internet has.
They accepted BTC for a while but stopped. The other comment here mentioned the transaction fees being a problem for purchases on the scale of steam game prices, but it wasn’t just that. A big problem was crypto volatility and transaction processing time. They found that very often by the time a transaction cleared the value had swung enough that they were getting amounts that failed to align with the actual prices of the games people were buying.
It’s more stable now, so maybe that would be less of a problem, but I feel it highlights a big problem with crypto in general and that is that even when you do find places that accept crypto nothing is priced in crypto. It’s basically always just a proxy for USD using whatever its current market value is.
Stable coins exist to counter that very problem. There’s several out there that are pegged to the value of the dollar, and are mostly used as intermediaries when trading between other coins.
USDT is one such option.
using a stable coin that has that much controversy as an example kinda sums up crypto lmao.
I don’t pay attention to those, so it was the only one I knew the name of.
That’s what Backpage tried to do when the cc processors pulled out. The owners of Backpage were at some point charged with money laundering among many many other crimes. The years of legal battles that started in 2018 drove one of them to suicide. Would not recommend.
Backpage is very different than Valve. Backpage execs were directly involved in the pimping of minors, this were proven in court.
I don’t believe Valve execs are pimping minors through Steam.
No, they were not directly involved and no, pimping minors was not proven in court. Money laundering and conspiracy to facilitate prostitution were the charges that stuck. In fact, prosecutors claiming they were involved in child sex trafficking caused a mistrial apnews.com/…/business-trials-3b1c9d3e59e90cd60764…
The point is not about what they did or didn’t do, it’s that if you try to go outside the system you get hammered.
Thanks for the correction.
I’m not comfortable with tech execs making bank off sex workers, but I should aim to be more familiar with the outcome of the case.
Its not different because in both instances it was CC companies being anti sex.
Realpage being a “den of CSAM” was not happening at any scale the CC companies were actively worried about and it was about defunding sex workers.
Same deal here. This is about control and puritanism.
Daydreaming about this now.
Crypto isn’t necessary (or rather, blockchain isn’t necessary). Check out GNU Taler. So far I believe only Swiss banks have adopted it.
That’s why you should be buying those games from itch / Patreon/ SubscribeStar, banking on a single game store is a loosing game.
That is why EU has the DMA That is why a market is only healthy if you participate in it
E.g. when buying coffee (except for Starbucks) I’ll go to any café that sells it, if it looks too corporate or dirty I’ll go somewhere else.
The problem with that is that all of these platforms also use the same big payment providers, meaning they’re just as likely to be forced to remove these sorts of games.
True. A number of Patreon folk had to go for SubscribeStar or elsewhere because they decided to ban several types of fetish
Patreon has similar restrictions. I’m not sure about itch. They all rely mostly on stripe for payments. Stripe gets to set a lot of terms, and switching platforms doesn’t usually change that.
I’ve noticed that enforcement becomes more of a thing the larger the platform
AFAIK Steam uses adyen for payments (at least that’s my experience every time Steam wants to verify my credit card).
They will be next as all of those also use the CC companies.
Steam is banning porn games!? How will I get my Northernlion Reads Steam Porn Game Reviews content now?
He’d have to stop playing Umamasume for long enough to read steam porn game reviews
I really hope the EU will step in to stop this, it’s a despicable practice, and it makes me sad that Valve doesn’t stand their ground. They’re big enough that they should be able to exert pressure on Visa and MC, who seemingly push this forward the most.
I think you're seriously underestimating how big VISA and Mastercard are. Valve is estimated to be worth around 8 billion, Visa made 4.5 billion in profits Q2 of 2025. VISA makes more money annually than Valve is even worth. Furthermore if we exclude China, Visa and MC make up 90% of all online payments. Steam's entire business depends on online purchases. Steam would be thoroughly fucked if Visa and MC dropped Valve.
What Visa and MC are doing is despicable and something should be done about them, but Valve is not in a position to do anything but bend over and spread the cheeks.
They can’t do anything about two foreign private parties doing their own thing. But I do hope they ditch visa and mastercard
The EU will sooner ban all adult games from Steam. Seriously, check out any porn game on steamdb.info and look for “restricted_countries” in the Metadata section. Notice a certain large EU country there?
I really don’t get why payment processors care. like, I really doubt it’s a morality thing for them, so where’s the financial incentive?
They are USAian. Owners are most likely conservative and Christian --> imposing their values on others through money. It's the rich people's way.
I doubt that it has anything to do with social preferences of anyone internal to payment processors. They won’t care.
