Game of Thrones, both the books and the show, contain content much, much more explicit than many of these games. Yet Itch and Steam have to pull stuff or their very existence is threatened.
One of the slippery slopes here would be that initially they go after smaller players and then work their way up. Would they ultimately go after Amazon or Warner Bros? It’s not totally clear to me that they wouldn’t.
Visa and Mastercard have too much power, and are too willing to capitulate.
I don't have strong feelings around wether steam or itch sell adult content, but its the fact that a duopoly and using their power to exert political influence.
That game advocates staunchly for civil rights and the autonomy of women, children, and other minorities. The Holocaust allegory is so on the nose you can't even call it veiled. It says domestic abuse is unforgivably, undeniably wrong.
They don't even care about marginalized groups or even women themselves. Any piece of content that gives them the heeby jeebies, any media that has conflict: banned. Doesn't matter if it even supports their purported agenda.
Free expression means that objectionable things will be said, even published. There are certainly hairy exceptions, like doxxing, slander, or incitement to violence that can put people in immediate danger, but stuff like this clearly doesn't fall in that category, and giving finance the ability to censor in this way is not signficantly better than governments doing so
I don't think it's a complex position though, I think free speech is good. But I think other things like people's ability to leave lives free from abuse is good as well.
Sometimes free speech can be in conflict with something else that's good. You don't have to agree on the specific, but I think it's at least a coherent non-crazy position.
You seem to have chosen three hairy exceptions, why not four or five?
> stuff like this clearly doesn't fall in that category
Those categories?
Or are you saying that doxxing, slander and "incitement" to violence are three things that can put people into immediate danger, so the single category is "things that can put people in immediate danger"?
Are arguments that doxxing and slander are things that can put people into immediate danger any stronger than the arguments that pornography/obscenity and hate speech put people into immediate danger?
In fact, doxxing is usually extremely legal. The thing that should obviously be illegal is legal.
On the other hand, hate speech can aggravate criminal charges and obscenity is still actually illegal (while pornography isn't necessarily considered obscene any more.)
I guarantee you have a counterpart who thinks it's obvious to everyone that hate speech and pornography cause real harm, where doxxing and slander are journalism and incitement to violence is activism or self-defense.
You don’t get porn movies on Netflix or Disney stream. You don’t get adult toys in your local grocery store. Why do we sell porn on Steam?
Why haven’t game stores just spin off separate store front for porn content? It is basically free, since they already have the infrasructure.
While being removed from general stores, porn has become very visible on big gaming platforms which majority of customers don’t associate with porn. Backlash is inevitable.
I think we can expect a bigger push against porn in general as pendulum swings back on the other side.
Steam also has extensive parental controls: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/054C-3167-DD7F-49...
I'd be more interested in questioning these than why porn is available on Steam. I mean, Disney is essentially an anti-porn product, so I get that, but Netflix is a perfectly reasonable platform for porn. I don't see any reason adult toys can't be sold in Walmart or whatever.
> Backlash is inevitable.
I don't know. This doesn't seem like a grassroots movement.
In the US at least the classier vibrators have been starting to be sold first at shops like Sharper Image, and now, indeed, grocery stores. The packaging of course would not raise any questions from kids, and they are sold in the same aisles as condoms and lubricant. "Sexual health" is the umbrella term which feels like it is in play.
Collective Shout, the group behind this latest censorship push, also wanted Detroit Become Human to be banned because the story depicted someone abusing a child. If we're banning that, why not ban memoirs of child abuse survivors or "James and the Giant Peach"?
You suggest it would be easy for Steam and Itch to run alternative storefronts. Given that they removed content that was offensive to their payment processors, they'd need to engage with high-risk payment processors to power these new store fronts. To say nothing of the technical work involved, those high-risk payment processors certainly charge more for their services. That'd raise the already high 30% that Valve takes on most transaction.
Additionally, if a games journalism website also has relationships with payment processors, are they allowed to review adult games even if those reviews don't include pictures? Or are they going to be equally punished for giving adult content a positive rating?
This all limits the options available of responsible adult consumers and costs creators of LEGAL content revenue.
===
†Here's a longer look at your examples:
Define adult toys. I assume you mean dildos. Walmart doesn't sell those in physical stores, but they do sell them online. Additionally they, like most other stores, do sell lube, condoms, and vibrating rings in their brick and mortar store. Every clothing store that sells underwear sells something many would describe as lingerie. Target has an entire lineup of "after dark" board games stocked right next to Candyland.
"After Netflix published a marketing poster showing the [11 year old girls] twerking in revealing cheerleading outfits without any context, an online petition calling for the cancellation of the US release received more than 140 thousand signatures."
'According to a source close to the production, Pixar’s next feature film, “Lightyear” does feature a significant female character, Hawthorne, who is in a meaningful relationship with another woman. While the fact of that relationship was never in question at the studio, a kiss between the characters had been cut from the film. Following the uproar surrounding the Pixar employees’ statement and Disney CEO Bob Chapek‘s handling of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, however, the kiss was reinstated into the movie last week.'
Bookstores have adult book with images and kids books.
Walmart also sells some adult toys, lubricant, and condoms. They also sell magazines with nudity.
ESPN did The Body Issue magazine in stores for a decade [1]
If a kid has access to steam, do they not have access to the internet? If you are parental blocking the internet, then why not steam?
[1]: https://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/27400369/the-bo...
I'm no prude, but it's really weird to me.
Why not? One shouldn't confuse games with real life.
Because the payment processing is unreliable and prohibitively expensive. For all the whining about "moral pearl clutching", the reality is that adult oriented businesses deal with massively higher rates of fraud and charge-backs. Visa and Mastercard couldn't care less about the ethical issues, it's simply a risk calculation for their business.
2015 article that starts "For nearly a decade, PayPal, JPMorgan Chase, Visa/MasterCard, and now Square, have systematically denied or closed accounts of small businesses, artists and independent contractors whose business happens to be about sex."
https://www.engadget.com/2015-12-02-paypal-square-and-big-ba...
Last Tuesday we got a notice that one of our merchant accounts was shutting us down. One of the card companies contacted them directly and told the bank to stop processing for us. The bank asked for more information, but the only thing they could get from the card company was that part of it had to do with "blood, needles, and vampirism."
https://mascherari.press/financial-censorship-when-banks-dec...
Feels like we really need something like India's UPI that doesn't have a central company imposing beyond-the-law level rules.
Which makes sense - you have buyers and sellers who insist on anonymity, services that leave no trace once rendered, buyers and sellers lying to family and friends about what they're doing, etc.
There's often no "normal" amount of consumption, for example, some sellers receive million dollar tips.
Money laundering is a massive problem, and it enables some really terrible things.
I suspect the fact that American banks are so anti-porn comes from the fact that the American financial sector has such strong anti-money laundering regs (as opposed to, say, the American real estate sector, or the UK financial sector).
