Need to petition Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and American Express. I don't think trying to get Valve to reverse these recent changes will necessarily be effective, since they are being pressured by the payment processors and they definitely aren't going to risk not being able to effectively do business at all.
this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
589 points (99.5% liked)
Technology
73254 readers
3767 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Yeah, nah.
Petition these people:
https://www.collectiveshout.org/partners
Collective Shout is sustained by a small number of Australian partners. These are not big groups, and would quickly pull funding under any sort of pressure.
Collective Shout has a deep history with Christofascism and TERFs, so highlighting those angles is the way to go to get them pariahed. Once CS is out of the picture, we can work on undoing the damage they did.
Petitioning people to do something that is against their entire purpose doesn't seem like it would be effective.
Not only that, they'll get louder claiming they're being oppressed. Ignore them.
It's the height of stupidity to try to pressure collective shout.
You don't tell the child to stop drawing on the wall for the 20th time and expect it to work.
You take it's crayons away so it can't anymore.
You fix the tool of abuse so it can't be abused.
I think the idea is to pressure the partners of Collective Shout, per the url in the comment. Those might not necessarily agree with what they're doing in this case, and if they see it's making waves, reconsider their partnership.
Looking at the partners on that page, I think at least half of them are more than okay with Collective Shout's actions.
The petition is directed at Visa and MasterCard. I'm not sure why the article says it's a petition directed at Steam, because it's not.
i would expect the multi billionaire owners of the largest gaming platform on PC to have the ability to not fold like paper mache. I can also be mad at payment processors and valve at the same time
Kinda hard to stay at the top if you literally get blacklisted from doing financial transactions. Big as they are, they're nowhere near the same level as the payment processors.
Valve is basically a small business one bad Monday from going bankrupt compares to payment processors.
Banks and payment processors are the single largest most powerful forces in a capitalist market.
You literally do NOT get bigger. Full stop.
Valve is basically a small business one bad Monday from going bankrupt compares to payment processors.
Few quick searches around the internet says that (measured by revenue) Mastercard alone is roughly 3 times bigger than Valve. So even if Valve is pretty big player it's not even close on major payment processors. And they're not playing on the same rules either, any payment processor can vanish payments for anyone with just 'fuck you, that's why' -reasoning buried in their contracts. There's almost no one who could afford to fight with them even in theory and much less in practise.
No, Valve has something that MasterVisa doesn't: being liked by people. If Valve stopped taking payments and yelled to the rooftops that MasterVisa was responsible, people from all walks of life will stop, listen, and then get their pitchfork. Through the platform of Steam, people browse through the things that make their days happier. If MasterVisa threatened to take that away, people will respond.
Also, Europe and other blocs will be inclined to oppose MasterVisa. It would be a very public case of where America is dictating how the people of other lands must live. That would almost certainly make systems like Wero take off, due to sheer nationalist fervor. America is easily painted as the enemy if it allowed MasterVisa to continue abusing people on such a huge and international scale.
Money isn't the only currency a person has, their opinions and agency are even more important, if they acted on using them. History books are filled to the brim where motivation is the greatest driving force of all.
Make your own payment processor, Gaben. It's the way.
Then people would have to get specific cards or crypto or whatever that aren't Visa/MasterCard in order to buy Steam games. That, of course, is if you can get banks to agree to carry "Steam cards". Either that, or everyone would need to buy Steam gift cards as an exclusive form of payment.
All of these are much less convenient than keeping your existing debit/credit card to pay for Steam games, and less convenience means less sales.
Or you could just transfer funds to a steam card, then with that, but all you want.
Yeah, but SteamPay is the future
Steam does not have to only accept steampay. Tho? You fear visa and mastercard will blaclist steam?
Steam removed games because visa and mastercard threatened to blaclist it, so yeah. That's the whole point.
Is that kinda what PayPal is, or was intended to be?
