Comment by Molitor5901
12 hours ago
Unless it's de facto illegal, payment processors should be business agnostic. You can make arguments that it's their platform, their business, they can do whatever they want - but that goes for insurance companies and everyone else we want to act neutrally.
If that's the case, then you have to 1) reduce requirements on the payment processors to do due diligence and/or 2) push handling of risks associated with payments elsewhere.
As others have mentioned, what evidence of risk is there between a normal game purchased on Steam, versus an adult game, purchased on Steam?
Steam has a specific return policy that it applies everywhere, the games don't show up on card statements, and Steam will lock your entire account for charging back.
If there's a secret epidemic of people making new accounts specifically to buy and chargeback on adult games, the solution is for the processor to pressure Steam to take measures to reduce fradulent chargebacks (e.g. through minimum account age requirements for adult games), not to censor the platform.
You're being too first principles here, for one. These giant operations have coarse rules because they are giant. Coming up with a single counterexample is not compelling. Coarse rules are inherently going to have false positives. That's a feature not a bug - regulated entities can't risk racking up offenses due to their automations or policies being too lax. Sooo..you did not "gotchya" anything with your comment.
Secondly, I was talking about categorically changing how we treat MC/Visa. If you are going to change their class of operation, something has to give. And it gets complicated.
Certain types of transactions come with different types of risk... one might reasonably assume that X-rated games fall into the "frequently fraudulent" category
>one might reasonably assume that X-rated games fall into the "frequently fraudulent" category
There was no such evidence presented, all the evidence was that some christian extremists complained.
Sure your wife might see that you have a payment to pornhub and might not like it but you will not get on your credit card report the name of the game you bought from Steam or GOG so this fake excuse does not work like it would have worked with adult sites subscriptions.
But if there is evidence for Steam and GOG let me know, if somehow I missed the news and the chritian extemists were not the one that pressured VISA then also let me know.
Steam in particular is known to play hardball with chargebacks. If you issue a chargeback, rumor is that Steam will lock your entire account. Which seems incredibly unfair, but capitalism.
If the theoretical angle is stolen credit cards, I am unmoved. The point of stolen credit cards is to launder for durable goods/services. The external value of a digital porn game is $0.
5 replies →
This has always been a lie.
The entire giftcard industry operates with these payment networks just fine despite large chargeback percentages that come from literal stolen credit cards
If the claim that "higher chargeback risk" like that cut you off from the payment networks were true, you would not be able to buy gift cards with credit cards.
To your point, lots of cards both limit purchases and charge higher rates on giftcard purchases to offset the risk.
Why would anyone assume that these are frequently fraudulent, especially within a managed platform like Steam?
When Fandango at Home sells you the movie Shortbus is it more likely to be a fraudulent transaction than when they sell you Shrek?
Different content absolutely has different risk profiles.
However, the payment networks do not care. As long as you aren't literally a front for laundering stolen credit cards, they are happy to take your money and very happy to charge you for every single chargeback.
There has NEVER been any evidence presented to support this "porn has high chargeback rates" claim, and other fields that DO have high chargeback rates have no problems taking credit cards.