Comment on Steam Users Rally Behind Anti-Censorship Petition
Bazoogle@lemmy.world 4 days agoMC 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.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
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.
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.