Mastercard has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms, contrary to media reports and allegations.
Our payment network follows standards based on the rule of law. Put simply, we allow all lawful purchases on our network. At the same time, we require merchants to have appropriate controls to ensure Mastercard cards cannot be used for unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content.
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Seth Eisen
They are a fucking payment processor; the only brand that matters is reliability and confidency, which they damaged now.
They’re not talking about with Steam customers though, but rather with the religious idiots who have decided to crusade against porn, feel emboldened by recent age-ID bills and are now pursuing the “MasterCard funds filth” angle.
I’m kinda wondering what the ratio of anti-porn religious knobs is you gamers. There’s a lot of religious folk but many of them also enjoy porn so …
There are less puritans than gooners, if a corpo is backing the puritans is because that corpo is ran by one of those demons.
Of course, because when everyone buy a game on steam the FIRST thing it comes to their mind is the credit card brand they used. What a load of bullock.
FFS I don’t even remember which one of my credit card I have saved on steam.
MasterCard can go fuck themselves. Great job saving your brand
Seriously rediculous, most people don’t even know if their card is Visa or Mastercard, nor do they care (because they dont know what they are or what they mean).
(This is from my experience with people i know)
Mastercard have changed their design so that it no longer says Mastercard on it, and it’s just the two circles. I bloody hate it, MasterCard thought they were able to get away with it because they thought they had brand recognition but literally no one cares about them.
Also they’ve been fine with porn games up until now and literally no one cared.
A bullock is a steer. You wanted bollocks.
I use Paypal and they charge my Discover (Novus network, IIRC). No MC policy issue, let me buy what I want.
I don’t have any credit cards saved on steam. I only use PayPal for steam purchases.
😬
I’d rather pay with my actual blood than use PayPal.
It’s purely because steam hasn’t been able to keep my login info secure for almost a decade. I’ve changed emails, passwords, both, and yet I will always get random 2FA attempts from other places. I just don’t trust them to keep my bank info safe either.
I’m looking at this and I am just wondering… Did you also check the computers your using?
It’s quite a bit easier to get in the pc of a normal user than it is to get into the computers of valve, or at least that’s to hope.
Yep, I’ve completely changed computers multiple times. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
check your email addresses, then check for malware on your system.
that’s definitely not normal…
Interesting. I’ve been using steam for decades and the only time my account was compromised was due to my own machine getting some malware. It was easy enough to clean up, reset password and reset all my steam sessions.
Now my blizzard account on the other hand… I got so tired of defending it that I’ve cleared all my CC and personal info from the account and just decided to let the hackers have it. Their shit leaks bad.
Choose your poison.
Ah yes PayPal the completely benign brand that Elon was trying to shove the fact that he registered X dot com down our throats with decades ago
e: didn’t realize it would link to that shithole
More people should watch this:
The Secret War To Censor The Internet
The CC companies have religious morons contained within their executives but they’re mainly being puppeted by outside religious evangelical organizations with a long history of wanting to destroy all sex work or erotica art.
deleted by creator
I kill people in GTA 5. I don’t kill people in Hentai Incest Generator 3000. Yet someone prefers to see my transaction only for the first one, citing damages to “the brand”.
Curiously, in our society, killing is less of a taboo than sex, especially in fiction.
Since the aughts, I feel it is a disservice we do to censor out the horror of warfare in games like Call of Duty or Medal of Honor. I haven’t seen what they did with Six Days In Fallujah (by a vet of the Iraq War who experienced Fallujah and wanted to share his experience) but we’d have more respect for the gravity of war if the tragedy and immediacy of combat was properly expressed. In the Arma series, it’s very easy to die, but it uses a similar engine used for training purposes.
It’s our Christian values (more specifically, our Paulinian values – he thought Christians should not have sex if they can abstain entirely¹ – which has turned into taboos against sex without strict licenses, that has made our society super-prudish.
1. Paul actually also prohibited having additional children, the end being [nigh] and all. Later biblical interpreters would have to deal with the world’s failure to end, and Christ’s failure to return in their lifetimes.
the end being neigh and all
And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him, and the horse said, “the end is neigh!”
(Neigh is what a horse says. The end is nigh. 😉)
Fixed but still funny.
