A couple years ago a bunch of credit card companies suddenly decided they wanted to dictate how people are allowed to spend their money. They issued warnings to game stores to delist all nsfw games or else. The credit card companies have an amazing racket going on and I struggle to believe they suddenly care about some morality over profit. Generally all they care about is that people spend as much money as possible. I also seem to recall them being notably silent on the much larger revenue streams coming from adult videos. So what was their actual purpose in these seemingly random strikes?
Australia has the equivalent of the john birch society which is pushing racist shit, anti sex worker nonsense, and anti nsfw games.
They where the people that doxxed only fans workers and got them in trouble for taxes.
They also got itch.Io to remove a bunch of nsfw games.
We have a similar group in the united States who got prostitution to be reclassified as human trafficking, as if a sex worker doing independent work online is the same as the movie “taken” with Nissam. That resulted in backpages getting removed, along with legitimate concerns about minors being trafficked. Also all the porn websites where being pushed by this group to remove all of the porn that doesn’t have someone tied to a ID card. People say all the porn websites are owned by one person and this is to ensure that.
If you really want to look into it these kind of groups are funded by religious groups, and republicans and are in the same group of people who pushed for project 2026 or 2028 whatever it was called.
Because apparently, from looking at the comments, some people think there’s no limit to NSFW games. When, there is.
It was the work of Collective Shout.
They’re an Australian christofascist group trying to push right wing purity nonsense. There was one game, No Mercy, that really did push things too far. Collective Shout was able to poster child that game and pressure payment providers into pressuring game platforms to delist a lot of NSFW games.
A lot of the ultra wealth you may have noticed have a christofascist lean, so with the vocal pressure from Collective Shout it was easy for them to claim economic harm saying if they didn’t pull games there’d be a boycott or something.
Makes me think of Harvester.
A lot of the ultra wealth you may have noticed have a christofascist lean
I think THIS is OP’s question. It is perfectly believable that a small number of insane and delusional people might truly think that these things are bad.
But I think the bigger question is: why do the ultra-wealthy believe this,or at least support it? What is the end game? Porn is popular and profitable: why is there no billionaire who has made their money off of smut rising to defend their industry?
I wouldn’t fully credit them, at best. VISA and MasterCard have their own puritan history, that fringe group is a scapegoat to do what they wanted to do anyways.
I did mention the ultra wealthy (like those in charge of Visa and MasterCard) have christofascist leanings and they caved super easy probably because of it, using them happily as a scapegoat.
I’m sure there’s a lot more that can be said about the global elite that others have said before
And it won’t be surprising when the christofascist leaders are outed as sex pests because the loudest voiced against sexual expression are personal fans that want to donimate others for malicous reasons. Like all the anti gay religious leaders that turn out to be child molesters.
Ty, I’m going to donate towards them.
Are you really a racist and a bigot and mysoginist? The founders have a history of not just being anti-nsfw but also being anti-LGBTQ, anti-abortion, and conspiracy theorists. The founder comes from Women’s Forum Australia, a group so crazy they were known to withdraw their kids from school because they thought the Wi-Fi was making them sick.
These people are anti education. Anti women’s rights under the guise of moral superiority. They are against legitimate sexual education (that thing proven to reduce child sex abuse cases). They are not who you want to back unless you are a right wing nutter.
Anti LGBTQ in what way? And what have they done that’s racist? I looked at their site and they did good work opposing Andrew Tate, is there more to this group?
Yes, I literally linked to some of their history. They’re all linked to right wing conspiracy groups. The founders and several of their members have posted long tirades against diversity programs, constantly retweet staunchly anti-trans people, have claimed sexually diverse (though they say perverse with no distinction about anything) nerds are the cause of all problems.
Even several of the games Collective Shout targeted specifically shows they don’t actually care about truth and just want to scream louder until they get their way. They campaigned against Detroit: Become Human saying it’s a vile sexist game because of a scene where you actually save a woman from being beaten by her husband, thus eliciting empathy in many players for victims of abuse (I personally remember it opening people’s eyes when they played it).
They claim videogames make people violent and sexist despite mountains of evidence otherwise.
They claim Tate as their success despite many other groups actively pushing against him and his media.
Numerous LGBTQ organizations have stated how Collective Shout negatively impacts them by targeting healthy representation of being LGBTQ by calling it sexual perversion. Even Vice if I’m not mistaken ran articles diving into their negative impacts.
If you want to support truly feminist work there are plenty of valid, successful, known anti-trafficking and anti-abuse charities doing good work.
This is an observation, not a threat: You are choosing death. It’s a death cult. If you don’t value life, keep it to yourself. Don’t take others down with you.
你好，我的好朋友！
Lol
King behaviour
Australians are my subjects, too 😎🇦🇺
I first read that as Collective Soul and thought “Why would a 90s rock band care about this?”
