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
buy a stock through a company like Fidelity where is the stock actually held and that was layers of public/private companies/corporations
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
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.
cc companies
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.
Gee, I wonder who people are going to believe.
Do other payment processors exist? Why is this hard for you?
Instead of linking the actual statement, we have a 3 and a half paragraph “article”. Here is the actual statement from MC
Mastercard has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms, contrary to media reports and allegations.
Our payment network follows standards based on the rule of law. Put simply, we allow all lawful purchases on our network. At the same time, we require merchants to have appropriate controls to ensure Mastercard cards cannot be used for unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content.
Good point, I also forgot the footer.
About Mastercard
Mastercard powers economies and empowers people in 200+ countries and territories worldwide. Together with our customers, we’re building a resilient economy where everyone can prosper. We support a wide range of digital payments choices, making transactions secure, simple, smart and accessible. Our technology and innovation, partnerships and networks combine to deliver a unique set of products and services that help people, businesses and governments realize their greatest potential.
Yes, the statement is in the article, which gives background context.
In fact this statement states that they ask their clients to litteraly do the job of justice. That’s quite scary.
Ensuring a card cannot be used to buy illegal content.
That means they can shut you down if they think you didn’t do enough, which is literally their whim.
Or if there is any possible ambiguity in the law. I’m thinking it’s possible this has something to do with the recent weakening of constitutional protections for adult content in the US, where censorship by states of somewhat arbitrarily “obscene” content can be deemed illegal. The quote in the article by Valve seems to reference the concept of offensiveness in Mastercard’s policies:
Payment processors rejected this, and specifically cited Mastercard’s Rule 5.12.7 and risk to the Mastercard brand. See https://www.mastercard.us/content/dam/public/mastercardcom/na/global-site/documents/mastercard-rules.pdf.
the rule including the text:
- The sale of a product or service, including an image, which is patently offensive and lacks serious artistic value (such as, by way of example and not limitation, images of nonconsensual sexual behavior, sexual exploitation of a minor, nonconsensual mutilation of a person or body part, and bestiality), or any other material that the Corporation deems unacceptable to sell in connection with a Mark.
So what I’m reading between the lines here is, there is now doubt among the lawyers of credit card companies or the lawyers of their middlemen that these games are for sure legal, and not in violation of obscenity laws that rely on hazy standards of offensiveness.
It never was about the laws. If it were, Mastercard wouldn’t have been doing it for quite some time now.
It’s truly idiotic. They backed down to 200 phone calls from CS. They probably cited that rule, saying doing what they do (processing payments) will damage their brand.
Lo and behold, once they stopped processing transactions their brand got damaged. And due to the ego damage already associated, they won’t back down and backtrack not that they actually have a problem on their hands. What with their brand being seen as discriminatory, weak to undue influence and excersizing undue power against their own clients. Very “good brand” of you, Mastercard.
If Mastercard wants to display Christo-fascist family friendlyness they can slap a cross onto their logo and change the font to Comic sans.
The precedent setting supreme court ruling I’m thinking of is very recent, and there are other recent significant changes to law that could also be relevant. My guess is that the phone calls didn’t make the difference on their own, but rather prompted internal conversations about legal liability given the new landscape and how they should be handling it to best avoid potential damages.
MasterCard’s and Valve’s statements seems to point at Stripe and PayPal as the ones who folded to the pressure. These payment processors then cited MasterCard’s rules to back up their change in policy.
MasterCard now clarifying that the payment processors are over-interpreting the rules and anything legal is ok seems a very good thing here. Valve should be able to go back to Stripe and PayPal with this and say: “Hey, you’ve misunderstood the rules you are quoting; MasterCard themselves say anything legal is ok, and that is the exact policy we’ve been using!”
I love how they form a consortium that stays in lockstep to maintain their oppressive control over everyone else.
So Valve says the processors - such as Stripe and PayPal - pressed the issue based on pressure from MasterCard (and possibly Visa). MasterCard says they had nothing to do with it. Itch says that Stripe was directly responsible in their case with a blanket ban on anything generally sexy, but that Stripe blamed their banking partners.
So Stripe, at least, is directly responsible but insists they are under outside pressure. This means the pressure is coming from one or more actual banks. Since we don’t have names, we have to do some research to find out who Stripe works with. The possibilities I was able to dig up on a quick search include:
- Citigroup
- Wells Fargo
- Barclays
- Goldman Sachs
- Evolve Bank & Trust
It seems clear that this has nothing to do with legality in any jurisdiction and that some powerful financial institution is forcing their twisted, puritanical morality on anyone they can at the behest of like-minded authoritarian terrorists. One or more of the above institutions are most likely at fault.
