Submitted 10 months ago by Berin@discuss.tchncs.de to games@lemmy.world
https://itch.io/updates/update-on-nsfw-content
The group responsible is “Collective Shout”, the same org has targeted Steam before.
People on social media are now calling for people to contact Mastercard, Visa and co. and file complaints.
Can we force law banning money transactions to the churches and christian organisations?
Fight fire with fire (not literally, at least not yet, even if they did that long time ago already).
A) Honest mistake. I appreciated people pointing out the country of origin.
B) While the specifics of my comment were off the mark, even with this group being Australian, this group affects world commerce, and American politics has strong influence on that world in turn. Just like how president of the USA would have a big effect on the levels of violence and cruelty in Gaza. Visa is an American corporation, and they’re clearly quite on board with this censorship influence.
The only dogshit I see here is your over the top aggressive name calling.
Collective Shout is an Australian group, not an American one.
Funded by Americans
I hate American Companies it will be a good time to start a new platform for NSFW games and payment platforms
RIP Itch.io
Choosing short term profits over long term userbase, it’s all downhill from here.
Visa/MC make up most of their income. They were given the ultimatum of either banning a small group of games, or losing the ability to process payments almost entirely. Itch is not the problem here.
Short term profits? How are they supposed to make any profits if payment processors refuse to process payments to them? They can’t just spin up their own fucking payment processor.
Beyond that, how does limiting the sale of any products make them money?
I swear, were none of you people paying attention when this happened to the right wing ghouls in the lead up to the 2016 election? Nothing of value was lost (or would have been), but Visa, Mastercard, etc have already shown they aren’t above using their position in the transfer of money to enforce their will.
The short term profits of going SFW only to appease payment processors vs. keeping everything but making it crypto only, which in the short term would be disastrous for income, but in the long term it would recover and they’d have independence from censorship.
Instead they chose to keep bigger profits and start deleting accounts.
Itch players and devs turning against the itch staff instead of the payment processors is like the friggin ouroboros of activism.
Is there an alternative to those payment processors? I feel like using those are just not good if they go down that road.
not really. Russia made their own payment processor because of being kicked out from SWIFT but using their system would be immoral.
it would be interesting if the EU makes their own payment processor
There are Klarna, Paysafecard, Skrill, Sofort, SEPA direct debit and probably many more local services.
This is literally why crypto was invented, as another user put it, “before crypto bros turned it into a pump n dump scheme”
It’s nice to see a more reasonable response in the comments on Fediverse. On the itch discussion board people are frothing at the mouth posting death threats and the like against itch staff.
The anger is completely misdirected. I wouldn’t be surprised if they decide to just let itch drop dead after this abuse from two sides simultaneously. Mega corps and rights groups at one side, and their very own users on the other.
Once this review is complete, we will introduce new compliance measures. For NSFW pages, this will include a new step where creators must confirm that their content is allowable under the policies of the respective payment processors linked to their account.
Itch is even willing to go for partial filtering, what more do you want. The only thing that will please these people is when itch waves their magic wand and keeps everything as is.
Once this review is complete, we will introduce new compliance measures. For NSFW pages, this will include a new step where creators must confirm that their content is allowable under the policies of the respective payment processors linked to their account.
kind of a clever way to say “hey don’t give us grief, if you want to change this go complain to visa and mastercard.”
Like folks here have said, accepting crypto payments might help, but who knows how soon that is going to get regulated.
It’s kinda impossible to regulate technically. That’s the whole point of crypto. Or do you mean that the company itself might be legally prohibited to accept crypto by their local law? That’s possible I think. I guess we’re slowly but steadily approaching the demand to have actual darknet fully-crypto gaming platform operated by anonymous team.
It’s kinda impossible to regulate technically.
No it’s not.
It’s nice to see a more reasonable response in the comments on Fediverse. On the itch discussion board people are frothing at the mouth posting death threats and the like against itch staff.
Sounds like the bar is so low to be even comparing the two sites.
Woke liberals ruining America, nothing new
Conservative fundamentalists and blaming liberals for their own actions
Name a better duo
Collective Shout is run by christian fundamentalists
My attempt to crack a shitty joke has backfired more than expected lol
The Q&A on their website makes them look like nonreligious feminists then? Where did you get that impression from?
I never thought I would say this, but cryptocurrency might have a use after all.
So do regular fiat payment processors that are beholden to citizens and not faceless shareholders. Wero and Pix for instance.
Democratic governments are supposed to safeguard your ability to exchange legal tender for legal goods and services. The fact that Visa/MC have a duopoly and a stranglehold on the entire online economy is a major governance failure that needs to be rectified ASAP.
Crypto goes a lot further and says no-one, not even the government, should be able to prevent a transaction from taking place. Not necessarily an invalid idea but it does come with some huge unanswered challenges, such as “what happens when someone makes 1B€ through fraud and refuses to hand over the coins” and “how do we even prevent large-scale fraud in the first place”.
This is exactly what it was designed to solve before cryptobros turned it into a pump and dump scheme.
If you want to buy something from seller X that is between you and X and no one else. No goverment, payment processor or other third party can get a cut or stop it for any reason.
Buying drugs and gooner games. That’s the satoshi dream.
I’d be okey with that if they demand itch.io to delist Atmospheric, First-Person, Horror, Psychological Horror \hj
Touche!
【ｌｉｍｉｎａｌ】
I know this is more of a serious thing, but I was thinking that I kinda hope these payment processors try to ban some big European company over some puritanical bullshit and then Europe responds with threatening a complete ban on them to put them in line. Ain’t no way any payment processor would ever risk being banned in one of the largest markets in the world.