In a nutshell, an Australian anti-porn group put pressure on the credit card networks Visa and MasterCard, which process the grand majority of card payments worldwide, for both credit and debit cards.
https://www.thepinknews.com/2025/08/04/visa-mastercard-adult-purchases/
What remains unclear to me is why a somewhat obscure lobbying group was able to bring two American multinationals to heel. But in any case, I am of the opinion that this group sits well within the range of right wing reactionary, in spite of dressing itself up in the cloak of feminism. The group’s Wikipedia page lists the founder as a conservative and anti-abortion activist.
As usual, Wilhoit’s Law is instructive: this despicable group seeks to denigrate sex work, depictions of sex, and the legal market for sex art and anything arbitrarily similar, by denying this group of people from the financial system and from earning an income, and then leave them without any support or even a suggestion as to what these people should do instead. This is the “bind but does not protect” part of Wilhoit’s Law. No different than American conservatives and TERFs that try to drive a wedge to isolate trans people, this group targets sex workers and they cannot be allowed to continue unabated.
The legal solutions are as straightforward as they seem: require that interstate financial services can only charge a fee if transactions are routed and processed neutrally. The economic solution would be the expansion of existing national payment clearing networks (ie ACH in the USA) to also process card payments as an alternative to the duopoly.
I know that these groups exist. What I don’t understand is, how do they get such successful companies to shoot themselves in the foot like this? Did they offer more money than the providers expected to make from the game revenue? What about the value of all the bad will they bought themselves for overstepping like that?
The only explanation that makes sense to me is the payment processors are ruin by shit heads who are actively looking for an excuse to censor shit.
Money. It’s always money.
Right wing nuts tend to yell quite loudly, and convinced executives (also right wing nuts) that their bottom line will take a hit if they don’t comply.
And Bad will from who? Dirty poors who have no choice but to use one of three options? They don’t give a shit if the poors like them or not.
They’re very connected and joined up.
The fascists are much more interconnected: there’s only a Thailand based crypto billionaire link to travel between the Deputy President of the USA and TRADITIONAL VALUES organised crime in Spain and North Africa.
Misogynistic far right groups in Australia get funding and guest appearances from nutters from Sweden and The Netherlands.
We don’t realise how much of a literal conspiracy to tear down our society is currently taking place.
there’s only a Thailand based crypto billionaire link to travel between the Deputy President of the USA and TRADITIONAL VALUES organised crime in Spain and North Africa.
sentence doesn’t really make sense to me, is “TRADITIONAL VALUES” an organised crime group in the mediterranean?
When examining why corporations toe the line for conservative endeavors, it’s less useful to examine the financial aspect and more useful to look at the power dynamic. Oligopolies are like dictators, in that they need to occasionally perform a tour de force, as a way to suppress the exercise of soft power. That is to say, scare the opposition to fragment them and to disorganize them, so they don’t get any bright ideas. Inspirational Skeletor warns precisely of this: https://mas.to/@skeletor/117191580571928662
What soft power would Visa and MasterCard have been afraid of? For context, in the USA, debit card transactions are capped at a fixed rate per transaction, whereas credit card transactions can have both a per-transaction and a percentage. Accordingly, the card networks would very much like to be processing more credit transactions than debit. But this revenue comes off the backs of consumers, in the form of higher prices because Visa’s fee is rolled in, even for people paying with cash. Enough clamoring about cost of living could easily put the card processors front-and-center before a Congressional committee, a spotlight they don’t really want.
Such furore would have to be driven from both consumers and businesses complaining about the extortionate practices by the card processors. Which is why the card networks hide in one domain and attack in another: deflect to greedy banks that are charging high interest directly to consumers (thus ignoring the cut that Visa/MasterCard take), and then clamp down on one segment of businesses, as a sign that they can be vicious if any other businesses start blabbing to the feds.
The card networks assume (unfortunately correctly) that small and medium businesses will not band together to overcome these monopolistic moves. And the largest businesses that process the most card transactions (eg Amazon, Walmart) are so entrenched in accepting card payments that they already negotiate deals directly with Visa and MasterCard, so they’re not a risk.
In the end, this could be viewed as a conservative cause that happens to overlap with a need for a naked show of force. And in that endeavor, they’ve succeeded: every platform that takes cards is on heightened alert, and that’s a real chilling effect on the marketplace. What Visa and MasterCard can do to one business segment, they can do to any other. But I guess for now, most businesses are just pricing that in as yet another “cost of doing business”.
How did they have enough money to make multiple credit card agencies comply? This seems like the most colossal waste of cash for a pressure group, ever, since it didn’t amount to anything. Did the CC companies refund them when they failed to get it done?
Friendly reminder that this isn’t just a right wing issue. There’s plenty of people on the left who are sex negative puritans as well, and they shouldn’t be ignored just because they’re “on our side”.
Infighting is always more important than common ground. This is why the left has been so effective for the last 10 years.
Multiple things can be true at the same time, the trick is being capable of understanding that and acknowledging that without distracting from the primary objective.
Unfortunately, broad-mindedness of that nature requires a minimum of room temperature IQ to handle and far too many people simply do not make the grade.