Yeah but PayPal's awful. They literally arbitrarily deny you access to your own funds. At least the banks have rules.
If someone wants to pay me something they can use it literally anything other than PayPal. I don't trust them they've stolen money from me before.
I don't trust them they've stolen money from me before
Same. They stole a small amount (~10 USD), but at that time that was 2-3 days worth of groceries where I live (which would have helped a lot)
they've actually paid me after I was scammed by fake stock broker. without fussing about it too. Really easy to get payments reversed.
Either way I’d be happy to also switch to another method of payment if it were an option.
PayPal is almost as pornphobic as MastercardVisa
Yes
I wish it was feasible to hve a large scale boycott of visa and mastercard. american express is already useless so it wouldn't help much to include it...
Or a decentralized alternative that isn't just used to scam people, that doesn't eat up insane amounts of electricity to process, and is as convenient as regular money.
In reality, private corporations should not have control over money at all. Money is printed by the local government and should be controlled by the local government. Governments generally have better free speech protections than private corporations, which have none. Obviously, free speech protections are not universal, but countries can already ban content in other ways.
Alternatives are not so hard, if you allow everyone to exchange and use every currency. Then, well, you need to pay someone selling in currency A - you pay your B's to buy some A's and you pay with them.
But there are lots of limitations on banking, some in good faith, and some to prevent mobility and make everything tracked. Possibility to track means possibility to decide who gets to do what.
I think that's why gold standard was dropped in the first place. When all money is guaranteed with gold, and gold (still does) buy money, you do have a universal currency hard to track.
With decentralized electronic currencies the problem is - you need consensus. There's no way around it at all. You can devise something to separate one consensus into a tree of subspaces, to make it more efficient in case an operation with a coin "123456" depends only on operations with coins from "123*" subspace, or something like that. Partitioned system. So then you don't need consensus on subspaces untouched by your operation. But you still can't have such an offline currency, because that depends on the finite amount of gold, while with electronic currencies double spending exists.
And I don't know if it's possible to make such an electronic currency anonymous for outside spectators. Zero-knowledge and other buzzwords are good, but I don't know how one can do this.
There is already a PoW crypto that is actually private called Monero. It uses ring signatures to sign transactions and rotating public keys to keep public keys private. It also happens to be relatively stable since it's basically the only crypto that people use as a currency (generally to buy illegal contraband online). It's PoW though, so has the energy consumption issues.
Since it's PoW, though, it still consumes buckets. Something I thought looked cool was Chia coin, which somehow uses hard drive space as a consensus algorithm which saves a ton of electricity, but I haven't read the whitepaper on that, so I don't fully understand it.
Signed, thanks for the link <3
But we have to oppose CollectiveShout as well, as in destroy them. They're way worse than I thought
"Hi there, would you like to sign the petition?"
The article is saying the petition is targeting steam, but the actual linked petition is addressing credit card companies. The text of the petition doesn't mention steam or valve. I don't know what the author of the article thinks is happening here, and they've explained it very badly.
As of July 16, Steam's new guidelines state that game publishers should avoid releasing titles that may violate the terms and conditions of its payment processors. In other words, the storefront is asking creators to not only follow the platform's rules but also submit to potential oversight from companies like MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal.
and from the petition
MasterCard and Visa have increasingly used their financial control to pressure platforms into censoring legal fictional content
Steam is enforcing MasterCard's, Visa's, and PayPal's policies. From Steam's Rules and Policies:
What you shouldn’t publish on Steam: ... 15. Content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers. In particular, certain kinds of adult only content.
Point number 15 was not there in a Snapshot from February on the wayback machine. If anything, the solution should just be to remove the payment method for those games (which would still hurt the creators substantially).
There is a line that is confusing:
In response to this censorship, some fans have launched a petition on Change.org urging Valve to revert its policies
There may be petitions about reverting Valve's policy, but it's not the main petition against Visa and MasterCard (which is the one they linked).