Shittygroup
Hellsfargo
Nutglaze
Oldball sacks
Devolve bank mistrust
This is all still project 2025
Donald Trump is on the Epstein list and is a child rapist
as Cody said on his showdy:
[he] is the guiltiest man who ever lived. just the sweatiest, most obvious rapist and child molester in the history of the world. he deserves an award for this; his first deserved award.
I have a hunch this goes one step higher than the private banks.
Sure. Let them whatabout. But to us, consumers, it shouldn’t matter.
We know the stores aren’t responsible, so we shouldn’t attack them.
The processors are. For Visa and MasterCard it’s pretty obvious. Itch, as you said, puts direct blame on Stripe, and I think we can trust that.
As much as processors need banks, banks also need processors. It’s a sort of symbiosis. Damage to one actually trickles onto the other. So pressing onto processors isn’t a mistake. It’d be foolish at best and malicious at worst to suggest that.
Now that we have leverage as users and consumers, having started a push which made way and caused a response (first the prepared phone statement and now a press release), the absolute wrong thing to do is bacl down and say “sorry, we were wrong, it was B after all and not you, A”.
And look at it this way: There’s less payment processors and they’re smaller than banks. If you suddenly turn to banks, you won’t accomplish anything because to them, a few consumers who aren’t their customers doesn’t cause them even an itch. But if payment processors come to them it might.
By that standard, I ought not be able to use the card to buy booze (might give it to a minor or use for a Molotov Cocktail) a gun (obviously could use for crime) , and probably a million other things they let people buy with cards.
Well, you see, guns and booze are adult things (with tons of lobbying and taxes and corporate interest), while games are for kids and stupid and non-Christian. Simple!
If this is true then I honestly hope Steam and Itch go “ok, then, PayPal and Stripe are banned from the store as payment forms until we can figure out a way of limiting content you can pay with them”. Honestly I don’t think enough people use either of those payments forms, and even if they do currently they almost assuredly have a card they can use instead, and are more likely to switch payment methods than to stop buying games.
IIRC Stripe is the main payment processor. If you’re paying with a visa or mastercard online, it’s usually via stripe. Hence, the immediate censorship.
Paypal can go fuck itself and die
Stripe can also go fuck itself and die, thanks
Ah, if that’s the case then MC statement is kind of pointless, so it’s not them putting the pressure, but you still have to go through the people putting the pressure to get to them. I thought that if you put your card number on steam it had some more direct form of charging than going through stripe.
Unfortunately they are indeed big players, Stripe where people use credit cards and PayPal everywhere else. Both horrible companies that we’d be a lot better off if replaced with privacy-respecting alternatives.
I mainly use PayPal as a necessary evil so I don’t have to pull out my wallet and put the card info in every time I want to buy a game. I dunno maybe I SHOULD go back to that because then only the games that are worth the effort of getting up off the couch are the ones I’d buy.
You can just save your card info in steam. No need for paypal for that.
Honeslty i am not sure what paypal is even for anymore
Ive literally never used PayPal. I didnt trust it in the early days, and by the time online shopping was normal there were far easier alternatives.
Steam remembers my card, so I don’t have to input it there everytime. I get that you wouldn’t want to put your card info somewhere shady, but Steam is not that. Also, most banks nowadays have virtual cards you can use for that sort of thing, some even have one use cards that self destroy after a single purchase. So the safety that PayPal used to offer is not that important anymore.
Another commenter already posted about steam saving card info, but I’ll make a nod to a password manager if you’re not already using one.
First of all, if you aren’t you should be, there’s plenty of awesome free ones. I like keepass or keepassXC. They’re cross platform and you can sync them across devices or use some form of cloud sync (not recommended by me but plenty of people do it).
Anyways. Within a password manager you can save card info (anything actually) and so you don’t have to pull out your physical wallet, just input your manager password and copy/paste over the card details. For me it’s just about as fast as using PayPal anyways with all the extra windows, redirects, loading times, and me using a 2fa token etc.
Funny, it turns out it is more brand damaging not to sell adult games, than to sell them…
Yeah before all this if you told me “MasterCard is selling incest and rape games!” I would have said no, Steam is doing that. But now I feel like they want to have a heavier hand.