Part of an ongoing campaign to de-anonymize the internet. Tie credit card to identity to game (adult or not) to in-game comms (can’t do that with videos). The noise is to make people aware and get them to self-censor.
Or religious nutjobs, which makes more sense?
OK, that’s nutty, but it has the same effect, along with helping identify ‘diverse sexual orientations’ as well. In Australia for example, law changes mean Steam is now using credit cards to identify adults, same in Thailand and UK I think. I guess I’ll go with ‘Why not both?’.
ETA: Oh look, the EU too https://www.euractiv.com/news/gamers-will-have-to-prove-their-age-under-eu-kids-act/
I mean… Whose funding the religious nut jobs?
Quelle surprise, it’s the crypto-fash again. Getting real tired of their shit.
Let me reinforce this point mentioned by mushroommunk:
There was one game, No Mercy, that really did push things too far. Collective Shout was able to poster child that game and pressure payment providers into pressuring game platforms to delist a lot of NSFW games.
There were a few others and they were justifying and glorifying violence and terrorism. Not satire. Not as political commentary. Not artistically valuable. I recommend you don’t research this further. It’s real NSFL stuff. They were not putting it in fictional universes or anything like that either. It was “commit these crimes”-simulators and justifying it with racism, sexism or whatever, claiming that the victims deserve it. Actually disgusting.
They would be declared illegal, by any customer protection agency or national / government prosecutors doing their job. They were only online and available because those gov. agencies were not aware of them and/or too slow in taking them offline.
And because the steam’s process didn’t check them. Which Valve acknowledged in the sense that they admitted they didn’t and couldn’t and THEN took everything offline they couldn’t and didn’t check.
And THAT also hit unrelated stuff, because valve couldn’t check it and doesn’t want to take responsibility. Which, yeah, understandable.
Cruelty is the point my friend
Wasn’t there also a legal angle to this? I seem to remember that payment providers had some potential concern about legal liability and were painting with a broad brush to avoid it, though I don’t remember exactly what laws would have been relevant
https://outrungaming.com/mastercard-addresses-nsfw-game-censorship-statement/
Payment processors got petitioned (from an anti-porn group) to ban games with rape, incest, and sexual violence*, and it went from there. Steam and itch couldn’t tell which games had the suspected content in them iirc, steam delisted in batches while itch had to manually review everything. Public perception played a factor in why the payment processors acted the way they did. Then you had the backlash to the treats being taken away, even gog gave away some nsfw games (but none of them had rape, incest, or sexual violence so weren’t being currently boycotted). Now it’s harder to get a nsfw game approved on steam. Also this anti-porn group has gotten other games like rape simulators (No Mercy) delisted before. So they had experience.
*I should have also noted that CP was a part of it. I did not see that on steam but the other stuff was 100% in steam’s library.
Good old “I want to impose my religious beliefs on others”. Certain religious people weren’t so successful before, so they decided to go after the money and pushed the credit card companies to ditch things. From what I gather via threats or innuendo about them supporting CSAM etc.
The actual reason is partially answered in other comments. Most people are focusing on who did it and they’re not asking the most obvious question - how bad does a game have to be to get noticed by Visa and MasterCard?
The games in question aren’t merely “NSFW”. Visa doesn’t care about vanilla porn. The delisted games dealt in subject matter that is difficult to justify.
MasterCard doesn’t need to help anybody buy “games” about incest, rape, or sexual assault of minors.
The delisted games dealt in subject matter that is difficult to justify.
The problem is who gets to decide what’s “difficult to justify”. That should be up to the individual, not the payment card company.
MasterCard doesn’t need to help anybody buy “games” about incest, rape, or sexual assault of minors.
That might be your opinion, but again, who gets to decide what’s on that list? If you don’t think those games need to be played, then don’t play them. It’s not hurting anyone when someone plays a video game, no matter how icky the game makes you feel. No one is forcing you to play anything.
Thank you for admitting that you’re a disgusting pedo.
It’s of course hard to tell, but I think we should not leave out the possibility of them showing their influence, without doing much actual damage.
Edit: The “Collective Shout” thing had fallen out of my memory, but I am still convinced adult games were an easy target, that would have little damage to the payment processors while flexing those “we boss” muscles.
Trying to redirect revenue streams they are not in to the ones that they are in. Or are trying to make things more advertiser friendly aka nobody want to talk about supporting the NSFW games in meetings with their bosses
Power. That’s what it always comes down to - money is an indirect form of power, so while you can usually “follow the money”, actors will sometimes chase direct power even at the cost of financial gain
Basically, some groups petitioned the credit card processors to block these sales. The credit card operators used this opportunity as a test - can they leverage their position for direct power, or will the state (or widespread public outcry) stop them?
They were risking basically nothing… They didn’t plan this, they took the opportunity created by special interest groups to test the waters
If it worked out, they could have turned it into massive “innovation”… Think of how much data on people’s behaviors is worth, then picture how much they could charge to control spending habits. It would be a whole new avenue for profit
Since they did receive real resistance, they quietly backed off before the issue could be settled. They’ll try something similar again sooner or later, mark my words
