Itch.io is delisting NSFW games due to pressure from payment processors
The group responsible is "Collective Shout", the same org has targeted Steam before.
There are calls on social media now to contact Mastercard, Visa and co. and file complaints.
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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.
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).
it doesn't even stop there - it will be used to punish people who do not exactly like it's expected, with the mere accusation of playing/reading/watching/thinking something "unchristian" as reason.
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.
::: spoiler mention of sexual assault not OP, but for example the first game collective shout went after a few months ago ("no mercy") was explicitly a game about raping women to make them obedient. this is bad not because its NSFW, it’s bad because it’s rape apologia, and a misogynistic hate game.
to me, it’s not much different than "chad vs the gay nazis", another hate game (with a pretty self-explanatory name) that was released around the same time and was also quickly delisted.
I wouldn’t be surprised if other games that just got delisted were as bad as no mercy. but also, the blanket banning of anything NSFW (or even just kinky) sets a terrible precedent. :::
The main stuff I saw removed was related to incest and rape, not in a "it contains it" way. Somehow Corruption of Champions 2 escaped the ban hammer which makes me think those games probably took things pretty far, or were basically built to simulate assaulting people.
For reference, CoC2 is uh.... Well when you lose in combat the enemy fucks you, and vice versa. It's like a lot of fetish stuff too. So not that I know exactly what's in the games, but I feel like you have to really be trying to outdo CoC2.
Edit: I'm not criticizing CoC2 btw, it's fine. Its... I don't wanna say tasteful but non con is like one of 90 things you can or cannot opt into. Idk how to put it. It's an actual game that happens to have non con content I guess is what I mean.
In childhood and teenage years I played a lot of games like Carmageddon, Postal, Grand Theft Auto. In first two games slaughtering innocent people en masse is part of gameplay loop. Yet I somehow didn't grow up to be maniac, and mostly didn't even hurt anyone physically in my whole life. It's games, fiction, you're not supposed to take any of that seriously or to project it onto your real life.
I'm aware, I promise you that, I'm not saying games make you violent or awful. That argument has been annoying me to hell and back my whole life. To be honest I've not heard the argument for video games made for porn games before, but yeah, fair. So yeah. I don't like those specific rape/incest games, they're kinda yuck to me, but you do you.
Out of curiosity do you think there should be a line? Where would it be? Maybe like only explicitly illegal content is ever removed? (I wanna say thats how ao3 works) Or is steam having final say your preference? What if steam decided to make changes on its own?
If I had my way, I'd just have filters and tags, and let steam manage their storefront. I might disagree on how they do it, but that's up to them(or it should be). It just feels weird and loopholey that a payment processor is making this sort of overarching decision.
The only line is depictions involving real people without their consent. A flexible line is a exploitable one.
It is very clear that MasterVisa will use any and all excuses to eliminate queerness from existence, and my perverse games will be the excuse.
For me the line would be fictional-vs-non-fictional. So if a game contains photos or videos of actual people being hurt or abused IRL, that is illegal. But anything fictional is fine. For shocking/kinky stuff, there might be some special tags, and tag-based extra warnings like "this game contains scenes of ..., do you want to open the page?". So when you find and open any game with certain tag you get a warning corresponding to this tag. After confirmation it might remember your consent and enable some flags in the options to not bother you next time. But you can go into the options any moment and hide it all again if you decide you don't want to see this kind of stuff in future. Also, before you enable/consent to this content, it probably shouldn't be randomly recommended to you.
So I think that's all pretty fair, of course including the fact that it should all be legal too.
Does the paradox of tolerance concern you at all? The idea that if you let shitty people have a say they'll eventually use the bit of tolerance you give them as a tool to take away tolerance of others.
Basically, in theory if you let the nazis have a political party they might win and ban all the other parties, so to keep it fair arguably you should ban them first.
Now applying that to games that are pretty obviously hate games, like the ones the other commenter mentioned, the raping women into obedience game, or a game where you kill a bunch of gay people, the implication is that those games should be banned.
I kinda just wanted your thoughts on the concept. Like for example a game where you play as a school shooter. All good?
Sorry if this is a little philosophical, I just honestly wonder where the line should be for the least amount of harm.
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.
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
And it won't happen because companies won't allow them to ban a trillion dollar industry, you knob. Banning adult games isn't remotely comparable. Most video games rely on violence and it's too big of an industry to fail, adult games have a tiny following and were an easy target.
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.
So what useful action can I take to push back against this censorship?
This is gonna be down vote central but use crypto to pay for games whatever that looks like.
Isnt itch.io only indie games?
Yes, but.
Everyone should read the open letter that's linked in the itch statement, to have a fully informed opinion.
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.
My line is these payment processors being judge, jury and executioner about what material they deem valid. So I am fundamentally opposed.
I agree, but they aren't.
I am specifically saying this, because my democratic country has laws that would also cover these things the letter mentions and would also deem them wrong. The people normally charged with upholding that law, are just dumb, "not from the internet" and overworked with other stuff.
