Technology

You do realise religion is just an excuse?

They're not talking about with Steam customers though, but rather with the religious idiots who have decided to crusade against porn, feel emboldened by recent age-ID bills and are now pursuing the "MasterCard funds filth" angle.

I'm kinda wondering what the ratio of anti-porn religious knobs is you gamers. There's a lot of religious folk but many of them also enjoy porn so ...

It's been going on since the start of the internet pretty much. Web hosts do the same thing. though they are much more forgiving. Middlemen saying what you can and can't talk about, share, and consume online.

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.

Hire prostitute in GTA, kill her, get money back - ✅

Have consensual sex with character in hentai game - 😤

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 [nigh] 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.

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.

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)

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.

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.