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this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2025
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My view is that Valve is the most likely to be honest about who is responsible here, both because they’re not responsible for this shit show no matter what the answer is and because they have a monetary interest in restarting sales.
Valves statement also matches with the claims of Itch.io, Stripe, and what Collective Shout themselves have claimed. So we've got two different claims, on one side are Visa and Mastercard, and on the other we've got literally everyone else. I feel pretty confident about which one is a load of bullshit.
It's also worth noting that Visa ~~and Mastercard~~ are playing semantic games with their statements. Nobody ever claimed they were "refusing legal transactions", rather what they're doing is threatening to stop working with any business that doesn't implement censorship that they're happy with. It's a subtle but important difference and they've never denied that's what they're doing.
Edit: rereading Mastercards statement they are claiming they don't restrict how businesses operate (although they do weasel around a little bit about illegal content), although Visa still hasn't denied that. They may also be playing games with that statement because porn is illegal in some countries that Mastercard operates in so they may be trying to claim porn is an illegal transaction despite businesses not selling it in the countries it's illegal in.
Edit 2: It just occurred to me this could also be about the UK and some US states new (and horrible) porn ID laws. I'm not aware of Valve doing anything to implement the strict age verification those laws are requiring for sites that distribute porn, and Visa/Mastercard could be trying to argue that without that in place any porn games Valve sells are "illegal transactions". In theory Steam does have age gating, but it's the same "are you over 18?" easily bypassed check that porn sites have always used.
Isn't owning a credit card age gating anyway? I don't think you can legally own a credit card in the UK.
(Edit: Oops I mean until you're 18.)
You would think, but I believe the law(s) require verification of a photo ID. I haven't looked too closely into the UK one, but the way the laws are written for a couple of the US states a credit card doesn't meet the requirements. There's also the fact that many of the preview images and videos for porn games on Steam show nudity and/or sex and you can access those without needing to purchase the game (just the birthday question to "verify" your age).
Edit: also steam gift cards are a thing, so you can purchase without using a credit card technically.
If you need to be 18 to own a credit card, then you're old enough to buy those games. And buying with steam gift card doesn't involve MasterCard or Visa for that payment, so it's literally none of their business.
So that's kind of missing the point. First as I pointed out you don't actually have to buy anything to see the explicit preview images, so Steam is arguably in violation of those laws. Secondly the issue is that the Visa and Mastercard contracts require companies to be in compliance with local laws. It doesn't matter whether someone is using a Visa or Mastercard to make the actual payment if the purchase would technically be considered illegal (which it arguably could be in some states/countries under the new super strict porn laws).
At the end of the day this boils down to a) terms of the Visa/Mastercard contracts, and possibly b) new anti-porn laws that are putting an onerous burden on services to collect customers IDs in order to prove age. This isn't a question of common sense, in contract law (and law in general) it's about the letter of it and not so much the spirit. Yes, it stands to reason that if you legally own a credit card, and you must be at least 18 to own a card, then you are obviously 18 or older. However that doesn't matter at all when the laws are written such that services must validate age using a photo ID. It also does not account for stolen credit cards (never mind that that's a far more serious situation than the possibility of under age kids seeing some naughty pixels).
This whole situation is stupid and Visa and Mastercard clearly need to make some changes to their terms and conditions, but until they do from a legal standpoint businesses like Valve and Itch.io have their hands tied.
You're right, I didn't take account of the possibility that they can cancel your contract if you have anything "illegal" on your platform. I was only relating to MasterCards statement:
in context of "you have to be 18 or older to buy it". Juristic semantics can change that.
Are the payment processors saying Visa"MC told them to not process payments for this content? Or are they just citing a section of the agreement when being asked why they're telling retailers to take down this content?
Nobody on any side has cited any sections of any agreement specifically. The closest we've got is the statement from Stripe who is the payment processor who recently had to turn down business with a womens sexual education charity (despite spending months trying to get to an agreement) and the reason they cited was contractual obligations with banking networks including Visa and Mastercard. They stated they want to be able to process payments for porn companies, and that they're exploring other options, but they couldn't at this time.
From an article posted yesterday
Sounds like Visa and Mastercard have clauses in their contracts that they don't even care about themselves, but payment processors like Stripe are bound to then
Well said, that is an accurate analysis of the situation