Updated: 8/1/2025 4:18 p.m. ET: In a statement to Kotaku, a spokesperson for Valve said that while Mastercard did not communicate with it directly, concerns did come through payment processor and banking intermediaries. They said payment processors rejected Valve’s current guidelines for moderating illegal content on Steam, citing Mastercard’s Rule 5.12.7.
“Mastercard did not communicate with Valve directly, despite our request to do so,” Valve’s statement sent over email to Kotaku reads. “Mastercard communicated with payment processors and their acquiring banks. Payment processors communicated this with Valve, and we replied by outlining Steam’s policy since 2018 of attempting to distribute games that are legal for distribution. Payment processors rejected this, and specifically cited Mastercard’s Rule 5.12.7 and risk to the Mastercard brand.”
Rule 5.12.7 states, “A Merchant must not submit to its Acquirer, and a Customer must not submit to the Interchange System, any Transaction that is illegal, or in the sole discretion of the Corporation, may damage the goodwill of the Corporation or reflect negatively on the Marks.”
It goes on, “The sale of a product or service, including an image, which is patently offensive and lacks serious artistic value (such as, by way of example and not limitation, images of nonconsensual sexual behavior, sexual exploitation of a minor, nonconsensual mutilation of a person or body part, and bestiality), or any other material that the Corporation deems unacceptable to sell in connection with a Mark.”
Violations of rule 5.12.7 can result in fines, audits, or companies being dropped by the payment processors.
I don’t think they realize how much worse their brands look now, after starting all this shit…
I want to cancel ally visa and mastercard cards and never give them my business ever again after this
This might just be my insomnia talking, but I thought a reasonable idea might be to call and reduce the available credit by however much is comfortable. For me, it would be fairly reasonable to reduce it by 50%. I assume they use some kind of magicians handshake to value their company based on how much potential credit is out there… Maybe it’d do nothing though. Anyone know?
This will do nothing except hurt your own credit score as your credit utilization will be higher
I am not a financial guru so hopefully someone will correct me if I’m wrong about this, but your credit score is affected positively the more available credit you have. So by voluntarily lowering your available credit, you’re actually hurting yourself way more than the card companies. At least I think that’s how it works, or rather one of many factors.
That will also destroy your credit rating
Amex is still reasonably good.
Amex charges up to 14% of every transaction. If a place takes it, they are almost always ripping you off.
Amex typically charges between 1.7 and 3.3%.
As someone who does not take amex they want to charge me between 7% and 14%. Maybe if I did more sales they would not charge as much, but the reason amex is not taken in as many places as mastercard or visa is the 7% to 14%.
Weird. All the info I can find shows a maximum merchant fee of 3.3% + $0.10 per transaction.
Even this article about the topic says the reason is because amex charges .5% - 1% more. Not 6-13% more.
Maybe it varies by country? Are you in NoAm or somewhere else?
I am in Canada, and amex is famous for charging way too much in merchant fees. They also charge it under a silly system based on the type of card used (the more “elite” the more the merchant pays).
nonconsensual mutilation of a person or body part
I feel like a strict reading of this rule would also put a lot of fighting games, shooters, horror games etc in the not approved category
I think some christian items could also be affected, like the bible. Cane and Able, crucifixion, etc are all in that book
Also incest
And circumcision of children.
Good vibes all around
No cell phone, no internet. Just people being people. Really living in the moment. Really knowing what its like to be human.
The good old days.
Also encouraging your neighbors to rape your own daughters instead of the visiting angels.
Lmao I really need to read the bible in full on day
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Right now in Rimworld I am sending child soldiers to bring more ammo to the mortars that are busy pounding away at some primitive tribesmen that are angry at me for dumping a few tons of toxic waste on their home or something.
Those that survive the mortar bombardment will be lobotomised and enslaved. If they have enough limbs remaining to be useful to me I will probably use a few of them as slaves and the rest will be sold to the empire. Any that the empire don’t want will be harvested for organs and dumped in a corpse pit.