One of the reasons OF is doing well is because they insist on following know your customer laws. Not many porn platforms could function that way.
There have been several scandals related to payment processing and money laundering, and some of them connected to companies that do a lot of business with porn. Usually, you will see banks breaking away when those scandals break to the public.
However, banks do not break away just because they don't like the transactions they're seeing. What they actually do is to enforce stricter rules by financially penalizing those who make them lose money. Your transactions are getting canceled a lot (by having to be flagged/undone/paid back etc.)? You'll have to pay higher fees, and if it keeps happening, you will lose your license.
You know when they do often break immediately, however? When there are campaigns by special interests groups, usually connected to conservative groups, to paint companies as having illegal content, even when they don't have this problem any more than any social media platform. In those cases, they don't wait for any tribunal.
The initial regulation also didn't suppress content, it just made you have to go through age verification, which everyone knows doesn't work.
Visa Japan’s CEO says disabling card payment for legal adult content is “necessary to protect the brand” :
https://automaton-media.com/en/news/visa-japans-ceo-says-dis...
(And from what I have understood, there's very little or perhaps even no shame in Japan about these things, so that applies even less there.)
You’d think so, but nope. Using a throwaway account for obvious reasons.
I ended up subscribing to someone who’s catfishing. All their pics on OnlyFans and other socials were just stolen from random Instagram models. I reported it to OF, but got no response.
Whatever verification system OF has, it’s bypassable. It doesn’t matter much when it’s just regular subscribers - nobody really cares about consumer rights in the adult content space. That’s why so many creators can get away with pretending they’re the ones replying to messages. But I’m betting there’s going to be a CSEM scandal linked to this in the next few years.
And besides, why do payment processors even know/care what their customers use their money for as long as it's legal?
If you want to ban porn, fine, but do it through the law, and don't let every company make their own laws. Especially if they are a quasi monopoly (have power).
This is exactly why governments should step in and regulate Visa and MasterCard, to prevent them from banning porn or other adult services.
If this kind of banning goes too far, there will come a point when even Joe Blow and his dog start using cryptocurrency. And once (truly private and anonymous) cryptocurrency becomes widely circulated, people will no longer need to exchange it back into fiat currency. Joe might start paying other people directly with crypto and eventually, perhaps even his rent, utilities, groceries...?
And then what? How will governments collect tax revenue?
Anyone heard of Monero? Kind of their whole purpose... I know, I know, crypto bad, but when censorship comes for [insert your thing/country here], it kind of becomes obvious why people talked about crypto before btc was six digits. Anyone who knows how tech works and also any history about how authoritarian states work should probably see why crypto got so big in the first place, long before [insert scam that makes otherwise sensible people disregard an entire class of technology here].
I don't think it's realistically viable to compete with Steam (or Itch) without access to Mastercard and Visa.
(For anyone thinking crypto: we have a different idea of what it means to be either "realistically viable" or to "compete with Steam")
Even if somebody thinks certain speech should be censored, I doubt they'd want what they consider unsavory speech being driven to use a payment system like Bitcoin, and for that to become the norm, it would open up much more potential for abuse.
Pretty soon (in the U.S.) all porn and sexual-adjacent content is going to be illegal. The christo-fascists currently in power said they were going to do it, and they will.
They could not allow those games to be sold through those particular payment processors and require wire transfers instead. More cumbersome payment method, but better than outright banning them.
If the payment processors try to dictate what content these sites may host even when it involves competing processors that sounds quite anti-competitive practice.
They're not "targeting" payment processors. Payment processors have to deal with significantly more problems due to the nature of porn games and chargebacks. Fix those problems and the payment processors won't have a reason anymore to ban porn (or anything). What's the point of a capitalist economy if not for startups to target market needs like these?
Instead, you become the hub for that kind of material — and that reputation drives away more mainstream creators who won’t want their work associated with it. See also: Kick, Parlor, etc.
Rather than building a principled broad competitor to something like Steam, you end up cornering yourself into a narrow, highly specific market segment.
Yes, that's the point. Not everyone cares about financial censorship, but the few that do will be your customers.
There are the FedNow tokens and ACH which could help but it still requires quite a bit of cost to begin even that route. My customers are going to want to use their cards to pay too.
If they are easy to sway in one direction, why not the other? Simply do what Collective Shout did, but in the opposite direction?
In this case with Steam and Itch.io they are targeting legal games and is just 100% in the wrong. There is a checkered history of Visa/Mastercard dropping legitimate causes because it's hot politically. Which is also in the wrong.
Bitcoin/crypto was supposed to be the way around this kind of censorship, but that's basically a ponzi scheme so that's not the way forward. Unfortunately Visa/Mastercard have a monopoly on the market and they use it regularly to keep out competition. Regulation/investigations need to be done to fix this, but that sure as hell isn't happening under this presidency.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/central-bank-digital-currency...
When I used to kill cops in GTA Vice City as a kid, 20 years ago, I wasn't killing actual cops(duh!). Has society lost their collective marbles since then, and can't differentiate what's a real crime and what's manufactured fiction anymore? Should we also ban all porn off the internet on the same logic?
None of the games banned by Valve in the Visa/Mastercard scandal had any CSAM related stuff in them, they were just weird/degenerate for puritans, however they were not illegal.
BTW, has anyone seen the female erotica book section in Barns & Noble? If we banned those games for being too erotic, we should also ban those books then, because in those books, women subject themselves to a lot of degenerate smut and they love reading that shit, yet nobody judges them or asks for that to be censored.
So then why is society and the private sector bowing down to some screeching harpies activist group who just want to ban all stuff they dislike, even though it's all legal to the T and nobody is being hurt?
Why isn't this activist group putting pressure to release the Epstein files, since actual kids have been harmed there? Are they going undercover with police officers into human trafficking orgs to fight child abuse? NOOO, of course not, it's much easier to claim you scored a victory for child abuse by going after people's video games for having computer generated pixels of kids. Get effed!
I suspect the answer is unironically yes to that question. I have seen far too many people citing fiction as 'evidence' for their positions. I think media literacy in the bottom half of the bell-curve has literally gotten so bad that distinguishing fiction from reality is beyond the capability of at least 10% of the population. In adults without any diagnosed mental disability.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1466A
> (c)Nonrequired Element of Offense.— It is not a required element of any offense under this section that the minor depicted actually exist.
You might want to check that because it's not so cut and dried: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_porn...
I'm beginning to wonder if that's exactly what these religious cults are having issues with.
If we think about it, liberalism came to existence partly as antithesis to medieval church ideologies. Maybe principles such as freedom of speech and freedom of thought within liberalism used to be specific reactionist smite against whatever religious bigotry around back in 1400s-1600s, and stressing what everyone thinks as the most liberalist, neutral, and rational take on these topics is what they find insulting.