Please check what laws your country has around the topic of glorification of crime and violence.
We also don't know what the payment processors told itch and steam.
Itch and steam are doing what they are doing as a blanket move, to create a situation where they can stay in business for now and deal with the problem at all.
My bet would be that they "allowed nsfw stuff", turned a blind eye, and now suddenly noticed they actually have a really big legal problem, with actual laws and the fact that it was an NGO and not an official legal institution that started this, was dumb luck and now they mostly need time and cover their own arse.
And I fully support the opinion that it shouldn't be the payment processors forcing these sorts of things. But reality is messy and if this was the path of least resistance to get something done, such is life.
If GTA V is allowed, I’m pretty certain most of what we’ve seen from NSFW games is as well. Regardless, a payment company should not be acting as judge for such things, just as media companies should not act as judge on copyright infringement on YouTube.
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.
Right. That's fair and I'll believe it.
Do you generally think there is any limit at all, in any type of media that crosses lines and shouldn't exist? Think "liveleak" stuff from when that was around.
Or do you consider this game topic just not crossing that line?
The idea that what you see online has an effect on what you do offline, is not that far fetched is it? I mean, I don't know if it's true and I guess you could argue it could work in both directions too. Do people blow off steam online so they don't have to enact their darkest fantasties IRL. Or does the online material encourage or normalize these things? It could also be so that this works different for different people. It let's one person blow of steam, while it pushes someone else over the edge to do something horrendous. And if that is the case, is it fair to take it away from those who are not negatively influenced by it, to prevent those in whom it inspires bad actions from seeing it. I guess we'd need research on the matter, I don't know if it exist or how reliable it is. But I don't think it's a nonsensical question to ask what the effects are.
Jesus Christ we can't be back to this old chestnut.
We cannot, and do not, standardize society's guard rails around the most extreme edge cases.
Leave it back with Jack Thompson in the late 90s-early 00s where it belongs. The horse has already been jellied by repeated blunt force trauma more than a decade ago. You're just punching a horse shaped divot into the dirt at this point.
The question is if it's edge cases. People suffer sexual trauma in very large numbers and working in psychiatry has taught me how incredibly harmful it can be. If this kind of material could help prevent sexual trauma, we should definitely allow it. If research shows that it makes problems far worse, we should consider limiting access to it. I am not saying either is the case, I am saying I don't understand what is wrong with the question itself.
This restated question is not the problem directly.
The problem is the entire discussion/concept of "exposure to a dangerous idea in a pretend context maybe might maybe make someone more likely to emulate it in reality" when there has been little to no evidence found supporting that concept. Additionally the non-proportional amount of concern given to videogames in relationship to this concept as compared to literally any other form of media.
If there was even one iota of connection between "exposure to horrible things in media" (or even "pretending to do horrible things in a pretend context") and "doing horrible things in real life", the world would already look considerably different than it does. Militaries would be using these games as "exposure therapy" for soldiers. We'd be seeing crime rates of all sorts shifting in accordance with the media industries. There would already be measurable impacts after the decades of these things existing.
And more so than any of that: This discussion has literally been happening for longer than any of us here have been alive. I'm tired of having it.
Please stop letting the vague idea of "but it might help" override the logic of "but there's no evidence to support that except a vague gut feeling".
Okay, Jack Thompson
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.
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.
I'm pretty sure I can find fictional things immoral? Why would it be unethical to have an opinion on fictional things?
Factually, all the lines that you allow to be crossed are crossed and all lines that are collectively defended are usually not crossed. That's culture. It's arbitrary and not absolute.
Puritanical US based payment processors need to stop getting their panties twisted.
I don't even understand how they give a shit. Seems like the perfect place for shareholders to want them to make as much money as possible, it's a limited market.
People with a lot of money doesn't really want just money. They want power to impose their views over the rest. Money is just a mean to do so.
The shareholders aren't the ones pressuring the payment processors.
the payment processors didn’t randomly wake up this week and decide to ban NSFW video games on a power trip.
they are being financially pressured in some way to threaten game platforms that they’ll remove their services completely. the implication of that is they’re worried about losing even more money than they make from payments on game platforms.
from the payment processors perspective, they’re thinking, “okay this is not a hill we want to die on and it’s a small percentage of our business anyway.”
They give a shit because they are being pressured into giving a shit by religious nutjobs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morality_in_Media
That hasn't ever stopped other companies from pursuing profits at all other costs.
Why are they capitulating though?
You're still thinking within reason. Megalomania doesn't.
It's not about money, but power. "The world bent its knee at our word." Simple as that. People can be and are that crazy.
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.
Same with ad companies that are deathly afraid of being seen next to NSFW images, so for instance Imgur has cracked down on them.
I never thought I would say this, but cryptocurrency might have a use after all.
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.
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".
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.
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. 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.
Making crypto backed by more and more things (like games) makes staying within its ecosystem more comfortable in the long run.
Yeah, but there are already tons of widely-known legal services everybody uses like Coinbase, Binance, etc, which make it easy to P2P from card to crypto and it's impossible to control money flows after it turns into crypto, which means controlling how people spend their money like this would be impossible. But yeah, regarding big players like Steam adopting crypto and converting into/from real money on large scale - and what payment processors can do about this if they are pissed off - this is something I have no idea about. But people like Elon Musk probably do this a lot with incredible volumes of money.
No it's not.
Elaborate please.
Except Monero and a few exceptions, AML and KYC checks are everywhere. Tainted coins and shit.
Crypto goes somewhere that they don't like? Crypto is seized when it reaches an exchange and they ask for ID and source of funds
I don't understand. Lets say I have a normal bank card, I paid taxes for all the money I got there. Sometimes I buy crypto using p2p on some platform using this card. I trade this crypto with some other crypto on the same platform. Periodically I send crypto to my personal wallet from there. From my personal wallet I buy porn games for example. At which point someone comes in and seizes anything?
They would not, but you would not be anonymous this way. You get problems when:
As long as you stay with centralized exchanges and directly send crypto to some websites, you should in theory always be fine (as long as you don't send them to criminal or pro-privacy services), but that's not the original goal of crypto
Apart from that, some countries straight up force you to declare every transaction you make with crypto, which isn't doable for most people and puts them in illegality
You don't have to send crypto from exchange directly to websites. You can send it to your external wallet (outside of any platform), and spend from there. And no one's ever going to be able to prove that wallet belongs to you.
Nearly every cryptocurrency (aside from like Monero), is a literal open, transparent ledger that anyone can (and do) view and analyze.
It's not anonymous at all.
Look, when you use some platform with KYC, they indeed can tie that id information you give them to your internal addresses you use on the same platform. But the moment you send it to your external wallet that link is lost. They can see the transaction but they don't know and can't check if that destination address belongs to you, or it's a person who sold you something, or it's your friend/relative, or someone you donated to, etc.
This is naive and incorrect. There is a reason why darknet markets these days only deal in Monero, for the most part.
I'm not saying it's trivial, but there are literally corporations dedicated to analyzing block chains for law enforcement. It's an entire industry.
yes, even without KYC, one opsec fail and they can get quite a info on you, things like usage patterns and eventually potentially a profile, upon which will probablycreate a "credit score" of sorts and probably sell advertising data too because why not!?
Then explain how exactly is this incorrect. If you buy and smuggle weapons for example, feds do undercover operation and pretend to sell guns, they set their own wallet, they track transactions, they co-operate with exchanges and have access to KYC data, they see you sent from exchange to wallet X, and then wallet X payed for weapons to their undercover wallet Y. What they achieve here is: they just see there is some chance that wallet X also belongs to you and maybe it's you who are buying those weapons, but they can't use this as proof of anything, what they can do is start spying on you from other vectors: your regular bank accounts, your social media, or even IRL to check if they can find any real evidence. That's basically all. This is not at all a concern for people who don't run international multibillion crime syndicates, etc. And also this all is extremely irrelevant to original topic. Because those games aren't even illegal, it's basically just a fkin preference of payment processors to demand Steam and Itch to take them down. If Steam operated in crypto, no amount of transaction tracking would make it possible to enforce something like this, because this is not law enforcement to begin with, it's not illegal games and they are not taken down due to any legal concerns.
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.”
Sounds like the bar is so low to be even comparing the two sites.
I'm wondering who gave these credit card companies the moral authority.
Finicial authority beats moral everytime.
The fact that they hold the keys to the kingdom. Online retailers and businesses rely on credit card processors to be able to do business, which is all the leverage they need to exert tremendous pressure on the businesses they service.
This is something that really should be getting legislated against, but good luck in the US under the current administration. Maybe the EU has a shot.
I'm sure this is no coincidence that cbristofascists are in control of all the top branches of US Government.
Tbf, Collective Shout group is actually Australian
Visa and Mastercard are based in the US, though.
It’s not about morals. It’s purely about money. Porn sites are labeled as high risks because things like chargebacks, stolen credit cards etc happen more often at these adult websites. Not to mention the thin line between legal and illegal content. Therefore payment processors charge companies in the high risk category a higher fee since they need to audit these companies more frequently and deal with these chargebacks etc. more.
So either Itch.io goes into the high risk category and pay more for transactions or they remove porn. Maybe itch.io should just create a separate company to host these adult games.
But wasn't that true before Collective Shite decided to piss on everyone else's day?
Plus, I thought NSFW works were a large market driver. Back in the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray war, they said the winner would be determined by the porn producers.
maybe it's because itch mostly sells non-porn games so they probably flew under the radar since they could have less fraudulent transaction or chargebacks as a porn site. Or the payment processors didn't care too much that itch broke the compliance rules until someone reminded them of their duties. Like PornHub was showing illegal content for years and the payment processors only gave a shit about it until someone went to the news.
Meanwhile, on my feed there's a post directly below this one about a compiler that will give you BSDM messages for good and bad coding and can even be hooked up to a remote butt plug to pleasure you when you compile a successful program.
The Rust community just knows what's up.
cargo mommy reference
Gives a new meaning to the term "code smell".
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.
Edit - autocorrect turned pro life into problem life. I am ok with this.
Controlling the money means controlling the world.
ACLU petition concerning the payment processors: https://action.aclu.org/petition/mastercard-sex-work-work-end-your-unjust-policy
Fucking signed.
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).
Posted this elsewhere so just going to copy paste here but with regards to Collective Shout:
I think we need to get this group to weigh in on the content of certain holy books. Surely as a secular organisation they will have no problem demanding that the bible and qur'an be banned (I bet I know which one they actually would like banned).
After all we don't want kids exposed to books that contain incest, sex, violence, rape, etc. I'm sure there are some parts of Ezekiel they will want editted at the absolute minimum.
I imagine balkanisation would be one way to make them slightly less visible/insufferable, and you know they would love some factional infighting.
Every time they get brought up they should be forced to confront that the people pulling their strings are most likely engaging in all the things they want banned from culture (regardless of culture or intent). Once they are forced to start lobbying Visa and MasterCard to block transactions to religious bodies I will accept they genuinely believe in the drivel they leak. Until then its performative puritanism.
P.s. not a fan of religion of any stripe, but I would feel as violently opposed to censoring them as I am to censoring anything else, I will accept it if its the only responsible solution until then alternative can be found.
Well yea, but also no. I think a lot of their ability to operate is the veneer of legitimacy they have, my suggestion above, while funny, was mainly facetious, however if we could figure out a way of stripping that legitimacy away they might see more pushback from the next company they try to convince they represent a statistically large chunk of the population.
In this exact situation if Visa had just said to them: "We will take that under advisement." Then filed the whole thing with the crayon scrawl "letters" they get from a certain "BLEACH BLONDE BAD BUILT BUTCH BODY" about not letting the Jews buy any more space lasers. Then no one would be getting rights taken away from them.
Can't wait for an EU alternative to Visa/Mastercard. Heard Wero is supposed to be that. Europe can't decouple from US garbage fast enough.
we already had that: Eurocard. they needed to pay mastercard in order to be compatible with their terminals, and that relationship ended with mastercard just absorbing them.
they were started for the exact same reason that we are talking about, to get a european alternative. so obviously the answer is not free market-based.
I hope that as an American, I would have the option to use Wero for all of my purchases. I simply don't trust my government.
GNU Taller. I heard it was working in Switzerland
Sounds interesting!
I suspect the reason why is that most of them are under pressure from the USA government, which is trying to recrete Gillead
I hate American Companies it will be a good time to start a new platform for NSFW games and payment platforms
Let the Digital Euro become a thing. It will wreck havoc on the current payment ecosystem.
And the Digital Euro is not a crypto. It will be a digital currency, backed by the ECB, at a one to one exchange rate with standard euro currency.
I mean the issue here is not with the money itself, it's the payment processors
The eEU is supposed to be one, itself. And even if it fails Wero and MBWay are growing, which are direct money transfer systems.
be careful. stablecoins are a step towards central bank digital currency. once CBDC is established, it’s all over for freedom to spend money.
You can still pay with gold and silver.
Euro(pe) is the MVP
It has its moments.
The various groups trying to ban payments for NSFW products and whatever else they don't like would just target the ECB and member states to restrict transactions they don't like
Sure. Targeting a central bank and several independent nations will be as simple as pressuring two US companies. /s
You're a dick. Hope you get better
Practically the whole world has been having an authoritarian/conservative shift. I would not expect the EU and ECB to be a progressive force for sex work. The EU has been pushing to break encryption for a solid decade now. Visa and Mastercard process 90% of transactions outside of China. They're huge. I don't see why ECB leadership would be particularly less conservative and risk averse than Visa and Mastercard. Bankers are usually on the conservative side of politics
The Nederlands, Germany, Spain, if I'm not wrong, France and Italy have prostitution as legal. My own country abstains from legislating on it, instead opting to criminalizing procuring and the facilitation of prostitution, as well as human traffic for such end.
Europe has a well established culture of sex work, with a good number of organizations lobbying - openly, through open public debate - in the way of making sex workers being recognized as any other worker and increasing their social relevance and recognition.
If you inform yourself a bit, in my country, you can legally establish yourself as an escort, under a very specific tax code, and pay taxes according to the money you make and have tax deductions and social benefits.
Currently, we already have a direct payment and transfer system, called MBWay, that through your phone number, allows for transfering, paying and collecting money, from one account to another.
No fintech, no middle agents, no shit: direct transfers from one account to another.
The Digital Euro takes this a step further. And even if the eEuro never takes place, this system is to be widened to all EU and abroad, to run against AliPay, Visa, MasterCard and others.
