Mastercard has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms, contrary to media reports and allegations.
Our payment network follows standards based on the rule of law. Put simply, we allow all lawful purchases on our network. At the same time, we require merchants to have appropriate controls to ensure Mastercard cards cannot be used for unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content.
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Seth Eisen
I’d love Valve to spend their extra billions on opening a payment processor. Fuck the big 3.
Can I still use visa or MasterCard on a dildo? And can I pay for it in cash… Dollars? Is my money accepted at the local adult bookstore?
Why doesn’t valve simply restore games back then? Tell payment processors MC is OK with them (as evident by this statement) and tell them to come back with a reply from MC?
Why not just let MC deny the payments if they have a “policy” about it?
Let the free market decide. Other payment methods do exist.
They are a fucking payment processor; the only brand that matters is reliability and confidency, which they damaged now.
They’re not talking about with Steam customers though, but rather with the religious idiots who have decided to crusade against porn, feel emboldened by recent age-ID bills and are now pursuing the “MasterCard funds filth” angle.
I’m kinda wondering what the ratio of anti-porn religious knobs is you gamers. There’s a lot of religious folk but many of them also enjoy porn so …
There are less puritans than gooners, if a corpo is backing the puritans is because that corpo is ran by one of those demons.
Get ready for Gilead.
so this is a game of telephone between activists, payment cards, payment processors, and vendors.
Also TIL mastercard HQ is located in Purchase, NY.
My view is that Valve is the most likely to be honest about who is responsible here, both because they’re not responsible for this shit show no matter what the answer is and because they have a monetary interest in restarting sales.
Oh I’m so glad that their brand isn’t being damaged. It’d be terrible if that were to happen.
That would only matter if they weren’t a monopoly. If there were viable alternatives then this would not be an issue, as users could just go buy dirty cat girl pokemon clones with their baiter cards and not use master cards.
Direct link: Mastercard rule 5.12.7 Illegal or Brand-damaging Transactions
Tweet of their attempt to deny responsibility: great opportunity to wreck their brand.
Wtf are all these rules that I didn’t agree to when getting a bank card?
Of course, because when everyone buy a game on steam the FIRST thing it comes to their mind is the credit card brand they used. What a load of bullock.
FFS I don’t even remember which one of my credit card I have saved on steam.
MasterCard can go fuck themselves. Great job saving your brand
I don’t have any credit cards saved on steam. I only use PayPal for steam purchases.
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
😬
I’d rather pay with my actual blood than use PayPal.
It’s purely because steam hasn’t been able to keep my login info secure for almost a decade. I’ve changed emails, passwords, both, and yet I will always get random 2FA attempts from other places. I just don’t trust them to keep my bank info safe either.
I’m looking at this and I am just wondering… Did you also check the computers your using?
It’s quite a bit easier to get in the pc of a normal user than it is to get into the computers of valve, or at least that’s to hope.
How do they manage to keep millions of other accounts uncompromised for over a decade, yet somehow it’s only you getting 2FAs? Seems unlikely.
I use Paypal and they charge my Discover (Novus network, IIRC). No MC policy issue, let me buy what I want.
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.
