Statement: mastercard.com/…/clarifying-recent-headlines-on-g…
Mastercard has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms, contrary to media reports and allegations.
Our payment network follows standards based on the rule of law. Put simply, we allow all lawful purchases on our network. At the same time, we require merchants to have appropriate controls to ensure Mastercard cards cannot be used for unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content.
acosmichippo@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
so this is a game of telephone between activists, banks, payment processors, and vendors.
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.
brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
Nobody is forcing them to use mastercard and visa services
cley_faye@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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.
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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
Ulrich@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
Combining what Valve and Itch said, it seems like it’s Stripe or PayPal, and they cited MasterCard’s policies as justification…
paraphrand@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yet everyone initially confidently reported on who was to blame.