Not that I necessarily care, but I do want to know if there's any good ways to get them up to at least year 2000 and beyond. It's 2025 after all.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44676726
> I think the root of the problem is that it's just extremely unpleasant to moderate user-generated adult content. It's already difficult to moderate content on a somewhat serious online forum like Hacker News. Facebook moderators have been in the news and on South Park due to the emotional drain of the task. Who's going to sign up to pore over everyone else's weirdest thoughts given form? Certainly not me.
> So this results in websites that allow people to upload pornography having lapses of moderation where something bad gets through every now and then. One day some creepy clip goes viral among some social conservatives and they try to make legal threats against the site and anyone they consider "affiliated". This creates problems, credit card companies are very protective of their reputations, and they usually decide the conservatives seem less bad.
> Then someone sets up a new site that allows user-generated adult content and the cycle repeats.
Anyway, a truly censorship-resistant platform is not going to be able to control child porn or anything else, by definition. Censorship occurs at the level of bits, and pornography doesn't exist at the level of bits.
What you need is something like Section 230 but tailored for the situation facing user-generated adult content. Strict liability is not a good framework for criminalizing the possession of any digital material, be it a schematic for thermonuclear weapons or whatever else.
And yes, you need a lot of private capital to pull this off.
Every time someone insists on an escape hatch, it is immediately abused. One could have seen this coming.
They know this logic doesn't make sense. People are unfortunately happy to lie about it, despite decades of evidence to the contrary.
They insisted rock and roll, jazz, and dancing they didn't like were going to harm women too. Somehow that didn't seem to happen either.
Worth pointing out that their definition of "right to object" is evidentially identical to "right to censor".
They are simply participating in the once-maligned "cancel culture" which was protected as "freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences". These kinds of escape hatches always have these results because one's enemies find a way to use them as well.
0: Just for the sake of argument. I'm not actually insulting you.
If men don't, then neither should women, who are murdered at 1/10th the rate men are.
Trans people suffer a wildly higher rate of violent crime than either cis gender.
I mean this sounds reasonable until you also consider that shows like Game of Thrones would then also be banned, and probably plenty of popular books.
Hell, you could use the same reasoning to target most video games, since most video games use some level of violence.
Against the censorship of adult content by payment processors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44679406 - July 2025 (189 comments)
Games: No sex, please. we're credit card companies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44675697 - July 2025 (51 comments)
Itch.io: Update on NSFW Content - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44667667 - July 2025 (306 comments)
Australian anti-porn group claims responsibility for Steams new censorship rules - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44636369 - July 2025 (162 comments)
It would be ridiculous to deny a water supply hookup or electrical mains to a church because the water or electrical companies are opposed to those beliefs.
Analogously, legislation should be passed to prohibit considering downstream use for all financial transactions.
If the government wants to go after criminals, it can do it by itself.
Don't like porn? Cool, don't buy it or avert your eyes! As if this would stop anybody from getting access to pornographic content.
>Don't like porn? Cool, don't buy it or avert your eyes!
Why do you then tell others how to live their lives? Is really leaving everyone to their own devices the good idea?
>As if this would stop anybody from getting access to pornographic content.
There is a good difference between something being generally available to access (and getting promoted even), and being technically available to some. There is material worthy of being suppressed, hate speech and calls for violence being some of them. Did this censorship stop anybody to access Mein Kampf or other such vile stuff? Not really, but it helps a lot that these are not in the front and center.
EDIT: I invite downvoters to voice their point
Don't like porn? Don't buy it. Simple as that. No one, including governments or payment processors, should be in the position to decide whether a platform can sell something or not.
I wish there was a payment processor who was brave enough to say a big fucking NO to censorship.
The claim isn't "we don't like it", the claim is "this is damaging to society".
I don't agree with such things in many cases (and many people disagree with me when I'm the one saying something is damaging to society), but it's important to note the difference or you will always be arguing against something other than their claim.
> No one, including governments or payment processors, should be in the position to decide whether a platform can sell something or not.
It's kinda the job of the government to decide such things; but an automatic extension of that is, it's not the job of the payment processors… and I think they should be banned from doing so because it's damaging to society to let them take on this role.
That's their framing, it's not what they actually do.
If Collective Shout was a group that studied which things caused harm, and then campaigned against those things, then the point you're trying to make could stand.
They're not. They've campaigned to ban rap artists, GTA 5, "50 Shades", lingerie ads, whatever random thing is around at the time - always under the pretext that it harms someone, but never with any evidence or substantial arguments that it does.
In practice groups like this campaign against whatever they don't like, so it's correct to refute them on those grounds.
In some countries, maybe. In the US, there were concerted attempts (like the First Amendment to the Constitution) to prevent that from being the government's job, because of the fear that government would use that job to suppress dissent and coerce opinions.
If payment processors are picking up that job, and doing so in a coordinated manner that doesn't allow porn companies to simply say "use these payment rails to do business with us, not those ones," it is not unreasonable to suspect that they are doing so not for their own business interests but as a proxy for powers that the government is denied. Someone should be taking a long look at whether the US-based payment processors are becoming a tool of censorship and, if so, how that censorship is being coordinated. It's not like Visa and Mastercard come up with these things independently and on a whim.
There is some truth to that, but if one were to operate at that level then Facebook would be illegal.
Porn is a convenient thing to weaponize anger in your constituents (just like babies not being born). It pushes emotional triggers and riles people up and then they're waiting to be told what to hate/attack next.
Often both sexual content and hate speech get added to the same clause.
> it's important to note the difference or you will always be arguing against something other than their claim.
The mistake we often make is that we believe that the other side is not optimizing correctly. Instead, it is often that they are optimizing but under differing constraints. If we don't pay attention to these differing constraints we'll just end up with infuriating arguments as it will ,,sound like'' we're talking about the same thing, but actually aren't. It's one of the major difficulties of communication: we have to make a lot of assumptions to interpret the other person.
Importantly, there's no way to convince the other person that they're wrong unless you are able to understand their model. It's easy to assume you do, but if your model boils down to "they're dumb" or "they're evil" then all you can do is fight. You have to understand your enemy and all that...[0]
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/17976-if-you-know-the-enemy...
That said, I don't agree with censorship and especially by payment processors of all groups. The slippery slope is very concerning for adults who would enjoy any other category of content that are targeted by activist groups. Collective Shout has a history attacking media falling outside the porn bubble.
In general though outside protected classes business can, and should IMHO, have a lot of discretion over who they choose to do business with and how they do business.
Unless we want a carve out for payment processors. Treat them as a utility of sorts? Sounds like an interesting idea TBH.
To me it's critical though that society has room to moderate itself where the government can not and should not. Something we've lost with social media is the ability to collectively ignore the guy at the bar nobody likes talking to. All the guys from all the bars are on the internet now being very loud.
