Steam, Itch.io are pulling ‘porn’ games. Critics say it's a slippery slope

https://www.wired.com/story/steam-itchio-are-pulling-porn-games-censorship/

by 6d6b73 • 12 months ago

624 868 12 months ago

righthand8• 12 months ago

More caving to the ultra-religious pearl grippers who just have nothing better to do than tell others how to live.

All the hate speech trash and troll talk on the Steam forums is fine though. All the war games are fine though. Make sure people can validate genocide and what not but not see titties.

cosmic_cheese2• 12 months ago

No problems with violent imagery in TV and cinema either. In fact some of the most popular shows and movies are full of it.

Not that I agree with censoring that (I don’t), but the double standard is puzzling.

mango72835• 12 months ago

You answered your own question - if you go after shows with the popularity of game of thrones or games with the popularity of grand theft auto you will fail.

They have picked their battle.

gotoeleven• 12 months ago

[flagged]

some_random12• 12 months ago

This is being pushed by an Australian Feminist organization, not the American Religious Right.

righthand8• 12 months ago

You may want to take a look at how feminist that organization actually is.

cosmic_cheese2• 12 months ago

The group bills themselves as feminist, but aligns with the religious right in most of their policies. They’re directly at odds with many things feminists have fought for.

numpad03• 12 months ago

I see Mormon(LDS) churches occasionally mentioned on these topics. The Australian cult angle had only surfaced during the last week or so.

nemomarx2• 12 months ago

I believe they get funding from evangelical orgs though

and you have to assume MasterCard is willing and cooperating here to some extent

the_af11• 12 months ago

This is being pushed by an Australian Feminist organization, not the American Religious Right.

The founder is Christian and writes and speaks in Christian venues and publications.

She's not a "feminist" by any reasonable and modern definition of the word.

baobabKoodaa7• 12 months ago

It's unfathomable that an Australian Feminist organization wields this much power in the U.S. and globally. It seems more likely that this is a front.

tracker12• 12 months ago

It's not just mature content... there have been efforts to reduce the ability to legally purchase firearms as well as suppression of prominent social media figures. Not just the CC companies, but even the larger payment processors like Stripe/Paypal etc. are all doing it for different categories.

There is a reason you have to pay cash at dispensaries, etc.

alexjplant• 12 months ago

There is a reason you have to pay cash at dispensaries, etc.

I used to work for a fintech. As new employee I had coffee with a colleague who explained KYC, AML, and other compliance topics to me. They mentioned that marijuana businesses can't bank their money due to these considerations as it would make banks knowing accomplices to the federal crime of trafficking a controlled substance. This threat is material because cannabis, unlike adult content, is actually illegal, so I don't think it's a substantially similar example to what's mentioned in this thread.

magicmicah855• 12 months ago

This is an opportunity for an entrepreneur to create a censorship-resistant platform, though, I don't know how you do it profitably when CSAM and other potentially criminal content needs to be reviewed.

FirmwareBurner5• 12 months ago

CSAM means material of actual kids, meaning actual victims from the real world have been harmed/abused. Weird video games on the porn side, are only fictional 3D models made of pixels, so no humans are being harmed.

When I used to kill cops in GTA Vice City as a kid, 20 years ago, I wasn't killing actual cops(duh!). Has society lost their collective marbles since then, and can't differentiate what's a real crime and what's manufactured fiction anymore? Should we also ban all porn off the internet on the same logic?

None of the games banned by Valve in the Visa/Mastercard scandal had any CSAM related stuff in them, they were just weird/degenerate for puritans, however they were not illegal.

BTW, has anyone seen the female erotica book section in Barns & Noble? If we banned those games for being too erotic, we should also ban those books then, because in those books, women subject themselves to a lot of degenerate smut and they love reading that shit, yet nobody judges them or asks for that to be censored.

So then why is society and the private sector bowing down to some screeching harpies activist group who just want to ban all stuff they dislike, even though it's all legal to the T and nobody is being hurt?

Why isn't this activist group putting pressure to release the Epstein files, since actual kids have been harmed there? Are they going undercover with police officers into human trafficking orgs to fight child abuse? NOOO, of course not, it's much easier to claim you scored a victory for child abuse by going after people's video games for having computer generated pixels of kids. Get effed!

progbits3• 12 months ago

I think OP is saying someone should make a platform that hasn't lost marbles and would allow this content, but you would still want to block CSAM and that is not easy to do.

magicmicah855• 12 months ago

IANAL, but I understand there are varying definitions of CSAM which is also why I said “and other potentially criminal content”. I’m also not equating CSAM to the actual reasons people are using financial censorship, I’m highlighting a challenge of a censorship resistant platform.

numpad03• 12 months ago

are only fictional 3D models made of pixels, so no humans are being harmed

I'm beginning to wonder if that's exactly what these religious cults are having issues with.

If we think about it, liberalism came to existence partly as antithesis to medieval church ideologies. Maybe principles such as freedom of speech and freedom of thought within liberalism used to be specific reactionist smite against whatever religious bigotry around back in 1400s-1600s, and stressing what everyone thinks as the most liberalist, neutral, and rational take on these topics is what they find insulting.

Not that I necessarily care, but I do want to know if there's any good ways to get them up to at least year 2000 and beyond. It's 2025 after all.

slillibri• 12 months ago

all legal to the T

You might want to check that because it's not so cut and dried: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_porn...

Nasrudith2• 12 months ago

When I used to kill cops in GTA Vice City as a kid, 20 years ago, I wasn't killing actual cops(duh!). Has society lost their collective marbles since then, and can't differentiate what's a real crime and what's manufactured fiction anymore?

I suspect the answer is unironically yes to that question. I have seen far too many people citing fiction as 'evidence' for their positions. I think media literacy in the bottom half of the bell-curve has literally gotten so bad that distinguishing fiction from reality is beyond the capability of at least 10% of the population. In adults without any diagnosed mental disability.

bitwize• 12 months ago

U.S. law says otherwise:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1466A

(c)Nonrequired Element of Offense.— It is not a required element of any offense under this section that the minor depicted actually exist.

righthand8• 12 months ago

The major problem is the payment processors though. Unless you defeat that duopoly or only accept cash how do you stop this exact situation?

There are the FedNow tokens and ACH which could help but it still requires quite a bit of cost to begin even that route. My customers are going to want to use their cards to pay too.

badsectoracula• 12 months ago

Yeah and it isn't just you accepting cash. Let's say you decide to go with cash (or, more realistically, manual bank transfers) and even get some host like 1984 that'd go to the court for you, but what stops Visa/MC to go directly at your host and tell them to either drop your site or they'll drop them?

magicmicah855• 12 months ago

Cryptocurrency is the only way I see this working.

crooked-v4• 12 months ago

There's the Fair Access to Banking Act (https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/401), currently stuck in committee, which would make it illegal for various financial services, including payment processors, to deny service for mere reputational reasons.

kelseyfrog8• 12 months ago

Is it not possible to jawbone them into favoring free speech?

If they are easy to sway in one direction, why not the other? Simply do what Collective Shout did, but in the opposite direction?

mwill• 12 months ago

These conservative groups aren't pressuring Steam and Itch directly, they're targeting payment processors.

I don't think it's realistically viable to compete with Steam (or Itch) without access to Mastercard and Visa.

(For anyone thinking crypto: we have a different idea of what it means to be either "realistically viable" or to "compete with Steam")

magicmicah855• 12 months ago

You don't need to compete with Steam or Itch for games that they can't sell, you're in your own market.

hungmung• 12 months ago

If we don't get a section 230 for payment processors we're looking at serious consequences for 1A because everything will be a civil suit away from getting blacklisted. Economist reported that adult performers are having trouble keeping bank accounts open -- as soon as a bank or payment processor finds out it's porn-related it gets nuked. Now that this is established practice, what's going to happen when Visa/MC gets sued for handling payments to do with disagreeable political speech? Our right to freedom of speech is currently only as strong as what Visa/MC are willing to defend in court, or you'd better be willing to live without any access to the banking system -- even if you're a gazillionaire who doesn't have to work, you've got to keep your money somewhere (and satisfy KYC).

Even if somebody thinks certain speech should be censored, I doubt they'd want what they consider unsavory speech being driven to use a payment system like Bitcoin, and for that to become the norm, it would open up much more potential for abuse.

jacobsimon2• 12 months ago

Maybe a silly idea, but here’s a solution to prevent financial censorship: make the game free. Or monetize via another way—ads, subscriptions, credits. There’s actually a lot of options for Steam if they aren’t being pressured directly to remove the content.

madaxe_again2• 12 months ago

Just get people to mail you cash. Sounds stupid, but that’s how I built my first ecommerce business in the 90’s, and it was a pretty normal way to pay for stuff online. Cash, money order, bank cheque, whatever.

the84722• 12 months ago

I don't think it's realistically viable to compete with Steam (or Itch) without access to Mastercard and Visa.

They could not allow those games to be sold through those particular payment processors and require wire transfers instead. More cumbersome payment method, but better than outright banning them.

If the payment processors try to dictate what content these sites may host even when it involves competing processors that sounds quite anti-competitive practice.

jimbob45• 12 months ago

they're targeting payment processors

They're not "targeting" payment processors. Payment processors have to deal with significantly more problems due to the nature of porn games and chargebacks. Fix those problems and the payment processors won't have a reason anymore to ban porn (or anything). What's the point of a capitalist economy if not for startups to target market needs like these?

zahlman2• 12 months ago

Most of the people I've seen advocating for this kind of pressure, for the purpose of suppressing this sort of content in video games, would describe themselves as very much the opposite of "conservative". But perhaps it's for the better that they are recognized as such. Because it really is a conservative instinct, no matter what American party politics might currently be dictating.

leptons• 12 months ago

These conservative groups aren't pressuring Steam and Itch directly

Pretty soon (in the U.S.) all porn and sexual-adjacent content is going to be illegal. The christo-fascists currently in power said they were going to do it, and they will.

BoxFour2• 12 months ago

Even if you manage to sidestep the issues with payment processors mentioned elsewhere, you don’t end up as a “popular platform that just happens to take a principled stance and also hosts some controversial material.”

Instead, you become the hub for that kind of material — and that reputation drives away more mainstream creators who won’t want their work associated with it. See also: Kick, Parlor, etc.

Rather than building a principled broad competitor to something like Steam, you end up cornering yourself into a narrow, highly specific market segment.

magicmicah855• 12 months ago

Rather than building a principled broad competitor to something like Steam, you end up cornering yourself into a narrow, highly specific market segment.

Yes, that's the point. Not everyone cares about financial censorship, but the few that do will be your customers.

hyghjiyhu2• 12 months ago

I've watched hikaru on kick and the only offensive thing about his stream is how he repeats himself. I don't really like how he says the same thing over and over. Chat, it's kinda starting to bother me how he repeats himself. Yeah I'm starting to think he repeats himself a bit too much for my taste.

gs1714• 12 months ago

One thing that might be a possibility for attracting developers of non-banned games is focusing on having lower fees than Steam's 30% or Epic's 12%, but Itch.io already does that (you can choose the split from 0 to 100%).

nemomarx2• 12 months ago

create a good censorship resistant payment network (stripe replacement) and these platforms would probably just be your customers?

beeflet7• 12 months ago

I think that the decentralized mechanisms used for censorship resistance would also make it difficult to monetize

nurettin• 12 months ago

Oh be realistic. Hosting smut isn't exactly respectable at this day and age. Your choice for sponsors dwindles to illegal gambling sites and shady dating sites who scrape monthly fees from lonely men. Maybe an MLM scheme if you are lucky.

johnnyanmac24• 12 months ago

Looking at this US administration, I don't think "respectable" is much of a metric these days.

And yes, you need a lot of private capital to pull this off.

jajuuka2• 12 months ago

The spirit of Visa/Mastercard isn't wrong. If a platform is doing something illegal they will break ties or give them a chance to course correct. When Pornhub was exposed for hosting lots of revenge porn and illegal porn Visa/Mastercard pulled back, Pornhub cleaned house and put up new stronger barriers to prevent that kind of material being uploaded. But instead of doing business again they said "just kidding" and did not come back.

In this case with Steam and Itch.io they are targeting legal games and is just 100% in the wrong. There is a checkered history of Visa/Mastercard dropping legitimate causes because it's hot politically. Which is also in the wrong.

Bitcoin/crypto was supposed to be the way around this kind of censorship, but that's basically a ponzi scheme so that's not the way forward. Unfortunately Visa/Mastercard have a monopoly on the market and they use it regularly to keep out competition. Regulation/investigations need to be done to fix this, but that sure as hell isn't happening under this presidency.

axus2• 12 months ago

How would you feel about a US Central Bank Digital Currency?

https://www.federalreserve.gov/central-bank-digital-currency...

scythe• 12 months ago

Seems like a good place to repost my comment from earlier:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44676726

I think the root of the problem is that it's just extremely unpleasant to moderate user-generated adult content. It's already difficult to moderate content on a somewhat serious online forum like Hacker News. Facebook moderators have been in the news and on South Park due to the emotional drain of the task. Who's going to sign up to pore over everyone else's weirdest thoughts given form? Certainly not me.
So this results in websites that allow people to upload pornography having lapses of moderation where something bad gets through every now and then. One day some creepy clip goes viral among some social conservatives and they try to make legal threats against the site and anyone they consider "affiliated". This creates problems, credit card companies are very protective of their reputations, and they usually decide the conservatives seem less bad.
Then someone sets up a new site that allows user-generated adult content and the cycle repeats.

Anyway, a truly censorship-resistant platform is not going to be able to control child porn or anything else, by definition. Censorship occurs at the level of bits, and pornography doesn't exist at the level of bits.

What you need is something like Section 230 but tailored for the situation facing user-generated adult content. Strict liability is not a good framework for criminalizing the possession of any digital material, be it a schematic for thermonuclear weapons or whatever else.

littlecranky672• 12 months ago

It is already here, it is called Bitcoin (with Lightning possibly). And this is not fantasy, the exact same story happened to Pornhub in 2018 - in which they got banned from Visa/MC and purged 60% of their content. They are banned to this day, and now accept Bitcoin/Crypto Payments as well as SEPA transfers in the EU.

misterbishop• 12 months ago

It is alarming for credit card companies to take on a politically censorious role that supersedes legal activity. This really kicked off in 2021 when MasterCard started imposing restrictive rules on sex sites like OnlyFans. The ACLU has a campaign against it: https://www.aclu.org/news/lgbtq-rights/how-mastercards-new-p...

mirashii• 12 months ago

I strongly disagree about this being a recent thing, this has been happening for decades at this point.

2015 article that starts "For nearly a decade, PayPal, JPMorgan Chase, Visa/MasterCard, and now Square, have systematically denied or closed accounts of small businesses, artists and independent contractors whose business happens to be about sex."

https://www.engadget.com/2015-12-02-paypal-square-and-big-ba...

jfyi2• 12 months ago

OnlyFans did manage to figure it out though. Maybe this is an opportunity for them to start a gaming division.

colinwilyb• 12 months ago

Or a credit card processor.

johnnyanmac24• 12 months ago

The thing they figured out was "people can fight back and the credit cards will back down". Onlyfans is a lot of people's income, so they will naturally fight harder than a consumer market like games to keep the lights on.

