Apparently this wasn't Steam or Visa randomly deciding to do this. They were lobbied by an Australian NGO to remove SA and Incest material:

https://www.collectiveshout.org/

Steam wouldn't remove SA games so they went to the payment processors and complained until those companies put pressure on Valve.

Or they're just taking credit for something that was already happening. Hard to tell.

I'm realy not sure where the intersection between hating Gamers and the shallow reasoning Visa should be the ones to set our moral standards. Like shit you must realize they're two steps away from labelling anything LGBTQ+ as "morally deviant" too.

Yes I'm entirely aware its whataboutism but I'm not sure there are any other points one could take. I'd rather put more direct pressure from movements and whatever direct pressure on Steam one can make rather than just looking at this as some sort of W because 4chan got their fav games banned.

Steam says payment processors got a say but realy they got the final decision here. It makes no sense to imagine Steam agrees this is good for them in the future either. In the future what is to say games from a certain country must be banned because Visa says so. Might as well substitute that for the US State Department already.

This is a slippery slope where a cheap W doesn't mean its a good outlook. With still 3.5 years of Trump left and the tariff shit still going I'm not surprised if eventualy they force region locking by default. Oh you're Brazilian? I'm sorry you can't buy because Visa doesn't allow this game to be sold over there and Visa also says local payment systems should be banned(literally current news).

This is really not good. Steam is by far the largest pc platform and where most indie games make the majority of their money. The likelihood of indie LGBTQ+ games getting banned over completely benign "sexual content" is huge.

I guess this is how the US gets morality-laws-with-American-characteristics. Just another aspect of the corporate censorship and surveillance state. There's another post on here about people having to submit photo ID in the UK to use certain sites. Plus the ad-tech computer-fingerprint tracking technology that has existed forever. I completely agree it's going to start being used for way more invasive and damaging kinds of censorship if it isn't already. But I doubt we'd see any article written about Steam removing a game from a sanctioned country unless maybe they're Russian or something like that.

I wonder if Valve has even gotten any complaints for payment processors though, or is this just preemptive or an excuse? And I wonder if this is more of a ruling-class consensus and not just an isolated instance.

content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers

Why would these companies set these standards? Its not like the average consumer cares about whether their payment processor lets them pay for both cod and nekopara.

let the smut go, first they came for the perverts and I'm speaking the fuck out for them before they come for me

Jarvis, generate a meme using the "the myth of consensual sex" template, where the consenting parties are labeled "Steam" and "Gooners" and Jesus is replaced with Visa and Mastercard

i wonder if this explains why there aren't any games that are outside the US imperial box when it comes to violence and what not.. there should be all kinds of 9/11 games and destroy the USA games.. but you won't find any

First they came for Hunie Pop...

I'm never gonna get the CCP Milker on Steam, am I? Oh well. Back to the brainwashing mines.

Cool, I hated how incest got normalised