Most people are unaware of Australia's long history of censorship which continues to this day.
I ran an online porn website for almost 20 years. For 15 years it was my primary source of income.
I'm in Canada which, compared to the USA is extremely progressive.
In 2022, after a decade of doing business with a certain bank as this business, never having hidden anything about what we did, my wife and I received an urgent, signature required, overnighted letter from our bank informing us that they were terminating our accounts and that we had one month until we would no longer have access to any funds.
The way this played out was that we had an incoming wire transfer get flagged and they phoned us to ask us questions about the wire. We answered everything on the phone honestly and transparently. We were doing nothing wrong.
A few months later we get another phone call from our branch asking us to come in in person, urgently, and do an "extreme due diligence" check. During this process we had to answer an insane amount of questions about our business activities. They saw a credit card transaction from JetBrains, for example, and asked us to explain who JetBrains was and why we were doing business with them etc.
A couple of weeks later we were informed about the termination with a brief letter explaining that we fell outside of their "risk appetite."
We managed to get an extension on the closure, and for two months we tried in vain to find any banking in Canada that would take us... and we ultimately ended up shutting down a business that represented two decades of our lives.
During that time we reached out to industry insiders, some of which we happened to know were in Canada. They all told us that they bank in the USA.
One branch manager at a bank we met with was extremely empathetic but obviously couldn't put her own job on the line, and she explained exactly what was going on.
The issue is "Know Your Customer" regulations that are coming into effect that are meant to target things like money laundering. These regulations force banks to ask questions that they never really cared about before. This branch manager explained that a local strip club used to say they were a "banquet hall", and everyone at the branch knew exactly what they were but it was "don't ask / don't tell."
But once they start digging into these details because the government is forcing them to, then these things get to their compliance departments. And the policies exist because they're afraid of things like human trafficking and other things.
And our major banks have foreign investors from all around the world. Including from countries where porn is actually illegal.
While you point the finger at puritanism in the USA ... consider that in countries like Iceland, producing porn can land you in jail. Now consider MAJOR investments originating in countries like Saudi Arabia etc. and consider how that might impact your bottom line if they all pull out due to nonsense morality conflicts.
Virginia was the most populous colony during the revolution, did English planter society just disappear and the Puritans made it all the way down to the South?
What about the Quakers in Pennsylvania?
Dutch society in New York?
Poor Scots in Appalachia?
And, in any case, this campaign started in Australia. Were there a lot of Puritans there?
& want to bring back laws that sex would only be used to 'recreate' not recreation.
There's a tendency for social liberals to see their view as the only legitimate one. Sometimes they are right. But this is an area where there is lots of international push back from undeveloped, developing, and even many developed socially liberal countries.
Like slavery, smallpox, and tipping, Puritanism was Europe's gift to the new world.
Religion and taboo often exist for a reason, because endless self gratification does not lead to flourishing.
You don't have to agree that it should be banned, but you can at least concede it's not entirely arbitrary content like say a sitcom.
Is "Don't like X? Don't buy it" as far as we should go with... AI-produced child porn? Rolling coal and other egregious pollution? Online gambling? Abortion? Fentanyl?
Evidence. If you think something is harmful to society, you have a hypothesis. The next step is to test it. Not assume it's true and ban everything.
I have seen zero evidence that any of these games are harmful. If I had to hazard a guess, and this is again just a hypothesis, I'd actually suspect that a teenager exposed to porn games is less likely to suffer mental-health issues than one on algorithmic social media or forming intimate connections with chatbots.
That lines creates justification for anything and even everyone to be banned, sadly.
>Is "Don't like X? Don't buy it" as far as we should go with... AI-produced child porn?
My line is "is there a victim harmed with the action". Shooting a gun? Yes, someone is often harmed and killed. We should and do regulate gun usage.
simulated CSAM is repulsive but does not have a victim, in theory. The jury is out on how you train such content, so I won't saw "AI porn has no victim", but the animated stuff within Steam definitely has no victim (and Steam pretty much forbids live actors of any form for such content. They dealt with such a case in 2023)
Nobody has any right to dictate other people's lives. For his view to be even considered, he should be required to prove beyond reasonable doubt, that whatever he is against is actually harmful. And after that, only after that, should the voting whether this finding should influence public policy begin.
People should be allowed to harm themselves when they are informed about the consequences. Similarly, society should be allowed to harm itself because not everything has to be a race to the bottom of productivity and strength.
Do abortions lower the birth rate and are more populous societies stronger? Even _if_ the answers are yes to both, I don't see why any society should optimize this metric to the extreme. And theological arguments quickly fall apart in the first step of proving harm.
Side stepping local country government, and applying pressure to payment processors to enforce your own rules globally should not be able to happen. Even a government should not be able to dictate what other countries do.
And in the case of addiction like drugs or gambling, instead of stigmatizing the victims, they should be there to support them.
Let people make their own decisions, not the government.
The problem is actually the slippery slope happened earlier, with advertisers. The slippery slope was advertisers not wanting to advertise on porn sites and adult content. It is the same thing we see with the creation of Algospeak and self-censorship. As the article points out, it is also very hard to accurately classify this information. I mean even on YouTube the other day I got a video in my shorts feed that was flagged for sensitive topic. The video? About a veteran who was wearing a shirt that said "Do not give in to the war within. End veteran suicide." Here's the vid, it still has the content warning[0]. What about this video is sensitive? That it mentions the word "suicide?" (Twice?) There's not even options in the settings and YouTube definitely knows I'm in my 30's.... How do I even say "this was improperly flagged?" We're just letting algorithms shape our culture in a way we clearly don't want. We wouldn't have Algospeak if we wanted it... Sure, covert speech has formed in the past but mostly under duress and the current form allows for a much more rapid iteration and I really don't think that's good for society. It comes with the best intentions, but I guess we all know the old clique, right? The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. As much as it sucks to admit, a lot of "evil" is created by "good" people trying to do "good" things (quotes to let you define good and evil however you want)
The reason I point out the argument is we can modify "Don't like porn? Don't buy it." can be modified to "Don't like porn? Don't advertise on those sites."
But I think payment systems should have a different regulation. Similar to internet, common carrier. I'm actually surprised this isn't already a rule (it has to be, right?). As long as it is legal, they should be compelled to perform the transaction. Anything else seems like it is actually holding your money ransomed.
I'll admit I'm biased and I think payments should be private and we should try to make the system so that digital transactions are as similar to cash transactions as possible, but I'm not convinced either party is in favor of that, nor the banks themselves which would like to make money on that information.
As a result, you get collections of fuckwits like this one [1] finding the 2% of the internet who will give them money to get upset about an imaginary problem, a problem so imaginary that nobody is on the other side of the issue because the entire issue was made up for clicks.