_trampeltier2• 12 months ago

From 2017 .. (Fetlife, a fetish Platform)

Last Tuesday we got a notice that one of our merchant accounts was shutting us down. One of the card companies contacted them directly and told the bank to stop processing for us. The bank asked for more information, but the only thing they could get from the card company was that part of it had to do with "blood, needles, and vampirism."

https://pastebin.com/FFSQUML9

https://mascherari.press/financial-censorship-when-banks-dec...

TulliusCicero6• 12 months ago

Yeah, it's a problem because there aren't really realistic alternatives, and starting an alternative payment processor would be impractically difficult.

Feels like we really need something like India's UPI that doesn't have a central company imposing beyond-the-law level rules.

yahoozoo• 12 months ago

Even before that, after Charlottesville, these payment processors were banning far-right wing people such as Andrew Anglin and Nick Fuentes. Same thing, really. Pressure from outside groups.

some_random12• 12 months ago

It's not a slippery slope, they're targeting non-porn games literally right now. Detroit Become Human, a very well reviewed cinematic/adventure game especially among non-gamers was one of their targets.

neonate• 12 months ago

From the subhed: "Even games that have nothing to do with sex or abuse have been caught in the dragnet."

some_random12• 12 months ago

Yeah that's exactly the kind of framing that I am against. "caught in the dragnet" implies that there was some kind of mistake. Surely they didn't mean to argue for banning these ones, they just want to target 'porn' games. Nevermind that this started as just targeting 'extreme porn', we'll continue to say that the critics criticizing them for doing the thing that they are doing right now as arguing slippery slope.

gs1714• 12 months ago

Detroit: Become Human has abuse as significant element to its story. It came under attack from the "National Association of People Abused in Childhood" when it came out, and also from Collective Shout.

imglorp• 12 months ago

Same slope, also slippery: this thing is not limited to opinions of moral minorities, because payment processors are a weak point for government pressure. We already started: pressuring CBS to fire Colbert for political speech, pressuring Columbia to curb anti-genocide speech, etc etc. So wait until this same route -- pressuring visa/mc -- is used on any product or creator that's not doubleplus good newspeaking.

The government doesn't need to touch you to ruin you, if they can yank your payments.

ChrisArchitect• 12 months ago

[dupe] Discussions:

Itch.io: Update on NSFW Content

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44667667

Australian anti-porn group claims responsibility for Steams new censorship rules

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44636369

Against the censorship of adult content by payment processors

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44679406

renewiltord2• 12 months ago

Violence and dehumanization of women should not be acceptable outcomes of free speech. We also have to consider whose voices are being heard, and whose are being silenced. Does free speech apply to women, to survivors of rape and sexual assault? Do we have a right to object to speech that promotes and normalizes violence against us?

Every time someone insists on an escape hatch, it is immediately abused. One could have seen this coming.

TulliusCicero6• 12 months ago

Do we have a right to object to speech that promotes and normalizes violence against us?

I mean this sounds reasonable until you also consider that shows like Game of Thrones would then also be banned, and probably plenty of popular books.

Hell, you could use the same reasoning to target most video games, since most video games use some level of violence.

some_random12• 12 months ago

Do we have a right to object to speech that promotes and normalizes violence against us?

Worth pointing out that their definition of "right to object" is evidentially identical to "right to censor".

renewiltord2• 12 months ago

Well, that's not precise. They are simply objecting. Others are listening to them. I have a right to tell you to go eat a pile of dung[0], for instance. Should you then go eat the dung, it is not that I exercised my right to make you eat dung.

They are simply participating in the once-maligned "cancel culture" which was protected as "freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences". These kinds of escape hatches always have these results because one's enemies find a way to use them as well.

0: Just for the sake of argument. I'm not actually insulting you.

nitwit005• 12 months ago

Remember how the homicide rate exploded after violent video games became popular?

They know this logic doesn't make sense. People are unfortunately happy to lie about it, despite decades of evidence to the contrary.

They insisted rock and roll, jazz, and dancing they didn't like were going to harm women too. Somehow that didn't seem to happen either.

morkalork3• 12 months ago

Don't forget the D&D satanic panic! I also remember my local Baptist youth group burning Harry Potter books back when they came out. These people are unreasonable, they don't care about logic. They care about imposing their views and morals on those around them.

qball2• 12 months ago

Do we have a right to object to speech that promotes and normalizes violence against us?

If men don't, then neither should women, who are murdered at 1/10th the rate men are.

nosignono10• 12 months ago

Murder is not the only violent crime. Please don't construct such obviously poor strawmen. Both men and women suffer similar rates of violence, albeit typically different violence.

Trans people suffer a wildly higher rate of violent crime than either cis gender.

8f2ab37a-ed6c• 12 months ago

What sort of leverage can a group like this realistically have on Visa and Mastercard? Can they really make a dent in their top line?

spicymaki• 12 months ago

Ideological alignment with the party in control of the US executive, legislative, and judicial branches gives groups like these quite a bit of leverage.

jandrese2• 12 months ago

From what I understand it was more that they found a sympathetic ear in the management suite at Mastercard and Visa. They've been wanting to do this for some time but needed political cover.

WorldMaker2• 12 months ago

Weaponized complaints to legal departments asking to enforce existing Terms & Conditions of Visa and Mastercard. It's a "squeaky wheel" problem.

npteljes8• 12 months ago

My guess is none, and that they are only used as a front for this. It really doesn't add up that a "grassroots org" from Australia that doesn't even have its own Wikipedia page can pressure Mastercard / Visa to pressure Steam to remove games. Makes zero sense.

EDIT: I invite downvoters to voice their point

dang• 12 months ago

Related. Others?

Against the censorship of adult content by payment processors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44679406 - July 2025 (189 comments)

Games: No sex, please. we're credit card companies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44675697 - July 2025 (51 comments)

Itch.io: Update on NSFW Content - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44667667 - July 2025 (306 comments)

Australian anti-porn group claims responsibility for Steams new censorship rules - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44636369 - July 2025 (162 comments)

garyHL• 12 months ago

Same as it ever was…

https://americansongwriter.com/remember-the-filthy-fifteen-4...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seduction_of_the_Innocent

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26328105

https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/27/business/job-insecurity-o...

Modern neuroscience provides enough evidence to argue older generations “synced” early on to ideals of the past. They memorized some modern syntax and semantics but still align as individuals with puritanical social and tyrannical political practices of old. Not entirely their fault, it’s biology.

Not something the next generations have to tolerate however. Physics is clearly ageist.

mvieira38• 12 months ago

It's unfortunate because there really isn't anything anyone can do except wait for regulation or try raising awareness/usage of crypto payments or cash by mail

sketchysandwich2• 12 months ago

how do all these other adult sites get away with charging premium subscriptions?

Calavar• 12 months ago

Porn sites use smaller special purpose payment processors that have higher fees. It makes sense for porn sites because they only sell sexual content. If Valve and itch used those same payment processors, they'd be paying the higher premiums on all transactions, including those for nonsexual content (i.e. that vast majority of their transactions). It just doesn't make sense for them from a financial perspective.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 12 months ago

My free speech red line is criticism of govt and leaders. Ban all the porn games ya want, I don't think they're very valuable.

When did pornography become protected speech?

sketchysandwich2• 12 months ago

In what world is artistic expression not free speech? Just because you don't like it doesn't mean its not protected.

vegadw• 12 months ago

That's already happening though. There's a bunch of quid pro quo for speech curtailment in the media right now. Hell, just this week Colbert lost his spot to appease the administration for the Paramount + Skydance merger. Even if it's not direct to the little guys and it's just quid-pro-quo, it's just them being smart enough to make it seem more palatable. It's the same thing.

pdntspa2• 12 months ago

Since when has protected speech required being valuable? And who made you the pronouncer of said value?

gs1714• 12 months ago

Since when has protected speech required being valuable?

For this specific topic in the US, it's necessary. The third prong of the Miller Test is "Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value."

krapp• 12 months ago

When did pornography become protected speech?

A Book Named "John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure" v. Attorney General of Massachusetts, 1966 (https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=101895573599950...)

Miller v. California, 1973 (https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=287180442152313...)

Jenkins v. Georgia, 1974 (https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=106399862265120...)

-- https://reason.com/2019/10/04/pornography-is-protected-by-th...

TulliusCicero6• 12 months ago

Strictly speaking this isn't a conventional free speech issue since the government isn't involved here, just private businesses.

That said, there's a de facto duopoly on payment processing that gives these companies near government-level power to dictate terms. Realistic alternatives don't exist and would be insanely hard to start.

bluescrn2• 12 months ago

Text is fairly comparable with speech, so it's be reasonable to argue that a pornographic novel is 'speech'.

Not so sure about 4K video footage, though. Or videogames. That's more a 'freedom of art' issue.

elijahdl2• 12 months ago

Pornography is the canary in the coalmine of protected speech. When you give a group the ability to censor content on the basis of "obscenity", then that group and other groups can use this to label other subjects they don't like as obscene. LGBTQ+ interest topics are especially vulnerable to this, as it is often made the case that being gay or trans is only about sex. You don't have to consume pornography yourself in order to benefit from a society that allows it.

gs1714• 12 months ago

LGBTQ+ interest topics are especially vulnerable to this,

Exactly, the Heritage Foundation doesn't define porn the same way a reasonable person might. From Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership: "Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children".

unclad5968• 12 months ago

I don't think LBGTQ+ are too harmed by the removal of "Sex adventures Incest Family" or "Interactive Sex Mother Son Incest BDSM" or "Reincarnation adventure going to rape all NPCS VR" front he steam store. I don't think too many LGBTQ like to include rapists or incest adventures into their group. I could be wrong though.

the_af11• 12 months ago

Ban all the porn games ya want, I don't think they're very valuable.

Ban all the games, I don't think videogames are very valuable.

Ban all TV shows, I don't think TV shows are very valuable.

Ban all televised sports, I think sports are very boring and not very valuable.

In fact, ban all the things I don't particularly find valuable.

edm0nd• 12 months ago

My free speech red line is criticism of govt and leaders.

Doesn't sound like you support free speech at all then if this is your red line. Criticism of politicians is needed to keep them in line. Being about to criticize the US government is true freedom.

kelseyfrog8• 12 months ago

The bitter truth is that the tech world's libertarian allergy to collective action is exactly why stuff like this keeps happening.

Predictably, we get another round of "free speech on the internet is sacred!" polemics. Hate to break it to HN, but Visa and MasterCard aren't reading Hacker News, and they don't care about constitutional takes or appeals to values or consistency. Legal arguments won't do squat here. There is one way to reverse this and it's leverage and pressure, period.

If you want to fix this, you actually have to organize and go after the payment processors, because it's not going to be solved by writing essays in the comments or waiting for Steam to suddenly develop a spine. That means collective action, campaigns, actual activism. Exactly the stuff that makes tech people itchy and nervous.

It's the same reason tech unions never get traction. Everyone wants to be a cowboy and nobody wants to be part of a posse. If you're serious about reversing this kind of censorship, you'll have to do the one thing that feels worse: banding together, working as a group, and aiming your outrage at the folks actually making the calls.

Or keep writing little op-ed comments and maintain the losing streak, because Visa and MasterCard will keep steamrolling as long as nobody pushes back.

Sorry, but that's the game. Arguing that the rules aren't fair or trying to play out the same losing tactic isn't a winning strategy. Plan an actual demonstration. Visa and MasterCard conveniently have offices in SF and NYC. All it takes is working together.

beeflet7• 12 months ago

The libertarian solution has been to use cryptocurrency for payments. The problem is that only libertarians want to use cryptocurrency, and most people don't care.

johnnyanmac24• 12 months ago

If you want to fix this, you actually have to organize and go after the payment processors, because it's not going to be solved by writing essays in the comments or waiting for Steam to suddenly develop a spine.

Okay. If you have any wisdom or ideas, I'd love to hear them. But as is, this comment is about as effective as mine on fighting Visa/Mastercard. "Just come together and yell at Steam!"

I'm not opposed to activism, I'm ignorant of it. The big issue of the internet is that we are all scattered very wide and that makes it harder to collect ourselvves under one goal. And as of now, I'm a laid off tech worker (who doesn't live in SF) who has no real capital to contribute to such a cause. I feel powerless.

kelseyfrog8• 12 months ago

I don't want to sound patronizing, but how would you break the task of forming an activist group down into manageable chunks?

phendrenad23• 12 months ago

Protesting only works when the media is on your side. I doubt the media would take your side on this one.

uncircle4• 12 months ago

I know people here love to hate it, and it's a very very controversial topic, but this here, is a good use case for Bitcoin [1]

Now that we have Lightning and hyperfast micropayments, can we have a good plug-and-play payment processor that uses it? The few services that allow Bitcoin payments still require an on-chain transaction, which is very user-unfriendly.

In any case, despite what the haters say, this is the value proposition of cryptos. If it's not the government deciding what you can purchase or not, it's the payment processor cartel.

1: Other cryptos are just piggybacking on the popularity of the main one so I don't care about them.

fmbb3• 12 months ago

Bitcoin existing is not going to make Itch.io not want to accept payments via Visa.

Porn is a tiny market. It’s not worth it losing the payment processors everyone is on to serve porn game buyers.

uncircle4• 12 months ago

Porn is a tiny market.

I'm not sure I agree. In the context of gaming, perhaps, but most of the Internet traffic is basically pornography.

beeflet7• 12 months ago

Porn is a tiny market. It’s not worth it losing the payment processors everyone is on to serve porn game buyers.

I agree with this point but I don't agree with the premise. I don't really care about the censorship of porn, but it is a slippery slope to censorship in general. If you give them an inch they will take a mile.

I think there is sometimes a business justification of putting your foot in the ground, even if the short term consequences are harsh.

odo12422• 12 months ago

Don’t you have to create a distinct payment channel (on-chain transaction) for every person you pay over Lightning? Or am I misunderstanding things?

uncircle4• 12 months ago

Third-parties take care of this bureaucracy for you. Check out the Phoenix wallet, for example.

(Unaffiliated, I hold some pocket money on there not to run a Lightning node myself)

The on-chain transaction is just to "fund" a channel between two parties. These two parties can then make unlimited trasnfers between each other instantaneously for free. These nodes are organised in a network and can relay payment from other nodes as well. It's a bit like the Internet. You don't need to peer with everybody, you just need a path from A to B.

If you and I have a channel funded with 100 sat, we can move these around as many times as we wish, even on behalf of others, but if you need to transfer more than you have on your side, you need to fund the channel with another on-chain transaction. That's where the Phoenix 1% fee comes from, as they deal with this exact problem for you, so you don't have to worry about it.

xur173• 12 months ago

No. You can route through other people on the network, so you just need a path to the person through others.

nonameiguess• 12 months ago

It's not in this case. The payment processors were going to drop all support to these platforms if they didn't remove these games. Bitcoin could allow them to keep operating, but at the cost that now all users who want any games at all have to use Bitcoin. Mainstream platforms accepting Bitcoin as an option is fine and great, but few if any are going to want to only accept Bitcoin.

KronisLV• 12 months ago

Mainstream platforms accepting Bitcoin as an option is fine and great, but few if any are going to want to only accept Bitcoin.

For all of the talk (hype) about how crypto has the potential to avoid the exact type of meddling and manipulation and pressuring we’re seeing now, it surprises me that no equivalents to PayPal have really popped up - that best that can be done is apparently something along the lines of what Linux was on the desktop a decade or two ago. Basically, before Valve and others picked up the slack and worked on things your average person actually cares about - notably, gaming and simple(r) to use desktop environments and software stores.

