I’ll do direct bank transfers if it means no censorship.

This is the start. Mastercard and Visa will soon block you from other content like movies and music (if it’s explicit) and books.

They are at the whims of religious extremists.

I criticised how apologetic itch.io’s statement was towards the payment mafia, but credits where it’s due:

Going nuclear was the smart move. I seriously doubt this censorship wave would’ve gathered so much attention if itch.io only delisted games with the content the mafia is currently going against. It helps to avoid that slippery slope, where people turn a blind eye to small violations of their agency until it’s on something that personally matters to them.

It’s also sensible to look for alternatives, so it doesn’t need to rely on the mafia on first place. A bit too late, but better late than never.

Good luck finding anything that works globally. Crypto payments are only alternative - Thankfully PayPal seems to be planning going crypto processor itself

Me, too.

It’s how my clients pay me, so I can’t complain!

Hey man I’m down to clown with this method

Wero

And, not international but options for many countries…

OctoStrategy | Digital Infrastructures

(octostrategy.com)

I hope one day gnu taler will be used every where. That or crypto exchanges start supporting it.

GNU Taler - Wikipedia

(en.m.wikipedia.org)

The issue I have with non-credit card purchases is who owns the fraud transactions. For that reason alone, I don’t like the idea of giving any site full banking information, especially given the sheer amount of data exfiltration that takes place on a regular basis.

A lot of European countries have direct bank transactions streamlined, you scan a QR code and fraud is owned by the bank.

It’s ecen more secure than cards, since you can’t get double charged by the vendor.

Did they even have the option not to go nuclear? From the sounds of their blog post, they would have spent the proper amount of time to do what they were being “asked” (threatened) to do, if they were even given time to do so. They said their preferred decision would have been to ask every NSFW dev if they complied with the payment processors they accept, but the time they were expected to implement all that was so short that they couldn’t do that fairly.

…just use USDC or Tether?

Stable to the dollar, no need to alter prices, quick, cheap to send, on multiple chains for more options.

Yeah, so it’ll never happen.

My country has our own government operated, fast, simple and cheap payment method so now visa and mastercard are making the US government pressure us to destroy it

Or, even worse: At the whims of the president

It would be a convenient way to bypass having to pass legislation, allowing more consolidation of power in the executive branch

We really need a push based payment system. It’s absurd someone can take money from you simply by knowing your credit card or bank numbers

Did they even have the option not to go nuclear?

Yes: hide only the games tagged “adult” (subset tag), instead of all games tagged “nsfw” (superset tag), to reduce the disruption. And then work swiftly to relist the adult games with content not being targeted by the payment mafia. Even if itch.io showed one or two false negatives, it would already be a clear sign of good will towards the mafia.

I’m glad the people working there did not do this though. I hope itch io lets the disruption stays on, for as long as possible; preferably affecting as many non-adult games as possible.

What Americans tend to refer to as “fraud protection” is charge back policies, where the payment processor acts as Content Police and revert transactions if they hear the vendor was unfair to their customer (and they usually are on the side of the customer).

My EU bank won’t do that even on my credit card, because it’s insane that one would expect a financial institution to be judge, jury, and executioner in the case of a disagreement over legal services rendered.

Americans have to own up to the uncomfortable fact that dependence on these policies is what keeps the big credit cars companies in power, on top of severely driving up consumer prices (unfairly weighted towards the rich of course who get cashbacks thanks to the obscene money Visa makes on their enormous transaction fees) and being incredibly unfair to small vendors who don’t have the means to meaningfully dispute fraudulent chargebacks.

Which country?

Wait, where in the world does that happen?

…don’t tell me that in the US if someone has your banking details they can do literally anything they want, and just empty your account