Updated: 8/1/2025 4:18 p.m. ET: In a statement to Kotaku, a spokesperson for Valve said that while Mastercard did not communicate with it directly, concerns did come through payment processor and banking intermediaries. They said payment processors rejected Valve’s current guidelines for moderating illegal content on Steam, citing Mastercard’s Rule 5.12.7.
“Mastercard did not communicate with Valve directly, despite our request to do so,” Valve’s statement sent over email to Kotaku reads. “Mastercard communicated with payment processors and their acquiring banks. Payment processors communicated this with Valve, and we replied by outlining Steam’s policy since 2018 of attempting to distribute games that are legal for distribution. Payment processors rejected this, and specifically cited Mastercard’s Rule 5.12.7 and risk to the Mastercard brand.”
Rule 5.12.7 states, “A Merchant must not submit to its Acquirer, and a Customer must not submit to the Interchange System, any Transaction that is illegal, or in the sole discretion of the Corporation, may damage the goodwill of the Corporation or reflect negatively on the Marks.”
It goes on, “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.”
Violations of rule 5.12.7 can result in fines, audits, or companies being dropped by the payment processors.
“Nonconsensual mutilation of a person or body part” includes just about every fighter or shooter game. They really want to have COD delisted over this?
To be fair, that would be fucking hilarious.
you’re missing some context in that.
“The sale of a product… which is patently offensive and lacks serious artistic value… (such as… images of… Nonconsensual mutilation of a person or body part”
insert joke about COD lacking artistic value, but clearly there is more to COD than just body mutilation.
“Patently offensive” and “lacks serious artistic value” are entirely subjective classifications. With those restrictions, any game with country music should be delisted.
Man, if i could get a patent on offending people . . . money, money money, win win win.
Wagner and Mahler: Listen, we have some really badass tracks. Use them! And nobody would dare to call this music “not art enough”.
Artistic value is subjective.
That clause shouldn’t hold up in a court.
Unironically, COD getting delisted would probably get mainstream media coverage and legitimate outrage from people who “don’t play video games” but actually do.
Some kid on COD said he fucked my mom and then he called me a faggot.
A ‘removed’?
Also most movies, tv shows, books, every single religious text
I don’t think they realize how much worse their brands look now, after starting all this shit…
I want to cancel ally visa and mastercard cards and never give them my business ever again after this
This might just be my insomnia talking, but I thought a reasonable idea might be to call and reduce the available credit by however much is comfortable. For me, it would be fairly reasonable to reduce it by 50%. I assume they use some kind of magicians handshake to value their company based on how much potential credit is out there… Maybe it’d do nothing though. Anyone know?
You guys use them for actual credit? To me it seems that in Europe they are mostly used as a debit card directly charging your account, but compatible with the global payment processing of them.
I thought credit was the main selling point.
- Ability to dispute & reverse charges.
- Flexibility to keep cash in an account earning higher interest until payment is due.
- Not having to constantly check enough cash is in your low interest checking account (which you’ll keep low so your cash earns more interest elsewhere & to minimize losses in case of unauthorized debits).
You have an account that earns interest?
Last time I saw that was as a child.
But then again I was able to get a loan for my house at ridiculously low interest, so I’m not complaining too much.
Well think of it like this. I keep an amount in my checking account (basically no interest) to cover the credit card bills. Extra I move out to an online savings account that does have a ddcent interest rate. By having a date when the CC bill comes due, I can check once a month (7 days before due) and move money if needed to cover the bill. So while the checking has practically no interest, I was getting close to 5% on the savings for a while. Still a far stretch from the 12% cds I got as a kid, but it’s something.
HYSA exist. My checking account earns a pittance.
You can occasionally find high interest checking accounts too, but they tend to have weird strings attached
Yep, like this one, though it could earn more in bonds or investments.
Low-interest loans are great, too: if they don’t need to be repaid right away, they can be leveraged to earn back more than their cost.
This will do nothing except hurt your own credit score as your credit utilization will be higher
I am not a financial guru so hopefully someone will correct me if I’m wrong about this, but your credit score is affected positively the more available credit you have. So by voluntarily lowering your available credit, you’re actually hurting yourself way more than the card companies. At least I think that’s how it works, or rather one of many factors.
That will also destroy your credit rating
Amex is still reasonably good.
Amex charges up to 14% of every transaction. If a place takes it, they are almost always ripping you off.
Amex typically charges between 1.7 and 3.3%.
