Which is why de-monopolization of critical infrastructure such as payments is important for sovereignty.
Also which is why, I am happy to see V-pay and SEPA transfers in EU. Especially SEPA-direct transfers, allowing you to be free of CC-processing fees completely as they have been regulated to be free quite well...
"payment processors insist that if the product is legal, they do not tell vendors what they can or cannot sell"
Absolute lies. They require that transactions that may damage the goodwill of the Corporation or reflect negatively on the Marks are not to be submitted to the Interchange System. It is also their own sole discretion what does or doesn't hurt their Brand.
It's a stupid situation that banks and payment processors force their ethics upon while other companies take the blame (valve in this case). They should just dommoney transfers and as long as the transfer itself is legal should not have any opinion on the parties or product involved in the transaction.
The monetary system is a public good and should be treated like one, with transparent upfront rules not arbitrary action that takes people by surprise.
Ridiculous that a few large corporations get to decide this. The only people who have any business deciding what content is or isn't allowed on someone else's platform, are the People, or their representatives in government.
I can accept that some content goes too far and might have to be banned according to some people, but the only groups who should have the actual power to do that, should be the owner of the platform, the users of the platform, and the government, and definitely not some third party that might have completely different interests.
The only reason this is possible at all is that some of these payment providers are nearly monopolists. People should have about a dozen payment options to avoid this. Fortunately I do; Steam supports iDeal, which is not controlled by any payment provider. It just goes straight to my bank. If my bank were to try to ban certain types of legitimate payment, customers could simply switch to a different bank to avoid the ban.
The only kinds of payment that payment providers should ban, are those involving financial crimes, like money laundering, fraud and corruption.
If valve can escape the Microsoft store, it can handle a few payment processors.
what would happen if Valve accepted Cryptocurrency?
in turn, what might happen if valve decided to become a cryptocurrency exchange exclusive to the gaming community?
EDIT: another solution is to use a load-wallet based system to shroud transactions from your financial nanny. money in, money out, no explicit evidence of a purchase.
Piracy gained two more pluses in the past few weeks: no age verification and no payment blockage.
It bears repeating -
While all games delisted at MC/Visa demands were from the rape and/or incest nsfw genre (and that should've not been on Steam to begin with), it still set a dangerous precedent as the game selection criteria was ultimately subjective. Relatable, but subjective. Next time it will again be subjective, but not as clear cut, yet the precedent will already be in place.
Indeed, PayPal is not gone for everyone, luckily. I am from Europe and can still buy games using PayPal, just did. This makes me happy, as I am trying for over two weeks now to buy credits on Open AI, just to be able to translate texts from the FastAPI docs to German. Open AI and others do not support PayPal and not even a prepaid credit card, which my local bank sold me as "works everywhere". It is frustrating.
I definitely became an advocate for some serious laws regarding payment processors being unable to disagree using some payment systems
They are probably drying their tears with stacks of 1000 bucks
Yeah, that's right, we play the ideology card, the moral card, but still, we don't want to lose too much money.
So no $, €, and so on...
[dead]
[dead]
Everyone I know personally still loves steam. We hate more than a few banks and strongly dislike the visa/mastercard duopoly but steam is great. Guessing the game drought is causing some news publications to reach for a story.