MasterCard and Valve continue to have a back-and-forth dispute after Valve was forced to remove many graphic adult games fromSteam. According to Valve, the games were removed due to MasterCard’s rules on illegal or brand-damaging transactions, which are enforced by payment processing companies.
Controversial Game Removed From Steam After Major Backlash
The game received backlash due to featuring incest and sexual assault.
MasterCard says that despite the allegations, they haven’t restricted any activities on game creator platforms and sites, but their merchants do have the power to block unlawful content.
“Mastercard has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms, contrary to media reports and allegations.”
“Our payment network follows standards based on the rule of law. Put simply, we allow all lawful purchases on our network. At the same time, we require merchants to have appropriate controls to ensure Mastercard cards cannot be used for unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content.” -Mastercard
Valve Unsuccessfully Tried To Communicate With MasterCard
The crack-down on adult games that contain offensive scenes of rape and sexual abuse began with Collective Shout, a campaigns movement against the objectification of women and the sexualisation of girls.
“Following our successful campaign and 70k petition to get rape simulation game ‘No Mercy’ pulled from gaming platform Steam, we discovered almost 500 other games depicting rape, incest, sexual torture and child abuse.”
Collective Shout says they called their supporters into action to email the payment processing companies and ask them to stop profiting from these games,and it worked.
“As a result of our campaign, Steam has introduced a new rule to their policies and removed hundreds of rape and incest games.” -Collective Shout
Valve says they attempted to open a line of communication with MasterCard regarding therules on adult gamesahead of the removal but were unsuccessful, and instead ended up deliberating the rules with payment processors.
“Mastercard did not communicate with Valve directly, despite our request to do so,”
“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.” ViaPCGamer
It’s not just Steam that ispurifying their platformas a result of the campaign. Another digital gaming site goliath,Itch.io, recently announced they are making some changes to their NSFW games as well.
“We are re-indexing free adult NSFW content. We are still in ongoing discussions with payment processors and will be re-introducing paid content slowly to ensure we can confidently support the widest range of creators in the long term.”
Conservative Pressure Kills Adult Games In Yet Another Storefront
Itch.io, once a haven for offbeat indie games, has been hit much harder than Steam was.
