Steam Censorship of Adult Games Shows How Payment Processors Wield Immense Power
ign.com71 points by diggan 17 hours ago
71 points by diggan 17 hours ago
If you're in the UK there is a parliament.uk petition to "Ban payment processors stopping services based on objections to legal content": https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/734441
Instead of forcing payment processors to do business with companies against their will, I'd prefer for the government to become a payment processor that does not reject the customers this bill is trying to protect.
Unless it's de facto illegal, payment processors should be business agnostic. You can make arguments that it's their platform, their business, they can do whatever they want - but that goes for insurance companies and everyone else we want to act neutrally.
If that's the case, then you have to 1) reduce requirements on the payment processors to do due diligence and/or 2) push handling of risks associated with payments elsewhere.
As others have mentioned, what evidence of risk is there between a normal game purchased on Steam, versus an adult game, purchased on Steam?
Steam has a specific return policy that it applies everywhere, the games don't show up on card statements, and Steam will lock your entire account for charging back.
If there's a secret epidemic of people making new accounts specifically to buy and chargeback on adult games, the solution is for the processor to pressure Steam to take measures to reduce fradulent chargebacks (e.g. through minimum account age requirements for adult games), not to censor the platform.
You're being too first principles here, for one. These giant operations have coarse rules because they are giant. Coming up with a single counterexample is not compelling. Coarse rules are inherently going to have false positives. That's a feature not a bug - regulated entities can't risk racking up offenses due to their automations or policies being too lax. Sooo..you did not "gotchya" anything with your comment.
Secondly, I was talking about categorically changing how we treat MC/Visa. If you are going to change their class of operation, something has to give. And it gets complicated.
Certain types of transactions come with different types of risk... one might reasonably assume that X-rated games fall into the "frequently fraudulent" category
>one might reasonably assume that X-rated games fall into the "frequently fraudulent" category
There was no such evidence presented, all the evidence was that some christian extremists complained.
Sure your wife might see that you have a payment to pornhub and might not like it but you will not get on your credit card report the name of the game you bought from Steam or GOG so this fake excuse does not work like it would have worked with adult sites subscriptions.
But if there is evidence for Steam and GOG let me know, if somehow I missed the news and the chritian extemists were not the one that pressured VISA then also let me know.
Steam in particular is known to play hardball with chargebacks. If you issue a chargeback, rumor is that Steam will lock your entire account. Which seems incredibly unfair, but capitalism.
If the theoretical angle is stolen credit cards, I am unmoved. The point of stolen credit cards is to launder for durable goods/services. The external value of a digital porn game is $0.
This is generally true not just for Steam. By issuing a chargeback, you're burning that bridge and shouldn't be expect to do business with that vendor again.
No future business, maybe. Steam locking your account could take a library with thousands of dollars of purchases.
As far as I can tell, you get restricted from buying new games/activating codes, but they don't take away your existing library (besides the one you chargeback'd).
That is not the case. A non-criminal chargeback maybe, but if you've had your card stolen and chargeback with a merchant for that, they don't hold that against you.
Though, it maybe be more annoying to get your purchase approved because the automated risk system will flag it.
We sell product to people with prior chargebacks with us every single day
>Steam in particular is known to play hardball with chargebacks. If you issue a chargeback, rumor is that Steam will lock your entire account. Which seems incredibly unfair, but capitalism.
1 do we have evidence this is happening more with adult games? You can refund games in 2 hours I think, so it is enough to get that clarity and refund the game or find it is trash and refund it.
2 the evidence points to a Christian Extremist group, so are you guessing here ?
If we are just pulling guesses from our asses I would guess that children that get their hands on the parent credit card could buy a lot of bullshit , then parents find out since the bullshit costs much more than a game and would attempt to recover the money sicn ehte time interval passed. And afaik all single player games can be obtained for free so honestly if someone is in doubt about some adult game they can find a free version somewhere and do not risk getting found out by some partner that spies on their Steam Library content or purchases.
This has always been a lie.
The entire giftcard industry operates with these payment networks just fine despite large chargeback percentages that come from literal stolen credit cards
If the claim that "higher chargeback risk" like that cut you off from the payment networks were true, you would not be able to buy gift cards with credit cards.
To your point, lots of cards both limit purchases and charge higher rates on giftcard purchases to offset the risk.
Why would anyone assume that these are frequently fraudulent, especially within a managed platform like Steam?
When Fandango at Home sells you the movie Shortbus is it more likely to be a fraudulent transaction than when they sell you Shrek?
Different content absolutely has different risk profiles.
However, the payment networks do not care. As long as you aren't literally a front for laundering stolen credit cards, they are happy to take your money and very happy to charge you for every single chargeback.
There has NEVER been any evidence presented to support this "porn has high chargeback rates" claim, and other fields that DO have high chargeback rates have no problems taking credit cards.
If the payment processors really cared about children, they would be banning companies that sell guns, not video games with boobs in them.
