Delist thousands of games, or deslist a handful of payment middle-men?
You know by now you might have to use crypto for yer sinful games.
I think it’s time for a game platform divorced from Visa/Mastercard to rise to the occasion and step in for these platforms. Websites without these processors already exist, so the model is proven to work well enough (it’s less convenient for sure).
I wouldn’t think the US would be a good country for this hypothetical store though. I think it’s only a matter of time until they attack the publishers and studios directly. I’m not counting on the 1st amendment to help anyone.
Collective Shout describe themselves as a “grassroots campaigns movement against the objectification of women and the sexualisation of girls”, but are associated with outspokenly homophobic and anti-abortion Christian conservative groups, according to a now-deleted Vice article. They recently claimed credit for the campaign that saw payment providers pressuring the online storefronts to remove content the group deemed unacceptable.
It’s not hard to empathise with the folks behind Itch for being placed in an impossible position, but their lack of forewarning has left creators blindsided and in some cases, seemingly without income. “I wish we had gotten some warning from Steam and Itch,” wrote game developer Robert Yang on Bluesky, “but we already know it’s Collective Shout + payment processors waging culture war against LGBTQ people and sexual expression. I guess there’s nothing else for Steam and Itch to say”.
Personally speaking, I’d be willing to extend that good faith to Itch.io themselves, but they aren’t the one holding the gun to their own heads here. That’d be financial companies, pressured by Collective Shout, who themselves have ties to an organisation whose CEO once described gay marriage as an “unspeakable offence to God”. It’s not difficult to imagine what kind of expression these groups might decide to deem as unacceptable next.
Well that is at least something Bitcoin could have fixed
At this point I would only try something untraceable like Monero. I don’t want the moral police to come knocking to my house saying that I bought something against the glory of the Lord.
And probably would have if it wasn’t being manipulated by speculators.
This is like shitting your pants to ward off bears.
If shitting your pants is cool, then I’m Miles Davis.
Payment processors and financial institutions sure do seem to hold disproportionate amounts of power.
When governments allowed payment processors to dominate the market to the point of duopoly/oligopoly.
And a single woman and her organization seems to hold a disproportionate amount of power over the payment processors.
I don’t understand it. Payment processors could easily tell her to pound sand, but they don’t.
talk to anyone that works in the porn industry. Mastercard and Visa have ALWAYS been like this ever since the late 90s/early 00s. they set the rules for what the adult entertainment industry can produce and sell and only now are people discovering because of video games that they’ve been this way for decades.
Welcome to capitalism. 1 person and their company can influence an entire country while being top 10 retards.
And they don’t care when it’s actual sex trafficking of minors (JP Morgan in relation to Epstein).
This is just a distraction
Collective shout finacials year: 2024 revenue: 458043 employee_expenses: 107000 other_expenses: 215488 net_surplus: 135555 employees: total_fte: 2 full_time: 0 part_time: 1 casual: 4 volunteers: 15 donations_and_bequests: 389800 government_grants: 0 commercial_income: 0 expense_to_revenue_ratio: "70.4%" average_expense_per_employee: 39400 Leadership - name: Melinda Tankard Reist role: Founder, Movement Director public_socials: - Twitter: @MelTankardReist - Instagram: @collective.shout public_email_address: Not publicly listed salary: Not publicly listed - name: Caitlin Roper role: Campaigns Manager public_socials: - Instagram: @collective.shout public_email_address: Not publicly listed salary: Not publicly listed - name: Renee Chopping role: Campaigns Strategy public_socials: - LinkedIn public_email_address: r******@collectiveshout.org salary: Not publicly listed - name: Lyn Swanson Kennedy role: Campaigns Strategy public_socials: - Instagram: @collective.shout public_email_address: Not publicly listed salary: Not publicly listed - name: Coralie Alison role: Movement Operations Manager public_socials: - Twitter: @CoralieAlison - Instagram: @collective.shout public_email_address: Not publicly listed salary: Not publicly listedFuck.
These.
Fucking.
Shitsucking
Subhuman
Leeches
Lot of college-educated white women in these nonprofits lol
Removed by mod
Damn guess we’ll need to move to the alternative- ah wait- no- itch was the alternative.
I wonder if a federated game platform would work as an idea or if that’s just an inherently bad idea due to the nature of trusting strangers with your money.
the problem is the payment processors, not itch
unless you’re fine with crypto, sending cheques by mail or having everything be free, your new platform is gonna get the same problems once it’s big enough to be noticed
Without payments processors, they can’t sell games.
