this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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Kinda hard to stay at the top if you literally get blacklisted from doing financial transactions. Big as they are, they're nowhere near the same level as the payment processors.
No, Valve has something that MasterVisa doesn't: being liked by people. If Valve stopped taking payments and yelled to the rooftops that MasterVisa was responsible, people from all walks of life will stop, listen, and then get their pitchfork. Through the platform of Steam, people browse through the things that make their days happier. If MasterVisa threatened to take that away, people will respond.
Also, Europe and other blocs will be inclined to oppose MasterVisa. It would be a very public case of where America is dictating how the people of other lands must live. That would almost certainly make systems like Wero take off, due to sheer nationalist fervor. America is easily painted as the enemy if it allowed MasterVisa to continue abusing people on such a huge and international scale.
Money isn't the only currency a person has, their opinions and agency are even more important, if they acted on using them. History books are filled to the brim where motivation is the greatest driving force of all.
they're already started, slow af as anything done by bureaucrats, when Trump 2.0 began his shenanigans.
Few quick searches around the internet says that (measured by revenue) Mastercard alone is roughly 3 times bigger than Valve. So even if Valve is pretty big player it's not even close on major payment processors. And they're not playing on the same rules either, any payment processor can vanish payments for anyone with just 'fuck you, that's why' -reasoning buried in their contracts. There's almost no one who could afford to fight with them even in theory and much less in practise.
You realize three times bigger is barely anything right? Also their power per user is significantly higher considering almost everyone who uses it cares for steam but almost nobody cares about their card. If Mastercard tried using their blacklist power people are few more likely to switch card than platform.
I'd bet that there are more mastercard users who haven't even heard about Steam or Valve than there's users on Steam. And MC with others are using their massive leverage right now, what you're going to switch to?
Also 3 times bigger is definetly something. It's like asking what's the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars (answer is about billion dollars). Not quite, but effectively the same. And payment processors have the power to practically stop all money transfers to Valve (which they are threatening with already). Microsoft or Apple might have cash to fight that, Valve most definetly could not sustain legal fight with them if absolute majority of their income is cut off.