I don’t think they should ban anything that not actually illegal in the first place. But ya if they’re going to “try to protect the kids” at least go for the obvious issues. Then again they don’t actually care about the kids haha.
This is classic "whataboutism". "What about guns or violence?"
Maybe they will next, maybe not. What does that have to do with them taking this first step? We have to evaluate the merit of this action, on its own.
Personally, I think that opening Steam's "New and Upcoming" and seeing nothing but low-quality porn games is bad. Bad for steam, bad for gamers, and bad for children.
Personally, I think that opening Steam's "New and Upcoming" and seeing nothing but low-quality porn games is bad.
Is this something that happens when you have a registered account? I don't have a Steam account. I opened https://store.steampowered.com/explore/upcoming/ in a private browser window and I see only one one game out of 20 tagged with "Nudity" / "Sexual content".
Payment processors demonstrated that they can, with a handful of keystrokes, destroy any industry they dislike.
I don't think it's "whataboutism" to ask why they don't do something that helps society with that power instead of using it to censor art they find personally distasteful.
Did they though...?
I don't see any destroyed industries.
Payment can be processed many ways, games can be bought from multiple store fronts, and there are still pornographic games on steam... so...
GOG is also starting to need a "no porn" filter, though I haven't used Steam, so I don't know how they compare on that.
Is this any different than the previous takes and discussions 2 months ago?
Against the censorship of adult content by payment processors
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44679406
Payment processors' bar on Japanese adult content endangers democracy
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44627828
Visa and Mastercard: The global payment duopoly
(you included a double link)
and yes the censorship is slowly showing its effects:
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/valve-appear-to-be-blocking...
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/steam-is-no-longer-allowin...
https://www.eurogamer.net/queer-developers-speak-out-as-adul...
Hot take, but Steam, a platform used by millions of children, should not have adult games.
Seems overly protective, and possibly a bit ridiculous depending on your sensibilities, if thought through.
By similar logic supermarkets should not carry alcohol or tobacco, theaters cannot show 18+ movies (even non-explicit ones), and entire parts of some cities need to be redone because of their red-light districts, because there are some at central locations a kid could reasonably stumble into.
I think just restricting access to this stuff, being discreet about it, and maybe limiting advertisement, is enough. I've lived somewhere with a pretty plainly visible red-light district close to the central train station, yet most people don't even realize it is there. I'd hope something similar could be accomplished for Steam as well.
Finally, at the end of the day parents gotta parent.
Hot take, but parents should, y'know, parent. Steam offers parental controls which can disable the store entirely, and have a whitelist for which games can be played along with other features.
Hot take, but parents should, y'know, parent
Every one of these "just shunt the responsibility from the giant corporation with infinite resources to the parents who are already stretched thin" is another link in a long, long chain that is the woes of modern parenting and really in the woes of modern life, in general.
Historically we have typically gated adult content from children via opt-in systems, not opt-out systems, like you're describing - e.g. Adults opt-in to sensitive content, not children opt-out. There is a reason adult stores are separate from Walmarts and that 21+ bars are separate from family-restaurants.
Also these games are absolute garbage, so I'm not sure why everyone is jumping on this issue like we're losing something of significant cultural value... Why is low-quality XXX-slop the line in the sand we're deciding to rally around... This is not a slippery slope to fascism, or whatever make-believe story we're peddling about this situation, its somebody somewhere doing the right thing, for once, and slowing our seemingly inevitable decline into Biff's Casino Future the teensiest bit.
Steam has pretty good built in parental controls imo. You can allow-list or block-list games, and block viewing various content on the store, or even entirely disable the store. There are tiers to filtering such as “frequent violence” “any nudity” “frequent nudity” and “adult only”. You can also separately disable the viewing of user-generated content, which I think disables the steam workshop. And even set playtime limits.
Steam’s parental controls are pretty good if used properly.
As a parent, I don't want my child reading your comment. Also, your comment is absolute trash, so deleting it wouldn't be a loss of anything of cultural significance.
No, I will not talk to my son about it. Hacker News has unlimited resources, so they should do it for me. I'm already stretched too thin - I have to get to Walmart to buy more wine and ammunition before it closes.
I can buy all manner of smut, boner pills, and dildos from Amazon.
You can buy Nicki Minaj and Lil Wayne albums on iTunes containing very illicit lyrics and adult themes.
What is your justification for this position? How does this not reduce to "steam shouldn't sell games that aren't fit for toddlers"?
What is your justification for this position?
How does this not reduce to "steam shouldn't sell games that aren't fit for toddlers"?
"The same way that a speed limit, age of consent, or drinking age doesn't get reduced to nobody can drive, have sex, or drink."
I really don't understand your logic here. Are you not saying "Steam shouldn't be allowed to sell pornographic games to adults"? Or are you saying it's ok for steam to sell them to adults, but not children? (But that was already the case, even before all of this). If you are saying "steam shouldn't sell pornographic games", how is that like any of the things you said?
Hot take but adults have the inviolable right to get adult content, whether it appeals to you or not