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.
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Seth Eisen
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
My view is that Valve is the most likely to be honest about who is responsible here, both because they’re not responsible for this shit show no matter what the answer is and because they have a monetary interest in restarting sales.
Valves statement also matches with the claims of Itch.io, Stripe, and what Collective Shout themselves have claimed. So we’ve got two different claims, on one side are Visa and Mastercard, and on the other we’ve got literally everyone else. I feel pretty confident about which one is a load of bullshit.
It’s also worth noting that Visa
and Mastercardare playing semantic games with their statements. Nobody ever claimed they were “refusing legal transactions”, rather what they’re doing is threatening to stop working with any business that doesn’t implement censorship that they’re happy with. It’s a subtle but important difference and they’ve never denied that’s what they’re doing.Edit: rereading Mastercards statement they are claiming they don’t restrict how businesses operate (although they do weasel around a little bit about illegal content), although Visa still hasn’t denied that. They may also be playing games with that statement because porn is illegal in some countries that Mastercard operates in so they may be trying to claim porn is an illegal transaction despite businesses not selling it in the countries it’s illegal in.
Edit 2: It just occurred to me this could also be about the UK and some US states new (and horrible) porn ID laws. I’m not aware of Valve doing anything to implement the strict age verification those laws are requiring for sites that distribute porn, and Visa/Mastercard could be trying to argue that without that in place any porn games Valve sells are “illegal transactions”. In theory Steam does have age gating, but it’s the same “are you over 18?” easily bypassed check that porn sites have always used.
Isn’t owning a credit card age gating anyway? I don’t think you can legally own a credit card in the UK.
(Edit: Oops I mean until you’re 18.)Credit card, yes, but a debit card that can be used for online transactions? I had one at 13. My mom had to co-sign for it, but I got one when I setup an account to deposit my paper route checks.
Are the payment processors saying Visa"MC told them to not process payments for this content? Or are they just citing a section of the agreement when being asked why they’re telling retailers to take down this content?
Nobody on any side has cited any sections of any agreement specifically. The closest we’ve got is the statement from Stripe who is the payment processor who recently had to turn down business with a womens sexual education charity (despite spending months trying to get to an agreement) and the reason they cited was contractual obligations with banking networks including Visa and Mastercard. They stated they want to be able to process payments for porn companies, and that they’re exploring other options, but they couldn’t at this time.
From an article posted yesterday
“Mastercard did not communicate with Valve directly, despite our request to do so,” Valve’s statement sent over email to Kotaku reads. “Mastercard communicated with payment processors and their acquiring banks. Payment processors communicated this with Valve, and we replied by outlining Steam’s policy since 2018 of attempting to distribute games that are legal for distribution. Payment processors rejected this, and specifically cited Mastercard’s Rule 5.12.7 and risk to the Mastercard brand.”
Sounds like Visa and Mastercard have clauses in their contracts that they don’t even care about themselves, but payment processors like Stripe are bound to then
both because they’re not responsible for this shit show
Nobody is forcing them to use mastercard and visa services
Other than that being how a huge portion of Americans access their money.
Yet everyone initially confidently reported on who was to blame.
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.
Can religion just die already?
You do realise religion is just an excuse?
Of course
But what was “illegal”? I mean, if we’re applying real life laws to video games, that completely removes any game where violence is portrayed, GTA, Sonic the hedgehog, animal cruelty in super Mario. That’s why they are GAMES.
dumbasses. All of them.
No more RISK. Too violent. Should probably ban Clue while we’re at it.
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 - 😤
Curiously, in our society, killing is less of a taboo than sex, especially in fiction.
Since the aughts, I feel it is a disservice we do to censor out the horror of warfare in games like Call of Duty or Medal of Honor. I haven’t seen what they did with Six Days In Fallujah (by a vet of the Iraq War who experienced Fallujah and wanted to share his experience) but we’d have more respect for the gravity of war if the tragedy and immediacy of combat was properly expressed. In the Arma series, it’s very easy to die, but it uses a similar engine used for training purposes.
It’s our Christian values (more specifically, our Paulinian values – he thought Christians should not have sex if they can abstain entirely¹ – which has turned into taboos against sex without strict licenses, that has made our society super-prudish.
1. Paul actually also prohibited having additional children, the end being [nigh] and all. Later biblical interpreters would have to deal with the world’s failure to end, and Christ’s failure to return in their lifetimes.
Well it’s Cain’s fault. He did the first murder and it was bad. Adam did the first fuck and it was good.
Such is the way of the lord
the end being neigh and all
And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him, and the horse said, “the end is neigh!”
(Neigh is what a horse says. The end is nigh. 😉)
Fixed but still funny.
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.
I use Paypal and they charge my Discover (Novus network, IIRC). No MC policy issue, let me buy what I want.
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.
😬
I’d rather pay with my actual blood than use PayPal.
It’s purely because steam hasn’t been able to keep my login info secure for almost a decade. I’ve changed emails, passwords, both, and yet I will always get random 2FA attempts from other places. I just don’t trust them to keep my bank info safe either.
Interesting. I’ve been using steam for decades and the only time my account was compromised was due to my own machine getting some malware. It was easy enough to clean up, reset password and reset all my steam sessions.
