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
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.
Oh I’m so glad that their brand isn’t being damaged. It’d be terrible if that were to happen.
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 …
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 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”.
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 neigh 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. 😉)
The only game that I know of that tackles war as a psychological thing is Spec Ops the Line which is a brilliant game that is now delisted on steam for reasons. Regardless I do think the reason war is rarely shown in such a way is that the artistry (for lack of a better term) is relatively hard to balance between story and gameplay. Not even getting into how hard it is to tell such a story, making True Grit 1969 is a lot easier than making True Grit 2010.
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.
check your email addresses, then check for malware on your system.
that’s definitely not normal…
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.
Yep, I’ve completely changed computers multiple times. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Choose your poison.
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.
In America I think you also either literally or effectively (to compete) have to own some banks as well. I think it’s called vertical integration.
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!
I’d never heard of this before. I hope Liberapay adds support for it. I don’t think all itch.io developers would be interested. I’m not sure it quite solves all the problems that Steam has with getting payments to game publishers.
Quite interesting; thanks for the link!
The Drip Card from Valve incoming!
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?
It’s processors all the way down.
MC and VISA are the networks. They allow communication between banks, and the entire operation is packaged up by payment processors like Stripe, Square or PayPal. So you have processors, the banks on either end (perhaps two separate ones), the network operator, and additionally any extra companies that might offer additional services for the transaction, like for fraud prevention or financing.
I see, thank you for the explanation. I’m ashamed to say I never knew how any of this worked. I just knew it magically got me the games I wanted.
Mastercard: worried about damaging brand
ALSO Mastercard: torpedos brand harder than the titan submersible implosion
Mastercard: We better not alienate our customers! Let’s cave to these religious lunatics from Australia.
Mastercard: Becomes hated by gamers all over the world.
so this is a game of telephone between activists, payment cards, payment processors, and vendors.
Also TIL mastercard HQ is located in Purchase, NY.
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.
Ah, true, yes.
You would think, but I believe the law(s) require verification of a photo ID. I haven’t looked too closely into the UK one, but the way the laws are written for a couple of the US states a credit card doesn’t meet the requirements. There’s also the fact that many of the preview images and videos for porn games on Steam show nudity and/or sex and you can access those without needing to purchase the game (just the birthday question to “verify” your age).
Edit: also steam gift cards are a thing, so you can purchase without using a credit card technically.
If you need to be 18 to own a credit card, then you’re old enough to buy those games. And buying with steam gift card doesn’t involve MasterCard or Visa for that payment, so it’s literally none of their business.
So that’s kind of missing the point. First as I pointed out you don’t actually have to buy anything to see the explicit preview images, so Steam is arguably in violation of those laws. Secondly the issue is that the Visa and Mastercard contracts require companies to be in compliance with local laws. It doesn’t matter whether someone is using a Visa or Mastercard to make the actual payment if the purchase would technically be considered illegal (which it arguably could be in some states/countries under the new super strict porn laws).
At the end of the day this boils down to a) terms of the Visa/Mastercard contracts, and possibly b) new anti-porn laws that are putting an onerous burden on services to collect customers IDs in order to prove age. This isn’t a question of common sense, in contract law (and law in general) it’s about the letter of it and not so much the spirit. Yes, it stands to reason that if you legally own a credit card, and you must be at least 18 to own a card, then you are obviously 18 or older. However that doesn’t matter at all when the laws are written such that services must validate age using a photo ID. It also does not account for stolen credit cards (never mind that that’s a far more serious situation than the possibility of under age kids seeing some naughty pixels).
This whole situation is stupid and Visa and Mastercard clearly need to make some changes to their terms and conditions, but until they do from a legal standpoint businesses like Valve and Itch.io have their hands tied.
You’re right, I didn’t take account of the possibility that they can cancel your contract if you have anything “illegal” on your platform. I was only relating to MasterCards statement:
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.
in context of “you have to be 18 or older to buy it”. Juristic semantics can change that.
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
Well said, that is an accurate analysis of the situation
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.
Pick a bank that use different sercives
Combining what Valve and Itch said, it seems like it’s Stripe or PayPal, and they cited MasterCard’s policies as justification…
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
Yet everyone initially confidently reported on who was to blame.
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.
It is fucking wild that we don’t have INTERAC credit cards here in Canada
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?
Deliberate Anal Inebriation — a.k.a. “boofing,” “plugging,” “butt chugging,” “booty bumping,” And so forth — is a popular subgenre of concert-style praise music long enjoyed by American evangelicals.
That’s… Way out of left field for this post lol
Fiat currency is the problem
It really isn’t, in this case. The issue is not the currency being used for the transactions, but rather two companies having a duopoly on processing those transactions that allow them to dictate terms to other people on how they can legally use their money. If there were two similar points of failure in processing cryptocurrency transactions, they would be just as vulnerable to having whoever occupied those two spots throwing their weight around. Sure, I suppose in that situation, companies could take payments to a new wallet easier than they could open new business accounts, and bypass the restrictions temporarily, but it still wouldn’t be a viable solution in the long term.
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).
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 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.
mastercard you are hurting your brand by doing this
Effecting the brand?? Who in their right mine would associate them with anything but payments? That’s ridiculous
This is actually ruining their brand. I now associate MC and Visa with Christian oppression
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.
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!
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.
Get ready for Gilead.
