Valve have added a new rule to the Onboarding guide for game developers, noting that payment processors get a say in what stays on Steam.
Newly added rule is:
Content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers. In particular, certain kinds of adult only content.
Diff of the new terms https://github.com/SteamDatabase/SteamworksDocumentation/commit/fddd59b5395cc3c1c74574650dbf5784612d0521
:/ payment processors strike again (slippery slope etc)
I really don’t get why payment processors care. like, I really doubt it’s a morality thing for them, so where’s the financial incentive?
They are USAian. Owners are most likely conservative and Christian --> imposing their values on others through money. It’s the rich people’s way.
I doubt that it has anything to do with social preferences of anyone internal to payment processors. They won’t care.
Putting pressure on payment processors is a useful way to put pressure on any commercial service. The commercial service may operate in another country, but it needs the payment processor, and the payment processors don’t want to be ejected from countries. The payment processor can be a lever for laws passed elsewhere.
Every payment processor on steam is a publicly traded company, not privately owned. So it wouldn’t really be up to any one individual’s moral preference about such things. Personal preference would only count in to it if one of the shareholders had enough shares to push the board around, but the only one where I could see that being the case would be PayPal from people like Theil and Andreessen. Like they’re both jack wads for other beliefs, but I wouldn’t exactly call them bible thumpers.
If Steam or someone went to crypto just to kick the processors out, that might be one thing that would actually make me look at crypto with something other than derision.
That was originally one of the intended purposes of cryptocurrency, or at least claimed to be. Too bad we can’t have anything without needing to make it an investment engine.
They accepted BTC for a while but stopped. The other comment here mentioned the transaction fees being a problem for purchases on the scale of steam game prices, but it wasn’t just that. A big problem was crypto volatility and transaction processing time. They found that very often by the time a transaction cleared the value had swung enough that they were getting amounts that failed to align with the actual prices of the games people were buying.
It’s more stable now, so maybe that would be less of a problem, but I feel it highlights a big problem with crypto in general and that is that even when you do find places that accept crypto nothing is priced in crypto. It’s basically always just a proxy for USD using whatever its current market value is.
Stable coins exist to counter that very problem. There’s several out there that are pegged to the value of the dollar, and are mostly used as intermediaries when trading between other coins.
USDT is one such option.
using a stable coin that has that much controversy as an example kinda sums up crypto lmao.
I don’t pay attention to those, so it was the only one I knew the name of.
Well yes, this was the original intent of crypto. Putting payment in the hands of the people. It’s only been made terrible by tech bros and greed the same way the Internet has.
Crypto isn’t necessary (or rather, blockchain isn’t necessary). Check out GNU Taler. So far I believe only Swiss banks have adopted it.
That’s what Backpage tried to do when the cc processors pulled out. The owners of Backpage were at some point charged with money laundering among many many other crimes. The years of legal battles that started in 2018 drove one of them to suicide. Would not recommend.
Backpage is very different than Valve. Backpage execs were directly involved in the pimping of minors, this were proven in court.
I don’t believe Valve execs are pimping minors through Steam.
No, they were not directly involved and no, pimping minors was not proven in court. Money laundering and conspiracy to facilitate prostitution were the charges that stuck. In fact, prosecutors claiming they were involved in child sex trafficking caused a mistrial https://apnews.com/article/business-trials-3b1c9d3e59e90cd60764b3eb989fec80
The point is not about what they did or didn’t do, it’s that if you try to go outside the system you get hammered.
Thanks for the correction.
I’m not comfortable with tech execs making bank off sex workers, but I should aim to be more familiar with the outcome of the case.
Its not different because in both instances it was CC companies being anti sex.
Realpage being a “den of CSAM” was not happening at any scale the CC companies were actively worried about and it was about defunding sex workers.
Same deal here. This is about control and puritanism.
Daydreaming about this now.
This is such horse shit. I hate these puritanical CC companies
I’m sure no one will miss those incest games, but letting payment processors decide what speech people are allowed to exchange is nuts. These are middlemen. They don’t need to exist. I want more countries to hurry up and adopt GNU Taler and make all these middlemen superfluous.
We need GNU taler everywhere. Fuck these USAian payment processors.
Wow GNU Taler is indeed the answer, it attempt to be a privacy friendly alternative to PayPal
It’s not yet another cryptocurrency, no blockchain 🎉 no mining 🎉 no surveillance for the purchaser!
That’s why you should be buying those games from itch / Patreon/ SubscribeStar, banking on a single game store is a loosing game.
That is why EU has the DMA That is why a market is only healthy if you participate in it
E.g. when buying coffee (except for Starbucks) I’ll go to any café that sells it, if it looks too corporate or dirty I’ll go somewhere else.
They will be next as all of those also use the CC companies.
Diff of the new terms
They add a
<br>inside the<li>? wthMessy layouting
You never make a list that has an item with a hard break in it? They are everywhere.
Why would I add a line break when I don’t want or need a line break? It’s a list item, not a text paragraph.
I define the layout and spacing in CSS for the li element.
I don’t think I’ve ever noticed this as prevalent or common. If at all then as a strange outlier.
If it’s a list item with line breaks, sure. But the linked diff adds it at the end of the li with no content following. And it does so on the previous li. Leading to a line diff on a to this unrelated item.
A NSFW game apparently had the most played demo last NextFest
Workaround is easy to install nude patches
I don’t think there’s a way for Valve to avoid this. Like I don’t think it would be enough to mark games as only available for purchase without support from the major payment processors/rails. Like disable those and add crypto payment support and only use those for those games. Those games being on the store that major payment processors support, they’ll not want those on a store they support
This is a case where probably should be another store that doesn’t use major payment processors but until alternative payment rails became popular, it’d be a low sales volume store. I know cryptocurrency has negative connotations because of the community, but I think those currencies are the only long term solution for people making porn games or whatever type of content that may have rich/powerful groups wanting to suppress
Doesn’t even need crypto support. Steam sells steam gift cards so they could just take the Pokemon approach for games where it can only be redeemed with credits.
I think that’ll still be the problem with it being in the storefront at all. Some parents org makes large enough fuss about porn games on Steam and payment processors demand stronger moderation rather than have their brands associated with Steam and whatever may be released on it
At that point only solution is for Steam to become their own payment processor, since I don’t see any huge company choosing to lose money by abandoning mainstream methods of payment customers use.
Removed removed, or removed only for the prude American banks?
Whelp, time to pirate!
Not that most ‘adult’ games on steam are worth it, they’re mostly objectifying shit that wouldn’t know what consent and boundaries were if it kissed them on the mouth and they felt uncomfortable with it.
Nor would they know what good writing, acting or realistic sex etc is either.