Well it’s Cain’s fault. He did the first murder and it was bad. Adam did the first fuck and it was good.
Such is the way of the lord
The only game that I know of that tackles war as a psychological thing is Spec Ops the Line which is a brilliant game that is now delisted on steam for reasons. Regardless I do think the reason war is rarely shown in such a way is that the artistry (for lack of a better term) is relatively hard to balance between story and gameplay. Not even getting into how hard it is to tell such a story, making True Grit 1969 is a lot easier than making True Grit 2010.
Hire prostitute in GTA, kill her, get money back - ✅
Have consensual sex with character in hentai game - 😤
Mastercard: worried about damaging brand
ALSO Mastercard: torpedos brand harder than the titan submersible implosion
Mastercard: We better not alienate our customers! Let’s cave to these religious lunatics from Australia.
Mastercard: Becomes hated by gamers all over the world.
I’d love Valve to spend their extra billions on opening a payment processor. Fuck the big 3.
Honestly, wouldn’t be surprised, they have spent god knows how much to push linux to unshackle themselves from Windows and Microsoft
There’s multiple steps to this sadly, including the payment gateway, processor, acquirer and this is before even Mastercard, VISA, Amex or other card companies come into the picture.
It’s not impossible, but Valve would need to convince the card issuers that they are a valid processor and then also make deals with banks all over the world for GWs. Or they could just act like Stripe and own the full stack and bully their way through the fintech world.
They already support local payment processing schemes such as Bancontact, iDEAL, JCB, Pix, etc. A good chunk of their international customer base already isn’t dependent on the big American payment processors.
The way towards undermining Visa/MC’s power is for more governments/Central Banks to push for indigenous alternatives which abide by local regulations rather than foreign puritanism. This is already a desirable goal for most both from a geopolitical POV (reduce American control over world finance) and a financial one (VISA/MasterCard charge outrageous transaction fees).
American consumers are fucked whichever way things go though, it’s not like the regime is going to make a move to break up the monopoly nor to push for less censorship in media. If Valve somehow goes through with this and makes deal with all major American banks, they’ll be done just in time for the Save The Children From Pedostanic Video Games Act or whatever the fuck that will force them to purge all thought crime from their platform.
Yeah I’m surprised they are not on board with Interac Debit in Canada.
Weird, either there’s some backroom drama with Interac or now might be the time for you to ask their support about it.
In America I think you also either literally or effectively (to compete) have to own some banks as well. I think it’s called vertical integration.
Considering valve is, basically, the gateway to a billion dollar industry, they certainly have the weight to throw around and get this done, or at least to prop up a less demonic processor. It’ll take time whatever they do, but i really hope they are doing something.
That, and I’m like 70% sure that as a payment processor you can’t take your own payments in the way that valve would need to.
Unfortunately Taler still needs a lot of maturing, but having a distributed payment system not running on that horrendous waste of time and energy that is the block chain is promising!
I’d never heard of this before. I hope Liberapay adds support for it. I don’t think all itch.io developers would be interested. I’m not sure it quite solves all the problems that Steam has with getting payments to game publishers.
Quite interesting; thanks for the link!
The Drip Card from Valve incoming!
I expected nothing less from them. They did pretty much the same exact thing when Japan tried confronting them after they started blocking Japanese retailers from trading internationally. I can’t find the article anymore but IIRC, Japan’s Prime Minister tried having an in person interview with them about it but it was cut short because he stormed out of the room after Visa tried denying everything. I don’t think that the payment processors will ever take responsibility for their actions.
Why would they? Everybody’s going to keep using them anyway.
Why doesn’t valve simply restore games back then? Tell payment processors MC is OK with them (as evident by this statement) and tell them to come back with a reply from MC?
mastercard you are hurting your brand by doing this
Can religion just die already?
You do realise religion is just an excuse?
Of course
They realized that this news getting out damaged their brand worse.
there are no good people in this. mc, visa, itch.io, and steam all caved to regressive bigots.
They forgot the part of their TOS about “damaging the brand”.
Oh I’m so glad that their brand isn’t being damaged. It’d be terrible if that were to happen.
Can I still use visa or MasterCard on a dildo? And can I pay for it in cash… Dollars? Is my money accepted at the local adult bookstore?