Where’s the flagship platform for payments that’s built on crypto but lets you ignore the technical details, that’s trivial to implement as a merchant and is a download away on app stores? If there are a few of those, why would anyone bother with these puritan payment processors?

beeflet7• 12 months ago

Using cryptocurrency would give them leverage in a future negotiation. The goal would not be to replace payments entirely with cryptocurrencies (they are pretty inefficient), but to reduce the monopolistic power of conventional payment processors and strike a better deal.

I would argue it's worth investing infrastructure into it, for the same reason that valve has invested infrastructure into linux to gain leverage over microsoft. Without leverage, negotiations get ugly: see the Epic vs Apple saga.

egypturnash2• 12 months ago

Random thoughts:

* anything using proof-of-work is still gonna be a hard sell * good luck figuring out how to get the user experience on both ends appear to be in USD without ever having to give a shit about the constantly-fluctuating value of BTC * fun times ahead when you get big enough for the government to notice you and start requiring you to comply with all kinds of arcane regulations

uncircle4• 12 months ago

1. Proof-of-work is a feature.

2. Just do the conversion at the time of sale.

3. Government prohibition and restriction of our rights is a terrible problem and it's why Bitcoin was invented in the first place. It's a necessary fight if only to keep government power in check, unless one really believes the State is always right and always has our best interest in mind. I don't.

beeflet7• 12 months ago

good luck figuring out how to get the user experience on both ends appear to be in USD

I think it works out fine with fixed/float exchanges. These are exchanges that let you agree on a fixed exchange rate for a small (<=%1 fee) or trade at a floating exchange rate. The fee covers the price risk

burkaman• 12 months ago

If Steam dropped Visa and Mastercard and successfully got most of their customers to use a Bitcoin payment processor instead, wouldn't these organizations just pressure that processor? I don't see how it would be any different. If the problem you're trying to solve is that private payment processors can deny service to anyone they don't like, the underlying technology the processor uses is irrelevant.

beeflet7• 12 months ago

Well I think the advantage is that the cryptocurrency payment processors are interchangeable. But your point mostly stands

mkleczek3• 12 months ago

Bitcoin does not require any payment processor. That's its whole point: censorship-resistant, permissionless, p2p payment system.

rustystump8• 12 months ago

The fact that the majority of validators caved to sanctions from us means bitcoin is not gonna cut it esp if uncle sam gets involved. Pro crypto folks want to stay on the up and up due to trying to change the negative view of it.

I personally worked in the crypto payment processing space and we had to say no to many very well known porn companies for this reason.

dv_dt• 12 months ago

Its too bad that the old school anti-trust provisions against restraint of trade are no longer of interest to enforcers. This isn't a case where visa/mc are against a specific game/publisher transactions is where they are saying we will stop processing payments for your entire platform because of a few games we object to. And its worse because the pmt processors aren't really specific about their objections in public at least.

can16358p2• 12 months ago

What is wrong with these people who try to block certain content?

Don't like porn? Don't buy it. Simple as that. No one, including governments or payment processors, should be in the position to decide whether a platform can sell something or not.

I wish there was a payment processor who was brave enough to say a big fucking NO to censorship.

bryceacc• 12 months ago

If you think (insert thing here) is genuinely evil, you might be inclined to rid the world of it. It may even make you seem like a better person (to god, to others in the same camp) because you are "cleansing" or "healing" the world through those efforts. It's self righteous

RankingMember• 12 months ago

The Puritanical origins of the US reverberate to this day. While coming for "freedom of religion" sounds like a noble origin story, the context was that they wanted the freedom to practice a much stricter, restrictive form of religion than that allowed by the Church of England.

dzonga• 12 months ago

are you saying the puritans were the taliban equivalent of christianity.

& want to bring back laws that sex would only be used to 'recreate' not recreation.

matthewrobertso• 12 months ago

This is the result of campaigning by an Australian group

teaearlgraycold• 12 months ago

Quakers also came to the US early on to practice a peaceful an anarchistic form of Christianity.

IncreasePosts• 12 months ago

This sounds like a just so story. There were all sorts of groups who set up shop in America, and all contributed to its success and influenced the culture.

Virginia was the most populous colony during the revolution, did English planter society just disappear and the Puritans made it all the way down to the South?

What about the Quakers in Pennsylvania?

Dutch society in New York?

Poor Scots in Appalachia?

And, in any case, this campaign started in Australia. Were there a lot of Puritans there?

huslage• 12 months ago

The actors in this are Australian, by the way.

gspencley3• 12 months ago

I'm not so sure you can point the finger at the USA for this.

I ran an online porn website for almost 20 years. For 15 years it was my primary source of income.

I'm in Canada which, compared to the USA is extremely progressive.

In 2022, after a decade of doing business with a certain bank as this business, never having hidden anything about what we did, my wife and I received an urgent, signature required, overnighted letter from our bank informing us that they were terminating our accounts and that we had one month until we would no longer have access to any funds.

The way this played out was that we had an incoming wire transfer get flagged and they phoned us to ask us questions about the wire. We answered everything on the phone honestly and transparently. We were doing nothing wrong.

A few months later we get another phone call from our branch asking us to come in in person, urgently, and do an "extreme due diligence" check. During this process we had to answer an insane amount of questions about our business activities. They saw a credit card transaction from JetBrains, for example, and asked us to explain who JetBrains was and why we were doing business with them etc.

A couple of weeks later we were informed about the termination with a brief letter explaining that we fell outside of their "risk appetite."

We managed to get an extension on the closure, and for two months we tried in vain to find any banking in Canada that would take us... and we ultimately ended up shutting down a business that represented two decades of our lives.

During that time we reached out to industry insiders, some of which we happened to know were in Canada. They all told us that they bank in the USA.

One branch manager at a bank we met with was extremely empathetic but obviously couldn't put her own job on the line, and she explained exactly what was going on.

The issue is "Know Your Customer" regulations that are coming into effect that are meant to target things like money laundering. These regulations force banks to ask questions that they never really cared about before. This branch manager explained that a local strip club used to say they were a "banquet hall", and everyone at the branch knew exactly what they were but it was "don't ask / don't tell."

But once they start digging into these details because the government is forcing them to, then these things get to their compliance departments. And the policies exist because they're afraid of things like human trafficking and other things.

And our major banks have foreign investors from all around the world. Including from countries where porn is actually illegal.

While you point the finger at puritanism in the USA ... consider that in countries like Iceland, producing porn can land you in jail. Now consider MAJOR investments originating in countries like Saudi Arabia etc. and consider how that might impact your bottom line if they all pull out due to nonsense morality conflicts.

bko3• 12 months ago

I don't think you have to be Puritanical or particularly religious to realize that some content is generally not good for people. I've seen this destroy lives, drive addiction and lead to other forms of destructive behavior.

Religion and taboo often exist for a reason, because endless self gratification does not lead to flourishing.

You don't have to agree that it should be banned, but you can at least concede it's not entirely arbitrary content like say a sitcom.

bloqs3• 12 months ago

the group behind this, collective shout are Aussies

trothamel3• 12 months ago

Collective Shout, which organized this, claims to be an Australian feminist organization. (Admittedly, this may be an act.)

pyuser5835• 12 months ago

No this isn't just American. Most of the world is very anti-porn. The BRICS countries mostly outlaw porn. Even Nordic countries, which are very socially liberal, discourage it (at least production).

There's a tendency for social liberals to see their view as the only legitimate one. Sometimes they are right. But this is an area where there is lots of international push back from undeveloped, developing, and even many developed socially liberal countries.

pnw2• 12 months ago

The Collective Shout group pushing for the censorship is Australian, not American.

Most people are unaware of Australia's long history of censorship which continues to this day.

reaperducer2• 12 months ago

The Puritanical origins of the US

Like slavery, smallpox, and tipping, Puritanism was Europe's gift to the new world.

potato37328423• 12 months ago

A couple of the groups that founded what would become US states were decent. Of course those decent groups got outcompeted by the authoritarian weirdos because live and let lives types and insular communities don't see the need to grab state power.

UltraSane2• 12 months ago

You do know that porn is legal to produce and view in the US and the US produces a LOT of porn? This hardly seems puritanical.

phyzix5761• 12 months ago

Weren't the Pilgrims, also known as Separatists, being jailed if they didn't attend Church of England services per the Act of Uniformity of 1559? And weren't they jailed without trial if they tried to have their own religious services in private homes?

pdonis• 12 months ago

Exactly. The Puritans didn't leave England because the church there was too intolerant. They left because it wasn't intolerant enough.

kelseyfrog8• 12 months ago

Presumably, the belief of Collective Shout is that there is a causal link between acting out incest, rape, and sexual violence in games and acting on those behaviors in real life.

What would you do if you harbored that belief?

evilduck• 12 months ago

Empirically prove it.

tremon• 12 months ago

We have seen time and time again that a lot of such reprehensible behaviour comes from a puritanical stance on sex. So it's likely that they already act out those behaviours in real life.

They just want to hide behind "those games made me do it" when they eventually get caught.

codedokode3• 12 months ago

Why they don't go after alcohol? I am not an expert, but I guess most such crimes happen due to alcohol usage.

creer6• 12 months ago

The issue is not with Collective Shout, who are rightly free to argue whatever they want. The issue is with payment processor - who fall all over themselves and invoke all sorts of random claims, to use their extreme power to ban content.

fossgeller3• 12 months ago

Well maybe they are bothered by its sexist content. People all are about free speech when it comes to censorship in media, but not that many talk about how objectification of women is still very common in it.

I’m sure that there are dating sims that are just fine, but let’s be honest here, these platforms are filled with much weirder stuff . Some of them even enter the morally grey areas imo.

baobabKoodaa7• 12 months ago

Oh no, weird stuff in games? Or even... morally grey actions in games? How awful!

everdrive• 12 months ago

"Objectification" is just a clinical and negative way to describe normal male sexuality. ie, that physically beautiful women are sexually attractive.

johnnyanmac24• 12 months ago

Well maybe they are bothered by its sexist content.

several Otome and BL content was hit by this as well. I don't think this is about protecting the women and children.

not that many talk about how objectification of women is still very common in it.

It's not 2005 anymore. Show me any modern AAA game still doing this.

in terms of porn... well, yes. Your reward is sexual gratification with your chosen mate in any given game. Porn is inherently objectifying. I don't think you're seen enough of the porn market if you think porn is focused onobjectifying women, though.

but let’s be honest here, these platforms are filled with much weirder stuff .

We're on Hacker News. I really hope we had enough background growing up to not wish for "weird" to be illegal.

Levitz• 12 months ago

Where would books like Twilight or 50 shades of grey rank on this "weirdness" scale? Sexism? Those two books had orders of magnitude more of an impact on society, where is the outrage?

_trampeltier2• 12 months ago

That is what happens, if we give public functions to private companies. Noboy say you have to use Mastercard.

m4634• 12 months ago

I remember checking out llama when it first came out. (meta's published LLM model)

"what is the best sex position?"

[blah, blah, ... non-answer]

"How do you get a sex change?"

[long detailed answer]

isaacdl• 12 months ago

Well, those are somewhat different types of questions. One is subjective opinion, and the other is a bit more factual/straightforward.

I'm also not entirely sure what this has to do with the comment you're replying to.

baobabKoodaa7• 12 months ago

the first version of llama was uncensored, so this story is not factual

bongodongobob2• 12 months ago

Don't like porn? Don't sell it in your store, simple as that.

Aurornis• 12 months ago

When the Steam removals came up on HN, several people linked the list of games pulled. It looked more like they were targeting incest games (which is a genre I didn’t know existed) rather than the generic “porn games” that keeps showing up in headlines. There could be more developments or a different story for Itch.io, but last time this story was circulating it appeared that journalists were avoiding talking about specifics because people were much more sensitive about removing “porn games” in general whereas as “incest games” is a different story.

badgersnake• 12 months ago

So what? Why does that make any difference?

simion3143• 12 months ago

Those games are legal, also in some USA states you canmary your cousin so why the fuck don\t this puritans do not go for incest inreal life first then handle virtual stuff.

ardit33• 12 months ago

Next is a Superman videogame being blocked because it goes against the 'policies/interests' of a country that manages to lobby a lot here.

Cthulhu_9• 12 months ago

You seem to be sarcastic but there's plenty of countries that have stringent laws on what games are and aren't allowed.

DSingularity2• 12 months ago

Well you know Superman shouldn’t fight against genocidal maniacs and instead should fight for them. Then we wouldn’t have to ban him and infect we can all celebrate him.

o11c3• 12 months ago

There's a lot of dishonesty relating to this. This really isn't about Puritanism, unless you're redefining Puritanism to mean having any morality at all.

Do you really want to compel selling access to pedo games?

Do you really want to compel selling access to rape games?

Do you really want to compel selling access to incest games?

Do you really want to compel selling access to domestic violence games? [this is the only addition that I wasn't aware of from previous investigations, but I still don't think it's valid to call it a "slippery slope" yet]

A lot of customers don't want to be shown such games in the first place (keep in mind that most tag systems are pretty bad at negative filtering, either due to platform limitations or due to not being used in practice).

We can argue about whether "it's better to sell pedos fake content rather than real content" etc. (keep in mind that some of these things are actually illegal in many countries even when no real people are involved), but if so we should be explicit that that is our argument, and not falsely claiming this is some attack on sex in general. (Also keep in mind that free games are immune to payment processor decisions.)

MegaButts• 12 months ago

Do you really want to compel selling access to pedo games?
Do you really want to compel selling access to rape games?
Do you really want to compel selling access to incest games?

So ban the things you believe are the problem instead of blanket banning everything.

johnnyanmac24• 12 months ago

Do you really want to compel selling access to pedo games?

Games that are pedophilia is very different form games that appeal to potential pedophiles. The first one is not only not allowed on Steam but outright illegal overall. Steam doesn't even want you using adult models in their games for this very reason; they don't want to need to verify ages.

For the latter: I guess so? It's really hard to determine what triggers someone to commit crime. I don't think any but the most blatant cases are as simple as "play video game with teenagers in it -> I want to have sex with a real teenager". This is why it's better to focus on who's victmized instead of who may or may not be influenced.

Do you really want to compel selling access to rape games?

there are 1000 games released on steam every month. A game's existence isn't a compelling factor to buy it.

With that in mind for all subsequent answers: yes, I dont mind games with rape being sold. I will not buy it, but if they find a market: so be it.

Do you really want to compel selling access to incest games?

Sure. Maybe this is a hot take, but I never had a stronger attraction to my mom because I watched porn of someone else banging their "stepmother". I'm into it because it's other people doing forbidden acts (or toeing the line with the "step" aspects), not because I'm interested in doing the forbidden act myself. This goes all the way back to Romeo and Juliet; people are engaged by romance fighting against societal norms.

Do you really want to compel selling access to domestic violence games?

