this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
1195 points (99.6% liked)
Technology
73370 readers
4183 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The article is saying the petition is targeting steam, but the actual linked petition is addressing credit card companies. The text of the petition doesn't mention steam or valve. I don't know what the author of the article thinks is happening here, and they've explained it very badly.
and from the petition
Steam is enforcing MasterCard's, Visa's, and PayPal's policies. From Steam's Rules and Policies:
Point number 15 was not there in a Snapshot from February on the wayback machine. If anything, the solution should just be to remove the payment method for those games (which would still hurt the creators substantially).
There is a line that is confusing:
There may be petitions about reverting Valve's policy, but it's not the main petition against Visa and MasterCard (which is the one they linked).
Replying my same comment from elsewhere to you as well:
So yeah, being mad at Valve is stupid, people need to be mad st MC and Visa and probably also PayPal.
Being mad at Valve is shooting the messenger.
Fortunately the petition is at least correctly aimed at the payment processors.
But also...
If MC and Visa won't budge on their positions, well, if Valve then makes an alt payment system for adult only games...
MC and Visa go, oh, hey, you're violating our guidelines, we no longer support Valve/Steam, now no one can buy any game.
This is a MAD situation, Valve would have to come up with a comprehensive payment processing system for everything, in secret, and then deploy it all at once.
No, that is not how that would work. People cannot buy games that violate MasterCard's and Visa's policies using MasterCard or Visa. If someone buys the game using a different payment method, crypto or a direct bank link, it would not violate MasterCard or Visa's policies because they had no part of the transaction.
Being mad at Valve is reasonable, because they did not have to ban all games that their payment processors disagree with. They would need to remove the option to pay with those for certain games, and the process of filtering them out and deciding would take a lot of time, money, and labor. It's easier for valve to just ban it outright, but it is not the right thing to do. Valve is not the reason it started, but there is reason to be mad at Valve as well.
It is, actually, allow me to explain:
Visa and MasterCard have policies for who they do business with, ie, merchants and vendors.
The business they do with Valve is the business of processing online payments, Valve is one of their merchant partners.
They can absolutely shut everything down in the name of upholding their own moral / business standards, via deciding to no longer be a business partner with Valve.
If Valve uses an alt payment system for adult games, Visa and MC are still business partners with Valve, Valve is now in violation of their partnership guidelines, ergo, Visa and MC drop Valve.
Visa and MC are concerned with the reputations of the partners they have, in general, not so much with the exact transactions they actually process.
No, its not, and Valve did have to act in this way, see above.
Itch.io and Nutaku just did the same thing after Valve did, you can no longer buy any games that cost money, that have explicit sexual content, so by your logic, its Valve and Itch.io and Nutaku all being unnecessarily censorious, of their own accord, rather than the reality, which is that MC and Visa are strong arming all these digital market places.
EDIT: In itch.io's case, they even delisted their totally free adult games.