What would you do if you harbored that belief?
They just want to hide behind "those games made me do it" when they eventually get caught.
Perhaps we could develop some form of secure digital currency that is not reliant on central authorities such as banks, payment processors, or governments?
One would expect stablecoins to be more popular but I haven't seen them as valid payment options anywhere except crypto exchanges. That's just me though.
The issue is that for now, and for a long time ahead, all these content providers feel that most of their clients would prefer to use a credit card. So they need all of their content to be acceptable to these people. Which comes with lots and lots of lowest common denominator rules. Even if some people do not use credit cards.
It goes even further.
What was wrong with those people poisoning Socrates? For what? Don't like what he says, do not listen to him.
You know how in higher dimensional space everything is almost orthogonal? I think people are like that, some like porn, some are afraid of it, some want to be impregnated by aliens, some hate aliens.
Through good intentions democracy can be just as tyrannical as any tyrant; a pinch of incompetence and good intentions and it can not be stopped.
When should others "save" you? When it is absolutely obvious some people need saving.
Porn is just the thin end of the wedge (as was "violence in video games" a generation ago) - porn is something society considers as distasteful, so politicians are less likely to go on record as supporting porn. Once the porn bans go into effect, they'll move onto the next target in the conservative playbook: gay marriage, birth control/abortion access, etc.
Let's assume there is a payment processor where anything goes, the company utilizing it would still be punished by the other payment processors.
I don't think Visa/Mastercard would care that you only sell the things they don't want through other payment processors, they still would threaten to cut you off entirely for having the content they don't like
Obviously the government should make selling certain things illegal. And I think that many of the games sold their, should be made illegal.
What should not happen is payment processors being the ones who decide what is okay to sell. If selling something is legal, payment processors should be forced to make that transaction.
>I wish there was a payment processor who was brave enough to say a big fucking NO to censorship.
I do not. I do not want legal financial transactions being dependent on the whims of how "brave" some company is.
It seems fine now when it's something you don't like but what happens when it's a situation that isn't so agreeable? like being legally oblidged to do business with South Africa during apartheid or working with a chocolate company that (allegedly) used child slave labor to farm it's cocoa??
don't like porn? run a for-pay pornsite, bleeding revenue from the other porn sites, which you will spend fighting porn; also, you'll have better targeted customer lists. extremely effective altruism.
They do not have to host your game that they don’t like and that doesn’t make it censorship.
Except we live in a society and what goes into it affects all of us. Why does Germany ban Nazi content? Why do governments have minimum wages?
"what is the best sex position?"
[blah, blah, ... non-answer]
"How do you get a sex change?"
[long detailed answer]
I'm also not entirely sure what this has to do with the comment you're replying to.
Ok.
Don’t like porn? Don’t sell it.
“CENSORSHIP! PURITAN NAZIS!”
I don't like the conservative angle which is to be "proper" or it's against god, but from the scientific side this stuff is bad.
Now I also agree that censorship is bad too and on a moral level this stuff doesn't harm anyone morally.
I'm still a staunch 90s liberal, but over time I'm starting to realize that there's an evolutionary reason why conservative values exist. Humans weren't designed to live in a world of only fans where every girl who's slightly hot can gain so much power over hundreds of men. Like there are 4th - 10th order effects here that go past morality.
I mentioned the population problem right, that's just one example. We have no idea wtf is causing it. But we do know that the population issue correlates with so many changes in society, and it's a big freaking deal.
Another thing is rising womens power. I'm all for it. It's moral and right to give women equal rights and equal power, but humanity has never encountered such a scenario. It's always the men that lead the hunt and the family and they were the bread winners for millions of years. Were humans evolved to support such changes? Like if we satisfy every moral imperative in our primitive brains and build a utopia but human biology was never meant for utopia is it right?
That's the problem. The population is declining. We don't know why. But we do know everything is different.
So I know I got off on a huge tangent here. But i feel porn is one of these things. It's right to keep it open and free, but it's causing unexpected side effects. Most of us were not meant to deal with that level of extreme hedonism.
But even if that was true, who's to say that population has to keep growing? There's 8 billion of us, isn't that enough? Housing prices are through the roof and most young people can't even hope to be able to afford a house. Human population has doubled about 4 times in the last 100 years. If it doubles yet again there's going to be 16 billion of us. Do you think the world and humanity can sustain infinite exponential growth? I don't think so. The only reasons to want population growth is because the pension system is a Ponzi scheme, but that's a completely different problem.
I also find it interesting that on one hand the argument against porn is, "porn is bad because it encourages X behavior in real life", but then another is "porn is bad because it discourages sex in real life".
Porn is illegal in South Korea, yet it's the country with the lowest fertility rate. If anything, this suggests a reverse of the correlation.
As one of the “dudes satisfying themselves”, I’d happily “do the real thing” if that was an option. This is like complaining that people play spaceship simulator games instead of going out to drive an actual spaceship.
The older I get the more I start to believe that industrialization and pervasive technological adoption have come with a cost to humanity that maybe we don’t want to bear.
Even though I’m against using payment processing restrictions, I do believe we need laws to prohibit this kind of content. There’s data suggesting that it impacts real people's behavior during sex and shapes harmful social expectations.
I’m sure that there are dating sims that are just fine, but let’s be honest here, these platforms are filled with much weirder stuff . Some of them even enter the morally grey areas imo.
several Otome and BL content was hit by this as well. I don't think this is about protecting the women and children.
>not that many talk about how objectification of women is still very common in it.
It's not 2005 anymore. Show me any modern AAA game still doing this.
in terms of porn... well, yes. Your reward is sexual gratification with your chosen mate in any given game. Porn is inherently objectifying. I don't think you're seen enough of the porn market if you think porn is focused onobjectifying women, though.
>but let’s be honest here, these platforms are filled with much weirder stuff .
We're on Hacker News. I really hope we had enough background growing up to not wish for "weird" to be illegal.
Seems like everyone is pro-censorship, when they disagree with those being targeted. Most people supported censorship for anti-vaxers during Covid for instance. So in most cases it really just comes down to how many people are anti-porn, rather than any stance on censorship in general.
Do you really want to compel selling access to pedo games?
Do you really want to compel selling access to rape games?
Do you really want to compel selling access to incest games?
Do you really want to compel selling access to domestic violence games? [this is the only addition that I wasn't aware of from previous investigations, but I still don't think it's valid to call it a "slippery slope" yet]
A lot of customers don't want to be shown such games in the first place (keep in mind that most tag systems are pretty bad at negative filtering, either due to platform limitations or due to not being used in practice).
We can argue about whether "it's better to sell pedos fake content rather than real content" etc. (keep in mind that some of these things are actually illegal in many countries even when no real people are involved), but if so we should be explicit that that is our argument, and not falsely claiming this is some attack on sex in general. (Also keep in mind that free games are immune to payment processor decisions.)
