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.
Now what?
If you’re visible, you’re a target. If you’re not, you don’t matter.
Step 4 gets you thrown in jail for violating AML.
The problem with alternatives to things like OnlyFans is that the performers who work through OnlyFans want to go where people can find them. They can dumb down their acts - and have lots of paying traffic, or they can do what they would prefer - and have hardly any paying traffic. That's tough.
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.
Probably the only way around it is to spin up a completely different corporate entity which only allows for payments via wire transfer, ACH, or perhaps some of the various payment apps available.
> (For anyone thinking crypto: we have a different idea of what it means to be either "realistically viable" or to "compete with Steam")
Wow, not crypto, but GP fucking nailed it.
> Bezos: We got an order from somebody in Bulgaria, and this person sent us cash through the mail to pay for their order. And they sent us two crisp $100 bills. And they put these two $100 bills inside a floppy disk. And then they put a note on the cover of the floppy disk, and they mailed this whole thing to us. And the note on the cover of the floppy disk said, "The money is inside the floppy disk. The customs inspectors steal the money, but they don't read English." That shows you the effort to which people will go to be able to buy things.
Yes, a small business in the 90s may have been able to make it work, but it's not the 90s anymore.
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?
This is commonly repeated, but doesn't hold up. Chargeback fees (especially for card-not-present transactions) are paid by the merchant and are simply increased (with reserves required) for high-risk accounts. It also wouldn't make sense to target hyper-specific niches if it were really about chargebacks, they would go after all of it, and go after things like the CS marketplace.
But the biggest giveaway IMO is that they do not allow, e.g., Steam selling these games crypto-only. It's either remove them entirely or remove credit cards entirely. If it was really about specific titles having high fraud/chargeback rates, selling them some other way would be fine.
Charge backs, etc... can be effectively solved by appropriately pricing in such risks (or not offering those services at all).
This isn't a payment processor issue, it's a political choice.
The problem is that they aren't being told "we won't let people buy this through us", they're told "this needs to go entirely or no more credit cards for you".
The problem isn't just "the Payment Processor doesn't want to support this game" but also "this game shows Guilt-By-Association that your platform's money might go to 'criminals' or 'sinners'."
Guilt-By-Association is real gross, but a large part of the current fight, too, especially looking at itch.io's payment processor-required actions, not just Steam's.
That don't use Visa/Mastercard? The bans aren't coming from the platforms but from the payment processors.
All of those are still prone to censorship if the attacking group is motivated enough. Even crypto, which should be the ideal solution to this problem, is not ideal because most transactions are performed through centralized exchanges which can easily blacklist whatever transactions they want.
You can't even realistically have a F2P game that requires a high spec machine because of how the market works.
