A couple years ago a bunch of credit card companies suddenly decided they wanted to dictate how people are allowed to spend their money. They issued warnings to game stores to delist all nsfw games or else. The credit card companies have an amazing racket going on and I struggle to believe they suddenly care about some morality over profit. Generally all they care about is that people spend as much money as possible. I also seem to recall them being notably silent on the much larger revenue streams coming from adult videos. So what was their actual purpose in these seemingly random strikes?
Wasn’t there also a legal angle to this? I seem to remember that payment providers had some potential concern about legal liability and were painting with a broad brush to avoid it, though I don’t remember exactly what laws would have been relevant
Let me reinforce this point mentioned by mushroommunk:
There was one game, No Mercy, that really did push things too far. Collective Shout was able to poster child that game and pressure payment providers into pressuring game platforms to delist a lot of NSFW games.
There were a few others and they were justifying and glorifying violence and terrorism. Not satire. Not as political commentary. Not artistically valuable. I recommend you don’t research this further. It’s real NSFL stuff. They were not putting it in fictional universes or anything like that either. It was “commit these crimes”-simulators and justifying it with racism, sexism or whatever, claiming that the victims deserve it. Actually disgusting.
They would be declared illegal, by any customer protection agency or national / government prosecutors doing their job. They were only online and available because those gov. agencies were not aware of them and/or too slow in taking them offline.
And because the steam’s process didn’t check them. Which Valve acknowledged in the sense that they admitted they didn’t and couldn’t and THEN took everything offline they couldn’t and didn’t check.
And THAT also hit unrelated stuff, because valve couldn’t check it and doesn’t want to take responsibility. Which, yeah, understandable.
It was the work of Collective Shout.
They’re an Australian christofascist group trying to push right wing purity nonsense. There was one game, No Mercy, that really did push things too far. Collective Shout was able to poster child that game and pressure payment providers into pressuring game platforms to delist a lot of NSFW games.
A lot of the ultra wealth you may have noticed have a christofascist lean, so with the vocal pressure from Collective Shout it was easy for them to claim economic harm saying if they didn’t pull games there’d be a boycott or something.
I wouldn’t fully credit them, at best. VISA and MasterCard have their own puritan history, that fringe group is a scapegoat to do what they wanted to do anyways.
I did mention the ultra wealthy (like those in charge of Visa and MasterCard) have christofascist leanings and they caved super easy probably because of it, using them happily as a scapegoat.
I’m sure there’s a lot more that can be said about the global elite that others have said before
And it won’t be surprising when the christofascist leaders are outed as sex pests because the loudest voiced against sexual expression are personal fans that want to donimate others for malicous reasons. Like all the anti gay religious leaders that turn out to be child molesters.
I first read that as Collective Soul and thought “Why would a 90s rock band care about this?”
Ty, I’m going to donate towards them.
Are you really a racist and a bigot and mysoginist? The founders have a history of not just being anti-nsfw but also being anti-LGBTQ, anti-abortion, and conspiracy theorists. The founder comes from Women’s Forum Australia, a group so crazy they were known to withdraw their kids from school because they thought the Wi-Fi was making them sick.
These people are anti education. Anti women’s rights under the guise of moral superiority. They are against legitimate sexual education (that thing proven to reduce child sex abuse cases). They are not who you want to back unless you are a right wing nutter.
Anti LGBTQ in what way? And what have they done that’s racist? I looked at their site and they did good work opposing Andrew Tate, is there more to this group?
Yes, I literally linked to some of their history. They’re all linked to right wing conspiracy groups. The founders and several of their members have posted long tirades against diversity programs, constantly retweet staunchly anti-trans people, have claimed sexually diverse (though they say perverse with no distinction about anything) nerds are the cause of all problems.
Even several of the games Collective Shout targeted specifically shows they don’t actually care about truth and just want to scream louder until they get their way. They campaigned against Detroit: Become Human saying it’s a vile sexist game because of a scene where you actually save a woman from being beaten by her husband, thus eliciting empathy in many players for victims of abuse (I personally remember it opening people’s eyes when they played it).
They claim videogames make people violent and sexist despite mountains of evidence otherwise.
They claim Tate as their success despite many other groups actively pushing against him and his media.
Numerous LGBTQ organizations have stated how Collective Shout negatively impacts them by targeting healthy representation of being LGBTQ by calling it sexual perversion. Even Vice if I’m not mistaken ran articles diving into their negative impacts.
If you want to support truly feminist work there are plenty of valid, successful, known anti-trafficking and anti-abuse charities doing good work.
