acosmichippo@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
so this is a game of telephone between activists, banks, payment processors, and vendors.
Their condition (both via and mastercard) include stuff which, when you read it attentively, boils down to “we only prevent illegal things. And stuff we deem bad.”.
It’s not even a game of telephone or anything, they have their conditions that says “yes we did” and their PR that says “we probably didn’t”. They could be playing alone and still losing this one.
A game of telephone involves the message changing from each person. In this case, everyone but Visa/MC are blaming Visa/MC (valve, game stores, and collective shout).
It’s more like a game of calvinball, only Calvin is claiming the rule they made up doesn’t exist
Combining what Valve and Itch said, it seems like it’s Stripe or PayPal, and they cited MasterCard’s policies as justification…
Yet everyone initially confidently reported on who was to blame.
Catoblepas@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
My view is that Valve is the most likely to be honest about who is responsible here, both because they’re not responsible for this shit show no matter what the answer is and because they have a monetary interest in restarting sales.
orclev@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Valves statement also matches with the claims of Itch.io, Stripe, and what Collective Shout themselves have claimed. So we’ve got two different claims, on one side are Visa and Mastercard, and on the other we’ve got literally everyone else. I feel pretty confident about which one is a load of bullshit.
It’s also worth noting that Visa and Mastercard are playing semantic games with their statements. Nobody ever claimed they were “refusing legal transactions”, rather what they’re doing is threatening to stop working with any business that doesn’t implement censorship that they’re happy with. It’s a subtle but important difference and they’ve never denied that’s what they’re doing.
davidagain@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Isn’t owning a credit card age gating anyway? I don’t think you can legally own a credit card in the UK.
orclev@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
You would think, but I believe the law(s) require verification of a photo ID. I haven’t looked too closely into the UK one, but the way the laws are written for a couple of the US states a credit card doesn’t meet the requirements. There’s also the fact that many of the preview images and videos for porn games on Steam show nudity and/or sex and you can access those without needing to purchase the game (just the birthday question to “verify” your age).
Bytemeister@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Credit card, yes, but a debit card that can be used for online transactions? I had one at 13. My mom had to co-sign for it, but I got one when I setup an account to deposit my paper route checks.
baronvonj@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Are the payment processors saying Visa"MC told them to not process payments for this content? Or are they smjist citing a section of the agreement when being asked why they’re telling retailers to take down this content?
orclev@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Nobody on any side has cited any sections of any agreement specifically. The closest we’ve got is the statement from Stripe who is the payment processor who recently had to turn down business with a womens sexual education charity (despite spending months trying to get to an agreement) and the reason they cited was contractual obligations with banking networks including Visa and Mastercard. They stated they want to be able to process payments for porn companies, and that they’re exploring other options, but they couldn’t at this time.
A_Union_of_Kobolds@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Well said, that is an accurate analysis of the situation
brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 3 weeks ago
Nobody is forcing them to use mastercard and visa services
Catoblepas@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
Other than that being how a huge portion of Americans access their money.
brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 3 weeks ago
Pick a bank that use different sercives
shani66@ani.social 2 weeks ago
they could and should fight this, Amazon did and they came out on top, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t the payment processors fault.