As someone who does not take amex they want to charge me between 7% and 14%. Maybe if I did more sales they would not charge as much, but the reason amex is not taken in as many places as mastercard or visa is the 7% to 14%.
Weird. All the info I can find shows a maximum merchant fee of 3.3% + $0.10 per transaction.
Even this article about the topic says the reason is because amex charges .5% - 1% more. Not 6-13% more.
Maybe it varies by country? Are you in NoAm or somewhere else?
I am in Canada, and amex is famous for charging way too much in merchant fees. They also charge it under a silly system based on the type of card used (the more “elite” the more the merchant pays).
Does it really matter when you’re a duopoly and equally bad as one another?
Until they’re not, and any competition now has the NSFW and LGBT markets to themselves
Brilliant, just make your rules vague and force everyone else down the chain to self-censor. Surely this will result in the best outcome.
Fucking mastercard
It’s not even that vague.
Valve basically said: “we are not doing anything illegal”.
To which mastercard responded: “yeah but you’re making us look bad, so tough”.
To which mastercard responded
I don’t think you read this properly. Mastercard didn’t respond at all.
Of course they did.
They just did so from behind a veil of plausible deniability.
You think a citatation of a specific mastercard contract clause came from a concerned partner?
A lawyer for a processor like PayPal or Stripe could easily have gone “uh, the Mastercard contract clause prohibits this”.
And PayPal is well known for doing shitty things, so it wouldn’t surprise me.
Maybe.
But Valve asked mastercard directly.
A lack of a response is a also a response, in this case essentially an endorsement of whatever their partner was telling Valve.
So you think Valve is lying?
What?
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Did you not read literally the first line?
In a statement to Kotaku, a spokesperson for Valve said that while Mastercard did not communicate with it directly, concerns did come through payment processor and banking intermediaries
Yes.
Plausible deniability.
“Oh so sorry that wasn’t us, one of our partners just overzealously applied our policies”
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or any other material that the Corporation deems unacceptable to sell in connection with a Mark
which could be just anything.
NugganMastercard has decided the following things are abominations, and are therefore unacceptable to sell:Cats, the colour blue, oysters, mushrooms, chocolate, garlic, cheese, the smell of beets, jigsaw puzzles, and rocks
A few of those even have actual real live victims, unlike video game porn. This whole debacle is truly absurd.
These comments are what is absurd ngl.
Get a grip.
wat
Whoat?
Obviously our solution here is to send a pissed off bard to beat up Mastercard, then.
If they just wanted to follow the law, they could have left it at “don’t sell anything illegal” without all the extra “brand damage” nonsense.
Up to the third comma, yes, but all the rest seems to go beyond that pretty arbitrarily.
When they say anything that “may damage the goodwill of the corporation”, and qualify that with “in the sole discretion of the Corporation” that just means “anything we don’t want to be associated with, and we will be the judge of that”.
That’s what makes it so vague, how is a Merchant or an Acquirer supposed to know what Mastercard might find damaging to the goodwill? They have to guess, or use trial and error*. Most will just err on the side of caution, which means customers get blocked from even more purchases, just to be safe.
* Or talk to Mastercard, which Valve apparently tried, but they wouldn’t respond.
When they say anything that “may damage the goodwill of the corporation”,
Looks like MasterCard is going to have to ban MasterCard because of all the damage they’ve done to MasterCard’s goodwill.
Their rules seem to just follow the law
Whose law? The US? UK? Netherlands? Japan? Or Singapore?
That’s why it’s vague.
It’s much worse than that. How they word it is “if it may damage the public image of mastercard”. And they don’t review the content, they review the means used to prevent the damage to their brand.
So valve doesn’t even need to have anything that actually damage mastercard brand, it just need to be that mastercard is not comfortable enough with the measures used to prevent it.
Like buying anything would actually damage the brand of Mastercard. It’s such a nonsensical excuse that I’m surprised nobody laughed in their face.
Yeah, right up until assholes start posting “MASTERCARD SELLS SMUT INCEST HENTAI GAMES” on TikTok. Then it’s a problem, and MasterCard considers that damaging to the brand.
There’s really nothing stopping anyone from posting that right now. That’s the quality level of most of the online content nowadays.
That’s my point. They are posting it, and MasterCard does consider it harmful to the brand, so now we’re here.
Except that’s entirely false. Even now they are pretending they do nothing, it’s the intermediaries who force things.
Mastercard sells absolutely nothing. And they have no responsibility for anything sold. And no one ever thought it was mastercard selling or even allowing to sell illegal things.
