More caving to the ultra-religious pearl grippers who just have nothing better to do than tell others how to live.
All the hate speech trash and troll talk on the Steam forums is fine though. All the war games are fine though. Make sure people can validate genocide and what not but not see titties.
This is an opportunity for an entrepreneur to create a censorship-resistant platform, though, I don't know how you do it profitably when CSAM and other potentially criminal content needs to be reviewed.
It is already here, it is called Bitcoin (with Lightning possibly). And this is not fantasy, the exact same story happened to Pornhub in 2018 - in which they got banned from Visa/MC and purged 60% of their content. They are banned to this day, and now accept Bitcoin/Crypto Payments as well as SEPA transfers in the EU.
It is alarming for credit card companies to take on a politically censorious role that supersedes legal activity. This really kicked off in 2021 when MasterCard started imposing restrictive rules on sex sites like OnlyFans. The ACLU has a campaign against it:
https://www.aclu.org/news/lgbtq-rights/how-mastercards-new-p...
It's not a slippery slope, they're targeting non-porn games literally right now. Detroit Become Human, a very well reviewed cinematic/adventure game especially among non-gamers was one of their targets.
> Violence and dehumanization of women should not be acceptable outcomes of free speech. We also have to consider whose voices are being heard, and whose are being silenced. Does free speech apply to women, to survivors of rape and sexual assault? Do we have a right to object to speech that promotes and normalizes violence against us?
Every time someone insists on an escape hatch, it is immediately abused. One could have seen this coming.
My guess is none, and that they are only used as a front for this. It really doesn't add up that a "grassroots org" from Australia that doesn't even have its own Wikipedia page can pressure Mastercard / Visa to pressure Steam to remove games. Makes zero sense.
Modern neuroscience provides enough evidence to argue older generations “synced” early on to ideals of the past. They memorized some modern syntax and semantics but still align as individuals with puritanical social and tyrannical political practices of old. Not entirely their fault, it’s biology.
Not something the next generations have to tolerate however. Physics is clearly ageist.
It's unfortunate because there really isn't anything anyone can do except wait for regulation or try raising awareness/usage of crypto payments or cash by mail
The bitter truth is that the tech world's libertarian allergy to collective action is exactly why stuff like this keeps happening.
Predictably, we get another round of "free speech on the internet is sacred!" polemics. Hate to break it to HN, but Visa and MasterCard aren't reading Hacker News, and they don't care about constitutional takes or appeals to values or consistency. Legal arguments won't do squat here. There is one way to reverse this and it's leverage and pressure, period.
If you want to fix this, you actually have to organize and go after the payment processors, because it's not going to be solved by writing essays in the comments or waiting for Steam to suddenly develop a spine. That means collective action, campaigns, actual activism. Exactly the stuff that makes tech people itchy and nervous.
It's the same reason tech unions never get traction. Everyone wants to be a cowboy and nobody wants to be part of a posse. If you're serious about reversing this kind of censorship, you'll have to do the one thing that feels worse: banding together, working as a group, and aiming your outrage at the folks actually making the calls.
Or keep writing little op-ed comments and maintain the losing streak, because Visa and MasterCard will keep steamrolling as long as nobody pushes back.
Sorry, but that's the game. Arguing that the rules aren't fair or trying to play out the same losing tactic isn't a winning strategy. Plan an actual demonstration. Visa and MasterCard conveniently have offices in SF and NYC. All it takes is working together.
I know people here love to hate it, and it's a very very controversial topic, but this here, is a good use case for Bitcoin [1]
Now that we have Lightning and hyperfast micropayments, can we have a good plug-and-play payment processor that uses it? The few services that allow Bitcoin payments still require an on-chain transaction, which is very user-unfriendly.
In any case, despite what the haters say, this is the value proposition of cryptos. If it's not the government deciding what you can purchase or not, it's the payment processor cartel.
1: Other cryptos are just piggybacking on the popularity of the main one so I don't care about them.
Its too bad that the old school anti-trust provisions against restraint of trade are no longer of interest to enforcers. This isn't a case where visa/mc are against a specific game/publisher transactions is where they are saying we will stop processing payments for your entire platform because of a few games we object to. And its worse because the pmt processors aren't really specific about their objections in public at least.
What is wrong with these people who try to block certain content?
Don't like porn? Don't buy it. Simple as that. No one, including governments or payment processors, should be in the position to decide whether a platform can sell something or not.