There are a few smaller EU payment processors. I’d love to see them move into the space Visa/Mc leave behind here but I’m not sure they are “big” enough for it.
Those ladies are really unpopular at the moment.
Still, it further highlights just how much power over law payment processors have - a worrying thought that the morality of a company (influenced by problem life nuts) dictates international law.
Controlling the money means controlling the world.
First they came for the incest/rape games, which most people somewhat agree with (although the principle is still wrong) Next up is all nsfw games. After that, it’ll be mainstream and indie games altogether. This never stops with just one “victory” for these groups.
Isnt itch.io only indie games?
So what do I, a common shlub, do to resist this? Boycott Steam and itch.io until they reinstate the games?
Steam and Itch are both victims in this matter, their hands are tied. If the payment processors simply refuse to process any payments unless they comply, there’s no point in trying to put pressure on them. I’m pretty sure they were happy to take people’s money for these games and still would be, if they could so while saving face.
Once they get rid of the sex they’ll come for the violence.
Steam is gonna look mighty empty if every game with violence is removed tho.
They're not going to ban 90% of video games, not everything is a slippery slope
It’s going to come down to anything with even a whisper of LGBTQ+/minority/disability/etc representation, just like with books.
They start with the “egregious” content (not that it’s necessarily right to remove that either), then narrow it down until it shapes up into hegemonic conformity and systemic oppression via media (there’s a term for it, kind of like stochastic violence but not quite that I can’t remember atm).
BDSM games have been targeted as well for “sexual violence”. Only straight, vanilla PiV missionary for the express purposes of having children within the confines of marriage where nobody is enjoying it porn will be left.
There are specific games in steam’s case I’m very ok with getting removed, but at the same time its very fucked up that we’re in a situation where the world is beholden to payment processors. Ideally this would be a case where they go directly to Valve and say “hey we think you should take a look at your content policy and at these specific games” and Valve makes the call from there on where they want to draw the line.
What kills me is in most cases you have to pay for the game, then you have to download the game, then install it and finally play it. It’s not.like the game is going to one day pop into your computer and then force you to play it.
Bottom line. If the game bothers ornoffends you just move on.
Yes, but.
Everyone should read the open letter that’s linked in the itch statement.
There definitely is a line. Everyone can choose were they draw it. You don’t have to draw it in a way where you end up defending things that are kinda messed up.
There is definitely a hill worth fighting on in that area. I don’t think it’s this exact one.
Moral judgement or suppression of fiction/artistic expression is deeply and profoundly unethical. How you or I or anyone else feels about something that isn’t “real” is inconsequential. If you allow any line to be crossed in this, then every line can and will be crossed.
My line is: any kind of fictional content is ok. If nobodies hurt, then there is no crime. And in practice being maniac in games doesn’t translate to being maniac irl. There might be some exceptions of crazy people being inspired by games to do crimes, but they should be dealt with on case-by-case basis using just regular law and law enforcement.
I feel like there is nuance that is really getting lost on some people and that is the way that people engage with these games. Let me try to explain: I like playing NSFW games - even with tags like Rape, Corruption or the occasional Incest. Without trying to go into too much detail, it’s simply erotic to me in the correct context. Now, do I know that these topics are incredibly taboo and/or offensive in real life? Yes, of course. I keep these things private and never put them out in real life. I would rather noone knows about what I do privately in my own time at my own PC. The way I see it, I simply paid an artist to draw something erotic and write a good story and/or program some gameplay attached to it. And once I stop engaging with the videogame, I also do not have any desire to recreate anything in real life. The same way that I don’t go around killing people after playing GTA, I also don’t go around assaulting women because I played a videogame where these things happen.
And that’s exactly what worries me - the people pushing this narrative, genuinely think I would want to start reenacting something I’ve seen in a videogame happen. That is complete nonsense.
My line is these payment processors being judge, jury and executioner about what material they deem valid. So I am fundamentally opposed.
Puritanical US based payment processors need to stop getting their panties twisted.
It’s an Australian organisation pressuring the payment processors.
It’s not just happening recently with Steam and Itch.io, it’s been happening for a while.
Some smutty art creators on Patreon have been chased off that platform because of payment processors telling patreon they’d pull the plug if Patreon kept that type of art on the platform. Those same artists have then reported being unable to set up, for instance, Stripe for their paywalls.
Porn stars have complained about being unable to set up accounts with payment processors.
They should do Twitter next. Twitter has nsfw AI role play now and it should be banned by payment processors
What else do people use itch.io for?
Oh wow. Itch is also involved even though I would assume they have less than 1% of Steam’s gross revenues.
MuskyMelon@lemmy.world 10 months ago
This is how crypto payments go mainstream
LettyWhiterock@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The bitcoin boom turned any crypto currency into just a volatile means of investment. None of them are seen as currencies to buy things anymore, and I don’t think that’s changing.
Not to mention the many other issues with crypto currency as a concept. But those don’t really matter in the face of, well, not being viewed as a currency anymore.
monogram@feddit.nl 10 months ago
Naa onlyfans would have done it already.
Crypto payments are too unstable, there’s a huge & rightful stigma on crypto scams. Enjoy your bitcoin once it becomes too expensive to trade.
ipitco@lemmybefree.net 10 months ago
And that’s a great thing
ICastFist@programming.dev 10 months ago
Some of the actual reasons people hate crypto are: