Mastercard release a statement about game stores, payment processors and adult content
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/08/mastercard-release-a-statement-about-game-stores-payment-processors-and-adult-content/Open linkView original on lemmy.world123
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They seem to claim that "anything legal is ok with them", but they've always tightly controlled (legal) porn and did this with OnlyFans too. I'll paste a previous comment of mine here:
I didn't know this till I heard a podcast series about this, but the global rule makes for porn are Visa and Mastercard. They decide what "goes too far" and remove a site from their service if they don't like it, effectively cutting off all revenue streams and killing the site. They did this with porn sites and threatened OnlyFans. There are a bunch of rules they've written for the industry (e.g. fingering an orofice with4 fingers was acceptable, but when the thumb goes in then it becomes "fisting" and this used to be unacceptable), but many rules are unwritten and have to be guessed.
I think this is the podcast series for anyone interested (although I heard this a long time ago and I'm not sure if it was a different series and I'm not going to listen again to confirm).
While I find this fascinating, what these monopolies do with their power, I wonder more what the alternatives are... There where some interesting Economist articles on major changes to financial techs aiming to break this though that was years ago and I don't remember much other then discussion of micro loans and government cryptos schemes
Fix would be government regulation.
Alternatives are sending cash by mail, accepting bank ACH, and of course, cryptocurrency.
I wonder if the Canadian e transfer system would be helpful. I literally used to buy drugs using e-transfer and I'm pretty confident they still deal.
Crypto. I mean everything except the banking system
🎶"Why you fucking lying"🎶
Why would payment processors lie?
This is basically what I said earlier was probably their driving factor.
Payment processors do not care about someone's social norms. Payment processors, however, do not want to get in trouble with a country, because getting their ability to operate in a country suspended would be really bad for them. As a result, countries have lots of leverage over payment processors, which is a good way to apply pressure to commercial websites that use payment processor services.
Collective Shout is in Australia. There are laws against some forms of adult content in Australia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_video_games_in_Australia
There is some material available on some of these online stores --- at least globally, and I'd guess in Australia --- that violates those restrictions. Payment processors won't risk getting in trouble with countries.
But I'm not in Australia!
Probably not, but it's also not just Australia that has similar morality laws.
What I'd guess that the online stores are going to most likely do is have lawyers sit down, review the various countries that they sell games in, write up some list summarizing legal restrictions and embed that into their selling policy and add that it's not legal advice, the list may not be current and complete, and that if some published game does wind up violating the law in some country, that they may remove it from sale in that country to conform to the law. Then they're going to re-list the stuff that they're comfortable saying is conformant in the countries where it is conformant. At least some of them have already intended that (a) there's some kind of review process going on and (b) that they expect to be doing reinstatement of games.
That would be nice, but it's very much not what we observe now
The only thing I wanna hear from them is "Sorry we listened to TERFs. Here's your sex games back."
Fk them all. Fk MasterCard. And Steam should never listen to them.