"Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games from Steam"

[kane_magus]

I think this is complete bullshit.

And this is coming from someone who has ranted more than once about seeing hentai/porn games showing up on the Steam storefront and in my discovery queues and the like. Even if I don't care for or want to see that shit myself, I think Steam should be allowed to sell (or not sell) whatever it damn well pleases. If credit card companies are the ones trying to dictate to Steam what they can and cannot sell, though, then Steam should (or, at least, could) probably tell them to take a long walk off a short pier and create their own payment processing service. You know, if Valve really wanted to do that. They could very well do that, but they probably won't, though. It's much easier to just kowtow to the Moral Guardians™ and whiny pissbabies, I guess.

Well, that and if a bunch of people were suddenly faced with the horrid inconvenience of not being able to mindlessly plug their credit card number into Steam and use that to buy games, they just wouldn't buy games on Steam anymore, whether said people were buying hentai/porn games or not. And that is way more important to Steam than selling a few extra rape/incest/bestiality/whatever games.

In any case, this isn't the first time that the credit card oligopoly has imposed their whims onto others. It's never not bullshit.

Comments

[scissorsevered]

I might just be naive but I never understood why credit card companies didn't want to be associated with adult content (and I mean actual established companies, not some random persons snuff forum). If I'm buying some sex simulator on steam I don't ever make the connection between the game and the Visa I'm using to buy it.

And I'm sure it comes down to some government or corporate nonsense I don't understand, but this laywoman here thinks its pointless and dumb.

[kane_magus]

In this particular case, I think it was at least partly because some wackadoo anti-porn group was crusading and putting pressure on the credit card companies, who in turn put pressure on Steam.

I'd guess that it didn't take an awful lot of nudging to get the credit card companies to act, though. Even before this, credit card companies had done stuff like completely cut ties with Pornhub (apparently because Pornhub, at some point, had actual CP and such on there, which... yeah I suppose I get why the CC companies would want nothing to do with that), and also cut off Japanese sites like DLSite, and it's why Tumblr went anti-porn back in 2018, and it's why sites like Patreon also crack down hard on porn creators now. As for the actual reasons why CC companies do it... I have no idea. Nanny state shit and fanatical activists, I guess.

[kane_magus]

Sidebar: this same group, "Collective Shout," apparently also tried to get Detroit: Become Human banned back when that first came out, supposedly because of the depiction of violence against women and children, or whatever. I haven't played that game myself yet (though I do have it on Steam), but I have seen two separate complete LPs of it from SBFP, and I think it's pretty ludicrous that anyone (anyone sane, at least) would want to ban it.