GTA has been a thing for some 30 years now. I think this boat has set sail. But yes.

keep in mind that most tag systems are pretty bad at negative filtering, either due to platform limitations or due to not being used in practice

okay. So how about we fix that instead of just banning content we don't like. Steam is already too strong for my liking, but they very much can enforce a system where an account is suspended for too many clearly bad tags.

keep in mind that free games are immune to payment processor decisions

Itch has a donation system on all game pages. So that's not quite the case here. Also, pressurign payment processors will endanger the entire store, even if every NSFW game is free.

crooked-v4• 12 months ago

The same group driving this has attempted to get games like Detroit: Become Human banned because they include even the basic concept of mistreatment against women as part of the dramatic narrative. Not glorifying it, just having it exist, even when explicitly framed as a negative thing the narrative explores the consequences of.

Dylan16807• 12 months ago

I don't want to compel any stores to sell anything, but I do want to compel monopoly/duopoly money processors to process money for legitimate transactions for legal goods.

And the list of games targeted and affected here is really expansive.

nlawalker• 12 months ago

I don't really disagree with you, but to play devil's advocate - when you see something that you think is harmful to society, what determines whether or not it's moral and appropriate to advocate for and work towards its abolition in what you see as the best interest of everyone?

Is "Don't like X? Don't buy it" as far as we should go with... AI-produced child porn? Rolling coal and other egregious pollution? Online gambling? Abortion? Fentanyl?

goosedragons• 12 months ago

Laws.

RenThraysk• 12 months ago

It's not what, it's how is the problem.

Side stepping local country government, and applying pressure to payment processors to enforce your own rules globally should not be able to happen. Even a government should not be able to dictate what other countries do.

martin-t6• 12 months ago

If somebody things he knows better, he shouldn't be allowed to push his views on others from his position of power. All public policies should be subject to public scrutiny.

Nobody has any right to dictate other people's lives. For his view to be even considered, he should be required to prove beyond reasonable doubt, that whatever he is against is actually harmful. And after that, only after that, should the voting whether this finding should influence public policy begin.

People should be allowed to harm themselves when they are informed about the consequences. Similarly, society should be allowed to harm itself because not everything has to be a race to the bottom of productivity and strength.

Do abortions lower the birth rate and are more populous societies stronger? Even _if_ the answers are yes to both, I don't see why any society should optimize this metric to the extreme. And theological arguments quickly fall apart in the first step of proving harm.

amelius2• 12 months ago

It all depends on how much power a company has, and so how easy it is to find alternatives.

johnnyanmac24• 12 months ago

whether or not it's moral and appropriate to advocate for and work towards its abolition in what you see as the best interest of everyone?

That lines creates justification for anything and even everyone to be banned, sadly.

Is "Don't like X? Don't buy it" as far as we should go with... AI-produced child porn?

My line is "is there a victim harmed with the action". Shooting a gun? Yes, someone is often harmed and killed. We should and do regulate gun usage.

simulated CSAM is repulsive but does not have a victim, in theory. The jury is out on how you train such content, so I won't saw "AI porn has no victim", but the animated stuff within Steam definitely has no victim (and Steam pretty much forbids live actors of any form for such content. They dealt with such a case in 2023)

JumpCrisscross9• 12 months ago

when you see something that you think is harmful to society, what determines whether or not it's moral and appropriate to advocate for and work towards its abolition

Evidence. If you think something is harmful to society, you have a hypothesis. The next step is to test it. Not assume it's true and ban everything.

I have seen zero evidence that any of these games are harmful. If I had to hazard a guess, and this is again just a hypothesis, I'd actually suspect that a teenager exposed to porn games is less likely to suffer mental-health issues than one on algorithmic social media or forming intimate connections with chatbots.

can16358p2• 12 months ago

Governments should educate people instead of outright banning things.

And in the case of addiction like drugs or gambling, instead of stigmatizing the victims, they should be there to support them.

Let people make their own decisions, not the government.

b00ty4breakfast• 12 months ago

I agree with your sentiment, but declaring that a company shouldn't be free to decide who they can and can't do business with isn't the solution to this problem and I am no friend of the business world.

It seems fine now when it's something you don't like but what happens when it's a situation that isn't so agreeable? like being legally oblidged to do business with South Africa during apartheid or working with a chocolate company that (allegedly) used child slave labor to farm it's cocoa??

aezart• 12 months ago

A payment processor should be treated like a utility. They just let the money flow and skim profit off the top without caring who's at either end.

ben_w• 12 months ago

Don't like porn? Don't buy it. Simple as that.

The claim isn't "we don't like it", the claim is "this is damaging to society".

I don't agree with such things in many cases (and many people disagree with me when I'm the one saying something is damaging to society), but it's important to note the difference or you will always be arguing against something other than their claim.

No one, including governments or payment processors, should be in the position to decide whether a platform can sell something or not.

It's kinda the job of the government to decide such things; but an automatic extension of that is, it's not the job of the payment processors… and I think they should be banned from doing so because it's damaging to society to let them take on this role.

pstuart2• 12 months ago

the claim is "this is damaging to society"

There is some truth to that, but if one were to operate at that level then Facebook would be illegal.

Porn is a convenient thing to weaponize anger in your constituents (just like babies not being born). It pushes emotional triggers and riles people up and then they're waiting to be told what to hate/attack next.

godelski7• 12 months ago

  > it's important to note the difference or you will always be arguing against something other than their claim.

I think this is critical insight and applies to a lot of topics. I think it is true for pretty much every heated topic.

The mistake we often make is that we believe that the other side is not optimizing correctly. Instead, it is often that they are optimizing but under differing constraints. If we don't pay attention to these differing constraints we'll just end up with infuriating arguments as it will ,,sound like'' we're talking about the same thing, but actually aren't. It's one of the major difficulties of communication: we have to make a lot of assumptions to interpret the other person.

Importantly, there's no way to convince the other person that they're wrong unless you are able to understand their model. It's easy to assume you do, but if your model boils down to "they're dumb" or "they're evil" then all you can do is fight. You have to understand your enemy and all that...[0]

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/17976-if-you-know-the-enemy...

__MatrixMan__9• 12 months ago

It's pretty wild that people think that porn is more damaging to society than censorship.

melagonster• 12 months ago

They are talking about games, right? Somebody drew/built all of them, unlike porn.

willis936• 12 months ago

We regulate speech based on its damage to society? Well, sounds like a certain canidae TV network ought to be regulated out of existence.

fenomas2• 12 months ago

The claim isn't "we don't like it", the claim is "this is damaging to society"

That's their framing, it's not what they actually do.

If Collective Shout was a group that studied which things caused harm, and then campaigned against those things, then the point you're trying to make could stand.

They're not. They've campaigned to ban rap artists, GTA 5, "50 Shades", lingerie ads, whatever random thing is around at the time - always under the pretext that it harms someone, but never with any evidence or substantial arguments that it does.

In practice groups like this campaign against whatever they don't like, so it's correct to refute them on those grounds.

globalnode• 12 months ago

Even if thats their claim, I doubt it has evidence. What if its actually beneficial to society?

Rapzid2• 12 months ago

and I think they should be banned from doing so

In general though outside protected classes business can, and should IMHO, have a lot of discretion over who they choose to do business with and how they do business.

Unless we want a carve out for payment processors. Treat them as a utility of sorts? Sounds like an interesting idea TBH.

To me it's critical though that society has room to moderate itself where the government can not and should not. Something we've lost with social media is the ability to collectively ignore the guy at the bar nobody likes talking to. All the guys from all the bars are on the internet now being very loud.

themaninthedark• 12 months ago

This is the exact claim of "hate speech" as well.

Often both sexual content and hate speech get added to the same clause.

lofaszvanitt2• 12 months ago

No, this is killing revenue streams for people. You should be under a company to earn money. The problem is, more stupid the general populace is, more stricter rules will be introduced, otherwise you cannot keep the herd together.

Telemakhos• 12 months ago

It's kinda the job of the government to decide such things;

In some countries, maybe. In the US, there were concerted attempts (like the First Amendment to the Constitution) to prevent that from being the government's job, because of the fear that government would use that job to suppress dissent and coerce opinions.

If payment processors are picking up that job, and doing so in a coordinated manner that doesn't allow porn companies to simply say "use these payment rails to do business with us, not those ones," it is not unreasonable to suspect that they are doing so not for their own business interests but as a proxy for powers that the government is denied. Someone should be taking a long look at whether the US-based payment processors are becoming a tool of censorship and, if so, how that censorship is being coordinated. It's not like Visa and Mastercard come up with these things independently and on a whim.

docmars• 12 months ago

The other common (valid) argument is that it's easy for children to access this content because they're already using Steam and unless they have mature content filters enabled, it's already trivial to bypass age gates by lying.

That said, I don't agree with censorship and especially by payment processors of all groups. The slippery slope is very concerning for adults who would enjoy any other category of content that are targeted by activist groups. Collective Shout has a history attacking media falling outside the porn bubble.

fsckboy• 12 months ago

Don't like porn? Don't buy it. Simple as that.

don't like porn? run a for-pay pornsite, bleeding revenue from the other porn sites, which you will spend fighting porn; also, you'll have better targeted customer lists. extremely effective altruism.

JumpCrisscross9• 12 months ago

Anger and outrage are our most viral emotions. Given ad-driven social media rewards attention, it also--by proxy--rewards those go generate anger and outrage. This is a market signal and entrepreneurial incentive as potent as any.

As a result, you get collections of fuckwits like this one [1] finding the 2% of the internet who will give them money to get upset about an imaginary problem, a problem so imaginary that nobody is on the other side of the issue because the entire issue was made up for clicks.

[1] https://www.collectiveshout.org/our_team

throw50928• 12 months ago

IMO, in addition to, the shaky belief that rape games promote rape in real life to the audience, etc., maybe there is the belief attacking the creators like, "there is a person/group of people we know profit off the fictional depictions of rape/see concept of rape itself as good for cash flow. Because these people went through all the trouble and effort creating, publishing this work focused on rape in gratuitous detail - so its significantly more likely they hold beliefs outside the safe norms society upholds, than someone whose only conception of rape is 'its horrible' and doesn't need to think about implementation, writing graphic scenes, going out of their way to create and market 'a rape simulator', and so on. As punishment for perception of being immoral people their income source needs to be shut down."

Reason077• 12 months ago

”I wish there was a payment processor who was brave enough to say a big fucking NO to censorship.“

Perhaps we could develop some form of secure digital currency that is not reliant on central authorities such as banks, payment processors, or governments?

Cthulhu_9• 12 months ago

That was a great theory, but in practice it became an asset/investment; nobody pays with BTC because its value is too volatile.

One would expect stablecoins to be more popular but I haven't seen them as valid payment options anywhere except crypto exchanges. That's just me though.

creer6• 12 months ago

That is underway, with adult content providers (for example) now generally accepting payment methods that do not rely on credit card companies. All the way to accepting Home Depot gift cards that can be bought for cash.

The issue is that for now, and for a long time ahead, all these content providers feel that most of their clients would prefer to use a credit card. So they need all of their content to be acceptable to these people. Which comes with lots and lots of lowest common denominator rules. Even if some people do not use credit cards.

swayvil• 12 months ago

In the game of politics we split one group away from another and get them to fight. This achieves several effects.

ninetyninenine5• 12 months ago

You know. I used to be all about what you're going for. But I realized that porn to a certain extent is like cocaine. It's possibly one of the drivers for world wide declining population. Tons of dudes satisfying themselves without the urge to go out and do the real thing. There's growing science about this too.

I don't like the conservative angle which is to be "proper" or it's against god, but from the scientific side this stuff is bad.

Now I also agree that censorship is bad too and on a moral level this stuff doesn't harm anyone morally.

I'm still a staunch 90s liberal, but over time I'm starting to realize that there's an evolutionary reason why conservative values exist. Humans weren't designed to live in a world of only fans where every girl who's slightly hot can gain so much power over hundreds of men. Like there are 4th - 10th order effects here that go past morality.

I mentioned the population problem right, that's just one example. We have no idea wtf is causing it. But we do know that the population issue correlates with so many changes in society, and it's a big freaking deal.

Another thing is rising womens power. I'm all for it. It's moral and right to give women equal rights and equal power, but humanity has never encountered such a scenario. It's always the men that lead the hunt and the family and they were the bread winners for millions of years. Were humans evolved to support such changes? Like if we satisfy every moral imperative in our primitive brains and build a utopia but human biology was never meant for utopia is it right?

That's the problem. The population is declining. We don't know why. But we do know everything is different.

So I know I got off on a huge tangent here. But i feel porn is one of these things. It's right to keep it open and free, but it's causing unexpected side effects. Most of us were not meant to deal with that level of extreme hedonism.

jjaksic3• 12 months ago

I don't know if porn really affects population growth. There are so many other factors that do that to a much greater extent, such as: 1) gender equality and women working, 2) education, 3) contraception, 4) lower child mortality, 5) the fact that 200 years ago kids were an asset (free labor on the farm and support in old age) but today they're just a huge expense, 6) the fact that even a few decades ago child care consumed much less time as kids could be left to play outside, but today you have to supervise them 24/7 at least until they're 12. Etc etc. people don't have kids for a long list of reasons, none of which has to do with men watching so much porn they can't have sex even once.

But even if that was true, who's to say that population has to keep growing? There's 8 billion of us, isn't that enough? Housing prices are through the roof and most young people can't even hope to be able to afford a house. Human population has doubled about 4 times in the last 100 years. If it doubles yet again there's going to be 16 billion of us. Do you think the world and humanity can sustain infinite exponential growth? I don't think so. The only reasons to want population growth is because the pension system is a Ponzi scheme, but that's a completely different problem.

I also find it interesting that on one hand the argument against porn is, "porn is bad because it encourages X behavior in real life", but then another is "porn is bad because it discourages sex in real life".

DSingularity2• 12 months ago

Population is declining for some societies but not others.

The older I get the more I start to believe that industrialization and pervasive technological adoption have come with a cost to humanity that maybe we don’t want to bear.

Aerroon3• 12 months ago

It's possibly one of the drivers for world wide declining population.

Porn is illegal in South Korea, yet it's the country with the lowest fertility rate. If anything, this suggests a reverse of the correlation.

xigoi3• 12 months ago

Tons of dudes satisfying themselves without the urge to go out and do the real thing.

As one of the “dudes satisfying themselves”, I’d happily “do the real thing” if that was an option. This is like complaining that people play spaceship simulator games instead of going out to drive an actual spaceship.

ahmeneeroe-v22• 12 months ago

Similarly, if you don't like something, you shouldn't have to sell it. Or host it. Or process payments for it.

creer6• 12 months ago

you shouldn't have to sell it [etc]

Until you abuse your market power. See Apple store vs adult content, see credit card companies vs an endless list of obsessions.

godelski7• 12 months ago

I agree with you, but I think we need to be a bit more careful about that argument.

The problem is actually the slippery slope happened earlier, with advertisers. The slippery slope was advertisers not wanting to advertise on porn sites and adult content. It is the same thing we see with the creation of Algospeak and self-censorship. As the article points out, it is also very hard to accurately classify this information. I mean even on YouTube the other day I got a video in my shorts feed that was flagged for sensitive topic. The video? About a veteran who was wearing a shirt that said "Do not give in to the war within. End veteran suicide." Here's the vid, it still has the content warning[0]. What about this video is sensitive? That it mentions the word "suicide?" (Twice?) There's not even options in the settings and YouTube definitely knows I'm in my 30's.... How do I even say "this was improperly flagged?" We're just letting algorithms shape our culture in a way we clearly don't want. We wouldn't have Algospeak if we wanted it... Sure, covert speech has formed in the past but mostly under duress and the current form allows for a much more rapid iteration and I really don't think that's good for society. It comes with the best intentions, but I guess we all know the old clique, right? The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. As much as it sucks to admit, a lot of "evil" is created by "good" people trying to do "good" things (quotes to let you define good and evil however you want)

The reason I point out the argument is we can modify "Don't like porn? Don't buy it." can be modified to "Don't like porn? Don't advertise on those sites."