Bankers want money.
American bankers should spit out the "holy" book they have stuck up their arses.
At least Germany, Spain, and Italy have resurgent far right political movements. I am not about to trust government payment systems to not eventually be abused as technology makes control and surveillance easier. A holy book can be replaced with whatever new age self-help, health movement, anti-<ethnicity/sexuality/religion> movement. All it takes is some instability and desperation and people will support whatever or turn a blind eye to whatever they may think is not their problem or they may potentially benefit from. Good for the EU to run their own payment systems. When a conservative wave takes a large enough majority in governance someday, it'll be the same problem as Visa/Mastercard/etc
The governance powers we give with results being leftist in mind will someday be in the hands of conservative who will use them with a kind of zeal that leftist don't
My own country too.
Now allow me too share a conviniently forgotten fact about most far right governments of the last century: they all were very at ease with having sex workers.
My own very catholic and repressive country had a very detailed law on prostitutes, which mandatory registration, regular medical exams and visits, etc. It's a good way too pacify populations.
The current hunt on independent adult themed art/entertainment/etc is more about good old fashioned religious zealotry than anything else. Pornography gets some flak but it's a lot harder to successfully target.
This isabout forcing people into conventional set roles and definitions and closing minds and shutting down free independent thinking. And stopping people from being or becoming humane.
@network_switch @Jackhammer_Joe even authoritarian states doesn't like dependencies which can tell them what they have to do. So those companies are a risk for their independence... my personal feeling europe's right people might not like porn but they probably would rather fight for porn then let a none european company tell them how they have to handle business ;)
@network_switch @Jackhammer_Joe oh on a sidenote -> https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/27/22641095/onlyfans-sex-work-ban-online-porn-payment-processing-controversy << just a reminder ...
To me it's an inevitability that if the EU weans itself off Mastercard/Visa, then EU based payment processors whether credit based or something like SEPA payments for a digital EURO would be censored. The EU would be happy to handle their own business and that may just end up no different than American companies and the American government. The European right can fight against porn while fighting for independent finance infrastructure
The issue with the systems being proposed and already in place in Europe is that the money flows directly between accounts. Banks don't have a way to know what is being payed for.
And there is even another system, where blocks of payment references can be bough from a slew of independent entities (all must be registered as financial entities at central banks) and used to transfer money that way. The issuer either charges a token value for each reference, a % on the payment value or both. Money flows directly between accounts, instantly.
The all-mighty PayPal uses a third party payment reference provider for people who want to use their service but don't want to put their card into it.
Time for Brazil's PIX to be exported around the world. That's likely to be hard, as here it is a direct, bank agnostic account-to-account transfer without middlemen and without any tax, so it'd need cooperation between the involved countries.
You're describing the same system behind Wero and MBWay. We can just use cellphone numbers to move money from account to account, regardless of the banks at each end of the transaction.
First, fuck Visa and Mastercard. Second, fuck Collective Shout. Third, I feel for the itch forum mods.
To be clear - "Collective Shout" both is and isn't responsible. It's the payment processors who actually enacted policies and are using them as the scapegoat for negative feedback.
How many times have people reported Twitter after Elon Musk took over for showing Nazi propaganda alongside their ads - with no response. An 'open letter' in July about a game already banned in April? DELIST EVERYTHING IMMEDIATELY.
How the fuck did we get to the point where a company which literally only takes your money and gives it to someone else (and also gets paid for that) can decide what kind of content people consume?
So how do we go about suing these guys? They're erasing art. And no, I'm not just some gooner who wants more jackoff material, Itch apparently removed anything with nudity in it.
I am a guy who wants more jackoff material, and I am an adult, and I am allowed to have sources for that material that is not some piecemeal ad hoc storefront where I subscribe to individual developers who drip feed content as it gets developed.
I am all for supporting artists and have subscribed to a few Patreons when my wallet allows, but I like having a place where I can play some demos or games that an artist puts up for free because why not? I am so sick of storefronts being targeted like this. All of the porn on Steam is behind an age gate, and sure, Itch could use such a gate, but it doesn't need to delist an entire form of art.
The only dogshit I see here is your over the top aggressive name calling.
u dont feelgoodman
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.
Why not just call visa and matercard just like that stupid lobbying company. Obviously it is harder to change company's minds, but maybe might accomplish something.
I hear shout has 1000 people on staff calling businesses, regular people could easily quadruple that.
Those people (Mastercard et al) do not listen to people, they listen to money.
Show them guillotines and molotovs so they understand they might not live to use their money, and they'll pay (regardless of if you pardon my pun) attention.
To quote the good folks over at the TWG Discord
See also here for more numbers to call
I'm completely fine with certain content being delisted because it is considered essentially on par with hate speech or something like that.
However, I really do not like that it is payment processors making that call. If someone makes that call, it should be the store in question (itch.io, Steam, whatever) or it should be the government.
