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Comment on Steam Users Rally Behind Anti-Censorship Petition

SpaceScotsman@startrek.website ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

The article is saying the petition is targeting steam, but the actual linked petition is addressing credit card companies. The text of the petition doesn’t mention steam or valve. I don’t know what the author of the article thinks is happening here, and they’ve explained it very badly.

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Bazoogle@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

As of July 16, Steam’s new guidelines state that game publishers should avoid releasing titles that may violate the terms and conditions of its payment processors. In other words, the storefront is asking creators to not only follow the platform’s rules but also submit to potential oversight from companies like MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal.

and from the petition

MasterCard and Visa have increasingly used their financial control to pressure platforms into censoring legal fictional content

Steam is enforcing MasterCard’s, Visa’s, and PayPal’s policies. From Steam’s Rules and Policies:

What you shouldn’t publish on Steam: … 15. Content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers. In particular, certain kinds of adult only content.

Point number 15 was not there in a Snapshot from February on the wayback machine. If anything, the solution should just be to remove the payment method for those games (which would still hurt the creators substantially).

There is a line that is confusing:

In response to this censorship, some fans have launched a petition on Change.org urging Valve to revert its policies

There may be petitions about reverting Valve’s policy, but it’s not the main petition against Visa and MasterCard (which is the one they linked).

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- sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  So yeah, being mad at Valve makes this whole petition stupid, people need to be mad st MC and Visa and probably also PayPal.
  
  But also…
  
  If MC and Visa won’t budge on their positions, well, if Valve then makes an alt payment system fod adult only games…
  
  MC and Visa go, oh, hey, you’re violating our guidelines, we no longer support Valve/Steam, now no one can buy any game.
  
  This is a MAD situation, Valve would have to come up with a comprehensive payment processing system for everything, in secret, and then deploy it all at once.
  
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  - Bazoogle@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    
    MC and Visa go, oh, hey, you’re violating our guidelines
    
    No, that is not how that would work. People cannot buy games that violate MasterCard’s and Visa’s policies using MasterCard or Visa. If someone buys the game using a different payment method, crypto or a direct bank link, it would not violate MasterCard or Visa’s policies because they had no part of the transaction.
    
    Being mad at Valve is shooting the messenger.
    
    Being mad at Valve is reasonable, because they did not have to ban all games that their payment processors disagree with. They would need to remove the option to pay with those for certain games, and the process of filtering them out and deciding would take a lot of time, money, and labor. It’s easier for valve to just ban it outright, but it is not the right thing to do. Valve is not the reason it started, but there is reason to be mad at Valve as well.
    
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    sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    
    No, that is not how that would work.
    
    It is, actually, allow me to explain:
    
    Visa and MasterCard have policies for who they do business with, ie, merchants and vendors.
    
    The business they do with Valve is the business of processing online payments, Valve is one of their merchant partners.
    
    They can absolutely shut everything down in the name of upholding their own moral / business standards, via deciding to no longer be a business partner with Valve.
    
    If Valve uses an alt payment system for adult games, Visa and MC are still business partners with Valve, Valve is now in violation of their partnership guidelines, ergo, Visa and MC drop Valve.
    
    Visa and MC are concerned with the reputations of the partners they have, in general, not so much with the exact transactions they actually process.
    
    Being mad at Valve is reasonable, because they did not have to ban all games that their payment processors disagree with.
    
    No, its not, and Valve did have to act in this way, see above.
    
    Itch.io and Nutaku just did the same thing after Valve did, you can no longer buy any games that cost money, that have explicit sexual content, so by your logic, its Valve and Itch.io and Nutaku all being unnecessarily censorious, of their own accord, rather than the reality, which is that MC and Visa are strong arming all these digital market places.
    
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- princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Replying my same comment from elsewhere to you as well:
  
  Yes but the payment processors didn’t say “you’re not allowed to sell this game with our service” they said “you’re not allowed to sell this game period or we walk”.
  
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