Watching this from afar, I'm deeply confused about the recent trend of payment processors determining what types of vice can be accessed using their payment systems. I understand legal compliance, and cases where legal compliance is ambiguous (marijuana transactions in the US). However why are payment processors collectively policing what is acceptable in video games?
jjk166 · 2h ago
Well first certain activities are very difficult to directly police so rather than getting better at dealing with the actual criminal behavior, you instead go after the money which is merely a proxy for the behavior.
Unfortunately tracking monetary transactions and finding the people doing heinous behavior you're supposed to be policing is still pretty hard, so you you hand off that task to someone else. The best way to go after the money is to put tight restrictions on money processors to collect data and high penalties for looking the other way, so they'll do your job for you.
Unfortunately determining which transactions are actually illicit is also pretty hard, so the payment processors go employ intermediate firms which give various buisnesses scores based on how well they comply with the payment processor's guidelines, which is a proxy for transaction suspicion.
Unfortunately scoring businesses on how well they comply with guidelines is also hard, so the intermediates make the businesses adopt operating guidelines and just compare how well those match up to the payment processor's, which is a proxy for how well the company complies. Typically these guidelines have certain moderation requirements.
Unfortunately moderating content is hard, so businesses that handle transactions for 3rd party content put the onus on those using their platform to self moderate, and put in place overly conservative moderation designed to satisfy the intermediates.
Repeat this a few times for a few different classes of behavior and suddenly the financial infrastructure is one of the most powerful tools to manipulate the population at scale in the world, much to the satisfaction of those who came up with the system. It's amazing how much extra you can get done by not doing your job.
OgsyedIE · 2h ago
The payment processors are complying in advance with laws that don't exist yet but are expected to be made. The Visa Global Government Affairs Department and the Mastercard Government Affairs & Policy Team hire historians and political scientists with years of policy industry experience to assess the political risks of failing to align with the ruling party of the country they are headquarted in.
For example, one of the major banks in Weimar Germany was Mendelssohn & Co., which did not align with the ideology of the post-1933 government. In 1938 the bank was liquidated and the assets forcibly absorbed into Deutsche Bank. The executives of Mendelssohn & Co. who were not already members of the Nazi party were all arrested and later murdered in the Holocaust, with the exception of Rudolf Loeb who fled to Argentina and died in 1966 and Paul Kempner who fled to the United States and died in 1956.
cozyman · 2h ago
have you considered that maybe they don't want to do business with companies that host child pornography and rape? You cannot deny that porn sites host that type of content because they were caught red-handed. So do you think it's not a big deal or that peoples access to self gratification is more important than the abuse of women and young girls?
OgsyedIE · 2h ago
Porn sites that host such content do not deliberately choose to host it, they are forced to host it by criminal users, because the website allows user uploads without content scanning, which allows users to upload anything and have it only get moderated after it is already live.
The existence of companies that fail to do an excellent job of preventing the upload of child pornography and rape is a trade off.
In exchange for giving section 230 to everybody, including porn hosts that fail to perfectly vet their content, the existence of youtube, hacker news and [insert your favourite social media] is enabled. Having the wrong things only get moderated after they are put on the internet, instead of before, is the price we pay to allow good things to get put on the internet.
After all, you certainly wouldn't like to be in a situation where you reply to me and have to wait three hours for a janitor to check that your reply is acceptable before your reply could go live, would you?
The current system avoids that hypothetical negative.
dpoloncsak · 1h ago
Bro that exact content gets uploaded to YouTube everyday too, but nobody's cutting Google's payments off
mrguyorama · 2h ago
Payment processors are being sued by essentially religious fundamentalists. They are anti-porn, have very very good lawyers, and keep winning vague cases.
Ironically, porn website keep accepting Visa/Mastercard like nothing happened
jeffwask · 1h ago
and all the sports betting sites are doing just fine.
siva7 · 2h ago
This screams so hard to buy a bank to solve this problems out for the gaming industry. Valve has the capital to do this but probably not the CEO...
burnt-resistor · 2h ago
I know someone who bought a defunct bank to solve a family wealth repatriation catch-22 issue.
This might be a sensible approach.