Annoy them, call their bullshit, but don't harass or threaten them, those are likely to backfire spectacularly
Oh wow. Itch is also involved even though I would assume they have less than 1% of Steam's gross revenues.
I guess they can't push back like steam can, they're much smaller. But if they could, would they?
Neither can Steam. Visa and Mastercard make up 90% of all online purchases outside China. If they cut off Steam then Steam is effectively dead.
Just add SEPA payments from Europe and I won't touch Visa or MC ever again.
Steam didn't push back at all though...
Steam has no power. They are beholden to a very particular monopoly that can get away with anything it wants and is currently being manipulated by unethical evangelical fascists.
The amount of money Valve rakes in with Steam is insane. If itch had even 0.1% of that it would be a much bigger website. Itch had to limit dynamic filtering (like searching for Arcade + Fantasy) to just a few preset tags because of the server load. I wouldn't be surprised if the number compared to Steam is less than 0.01%. People who want DRM free games generally go to GOG. Hell a lot of DRM free indie/AAA/retro games don't even get listed on itch, so they get only the tiniest portion of the pie.
That sounds rough. I follow a few devs/projects on Itch, but I don't really use their discovery features.
That's why they're first going after such cases. In Hungary we named this tactic the "goose liver method". Goose liver is often created by overfeeding geese, which is abuse. A lot of smaller political party, instead of regulating farming, decided to campaign on banning goose liver entirely, while bashing the food item as a "luxury only the rich can afford".
This is how crypto payments go mainstream
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.
And that's a great thing
But people like to hate on crypto because surely a centralized and privacy unfriendly payment system is better
They believe crypto = ERC20 + NFTs = scam, when the real goal of crypto is P2P uncensored transactions, and getting away of this centralized system
Some of the actual reasons people hate crypto are:
You're free to avoid those coins then... volatility doesn't mean bad
Yes, just like for stocks and pretty much every product on the market
Stablecoins are often centralized so they're not what the goal of crypto was, but sure. Why not hate the coins instead of the technology instead? Stablecoins are a small part of crypto.
If you know this is incorrect, why lie and say crypto is resource intensive when it's only a few that are like that? PoW has its flaws indeed.
Every software you use is not liable for any problems that occurs with it. Incidents will always happen. All recent incidents involved someone getting hacked by other means, being menaced into sending them crypto (so it could happen to anyone with a lot of cash as well for example, or through offshore bank accounts), or a company stealing people. I'm not aware of any code fail.
Pretty much all CEX are regulated currently. And with AML and KYC coming more and more (which is bad for crypto), the "no protections" claim is really false.
So? In case of a fork, you keep both coins... so you should still keep the value of both?
Isn't that the case of Solana? But yea currently there are problems with too many coins relying on PoW, but some just can't do without it, like Monero. It's the cost of having this system.
That's because of regulation and the banking system, not the fault of crypto? It's because people called crypto a scam that it became like that. You can still use the crypto to purchase stuff with it instead of getting fiat. Receiving money from P2P bank transfers is also similar to this, you'll get asked questions as soon as you go out of the normal way.
People calling crypto a scam don't think this much through. It's just more hard and complex than there is to the eye. Most people interface with crypto solely for trading, and people want quick profit through shitcoins, which is a very bad idea, then complain on the system. You should think twice before investing in stuff you don't understand: whether it's crypto, stocks, NFTs, in game items...
Yes, yes it does when we're talking about a payment system. Hence why no one pays stuff in shares except for some billionairs for tax reasons!
No one pays in shares because no one accepts this and it’s annoying to do?
Sure, volatility with crypto is annoying, but it will happen with a currency that works in every country, even fiat is volatile
Sounds like crypto
True, but countries have means to keep money more or less stable. Most countries also have laws that are supposed to ensure big money owners don't collude to play insider trading and pump'n dump every other week
Yea, it is a bit of a pain as well, but it has some benefits compared to traditional payment methods, unlike paying in shares
Pretty sure crypto pump and dump criminalization is still a thing. In the end, you're asking for someone to invest in something you benefit from, which is illegal in some places
What else do people use itch.io for?
game jams and indie games. there's no fee for publishing your game there, so it's the go-to place for indiedevs
Safe and clean games like my own Diarrhea 4.
I hope those "Payment processors" get vored alive!
Ew no. Not vore.
Oh, suddenly it's not ok when it's not your thing? Yes, vore!
"My thing" is vanilla. But of all the weird yet somehow socially acceptable kinks out there, I will go out of my way to kinkshame vore.
Understandable. Yet it's such a shame. You can never have what I can have. You can never imagine it.
Absolutely fucked up.
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.
There should be laws forcing payment processors to be neutral. They should have to accept any transaction that would be legal if made using cash.
Considering how long payment processing as a business has been a thing, I'm amazed its not more regulated in terms of being forced to be neutral or being unable to decline processing payments that are related to completely legal transactions.
