This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
If it was about money, MasterVisa would have already given up. There are people who claim that MasterVisa bent the knee to Collective Shout for the sake of money, yet when a much bigger demographic speaks, MasterVisa tries to ignore it.
This is about the power to shape society.
The fact that multi-millionaires are doing to most heinous shit with their money and getting a way with it, meanwhile me, a wage slave, has a payment processor telling me what I'm allowed to do with my money, society is built on tiers.
Gamers who care about this are a much smaller group than American regressive religious zealots.
Australian religious zealots are the ones taking credit for the steam & itch.io censorship.
MasterCard lied? No they would never
Anyway, thanks MasterCard for introducing me to porn games a few weeks ago
There was an entire subreddit devoted to porn games but it's not made it over to Lemmy.
Maybe once I get laid off I'll start a community
Oh wow, it's like everyone who said MasterCard was lying to protect their image from reality turned out to be correct. Only someone with a functioning brain could have seen this coming.
IMO MasterCard leadership already agreed with the nazis and were just looking for an excuse to act.
I do believe MasterCard and Visa owners and execs are card holding Nazis.
Ana Valens recently resigned from Vice following an article about the censorship of games. On social media, she shared communication between Mastercard and Riot Games.
Looks like Vice can't be trusted as a reliable source of information if they're willing to fire journalists after a little outside pressure is put on them.
This also goes to an entire new level. Before it was "only" censoring digital products and events. Now it is directly censoring media outlets.
This screams for an antitrust lawsuit, if a company has this kind of power.
Could be great links to share over Riot Games streams.
- MasterCard has asked Riot to keep an eye out for negative sentiments on official Riot streams
- Riot has asked esports content creators working with official Riot properties to watch out for any negative sentiments toward MasterCard
- Moderators have been told to look out for any unusual activity around the MasterCard issue
No better publicity than getting their own efforts thrown back at their faces.
MasterCard is running an effective PR campaign against themselves. They can't stop giving their critics all this gold.
https://www.theverge.com/24094310/vice-media-layoffs-bankruptcy-shane-smith
they havn't been trustworthy since 2023
I'm in Europe and following the news of the MasterCard and Visa censorship I activelly went looking for how else could I pay for things online without using their networks, and as it turns out there are plenty of solutions supported by both Steam and GOG which I was just ignoring before because they just looked as lots of "weirdly named" unrecognized payment options.
I'm now using those in my purchases and so far they actually look more convenient than the Visa/MasterCard (for example, with iDEA which is Dutch, I can literally pay from my mobile phone banking app by just taking a picture of a QR-Code on my screen). The problem in Europe is just there being lots of local solutions and no EU-wide one yet, though I'm lucky because I have bank accounts in different countries (having lived in several countries in Europe) so I have access to many options.
Keep in mind that outside Britain, the rest of Europe have long had their own debit card withdrawal and payment networks and not relied on Visa/MasterCard (to me Britain was, frankly, weird in that it relies on mainly VISA Debit and had no local payment solution, probably explained by lack of political will in the UK for that: most such payment networks in Europe were born out of political pressure on banks to come up with a standard and sometimes were even started as state-owned companies) so a lot of these local online payment options are extensions of those existing networks, which is probably why trying come up with an single integrated cross-border payment processor has been slow going.
That said, thanks to it having been mandated at the EU level, bank transfers are nowadays fully cross-border integrated and you can transfer money between accounts anywhere in EU with the same ease and for the same cost you can for local accounts (the banks really resisted that, by the way, as it took away most of their "international transfers" profits) so we're probably not far from a single EU-wide payment processor (or at least EU-wide account support on existing solutions).
Cries in American
There is a EU-wide payment option.
Not universal yet but heading that way. MBWay is gaining momentum as well and the eEuro could be a thing.
Why do payment processors have the ability to control morality in our world? Easily the definition of a monopoly. Absolutely insane.
Because we, collectively as a society, gave them that power.
Clearly, that was a mistake.
Man wtf can we DO about this shit? I'm planning on calling and shit but damn they don't give a fuck.
Is it too late??
Do you have to have assloads of money to file a class action suit? Like would steam or GOG or itch be down to be a part of it or is that just a pipe dream.
I am not promoting it, but I will say that this is the exact reason shit like cryptocurrency exists. Stupid overreaching shit like this.
Keep calling. Tell your friends. It's already gotten MasterCard's attention enough to make a statement.
I'm super pro crypto but it isn't a magic bullet. The companies being restricted are victims of a monopoly who will retaliate if they try alternatives. It's the same reason NFTs haven't killed Ticketmaster.
Man I just wish there were better alternatives to MasterCard and Visa.
It really boggles the mind why we have to go through private corporations to use our monetary system in the digital realm
If we had to use private corporations then there needs to be enough competition to prevent what is happening now.
FedNow became a thing just two years ago. With transaction fees of just $0.043/transaction, it's cheaper than every other payment processor out there. Hopefully it can gain adoption and push out Visa/Mastercard.
With how things are going, I'd be happy to support an EU-based alternative.
looking forward to taler becoming a thing
I'm all for it but I thought this was simply an alternative to say, apple pay or paypal
What about everyone buy a share of thier stock. Then sue thier board for ignoring thier fiduciary duty to the shareholders. Turning down business is bad for revenue... and the games that got removed probably made decent money all together.
Stuff like this is going to make people mostly pay in cash and buy gift cards as needed. I already started buying most of my things in person anyway just to avoid paying for shipping. I'm seriously considering only buying steam games with gift cards I buy at the store and avoiding using my card as much as possible.
I remember during world's a couple of years ago, the stream chat was shouting "TY MASTERCARD" everytime their ads came up
God, imagine tanking a fucking corporation lmao
rule34 MasterCard. it's the only way.
make it a bottom dollar bitch.
Ah ah ah boost that shit.
