Why do payment processors do stuff like this? Is there some regulation that requires them to? I get that they don't want to process fraudulent transactions, but I'd think the response to a higher percentage of fraud from some industry would be to charge them more. It doesn't make sense to me why they would be concerned about the content of games, as long as everything is legal and the parties concerned aren't subject to sanctions.
Some of these games seem completely abhorrent, and probably illegal in more restrictive jurisdictions, but not the United States. And I've not seen any suggestion they're funding terrorism or something. So I'm perplexed.
Look. Ignore the content. Why the fuck do we allow credit card companies have a say in how we spend our money?
Fraud? Abuse? Fine, let me put cash onto a card and if that card gets stolen, oh well, my loss. Mastercard should have no say in what what speech is considered acceptable outside of their offices. We don't care what execs at a water company think? Why do we care about the people at Mastercard?
Payment processors(Visa, Master) , payment gateways(Stripe, Paypal...) and payment hosts (Patreon, Gumroad...) are a huge pain to deal with even when you're selling something which is legal and risk free just because their algorithm or employees are often overcautious, anything out of mundane they'll ban first and then ask questions(if you're lucky).
I have a FOSS project called Open Payment Host[1] which removes the payment hosts from the equation and removes the technical hassle of integrating multiple payment gateways but it does not solve the pain of having to deal with the payment gateways and by extension payment processors and banks.
My long term plan is to integrate direct banking API where ever it's available.
Is there any bank from any country which provides direct banking API to end customers for plain savings bank account (I've seen some provide for current accounts).
The article calls out “certain adult games” which is vague. It is interesting to note that most of the delisted games were themed specifically around incest.
So funny how people think this is a moral crusade. You should read articles around the tech stack for payment processing at any adult site. People try to do chargebacks all of the time on these kind of services. "Hunny what is this transaction on our account for BigBussomsCom?" .. "Oh must be some kind of fraud" "then let's call the bank and straighten it out". It's variations of this, over and over that lead to the high chargeback rates. I seem to recall that chargebacks are an order of magnitude higher for adult-oriented transactions. Unless you have a system of countering this with a team devoted to it, you will have a lot of successful chargebacks. I doubt Valve has the specialized team needed to deal with the amount of chargebacks, this the CC companies trying to avoid the headache.
Okay so is Steam enough of a money printer for Valve to say "well fuck you guys, we'll make our own credit card with hookers and bingo"? And hold out Half-Life 3 (only purchasable with the ValveCard) as a carrot?
Related to this, here's an ACLU filing with the FTC that lays out the content that the credit card companies don't like and how they pressure companies to remove it.
If you don't like it, start another payment processor that doesn't cave to pressure. Where are all the free market proselytizers at?
I expect all of you complaining about this to never once complain on legal grounds about Apple's 30% tax in the app store or when a bakery refuses to sell a cake to a gay person.
This is what unrestricted freedom for every entity looks like.
And this is why we need laws and regulations that are actually enforced. Because companies and larger organisms do not necessarily operate on timescales that are able to be reasonably responded to within a human lifespan.
I think it’s hilarious we allow stuff like Postal or Soldier of Fortune without a question, where the whole focus is on going crazy and murdering a whole bunch of people.
But try to show a sensual human body, instead of one that’s ripped into small pieces, and oh my god, this is going too far!
For those thinking is only related to chargebacks and fraud, it is not.
VISA and Mastercard have been banning a lot of content that is not porn but has political values that are disapproved by certain billionaires and investors. There is a bunch of links I wanted to post about, such as US billionaires bragging he personally called VISA CEO to ban content on PH or japanese politicians mad at the censorship of japanese art with certain values because of these companies. But I am on phone walking home so if anyone else has such links please post.
Valve clearly doesn't want to play content cop, but when the payment processors start squeezing, they have no real choice. What's wild is how much unaccountable power Visa and Mastercard wield over digital expression
It's about time that credit cards were treated like money and this kind of behaviour forbidden. When you pay with cash the notes and coins don't refuse to be handed over because the issuing bank has an opinion about what you are buying, it should be the same for all payment methods.
Let's just remember that this is a ballot-box issue, not a payment-type issue.
A lot of folks I'm sure will say this is what crypto is for, but if that ever gained enough traction then (the US) congress would clamp down on it. They'd probably call it "money laundering" or something like that. Remember the guy that went to jail for exchanging crypto for fiat?
Are you mad at Visa/Mastercard? They don't care about porn, they care about not having congress smash them.
You want regulations that would prevent MC/Visa from doing this? You've got it backwards. Regulation is on the side of surveillance and morality police.