Having a federated platform wouldn’t mean much if the payments processors blanket ban the platform.
Just use an intermediary and payment processors will be powerless
Someone’s gonna process the payment between the two banks, adding an intermediary between both banks won’t help much when it will be denied processing as well.
Still wouldn’t address the root problem here: payment processing companies have the power to just deny payment from even happening.
Unless you’re referring to making a federated platform that instead allows devs to connect with buyers and make transactions off channel.
Would limit widespread issues like this but now you’re opening a whole new can of worms with trust
Crypto payments is one solution.
This but unironically. I was going to try and use monero recently just to dip my toes in the proverbial crypto water, until I found out that I can’t buy anything with monero other than drugs.
I recall you could pay for some VPS but it was years ago and I know nothing about the current situation.
Cryptocurrency was going to be an alternative coin but it’s just used to speculate and buy illegal things.
buy illegal things
but that is actually what we’re here for in this thread - we want to buy things that our masters say we cannot.
My biggest problem is, they banned with this method, all the games that are targeted for adults but not porn, or gore. Like they hate spicy food and banned all things that are not white rice and unseasoned chicken breast.
It was really hard to find deep philosophical games which are good and are not containing porn or gore, but targeted to adults. Now its imposaible. They have literraly no platform. Unlike the porn games, they have many aside from steam and itch.
We can blame the religious organisation as much as we want, but the fundamental problem here is payment processors. They should be common carriers. Content-neutral middlemen who facilitate payment to anything that isn’t literally unlawful. This is no different to an ISP throttling access to Netflix because they operate their own streaming platform. If the storefront, the developer, and the buyer are all ok with a transaction, there’s no good reason for a fourth party to stand in the way of that.
Yeah, payment processing is among the many many many industries that ought to be nationalized so they can be administered in a transparent and democratic manner (see also, healthcare education housing electricity internet etc.)
There’s just too much opportunity to use it to manipulate markets and oppress minority viewpoints for it to remain in private hands imo
So you want Trump and MAGA politicians to be able to deny your payments instead?
The problem with “just let the government do it” is when the government is run by people like this.
So don’t let them.
Basically nothing works if no one cares about their community. One of the reasons Trump is in power right now is because of a deep seated American apathy for, like… everything.
Trump, et. al., are dismantling USPS, but I like USPS. It’s bad that they’re doing that.
How naive can you be? You think your vote matters here?
When every single district has been gerrymandered to death for 100 years, nobody’s vote really matters anymore.
Your cynicism can’t defeat me, man. I am God’s holy warrior. I crush weak pessimism like yours beneath the weight of my iron will.
How is it you think private companies will be more easily coercible when Trump’s cronies are the private sector?
Rofl. Your god can eat a dick. I’ve seen exactly what your god does.
It’s easier to start a competing company than it is to start a competing government.
You need a powerful standing army for the latter, and standing armies are part of why we’re in the trouble we’re in.
It’s easier to start a competing company than it is to start a competing government.
Not when Trump’s government refuses to do anything about all the slapp suits PayPal levies against you for treading on their financial turf.
You need a powerful standing army for the latter,
Corporations, without oversight, just become warlords with their own standing armies. You’re not getting out of this one through the low effort of simply buying a different brand of latte, man, I’m sorry.
To me it’s insane that food also isn’t on that list. Anything that isn’t a luxury can’t be trusted to be handled by capitalism.
Putting the ridicoulous idea that governments are fair and transparent aside, payment processors need to be international. Otherwise, most countries will not be able to access services because their local payment processor is not supported by smaller websites.
However, the payment processors should be regulated with something similar to net neutrality so they can’t discriminate payments. And EU could probably launch a government run competitor to dilute their duopoly.
Really the only time they should be even allowed to discriminate on payment is when it is suspected to be part of a crime.
Well, yes. I just did not consider them to be the ones discriminating if it is against the law, but the government.
Power finds a way, so I wouldn’t hope for nationalization itself to be anything good.
power already did find a way, its called privatization.
Yes, because without one government that was helping them out, punishing their competition and funding them, also making regulations convenient for them, Alphabet, Meta and others would be even more powerful. /s
…those are all corporations. Nationalization would make it a public service, rather than a corporate profit-driven service like how it is now.
