Technology

My view is that Valve is the most likely to be honest about who is responsible here, both because they’re not responsible for this shit show no matter what the answer is and because they have a monetary interest in restarting sales.

Their condition (both via and mastercard) include stuff which, when you read it attentively, boils down to "we only prevent illegal things. And stuff we deem bad.".

It's not even a game of telephone or anything, they have their conditions that says "yes we did" and their PR that says "we probably didn't". They could be playing alone and still losing this one.

It feels to me like payment processing has a similar function to physical currency. Like all of those security features on the bills are used to ensure the transaction is trusted.

Point being, I've long thought that payment processors are essentially doing a job that should be done by the government.

There are strange gaps where physical services have digital analogues but are completely ignored by the government.

I don't understand why the treasury doesn't process payments or why the post office doesn't issue email addresses, for another example.

Anyways, back to the point, physical currency specifically says that it is valid for all debts. If they applied the same logic to payment processing, then this would never happen.

Payment processing is one of those things that really should have been treated as a public utility from the start. The same way we treat water, electricity, and phone lines. But even getting the internet treated as a utility has been a losing battle thus far.

Would it be possible to build a FOSS alternative to all this?

Mastercard: We better not alienate our customers! Let's cave to these religious lunatics from Australia.

Mastercard: Becomes hated by gamers all over the world.

Like for real, the only reason I'm associating them with these games now is because they've actively brought it into the limelight, so we can see that

I wouldn't have even thought anything of association if they hadn't done so.

But now, anytime I see an NSFW game on Steam, I'm immediately associating it with Visa and MasterCard due to the fact that the news is that they're trying to get rid of those games, which I assume is not what they wanted, but you know it's what's happening.

This is actually ruining their brand. I now associate MC and Visa with Christian oppression

They think they're more than a money pipe.

A competitor to MasterCard and Visa could show up with double their combined budget and do what they do to massively disrupt this particular industry. The average Joe would not give half a shit and continue paying for stuff with whatever card their bank gave them just like they always have.

The specific brand of payment processor a card uses is just not a thing people care about unless they have an Amex and that's essentially because places don't always take it.

The astonishingly hypocritical part:

Guess who does payment processing for OnlyFans?

Visa.

And MasterCard.

=D

All you need to verify your id is a credit card!

Then you get all the pr0n you want!

Hope you didn't borrow one from your parents!

No child has ever thought of that before!

Honestly, wouldn't be surprised, they have spent god knows how much to push linux to unshackle themselves from Windows and Microsoft

There's multiple steps to this sadly, including the payment gateway, processor, acquirer and this is before even Mastercard, VISA, Amex or other card companies come into the picture.

It's not impossible, but Valve would need to convince the card issuers that they are a valid processor and then also make deals with banks all over the world for GWs. Or they could just act like Stripe and own the full stack and bully their way through the fintech world.

They just need to adapt this!

Seriously rediculous, most people don't even know if their card is Visa or Mastercard, nor do they care (because they dont know what they are or what they mean).

(This is from my experience with people i know)

Curiously, in our society, killing is less of a taboo than sex, especially in fiction.

Since the aughts, I feel it is a disservice we do to censor out the horror of warfare in games like Call of Duty or Medal of Honor. I haven't seen what they did with Six Days In Fallujah (by a vet of the Iraq War who experienced Fallujah and wanted to share his experience) but we'd have more respect for the gravity of war if the tragedy and immediacy of combat was properly expressed. In the Arma series, it's very easy to die, but it uses a similar engine used for training purposes.

It's our Christian values (more specifically, our Paulinian values -- he thought Christians should not have sex if they can abstain entirely¹ -- which has turned into taboos against sex without strict licenses, that has made our society super-prudish.

1. Paul actually also prohibited having additional children, the end being neigh and all. Later biblical interpreters would have to deal with the world's failure to end, and Christ's failure to return in their lifetimes.

I'm so confused; I thought MC and VISA were payment processors. So when I buy a game off Steam, I have two companies handling my money?