The monetary layer is not the one where bad behavior should be policed. Being able to send and receive money is a basic utility that no government or bank should be able to deprive someone of. That's why I support cryptocurrency.
Tangent, but each of those events should be a reminder of why we must fight to never, ever live in a cashless society.
Because once big entities control the pipeline of what you can buy and you have no alternative, they basically can dictate what you can and can't do.
We saw that during the wikileak story when visa prevented Europeans to give to the org despite the fact it was perfectly legal to do so on their soil.
Just like data handled by an Apple device is not really your data since they can prevent you from doing what you want with it, money handled by Visa is only your money until they don't like what you do with it.
If Valve limited credit card purchases to PG games, but let customers purchase other games via crypto, then payment processors couldn’t complain about alleged high chargeback rates or association with adult content.
I imagine payment processors wouldn’t love this solution, but at that point they’re just asking for full editorial control, and we should resist.
To all the people saying "fraud" is the reason - think that through.
Do you really, really think fraud and chargebacks for games covering specific fetishes on Steam have even the tiniest iota of relevance here?
Steam readily offers refunds for a multitude of scenarios!
Valve is also large enough to make itself known to payment processors to not be erroneously lumped in with seedy merchants.
From my understanding, VISA and Mastercard have relatively vague rules that payment processors must follow and payment processors must interpret that based on their own risk tolerance of adverse action being undertaken against them by VISA and/or Mastercard for not following the vague rules in the manner VISA/Mastercard interpret them as at a given point in time.
This is how you end up with situations where both payment processors and the big credit card networks point at each other when politicians ask "why are you withholding financial services from (insert company here)?" and, technically, both entities are correct at pointing the fingers at each other.
There's other factors with respect to contract law in a global economy spanning varied jurisdictions that add additional wrinkles, but I'm skeptical they're the culprit in this specific case
The games that got banned this time, even before considering their depiction of incest, are often of such poor quality that it's difficult to even call them 'games.' Valve itself should have removed them from Steam long before payment processors had to step in. Defending these kinds of games is like equating Blue is the Warmest Color with a random PornHub video, simply because they both contain sexual acts. If Baldur's Gate 3 ever gets banned, then you can truly make a fuss.
there are 2 solutions to this:
1. steam accepts eth and other cryptos; most people associate btc with crypto because it is the original but it is now technically vastly inferior.
2. the seven seas (nobody ever turns your free transaction down and you get to keep whatever it is forever with no fancy license/tos/eulas attached)
This is the kind of thing that crypto gets around. Surely the CC companies will allow folks to use their cards to buy crypto then in the same 1 minute that newly bought crypto could be used to buy the game and valve if they converted the btc to usd at the same day or very quick could mitigate the volatility of the asset
I'll never understand what is these payment processors' problem with adult content.
If someone wants to sell something and someone else wants to buy something, it should be nobody else's business to police it as long as two parties are settled.
That's why I want to see crypto take over and get rid of the middleman and regulators.
They did the same to Dlsite, a while ago, made them rename all the tags and then delist lolige, but more notably alot of games with sailor uniforms and/or high school character/settings.
If you think it's illegal under PROTECT then you should enforce the law, not use credit card companies to force people to use a VPN. And if it's illegal it should be illegal everywhere, not just where people are paying rather than sharing. Clearly if many people are paying for a work it's less likely to be obscene
Why not just make it not purchasable with that payment option/store credit?
In many countries Steam supports plenty of alternative payment options that do not use VISA or mastercard.
Thinking about it, if a platform as enormous as Steam just completely stopped accepting VISA and mastercard, they'd a) probably still be fine b) VISA and mastercard would probably cave - few companies will prioritize outworn politics over literally billions of revenue. In fact I'd expect these two to be the last to do that. Valve would be more the type to put principles first. Too bad they didn't this time.
Can someone please explain why we still have chargebacks in 2025? Don't accept cards without 3DS, problem solved. If not, why not? Are some important consumer segments still stuck with cards that don't have it?
This is not an issue oof payment processors. It is an issue of Visa and Mastercard duopoly, whom use payment processors as middlemen in order to be able to push their own "rules" onto businesses and get away clean.
The good old USA, when you can show someone bashing someone else's head with brain spilling out and it might get an R rating. But show a nipple and holy shit we have crossed the line.
So the outlast trials latest villain is a pair of incestuous elderly conjoined twins. The game features intense violence, lots of genitals, kills via explicit mutilation of those genitals, lots of rape threats. One guy in particular gets turned into a human sex toy via mutilation and wax.