You can bet that if libraries, for example, became privatized, we’d quickly see several different library companies pop up, each with their own paid book subscription service with exclusive partnerships with various popular authors, much like we have today with streaming platforms. Conversely, if we were to nationalize those streaming platforms, we’d likely see the service transformed to be more akin to our current library service.
It’s why the rightmost parties generally want to defund many public services and move them to the private sector - it transforms services that we spend money on to benefit the people into services that the people spend money on to benefit corporations.
I don’t believe in nationalization. I only believe in a simple, small and very firmly enforced set of laws.
It’s not about for-profit or not for-profit, it’s about laws being used to force you to pay to a certain kind of businesses. And not to whoever you like.
Because a paid library is kinda fine as a concept. A library has to function, repair chairs, change lightbulbs, pay security guards and, ahem, librarians, pay for new books and electricity and so on.
So - laws forcing you to predictably pay to someone involved in making laws. Copyright laws, surveillance laws, other laws. And the state having its secrets, and doing a lot of that funding and pressure and what not in secret.
And the more complex your set of rules is, the more it turns into “money buys right”, because it turns into a game where the side with more money on lawyers and technical solutions to loopholes wins.
The rightmost parties which want to defund public services are perfectly complemented by the left-center parties which generally want to have unaccountable funding of some public service. It’s not a left\right\yellow\blue issue. It’s an issue of a political system where only those representing some power interest are able to act. Just there are some power interests in replacing a public service with a private monopoly\oligopoly, and some power interests in feeding from the public service itself. I’m pretty certain that, similar to hedge funds, these ultimately end on the same groups of people.
One can even say that this is a market dynamic.
So - the political system is intended to ideally function like a centerpoint, not the milking mechanism described.
The problem is
-
in a too complex set of laws (honestly I’d suggest a limit on the total amount and a limit on the length of one law, and a referendum week once in 5 years on every law from the list suggested for the next 5 years, dropping all that was before ; when the laws are so complex that you can be right or wrong in any situation depending on being poor or Bezos, it means that the idea of having a specific law for every situation has just failed),
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in too many levels of representation allowing power to affect representatives,
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in there being no process to at any moment initiate recall of a representative,
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in not wide enough participation, it would be best if the majority of population would participate a few times as a representative in various organs, this can be made with making those organs more function-separated and parallel, with bigger amount of places and mandatory rotation, so that one person could become a politician on one subject once for a year or so,
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in there being too much professional bureaucratic entities inside the government,
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in no nationwide horizontal organizations allowing to 2A through any situation,
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in trade unions and consumer associations (there was such a thing too, ye-es) being almost dead.
So just have to fix these 7 points, and life will be better.
LOL, this is something averaging the classical (as in ideal, never really existing) American Republican ideas and the classical (as in functioning for a few years in early 1920s and late 1980s) Soviet system. Why do they mix so well, LOL.
Because a paid library is kinda fine as a concept. A library has to function, repair chairs, change lightbulbs, pay security guards and, ahem, librarians, pay for new books and electricity and so on.
Yeah, but taxes can pay for all of that. And being able to read, to access the Internet, to do the many other things provided by library services are fundamental to the human experience or to modern society. You shouldn’t be prevented from these because you cannot afford to pay. A paid library is fine as a concept, but only if it doesn’t decrease the availability of free libraries.
And the more complex your set of rules is, the more it turns into “money buys right”
Well, no. Things being at the whim of who has the most money is what turns it into “money buys right”. It doesn’t matter how complicated the rules are, if the rules don’t permit money to play into it. If libraries were paid, that would certainly turn access to reading into a “money buys right” situation.
Simple laws are great, and you should avoid laws that allow loopholes. But sometimes a more complicated law is required because the situation is more complicated.
in too many levels of representation allowing power to affect representatives
Quite the opposite. Give too much power into one central authority and that allows power to affect representatives. More distributed power at the local level, with restrictions on the abuse of that power coming from a higher level, is a much more equitable solution.
in not wide enough participation
This thread is not about any one particular country. In fact, it’s specifically about multinational companies bowing to the pressure of one minor lobbyist. That said, compulsory voting works wonders. We’ve seen it quite clearly here in Australia. Make everyone vote, and surprise surprise, the impact of a loud minority gets drowned out! Combine that with a voting system other than FPTP and you’re well set for a much better democracy.