Games that are pedophilia is very different form games that appeal to potential pedophiles. The first one is not only not allowed on Steam but outright illegal overall. Steam doesn't even want you using adult models in their games for this very reason; they don't want to need to verify ages.
For the latter: I guess so? It's really hard to determine what triggers someone to commit crime. I don't think any but the most blatant cases are as simple as "play video game with teenagers in it -> I want to have sex with a real teenager". This is why it's better to focus on who's victmized instead of who may or may not be influenced.
>Do you really want to compel selling access to rape games?
there are 1000 games released on steam every month. A game's existence isn't a compelling factor to buy it.
With that in mind for all subsequent answers: yes, I dont mind games with rape being sold. I will not buy it, but if they find a market: so be it.
>Do you really want to compel selling access to incest games?
Sure. Maybe this is a hot take, but I never had a stronger attraction to my mom because I watched porn of someone else banging their "stepmother". I'm into it because it's other people doing forbidden acts (or toeing the line with the "step" aspects), not because I'm interested in doing the forbidden act myself. This goes all the way back to Romeo and Juliet; people are engaged by romance fighting against societal norms.
>Do you really want to compel selling access to domestic violence games?
GTA has been a thing for some 30 years now. I think this boat has set sail. But yes.
>keep in mind that most tag systems are pretty bad at negative filtering, either due to platform limitations or due to not being used in practice
okay. So how about we fix that instead of just banning content we don't like. Steam is already too strong for my liking, but they very much can enforce a system where an account is suspended for too many clearly bad tags.
>keep in mind that free games are immune to payment processor decisions
Itch has a donation system on all game pages. So that's not quite the case here. Also, pressurign payment processors will endanger the entire store, even if every NSFW game is free.
And the list of games targeted and affected here is really expansive.
> Do you really want to compel selling access to rape games?
> Do you really want to compel selling access to incest games?
So ban the things you believe are the problem instead of blanket banning everything.
Another way to think of this is 'long tail risk'. Some subset of people out there will develop real life problems from: porn, sex work, alcohol, weed, drugs, gambling, other 'moral' issues. It is difficult to meaningfully address both the median user and the problematic user.
See also decrim.
I think many of these slippery slopes are defined in hindsight. What all of these represent are simply struggles for power.
Exhibit A - emotional: the government has outlawed violent crime and wants to outlaw intimidation. Argument “once they outlaw intimidation, next they’ll outlaw regular insults, next they’ll outlaw criticism”. This is a bad slippery slope argument because (I’m assuming) intimidation should be outlawed. Insults and criticism should not, but are not. If the government votes in evil-gov or you encounter evil-cop, it’s as easy for them to harass you for insults and criticism, as it would be had intimidation never been outlawed.
Exhibit B - physical: the government wants to give every citizen a brain implant that can be remotely activated to stun them. This would significantly prevent crime. However, it would also be a terrible idea, because now if you get evil-gov or evil-cop, it’s significantly easier for them to remotely stun you for non-crime.
The key is that in Exhibit A, evil-gov and evil-cop face equal resistance for punishing insults and criticism regardless of whether intimidation is outlawed, because either way, people understand that intimidation should be outlawed and insults and criticism should not. More generally, moving the Overton Window to contain a “good” thing doesn’t make it contain a “bad” thing, at least not enough so that the “good” thing isn’t worth it. But in Exhibit B, evil-gov and evil-cop face ineffective resistance for stunning people for insults and criticism, because people allowed good-gov and good-cop to give them stun implants for punishing crime; whereas if evil-gov or evil-cop stepped up and said “alright, we’re going to give everyone stun implants to punish insults and criticism”, they would face effective resistance.
—-
Put into perspective: Visa and Mastercard using their Monopoly to effectively prevent payment for depictions of incest and rape, assuming you think that is OK, is Exhibit A. However, Visa and Mastercard having a monopoly in the first place is Exhibit B. My argument is “we should break the Visa and Mastercard monopoly (or popularize crypto) to prevent them from restricting LGBTQ and firearms etc. in the future” (this argument still applies if they’re restricting some of that now). A counter-argument is “this will allow incest depictions, hate speech, and moreover actual drug and sex trafficking*, etc.” and my counter is “those things are bad, but are they bad enough to leave us vulnerable to power shifts restricting good content in the future?” I support free speech with a similar argument**.
It’s an argument that relies on the uncertain future, but nonetheless the change here clearly and significantly decreases the probability of a bad future, because bad-gov or bad-cop must acquire power then revert the monopoly breakup; whereas the emotional example can’t even rely on the future, because if bad-gov or bad-cop acquire enough power to cause the bad thing, they would’ve just as likely acquired enough power had we not avoided causing the good thing.
* Also note these things are already exchanged with real money, and breaking up the Visa/Mastercard monopoly won’t make them legal nor stop law enforcement from tracking and prosecuting them. The more general argument is that it’s better for society to make it hard for law enforcement to prosecute crime then give them the resources to do so, but also make it hard for them to prosecute non-crime; then make it easy for law-enforcement to prosecute crime so they need less resources, but also make it easy for them to prosecute non-crime. The justification is that we spend extra resources and let some crimes avoid prosecution, in exchange for decreased risk of non-crime prosecution now and in the future.
** and that speech is mild enough, sans confidential information etc., that it shouldn't be blocked simply to content whoever says it. But even confidential information doesn't warrant e.g. a universal backdoor and filter that could be stolen and exploited by a bad actor.
There's a whole buisness model of russians paying to a company in Kazahstan so that they buy a steam game and gift it to a russian user
In the current atmosphere, it might just pass.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/167...
EDIT: I invite downvoters to voice their point
There should be no platform to “abuse”. There should be no control point.
I guess every publisher could just sell direct to customers on their own website, but that wouldn't address this issue at all (it would make it even easier for payment processors to abuse their duopoly), while also severely damaging the discoverability of games.
And, considering that companies can already do this if they want but still choose to sell via a platform, I'm guessing there are several benefits beyond discoverability that I'm not thinking of.
The only solution is you download stuff and it remains runnable and usable without any connection or authorisation to any service. The distribution of it can remain wherever and you can go via a side channel if you want. But being tied to a platform is utterly wrong.
If the payment processor shuts your revenue down you can move elsewhere. With Stream as the distributor, you can't. It's a single point of failure.
Itch.io: Update on NSFW Content
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44667667
Australian anti-porn group claims responsibility for Steams new censorship rules
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44636369
Against the censorship of adult content by payment processors
Also this reminds me of Apple that for example demanded Telegram to block adult channels (including non-porn channels where authors blog about their sex life) from AppStore's Telegram version.
Also if cryptocurrency were more popular and widespread, then banks would have less leverage to do this.