The day I will be informed that Valve delisted anything after being pressured by a credit card company is the last day I buy a game on it. Personally I pay with my own country's payment system that's unrelated to these companies.
Given the pc gamer article mentions "keep it in the family", I think they mean incest. Why on earth did valve have this on their platform on in the first place?
Part of the coalition directing ESG which direct BlackRock and Vanguard which then threaten Visa/Mastercard… has been extremely successful in making people believe this is a crusade only by Visa/Mastercard.
It’s the S. And so very few people have any idea. Visa/MC doesn’t actually hate money.
They have better argument fiduciary defense accept porn money than deny it - unless they don’t and no one asks or thinks about it.
Honestly, this whole Visa/Mastercard control thing feels a lot like realizing you’ve been following rules that don’t really fit you. It’s tough to break out of it. But FedNow is an interesting option. It lets banks move money instantly, 24/7, with no card networks involved, so less hassle with the content policing. It’s not a magic fix (still early days, only works in the US), but it shows there’s another way if you’re willing to step outside the old patterns. Sometimes that’s what you need to actually move forward. And no I'm not a Fednow shill. Has anyone tried Kagi btw? ;)
The discussion seems to be mostly about the moral issues, but it seems likely that the titles being a 'magnet for scams and chargebacks' is more likely the cause.
Just a reminder that when still using cash, you are allowed to buy whatever you want that is legal without asshole bankers or institutions deciding for you!
It is a shame that it takes payment processors to get Valve to do even the bare minimum curation of their store. IMO the thousands of outright bad games and ai slop asset flips and weirdo porn that verges on outright illegal content in many countries should have never been allowed in the first place. All of this leads back to various executives at Valve essentially doing no actual work and refusing to hire anybody because a huge part of their corporate culture is to keep headcount low while chasing constant growth.
Sorry but ancaps are not allowed to complain - it's a 'free market' and the credit card companies are bigger than gabe newell - end of story, cry is free.
In ancap logic I think the fault here is all on gabe for not lobbying the government enough and/or for not having been able to gather enough force to fight against those companies somehow.
It's interesting that Valve sort of put themselves in this situation by opting not to police their store anymore.
I'm personally a fan of fewer restrictions on content in video games and fewer "gatekeepers" but it's kind of inevitable that people would get upset when you chose to allow people to sell games like "Sex With Hitler" and "Pimp Life: Sex Simulator". Deciding to allow that content on your store and simultaneously not going to bat for it is weird, it's like they decided to just get the porn money while they could as a short-term boost to revenue.
Itch.io still has fewer restrictions but I assume they'll eventually have to clamp down too once payment processors cut them off - they don't have the financial resources to fight it like Valve or Epic do.
Interestingly Nintendo has as of late relaxed their restrictions too, you can find porn-adjacent shovelware on the Switch eShop despite their history of being very censorious. I wonder if payment processors will successfully push them around too or if Nintendo is too big to get pushed around.
Simulated "immoral" activity could be considered a moral gray area. If nothing else, morality is subjective.
So I think it's reasonable to argue for private, individual consumption of morally subjective material (not least of which is the logistical difficulty of preventing such things), as well as the right to create and sell such things. (You or I might approve of or oppose those things, but that's a different argument from what I make below.)
Aside from that, I don't think Valve or a payment processor is obligated to be a neutral party. Whether it might come from collective consumer backlash or whoever makes decisions for an organization deciding what they will or will not allow to flow through their system, I think they too should have the right to allow or ban things. If publishers and consumers want their morally gray content, so be it, but don't feel entitled to have Steam and VISA along for the ride if they don't want to be.
Hypothetically, Valve might prefer Steam be neutral, because money. But then they have the option to fight their payment processor or look for alternatives, rather than "forcing" their payment processor to be a part of something that the payment processor opposes.
TL;DR when a morally subjective issue involves a lot of parties, every party should have the right to "opt out" if they are morally opposed. (in my opinion)
The ISPs, web services, payment services, and advertisers are all in a Mexican standoff right now - with every small move for domination throwing a volley of bullets at the customer from all sides.
The card companies are cutting off all the low hanging fruit to establish precedence (steam is not the only one affected). One it's established that they can ban certain things, then they've established they get to control the purchase of literally any idea, cause, or product they want. The card companies want to control and starve anything or anybody they don't like - especially their competition and regulators. They'll control the spice.
Net neutrality regulation would have prevented this and forced them to play nice with each other, with the side effect of a net benefit to society instead of tearing it apart.
We all warned you the free and open Internet, and by extension irl, as we knew it would unravel.