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.
some people were peddling crypto as a way to regain autonomy but most consumers don't have the skills to buy it using cash and sideline Visa/MasterCard. it's also not as accessible to people without technical skills.
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 always been a pump and dump scheme, as all black markets are
excluding SEPA, it's impossible to buy most things using them in my EU country.
SEPA also doesn't have disposable credentials using randomized credit cards. i don't want the stores I buy from to have my bank account info and potentially be charged by them randomly.
SEPA payments are push. Not pull. A vendor could request recurring payments, but you have to specifically authorize them. They are very rarely used, except maybe for monthly utilitiy payments.
thanks for clarifying. there's still the risk of your IBAN getting leaked in a hack, no?
It's not supposed to be a secret. Most companies here publish it on their invoices, so you can pay them. Some nonprofits even display it on their websites to accept donations.
Even the some governments publish the treasury account numbers for anyone to see.
They should do Twitter next. Twitter has nsfw AI role play now and it should be banned by payment processors.
Edit: I say this because I want to bring up the hypocrisy of the advocacy. Why they get to choose what companies can do porn which cannot?
Payment processors should not get to police what kind of legal transactions people use their services for. No matter how much you dislike the particular product. And especially since they have an effective monopoly. If we let them go through with this, it would open the gateway for them to enact the kind of control over our consumption that should be exclusive to elected officials.
As we can see, they already have that kind of control, and what's worse is that it's not limited to just one country.
Maybe the OP has a point, and it'll take them fucking with something else than "just" hobbies to get regulated.
This has been happening forever in the adult video space. Certain kinks are verboten and disallowed by payment processors, which leads to a kind of underground gray market where you have to use certain euphemisms to avoid getting flagged.
While i agree the notion its not that black and white.
Payment processors are companies. Where you would draw the line when company can and cant decite how they want to manage their product? In the end its their decition.
We already do it for utilities. A financial company should not be deciding what its users are allowed to spend their own money on except within the confines of law.
Assuming we're being facetious here, 100% agree.
Hell, if extwitter gets banned, it'd be hilarious because then there would probably be laws changed to ensure only the government can select what gets banned. Though, not so hilarious in the current state of the world.
They list this as one of their main goals, right on their website.
Tbf it should be banned for being ridiculous but not from a morality standpoint from the payment processors, just bc it's cringe and has nothing to do with that social media format. That being said, Twitter is getting worse and worse
I wonder who major porn sites use as payment processors? (I don't know the answer, I'm just saying...)
Most of the large ones only take bank transfers and cryptocurrency now.
Goddamn cookers the lot of them. Perhaps I'll make an abortion game on Itch in protest.
"Cookers"?
Local slang word that derives from "their brains are fried/not working" which also implies stupidity and fanatical adherence to things like religion, anti abortion, anti vax, and the like.
This organization is nuts.
This is from their FAQ:
I kept wondering why their focus was only on “girls, girls, girls” all over the place and everything was pink.
So media involving the dehumanization of men is totally cool with them. A game about raping men would be totally fine and no issues there because it’s not “typical”. Just don’t do anything to the girlys.
https://www.collectiveshout.org/faq
As if the sexualization of men doesn’t have a negative impact on men as a whole…telling men that the only way to be sexy is to be masculine and strong isn’t at all damaging to them? How does that make any bit of fucking sense? Not all men can live up to those unrealistic depictions with a 6 pack and big muscles nor should all men aspire to be that.
The fuck is wrong with these people…
The thing is, I actually appreciate the idea of "de-objectifying" people in terms of fictional design; but I want that to be encouraged as part of the creative expression. A sexy female character with an identity and story behind her is a lot more fun to me than one just created to have big boobs. Heck, those same design principles can help design sexy men that appeal to female/gay groups.
But needless to say, forcing those views as part of these acts isn't helping anyone. It's just exerting forceful control, and we know how well that works for art.
This is becoming the norm. Don't think there can be some new payment processor based off traditional finance and banking that can get around this. Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Square, SEPA, FedNow, etc will all rather block transactions to companies that deal in NSFW or whatever is considered dangerous content than try and be some neutral payment rail.
Any in terms of cryptocurrency, any stablecoin will end up subject to the same problems where the issued stablecoin is backed by a governments currency or bonds or even like corporate bonds which are regulated by countries and those are all clear ways to regulate what is appropriate for spending money on. Stablecoins have freeze and clawback mechanisms, at least the ones that are legally compliant. Really to me the only solution is for non-stablecoin/gold/etc backed cryptocurrencies to become popular for payments
Problem is the same as it has always been though.
Sex sells.
It's gonna be a hard push for a lot of these companies to stop accepting transactions for NSFW stuff unless they can prove it's harmful or they get legal repercussions because it's a big part of business. In an economy where "year over year growth" is such a big deal, neutering transactions that account for (guessing generously) 7% of your revenue is a hard pill to swallow without serious force.