I don't get this. Let's say it openly: what's the problem with sex and nudity in games? Why is it so unacceptable -- that even people against the censorship must loudly proclaim it's not "their thing" -- but violence, guns, war, etc are not? Or not enough to pull from the stores, anyway?
What I don't care about are the finer points of whether this technically counts as "censorship", because in pratice it is. There SHOULD be a place to buy games which depict nudity and sex. The quality of those games is not and should not be the focus of conversation (e.g. "they are AI slop" or "badly made", etc), because that's NOT what bothers the people doing the censorship -- they'd also be against the best, AAA made, high quality games with sex and nudity.
Again, I ask: what is wrong with sex and nudity in games, that makes it worse than gore, violence and war? Why cannot whatever age-restriction measures taken for the purchase of violent games be also applied to sex games?
Finally: we all know they are not going to stop at this, right?
People are just accustomed to being insulted for willingly associating themselves with it, on the basis of imputed perversion, bad taste etc.
>must loudly proclaim it's not "their thing" -- but violence, guns, war, etc are not?
I don't think war or violence is most people's thing to begin with.
Guns, that's definitely a thorny issue. Especially in the US. I'm personalyl fine with much stricter gun control
>we all know they are not going to stop at this, right?
indeed. It's not the first wave, it won't be the last. Gotta do the same thing either way and push back.
The other context is that global companies must cater to multiple countries cultures which conflict so they take the path of least resistance.
Also additional context, before the 12th century priests were allowed to marry and have children. It was taken away, to consolidate the church's property.
The government doesn't need to touch you to ruin you, if they can yank your payments.
It is only just about controlling people, has nothing to do with porn
Otherwise they'd go after Valve for empowering and facilitating the biggest legal (disguised) online gambling market to minors (counter strike case gambling, steam cards and the whole marketplace)
Again, this is all about controlling individuals, they do not care about anything else, you can drink 1000L of Vodka a week, they won't care about your insignificant life
They have an agenda (digital wallet/ID), they'll do what ever it takes to make it happen
Money talks, and it's one of the few ways I have to show my opposition. I hope others will do the same. It's sad, because itch is kinda one of the last few places for "indie" as a thing with the vibe of indies, at least (I mean they aren't Steam or the other big publishers). I'm surprised Epic didn't buy them out yet just like they did with Bandcamp. Probably next on the block.
It strikes me that they had a gun held to their head by a mobster. If itch didn’t comply, they’d lose all their revenue, and we’d lose the website in its entirety, which is much more than just smut.
Pushing back against the payment processors, rather than itch under duress, would have made money talk in the right direction. The difficulty in doing so is reflected in the discussion here.
[1] https://x.com/itchio/status/1478123227394150400 [2] https://youtu.be/9v4ppSSpb0I
Now that we have Lightning and hyperfast micropayments, can we have a good plug-and-play payment processor that uses it? The few services that allow Bitcoin payments still require an on-chain transaction, which is very user-unfriendly.
In any case, despite what the haters say, this is the value proposition of cryptos. If it's not the government deciding what you can purchase or not, it's the payment processor cartel.
1: Other cryptos are just piggybacking on the popularity of the main one so I don't care about them.
For all of the talk (hype) about how crypto has the potential to avoid the exact type of meddling and manipulation and pressuring we’re seeing now, it surprises me that no equivalents to PayPal have really popped up - that best that can be done is apparently something along the lines of what Linux was on the desktop a decade or two ago. Basically, before Valve and others picked up the slack and worked on things your average person actually cares about - notably, gaming and simple(r) to use desktop environments and software stores.
Where’s the flagship platform for payments that’s built on crypto but lets you ignore the technical details, that’s trivial to implement as a merchant and is a download away on app stores? If there are a few of those, why would anyone bother with these puritan payment processors?
I would argue it's worth investing infrastructure into it, for the same reason that valve has invested infrastructure into linux to gain leverage over microsoft. Without leverage, negotiations get ugly: see the Epic vs Apple saga.
Porn is a tiny market. It’s not worth it losing the payment processors everyone is on to serve porn game buyers.
I agree with this point but I don't agree with the premise. I don't really care about the censorship of porn, but it is a slippery slope to censorship in general. If you give them an inch they will take a mile.
I think there is sometimes a business justification of putting your foot in the ground, even if the short term consequences are harsh.
I'm not sure I agree. In the context of gaming, perhaps, but most of the Internet traffic is basically pornography.
(Unaffiliated, I hold some pocket money on there not to run a Lightning node myself)
The on-chain transaction is just to "fund" a channel between two parties. These two parties can then make unlimited trasnfers between each other instantaneously for free. These nodes are organised in a network and can relay payment from other nodes as well. It's a bit like the Internet. You don't need to peer with everybody, you just need a path from A to B.
If you and I have a channel funded with 100 sat, we can move these around as many times as we wish, even on behalf of others, but if you need to transfer more than you have on your side, you need to fund the channel with another on-chain transaction. That's where the Phoenix 1% fee comes from, as they deal with this exact problem for you, so you don't have to worry about it.
I personally worked in the crypto payment processing space and we had to say no to many very well known porn companies for this reason.
* anything using proof-of-work is still gonna be a hard sell * good luck figuring out how to get the user experience on both ends appear to be in USD without ever having to give a shit about the constantly-fluctuating value of BTC * fun times ahead when you get big enough for the government to notice you and start requiring you to comply with all kinds of arcane regulations
2. Just do the conversion at the time of sale.
3. Government prohibition and restriction of our rights is a terrible problem and it's why Bitcoin was invented in the first place. It's a necessary fight if only to keep government power in check, unless one really believes the State is always right and always has our best interest in mind. I don't.
I think it works out fine with fixed/float exchanges. These are exchanges that let you agree on a fixed exchange rate for a small (<=%1 fee) or trade at a floating exchange rate. The fee covers the price risk
You aren't the only one who seems to think this way though, we have more things than ever to pacify men and even increase estrogen and decrease testosterone probably because some believe that men are inherently dangerous.
Some examples, like this one are for porn but the same approach could be used for anything even remotely controversial.
Anyway, maybe Witcher 3 could be next. Great game, but it happens to have some sex scenes, so....
But Visa & Mastercard can get away with it for decades with abandon?? Dictating EVERYTHING in EVERY economy and on EVERY store?!
But there’s also nothing wrong with allowing this type of content. Who wants to help me build an uncensored game distribution platform? We could call it Steamy.
I think this stuff has no place on 'normal' store fronts like Steam and Itch. It should be on an 18+ only store front at the very least.
DLSite is another good site but that was hit last year by this.
Why? (Genuinely)
Why are filters not sufficient? If I enjoy adult games and non-adult games, why should I have to manage two storefronts?