Fundamental property rights are now dead; we just watched it happen.
Payments companies successfully got valve to stop purveying weapons grade incest/child-porn/rape themed smut that is barely a game?
Nabokov was a great author and Lolita was the work of a great author who turned his pen/typewriter to a detestable subject leading to innumerable questions about art.
These guys are just z-graders who get off on non-consensual sexual interactions involving children.
Valve absolutely should not be publishing this stuff.
Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games
(pcgamer.com)938 points by freedomben 18 July 2025 | 902 comments
Comments
Some of these games seem completely abhorrent, and probably illegal in more restrictive jurisdictions, but not the United States. And I've not seen any suggestion they're funding terrorism or something. So I'm perplexed.
Fraud? Abuse? Fine, let me put cash onto a card and if that card gets stolen, oh well, my loss. Mastercard should have no say in what what speech is considered acceptable outside of their offices. We don't care what execs at a water company think? Why do we care about the people at Mastercard?
I have a FOSS project called Open Payment Host[1] which removes the payment hosts from the equation and removes the technical hassle of integrating multiple payment gateways but it does not solve the pain of having to deal with the payment gateways and by extension payment processors and banks.
My long term plan is to integrate direct banking API where ever it's available.
Is there any bank from any country which provides direct banking API to end customers for plain savings bank account (I've seen some provide for current accounts).
[1] https://github.com/abishekmuthian/open-payment-host
https://bsky.app/profile/steamdb.info/post/3lu32vdlsmg27
Wondering if this will be a slippery slope towards pulling more anodyne stuff.
This statement imply that:
* Simulated violence is not violence.
* Simulated sex is not sex.
* Simulated sorcery is not sorcery
https://www.aclu.org/documents/federal-trade-commission-comp...
I expect all of you complaining about this to never once complain on legal grounds about Apple's 30% tax in the app store or when a bakery refuses to sell a cake to a gay person.
This is what unrestricted freedom for every entity looks like.
And this is why we need laws and regulations that are actually enforced. Because companies and larger organisms do not necessarily operate on timescales that are able to be reasonably responded to within a human lifespan.
But try to show a sensual human body, instead of one that’s ripped into small pieces, and oh my god, this is going too far!
VISA and Mastercard have been banning a lot of content that is not porn but has political values that are disapproved by certain billionaires and investors. There is a bunch of links I wanted to post about, such as US billionaires bragging he personally called VISA CEO to ban content on PH or japanese politicians mad at the censorship of japanese art with certain values because of these companies. But I am on phone walking home so if anyone else has such links please post.
https://www.collectiveshout.org/open-letter-to-payment-proce...
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Steam-Payment-providers-force-V...
they have their own banned topics lists and if you fuck up you lose your income
Dethrone the payment processors or they get to decide what is and is not allowed to be sold.
A lot of folks I'm sure will say this is what crypto is for, but if that ever gained enough traction then (the US) congress would clamp down on it. They'd probably call it "money laundering" or something like that. Remember the guy that went to jail for exchanging crypto for fiat?
Are you mad at Visa/Mastercard? They don't care about porn, they care about not having congress smash them.
You want regulations that would prevent MC/Visa from doing this? You've got it backwards. Regulation is on the side of surveillance and morality police.
Because once big entities control the pipeline of what you can buy and you have no alternative, they basically can dictate what you can and can't do.
We saw that during the wikileak story when visa prevented Europeans to give to the org despite the fact it was perfectly legal to do so on their soil.
Just like data handled by an Apple device is not really your data since they can prevent you from doing what you want with it, money handled by Visa is only your money until they don't like what you do with it.
I imagine payment processors wouldn’t love this solution, but at that point they’re just asking for full editorial control, and we should resist.
mindgeek then wiped all _unconfirmed_ content regardless of whether it was revenge porn or not.
Do you really, really think fraud and chargebacks for games covering specific fetishes on Steam have even the tiniest iota of relevance here?
Steam readily offers refunds for a multitude of scenarios!
Valve is also large enough to make itself known to payment processors to not be erroneously lumped in with seedy merchants.
From my understanding, VISA and Mastercard have relatively vague rules that payment processors must follow and payment processors must interpret that based on their own risk tolerance of adverse action being undertaken against them by VISA and/or Mastercard for not following the vague rules in the manner VISA/Mastercard interpret them as at a given point in time.
This is how you end up with situations where both payment processors and the big credit card networks point at each other when politicians ask "why are you withholding financial services from (insert company here)?" and, technically, both entities are correct at pointing the fingers at each other.