I wish there was a payment processor who was brave enough to say a big fucking NO to censorship.
I suspect that a lot of people who object to this censorship, would be perfectly fine with a game being pulled because say it glorified owning slaves, or if gameplay was explicitly anti-homosexual. Then they would see the harms, employ their empathy, and support the censorship. Not everyone, of course, but a lot of the people who are outraged about this article.
Seems like everyone is pro-censorship, when they disagree with those being targeted. Most people supported censorship for anti-vaxers during Covid for instance. So in most cases it really just comes down to how many people are anti-porn, rather than any stance on censorship in general.
> What is wrong with these people who try to block certain content?
Porn is just the thin end of the wedge (as was "violence in video games" a generation ago) - porn is something society considers as distasteful, so politicians are less likely to go on record as supporting porn. Once the porn bans go into effect, they'll move onto the next target in the conservative playbook: gay marriage, birth control/abortion access, etc.
Let's assume there is a payment processor where anything goes, the company utilizing it would still be punished by the other payment processors.
I don't think Visa/Mastercard would care that you only sell the things they don't want through other payment processors, they still would threaten to cut you off entirely for having the content they don't like
I guess you can also ask "don't like gambling, don't gamble".
It goes even further.
What was wrong with those people poisoning Socrates? For what? Don't like what he says, do not listen to him.
You know how in higher dimensional space everything is almost orthogonal? I think people are like that, some like porn, some are afraid of it, some want to be impregnated by aliens, some hate aliens.
Through good intentions democracy can be just as tyrannical as any tyrant; a pinch of incompetence and good intentions and it can not be stopped.
When should others "save" you? When it is absolutely obvious some people need saving.
>No one, including governments or payment processors, should be in the position to decide whether a platform can sell something or not.
Obviously the government should make selling certain things illegal. And I think that many of the games sold their, should be made illegal.
What should not happen is payment processors being the ones who decide what is okay to sell. If selling something is legal, payment processors should be forced to make that transaction.
>I wish there was a payment processor who was brave enough to say a big fucking NO to censorship.
I do not. I do not want legal financial transactions being dependent on the whims of how "brave" some company is.
The explanation is simple: they don't want easy revenue streams for people. You want to earn some side income, go F yourself. If you look around, and want to earn a few dollars, what can you do? Literally nothing. And this keeps continuing.
In discussions about this topic, in almost every place I see them, lots of people (against this censorship) are going "I don't play this kind of games" or "I don't personally care about tentacle fetish" (or whatever).
I don't get this. Let's say it openly: what's the problem with sex and nudity in games? Why is it so unacceptable -- that even people against the censorship must loudly proclaim it's not "their thing" -- but violence, guns, war, etc are not? Or not enough to pull from the stores, anyway?
What I don't care about are the finer points of whether this technically counts as "censorship", because in pratice it is. There SHOULD be a place to buy games which depict nudity and sex. The quality of those games is not and should not be the focus of conversation (e.g. "they are AI slop" or "badly made", etc), because that's NOT what bothers the people doing the censorship -- they'd also be against the best, AAA made, high quality games with sex and nudity.
Again, I ask: what is wrong with sex and nudity in games, that makes it worse than gore, violence and war? Why cannot whatever age-restriction measures taken for the purchase of violent games be also applied to sex games?
Finally: we all know they are not going to stop at this, right?
Porn games on Steam and itch are tacky af but they don’t push them on me and I sort of just ignore them. That being said they should probably sell them on different website.
The very idea of a store front for software needs to die. It’s a single strangle point that serves only to concentrate power and create a legal or regulatory target.
There should be no platform to “abuse”. There should be no control point.
The decision to provide or not some services or products should be free from considering downstream use.
It would be ridiculous to deny a water supply hookup or electrical mains to a church because the water or electrical companies are opposed to those beliefs.
Analogously, legislation should be passed to prohibit considering downstream use for all financial transactions.
If the government wants to go after criminals, it can do it by itself.
The problem with slippery slopes is that the world is made of them. You can't leave the slippery slope, at BEST you can choose which slope you're sliding down.
Another way to think of this is 'long tail risk'. Some subset of people out there will develop real life problems from: porn, sex work, alcohol, weed, drugs, gambling, other 'moral' issues. It is difficult to meaningfully address both the median user and the problematic user.
This is absolutely a wedge to censor LGBTQ+ content. If you can separately argue that adult content should be blocked and LGBTQ+ themes are for adults, then you can block queer content online en masse.