Now my blizzard account on the other hand… I got so tired of defending it that I’ve cleared all my CC and personal info from the account and just decided to let the hackers have it. Their shit leaks bad.
I’m looking at this and I am just wondering… Did you also check the computers your using?
It’s quite a bit easier to get in the pc of a normal user than it is to get into the computers of valve, or at least that’s to hope.
check your email addresses, then check for malware on your system.
that’s definitely not normal…
Direct link: Mastercard rule 5.12.7 Illegal or Brand-damaging Transactions
Tweet of their attempt to deny responsibility: great opportunity to wreck their brand.
Wtf are all these rules that I didn’t agree to when getting a bank card?
Can I still use visa or MasterCard on a dildo? And can I pay for it in cash… Dollars? Is my money accepted at the local adult bookstore?
Is this why it appeared Steam only took down Incest and other spicy things?
Or did all the reporting just read the top of the list, and that had all the incest front loaded?
That’s what it started with but it seems to have quickly expanded to include a lot of more mundane things. Initial reporting was only on the first wave of censored games and didn’t include the stuff that was removed later on.
They forgot the part of their TOS about “damaging the brand”.
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?
They are a fucking payment processor; the only brand that matters is reliability and confidency, which they damaged now.
They’re not talking about with Steam customers though, but rather with the religious idiots who have decided to crusade against porn, feel emboldened by recent age-ID bills and are now pursuing the “MasterCard funds filth” angle.
I’m kinda wondering what the ratio of anti-porn religious knobs is you gamers. There’s a lot of religious folk but many of them also enjoy porn so …
There are less puritans than gooners, if a corpo is backing the puritans is because that corpo is ran by one of those demons.
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.
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 thus far.
Only problem with a public utility like that now would be Trump and his Insane Cunt Posey would weaponize it for the religious right.
As if they’re not weaponizing private entities anyway
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.
Postal banking is a thing in some places.
I’m not sure I want the government running those services. Like a basic one, sure, but for handling credit cards and general banking services? Nah, I don’t want the Trump administration having direct access to my purchases.
I don’t see any reason to trust the credit industry more than the government, though.
The main reason is that the credit industry isn’t in the business of running an intelligence service or part of law enforcement. That said, what they are connected to is almost the same as an intelligence service, that being the advertising industry, and there’s literally nothing stopping them from selling or even being forced to give their data to law enforcement. The only reason it doesn’t happen more I’d say is just the optics of it.
Ultimately what’s needed is a digital payment system that’s at least somewhat anonymous, but that’s an incredibly hard nut to crack. Bitcoin tried it, but largely failed to do so (and immediately got corrupted by speculators that wanted to use it as a forex instead of currency). A couple of the other crypto currencies that have come out since then have claimed to be better but I’m still incredibly skeptical that there’s any real anonymity there.
Someone above linked GNU Taler which seems to go in the right direction, but I’m not sure how mature it is yet. It specifically claims to not be a new currency, so hopefully the speculation part won’t be an issue.
Yes, that was me. Unfortunately much like GNU Hurd, Taler is less of a project than it is a thought experiment. It lacks a sufficient number of people pushing it to become a viable project. It exists, but as far as I’m aware it’s never been used seriously in the real world outside of some proof of concept type deployments at a university. Without a champion, ideally a major business or significant public figure, it’s likely to continue being far more conceptual than practical.
I guess the closest we might be getting anytime soon then is the digital euro. Which is supposed to end its preparation phase soon, and, in spite of being government issued, promises to be private (not like ccs are remotely private anyway, so nothing lost at least).
As always there’s some risk of it getting changed to allow tracking later down the line, but if done correctly it could still be a big improvement over the current situation for EU citizens. If it’s successful, maybe other governments will look into similar programs.
I feel like ideally the digital euro project would work with GNU Taler since the goals seem to align, with the main difference being that the digital euro would be government backed. I don’t have high hopes since governments always fuck this up somehow, but I guess in the best timeline the EU is that champion (since using the same technology even with a different currency would give some trust into the concept, so it could help with finding early adopters - likely outside of the EU since I’d imagine in that scenario the digital euro would just be preferred here)
Would it be possible to build a FOSS alternative to all this?
Does Bitcoin count?
Yes, it does. Pretty wild that people will proudly fly their luddite flag even in threads like these lol.
Bitcoin is sadly a failed experiment and you’re not a luddite for pointing out its various shortcomings. I was an early adopter back when you could get an entire coin for a buck or two, but never invested much in it and lost most of what I had when one of the early exchanges imploded.
The concept of bitcoin was great, a decentralized currency not under the control of any government or institution, but that was still reliable and pseudo-anonymous. The execution however was beyond disappointing. It was quickly commandeered by “investors” looking to gamble on something even more volatile than forex markets and ceased being able to function as an actual currency due to the wild swings in value. In order to be a useful currency something must have a relatively stable value. Additionally scammers and criminals also gravitated to bitcoin further driving legitimate businesses away from it not wanting the guilt by association. Finally it turned out that the anonymity was even easier to break than initially thought and the tax headaches involved in buying, selling, or trading in bitcoin or any cryptocurrency make it too annoying to actually use (massively compounded by its wildly fluctuating exchange rates).
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.
mastercard you are hurting your brand by doing this