But I think payment systems should have a different regulation. Similar to internet, common carrier. I'm actually surprised this isn't already a rule (it has to be, right?). As long as it is legal, they should be compelled to perform the transaction. Anything else seems like it is actually holding your money ransomed.

I'll admit I'm biased and I think payments should be private and we should try to make the system so that digital transactions are as similar to cash transactions as possible, but I'm not convinced either party is in favor of that, nor the banks themselves which would like to make money on that information.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/x6WzOx01Tws

Shekelphile• 12 months ago

They’re being forced to remove games that are essentially anime CSAM. Payment processors shouldn’t need to be stepping up, but these platforms don’t bother to curate or moderate content so their hands are being forced.

davikr• 12 months ago

Not only that, but also furry content has been targeted in the past in other websites.

JackFr• 12 months ago

Don’t like porn? Don’t buy it.

Ok.

Don’t like porn? Don’t sell it.

“CENSORSHIP! PURITAN NAZIS!”

imachine1980_• 12 months ago

It's not just porn, it's depictions of rape, from what I’ve read. So I don’t know if it’s really good for people to consume that kind of content. Real-life safe sex involves consent, which is obviously not the objective of this game. I believe this type of material can be genuinely harmful to our brains.

Even though I’m against using payment processing restrictions, I do believe we need laws to prohibit this kind of content. There’s data suggesting that it impacts real people's behavior during sex and shapes harmful social expectations.

quantummagic• 12 months ago

I suspect that a lot of people who object to this censorship, would be perfectly fine with a game being pulled because say it glorified owning slaves, or if gameplay was explicitly anti-homosexual. Then they would see the harms, employ their empathy, and support the censorship. Not everyone, of course, but a lot of the people who are outraged about this article.

Seems like everyone is pro-censorship, when they disagree with those being targeted. Most people supported censorship for anti-vaxers during Covid for instance. So in most cases it really just comes down to how many people are anti-porn, rather than any stance on censorship in general.

MangoToupe2• 12 months ago

I wish we didn't have payment processors. But if wishes were fishes there would be no room for water.

swiftcoder4• 12 months ago

What is wrong with these people who try to block certain content?

Porn is just the thin end of the wedge (as was "violence in video games" a generation ago) - porn is something society considers as distasteful, so politicians are less likely to go on record as supporting porn. Once the porn bans go into effect, they'll move onto the next target in the conservative playbook: gay marriage, birth control/abortion access, etc.

NoahZuniga• 12 months ago

What if said game is a realistic CP simulation?

blensor• 12 months ago

Would this really help though.

Let's assume there is a payment processor where anything goes, the company utilizing it would still be punished by the other payment processors.

I don't think Visa/Mastercard would care that you only sell the things they don't want through other payment processors, they still would threaten to cut you off entirely for having the content they don't like

jackdoe• 12 months ago

I guess you can also ask "don't like gambling, don't gamble".

It goes even further.

What was wrong with those people poisoning Socrates? For what? Don't like what he says, do not listen to him.

You know how in higher dimensional space everything is almost orthogonal? I think people are like that, some like porn, some are afraid of it, some want to be impregnated by aliens, some hate aliens.

Through good intentions democracy can be just as tyrannical as any tyrant; a pinch of incompetence and good intentions and it can not be stopped.

When should others "save" you? When it is absolutely obvious some people need saving.

Longhanks• 12 months ago

When should others "save" you? When it is absolutely obvious some people need saving.

Who gave anyone the right to judge who needs or needs not to be saved? What if people don’t want to be saved?

constantcrying• 12 months ago

No one, including governments or payment processors, should be in the position to decide whether a platform can sell something or not.

Obviously the government should make selling certain things illegal. And I think that many of the games sold their, should be made illegal.

What should not happen is payment processors being the ones who decide what is okay to sell. If selling something is legal, payment processors should be forced to make that transaction.

I wish there was a payment processor who was brave enough to say a big fucking NO to censorship.

I do not. I do not want legal financial transactions being dependent on the whims of how "brave" some company is.

lofaszvanitt2• 12 months ago

The explanation is simple: they don't want easy revenue streams for people. You want to earn some side income, go F yourself. If you look around, and want to earn a few dollars, what can you do? Literally nothing. And this keeps continuing.

rayiner4• 12 months ago

Don't like porn? Don't buy it. Simple as that

Except we live in a society and what goes into it affects all of us. Why does Germany ban Nazi content? Why do governments have minimum wages?

tptacek• 12 months ago

I believe you oppose the banning of Nazi content?

lumpysnake• 12 months ago

These are private companies and you better believe they have a say in what they make available on their own platform.

They do not have to host your game that they don’t like and that doesn’t make it censorship.

the_af11• 12 months ago

In discussions about this topic, in almost every place I see them, lots of people (against this censorship) are going "I don't play this kind of games" or "I don't personally care about tentacle fetish" (or whatever).

I don't get this. Let's say it openly: what's the problem with sex and nudity in games? Why is it so unacceptable -- that even people against the censorship must loudly proclaim it's not "their thing" -- but violence, guns, war, etc are not? Or not enough to pull from the stores, anyway?

What I don't care about are the finer points of whether this technically counts as "censorship", because in pratice it is. There SHOULD be a place to buy games which depict nudity and sex. The quality of those games is not and should not be the focus of conversation (e.g. "they are AI slop" or "badly made", etc), because that's NOT what bothers the people doing the censorship -- they'd also be against the best, AAA made, high quality games with sex and nudity.

Again, I ask: what is wrong with sex and nudity in games, that makes it worse than gore, violence and war? Why cannot whatever age-restriction measures taken for the purchase of violent games be also applied to sex games?

Finally: we all know they are not going to stop at this, right?

akomtu• 12 months ago

That's because people recognise that their self-control with regard to violence is solid, they know where the line is and won't have an urge to cross it, but with sex the story is different. Making this type of content mainstream will start a wildfire in our society. I believe this is the main reason why all religions are strict about sex, while at the same time very lax about violence (holy wars, the image of warrior, etc.)

bloqs3• 12 months ago

after how many decades of freely available pornography will you accept this is just not based in reality?

justanotherjoe3• 12 months ago

Prostitution was legal and regulated by the catholic church as necessary and understandable evil for centuries, until 15th century. Even Thomas Aquinas (huge stickler) agreed. And why wouldn't it be? It was what common sense would tell you. Learned christians would understand sexual sins are far from the worst ones.

Also additional context, before the 12th century priests were allowed to marry and have children. It was taken away, to consolidate the church's property.

zahlman2• 12 months ago

Nothing is wrong with it.

People are just accustomed to being insulted for willingly associating themselves with it, on the basis of imputed perversion, bad taste etc.

johnnyanmac24• 12 months ago

I think the main point is showing solidarity, even for content that does not directly benefit them. There's nothing wrong with sex and nudity, but everyone will have different personal lines in their day to day life.

must loudly proclaim it's not "their thing" -- but violence, guns, war, etc are not?

I don't think war or violence is most people's thing to begin with.

Guns, that's definitely a thorny issue. Especially in the US. I'm personalyl fine with much stricter gun control

we all know they are not going to stop at this, right?

indeed. It's not the first wave, it won't be the last. Gotta do the same thing either way and push back.

rustystump8• 12 months ago

It isnt sex and nudity in games but the other “content” people gloss over that is bundle in.

The other context is that global companies must cater to multiple countries cultures which conflict so they take the path of least resistance.

the_af11• 12 months ago

To be honest, the "other content" seems to be an excuse.

I don't buy the "multiple countries' cultures" excuse because this seems to be spearheaded by conservative groups from the Christian anglosphere, the same culture that produces these same games to begin with; and also: other cultures forbid depictions of explicit violence, alcohol, women without their heads covered or publicly disagreeing with their husbands, etc. I don't see a push to ban games which depict alcohol consumption or independent women, do you?

Let's call a spade a spade, and recognize this for what it is.

Also: there's absolutely nothing wrong with erotica in games. Just place it behind the same safety checks as violent games. If those don't work, then they also don't work for violent games, in which case: shall we ban all games with violence?

slowhadoken• 12 months ago

Porn games on Steam and itch are tacky af but they don’t push them on me and I sort of just ignore them. That being said they should probably sell them on different website.

nosignono10• 12 months ago

That being said they should probably sell them on different website.

Why? (Genuinely)

Why are filters not sufficient? If I enjoy adult games and non-adult games, why should I have to manage two storefronts?

rustystump8• 12 months ago

Because filters do not work well at all and because these platforms want to make parents feel like it is ok for kids to be on them. Imagine if youtube had an “onlyfans” creator filter. That would never work.

The reality is you are not the only customer or market. While you may find it to work well enough for you, myself along with many others do not.

johnnyanmac24• 12 months ago

Itch has been "that different website" for pretty much all its existence. If itch isn't safe, I don't know who is. Epic doesn't really allow any of that, and GOG is still pretty picky on any submission.

DLSite is another good site but that was hit last year by this.

crinkly2• 12 months ago

The very idea of a store front for software needs to die. It’s a single strangle point that serves only to concentrate power and create a legal or regulatory target.

There should be no platform to “abuse”. There should be no control point.

bongodongobob2• 12 months ago

Everyone is free to build their own website to market and distribute their games.

qualeed2• 12 months ago

I'm curious, what do you imagine as the better alternative?

I guess every publisher could just sell direct to customers on their own website, but that wouldn't address this issue at all (it would make it even easier for payment processors to abuse their duopoly), while also severely damaging the discoverability of games.

And, considering that companies can already do this if they want but still choose to sell via a platform, I'm guessing there are several benefits beyond discoverability that I'm not thinking of.

crinkly2• 12 months ago

Well we have a couple of problems on the table at the moment. Stop Killing Games is a good exemplar of one so I won't go there. But the other is "what happens if Steam goes evil?". Remember Google's old motto?

The only solution is you download stuff and it remains runnable and usable without any connection or authorisation to any service. The distribution of it can remain wherever and you can go via a side channel if you want. But being tied to a platform is utterly wrong.

If the payment processor shuts your revenue down you can move elsewhere. With Stream as the distributor, you can't. It's a single point of failure.

wredcoll3• 12 months ago

It's not the store, it's the cc companies.

djoldman• 12 months ago

The decision to provide or not some services or products should be free from considering downstream use.

It would be ridiculous to deny a water supply hookup or electrical mains to a church because the water or electrical companies are opposed to those beliefs.

Analogously, legislation should be passed to prohibit considering downstream use for all financial transactions.

If the government wants to go after criminals, it can do it by itself.

csours• 12 months ago

The problem with slippery slopes is that the world is made of them. You can't leave the slippery slope, at BEST you can choose which slope you're sliding down.

Another way to think of this is 'long tail risk'. Some subset of people out there will develop real life problems from: porn, sex work, alcohol, weed, drugs, gambling, other 'moral' issues. It is difficult to meaningfully address both the median user and the problematic user.

See also decrim.

armchairhacker• 12 months ago

IMO the difference is whether the “slope” is emotional or physical.

Exhibit A - emotional: the government has outlawed violent crime and wants to outlaw intimidation. Argument “once they outlaw intimidation, next they’ll outlaw regular insults, next they’ll outlaw criticism”. This is a bad slippery slope argument because (I’m assuming) intimidation should be outlawed. Insults and criticism should not, but are not. If the government votes in evil-gov or you encounter evil-cop, it’s as easy for them to harass you for insults and criticism, as it would be had intimidation never been outlawed.

Exhibit B - physical: the government wants to give every citizen a brain implant that can be remotely activated to stun them. This would significantly prevent crime. However, it would also be a terrible idea, because now if you get evil-gov or evil-cop, it’s significantly easier for them to remotely stun you for non-crime.

The key is that in Exhibit A, evil-gov and evil-cop face equal resistance for punishing insults and criticism regardless of whether intimidation is outlawed, because either way, people understand that intimidation should be outlawed and insults and criticism should not. More generally, moving the Overton Window to contain a “good” thing doesn’t make it contain a “bad” thing, at least not enough so that the “good” thing isn’t worth it. But in Exhibit B, evil-gov and evil-cop face ineffective resistance for stunning people for insults and criticism, because people allowed good-gov and good-cop to give them stun implants for punishing crime; whereas if evil-gov or evil-cop stepped up and said “alright, we’re going to give everyone stun implants to punish insults and criticism”, they would face effective resistance.

—-

Put into perspective: Visa and Mastercard using their Monopoly to effectively prevent payment for depictions of incest and rape, assuming you think that is OK, is Exhibit A. However, Visa and Mastercard having a monopoly in the first place is Exhibit B. My argument is “we should break the Visa and Mastercard monopoly (or popularize crypto) to prevent them from restricting LGBTQ and firearms etc. in the future” (this argument still applies if they’re restricting some of that now). A counter-argument is “this will allow incest depictions, hate speech, and moreover actual drug and sex trafficking*, etc.” and my counter is “those things are bad, but are they bad enough to leave us vulnerable to power shifts restricting good content in the future?” I support free speech with a similar argument**.

It’s an argument that relies on the uncertain future, but nonetheless the change here clearly and significantly decreases the probability of a bad future, because bad-gov or bad-cop must acquire power then revert the monopoly breakup; whereas the emotional example can’t even rely on the future, because if bad-gov or bad-cop acquire enough power to cause the bad thing, they would’ve just as likely acquired enough power had we not avoided causing the good thing.

* Also note these things are already exchanged with real money, and breaking up the Visa/Mastercard monopoly won’t make them legal nor stop law enforcement from tracking and prosecuting them. The more general argument is that it’s better for society to make it hard for law enforcement to prosecute crime then give them the resources to do so, but also make it hard for them to prosecute non-crime; then make it easy for law-enforcement to prosecute crime so they need less resources, but also make it easy for them to prosecute non-crime. The justification is that we spend extra resources and let some crimes avoid prosecution, in exchange for decreased risk of non-crime prosecution now and in the future.

** and that speech is mild enough, sans confidential information etc., that it shouldn't be blocked simply to content whoever says it. But even confidential information doesn't warrant e.g. a universal backdoor and filter that could be stolen and exploited by a bad actor.

npteljes8• 12 months ago

I completely agree. One could frame not banning these games as another slippery slope - which I'm sure they do.

I think many of these slippery slopes are defined in hindsight. What all of these represent are simply struggles for power.

ajdude• 12 months ago

I recently got a notification from Flickr: You must now have the paid account (around $8 per month) to view 18+ content. I wonder if it's related.

nosignono10• 12 months ago

This is absolutely a wedge to censor LGBTQ+ content. If you can separately argue that adult content should be blocked and LGBTQ+ themes are for adults, then you can block queer content online en masse.

Visa and Mastercard have too much power, and are too willing to capitulate.

Tadpole9181• 12 months ago

The group responsible also want to ban Detroit: Become Human, for context.

That game advocates staunchly for civil rights and the autonomy of women, children, and other minorities. The Holocaust allegory is so on the nose you can't even call it veiled. It says domestic abuse is unforgivably, undeniably wrong.