Or, if they had some sense, they'd get into the credit business with their own "store card" that doesn't use V/MC. With this, they'd have the leverage to tell credit card processors to "get bent" should V/MC try telling them how to run their business and what content is acceptable.
Habgdnv · 18m ago
First they came for the porn, and I did not speak out - because, officially I do not watch porn.
Then they came for cryptocurrency, and I did not speak out - because I am not a crypto bro.
Then they came for the games, and I am a gamer...
but there was no one left to speak for me,
because payment processors had already "ethically" deplatformed everyone else.
JumpCrisscross · 3h ago
“In early July 2025, PayPal notified Valve that their acquiring bank for payment transactions in certain currencies was immediately terminating the processing of any transactions related to Steam. This affects Steam purchases using PayPal in currencies other than EUR, CAD, GBP, JPY, AUD and USD.”
lesuorac · 2h ago
So, this means a bank that handles EUR, CAD, GBP, JPY, AUD and USD isn't afraid of Visa/MasterCard and is willing to process the transactions while the other currencies don't have a willing bank?
JumpCrisscross · 2h ago
It means PayPal’s bank(s) don’t want to take foreign currency risks in non-major currencies.
altairprime · 2h ago
Is it Fiserv? I notice Mastercard invested into PayPal and Fiserv just a couple months ago, and PayPal was already in business with Fiserv via Fastlane.
linotype · 2h ago
I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but can Steam just accept Bitcoin?
Unfortunately tracking monetary transactions and finding the people doing heinous behavior you're supposed to be policing is still pretty hard, so you you hand off that task to someone else. The best way to go after the money is to put tight restrictions on money processors to collect data and high penalties for looking the other way, so they'll do your job for you.
Unfortunately determining which transactions are actually illicit is also pretty hard, so the payment processors go employ intermediate firms which give various buisnesses scores based on how well they comply with the payment processor's guidelines, which is a proxy for transaction suspicion.
Unfortunately scoring businesses on how well they comply with guidelines is also hard, so the intermediates make the businesses adopt operating guidelines and just compare how well those match up to the payment processor's, which is a proxy for how well the company complies. Typically these guidelines have certain moderation requirements.
Unfortunately moderating content is hard, so businesses that handle transactions for 3rd party content put the onus on those using their platform to self moderate, and put in place overly conservative moderation designed to satisfy the intermediates.
Repeat this a few times for a few different classes of behavior and suddenly the financial infrastructure is one of the most powerful tools to manipulate the population at scale in the world, much to the satisfaction of those who came up with the system. It's amazing how much extra you can get done by not doing your job.
For example, one of the major banks in Weimar Germany was Mendelssohn & Co., which did not align with the ideology of the post-1933 government. In 1938 the bank was liquidated and the assets forcibly absorbed into Deutsche Bank. The executives of Mendelssohn & Co. who were not already members of the Nazi party were all arrested and later murdered in the Holocaust, with the exception of Rudolf Loeb who fled to Argentina and died in 1966 and Paul Kempner who fled to the United States and died in 1956.
The existence of companies that fail to do an excellent job of preventing the upload of child pornography and rape is a trade off.
In exchange for giving section 230 to everybody, including porn hosts that fail to perfectly vet their content, the existence of youtube, hacker news and [insert your favourite social media] is enabled. Having the wrong things only get moderated after they are put on the internet, instead of before, is the price we pay to allow good things to get put on the internet.
After all, you certainly wouldn't like to be in a situation where you reply to me and have to wait three hours for a janitor to check that your reply is acceptable before your reply could go live, would you?
The current system avoids that hypothetical negative.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_on_Sexual_Expl...
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This might be a sensible approach.
Or, if they had some sense, they'd get into the credit business with their own "store card" that doesn't use V/MC. With this, they'd have the leverage to tell credit card processors to "get bent" should V/MC try telling them how to run their business and what content is acceptable.
Then they came for cryptocurrency, and I did not speak out - because I am not a crypto bro.
Then they came for the games, and I am a gamer... but there was no one left to speak for me, because payment processors had already "ethically" deplatformed everyone else.
https://www.pcgamer.com/50-of-transactions-were-fraudulent-w...