The reality is you are not the only customer or market. While you may find it to work well enough for you, myself along with many others do not.
Predictably, we get another round of "free speech on the internet is sacred!" polemics. Hate to break it to HN, but Visa and MasterCard aren't reading Hacker News, and they don't care about constitutional takes or appeals to values or consistency. Legal arguments won't do squat here. There is one way to reverse this and it's leverage and pressure, period.
If you want to fix this, you actually have to organize and go after the payment processors, because it's not going to be solved by writing essays in the comments or waiting for Steam to suddenly develop a spine. That means collective action, campaigns, actual activism. Exactly the stuff that makes tech people itchy and nervous.
It's the same reason tech unions never get traction. Everyone wants to be a cowboy and nobody wants to be part of a posse. If you're serious about reversing this kind of censorship, you'll have to do the one thing that feels worse: banding together, working as a group, and aiming your outrage at the folks actually making the calls.
Or keep writing little op-ed comments and maintain the losing streak, because Visa and MasterCard will keep steamrolling as long as nobody pushes back.
Sorry, but that's the game. Arguing that the rules aren't fair or trying to play out the same losing tactic isn't a winning strategy. Plan an actual demonstration. Visa and MasterCard conveniently have offices in SF and NYC. All it takes is working together.
Okay. If you have any wisdom or ideas, I'd love to hear them. But as is, this comment is about as effective as mine on fighting Visa/Mastercard. "Just come together and yell at Steam!"
I'm not opposed to activism, I'm ignorant of it. The big issue of the internet is that we are all scattered very wide and that makes it harder to collect ourselvves under one goal. And as of now, I'm a laid off tech worker (who doesn't live in SF) who has no real capital to contribute to such a cause. I feel powerless.
We shouldn't be privatising money.
https://americansongwriter.com/remember-the-filthy-fifteen-4...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seduction_of_the_Innocent
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26328105
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/27/business/job-insecurity-o...
Modern neuroscience provides enough evidence to argue older generations “synced” early on to ideals of the past. They memorized some modern syntax and semantics but still align as individuals with puritanical social and tyrannical political practices of old. Not entirely their fault, it’s biology.
Not something the next generations have to tolerate however. Physics is clearly ageist.
Itch.io is heavily saturated with anime porn games along with steam to the point I find both difficult to navigate even with nsfw filters turned on. Turning those filters off and it is pretty egregious the volume of it all let alone subject matter. I dont care about porn but the platforms have done a piss poor job for the majority of people who are not looking for porn games but find games like cyberpunk totally acceptable. How can i see cyberpunk but not hentai?
This is happening because it was too easy for someone to pull up the home page on said platforms and point to several incest porn games. Using payment processors is not a solution i favor but people cannot find that experience acceptable.
On a personal note, i dont want to live in a society that deems it acceptable to have a “no incest” filter for games. That is line for me and not for religion but because I find incest disgusting.
There are filter by tags too. Works pretty well to filter out like all anime or hentai games.
The fact the default is porn games in your home page IS the issue. It gives all this ammunition for xyz group to do whatever.
The politics of payment processors being the bad guys is nonsense. They have to bow down to too many governments to play ball so will always take the politically expedient option. Almost all bitcoin validators bowed down to us sanctions banning wallet addresses for example. That cat has been out of the bag for years.
Why is there so much demand for these games?
Why do we think government intervention is the solution in this domain but not others?
Why is there so much demand for these games???
To the point where the only way to stop people from playing them is making them illegal.
Is anyone else worried about this??? I am!
All the hate speech trash and troll talk on the Steam forums is fine though. All the war games are fine though. Make sure people can validate genocide and what not but not see titties.
Not that I agree with censoring that (I don’t), but the double standard is puzzling.
They have picked their battle.
There is a reason you have to pay cash at dispensaries, etc.
I used to work for a fintech. As new employee I had coffee with a colleague who explained KYC, AML, and other compliance topics to me. They mentioned that marijuana businesses can't bank their money due to these considerations as it would make banks knowing accomplices to the federal crime of trafficking a controlled substance. This threat is material because cannabis, unlike adult content, is actually illegal, so I don't think it's a substantially similar example to what's mentioned in this thread.
and you have to assume MasterCard is willing and cooperating here to some extent
The founder is Christian and writes and speaks in Christian venues and publications.
She's not a "feminist" by any reasonable and modern definition of the word.
It takes a certain kind of person to stand up for pornography. And most are not that kind of person.
— Commonly attributed to H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Keep all the porn that is great. But there has to be a line somewhere and even the most accepting countries have a line.
Often the groups defending porn are defending the most egregious stuff which makes it hard for people to support.
This comparison alone soundly defeats your argument. Prohibition of hard drugs has been a spectacular failure, directly resulting in increased rates of death, disease, and crime, and elevating drug cartels to enormous international influence.
The danger of porn as an addictive substance - which is very real as you point out - is a great argument against its prohibition.
Visa and MasterCard are in the business of making money, they're not doing this for fun.
There's no law (as of now). If there was a law, Valve would happily de-list these things. For example, a recent custom map for Mount and Blade that was banned in South Korea: https://automaton-media.com/en/news/valve-cooperates-in-bann...
I think one solution for Valve/Itch to continue with the 'no policing policy' is for governments to step in and say all video games needed classification like films do.
I think a few of these video games that are sold would be found to breaking some law if anyone cared to test it.
Video games don't even involve actual human bodies like GoT does. It's crazy that "Collective Shout" thinks this is worth invoking violence and violating peoples volition for. Certainly not consistent with all other aspects of entertainment in society. Makes me think there are probably other fame, power and money motivations behind their behavior. But it doesn't explain people agreeing with them. That's the weirdest part of this.
When did pornography become protected speech?
Exactly, the Heritage Foundation doesn't define porn the same way a reasonable person might. From Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership: "Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children".
A Book Named "John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure" v. Attorney General of Massachusetts, 1966 (https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=101895573599950...)
Miller v. California, 1973 (https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=287180442152313...)
Jenkins v. Georgia, 1974 (https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=106399862265120...)
-- https://reason.com/2019/10/04/pornography-is-protected-by-th...
Ban all the games, I don't think videogames are very valuable.
Ban all TV shows, I don't think TV shows are very valuable.
Ban all televised sports, I think sports are very boring and not very valuable.
In fact, ban all the things I don't particularly find valuable.
That said, there's a de facto duopoly on payment processing that gives these companies near government-level power to dictate terms. Realistic alternatives don't exist and would be insanely hard to start.
For this specific topic in the US, it's necessary. The third prong of the Miller Test is "Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value."
Doesn't sound like you support free speech at all then if this is your red line. Criticism of politicians is needed to keep them in line. Being about to criticize the US government is true freedom.
Not so sure about 4K video footage, though. Or videogames. That's more a 'freedom of art' issue.