There's other factors with respect to contract law in a global economy spanning varied jurisdictions that add additional wrinkles, but I'm skeptical they're the culprit in this specific case
Full-on murder simulators: OK.
Exchanging consensual pleasure with the wrong person: NOT OK.
They should have at least aimed at Living With Sister: Monochrome Fantasy.
there are 2 solutions to this: 1. steam accepts eth and other cryptos; most people associate btc with crypto because it is the original but it is now technically vastly inferior. 2. the seven seas (nobody ever turns your free transaction down and you get to keep whatever it is forever with no fancy license/tos/eulas attached)
I'm not sure why the payment processors can't just be excluded for the offending games during checkout instead.
If someone wants to sell something and someone else wants to buy something, it should be nobody else's business to police it as long as two parties are settled.
That's why I want to see crypto take over and get rid of the middleman and regulators.
If you think it's illegal under PROTECT then you should enforce the law, not use credit card companies to force people to use a VPN. And if it's illegal it should be illegal everywhere, not just where people are paying rather than sharing. Clearly if many people are paying for a work it's less likely to be obscene
In many countries Steam supports plenty of alternative payment options that do not use VISA or mastercard.
Thinking about it, if a platform as enormous as Steam just completely stopped accepting VISA and mastercard, they'd a) probably still be fine b) VISA and mastercard would probably cave - few companies will prioritize outworn politics over literally billions of revenue. In fact I'd expect these two to be the last to do that. Valve would be more the type to put principles first. Too bad they didn't this time.
Why is that above the bar then?
It’s the S. And so very few people have any idea. Visa/MC doesn’t actually hate money.
They have better argument fiduciary defense accept porn money than deny it - unless they don’t and no one asks or thinks about it.
but they'll tell you that they got pressured to ban "adult content" from steam
HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA
Who's kid is obsessed with microtransactions and cs:go cases gamba on steam?
Psyop and propaganda, calling them out gets you a ban
It’s not a precedent, its been the status quo for half a century
In ancap logic I think the fault here is all on gabe for not lobbying the government enough and/or for not having been able to gather enough force to fight against those companies somehow.
I'm personally a fan of fewer restrictions on content in video games and fewer "gatekeepers" but it's kind of inevitable that people would get upset when you chose to allow people to sell games like "Sex With Hitler" and "Pimp Life: Sex Simulator". Deciding to allow that content on your store and simultaneously not going to bat for it is weird, it's like they decided to just get the porn money while they could as a short-term boost to revenue.
Itch.io still has fewer restrictions but I assume they'll eventually have to clamp down too once payment processors cut them off - they don't have the financial resources to fight it like Valve or Epic do.
Interestingly Nintendo has as of late relaxed their restrictions too, you can find porn-adjacent shovelware on the Switch eShop despite their history of being very censorious. I wonder if payment processors will successfully push them around too or if Nintendo is too big to get pushed around.
So I think it's reasonable to argue for private, individual consumption of morally subjective material (not least of which is the logistical difficulty of preventing such things), as well as the right to create and sell such things. (You or I might approve of or oppose those things, but that's a different argument from what I make below.)
Aside from that, I don't think Valve or a payment processor is obligated to be a neutral party. Whether it might come from collective consumer backlash or whoever makes decisions for an organization deciding what they will or will not allow to flow through their system, I think they too should have the right to allow or ban things. If publishers and consumers want their morally gray content, so be it, but don't feel entitled to have Steam and VISA along for the ride if they don't want to be.
Hypothetically, Valve might prefer Steam be neutral, because money. But then they have the option to fight their payment processor or look for alternatives, rather than "forcing" their payment processor to be a part of something that the payment processor opposes.
TL;DR when a morally subjective issue involves a lot of parties, every party should have the right to "opt out" if they are morally opposed. (in my opinion)
The card companies are cutting off all the low hanging fruit to establish precedence (steam is not the only one affected). One it's established that they can ban certain things, then they've established they get to control the purchase of literally any idea, cause, or product they want. The card companies want to control and starve anything or anybody they don't like - especially their competition and regulators. They'll control the spice.
Net neutrality regulation would have prevented this and forced them to play nice with each other, with the side effect of a net benefit to society instead of tearing it apart.
We all warned you the free and open Internet, and by extension irl, as we knew it would unravel. Fundamental property rights are now dead; we just watched it happen.
You gave up the fight. You voted for it. Twice.
Nabokov was a great author and Lolita was the work of a great author who turned his pen/typewriter to a detestable subject leading to innumerable questions about art.
These guys are just z-graders who get off on non-consensual sexual interactions involving children.
Valve absolutely should not be publishing this stuff.