Visa and Mastercard have too much power, and are too willing to capitulate.
Yes, I think this is 100% the take we should come away with.
I don't have strong feelings around wether steam or itch sell adult content, but its the fact that a duopoly and using their power to exert political influence.
Is there any indication or reason why they would want to block LGBTQ+ content? Haven't both companies been very vocal supporters of LGBTQ+ in the past?
It's like those game companies, that support lgbt and donate to gay mental health foundations, but will block you when you mention some gay words in chat, because they are child friendly. I always found the hypocrisy funny. Then their auto-translate feature will routinely consistently swap pronouns to opposite.
Companies are not moral entities. They will go whichever way the wind blows. Right now it's more profitable and avoid being singled out by the current US admin to not vocally support LGBT. We saw this during pride month this year where most major companies either pulled their support or were not vocal at all. We've seen plenty of companies drop "DEI" policies to curry favor with the admin as well.
If a group this small can get Visa/Mastercard to hand out ultimatums, then it's not that far of a jump for the same group or another who is against LGBT to recontextualize LGBT as something sexual or something targeting children. We've already seen this rhetoric from the current admin.
There are a lot of people mentioning crypto as a possible solution to this, and a lot of people responding that crypto is a ponzi scheme, and they're not interested. But congress recently passed stablecoin legislation that could possibly fix this problem. Recipients would have a straightforward way of receiving money, and they wouldn't need to gamble on the price of bitcoin. Most people would probably still use a third part payment processor to handle the rough edges of managing money on the blockchain. But if any of them try to pull something like this it would be incredibly easy spin up a new processor and migrate accounts.
Weirdly, Amazon sells TONS of porn and NSFW content, and yet doesn't lose their Visa/Mastercard processing.
Game of Thrones, both the books and the show, contain content much, much more explicit than many of these games. Yet Itch and Steam have to pull stuff or their very existence is threatened.
117 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadAll the hate speech trash and troll talk on the Steam forums is fine though. All the war games are fine though. Make sure people can validate genocide and what not but not see titties.
Itch.io: Update on NSFW Content
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44667667
Australian anti-porn group claims responsibility for Steams new censorship rules
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44636369
Against the censorship of adult content by payment processors
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44679406
Every time someone insists on an escape hatch, it is immediately abused. One could have seen this coming.
EDIT: I invite downvoters to voice their point
Against the censorship of adult content by payment processors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44679406 - July 2025 (189 comments)
Games: No sex, please. we're credit card companies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44675697 - July 2025 (51 comments)
Itch.io: Update on NSFW Content - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44667667 - July 2025 (306 comments)
Australian anti-porn group claims responsibility for Steams new censorship rules - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44636369 - July 2025 (162 comments)
https://americansongwriter.com/remember-the-filthy-fifteen-4...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seduction_of_the_Innocent
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26328105
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/27/business/job-insecurity-o...
Modern neuroscience provides enough evidence to argue older generations “synced” early on to ideals of the past. They memorized some modern syntax and semantics but still align as individuals with puritanical social and tyrannical political practices of old. Not entirely their fault, it’s biology.
Not something the next generations have to tolerate however. Physics is clearly ageist.
When did pornography become protected speech?
Predictably, we get another round of "free speech on the internet is sacred!" polemics. Hate to break it to HN, but Visa and MasterCard aren't reading Hacker News, and they don't care about constitutional takes or appeals to values or consistency. Legal arguments won't do squat here. There is one way to reverse this and it's leverage and pressure, period.
If you want to fix this, you actually have to organize and go after the payment processors, because it's not going to be solved by writing essays in the comments or waiting for Steam to suddenly develop a spine. That means collective action, campaigns, actual activism. Exactly the stuff that makes tech people itchy and nervous.
It's the same reason tech unions never get traction. Everyone wants to be a cowboy and nobody wants to be part of a posse. If you're serious about reversing this kind of censorship, you'll have to do the one thing that feels worse: banding together, working as a group, and aiming your outrage at the folks actually making the calls.
Or keep writing little op-ed comments and maintain the losing streak, because Visa and MasterCard will keep steamrolling as long as nobody pushes back.
Sorry, but that's the game. Arguing that the rules aren't fair or trying to play out the same losing tactic isn't a winning strategy. Plan an actual demonstration. Visa and MasterCard conveniently have offices in SF and NYC. All it takes is working together.
