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Mastercard release a statement about game stores, payment processors and adult content
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this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2025
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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.