In fact, most people will believe no one sound of mind will buy something illegal with a credit card because mastercard and the likes will give your identity to the police.
So it’s not about illegal things, and it’s not about their image.
No, the rules don’t (that’s why it’s been fine for 7 years), and you used a derogatory term so cry harder about your downvotes.
please sir may I have another
I love how this has damaged Mastercards brand much more than anything Valve sells. MC would rather pressure Valve for selling NSFW games, than clean up billionaires buying and trafficking children.
Hey, Mastercard don’t deal with those transactions. Too traceable! Diplomatic narcotics and crypto have less of a paper trail…
Mastercard is living the corporate dream. They’ve colluded their way to a near monopoly and don’t have to care about the value of their brand. They just have to be invisible enough that they don’t pull heat for something or other from various governments.
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Collective Shout says it wasn’t their fault, MC and Visa say it wasn’t their fault, Steam and Itch say it wasn’t their fault. Conclusion? No one is to blame! No one did it! What’s more, it didn’t even happen!! it was all a figment of our imagination!
I mean, PayPal has not denied responsibility so far. Which is pretty interesting
They must be like the guy who is involved in the mischief but since he is not as visible as the others, he pretends that the issue is not with him to see if he gets away with it.
Which sounds to me like Steam and Itch could restore everything. Unless MC/Visa wants to publicly say they can’t?
Tl;dr: Mastercard says they didn’t “force” Valve to remove nsfw games. They just told them that if they didn’t remove the games that were complained about by Collective Shout, they’ll block them.
Couldn’t they just block collective shout thus probably losing far less business?
Mastercard? Yes, but then they’d have to admit that they were in the wrong, so it seems unlikely.
Unless MC and Visa are run by people who already agree with Collective Shout and are just using them as an excuse to enforce this policy.
Don’t they have shareholders though?
If they do, that includes them. Decision makers at all levels, nobody gets to say “hey I didn’t make Mastercard act this way.” Because the status quo would have been to carry on processing video game payments, even in the face of a minority faction like Collective Shout.
You’d expect them to put profits above this kind of petty consideration. That would only be valid if the company was owned by a fairly small group.
“Mastercard did not communicate with Valve directly, despite our request to do so,” Valve’s statement sent over email to Kotaku reads. “Mastercard communicated with payment processors and their acquiring banks. Payment processors communicated this with Valve
This whole thing reads like a telephone game where nobody wants to take any responsibility.
Honestly, I don’t care if MasterCard doesn’t want to take responsibility. It was their rule and their intermediaries that caused the situation and they did not intervene when valve tried to reach out directly.
They are responsible through action or inaction, no matter how they try to deny it.
It seems like, if they’re publicly denying responsibility, Steam and Itch now have legal cover to restore everything.
I’m not a lawyer, etc. etc., but don’t public statements from these kinds of entities inform how these clauses can be enforced?
At work when no one wants to pick up a task, I issue the “slopey shoulders” award.
they did the exact same thing in the porn industry. naturally Visa and MC didn’t communicate directly with the individual porn companies. So thats’ how places like CCBill and what have you took off. and then Visa and MC laid out their weird rules to CCBill who then passed it along to the individual companies.
CollectiveShout did take responsibility & they’re Confirmed to be pedos, so what are we waiting for ?
Ok furry artists, you know what to do, I wanna see the filthiest Visa x MasterCard art you can dream off. Payment process me baby
not furry but someone already made mastercard-chan and visa-kun
Thats hot. And I am going to assume this is canon from now on.
Is this Merryweathery? I swear he’s always the one doing these gijinkas (Internet Explorer-chan, Twitter-chan, Switch-chan, etc.)
Edit: Just me or does Mastercard-chan have a bulge? Cause like… yes please…
it is!
Figured lol, he’s the usual culprit for any cute gijinka of a current trend.
No, seriously, why don’t we bombard every customer service line with payment processor themed smut?
Phone sex,
Sex gifs,
Those geeek sculptures,
Etc
no don’t do it
Put simply, we allow all lawful purchases on our network.
As Valve correctly points out, this is a blatant & outright lie. They have cut off any number of legal entities over pressure from politicians or groups. Now they have to own it.
I mean, their own Rule 5.12.7 has that “or” in it, which includes transactions that are fully lawful but “may damage the goodwill of the corporation”.
You will find such language pretty much everywhere. And there are reasons for it. A good example are certain drugs that are technically not illegal. Because they have not been officially classified yet.