Now that we have Lightning and hyperfast micropayments, can we have a good plug-and-play payment processor that uses it? The few services that allow Bitcoin payments still require an on-chain transaction, which is very user-unfriendly.
In any case, despite what the haters say, this is the value proposition of cryptos. If it's not the government deciding what you can purchase or not, it's the payment processor cartel.
1: Other cryptos are just piggybacking on the popularity of the main one so I don't care about them.
Don't like porn? Don't buy it. Simple as that. No one, including governments or payment processors, should be in the position to decide whether a platform can sell something or not.
I wish there was a payment processor who was brave enough to say a big fucking NO to censorship.
Seems like everyone is pro-censorship, when they disagree with those being targeted. Most people supported censorship for anti-vaxers during Covid for instance. So in most cases it really just comes down to how many people are anti-porn, rather than any stance on censorship in general.
Porn is just the thin end of the wedge (as was "violence in video games" a generation ago) - porn is something society considers as distasteful, so politicians are less likely to go on record as supporting porn. Once the porn bans go into effect, they'll move onto the next target in the conservative playbook: gay marriage, birth control/abortion access, etc.
Let's assume there is a payment processor where anything goes, the company utilizing it would still be punished by the other payment processors.
I don't think Visa/Mastercard would care that you only sell the things they don't want through other payment processors, they still would threaten to cut you off entirely for having the content they don't like
It goes even further.
What was wrong with those people poisoning Socrates? For what? Don't like what he says, do not listen to him.
You know how in higher dimensional space everything is almost orthogonal? I think people are like that, some like porn, some are afraid of it, some want to be impregnated by aliens, some hate aliens.
Through good intentions democracy can be just as tyrannical as any tyrant; a pinch of incompetence and good intentions and it can not be stopped.
When should others "save" you? When it is absolutely obvious some people need saving.
Obviously the government should make selling certain things illegal. And I think that many of the games sold their, should be made illegal.
What should not happen is payment processors being the ones who decide what is okay to sell. If selling something is legal, payment processors should be forced to make that transaction.
>I wish there was a payment processor who was brave enough to say a big fucking NO to censorship.
I do not. I do not want legal financial transactions being dependent on the whims of how "brave" some company is.
Except we live in a society and what goes into it affects all of us. Why does Germany ban Nazi content? Why do governments have minimum wages?
They do not have to host your game that they don’t like and that doesn’t make it censorship.
I don't get this. Let's say it openly: what's the problem with sex and nudity in games? Why is it so unacceptable -- that even people against the censorship must loudly proclaim it's not "their thing" -- but violence, guns, war, etc are not? Or not enough to pull from the stores, anyway?
What I don't care about are the finer points of whether this technically counts as "censorship", because in pratice it is. There SHOULD be a place to buy games which depict nudity and sex. The quality of those games is not and should not be the focus of conversation (e.g. "they are AI slop" or "badly made", etc), because that's NOT what bothers the people doing the censorship -- they'd also be against the best, AAA made, high quality games with sex and nudity.
Again, I ask: what is wrong with sex and nudity in games, that makes it worse than gore, violence and war? Why cannot whatever age-restriction measures taken for the purchase of violent games be also applied to sex games?
Finally: we all know they are not going to stop at this, right?
There should be no platform to “abuse”. There should be no control point.
It would be ridiculous to deny a water supply hookup or electrical mains to a church because the water or electrical companies are opposed to those beliefs.
Analogously, legislation should be passed to prohibit considering downstream use for all financial transactions.
If the government wants to go after criminals, it can do it by itself.
Another way to think of this is 'long tail risk'. Some subset of people out there will develop real life problems from: porn, sex work, alcohol, weed, drugs, gambling, other 'moral' issues. It is difficult to meaningfully address both the median user and the problematic user.
See also decrim.
I think many of these slippery slopes are defined in hindsight. What all of these represent are simply struggles for power.
Visa and Mastercard have too much power, and are too willing to capitulate.
I don't have strong feelings around wether steam or itch sell adult content, but its the fact that a duopoly and using their power to exert political influence.
If a group this small can get Visa/Mastercard to hand out ultimatums, then it's not that far of a jump for the same group or another who is against LGBT to recontextualize LGBT as something sexual or something targeting children. We've already seen this rhetoric from the current admin.
Game of Thrones, both the books and the show, contain content much, much more explicit than many of these games. Yet Itch and Steam have to pull stuff or their very existence is threatened.