If by “people involved” you mean folks who consume this kind of content then id totally agree. As soon as you offer crypto or even mildly sexual content your cc abuse rate goes through the roof. Which i suspect is the sole reason for processors getting upset in this case

Is that not a similar or higher percentage for games with loot boxes or other sorts of gambling?

I bet it has higher chargeback percentage too and they probably pay higher fees. iirc if merchant is getting close to 2% fraud to sales ratio, they can get banned for life. It's probably different rules when you're the size of Valve though...

OK well this is interesting information, what are the connections between crypto or even mildly sexual content exactly that create this phenomenon? I mean they do not seem to be related - if you said crypto or drawings of currency I would say huh, well they are sort of related, but the graph connection between crypto and even mildly sexual content would seem to me to be about as tenuous as that between crypto and meat eating.

So why do these two things cause credit card abuse to go through the roof?

Furthermore if it caused the credit card abuse to go through the roof wouldn't Valve just remove it of their own accord - at some point the abuse would mean money was taken away from Valve right?

Finally the article doesn't give this as a reason why it was removed - it said "violate the rules and standards set forth by our payment processors" - which sure, that may mean "high rates of credit card abuse were reported", but I doubt it.

Anyway, a link to studies of this phenomenon?

ps: I would probably believe credit card abuse increase under crypto, due no doubt to my innate prejudices.

> You're starting from the premise that there's some weird puritan thing happening

Credit card processors don't have to be puritanical. Instead, puritanical people simply have to be smart enough to figure out that the best way to deplatform content that they disagree with is by putting pressure on their payment processor monopolistic vendors.

Giving in to a pressure campaign by ideological people can be a completely amoral and smart business decision.

> puritanical people ... deplatform content that they disagree

so that begs the question - what if the non-puritanical people also pressure the credit payment processors to stop curtailing to those puritanicals? Why is it effective one way, but not the other?

Probably because people are willing to put their real names on the "We're against incest/rape simulators" petition while most people are not going to be quite so fortright on the "Valve should reinstate the incest/rape simulators" petition.

See cryptocurrency payments. So the good news in this direction is that bitcoin et al are very much making progress at these businesses. As far as I can see, many - perhaps even most - such businesses now accept 2-5 forms of cryptocurrencies as payment. That took long enough but we are finally getting there.

The bad news is that essentially ALL such businesses still believe that it is essential for them to accept credit card payments - and that means they must still implement whatever agenda these are pushing. On their entire customer base, even if paying by crypto. For now.

Hopefully this progress continues.

> You can get a long ways just by assuming that the people involved in these transactions are utterly amoral.

Which begs the question. Why would amoral people decline cash?

Because, in expectation, they're going to lose money.

Sure, but why?

Disputed charges by the user. I know of one payment processor that specifically seeks out these high-risk businesses. Consider one of many possible scenarios would be that of a spouse who is alarmed at a charge to a clearly risque service and says "What the heck is that??" and the offender says "What the heck I don't know. Cancel the charge!"

Or I suspect in this case there are Puritans with a lot of money who will sue the payment providers if the providers don't block things they think are bad.

Yes the payment provider is making a simple money based business decision, or possibly there is a threat of sanctions against the directors so a personal decision as well.

> You could just ask, "why do payment processors pressure content vendors not to offer this kind of content". You're starting from the premise that there's some weird puritan thing happening, but there's really nothing puritan about American business culture. There are other explanations!

Someone, somewhere is making a choice to pressure content vendors to not offer this kind of content, and not to pressure them to not offer other kinds of content. It may be upstream of the payment processors but there is absolutely a weird puritan American thing going on somewhere, and it's much more interesting to get to the bottom of that since that's the point where change could happen. If everyone involved was amoral, these profitable games would continue being sold.

Your premise is that they are, for the payment processors, profitable. They very probably are not.

> there's really nothing puritan about American business culture. [...] utterly amoral.

What? Puritanism is not about some kind of blanket purity to be recognized or expressed from any angle, perspective or religion. And in American business is both extreme and extremely selective.

It's also very much about appearances and image projected. You have to accept a difference between anybody's personal values (in so far as these can show through the mess of corporate decisions), and the image that businesses believe they much display.

You're talking about a culture that freely and enthusiastically sold opiates for decades. If they're cracking down on porn, it's because porn is costing them money, probably because people are disputing charges.

The history of the US and "adult materials" goes so much further than potential disputed credit card charges.

That's super interesting but a trivial Google search shows that chargebacks are a huge problem for this space so I'm not sure why I would care about that history.

Utterly amoral people would need even more reason to not serve basically anyone. Since I know I don’t give a shit, the only thing I can assume is that it’s people that generally oppose what I think is perfectly acceptable.

Since the processors don’t actually care, they must simply believe that dealing with these annoying people is not worth the effort, compared to just not serving stupidly marginal markets.

But the thing is, the people upset about the sex aren’t upset about the killing, which I think is ridiculous.

What Thomas is hinting at is that these products are unprofitable for the payment processors.

So it’s not even that the controversy is not worth the effort. It’s that it literally costs them money to deal with.

The sex taboo may not make sense, but it exists. And it makes people behave in ways that creates problems for lending to them, specifically fraud and chargeback rates are demonstrably higher.