I didn’t ask if the tribesmen consented to any of this.
Honestly, that’s pretty tame for Rimworld.
I keep trying to learn rimworld. I drop out of most tutorials some time after building a refrigerator. Any recommendations on how to get further along? This is a game I’ll love once I know it but I’m not there yet.
Do the relaxed scenario girl and a lower difficulty for an easier time. Drop in a year round grow area, and mountainous area to mine a base into the mountain.
Thanks for the tips. I have been using that storyteller and easy mode but picking a random temperate forest.
Lower difficulty, in all present difficulty options the raid strength is determined largely based on your colony wealth. If you have massive towers of gold then expect big raids.
Even flooring adds up to wealth, massive rooms with carpets can become a non insignificant value. This isn’t to say don’t build them, but you should make sure a reasonable amount of your total wealth is invested into warfare. It can be quite easy to hoard things that are useless to you but have a fair bit of value to them.
I didn’t know that. Thank you!
Is there really a game that allows you to do all that??!!
Absolutely and more! We also have psychic powers, murder robots, friendly murder robots, vampires, genetic engineering, organized religion, semi-sentient plants, space ships, cannibals, space drugs, drugs in space, rabid woodland critters, eldritch horrors beyond comprehension, giant bugs, orbital bombardments, and also the looming threat of starvation as you watch all that you built burn. That’s all before we talk about things that the modding community has brought to the game.
To be clear, the RimWorld doesn’t force you into any one play style, and most of the things listed above can be disabled or avoided if that’s not your jam. At its core the game is trying to tell a story, it’s up to the player to help shape that story. It’s absolutely fantastic; quite literally the best $30 I’ve ever spent on a game (if we’re talking hours played, I’m just about to turn the corner on 2,000 hours (in the spirit of disclosure, a chunk of that is also spent making mods for the game)).
Diablo 2, corpse explosion!
Rust, just rust in general.
Oh did you not read the years and years of actions religious groups did to snuff games and movies?
Mortal Kombat is gone.
Mutilation seems to imply more than just violence or killing. For example, Days Gone has a scene very early that involves flaying someone’s skin off, I would imagine that type of stuff would qualify.
Wouldn’t that have artistic value? Since that adds to the story.
That’s true but anyone agaimt its inclusion would just say it doesn’t add to the story. “Clearly it detracts from the story, as the player would be distracted by the horrific event instead of enjoying the game” -some hypothetical mastercard Exec, right before fining Valve.
It’s not a court, so there’s no appeal from that, unless there’s an appeal granted by the contract itself.
They didnt have to show it so explicitly, although I’m not sure simply implying mutilation would qualify too.
Its hard to say what the right level of shock for that kind of thing is, it probably should just be restricted to adults only.
Brilliant, just make your rules vague and force everyone else down the chain to self-censor. Surely this will result in the best outcome.
Fucking mastercard
Collective Shout says it wasn’t their fault, MC and Visa say it wasn’t their fault, Steam and Itch say it wasn’t their fault. Conclusion? No one is to blame! No one did it! What’s more, it didn’t even happen!! it was all a figment of our imagination!
Gee golly I accidentally dropped internet privacy into the garbage and almost threw it out with the trash. Oops didnt mean to! Silly me.
Which sounds to me like Steam and Itch could restore everything. Unless MC/Visa wants to publicly say they can’t?
“Mastercard did not communicate with Valve directly, despite our request to do so,” Valve’s statement sent over email to Kotaku reads. “Mastercard communicated with payment processors and their acquiring banks. Payment processors communicated this with Valve
This whole thing reads like a telephone game where nobody wants to take any responsibility.
Honestly, I don’t care if MasterCard doesn’t want to take responsibility. It was their rule and their intermediaries that caused the situation and they did not intervene when valve tried to reach out directly.
They are responsible through action or inaction, no matter how they try to deny it.
