There are other stakeholders, like regulators and shareholders.

They are both telling the truth, which is how the best lies work.

Mastercard: "It's all good as long as it is legal".

Religious zealots: "Games depict sex with children!!!"

Steam/Itch: "Which games?"

Zealots: "Yes"

Mastercard: "Sex with children is illegal. Get rid of those games."

Steam/Itch: "Which games?????"

Mastercard: "That's a you problem. Figure it out and get rid of them or lose the ability to process payments."

Steam/Itch: *pulls most NSFW games while they figure out "which games"

Well, everyone discussing this seems to have been confused about it. Is it fucking PayPal and Stripe or fucking Mastercard and Visa?

Thing is…I think both claims are correct.

Mastercard and Visa are not the only middle-men; the only “payment processors” involved in making sales.

Next time you check out at a cafe, look at the branding of the tablet/software the cashier is using. Chances are, it wasn’t developed by the cafe owners, or by MC/Visa. That’s a payment processor. There’s some big ones out there that can be hard to avoid.

EDIT: While finding exact point of blame remains difficult, a recent statement from Valve suggests I may be wrong about the card companies being innocent, at least with Mastercard. It’s a long chain and it seems each link wants to forward blame.

It's been pretty widely reported that it's PayPal and Stripe(mostly Stripe) that have been the ones that were requiring them to remove the NSFW material.

MC and Visa are not technically payment processors, that would be stuff like stripe or ayden.

The problem is that cc companies have rules that put the onus of ensuring nothing illegal is purchased with their issued cards on the ones actually meditating the transaction, so it becomes a chilling effect because the intermediaries don't want to risk burning a bridge with the largest cc networks in the world, and overcorrect as a result.

Gee, I wonder who people are going to believe.

Do other payment processors exist? Why is this hard for you?

I have a hunch this goes one step higher than the private banks.

Shittygroup

Hellsfargo

Nutglaze

Oldball sacks

Devolve bank mistrust

This is all still project 2025

Donald Trump is on the Epstein list and is a child rapist

Sure. Let them whatabout. But to us, consumers, it shouldn't matter.

We know the stores aren't responsible, so we shouldn't attack them.

The processors are. For Visa and MasterCard it's pretty obvious. Itch, as you said, puts direct blame on Stripe, and I think we can trust that.

As much as processors need banks, banks also need processors. It's a sort of symbiosis. Damage to one actually trickles onto the other. So pressing onto processors isn't a mistake. It'd be foolish at best and malicious at worst to suggest that.

Now that we have leverage as users and consumers, having started a push which made way and caused a response (first the prepared phone statement and now a press release), the absolute wrong thing to do is bacl down and say "sorry, we were wrong, it was B after all and not you, A".

And look at it this way: There's less payment processors and they're smaller than banks. If you suddenly turn to banks, you won't accomplish anything because to them, a few consumers who aren't their customers doesn't cause them even an itch. But if payment processors come to them it might.

We should demand mastercard shut down all payments to everyone, as their very business model clearly falls afoul of the laws of the People's Republic of North Korea.

From the article

So this seems like Mastercard are basically saying "it's not us".

Exactly in the US I can buy an assault rifle. Something that would be a crime in most other countries.

Publicly, they're saying we don't want to get sued for allowing the purchase of illegal content, We have no problem with legal content.

That's not to say that's how they are phrasing it too the publishers.

By that reasoning they should not accept payments for alcohol, as that's illegal in some countries...

They're obviously basing it on the local laws of the business and customer. That varies from each transaction to the next. They're just saying that they don't restrict anything that they aren't legally required to restrict.

I love how they form a consortium that stays in lockstep to maintain their oppressive control over everyone else.

Yeah before all this if you told me "MasterCard is selling incest and rape games!" I would have said no, Steam is doing that. But now I feel like they want to have a heavier hand.

Ultimately I think it's pressure from the Trump admin/project 2025 on companies to eventually make porn illegal

Yes, the statement is in the article, which gives background context.

In fact this statement states that they ask their clients to litteraly do the job of justice. That's quite scary.

Ensuring a card cannot be used to buy illegal content.

That means they can shut you down if they think you didn't do enough, which is literally their whim.

Likely not, the devs don't have an agreement of any kind with the processor.

Loss of income is really difficult to sue for. Especially if you're an indie company in another country, trying to sue an international company. You either sue locally, or open up a office in their nation.

And your case has to be rock solid.

Like tech companies still lose cases around loss of income, even when it's obvious to the average person that the major company is going out of their way to stamp out competition.

IIRC Stripe is the main payment processor. If you’re paying with a visa or mastercard online, it’s usually via stripe. Hence, the immediate censorship.

Paypal can go fuck itself and die

Unfortunately they are indeed big players, Stripe where people use credit cards and PayPal everywhere else. Both horrible companies that we'd be a lot better off if replaced with privacy-respecting alternatives.