Probably because government and the people in charge of government are largely tech illiterate and being literate or seeking policy advice from literate people isn't expected.

It is fucking wild that we don't have INTERAC credit cards here in Canada

Postal banking is a thing in some places.

I'm not sure I want the government running those services. Like a basic one, sure, but for handling credit cards and general banking services? Nah, I don't want the Trump administration having direct access to my purchases.

They're trying with GNU Taler, but it's pretty much a pipe dream at this point.

Does Bitcoin count?

Only problem with a public utility like that now would be Trump and his Insane Cunt Posey would weaponize it for the religious right.

The issues here are trust, security, adoption and so forth. It's not easy to start a competition here I'd say.

I live miles and/or kilometers away from the three business that accept either of those

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

There are less puritans than gooners, if a corpo is backing the puritans is because that corpo is ran by one of those demons.

Valves statement also matches with the claims of Itch.io, Stripe, and what Collective Shout themselves have claimed. So we've got two different claims, on one side are Visa and Mastercard, and on the other we've got literally everyone else. I feel pretty confident about which one is a load of bullshit.

It's also worth noting that Visa and Mastercard are playing semantic games with their statements. Nobody ever claimed they were "refusing legal transactions", rather what they're doing is threatening to stop working with any business that doesn't implement censorship that they're happy with. It's a subtle but important difference and they've never denied that's what they're doing.

Edit: rereading Mastercards statement they are claiming they don't restrict how businesses operate (although they do weasel around a little bit about illegal content), although Visa still hasn't denied that. They may also be playing games with that statement because porn is illegal in some countries that Mastercard operates in so they may be trying to claim porn is an illegal transaction despite businesses not selling it in the countries it's illegal in.

Edit 2: It just occurred to me this could also be about the UK and some US states new (and horrible) porn ID laws. I'm not aware of Valve doing anything to implement the strict age verification those laws are requiring for sites that distribute porn, and Visa/Mastercard could be trying to argue that without that in place any porn games Valve sells are "illegal transactions". In theory Steam does have age gating, but it's the same "are you over 18?" easily bypassed check that porn sites have always used.

both because they’re not responsible for this shit show

Nobody is forcing them to use mastercard and visa services

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. 😉)

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.

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.

You do realize PayPal was just as involved in this as the rest right?

PayPal didn't send Valve any written content demands either, its acquiring bank did the enforcing just like MC, but PayPal was a named target of the campaign, got its Steam payment rail severed over the content issue, and ended up in the FTC's crosshairs alongside the card networks.

Also, PayPal's aggressive posture toward adult-adjacent businesses predates this.

The Erotic Review piece described PayPal freezing a subscription business for six months with "no appeal process, no recourse." So PayPal cracking down on Steam over adult content wasn't out of character; it was the largest-scale demonstration yet of a practice smaller publishers had already been living with.

😬

I'd rather pay with my actual blood than use PayPal.

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