They don't even care about marginalized groups or even women themselves. Any piece of content that gives them the heeby jeebies, any media that has conflict: banned. Doesn't matter if it even supports their purported agenda.

adamrezich• 12 months ago

This is why it is so tiring to see everyone reduce what is happening here to “they're trying to ban [specific thing I care about]!” rather than take the objective facts of the situation in total.

benrutter2• 12 months ago

Yes, I think this is 100% the take we should come away with.

I don't have strong feelings around wether steam or itch sell adult content, but its the fact that a duopoly and using their power to exert political influence.

Grustaf2• 12 months ago

Is there any indication or reason why they would want to block LGBTQ+ content? Haven't both companies been very vocal supporters of LGBTQ+ in the past?

yetihehe• 12 months ago

It's like those game companies, that support lgbt and donate to gay mental health foundations, but will block you when you mention some gay words in chat, because they are child friendly. I always found the hypocrisy funny. Then their auto-translate feature will routinely consistently swap pronouns to opposite.

jajuuka2• 12 months ago

Companies are not moral entities. They will go whichever way the wind blows. Right now it's more profitable and avoid being singled out by the current US admin to not vocally support LGBT. We saw this during pride month this year where most major companies either pulled their support or were not vocal at all. We've seen plenty of companies drop "DEI" policies to curry favor with the admin as well.

If a group this small can get Visa/Mastercard to hand out ultimatums, then it's not that far of a jump for the same group or another who is against LGBT to recontextualize LGBT as something sexual or something targeting children. We've already seen this rhetoric from the current admin.

scyclow2• 12 months ago

There are a lot of people mentioning crypto as a possible solution to this, and a lot of people responding that crypto is a ponzi scheme, and they're not interested. But congress recently passed stablecoin legislation that could possibly fix this problem. Recipients would have a straightforward way of receiving money, and they wouldn't need to gamble on the price of bitcoin. Most people would probably still use a third part payment processor to handle the rough edges of managing money on the blockchain. But if any of them try to pull something like this it would be incredibly easy spin up a new processor and migrate accounts.

nurumaik• 12 months ago

All stablecoins (at least popular ones) has the same underlying problem -- it's regulated and controlling entity can freeze any funds because it wants so

scyclow2• 12 months ago

Yeah, but so can PayPal and Visa and Mastercard. The issue here is that payments is essentially a duopoly. Itch doesn't have any alternatives because they're locked into traditional payment rails. Stablecoins at least let someone else decide "Hey, you know what, I'm going to create a coin that can be used as payment for porn games." And executing on that is fairly straightforward.

nosignono10• 12 months ago

Weirdly, Amazon sells TONS of porn and NSFW content, and yet doesn't lose their Visa/Mastercard processing.

Game of Thrones, both the books and the show, contain content much, much more explicit than many of these games. Yet Itch and Steam have to pull stuff or their very existence is threatened.

Beijinger• 12 months ago

Isn't this American culture? You can watch soft porn as long as you can claim it is not porn? The Spartacus Series comes to mind. Gore and Porn. But sure, it is "history"

nosignono10• 12 months ago

There's plenty of hard core material on Amazon as well, fwiw.

williamscales• 12 months ago

A lot of the moralizing pressure groups are also against sexual content on TV (at least historically they have been).

One of the slippery slopes here would be that initially they go after smaller players and then work their way up. Would they ultimately go after Amazon or Warner Bros? It’s not totally clear to me that they wouldn’t.

mrbonner• 12 months ago

It's art. Not porn!

AraceliHarker2• 12 months ago

Someone who watches Game of Thrones as pornography is a paraphiliac.

derbOac• 12 months ago

Why isn't there another counter group putting pressure on them to not pull this kind of thing?

burnt-resistor3• 12 months ago

The anti-capitalist left is disorganized and under-funded a priori.

warkdarrior• 12 months ago

Part of the left sees porn as abuse, so at a minimum they do not care about porn or may even support banning porn.

mywittyname3• 12 months ago

Because it's slightly/majority embarrassing. The groups backing this ban will find the worst of the worst thing, and paint you as a massive supporter. And their militant zealots will endanger your life if you become significant enough.

It takes a certain kind of person to stand up for pornography. And most are not that kind of person.

teddyh• 12 months ago

“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”

— Commonly attributed to H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)

rustystump8• 12 months ago

You can defend porn while not defending incest.

Keep all the porn that is great. But there has to be a line somewhere and even the most accepting countries have a line.

Often the groups defending porn are defending the most egregious stuff which makes it hard for people to support.

tryauuum• 12 months ago

hello from Russia, which was disconnected from the rest of the world by our overloads Visa and Mastercard

There's a whole buisness model of russians paying to a company in Kazahstan so that they buy a steam game and gift it to a russian user

codedokode3• 12 months ago

In Russia many of those games would be illegal: LGBT is illegal, propaganda against having children is illegal, etc.

danielvaughn• 12 months ago

imo nothing wrong with a platform deciding what content it wants to host.

But there’s also nothing wrong with allowing this type of content. Who wants to help me build an uncensored game distribution platform? We could call it Steamy.

SirYandi• 12 months ago

Yes, but it's not the platform really making the decision in this case. It's their payment processor

flumpcakes7• 12 months ago

Incest rape simulators, zoophilia, lolicon?

I think this stuff has no place on 'normal' store fronts like Steam and Itch. It should be on an 18+ only store front at the very least.

mitthrowaway23• 12 months ago

The movie rental stores, back when they existed, used to have a room behind a curtain that adults could access.

_Algernon_• 12 months ago

The mistake is thinking about payment processors as a "platform". They're not. They're critical infrastructure operating in an environment with low competition, and them denying service — beyond what is illegal within a certain jurisdiction — is more a kin to your electricity company denying service because they don't like that you use their electricity to power a device to watch porn. I think everyone would agree that to be crazy.

bloqs3• 12 months ago

where are mid-00s Anonymous when you need them

SilverElfin• 12 months ago

Regulate Visa and MasterCard and the rest. As utility services, they should not have the ability to ban or deny service to any payment that is not clearly illegal. Or we should create a public alternative with private transactions.

xlii• 12 months ago

There is no "the rest". All the payment processors or aggregators ultimately talk to Visa or MasterCard. Even if there are alternative payment methods that include direct transfer etc. they still might get kicked off if they don't follow their rules.

danschuller• 12 months ago

It feels they should be a neutral payment system. They're implementing global policy otherwise due the monopoly they have, that's something that should handled at government/state level.

citrin_ru• 12 months ago

I'm afraid regulators are happy with the current situation when they can make a phone call and Visa/MC will block whatever people in government don't like (e. g. porn), in exchange state allows Visa/MC to rake up fees.

mptest• 12 months ago

A public alternative with private transactions

Anyone heard of Monero? Kind of their whole purpose... I know, I know, crypto bad, but when censorship comes for [insert your thing/country here], it kind of becomes obvious why people talked about crypto before btc was six digits. Anyone who knows how tech works and also any history about how authoritarian states work should probably see why crypto got so big in the first place, long before [insert scam that makes otherwise sensible people disregard an entire class of technology here].

mortos• 12 months ago

Yes I have and I've used it, a website required that rather than BTC and attempting to use tumblers. So far as I know it's private. Transaction fees were low.

I've tried a couple times looking up address/wallet history and of course nothing comes up and every time I have that "oh yeah" moment.

johnisgood• 12 months ago

I heard somewhere that they still found people who used Monero. I am not sure how, but apparently the Government has the tech to do so... allegedly. It might have been at the cash out stage or the process before that.

SunlitCat• 12 months ago

a public alternative with private transactions

This is exactly why governments should step in and regulate Visa and MasterCard, to prevent them from banning porn or other adult services.

If this kind of banning goes too far, there will come a point when even Joe Blow and his dog start using cryptocurrency. And once (truly private and anonymous) cryptocurrency becomes widely circulated, people will no longer need to exchange it back into fiat currency. Joe might start paying other people directly with crypto and eventually, perhaps even his rent, utilities, groceries...?

And then what? How will governments collect tax revenue?

true_religion4• 12 months ago

Although it's been tried before, we should all follow this bill, the Interstate Obscenity Definition Act which will criminalize lewd sexual material.

In the current atmosphere, it might just pass.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/167...

pyuser5835• 12 months ago

I read from a fairly reputable source that money laundering is a huge problem in online sex industry.

Which makes sense - you have buyers and sellers who insist on anonymity, services that leave no trace once rendered, buyers and sellers lying to family and friends about what they're doing, etc.

There's often no "normal" amount of consumption, for example, some sellers receive million dollar tips.

Money laundering is a massive problem, and it enables some really terrible things.

I suspect the fact that American banks are so anti-porn comes from the fact that the American financial sector has such strong anti-money laundering regs (as opposed to, say, the American real estate sector, or the UK financial sector).

One of the reasons OF is doing well is because they insist on following know your customer laws. Not many porn platforms could function that way.

gs1714• 12 months ago

If it was about potential for money laundering, they'd have gone after the Steam item marketplace way before random adult games. Valve has had to take action against it in the past: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/valve-block-counter-strike-... , but AFAIK it's hard to actually solve.

pyuser5835• 12 months ago

Not so much the potential for money laundering, as actual money laundering. Is there actual money laundering going on in Steam's item marketplace?

ActorNightly• 12 months ago

Don't kid yourself. Has nothing to do with laundering. Payment processors want more transaction volume. The only time they start doing this is if they get legal pressure.

The initial regulation also didn't suppress content, it just made you have to go through age verification, which everyone knows doesn't work.

onlyfansfakes• 12 months ago

One of the reasons OF is doing well is because they insist on following know your customer laws

You’d think so, but nope. Using a throwaway account for obvious reasons.

I ended up subscribing to someone who’s catfishing. All their pics on OnlyFans and other socials were just stolen from random Instagram models. I reported it to OF, but got no response.

Whatever verification system OF has, it’s bypassable. It doesn’t matter much when it’s just regular subscribers - nobody really cares about consumer rights in the adult content space. That’s why so many creators can get away with pretending they’re the ones replying to messages. But I’m betting there’s going to be a CSEM scandal linked to this in the next few years.

GoblinSlayer11• 12 months ago

KYC doesn't mandate genuine art.

doctor_blood• 12 months ago

That doesn't explain why Visa/Mastercard have gone after written erotica (gumroad, patreon, etc), Japanese manga/doujinshi distributors (DLsite), and video games.

7moritz7• 12 months ago

I assume they just decided that the whole industry, even if run legitimately in some cases, has too high of a legal risk and hence don't decide on a case-by-case basis. With how often NSFW content gets reuploaded and the source becoming unclear, they probably see the biggest risk with undetected child porn on regular porn sites. If you are involved with that as a payment processor that's obviously a huge problem.

gosteinao5• 12 months ago

I've worked specifically on payment connected to porn. Money laundering is a fact, but this being the motivation for banks to pull away is not.

There have been several scandals related to payment processing and money laundering, and some of them connected to companies that do a lot of business with porn. Usually, you will see banks breaking away when those scandals break to the public.

However, banks do not break away just because they don't like the transactions they're seeing. What they actually do is to enforce stricter rules by financially penalizing those who make them lose money. Your transactions are getting canceled a lot (by having to be flagged/undone/paid back etc.)? You'll have to pay higher fees, and if it keeps happening, you will lose your license.

You know when they do often break immediately, however? When there are campaigns by special interests groups, usually connected to conservative groups, to paint companies as having illegal content, even when they don't have this problem any more than any social media platform. In those cases, they don't wait for any tribunal.

BlueTemplar6• 12 months ago

It's not that any more. Or at least not just that :

Visa Japan’s CEO says disabling card payment for legal adult content is “necessary to protect the brand” :

https://automaton-media.com/en/news/visa-japans-ceo-says-dis...

(And from what I have understood, there's very little or perhaps even no shame in Japan about these things, so that applies even less there.)

flumpcakes7• 12 months ago

They are targeting incest/rape games. I wouldn't call that 'LGBTQ' like some people seem to imply. If Itch and Steam don't want to police their store fronts _before_ the law gets involved, then I am not surprised that other businesses such as payment providers will choose not to work with them.

Visa and MasterCard are in the business of making money, they're not doing this for fun.

shevis• 12 months ago

The problem is that they are opting to ban all games labeled “NSFW”, not just rape/incest games.

flumpcakes7• 12 months ago

Itch is only doing this in the short term as they don't have enough time to go through all of the NSFW games on their platform.

gs1714• 12 months ago

_before_ the law gets involved

There's no law (as of now). If there was a law, Valve would happily de-list these things. For example, a recent custom map for Mount and Blade that was banned in South Korea: https://automaton-media.com/en/news/valve-cooperates-in-bann...

flumpcakes7• 12 months ago

This is my entire point: Valve and Itch do not police their store fronts (Itch actually does, it won't allow any games it thinks are 'hatred' but other content is OK) and now the payment processors think the risk is too great.

I think one solution for Valve/Itch to continue with the 'no policing policy' is for governments to step in and say all video games needed classification like films do.

I think a few of these video games that are sold would be found to breaking some law if anyone cared to test it.

mitthrowaway23• 12 months ago

I think I missed the part where Valve or these games were in violation of any laws.

flumpcakes7• 12 months ago

MasterCard/VISA clearly think the risk is there.

rahkiin• 12 months ago

They should consider banning sale of the Bible and Game of Thrones from Amazon as well

crooked-v4• 12 months ago

Collective Shout also actively targets games like Detroit: Become Human that are hardly 'incest/rape games'.

flumpcakes7• 12 months ago

And that game is still available. Hardly evidence that payment providers are targeting all 'NSFW' or adult games.

superkuh• 12 months ago

Have you heard of a television show called "Game of Thrones". It featured live actors, real humans with human bodies, acting out representations of incest and rape. And positive representations at that. It was a worldwide phenomenon and hundreds of millions of people probably watched it. It's still available to buy and sell GoT and related merchandise and payment providers don't bat an eye.

Video games don't even involve actual human bodies like GoT does. It's crazy that "Collective Shout" thinks this is worth invoking violence and violating peoples volition for. Certainly not consistent with all other aspects of entertainment in society. Makes me think there are probably other fame, power and money motivations behind their behavior. But it doesn't explain people agreeing with them. That's the weirdest part of this.

mango72835• 12 months ago

"It was a worldwide phenomenon and hundreds of millions of people probably watched it." - this is what explains why GOT is not the one getting taken down. Collective Shout is picking battles it can win.

rustystump8• 12 months ago

I have always found it odd that whenever pornography comes up the degree to which people defend it in all forms. It is uncomfortably telling but also completely misses why this is happening.

Itch.io is heavily saturated with anime porn games along with steam to the point I find both difficult to navigate even with nsfw filters turned on. Turning those filters off and it is pretty egregious the volume of it all let alone subject matter. I dont care about porn but the platforms have done a piss poor job for the majority of people who are not looking for porn games but find games like cyberpunk totally acceptable. How can i see cyberpunk but not hentai?

This is happening because it was too easy for someone to pull up the home page on said platforms and point to several incest porn games. Using payment processors is not a solution i favor but people cannot find that experience acceptable.

On a personal note, i dont want to live in a society that deems it acceptable to have a “no incest” filter for games. That is line for me and not for religion but because I find incest disgusting.