It seems like, if they’re publicly denying responsibility, Steam and Itch now have legal cover to restore everything.
I’m not a lawyer, etc. etc., but don’t public statements from these kinds of entities inform how these clauses can be enforced?
they did the exact same thing in the porn industry. naturally Visa and MC didn’t communicate directly with the individual porn companies. So thats’ how places like CCBill and what have you took off. and then Visa and MC laid out their weird rules to CCBill who then passed it along to the individual companies.
CollectiveShout did take responsibility & they’re Confirmed to be pedos, so what are we waiting for ?
Put simply, we allow all lawful purchases on our network.
As Valve correctly points out, this is a blatant & outright lie. They have cut off any number of legal entities over pressure from politicians or groups. Now they have to own it.
I mean, their own Rule 5.12.7 has that “or” in it, which includes transactions that are fully lawful but “may damage the goodwill of the corporation”.
You will find such language pretty much everywhere. And there are reasons for it. A good example are certain drugs that are technically not illegal. Because they have not been officially classified yet.
That used to be a thing here in Sweden some time ago, where they’d just change some little compound and could technically, legally sell it online until it was deemed otherwise. Because it’s now technically a new formula. Once it was classified, they just repeated the proceas.
MasterCard might not want to be seen as an enabler in the drug trade. So while it’s technically legal. They don’t want anything to do with it. And would like the option to take action.
And according to the articles. It’s not MasterCard pointing to that regulation, but the processors. As MasterCard notes. They’re not a bank, they’re not processing your payment. They just provide the technology to do so.
Furthermore. I’m quite amazed that people seem to think Valve is this really good company that we can all trust and take their word on. Valve says one thing. MasterCard says another. I wouldn’t take either one of them on just their word. Better to take a step back, and see how it develops so you don’t make yourself a useful idiot.
Tl;dr: Mastercard says they didn’t “force” Valve to remove nsfw games. They just told them that if they didn’t remove the games that were complained about by Collective Shout, they’ll block them.
Couldn’t they just block collective shout thus probably losing far less business?
Mastercard? Yes, but then they’d have to admit that they were in the wrong, so it seems unlikely.
Isn’t every game NSFW? Funny how language works.
Unless your work has been gamified. I play several games at work, one called Jira, another called GIT they aren’t super exciting but it’s a job.
Gotta love it when companies put something in their legal agreements that just says “we can do whatever the fuck we want.” Is the rest of the wall of text just there to hide that somewhere someone won’t read?
Fuckers are just propagating the fury without providing a fix. Are the censored games back or not? Because right now they aren’t. Put them back and make Mastercard do something about it now that they have staged their position. Collective Shout is playing both sides.
Oh shit, that’s an old school reference. Poor Mr. Cheeseface.
For those unfamiliar, this is from an old National Lampoons magazine.
A few years later, someone actually shot that dog.
I guess turn the boobs butts and dicks up to 10,000 then. In every game.
Its time for Gordon freeman to do unholy things with a headcrab!
Lamar IS fully debeaked, after all… ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Oh god why did you have to put that image in my head. No wonder it hides in the vents
Like this?
We have seen the same behavior out of the credit card companies before. Its pretty clear that they do pressure companies to remove content they don’t approve of. Its censorship and its legal since the companies are not the government. They are just tied in at a high level to the banking industry. Its a good example of how lack of regulation harms both creators and consumers.
It lets a bunch of poorly adjusted individuals force their personal mental problems on us all.
Taking away our freedom of speech is something to go to war over.
If this trend of giving all the government power to companies continues, well, let’s just say I’m glad we have the 2nd amendment to fight back against tyranny.
I’m not going to live in a reddit cuck-world without a fight.
So much fucking censorship and agenda-pushing on the internet.
It makes me sick how many useful idiots are being herded like sheep just to satisfy those with more money than them.
I need to know from which game that screenshot is.
For research.