This is an observation, not a threat: You are choosing death. It’s a death cult. If you don’t value life, keep it to yourself. Don’t take others down with you.
你好，我的好朋友！
Lol
King behaviour
Australians are my subjects, too 😎🇦🇺
Friendly reminder that this isn’t just a right wing issue. There’s plenty of people on the left who are sex negative puritans as well, and they shouldn’t be ignored just because they’re “on our side”.
Infighting is always more important than common ground. This is why the left has been so effective for the last 10 years.
Multiple things can be true at the same time, the trick is being capable of understanding that and acknowledging that without distracting from the primary objective.
Unfortunately, broad-mindedness of that nature requires a minimum of room temperature IQ to handle and far too many people simply do not make the grade.
Cruelty is the point my friend
Part of an ongoing campaign to de-anonymize the internet. Tie credit card to identity to game (adult or not) to in-game comms (can’t do that with videos). The noise is to make people aware and get them to self-censor.
Or religious nutjobs, which makes more sense?
OK, that’s nutty, but it has the same effect, along with helping identify ‘diverse sexual orientations’ as well. In Australia for example, law changes mean Steam is now using credit cards to identify adults, same in Thailand and UK I think. I guess I’ll go with ‘Why not both?’.
ETA: Oh look, the EU too https://www.euractiv.com/news/gamers-will-have-to-prove-their-age-under-eu-kids-act/
I mean… Whose funding the religious nut jobs?
Quelle surprise, it’s the crypto-fash again. Getting real tired of their shit.
https://outrungaming.com/mastercard-addresses-nsfw-game-censorship-statement/
Payment processors got petitioned (from an anti-porn group) to ban games with rape, incest, and sexual violence*, and it went from there. Steam and itch couldn’t tell which games had the suspected content in them iirc, steam delisted in batches while itch had to manually review everything. Public perception played a factor in why the payment processors acted the way they did. Then you had the backlash to the treats being taken away, even gog gave away some nsfw games (but none of them had rape, incest, or sexual violence so weren’t being currently boycotted). Now it’s harder to get a nsfw game approved on steam. Also this anti-porn group has gotten other games like rape simulators (No Mercy) delisted before. So they had experience.
*I should have also noted that CP was a part of it. I did not see that on steam but the other stuff was 100% in steam’s library.
Good old “I want to impose my religious beliefs on others”. Certain religious people weren’t so successful before, so they decided to go after the money and pushed the credit card companies to ditch things. From what I gather via threats or innuendo about them supporting CSAM etc.
It’s of course hard to tell, but I think we should not leave out the possibility of them showing their influence, without doing much actual damage.
Edit: The “Collective Shout” thing had fallen out of my memory, but I am still convinced adult games were an easy target, that would have little damage to the payment processors while flexing those “we boss” muscles.
Power. That’s what it always comes down to - money is an indirect form of power, so while you can usually “follow the money”, actors will sometimes chase direct power even at the cost of financial gain
Basically, some groups petitioned the credit card processors to block these sales. The credit card operators used this opportunity as a test - can they leverage their position for direct power, or will the state (or widespread public outcry) stop them?
They were risking basically nothing… They didn’t plan this, they took the opportunity created by special interest groups to test the waters
If it worked out, they could have turned it into massive “innovation”… Think of how much data on people’s behaviors is worth, then picture how much they could charge to control spending habits. It would be a whole new avenue for profit
Since they did receive real resistance, they quietly backed off before the issue could be settled. They’ll try something similar again sooner or later, mark my words
The actual reason is partially answered in other comments. Most people are focusing on who did it and they’re not asking the most obvious question - how bad does a game have to be to get noticed by Visa and MasterCard?
The games in question aren’t merely “NSFW”. Visa doesn’t care about vanilla porn. The delisted games dealt in subject matter that is difficult to justify.
MasterCard doesn’t need to help anybody buy “games” about incest, rape, or sexual assault of minors.
The delisted games dealt in subject matter that is difficult to justify.
The problem is who gets to decide what’s “difficult to justify”. That should be up to the individual, not the payment card company.
MasterCard doesn’t need to help anybody buy “games” about incest, rape, or sexual assault of minors.
That might be your opinion, but again, who gets to decide what’s on that list? If you don’t think those games need to be played, then don’t play them. It’s not hurting anyone when someone plays a video game, no matter how icky the game makes you feel. No one is forcing you to play anything.
Thank you for admitting that you’re a disgusting pedo.