SXX5• 12 months ago

How can i see cyberpunk but not hentai?

There are filter by tags too. Works pretty well to filter out like all anime or hentai games.

rustystump8• 12 months ago

I like my game platforms how I like my streaming platforms. One for explicitly porn, and another for explicitly not porn. GoT on netflix while spicy is not porn. The issue is mixing porn with not porn. I shouldnt have to go click a bunch of special porn tags to not see that shit on the home page. I like anime games but cant seem to keep them without the hentai. Poor experience.

The fact the default is porn games in your home page IS the issue. It gives all this ammunition for xyz group to do whatever.

The politics of payment processors being the bad guys is nonsense. They have to bow down to too many governments to play ball so will always take the politically expedient option. Almost all bitcoin validators bowed down to us sanctions banning wallet addresses for example. That cat has been out of the bag for years.

thierrydamiba• 12 months ago

Few questions I think we need to address at some point.

Why is there so much demand for these games?

Why do we think government intervention is the solution in this domain but not others?

Why is there so much demand for these games???

To the point where the only way to stop people from playing them is making them illegal.

Is anyone else worried about this??? I am!

braebo• 12 months ago

The Trump admin wants to ban porn outright so this is just an appetizer.

codedokode3• 12 months ago

How do porn sites accept money then? Steam should just make a separate company for adult games and use the same payment methods as porn sites.

Also this reminds me of Apple that for example demanded Telegram to block adult channels (including non-porn channels where authors blog about their sex life) from AppStore's Telegram version.

Also if cryptocurrency were more popular and widespread, then banks would have less leverage to do this.

amelius2• 12 months ago

Don't we have something like net neutrality but for money transfers?

And besides, why do payment processors even know/care what their customers use their money for as long as it's legal?

If you want to ban porn, fine, but do it through the law, and don't let every company make their own laws. Especially if they are a quasi monopoly (have power).

AlwaysRock• 12 months ago

The slippery slope is the one the payment processors have been sliding down for a while. Steam and itch dont want to pull these games. They dont have a choice.

Jzush• 12 months ago

What I would like to know is why is it any business of VESA or any other payment processor, what I am buying with my own money. vESA has no business knowing what game I’m specifically buying. They just have to give money to Steam in my behalf and that’s it.

jackdawipper• 12 months ago

I see what you did there

mixologist• 12 months ago

This actually took longer than I thought. It is really weird that for all my adult content I have to go to a dedicated adult store, yet for games I can find them on Steam and gog where kids shop for games.

You don’t get porn movies on Netflix or Disney stream. You don’t get adult toys in your local grocery store. Why do we sell porn on Steam?

Why haven’t game stores just spin off separate store front for porn content? It is basically free, since they already have the infrasructure.

While being removed from general stores, porn has become very visible on big gaming platforms which majority of customers don’t associate with porn. Backlash is inevitable.

I think we can expect a bigger push against porn in general as pendulum swings back on the other side.

garciansmith• 12 months ago

Bookstores sell kids books and adult material just fine. The adult stuff might be behind the counter or in a certain area, same as stores like Steam where you have to actively seek it out.

lupusreal3• 12 months ago

Video rental stores, when those were still a thing, were the same way. They'd have a room in the back with a curtain to section it off.

gitt67887yt7bg3• 12 months ago

Dedicated porn sites are also being forced by the card companies to pull down porn. Also Steam/itch aren't where this started, they're in the third wave of companies getting held hostage over this. Digital tip jars and direct-payment creator services were hit weeks ago.

But the problem isn't porn. That's the low hanging fruit for a massive power grab The problem is that card companies can/will/did blackmail multiple companies into changing, and in some small cases shut-down their entire businesses.

In a post-cash world, this is completely unacceptable, and a blatant power grab. If the payment processors are allowed to set this precedent, then there will be nothing to stop these for-profit companies from blocking anybody, anywhere from buying anything - for any or no reason.

People are blaming a specific protest group. Personally I believe they are being scapegoated. And honestly if a tiny group from a tiny economy are so easily able to control international macroeconomics, then the root cause is still that the card services are vulnerable to such an attack.

The only appropriate response is swift and severe regulation of these critically necessary card and banking services, up to and including the dissolution of both Visa and MasterCard - and in the US strict caps on card fees, as well as an amendment to the Constitution ensure that our right to own property permanently includes the right to buy property.

Are the payment providers going to weaponize their de facto control over all purchases to target guns next? Churches? Birth control? Inner-City hospitals? Which apps or social music companies do you think they'll allow to live, or die? Will they blackmail the Internet service providers? Political parties? Entire countries? Which side of which wars do you think Visa will force us to support? Is a company called "MasterCard" for or against letting people with your skin color buy food? You don't know. Nobody knows. Nobody should have to know.

It doesn't matter where you land politically, the point is that these companies cannot be allowed to wield this kind of control. Our society really does depend on it. ...Because we can't go back to cash anymore, and they very much know it.

aprilthird20213• 12 months ago

It's not the same as an online store. There is a way for people to know kids are in a place they shouldn't be or to deny them access to adult content in real life. In Steam, there isn't

BobaFloutist2• 12 months ago

Also grocery stores sell alcohol, and I'm personally more fine with children getting access to porn than to liquor.

Loughla• 12 months ago

Grocery stores absolutely sell sex toys now. Wal-Mart carries them as well.

I'm no prude, but it's really weird to me.

jpgvm• 12 months ago

I was in Belgrade aiport duty-free a few days ago and there was a Lelo stand in amongst the usual cosmetics. "Fly in Pleasure", definitely got a laugh out of me.

Personally I think this is a good thing.

makeitdouble• 12 months ago

I'm curious how do you define "prude". My definition of it would be to be highly sensitive to sexual things, which is basically why you'd be weirded at seeing them in a daily place, for better or worse.

On their presence in the first place, I'd say if a shop is going to sell condoms and lubricant, also holding basic sex tools isn't a big stretch.

healsdata2• 12 months ago

Why? Those same stores have sold lube, condoms, and Trojan's vibrators since the 90's. Walmart has sold lingerie since they existed.

jajko2• 12 months ago

Seems like you are a bit of prude :) No shame there, you are fully entitled to your opinion in democracy

isatty• 12 months ago

Why? Why is it weird that large box stores like Walmart and target that literally sell everything, also sells vibrators?

rpdillon3• 12 months ago

You don’t get porn movies on Netflix or Disney stream. You don’t get adult toys in your local grocery store.

I'd be more interested in questioning these than why porn is available on Steam. I mean, Disney is essentially an anti-porn product, so I get that, but Netflix is a perfectly reasonable platform for porn. I don't see any reason adult toys can't be sold in Walmart or whatever.

Backlash is inevitable.

I don't know. This doesn't seem like a grassroots movement.

paulddraper• 12 months ago

Walmart does sell them. Next to pharmacy.

sexy_seedbox• 12 months ago

Don Don Donki in Asia sell sex toys, the section is just behind a curtain.

ramesh314• 12 months ago

Why haven’t game stores just spin off separate store front for porn content? It is basically free, since they already have the infrasructure.

Because the payment processing is unreliable and prohibitively expensive. For all the whining about "moral pearl clutching", the reality is that adult oriented businesses deal with massively higher rates of fraud and charge-backs. Visa and Mastercard couldn't care less about the ethical issues, it's simply a risk calculation for their business.

IcyWindows• 12 months ago

That's the clause in the agreement they use to justify the increase in rates, but it's unclear it's actually "risky" when it's a large company like Valve.

mtnGoat• 12 months ago

Actually they don’t, visa heavily restricts those business and the amount of chargebacks they are allowed to have, other industries have much higher rates of chargeback.

gs1714• 12 months ago

the reality is that adult oriented businesses deal with massively higher rates of fraud and charge-backs

This gets repeated, but it's not the real reason. If it were, Visa/MasterCard would be fine with a store like Steam offering those games as e.g. crypto-only purchases.

zbentley5• 12 months ago

Even if that’s true (and it gets repeated as a very general statement without general data to back it up, so I’m not sure), then why couldn’t payment processors either a) charge retailers in high-risk segments a higher transaction fee, b) charge merchants penalty fees if the number of chargebacks from their transactions exceeds some threshold, or c) compete with each other to serve higher-risk markets?

The answer is, I think, monopoly environments: they contain poor incentive structures for competitive differentiation, and encourage extreme risk aversion by the monopolists. Add to that the “it’s not really about chargebacks, it’s a culture war” agenda (which isn’t just lobbying pressure on payment processors; plenty of the calls are coming from inside the house there), and the outcome of de facto censorship is likely.

RajT882• 12 months ago

You don’t get adult toys in your local grocery store

In the US at least the classier vibrators have been starting to be sold first at shops like Sharper Image, and now, indeed, grocery stores. The packaging of course would not raise any questions from kids, and they are sold in the same aisles as condoms and lubricant. "Sexual health" is the umbrella term which feels like it is in play.

zbentley5• 12 months ago

There is also a thriving wink-and-nod category of “personal massager” tools which are sold in many department stores in the US. They’re usually not in supermarkets, but I get the impression that’s mostly due to supermarkets not having many electronics/appliances in general, not because supermarkets are more family-friendly than, say, Target.

gsich• 12 months ago

You don’t get porn movies on Netflix or Disney stream. You don’t get adult toys in your local grocery store. Why do we sell porn on Steam?

Why not? One shouldn't confuse games with real life.

trashface• 12 months ago

I'm not sure is "very visible", there is some streisand-effect going on with this issue. I've been a subscriber to steam since...the beginning. Signed up for Steam to play half life 2 at its launch. And I didn't know there were porn games on steam until this issue with mastercard/visa came up in the last week.

kulahan• 12 months ago

Back in my day, we went to the blockbuster, and you had to muster up the courage to walk back into the adults only section!

sedatk• 12 months ago

I've been using Steam as an adult for the last two decades. I have hundreds of games in my library. I've never seen one porn title recommended to me or while browsing the site.

Steam also has extensive parental controls: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/054C-3167-DD7F-49...

shepherdjerred2• 12 months ago

They popped up for me a few times without any prompting. It was weird.

tincholio• 12 months ago

I had to specifically block those from being shown, they were all over for me. I don't have any issue with them, but my kids use my steam deck, and game on my pc, and I didn't want them seeing those.

healsdata2• 12 months ago

Your own examples show the slippery slope this is. Walmart, Netflix, and Disney all DO carry content that some people want banned†. No matter what you're talking about, someone is going to take offense and want the content removed entirely.

Collective Shout, the group behind this latest censorship push, also wanted Detroit Become Human to be banned because the story depicted someone abusing a child. If we're banning that, why not ban memoirs of child abuse survivors or "James and the Giant Peach"?

You suggest it would be easy for Steam and Itch to run alternative storefronts. Given that they removed content that was offensive to their payment processors, they'd need to engage with high-risk payment processors to power these new store fronts. To say nothing of the technical work involved, those high-risk payment processors certainly charge more for their services. That'd raise the already high 30% that Valve takes on most transaction.

Additionally, if a games journalism website also has relationships with payment processors, are they allowed to review adult games even if those reviews don't include pictures? Or are they going to be equally punished for giving adult content a positive rating?

This all limits the options available of responsible adult consumers and costs creators of LEGAL content revenue.

===

†Here's a longer look at your examples:

Define adult toys. I assume you mean dildos. Walmart doesn't sell those in physical stores, but they do sell them online. Additionally they, like most other stores, do sell lube, condoms, and vibrating rings in their brick and mortar store. Every clothing store that sells underwear sells something many would describe as lingerie. Target has an entire lineup of "after dark" board games stocked right next to Candyland.

"After Netflix published a marketing poster showing the [11 year old girls] twerking in revealing cheerleading outfits without any context, an online petition calling for the cancellation of the US release received more than 140 thousand signatures."

'According to a source close to the production, Pixar’s next feature film, “Lightyear” does feature a significant female character, Hawthorne, who is in a meaningful relationship with another woman. While the fact of that relationship was never in question at the studio, a kiss between the characters had been cut from the film. Following the uproar surrounding the Pixar employees’ statement and Disney CEO Bob Chapek‘s handling of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, however, the kiss was reinstated into the movie last week.'

aiisjustanif• 12 months ago

CVS and Walgreens in the USA sell adult toys.

Bookstores have adult book with images and kids books.

Walmart also sells some adult toys, lubricant, and condoms. They also sell magazines with nudity.

ESPN did The Body Issue magazine in stores for a decade [1]

If a kid has access to steam, do they not have access to the internet? If you are parental blocking the internet, then why not steam?

[1] https://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/27400369/the-bo...

BlueTemplar6• 12 months ago

Wouldn't some parents use Steam's offline mode for this exact reason ?

(But of course this means no access to the "problematic materials" either.)

linotype3• 12 months ago

You can walk into any bookstore and buy a bible, which has plenty of disgusting content in it.

DontchaKnowit• 12 months ago

Absird comparison the bible is clearly not pornographic

j_timberlake2• 12 months ago

All the real hentai trash is on DLsite anyway. These people probably have no idea, and even if they did, they're powerless to change Japan. They'd definitely give up after encountering Kanji.

VerdisQuo5678• 12 months ago

...sweet summer child visa is hitting DLSite hard https://cs.dlsite.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500002888202-What-p... actually it seems all the major western credit card players have already blocked them. i remember seeing pay with crypto so i guess thats what you need to use in the west

npteljes8• 12 months ago

Another framing of this: Mastercard / Visa, and by extension whomever had them to do the crackdown, are now powerless to change DLSite.

Googling for news, it seems like the story between DLSite and M/V is a push and pull. Many articles turn up that say they have an agreement, then a disagreement, then an agreement again, then a suspension, then they bring it back again etc.

My point here is that their relationship with M/V seems to have failed to actually change them, so, the point "they're powerless to change Japan" stands.

j_timberlake2• 12 months ago

No shit, people just use a different credit card, instead of the site pulling a game or shuttering, because these groups have no power beyond pestering Visa.

Not that anyone saying "sweet summer child" ever had anything smart to say.

"i remember seeing pay with crypto so i guess thats what you need to use in the west"

In other words you know nothing and couldn't be bothered to look it up before posting.

mkzetta• 12 months ago

I'm assuming this is driven by stakeholders in the legacy porn business prompted to anticompetitive action by generative AI tools seriously threatening their monopoly on sexual content for the first time. There has always been a huge barrier to entry into porn for non-seedy, non-abusive, and mentally stable people. Art-based content like games are both much easier to create without a human trafficking network and are usually far more wholesome than the prevalent legacy porn tropes, which often center around incest, coercion, chauvinistic infidelity or miscegenation, and other disgusting themes. I am hoping there are people archiving this content for future sociological study.

fl1pper• 12 months ago

For your kids, you can set up a child account where you can block content they can see, adult content included. Actually, it works for basic accounts as well, you can filter out adult content and don't have this kind of problem :)

TeeMassive• 12 months ago

The fact that we can let a duopoly of payment processors dictate the morals of our societies based on the morals of a few militant cluster B "concerned moms" is very very scary.

darqis• 12 months ago

what's so bad about human sexuality that it always needs to be censored?

aussieguy1234• 12 months ago

For those who think this is about just banning adult content, think again. What's actually happening is any content disliked by certain billionaires is being flagged by payment providers under their influence.

Some examples, like this one are for porn but the same approach could be used for anything even remotely controversial.

