Visa/MC make up most of their income. They were given the ultimatum of either banning a small group of games, or losing the ability to process payments almost entirely. Itch is not the problem here.
Comment on Itch.io is delisting NSFW games due to pressure from payment processors
ms_lane@lemmy.world 2 days ago
RIP Itch.io
Choosing short term profits over long term userbase, it’s all downhill from here.
DragonOracleIX@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
Short term profits? How are they supposed to make any profits if payment processors refuse to process payments to them? They can’t just spin up their own fucking payment processor.
Beyond that, how does limiting the sale of any products make them money?
I swear, were none of you people paying attention when this happened to the right wing ghouls in the lead up to the 2016 election? Nothing of value was lost (or would have been), but Visa, Mastercard, etc have already shown they aren’t above using their position in the transfer of money to enforce their will.
Gibibit@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Itch players and devs turning against the itch staff instead of the payment processors is like the friggin ouroboros of activism.
ms_lane@lemmy.world 2 days ago
The short term profits of going SFW only to appease payment processors vs. keeping everything but making it crypto only, which in the short term would be disastrous for income, but in the long term it would recover and they’d have independence from censorship.
Instead they chose to keep bigger profits and start deleting accounts.
wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
Tell me again how you’ve not actually read up on the issues with crypto as payment processor.
This shit has already been tried and the issues discussed at length. I think it was Mullvad that stopped accepting BTC and did an extensive writeup on why.
In short: the constantly shifting conversion rates make this unsustainable, as even if they accepted payment in crypto, they have to pay their bills in fiat currency. So their choices are to have crypto prices change literally every page load to reflect the exchange rate, or to just eat extra costs when suddenly 0.51btc goes from being worth $5 when the user pays to being worth $1 when they try to use it for anything else. Even with constantly updating prices, the shifting rates screwing them will still happen. The costs associated with even offering it as a payment type outweigh the actual revenue generated by an extreme order of magnitude, and even privacy/crypto oriented storefronts see something like under 1% of users using the option when it’s available.
And that’s my understanding of the short version.
There’s a big difference between “prioritizing short term profit” and “committing commercial/financial suicide to make a point”.
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 2 days ago
Heck even friggin Musk stopped accepting crypto to buy Tesla’s!