To everyone wondering what's going on, Visa and Mastercard threatened to end service with both Steam and Itch.io over adult content that is generally speaking legal. Basically, our rights are being trampled on by payment processors.
Viewing post in adult and erotic tags games gone?
I've been particularly mad about payment processors doing this shit for ages now and nobody really listened until it finally happened.
A while back, Toffer Team did a crowdfunding campaing for their Lip Lewd Idol visual novel series. They racked up 23k and PayPal froze the account and stole all their crowdfunding money.
I said even back then that this kind of behavior was an attempt to normalize censorship and now its happening. I'm just as furious about whats happening as you are, if not more so.
Visa and Mastercard are a duopoly that actively collude with eachother and I can't for the life of me understand why they havent been forcefully broken up by the government.
I'm not american, but if you are, contact your representatives. Theres a bill in the US right now being worked on specifically to make it illegal for Visa and Mastercard to decide what you do with your money.
The bills ErrorStack is referring to (actually two bills, H.R.987 and S.401) were introduced by two Republicans, the party you may notice control the government at the moment. So I would say it is potentially the right fuckin government, actually!
Payment processors overstepping their bounds is a bipartisan issue! Conservatives have been the target of it before! Making them politically neutral utilities is something we can all get behind, and you should contact your representatives in support of the "Fair Access to Banking Act" if you are a US citizen.
The bills ErrorStack is referring to (actually two bills, H.R.987 and S.401) were introduced by two Republicans. Payment processors overstepping their bounds is a bipartisan issue! Conservatives have been the target of it before! Making them politically neutral utilities is something we can all get behind, and you should contact your representatives in support of the "Fair Access to Banking Act"
if you are a US citizen.
What that means for you personally is that your unproductive doomerism isn't even based on facts. Next time you make a post, ask yourself if it's indistinguishable from what a propagandist would say if they were trying to demoralize people into doing nothing. And if it is, don't say it.
That's simple. The government has always wanted to ban shit they don't control and doing so through the government is hard because of free speech laws. Furthermore, seeing how the government is likely involved with human trafficking and sex slavery, anything that has sex in it is likely an important target for them.
This might seem farfetched but in my experience sexual predators engage in projection to hide their guilt and seeing how the "feminist group" is completely fine with "Cuties" then I have my suspicions that they are just a manufactured excuse for credit card companies to ban shit.
Indeed; the feminist group follows many reactionary conservatives on their Twitter account, such as Liz Wheeler, Charlie Kirk and Elon Musk's political party, all people that have been incredibly misogynistic by the past. The only feminists they follow are people like JK Rowling, who are only feminists by a very charitable and liberal definition of the term. They are a feminist group in name only. They are reactionary conservative censorship advocates, presumably Christian.
I'm normally not a crypto shill, but it might be worth investing into a small amount of relatively stable crypto specifically to have some way to do transactions when Visa and Mastercard are doing this shit.
Theres not a hugr amount of card providers out there. Most of them use Visa or Mastercard infrastructure.
There is an option, but it is a pretty big step backwards, so I doubt people would go with it. Rather than using credit cards for everyday shopping, we can withdraw money directly in bank to pay in cash, and for online payments, devs could have bank account number disclosed, so we can make a direct bank transfers instead. Basicly cutting off the use of payment processors altogether, so they either backpedal on bans or go bankrupt and new, more lenient ones get created.
Visa and Mastercard's huge monopoly frustrates me so much. They just have the ability to screw over anybody they don't like, how is that fair? It's not just with gaming either, it's also been with websites like OnlyFans and Tumblr. This is a repeated thing spanning across more than a decade with zero major repercussion. God.
https://www.change.org/p/tell-mastercard-visa-activist-groups-stop-controlling-what-we-can-watch-read-or-play
Pass it around and don't forget to tell your representative