Politics should not end at the ballot box, however, and getting people more involved in political life in general would be a great thing. Through communicating regularly with representatives. Through joining a union. Through attending protests. Etc. I’m also quite a fan of sortition.
in there being too much professional bureaucratic entities inside the government
We’ve seen first-hand how terrible it is when someone who thinks the government is “too much professional bureaucratic entities” comes into power, in the US. This is absolutely terrible anti-intellectual rubbish.
I don’t much care one way or the other about 3, it’s an insignificant irrelevance. I have no idea what 6 is even supposed to mean. 7 might be the only genuinely fantastic point.
-
its almost like their monopoly on the means of production made them powerful and they used that power to control the state. 🤔
I think it’s the other way around. See, hosting a service on the Internet carries some obligations.
The state treats them so that those are much easier to fulfill for these platforms.
The state gives them very expensive projects.
The state kills Aaron Schwartz, purely coincidentally also the author of the RSS standard. That thing that comes the closest to a uniform way of aggregating the Web, which would kill a lot of what platforms provide.
The state makes some of their products standard for the state, making those commercial things necessary to interact with the state.
So, the state does a lot to give them that monopoly in the first place.
the state does a lot to give them that monopoly
yes that’s precisely what i implied, because they control it in the first place. companies like amazon are more powerful than nation states, and they exercise that power.
if they make a big mistake or want labour law adjusted, they can get the state to coddle them, because they privately control, say, the entire food supply (ie the means of production) without which the state is meaningless.
this has been the capitalist state’s modus operandi for more than 100-200 years. and the oligarch’s power precede it, they shaped it that way back then.
aaron schwartz was literally just a dude, not remotely comparable to oligarchs.
Do you really think most governments will administer payment processes in a transparent and democratic manner?
They can do a really shit job of administering payment processes in a transparent and democratic manner before they end up being worse than the status quo where it’s entirely untransparent and undemocratic. Also, governments already have the power to make things they don’t like illegal, so there’s no reason to expect they’d block payments for things they’ve left legal, whereas payment processors currently block plenty of legal things.
So you expect governments like the Trump administration or Saudi Arabia will less likely block porn games than for profit companies?
You do realise this happened because thousands of people called the payment processors to complain about it, which means with thousands of people, you can pressure these companies to change their mind again. Try doing that to your own government, let alone a foreign government.
you can pressure these companies to change their mind again. Try doing that to your own government,
Jesus christ.
Okay, buddy, I’m giving you homework: you need to attend 10 city halls and 5 protests by the end of this year.
That’s literally what calling your government representatives is. You’re supposed to be able to pressure your representative to represent you.
I agree with your statement, but we are currently seeing politicians actively ignore their constituents wishes on policy.
Since people don’t like hearing what I’m saying I’ll reference the situation
Mitch McConnell is actively going against his former constituents and telling Repub reps to go against their constituents over Medicare/Medicaid. Saying “They’ll get over it.”
Several states voted to uphold abortion rights only to have their elected officials ignore them and ban those rights.
If a human is involved in any capacity, fallibility is built in. We may not like it, but it’s a fact.
Your government representative only has a voice in the government, but they don’t control it. Calling for profit companies en masse pushes your message directly to the people in charge who are scared of losing profits over this.
Tell me, when has calling your representatives ever resulted in a change in government policy within a reasonable time span? How often does a government do a major change in policy without you needing to vote someone out first?
en masse
That sounds wonderful to me, I just want that mass of righteous people to write down all of their ideas so future generations can continue their work even after the fervor has died down. I call those ideas laws and regulations and the ongoing spirit of that mass of righteous people a government, but I’m not too attached to semantics.
At the moment, they’re already at risk of being removed by the government, who can make them illegal, and simultaneously at risk of being removed by payment processors, who can prevent the stores from operating. It makes no difference to the government whether they’re also the payment processor. They could remove them anyway. Having two entities with unilateral power to remove something can’t be worse than just having one of them.
The US goverment can’t make porn illegal in another country. A US owned payment processor can force other stores in other countries that uses their service to save money to ban porn as well. You’re just advocating for giving governments of wealthier countries more control over smaller ones. I say no thanks to that nightmare scenario.
Why don’t you prove your government can do their job and prevent payment processors from being such massive monopolies and maybe I’d trust that they won’t immediately abuse their power.
A lot of governments already do. The credit card duopoly is the reason the US decided to come after Brazil’s solution.