We already have the example of now itch and steam getting hit by payment processor restricted on content. YouTube and advertisers wanting to not be shown on categories of content and demonetized channels. I remember headlines about Pixiv and payment processors some time ago
Lose access to the major payment processors and they'll lose far more than 7%. Until there's a means of payment thats popular enough to replace centralized authority payment processing, it's an easy choice for businesses to sacrifice their sex related sales to not sacrifice the larger portion of their sales that they'd lose without support of major payment processors.
The way things are going, there's going to be the need for popular NSFW specific stores that don't use Visa/Mastercard, private bank transfers, or national bank transfers. There's a split in internet video where porn sites are separate from stuff like YouTube. This payment processor content moderation is in the same vein as advertisers on YouTube and other social media networks
Oh for sure, the sites are getting in trouble. But that's because advertisers don't want to be associated with those things.
But the payment processors, that's literally how they make money. Can't make money off the top if there are no transactions. Banks will still let you deposit your money if you get it from a drug deal, bit of a don't ask don't tell there, but it's the government that has problems with how you got it. (hyperbole but you get my point)
I still think separating from credit card co.'s is a good idea regardless. But its pretty rare for them to turn down transactions unless they have to.
Hell Cashapp is jokingly called the "drug dealer financing app" but you don't see them getting shut down any time soon.
I bet a lot is money that these companies would take money from Trump and never child fuckers.
This is one of the big use cases I could see for a crypto like Monero. If someone made a Patreon-style site that used XMR, I'd be all over it.
It's one of those network effect catch-22s though. There's probably not enough people using Monero to justify creating a site like that - but we'll never hit a "critical mass" of Monero users if there aren't ecosystems that encourage its use.
I have the impression that the American government is doing all it can to delegitimize the American Dollar. Between that and the cultural impetus of sexuality, there is going to be a huge opening for Monero and friends to establish themselves as genuine currency.
and I was just reading this resetera thread yesterday, that collective with false claims sounds almost like it works for orange head’s faith office:
https://www.resetera.com/threads/waypoint-probably-dead-again-as-vice-caves-to-ultraconservative-anti-porn-group-collective-shout.1248486/
Noooooooooooooooo
(Litteraly downloaded only two games front there)
Quick! Everybody grab copies of the furry titles and the Rick and Morty incest game!
Mostly Joking, I hope these games figure out how to run on Newgrounds where I expect them to be very well recieved.
So we get them jailed, they're pedos & fascists. Start with petitions etc...
On one hand, they help tighten the grip of economic fascism, on the other hand they also piss off Tate... #confusedboner
How's this confusing? They're a Puritanical group. They do Puritanical things. They want people to live a Puritanical life. Literally nothing deep about it.
They are a dangerous cult fueled by a ton of repressed feelings. But so is Tate! If they wanted to fight each other for a while that would be pretty sweet.
Then let them fuck through a hole in a sheet and never allow a woman to climax. Leave the rest of us alone.
These are the sort of people who actually ban Christmas. And that's what scares me. They can't tell the difference between cheeky yet harmless fun, basic human variation, and evil, and they will make that your problem it they get enough power
I'd be okey with that if they pressured itch.io to delist
Atmospheric, First-Person, Horror, Psychological\hjTouche!
RIP Itch.io
Choosing short term profits over long term userbase, it's all downhill from 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.
Edit: Can't believe I forgot about the payment processors playing games with Wikileaks. For shame. Would have been a much better example.
Itch players and devs turning against the itch staff instead of the payment processors is like the friggin ouroboros of activism.
Except an ouroboros can keep going round and round. What these people want would just implode the site in a day.
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.
Tell me again how you've not actually read up on the issues with crypto as payment processor.
This shit has already been tried and the issues discussed at length. I think it was Mullvad that stopped accepting BTC and did an extensive writeup on why.
In short: the constantly shifting conversion rates make this unsustainable, as even if they accepted payment in crypto, they have to pay their bills in fiat currency. So their choices are to have crypto prices change literally every page load to reflect the exchange rate, or to just eat extra costs when suddenly 0.51btc goes from being worth $5 when the user pays to being worth $1 when they try to use it for anything else. Even with constantly updating prices, the shifting rates screwing them will still happen. The costs associated with even offering it as a payment type outweigh the actual revenue generated by an extreme order of magnitude, and even privacy/crypto oriented storefronts see something like under 1% of users using the option when it's available.
And that's my understanding of the short version.
There's a big difference between "prioritizing short term profit" and "committing commercial/financial suicide to make a point".
Heck even friggin Musk stopped accepting crypto to buy Teslas!
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.
Woke liberals ruining America, nothing new
Collective Shout is run by christian fundamentalists
My attempt to crack a shitty joke has backfired more than expected lol
kindly use /s next time please^^;
The Q&A on their website makes them look like nonreligious feminists then? Where did you get that impression from?
According to this article by Rock Paper Shotgun, they have connections to known fundamentalist and conservative groups.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
Conservative fundamentalists and blaming liberals for their own actions
Name a better duo