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.
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")
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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".
If men don't, then neither should women, who are murdered at 1/10th the rate men are.
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.
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?
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?
Perhaps we could develop some form of secure digital currency that is not reliant on central authorities such as banks, payment processors, or governments?
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]
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Porn is a tiny market. It’s not worth it losing the payment processors everyone is on to serve porn game buyers.
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
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?
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.
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.
There is a reason you have to pay cash at dispensaries, etc.
Visa and MasterCard are in the business of making money, they're not doing this for fun.
When did pornography become protected speech?
