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Comment on Valve gets pressured by payment processors with a new rule for game devs and various adult games removed

ugo@feddit.it ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

Won’t work. I imagine PayPal’s stance here is along the lines of “we will not allow any payment to go through to Valve as long as there is content we don’t want on Steam”.

If PayPal only stopped payments towards the content they don’t like, Valve wouldn’t have done anything. The fact Valve is removing content means that PayPal must have told them to remove the content or else they would stop allowing payments to Valve altogether. I can’t imagine a reality where this is not the case.

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muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
PayPal wouldn’t dare attack Steam for accepting external payment methods with rules they don’t agree with and can’t change because they don’t own those companies. In addition to opening them up to potential lawsuits, it could catastrophically backfire if Valve simply said “fine, we don’t accept PayPal anymore, but we do accept crypto now.”

PayPal would die in a week. The investors would drag out a guillitine by the next earnings call.

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- ugo@feddit.it ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  I think that’s a naïve view. PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe are all american companies that are either happy or feel compelled to comply the administration of the fascist-in-command.
  
  Sure maybe this is PayPal doing their own thing, or maybe it’s part of a more organized scheme in which potential lawsuits don’t really matter.
  
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  - muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Paypal has a reputation for this kind of thing from before Trump 2.0 though. They’ve ben doing this since at least 2003.
    
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sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Ah.

That’s true.

In fairness, I was trying to assess the capability of Valve to just make their own payment processing system, which they still largely could do.

Granted, this would be a bit of an endeavor…

But uh, fintech stuff is pretty common these days, Valve has a lot of money, and they could easily poach or hire some experts to guide the process of making their own version of something like Plaid or Chime or CashApp or Remitly, etc. but only for their ecosystem, not allow actual user to user direct cash txns, and work that into their own pre-existing Steam and Steam Mobile frontends.

Valve does kinda know a thing or two about servers and server code, I’ve worked a bit on both game network code (as an enthusiast/mod maker/etc) and on import/export transactions amd dbs (professionally)… the actual coding involved in a video game server stack is way, way more complex imo… Valve really only need help with the legalities and regulations of setting up a compliant psuedo bank and payment systems in different countries and such.

Then they could tell PayPal to go fuck themselves.

I am not saying this is likely to happen, just saying it is hypothetically possible… and Valve is kind of known for innovating the gaming space, pushing the envelope, raising the bar, as they say.

But, that being said… all that effort vs just delisting some shitty RenPy smut e-novels based on incest?

Yeah, I’d just can the goonslop too.

I’m seeing about 7000 ‘adult only’ games on the store right now… so… its not like they’ve just banned porn games.

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- ugo@feddit.it ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Absolutely. I suspect Valve might do just that if / when processors try to slip down the slippery slope. What if PayPal demands all adult games to be gone? What if they demand games with LGBT+ themes to be gone? At some point Valve will have to draw a line and tell them to fuck off if this happens.
  
  But since there are only a handful of payment processors, what if they all collude and do this?
  
  I imagine that if they weren’t already, this event has likely spawned a payment processor independence project internally.
  
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  - sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    
    But since there are only a handful of payment processors, what if they all collude and do this?
    
    This is possible, but I kind of doubt that say, MasterCard and Visa are going to blanket ban all kinds of ‘adult’ charges… at least right now.
    
    Like uh, ever been to a strip club?
    
    Its not like Visa and MC don’t know that the ATMs there are infact at strip clubs, and even those ATMs are still ultimately using Visa or MC as a payment processor.
    
    I imagine that if they weren’t already, this event has likely spawned a payment processor independence project internally.
    
    I’d say probably not full fledged, ‘we are actively developing this’ project, but it may have at least spawned some discussion along the lines I above described.
    
    The way large tech corps tend to work is that a whole bunch of at least high level, general concept plans are drawn up, considered in meetings, sorta like cards pulled out of a deck, into your hand… and then there is deliberation as to whether or not to actually ‘play’ said card.
    
    The way I know that above paragraph is that uh, hah, like GabeN, I used to work for MSFT, and a few other companies/nonprofits with a significant tech aspect.
    
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