371
Mastercard release a statement about game stores, payment processors and adult content
(www.gamingonlinux.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2025
371 points (97.9% liked)
Games
41137 readers
2392 users here now
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Rules
1. Submissions have to be related to games
Video games, tabletop, or otherwise. Posts not related to games will be deleted.
This community is focused on games, of all kinds. Any news item or discussion should be related to gaming in some way.
2. No bigotry or harassment, be civil
No bigotry, hardline stance. Try not to get too heated when entering into a discussion or debate.
We are here to talk and discuss about one of our passions, not fight or be exposed to hate. Posts or responses that are hateful will be deleted to keep the atmosphere good. If repeatedly violated, not only will the comment be deleted but a ban will be handed out as well. We judge each case individually.
3. No excessive self-promotion
Try to keep it to 10% self-promotion / 90% other stuff in your post history.
This is to prevent people from posting for the sole purpose of promoting their own website or social media account.
4. Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
This community is mostly for discussion and news. Remember to search for the thing you're submitting before posting to see if it's already been posted.
We want to keep the quality of posts high. Therefore, memes, funny videos, low-effort posts and reposts are not allowed. We prohibit giveaways because we cannot be sure that the person holding the giveaway will actually do what they promise.
5. Mark Spoilers and NSFW
Make sure to mark your stuff or it may be removed.
No one wants to be spoiled. Therefore, always mark spoilers. Similarly mark NSFW, in case anyone is browsing in a public space or at work.
6. No linking to piracy
Don't share it here, there are other places to find it. Discussion of piracy is fine.
We don't want us moderators or the admins of lemmy.world to get in trouble for linking to piracy. Therefore, any link to piracy will be removed. Discussion of it is of course allowed.
Authorized Regular Threads
Related communities
PM a mod to add your own
Video games
Generic
- !gaming@Lemmy.world: Our sister community, focused on PC and console gaming. Meme are allowed.
- !photomode@feddit.uk: For all your screenshots needs, to share your love for games graphics.
- !vgmusic@lemmy.world: A community to share your love for video games music
Help and suggestions
By platform
By type
- !AutomationGames@lemmy.zip
- !Incremental_Games@incremental.social
- !LifeSimulation@lemmy.world
- !CityBuilders@sh.itjust.works
- !CozyGames@Lemmy.world
- !CRPG@lemmy.world
- !OtomeGames@ani.social
- !Shmups@lemmus.org
- !VisualNovels@ani.social
By games
- !Baldurs_Gate_3@lemmy.world
- !Cities_Skylines@lemmy.world
- !CassetteBeasts@Lemmy.world
- !Fallout@lemmy.world
- !FinalFantasyXIV@lemmy.world
- !Minecraft@Lemmy.world
- !NoMansSky@lemmy.world
- !Palia@Lemmy.world
- !Pokemon@lemm.ee
- !Skyrim@lemmy.world
- !StardewValley@lemm.ee
- !Subnautica2@Lemmy.world
- !WorkersAndResources@lemmy.world
Language specific
- !JeuxVideo@jlai.lu: French
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
MC: It's not us.
Steam & Itch: It's the payment processors.
Gee, I wonder who people are going to believe.
Thing is…I think both claims are correct.
Mastercard and Visa are not the only middle-men; the only “payment processors” involved in making sales.
Next time you check out at a cafe, look at the branding of the tablet/software the cashier is using. Chances are, it wasn’t developed by the cafe owners, or by MC/Visa. That’s a payment processor. There’s some big ones out there that can be hard to avoid.
EDIT: While finding exact point of blame remains difficult, a recent statement from Valve suggests I may be wrong about the card companies being innocent, at least with Mastercard. It’s a long chain and it seems each link wants to forward blame.
Practically no one in the world who accepts payments for their online business directly integrates with visa or Mastercard. It's all 3rd party companies who integrate (because it's fucking hard and tedious) and then resell it in a nice easy package.
In almost all cases, any talk about payment processors, is them, not visa/Mastercard.
