Comment on Mastercard release a statement about game stores, payment processors and adult content
darcmage@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
MC: It’s not us.
Steam & Itch: It’s the payment processors.
Gee, I wonder who people are going to believe.
Thing is…I think both claims are correct.
Mastercard and Visa are not the only middle-men; the only “payment processors” involved in making sales.
Next time you check out at a cafe, look at the branding of the tablet/software the cashier is using. Chances are, it wasn’t developed by the cafe owners, or by MC/Visa. That’s a payment processor. There’s some big ones out there that can be hard to avoid.
Practically no one in the world who accepts payments for their business directly integrates with visa or Mastercard. It’s all 3rd party companies who integrate (because it’s fucking hard and tedious) and then resell it
In almost all cases, any talk about payment processors, is them, not visa/Mastercard.
Yup, most times when a business gets set up for accepting credit card payments they need to set up a bank, merchant account, gateway, those things integrate with the CC companies. Often they aren’t even the same company so you’re kind of dealing with a bunch of different entities. I’m not sure if I missed any other middlemen.
Though I’ll say lately the new thing is for the POS system / website / whatever to sell you the merchant account/gateway under their own systems so everything besides the bank and credit card companies are integrated through them (& they collect more money).
I remember seeing a graphic that was about every layer of companies that are interacted with when you use a credit card. Must have been at least like 6 layers of companies each taking a fee from a company that took fees higher up the chain closer to the consumer
buy a stock through a company like Fidelity where is the stock actually held and that was layers of public/private companies/corporations
I learned that. It was the whole chain to get to that point and how that organization even came to be and how they came to be and how it’s regulated that was a bit disgusting with how make shift it seemed to me. The whole stack all came off as a multi decade saga of stapling org on top of org until we came to the present of things mostly work but it’s a bit fragile with a mix of public and private regulators trying to hold things together and make old paper systems work with modern technology
True. Collective shout targeted visa, mc, paypal and paysafe. I guess it’s possible the game storefronts acted due to concerns of one of them.
In online stores Visa and MC are the big ones. If we exclude China, Visa and MC make up 90% of all online purchases worldwide. For online stores they are the two players who matter. Losing one is a significant loss of revenue, losing both will kill the store.
From what I understand it wasn’t actually mastercard and visa?
Itch statements made it very clear the issue was PayPal and Stripe.
Steam even disabled PayPal payments for a while, a couple days before the purge. While direct card payments with Visa/Mastercard still worked fine.
Valve also clarified today that it was the processors, not the card management companies, that they talked to. The processors were pointing at MasterCard’s rules, but refusing to provide Valve with someone at MasterCard to talk to.
So it’s Valve’s fault for just going with it, seems to me.
Still requires them to find a solution, putting it on patreon won’t work forever. I think most game stores should find a way to adopt cryptocurrency.
Well, everyone discussing this seems to have been confused about it. Is it fucking PayPal and stripe or fucking Mastercard and visa?
We’ll probably never get the whole story. Itch’s update from yesterday points the finger at stripe, others could still be involved.
It almost certainly wasnt the card brands forcing the issue. They outsource that stuff to payment processors and other middle men because it’s cheaper and gives them some legal shielding if someone buys something illegal with their cards
It’s been pretty widely reported that it’s PayPal and Stripe(mostly Stripe) that have been the ones that were requiring them to remove the NSFW material.
MC and Visa are not technically payment processors, that would be stuff like stripe or ayden.
The problem is that cc companies have rules that put the onus of ensuring nothing illegal is purchased with their issued cards on the ones actually meditating the transaction, so it becomes a chilling effect because the intermediaries don’t want to risk burning a bridge with the largest cc networks in the world, and overcorrect as a result.
cc companies
best to say card networks, as cc companies both include a lot of other things (like issuers), and doesn’t include some things (like debit cards, which still use the card networks)
Gee, I wonder who people are going to believe.
Other payment processors? Why is this hard for you?
There are other stakeholders, like regulators and shareholders.
JoMiran@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
They are both telling the truth, which is how the best lies work.
Mastercard: “It’s all good as long as it it legal”.
Religious zealots: “Games depict sex with children!!!”
Steam/Itch: “Which games?”
Zealots: “Yes”
Mastercard: “Sex with children is illegal. Get rid of those games.”
Steam/Itch: “Which games???”
Mastercard: “That’s a you problem. Figure it out and get rid of them or lose the ability to process payments.”
Steam/Itch: *pulls most NSFW games while they figure out “which games”.
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Wouldn’t it be nice if the payment processors required more than being really annoying to get something classified as possibly illegal?
JoMiran@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
The United States is a VERY litigious country. The biggest motivator in America is profit, and the possibility of lawsuits is contrary to profit. Fucking over indie devs selling niche games that makes a few bucks on Steam is a lot cheaper than the legal expenses of a lawsuit and the bad press of “Mastercard funds child pornography”.
It isn’t about fairness. It’s about profit.
gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Kind of off topic, but this just activated one of my trap card rants,
The problem is not that we’re a litigious society, the problem is we make litigation artificially costly and time consuming by restricting the number of lawyers and judges we create and only trying to address the bottleneck that creates by making courts harder to access (e.g. increasing filing fees, giving defendants more ability to force things into arbitration kangaroo courts, etc.).
Especially in light of how our courts have been just making up bullshit to let cops/soldiers/Republicans do whatever the fuck they since circa 1968/2001/2025, you can’t tell me that people need as many years of education to practice law as we require in this country.
Also, private bar associations are fucking weird, feudal era anti-democratic bullshit that ought to get replaced with proper public licensing agencies that are accountable to democratic systems and accessible to the public
/end rant
Jeffool@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Or, maybe, it’s just MasterCard’s way of saying “It’s Visa”? (Not that I know this. It could well be a lie for all I know. But also, maybe it’s not.)
lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.com 3 weeks ago
Games depicting it aren’t. Cool mental theater, though.
yermaw@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
I feel really dirty siding with this sort of thing, but also murder, assault, drugs, theft, vigilantism, the list goes on, is also illegal.
GeneralEmergency@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
“which games”
The multitude of incest games that litter Steam’s new releases?
Noja@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
they are not illegal tho, also you have to click multiple checkboxes to even see these games, you don’t see them by default