Putting pressure on payment processors is a useful way to put pressure on any commercial service. The commercial service may operate in another country, but it needs the payment processor, and the payment processors don’t want to be ejected from countries. The payment processor can be a lever for laws passed elsewhere.
Every payment processor on steam is a publicly traded company, not privately owned. So it wouldn’t really be up to any one individual’s moral preference about such things. Personal preference would only count in to it if one of the shareholders had enough shares to push the board around, but the only one where I could see that being the case would be PayPal from people like Theil and Andreessen. Like they’re both jack wads for other beliefs, but I wouldn’t exactly call them bible thumpers.
I don’t know how much truth there is to it, but one compelling reason I’ve heard is that adult content has a considerably higher chargeback rate than other content, making the risk much higher for payment processors. This makes sense - I could absolutely see some horny person buying some adult content, getting off to it, then doing a chargeback in their moment of introspection.
But that’s only using like 2 minutes of the 2 hour return window
Wouldn’t the cost land at valve? I guess not with a chargeback, but no way someone creates and account everytime they buy a porn game.
We need GNU taler everywhere. Fuck these USAian payment processors.
Wow GNU Taler is indeed the answer, it attempt to be a privacy friendly alternative to PayPal
It’s not yet another cryptocurrency, no blockchain 🎉 no mining 🎉 no surveillance for the purchaser!
www.taler.net/en/
There goes Valve creating their own payment processor
Dont temp them
I would 100% be on board for the lifetime warranty of Gaben.
A NSFW game apparently had the most played demo last NextFest
And twitter chatbot can do nsfw role play. I wonder why he doesn’t get pinged by payment processors.
This is such horse shit. I hate these puritanical CC companies
Workaround is easy to install nude patches
Oh look fascism ruining things yet. Again. Can’t make steam stop doing certain things. Force it on them by giga corporations outside there control. Don’t want no diversity anywhere.
Removed removed, or removed only for the prude American banks?
Whelp, time to pirate!
Not that most ‘adult’ games on steam are worth it, they’re mostly objectifying shit that wouldn’t know what consent and boundaries were if it kissed them on the mouth and they felt uncomfortable with it.
Nor would they know what good writing, acting or realistic sex etc is either.
I don’t think there’s a way for Valve to avoid this. Like I don’t think it would be enough to mark games as only available for purchase without support from the major payment processors/rails. Like disable those and add crypto payment support and only use those for those games. Those games being on the store that major payment processors support, they’ll not want those on a store they support
This is a case where probably should be another store that doesn’t use major payment processors but until alternative payment rails became popular, it’d be a low sales volume store. I know cryptocurrency has negative connotations because of the community, but I think those currencies are the only long term solution for people making porn games or whatever type of content that may have rich/powerful groups wanting to suppress
Doesn’t even need crypto support. Steam sells steam gift cards so they could just take the Pokemon approach for games where it can only be redeemed with credits.
I think that’ll still be the problem with it being in the storefront at all. Some parents org makes large enough fuss about porn games on Steam and payment processors demand stronger moderation rather than have their brands associated with Steam and whatever may be released on it
At that point only solution is for Steam to become their own payment processor, since I don’t see any huge company choosing to lose money by abandoning mainstream methods of payment customers use.
They add a
<br>inside the<li>? wthMessy layouting
You never make a list that has an item with a hard break in it? They are everywhere.
Why would I add a line break when I don’t want or need a line break? It’s a list item, not a text paragraph.
I define the layout and spacing in CSS for the li element.
I don’t think I’ve ever noticed this as prevalent or common. If at all then as a strange outlier.
If it’s a list item with line breaks, sure. But the linked diff adds it at the end of the li with no content following. And it does so on the previous li. Leading to a line diff on a to this unrelated item.
The anti-porn religious lobby just destroyed the livelihoods of thousands of pornographers
OnlyFans founder blames banks for ban on porn
Why is OnlyFans letting financial companies lure it away from porn?
There’s the reason. Anti-porn/religious groups will lobby payment providers and bans to stop payments being made to adult content creators. Is there problematic adult content on Steam? For sure. However, there is also problematic political content on Steam which seems not affect banks/payment providers interest.
We all should care cause adult content is the first to get censored. Then the censor bar will move to include other topics and more topics.
I’m sure no one will miss those incest games, but letting payment processors decide what speech people are allowed to exchange is nuts. These are middlemen. They don’t need to exist. I want more countries to hurry up and adopt GNU Taler and make all these middlemen superfluous.
Couldn’t they just restrict these games to be purchased with steam wallet credit only? You can’t buy a porn game on a card, fine. But you can top up your account with €50. Afterwards, the payment processor is out of the equation.