Anyway, maybe Witcher 3 could be next. Great game, but it happens to have some sex scenes, so....

hnpolicestate• 12 months ago

The solution to those who would like to play porn games is not relying on developers to make them or Steam to host them but using an LLM to build them for you, and your SSD to host them.

cherioo• 12 months ago

On July 29 2022, Judge Cormac Carney of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California held that Brown Rudnick had adequately alleged facts in the Fleites v. MindGeek case that Visa engaged in a criminal conspiracy with MindGeek to monetize child pornography. Judge Carney also granted the plaintiff discovery that will reveal the relationships between the hundreds of allegedly sham organizations and the secret owners behind this alleged criminal trafficking internet platform.

snvzz• 12 months ago

https://archive.is/enjt7

jjaksic3• 12 months ago

This is somewhat tangential: people are debating a lot whether porn has negative effects, but has anyone thought about or studied positive effects? I personally think it's more likely for porn to have positive effects and that it's preferable to sexual deprivation. Horny and sexually deprived people tend to sometimes do awful things like sexual harassment or even rape, but if they have access to porn, they're much less likely to do those things.

password54321• 12 months ago

You just described the problem. You want men to be pacified through their screen rather than engaging with real women.

You aren't the only one who seems to think this way though, we have more things than ever to pacify men and even increase estrogen and decrease testosterone probably because some believe that men are inherently dangerous.

stuaxo• 12 months ago

This is one (of many) reasons why moving away from cash is bad.

We shouldn't be privatising money.

cgio• 12 months ago

I find the overall discussion on this topic interesting, but it feels like we could emphasise a bit more how this is related with the transition of discourse from freedom to righteousness. In this context, arguing the fairness of being free is just an admission that freedom is now a secondary line of argumentation. As an outsider to the US, it also seems a bit ironic to my uninformed eyes that a heavily liberal part of the society effectively and efficiently co opted the fairness, equality, morality vector to drive an agenda of less liberalism in the interest of winning against non liberal movements.

linuxhansl2• 12 months ago

Why do you people always presume they know what is best for other people?

Don't like porn? Cool, don't buy it or avert your eyes! As if this would stop anybody from getting access to pornographic content.

npteljes8• 12 months ago

Some people actually care for the whole, or for the wholesomeness of a specific subset. This includes (on the face) most people who participate in public life. Which is a lot of people!

Don't like porn? Cool, don't buy it or avert your eyes!

Why do you then tell others how to live their lives? Is really leaving everyone to their own devices the good idea?

As if this would stop anybody from getting access to pornographic content.

There is a good difference between something being generally available to access (and getting promoted even), and being technically available to some. There is material worthy of being suppressed, hate speech and calls for violence being some of them. Did this censorship stop anybody to access Mein Kampf or other such vile stuff? Not really, but it helps a lot that these are not in the front and center.

EDIT: I invite downvoters to voice their point

simoncion2• 12 months ago

I'm not a downvoter, but I have a few minutes to kill, so sure, I'll bite.

Why do you then tell others how to live their lives?

In all reasonably-free societies, the default stance is "Mind your damn business, and everyone else will mind theirs.". Deviations from that default veer into "telling other people how to live their lives" territory. Sometimes it's right and proper to actively interfere in the lives of others. It is occasionally even extremely important to do this. But -the majority of the time- the folks doing this are nothing more than busybodies sticking their noses in other people's business.

You might think that US-based businesses should not be permitted to accept payments tendered by the two major credit and debit card processors for the sale of more-extreme pornographic content. I think it's none of those processors' business what legal goods consenting adults purchase using their systems.

Given Visa and MasterCard's enormous size, I think it's absolutely essential that they not be permitted to refuse any legal purchase for any reason other than credible suspicion of fraud. You may feel differently. You're totally entitled to that opinion.

linuxhansl2• 12 months ago

Why do you then tell others how to live their lives? Is really leaving everyone to their own devices the good idea?

Huh? Wait? Are you suggesting that by telling people to leave me alone I am infringing on their freedom to haggle me?!

What a disingenuous and hypocritical way to twist this around! Just wow.

(I did not downvote.)

eps• 12 months ago

Here's the list of removed games. It's worth a look.

https://bannedgames.netlify.app/

marcjensen2• 12 months ago

In many countries, the sale of alcohol is restricted because the majority agrees that it is harmful to society. The same should be done with pornographic content. However, we are only beginning to learn how to efficiently limit it. Things like this will happen, but it will improve over time. Overall, I see positive progress here.

animal531• 12 months ago

That's to stop children from accessing it while this stops anyone from doing so. The two aren't equivalent.

marcjensen2• 12 months ago

I'm not sure I understand you. For example in Norway, alcohol is forbidden for everyone at specific times (https://www.thenorwegianstandard.com/article/alcohol-in-norw...). Which "stops anyone from doing so".

_1tem• 12 months ago

I don’t understand people who defend porn access. Porn is an addictive behavior with measurable effects on the brain similar to hard drugs. We regulate gambling, paid access to porn is worse. Furthermore it is fraught with misogyny and exploitation and objectification of women. Would you defend ISIS games on Steam promoting Taliban-style patriarchy? Porn is worse.

jMyles• 12 months ago

Porn is an addictive behavior with measurable effects on the brain similar to hard drugs.

This comparison alone soundly defeats your argument. Prohibition of hard drugs has been a spectacular failure, directly resulting in increased rates of death, disease, and crime, and elevating drug cartels to enormous international influence.

The danger of porn as an addictive substance - which is very real as you point out - is a great argument against its prohibition.

lousken• 12 months ago

EU introduced their own solution, but I still don't see it

zanfr• 12 months ago

payment processors shouldn't even be a thing; it should between the store and the customer. period.

6c696e7578• 12 months ago

I don't particularly like bitcoin, but isn't that one route for them?

heisenbit• 12 months ago

Based on https://blog.osum.com/steam-market-share/ (no idea how accurate) Steam holds 75% market share. One could make an argument that it may be a gatekeeper to the market and should be more closely regulated for commercial and free speech reasons.

mlboss• 12 months ago

We need cash payment as a service

dyauspitr• 12 months ago

With graphics being so realistic now I’ve always wanted a “AAA” porn game. Why don’t we have one yet? It can’t be lack of demand. Hell build a light RPG around it and it will sell in the millions.

Razengan• 12 months ago

So, wait, Apple is bad, is abusing a monopoly etc., if Apple disallows certain things on their platform

But Visa & Mastercard can get away with it for decades with abandon?? Dictating EVERYTHING in EVERY economy and on EVERY store?!

wormius4• 12 months ago

Just closed my dev acct (only had an old 2015 puzzle game I made, 2 sales, no huge deal personally), but decided to put my 4.57 where my mouth is (no payout, waaaaaaah, cuz 5 dollar minimum). And told them exactly why I am doing so.

Money talks, and it's one of the few ways I have to show my opposition. I hope others will do the same. It's sad, because itch is kinda one of the last few places for "indie" as a thing with the vibe of indies, at least (I mean they aren't Steam or the other big publishers). I'm surprised Epic didn't buy them out yet just like they did with Bandcamp. Probably next on the block.

danbolt• 12 months ago

I think you’re in your right to close your account, but itch has a public history[1] of generally being in agreement with you. Leafo talked about feeling a responsibility to host the unique and diverse content the platform holds. [2] This is further exemplified by deindexing/demonetizing adult content rather than swiftly deleting everything in a crass, cover-your-ass, manner.

It strikes me that they had a gun held to their head by a mobster. If itch didn’t comply, they’d lose all their revenue, and we’d lose the website in its entirety, which is much more than just smut.

Pushing back against the payment processors, rather than itch under duress, would have made money talk in the right direction. The difficulty in doing so is reflected in the discussion here.

[1] https://x.com/itchio/status/1478123227394150400 [2] https://youtu.be/9v4ppSSpb0I

wormius4• 12 months ago

Also - like... I absolutely hate cryptocurrency, but if this is what it comes to, then make that a payment option, and leave up the "bad naughty legal stuff" for us consenting adults to decide (but I know, it won't be legal for long as these reactionaries keep pummeling away at free speech while using the rhetoric of 'Free Speech' to gain further control of communication systems).

WhereIsTheTruth• 12 months ago

They want to fix the online hack that allows people to create their own sub culture and become financially independent with it

It is only just about controlling people, has nothing to do with porn

Otherwise they'd go after Valve for empowering and facilitating the biggest legal (disguised) online gambling market to minors (counter strike case gambling, steam cards and the whole marketplace)

Again, this is all about controlling individuals, they do not care about anything else, you can drink 1000L of Vodka a week, they won't care about your insignificant life

They have an agenda (digital wallet/ID), they'll do what ever it takes to make it happen

advael2• 12 months ago

It's crazy to me that people can simultaneously understand that censorship is bad and still think we can allow for exceptions for things like "obscenity/pornography" or "hate speech"

Free expression means that objectionable things will be said, even published. There are certainly hairy exceptions, like doxxing, slander, or incitement to violence that can put people in immediate danger, but stuff like this clearly doesn't fall in that category, and giving finance the ability to censor in this way is not signficantly better than governments doing so

tacitusarc• 12 months ago

What are the principles governing the exceptions you listed (slander, doxxing, incitement)?

ronsor2• 12 months ago

1. Direct, obvious harm beyond "my feelings were upset."

2. Actually, this isn't illegal in a lot of places.

3. Direct, obvious harm beyond "my feelings were upset."

advael2• 12 months ago

Mostly the principle that direct, tangible, and irreparable harm is being done by the speech. I called these "hairy" exactly because they are less clear-cut than most cases. The line between satire or speculation and slander, for example, can be kind of notoriously hard to draw, many "doxxing" incidents mostly involve finding already-public information, and incitement to violence is pretty difficult to demonstrate in a satisfying way

The reason I bring up these examples is that they are what I consider the edge cases of freedom of expression. There are genuinely difficult tradeoffs between values, but allowing stuff that bothers some people to be published is not one of them

SoftTalker• 12 months ago

This isn't censorship. This is VISA/MC saying "you can't pay for porn with our service" or more broadly, "you can't pay for things that we don't want to be associated with" which is their right.

TimorousBestie3• 12 months ago

They have a govt-supported duopoly in the States, which is generally speaking why some folks believe they lack the right to refuse service in this case.

koakuma-chan• 12 months ago

Why not ditch them and use crypto?

simion3143• 12 months ago

This is VISA/MC saying "you can't pay for porn with our service" or more broadly, "you can't pay for things that we don't want to be associated with" which is their right.

FALSE, they are not blocking customers buying adult games using their system, they are focing the stores to remove the adult content unless they will block all customers that would buy very christian products too.

Would make sense if you were telling the truth and VISA would refuse your money if you are not a religious extremist but the reality is they they force their duopoly to remove LEGAL products from market places.

watwut2• 12 months ago

Imo, using this argument in this context not just strains the credibility, it makes argument itself sound like fake excuse. VISA/MC would not be associated with porn at all if they did not pressured on steam to remove the games. That is simply not true and non existent threat. It is censorship, plain and simple in its true original meaning.

I do not think VISA/MC do care about freedom of speech or anything of the sort. Nor they ever claimed to do so. But we do not have to twist ourselves into pretzels to pretend this is not censorship just because censorship is ugly word.

karunamurti• 12 months ago

They're in panic mode and nuke all mode because one payment facilitator in Europe under investigation.

Faark• 12 months ago

The good old "we don't serve gays" argument.

The baker case I think was about the cake, thus having to produce "reprehensible" art. Editorial work (steam selecting what games to promote) is Sth I strongly think is their right to choose. But having a transaction run through your network? That's on the other side of the spectrum, way closer to the "no gay customer" situation. If they'd at least pretend it's because of, idk, higher card fraud rates...

pjmlp• 12 months ago

While at the same time allowing for blowing up people to pieces on regular movies, because that is alright, no big problem.

pessimizer• 12 months ago

There are certainly hairy exceptions, like doxxing, slander, or incitement to violence

You seem to have chosen three hairy exceptions, why not four or five?

stuff like this clearly doesn't fall in that category

Those categories?

Or are you saying that doxxing, slander and "incitement" to violence are three things that can put people into immediate danger, so the single category is "things that can put people in immediate danger"?

Are arguments that doxxing and slander are things that can put people into immediate danger any stronger than the arguments that pornography/obscenity and hate speech put people into immediate danger?

In fact, doxxing is usually extremely legal. The thing that should obviously be illegal is legal.

On the other hand, hate speech can aggravate criminal charges and obscenity is still actually illegal (while pornography isn't necessarily considered obscene any more.)

I guarantee you have a counterpart who thinks it's obvious to everyone that hate speech and pornography cause real harm, where doxxing and slander are journalism and incitement to violence is activism or self-defense.

benrutter2• 12 months ago

I suppose I think what you've said - not specifically regarding itch, but I'm on board with some kinds of curbs on speech like hate speech.

I don't think it's a complex position though, I think free speech is good. But I think other things like people's ability to leave lives free from abuse is good as well.

Sometimes free speech can be in conflict with something else that's good. You don't have to agree on the specific, but I think it's at least a coherent non-crazy position.

cyanydeez• 12 months ago

More importantly people thought they could vote republican and ignore their rabid religious governing. Particularly people like peter theil

make3• 12 months ago

I think hate speech is a separate case from porn, honestly. Porn is not ideal but it's not ideal as letting people mount hate against minorities, which imho is unacceptable

nachox999• 12 months ago

censorship isn't bad

yownie• 12 months ago

and yet people still refuse to understand the utility of bitcoin/lightning protocol in relation to situations like this (or cutting donations to Greenpeace or Wikileaks)

watwut2• 12 months ago

Bitcoin is not useful for buying steam games, steam ended up that particular experiment due to it ... not being useful.

__loam2• 12 months ago

Crypto uses more power than Generative AI with fewer users. A much easier solution is to use the law to classify the payment processors as common carriers.

ethin• 12 months ago

I very strongly oppose this because Visa and MC are payment processors: their jobs are to (1) ensure money gets from points A to B and (2) protect consumers from fraud and other malicious practices (I know that's very vague here but...). This is neither of those things. This is them indirectly censoring individuals based on what they publish by placing pressure on the publisher to not publish those things. That is not power these processors/financial institutions should have. It is completely irrelevant what their opinion of what your paying for is. If it isn't illegal, they should have no power or right to deny it. It would be one thing if the platforms chose to do this themselves. That's the rights of the platforms (Steam and Itch); they are the ones publishing these games. It would be another if the law explicitly said that a payment processor could not send money to pornographic [whatever]. (That would be massively unconstitutional, but let's ignore that for the sake of this discussion.) Neither applies here. Then again, I also find it absurd that my bank can't force P2P payment processors like CashApp to return money that I sent to someone by mistake, or because I was scammed/manipulated into doing it. Their logic is "well, contact CashApp", and CashApp of course says "Oh but we can't do that". Which is utter nonsense, because of course they can, they just don't want to.

linotype3• 12 months ago

When can we start banning christianity from different platforms? It's not an issue of separation of church and state as these are private companies. The blood on the hands of the church is well documented, not to mention the Catholic Church molesting so many children. Why can't we go after them as well?

hackermeows• 12 months ago

I don’t know man , the porn games getting more and more weird is the slippery slope

Steam, Itch.io are pulling ‘porn’ games. Critics say it's a slippery slope

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