Why would a government just block payments for something it doesn’t like instead of, you know, making it illegal, which it already can do. I doesn’t need to block my payment to the heroin store, because the heroin store isn’t legally allowed to operate.
Because they can’t make it illegal in another country. I’m sure plenty of countries would just use US or China owned payment processors rather than spending money to set up their own. This would just give them more control over other countries than they already have now.
I think it is possible to have a government that functions in this way on a long term basis. I don’t think the same can be said of for profit companies.
A for profit company can be replaced with another and is more easily affected by boycotts. A goverment is neither easily replaced or influenced by people from other countries.
Until they monopolize their industry, which is something they’re always going to be trying to do by their very nature as for profits and which has already essentially happened here
A government can be influenced if it is transparent and democratic, which can be ensured if they’ve got good bylaws that are being scrupulously enforced. Like, if you have decisionmakers a) accountable to free and fair elections (whether they’re elected directly or appointed by elected people) holding b) regular and public meetings where c) outside organizations can raise disputes and get them decided under d) neutral procedures that are published in advance and that every party has equal opportunity to understand and take advantage of, and e) if those decisions and the reasoning behind them are also published and cited as precedent to be reinforced or overturned in subsequent decisions, then I really think the rest takes care of itself.
And I think we had a lot of this figured out when we got done fighting totalitarian regimes in the 1940s and turned around and passed the Administrative Procedure Act, but conservatives keep adding loopholes and trying to drag all of us back to feudalism and monarchies.
So you admitted that people have succeeded in adding loopholes to the US government that makes all your argument no longer true, and you think they still should be allowed handle payment processing? To me it just sounds like you’re arguing for transferring the power from one corruptible party (for-profit payment company) to another one (the government).
It would be easier for the government to actually regulate payment processors so they don’t become so big that they can influence online stores that use them than preventing people in governments from turning corrupt and misusing the control over payment processes. Even then, the US government has failed to do the former, so how do we expect them to do the latter?
Is the private sector currently doing that?
It’ll end up like the shit we’ve got going on now with. ICE being given access to Medicaid and tax records in order to deport more people.
What is stopping the government from just commandeering PayPal’s records?
Maybe the idea of BTC was fine. What wasn’t fine is the idea of mining.
And maybe payments over the Internet or over PSTN are fundamentally different from messaging, conferencing, downloading files, all that stuff.
But what’s important is the ability to pay for a service with something resembling cash IRL in the sense that an ATM machine from which you took that cash can’t take it back because you are paying for an adult journal with it.
But at the same time how can there be so few payment processors that they can affect a platform’s decision to do a kind of business?
That’s where we should look. Why is it hard to be a payment processor.
Mining is fine when you have a predetermined and adjustable energy consumption that is halved every 4 years. Which Bitcoin does
Payment processing should be treated like a utility.
That “treated like a utility” approach involves reliance upon the state, which is sometimes controlled by the hostile parties. This is what I don’t like in Internet political discussions, such solutions feel as if they assumed that you make it good once and it remains good.
It doesn’t necessarily mean it needs to be ran by the state.
Enforcement.
Maybe the idea of BTC was fine. What wasn’t fine is the idea of mining.
The mining is how BTC, etc are decentralised & secure (so the idea of btc and mining are the same idea in my head).
That’s where we should look. Why is it hard to be a payment processor.
Because you essentially need a global presence to at all be worth using. That is why it is a joke that NOBODY accepts American Express and only the shadiest of international ATMs accept Discover (saved my ass in Germany back in the 10s though)
You are literally saying that we need to look at why there aren’t more global mega corporations.
As a daily AMEX user, I think I have only run into 1 place that doesn’t take it here in the states. I do remember England being hit or miss at times, but that was over a decade ago. I don’t remember it being much of an issue in Germany either, but I didn’t use AMEX as often at that time.
I’m going to be really dumb
Why does a payment processor need to exist?
I am an artist in OtherCountry. You want to buy art from me. How do you do it?
Physical money? Okay. You now need a way to track that YOU sent 40 bucks in the mail and that I received 40 bucks in the mail and that is (at least) two different national postal services involved. And now I need a way to convert 40 YourLandia dollars into OtherCountry pounds. AND we need to make sure all of that happened quickly enough that exchange rates didn’t meaningfully change
Digital money? Who is running the site? How many different sites do I need to have accounts on to accept payment from all the countries I want to sell to?
