In general, yes, payment processors have in the past essentially ‘debanked’ specific people or businesses.

To the best of my knowledge, this has never before occured to … something on the scale of the worlds largest digital marketplace for a particular kind of product.

I do not disagree.with you that the current status of things is bullshit, that there have been instances of usually very small businesses getting thrown off…

But the outright scale of dictating Steam around is … almost as insane as dictating Walmart around.

Up untill this point, yeah, I am again not aware of any prior ‘enforcement action’ of this magnitude, and… the way corporate America works is that if you are bringing enough money to the table, you get some leeway on this kind of thing, you handle it behind closed doors, in a fairly involved way.

The way MC, Visa, PayPal have gone about this represents a huge breach of those unspoken norms, a massive, flagrant, naked power grab.

What I am trying to say is not that this system has ever been fine, flawless, or good… what I am trying to say is that this is akin to engaging the nuclesr option, its a thing that would be entirely reasonable for someone like Valve to … not assume they’d need to worry about this…

… precisely because the alternative actually is for Valve to develop basically its own PayPal, which would be a fairly large loss of business for other, former partnered payment processors.

Apparently the calculus of the situation has changed, in their minds, such that the payprocs seem to no longer fear Valve playing its nuclear option as a response to their own, seem to no longer value Steam as a marketplace.

Either that, or they have massively miscalculated.