What was the actual reason for the crusade against NSFW games?

Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Thoven@lemdro.id⁩ to ⁨[deleted]⁩

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?

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mushroommunk@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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.

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- snooggums@piefed.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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.
  
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- BurgerBaron@quokk.au ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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.
  
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- Flax_vert@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Ty, I’m going to donate towards them.
  
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  - SnoopSqueak@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    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.
    
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  - FinjaminPoach@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Lol
    
    King behaviour
    
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- paultimate14@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  A lot of the ultra wealth you may have noticed have a christofascist lean
  
  I think THIS is OP’s question. It is perfectly believable that a small number of insane and delusional people might truly think that these things are bad.
  
  But I think the bigger question is: why do the ultra-wealthy believe this,or at least support it? What is the end game? Porn is popular and profitable: why is there no billionaire who has made their money off of smut rising to defend their industry?
  
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- jaggedrobotpubes@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Makes me think of Harvester.
  
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MalReynolds@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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.

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- mushroommunk@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  The credit has been attributed to Collective Shout (religious nutjobs)
  
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  - MalReynolds@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    OK, that’s nutty, but it has the same effect, along with helping identify ‘diverse sexual orientations’ as well. In Australia for example, Steam is now using credit cards to identify adults.
    
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Redditmodstouchgrass@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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”.

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- isyasad@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Infighting is always more important than common ground. This is why the left has been so effective for the last 10 years.
  
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- bizarroland@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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.
  
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it_depends_man@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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 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.

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YarrMatey@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
outrungaming.com/mastercard-addresses-nsfw-game-c…

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.

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FoxAlive@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Australia has the equivalent of the john birch society which is pushing racist shit, anti sex worker nonsense, and anti nsfw games.

They where the people that doxxed only fans workers and got them in trouble for taxes.

They also got itch.Io to remove a bunch of nsfw games.

We have a similar group in the united States who got prostitution to be reclassified as human trafficking, as if a sex worker doing independent work online is the same as the movie “taken” with Nissam. That resulted in Craigslist getting removed, along with legitimate concerns about minors being trafficked.

If you really want to look into it these kind of groups are funded by religious groups, and republicans and are in the same group of people who pushed for project 2026 or 2028 whatever it was called.

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Malica@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Cruelty is the point my friend

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someguy3@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Good old “I want to impose my religious beliefs on others”.

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Wakko@hell.cloud ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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.

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- gastroglizzy@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  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.
  
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  - Wakko@hell.cloud ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Thank you for admitting that you’re a disgusting pedo.
    
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QueenHawlSera@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
How did that end, did any of the games end up getting reinstated?

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nightwatch_admin@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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.

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Toasticus@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Because apparently, from looking at the comments, some people think there’s no limit to NSFW games. When, there is.

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chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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

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theneverfox@pawb.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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

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