At the end of the day: For any transaction that is not face to face transfer of hard currency (and even then but…), you need an intermediary that both parties trust. Payment processors are that intermediary. Sometimes they are the person taking my IOU and turning it into money so that you can give me a hamburger. Sometimes that is effectively a courier making sure your money gets to me no matter where on the planet we are.
It is what lets us have transactions that aren’t “Okay, you drop your armor and I’ll drop my money and then we’ll slowly change places and… who the fuck just ran out of the bushes to steal the money I put down while waiting for you to put down your armor? And why are you now both doing the Carlton?”
You seem to know a lot of this, in order for your point to click for me, could you explain why some extra payment processor is needed? Would a simple bank transfer not work? If you give me your IBAN, we could let our banks take care of it, right?
You DO realize your banks are the payment processors in that case, right? And they are also working through an intermediary to facilitate said transfer (which has almost all the same problems as above). The money still has to get from Bank A to Bank B which gets even harder if they are in different countries.
And just to preempt “then why not just do everything with bank transfers?”
- Credit card companies provide a LOT more fraud protection.
- We basically do. You transfer money from your bank to your card (either as debit or credit). Your card then uses Visa/Mastercard to transfer money across whatever barriers to the destination card which then is transferred to the destination account
Hmmm. Something still isn’t clicking in my head.
GNU Taler is supposed to be a solution. Sort of a federated one. If I understand it correctly.
I am not particularly familiar with that but it will have an uphill battle. Replacing online transactions is a challenge but is feasible. And while I will always clown on cryptocurrency, I do wish at least one had actually taken off to fulfill that role without focusing on To Da Moon scamming.
Getting to the point that you can pay for food on holiday is a much less feasible one for a purely software project run without the backing of Special Interests.
No grasshopper, the blame falls squarely on the former. The latter was fine with things before
But we DO need to solve the payment processor issue as well, ever heard of GNU-Taler ??
The regressive asked the payment processors to do this. The payment processors themselves are the ones that actually did it. The regressive barely had any actual leverage. The payment processors chose to cave.
Why did they chose to cave in, when they were fine with things before ??
You’d have to ask them.
😂😂 So one cannot speculate that they might’ve infiltrated Payment Processors via taking advantage of affirmative action & falsely accused men to replace them ‽
Infiltrated? Who said anything about infiltrated? Are you just making shit up now?
What happened is incredibly simple.
- Some regressive organisations with no power other than persuasive power told payment processors to stop supporting NSFW content.
- Payment processors caved in to this pressure and told Steam and Itch that their current NSFW content is not allowed and to remove it.
- Steam and Itch, wanting to be able to keep making revenue at all, responded to this demand by removing NSFW content.
Anyone can do 1. I could go to Visa and say “stop promoting cats, tell Steam to stop selling Stray and Little Kitty, Big City.” It’s up to Visa whether or not they consider my pressure worth responding to. If they do, Steam has to stop selling Stray and LKBC if they want to stay in business. The blame here lies with Visa for choosing to listen to me even though, in this scenario, I’m being a total fuckwit. In reality, Visa would turn around to me and say “lol no, fuck off”. (Or, more likely, ignore me entirely.)
3 is an inevitable result if 2 occurs. If they can’t take in any money, they can’t continue selling any games. They can’t afford to pay the bills for their servers, or pay their employees, or anything. The only option is to give in.
That leaves 2 as the variable. They decide whether to respond to the pressure or not. And they deserve the blame any time they do.
Again, why were they ok with NSFW games on steam.before ? Why now ?
The reason for a “fourth party” is because so many of these are fully international.
The dream of cryptocurrency as actual currency (rather than just reinventing stocks) was the idea that you could use your bitcoin wallet to pay for a pizza in Kansas, London, other London, Shanghai, or Timbuktu with no perceived difference. That IS what visa/mastercard provide.
Get rid of that “fourth party” and now every single online service needs to have office space in every single country so that they can accept and convert purchases on their own. And the end result will just be dropping the majority of the world.
deleted by creator
They should’ve implemented crypto payments long time ago. Now they reap what they sow
The only way that would help is if they ONLY used crypto and nothing else, because the payment processors for currencies people actually use will continue threaten them as long as NSFW content is anywhere on the platform.
The bulk transactions go through international wire transfer system which is sort of P2P, and can’t be easily controlled like Visa/Master Card
That’s not the point. The point is that 99.99% of their customer base is not using crypto, so they need to use payment processors that accept currency people actually use. And as long as they do, the payment processors will force this on them.