Ultimately I think it’s pressure from the Trump admin/project 2025 on companies to eventually make porn illegal
There’s been two decades worth of lawsuits because PayPal has a history of withholding revenue and blocking small e-commerce stores.
I’m talking about e-commerce sites selling a board game, making $40k in sales through paypal, and PayPal refuses to give them money.
PayPal’s stance has been, “Fuck you sue us.”
I’m not saying this because I think Peter Thiel, who was one of the creators of Paypal, is a fucking evil villain.
It was an Elon company. Does it surprise anyone that it’s corrupt as fuck?
Silicon Valley used to call the founding staff of PayPal the PayPal Mafia
That’s not a statement. It’s just a lame excuse and attempt to escape the blame for their behavior.
I do kind of wonder of any of these game devs could go after these payment processing companies for loss of income? I’m not a lawyer, but I’d definitely be looking into it if I was a Dev that has been effected by this.
Likely not, the devs don’t have an agreement of any kind with the processor.
Valve, on the other hand, should be sueing if the Mastercard statement proves false and it was in fact their policies forcing the Steam and Itch io takedowns.
correct. so they could sue itch, which does have an agreement with them. and itch can sue the processors.
Yeah, I figured it would probably be something more like that order of operations. But I’m also sure there is probably a clause in the agreement between dev and store that says they can pull your game for any reason without notice, so there’s probably nothing that can be done.
correct, but it could be argued the clause is too broad and doesn’t fit into the current circumstances considering it wasn’t a choice itch made, but a choice their payment processor forced them to make.
that in itself could be a bridge that leads to a direct confrontation between developers and mastercard.
Loss of income is really difficult to sue for. Especially if you’re an indie company in another country, trying to sue an international company. You either sue locally, or open up a office in their nation.
And your case has to be rock solid.
Like tech companies still lose cases around loss of income, even when it’s obvious to the average person that the major company is going out of their way to stamp out competition.
It’s time for Steam to launch their own payment processing company, and apply pressure directly on the card networks and the future competition.
It won’t be nearly as profitable as their current business model, but sometimes industries need a shakeup.
They don’t need to start a payment processing company. All they gotta do is start accepting crypto again.
I mean come on, the solution is so obvious. This is what cryptocurency was designed for. But Lemmy refuses to see it. You’ll just downvote me and call it a scam like you always do.
The problem is not with crypto itself, it’s with the part of the community (certainly the loudest) who have been telling the public to treat it as an investment asset.
For me, the fact that you have to burn down an amazon forest for every transaction kinda matters, too.
And then people associate crypto with scam even if that’s incorrect because they don’t know better
So it’s a people problem?
I think you getting my upvote was a scam
This, but hating on crypto is trendy
Trendy and morally correct. If we can hate on Mastercard for the banning of adult content on Steam, we can blame crypto and the people around it for the scams and the continuing environmental harm.
Why blame crypto instead of the specific parts of a different community? You can’t generalize a group because of the actions of a few individuals
Cryptos impact is high but not as much as many other fields, and it’s not for the love of profit, but as a necessity to protect a decentralized currency used by lots of people
Many cryptos don’t even have any environmental cost
Why use Mastercard as an excuse to move to crypto? You can’t generalize the problems of the current monetary system because of the actions of a few. Crypto’s impact is high? It is a non-essential. Many cryptos don’t matter. And bitcoin, as the one people gravitate towards, is awful for the environment, for something that is a non-essential (and not even a practical currency).
I have always criticized the current system
Payment processors are just part of it. Each time similar issues arise, I’m here
The current system’s problems are not just the actions of a few. The few in question have an incredibly high market share. Crypto would fix these issues: no need for middlemen, more privacy and anonymity (for applicable cryptocurrencies), cheaper international transactions, decentralized to prevent censorship (as long as governments don’t fuck it up too much)
Not to mention your original message was about criticizing Mastercard which is a single entity, and you’re comparing that to criticizing crypto which isn’t
What isn’t essential to you could be essential to others. For many people, card payments are not essential. Emails aren’t essential. Cars or public transport aren’t essential. You’re saying something is useless based on adoption. So it is just useless until it becomes essential at an arbitrary point? So it does not prove anything
Cryptocurrency is essential to protect your online financial privacy. If you don’t care about it, that’s on you.
Has anyone else noticed that the MasterCard logo kinda looks like a butt?
A fuckable butt at that.
Ima quote Serj on this: “La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la, lie, lie, lie 🎶”
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just ask betamax
And hddvd