That used to be a thing here in Sweden some time ago, where they’d just change some little compound and could technically, legally sell it online until it was deemed otherwise. Because it’s now technically a new formula. Once it was classified, they just repeated the proceas.
MasterCard might not want to be seen as an enabler in the drug trade. So while it’s technically legal. They don’t want anything to do with it. And would like the option to take action.
And according to the articles. It’s not MasterCard pointing to that regulation, but the processors. As MasterCard notes. They’re not a bank, they’re not processing your payment. They just provide the technology to do so.
Furthermore. I’m quite amazed that people seem to think Valve is this really good company that we can all trust and take their word on. Valve says one thing. MasterCard says another. I wouldn’t take either one of them on just their word. Better to take a step back, and see how it develops so you don’t make yourself a useful idiot.
So obviously somebody is lying. I really don’t understand why Valve or Itch would be the ones lying about this. My money is on the group of self righteous censorship soldiers with too much time on their hands, and the payment companies. I could always be wrong I though.
MasterCard is so big they don’t even know what all their departments are doing. The PR department probably asked a couple of the top level execs if they were pushing for this and they said no so they claimed it didn’t happen.
MasterCard knows exactly what they’re doing.
executive leadership is varying degrees of Christian nationalist and trump supporters.
source: me, I know people.
they’re blaming it on the middle men
In a statement to Kotaku, a spokesperson for Valve said that while Mastercard did not communicate with it directly, concerns did come through payment processor and banking intermediaries.
Not necessarily. Valve says they haven’t heard from Mastercard directly. Is there evidence of Itch.io having been approached at all? It seems to me that they just made the move to delist and investigate to be safe in the wake of Valve’s rule changes.
If nobody takes responsibility, then they should all just agree that this was a big misunderstanding and reinstate the titty games.
Isn’t every game NSFW? Funny how language works.
Unless your work has been gamified. I play several games at work, one called Jira, another called GIT they aren’t super exciting but it’s a job.
Ironic though that gamification refers to features added to games to make them feel more like jobs (quotas, deadlines, milestones, certification etc).
Are you suggesting “professional gamer” is not a real/worthwhile job?
It’s like being a miner, the job isn’t safe for work
I only have about 20ish hours of work weekly and I’m on a hybrid schedule. My two days at home I’m essentially paid to game since I need to be available but don’t have anything to do. Am I a pro gamer now?
I think I did a whole 4 hours of work last week. Really pushing myself lately.
Dang, be sure not to overdo it. Don’t wanna burn out, y’know?
Fuckers are just propagating the fury without providing a fix. Are the censored games back or not? Because right now they aren’t. Put them back and make Mastercard do something about it now that they have staged their position. Collective Shout is playing both sides.
Gotta love it when companies put something in their legal agreements that just says “we can do whatever the fuck we want.” Is the rest of the wall of text just there to hide that somewhere someone won’t read?
so it was about potential brand damage that doesn’t exist? and/or has this actually brand damaged visa and mastercard more than ignoring collective shout?
What I see is Mastercard hiding behind their generic rules for processors and being fine with the processors taking unilateral action that could damage their brand.
Mastercard should demand they rescind the decision based on a flawed interpretation of their rules since the content IS NOT ILLEGAL where Steam provides it, or drop those processors entirely due to the brand damage their unilateral decision has caused. If Mastercard lets this sit, that signals that they agree with this decision, regardless of what they say, and they should be treated as such.
Read mastercard’s actual rule that is literally in the OP. The processor’s interpretation isn’t flawed and in no way does Mastercard limit their rule to what is illegal.
The rule is so open ended and vague that it’s entirely on Mastercard (and Visa) that this shit happened.
It is intentionally vague, because companies want to be able to weasel out of any and all accountability whenever possible.
But Mastercard isn’t off the hook either way even if we accept the rules as they are currently. Before this incident, Mastercard has been starting to censor adult content in general with rules changes. To the point where there was already a petition on the ACLU site about this exact type of censorship.
https://action.aclu.org/petition/mastercard-sex-work-work-end-your-unjust-policy
Mastercard is trying to weasel their way out of this particular instance because they didn’t directly have a hand in this video game situation, even though they clearly would agree with it based on other recent changes. They’re trying to play both sides by assuming that people didn’t know they were already doing these things.
What I read is that it is not about illegal content. It is about the measures taken to prevent illegal content from being sold. It’s much more devious than simple censorship.