Wow, I might actually have to stop using itch.io, is nowhere safe from the craziest anymore? I dont even make NSFW games, but bending the knee to dickheads over some overtly religious bullshit isnt gonna work for me.
It wasn’t Itch.io’s fault, but the fact that payment processing has been globally monopolized and can force it’s own arbitrary will on anyone without recourse.
Blame Visa and MasterCard and the christofascist scum from Collective Shout, who is responsible for pressuring the processors into harming the stores and artists.
Why anybody takes a “think of the children” organization seriously when their logo is a butthole is beyond me.
It just proves satire is dead and we live in a world full of idiots.
Agreed. Game and movie ratings already exist, who the fuck are they to say what we can/can’t access with MY credit card.
I don’t play those games nor use itch.io, but fuck this nonsense.
I understand. And my point still stands. Fuck them (cc processors)
Absolutely. Fuck payment processors
The credit card companies have a word. They shouldn’t exist.
I don’t think they had much option, they forced by the payment providers…
And thats beyod me, why they have the power to enforce anything like this???
And what is absolutely beyond me, why a group of alt-right femminist from the other side of the globe has power to enforce the payment providers?
It’s the same religious organization that went after them NSFW games on Steam. Like the games or not, it’s always a slippery slope with this kind of censorship.
Of course it would be the bible thumpers. Gotta stick their nose into everyone’s business.
If it’s against your religion to play porn games, fine. Don’t play them.
But fuck off if you think you can tell other people what not to play.
“it’s against my religion to eat fish.”
“Okay, then don’t eat fish.”
“It’s against my religion for you to eat fish”
“Fuck off.”
But that involves self regulation. And being able to resist temptation. And they’d just rather have temptation removed before they could encounter.
The fact that they’ve been successful at censoring stuff is a problem. It will likely embolden them to do worse.
Not just successful. But praised.
Even on Lemmy, if you go check out the initial threads on the Steam censorship you’ll see lots of “It is just incest and furry shit. Of course that should be banned” style comments. Less so here, but plenty of other boards and influencers immediately then chimed in that porn addiction is the real problem and you should watch a stream of a nice bigoted white man rather than give in to it and blah blah blah.
And it didn’t even start there. It ALSO isn’t the start, but the attack on Pornhub a few years back was a big watershed moment where this exact same attack was used (pressure the credit card companies to not do business with a morally dubious site). On the surface? Pornhub is full of revenge porn and child porn so it needs to be destroyed. No rational person would disagree with that… and everyone quietly ignored all the data showing that (and this was early 2020s…) facebook and twitter and instagram and so forth had MUCH more of both of those. But hey, Pornhub Corp complied and actually instituted some REALLY good policies that more or less equates to signed consent forms for every single performer. And… they were still on the shitlist. But everyone had stopped caring.
They have a little power in politics now, “give them an inch and they take a mile” is never not true.
Yep. A fucking Australian group of Bible thumpers, specifically.
A loud minority.
This is on Visa/MasterCard. Nobody would’ve cared if they ignored them.
Basically I’m suggesting the credit corps are led by closet puritans anyways.
Removed by mod
Everone talks about porn and loser males. Its more than that. Its way more. The banned all adult targeted games, even the ones which are not porn or gore. Many-many gamers are affected, way more than sexually fustrated nerds. They now start to see, that they poked the bear, and it came with the wolf and tiger to take justice.
Direct link to their statement rather than reading an article talking about it: https://itch.io/updates/update-on-nsfw-content
rather than reading an article talking about it
Good as a supplement, but the RPS article gives context itch.io is too much of a cowardly little bitch to include like: “Collective Shout describe themselves as a “grassroots campaigns movement against the objectification of women and the sexualisation of girls”, but are associated with outspokenly homophobic and anti-abortion Christian conservative groups, according to a now-deleted Vice article.”
Edit: and yes, the Vice article was removed because Vice’s ownership bitched out over covering Collective Shout.
Edit: and yes, the Vice article was removed because Vice’s ownership bitched out over covering Collective Shout.
Wow, holy shit. How fucking far Vice has fallen. There was a time they would go the extra mile to cover wild shit that no one else was doing. Greed and the wealthy’s critical need to have control over the media ruins everything.
We need zines to be a bigger thing again
