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.
Media contact
Seth Eisen
They realized that this news getting out damaged their brand worse.
so this is a game of telephone between activists, payment cards, payment processors, and vendors.
Also TIL mastercard HQ is located in Purchase, NY.
Their condition (both via and mastercard) include stuff which, when you read it attentively, boils down to “we only prevent illegal things. And stuff we deem bad.”.
It’s not even a game of telephone or anything, they have their conditions that says “yes we did” and their PR that says “we probably didn’t”. They could be playing alone and still losing this one.
A game of telephone involves the message changing from each person. In this case, everyone but Visa/MC are blaming Visa/MC (valve, game stores, and collective shout).
It’s more like a game of calvinball, only Calvin is claiming the rule they made up doesn’t exist
Combining what Valve and Itch said, it seems like it’s Stripe or PayPal, and they cited MasterCard’s policies as justification…
Yet everyone initially confidently reported on who was to blame.
They forgot the part of their TOS about “damaging the brand”.
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.
Can religion just die already?
You do realise religion is just an excuse?
Of course
American Payment Processors really need more competition. They can not be trusted to act in a free market sense and not drift into a chaindog for political ideas.
It feels to me like payment processing has a similar function to physical currency. Like all of those security features on the bills are used to ensure the transaction is trusted.
Point being, I’ve long thought that payment processors are essentially doing a job that should be done by the government.
There are strange gaps where physical services have digital analogues but are completely ignored by the government.
I don’t understand why the treasury doesn’t process payments or why the post office doesn’t issue email addresses, for another example.
Anyways, back to the point, physical currency specifically says that it is valid for all debts. If they applied the same logic to payment processing, then this would never happen.
Probably because government and the people in charge of government are largely tech illiterate and being literate or seeking policy advice from literate people isn’t expected.
It is fucking wild that we don’t have INTERAC credit cards here in Canada
Payment processing is one of those things that really should have been treated as a public utility from the start. The same way we treat water, electricity, and phone lines. But even getting the internet treated as a utility has been a losing battle.
Would it be possible to build a FOSS alternative to all this?
They’re trying with GNU Taler, but it’s pretty much a pipe dream at this point.
Does Bitcoin count?
With how volatile cryptocurrency has been in general in the last decade or so, I wouldn’t bet on it.
Crypto is ultimately a different form of money, as compared with fiat.
What I think people in this discussion are seeking is an electronic, FOSS , secure network that can facilitate economic transactions of fiat currency.
Of course the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive
Does DAI count?
What’s DAI?
Fiat currency is the problem
I feel like it should be super easy now for smaller competitors to pop up by just offering digital credit services using tap on mobile phones. No need to manufacture and ship out plastic cards, just a digital version people keep on the phone, until they get large enough to be able to provide physical cards.
The issues here are trust, security, adoption and so forth. It’s not easy to start a competition here I’d say.
It’s a catch 22. You need a phenomenal amount of capital to stand up a payment network with all those criteria, but anyone with that amount of capital can’t actually be trusted not to abuse their position in exactly the same way the existing banking networks have.
Probably not just capital, also political influence and other ways I guess. But yes, it’s always a problem if it’s like that. If you ask me, there should be a generic independent payment backbone, where many providers could provide payments - like internet or something like that.
Well at least with phone tap there’s like a limit of $200, so maybe some company can corner a niche market where they only cover small daily purchases. No $10,000 credit balances or $2000 purchases and points and whatnot, just like $1000 balance limits and max $200 on purchases through tap.
You wouldn’t need quite as much capital that way, and I bet that would eat a good chunk of business from visa and MasterCard.
Have you tried Discover or American Express?
I live miles and/or kilometers away from the three business that accept either of those
I kill people in GTA 5. I don’t kill people in Hentai Incest Generator 3000. Yet someone prefers to see my transaction only for the first one, citing damages to “the brand”.
Hire prostitute in GTA, kill her, get money back - ✅
Have consensual sex with character in hentai game - 😤
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
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.
A bullock is a steer. You wanted bollocks.
I don’t have any credit cards saved on steam. I only use PayPal for steam purchases.
Ah yes PayPal the completely benign brand that Elon was trying to shove the fact that he registered X dot com down our throats with decades ago
e: didn’t realize it would link to that shithole
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?
I’d love Valve to spend their extra billions on opening a payment processor. Fuck the big 3.
Honestly, wouldn’t be surprised, they have spent god knows how much to push linux to unshackle themselves from Windows and Microsoft
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.
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!
The Drip Card from Valve incoming!
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.
Effecting the brand?? Who in their right mine would associate them with anything but payments? That’s ridiculous
Like for real, the only reason I’m associating them with these games now is because they’ve actively brought it into the limelight, so we can see that
I wouldn’t have even thought anything of association if they hadn’t done so.
But now, anytime I see an NSFW game on Steam, I’m immediately associating it with Visa and MasterCard due to the fact that the news is that they’re trying to get rid of those games, which I assume is not what they wanted, but you know it’s what’s happening.
This is actually ruining their brand. I now associate MC and Visa with Christian oppression
They think they’re more than a money pipe.
A competitor to MasterCard and Visa could show up with double their combined budget and do what they do to massively disrupt this particular industry. The average Joe would not give half a shit and continue paying for stuff with whatever card their bank gave them just like they always have.
The specific brand of payment processor a card uses is just not a thing people care about unless they have an Amex and that’s essentially because places don’t always take it.
The astonishingly hypocritical part:
Guess who does payment processing for OnlyFans?
Visa.
And MasterCard.
=D
All you need to verify your id is a credit card!
Then you get all the pr0n you want!
Hope you didn’t borrow one from your parents!
No child has ever thought of that before!
Tbf in my day the children who thought of that and followed through got caught. Statements and such.
Those who didn’t get caught either stole it in magazine or VHS/DVD form straight from the store, or from an older relative, and then when internet happened, from free or pirate sites (pics at first that took forever on a 56k modem, then videos as tech progressed). Or if you were lucky someone would burn DVDs and sell them.
The trick is not actually buying anything.
Just using it for an id verification.
On a site that actually doesn’t cost anything.
It could be done, over a 56k modem, guess how I know?
Oh, that wasn’t even a thing back in my day. At first there was no age verification, then it became the familiar “Are you 18? [Yes] [No]” system we all know and love.
Well I suppose there was ID checks at the store, but ykwim.
IIRC, I genuinely, accidentally, first discovered internet porn on an elementary school computer, as a 5th grader.
Tried to go to the website for the whitehouse.
Turns out, the real website is whitehouse.gov, not whitehouse.com
At the time… yep, whitehouse.com was hardcore porn, this was way before school network admins… really even existed? muchless had any kind of url/ip blacklists.
So yep very old school, early days, near-miss or adjacent url hoarding… I think that would have been all the way back when expedia, yahoo, askjeeves were all still competetive search engines, and I am pretty sure I was using Netscape Navigator, hahahah!
Anyway, I was quite shocked, rofl, having grown up thus far literally going to church every weekend, being told by my parents that I couldn’t participate in the school Halloween festivities, as that was a ‘Satanic’ holiday.
Hooray fundamentalist upbringing!
Classic lmao!
I associate them with religious pundites and discrimination of payments. A payment is a payment, for christ’s sake! If it’s illegal, report it to the relevant authorities.
mastercard you are hurting your brand by doing this
Oh I’m so glad that their brand isn’t being damaged. It’d be terrible if that were to happen.
I’m so confused; I thought MC and VISA were payment processors. So when I buy a game off Steam, I have two companies handling my money?