Yup, most times when a business gets set up for accepting credit card payments they need to set up a bank, merchant account, gateway, those things integrate with the CC companies. Often they aren't even the same company so you're kind of dealing with a bunch of different entities. I'm not sure if I missed any other middlemen.
The new thing is for the POS system / website / whatever to sell you the merchant account/gateway under their own systems so everything besides the bank and credit card companies are integrated through them (& they collect more money).
I remember seeing a graphic that was about every layer of companies that are interacted with when you use a credit card. Must have been at least like 6 layers of companies each taking a fee from a company that took fees higher up the chain closer to the consumer. Similar when I read an explanation of, when you buy a stock through a company like Fidelity where is the stock actually held and that was layers of public/private companies/corporations
The Depository Trust Company
I learned that. It was the whole chain to get to that point and how that organization even came to be and how they came to be and how it's regulated that was a bit disgusting with how make shift it seemed to me. The whole stack all came off as a multi decade saga of stapling org on top of org until we came to the present of things mostly work but it's a bit fragile with a mix of public and private regulators trying to hold things together and make old paper systems work with modern technology
True. Collective shout targeted visa, mc, paypal and paysafe. I guess it's possible the game storefronts acted due to concerns of one of them.
In online stores Visa and MC are the big ones. If we exclude China, Visa and MC make up 90% of all online purchases worldwide. For online stores they are the two players who matter. Losing one is a significant loss of revenue, losing both will kill the store.
All of those devices are child companies of either Banks or Credit Card companies. Or, like Square, owe their continued existence to banking and wall st firms dumping cash on them.
The one outlier I know about is Canada's Interac system, which was started by Canadian banks, but now is its own thing
That's not quite true.
There are several layers between point of sale and the card brands and each layer is generally an independent company. Each of those companies makes or sells hardware and/or software that is used by the companies lower in the chain.
Square takes up several of these layers at once and charges much higher fees than other processors. The high fees and massive market coverage is why they exist, not because they're chewing through VC funds still.
According to wikipedia, where it listed the many rounds of VC and bank finding they have, they haven't yet made a profit
Square is owned by Block Inc who is a publicly traded company. They made $190m net profit in Q1 2025
And they lost 541 million in 2023.
And they were profitable in 2020 and 2021, what's your point?
Companies lose money sometimes
Block Inc, with the outlier of last year, is a company that takes a not insigificant cut of transactions.
Until the end of 2024, they were not profitable to the tune of -605 million dollars. Thats my point.
From what I understand it wasn't actually mastercard and visa?
Itch statements made it very clear the issue was PayPal and Stripe.
Steam even disabled PayPal payments for a while, a couple days before the purge. While direct card payments with Visa/Mastercard still worked fine.
Valve also clarified today that it was the processors, not the card management companies, that they talked to. The processors were pointing at MasterCard's rules, but refusing to provide Valve with someone at MasterCard to talk to.
So it's Valve's fault for just going with it, seems to me.
Still requires them to find a solution, putting it on patreon won't work forever. I think most game stores should find a way to adopt cryptocurrency.
Well, everyone discussing this seems to have been confused about it. Is it fucking PayPal and Stripe or fucking Mastercard and Visa?
We'll probably never get the whole story. Itch's update from yesterday points the finger at stripe, others could still be involved.
It almost certainly wasnt the card brands forcing the issue. They outsource that stuff to payment processors and other middle men because it's cheaper and gives them some legal shielding if someone buys something illegal with their cards
It's been pretty widely reported that it's PayPal and Stripe(mostly Stripe) that have been the ones that were requiring them to remove the NSFW material.
MC and Visa are not technically payment processors, that would be stuff like stripe or ayden.
The problem is that cc companies have rules that put the onus of ensuring nothing illegal is purchased with their issued cards on the ones actually meditating the transaction, so it becomes a chilling effect because the intermediaries don't want to risk burning a bridge with the largest cc networks in the world, and overcorrect as a result.
best to say card networks, as cc companies both include a lot of other things (like issuers), and doesn’t include some things (like debit cards, which still use the card networks)
There are other stakeholders, like regulators and shareholders.
Do other payment processors exist? Why is this hard for you?