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Regarding Steam, I think it is fair to say that PC gaming is probably the least restrictive as far as content policing goes. While it hurt me deep in my soul to praise MS, compared to most of the walled gardens which have popped up since 2000, the PC is a rather open platform. Anyone can develop and distribute any game, no matter how disturbing or distasteful."Windows Defender has prevented the execution of Holocaust Simulator 3000.exe because it violates the PC content policy" is not a thing that happens.
For every other platform except the very niche (GNU/Linux) and Android (depending on what the OEM allows), you have exactly one software distributor for your hardware. While I do not own any gaming consoles or iThings, I imagine that Sony, Nintendo, Apple and MS/XBox are likely much more restrictive in what content they will allow than Steam was. For one thing, they are protecting the reputation of the platform. With PCs, there is no reputation to protect, any youth who owns a PC can download free smut games without restriction. (Personally, I would argue that the potential to run software from f95zone is more than offset by the potential to use computers for all sorts of creative tasks from CAD, 3d modelling, software development, game modding, video and audio editing, drawing, writing, and so on, but presumably some parents would disagree.)
Also, the power of the payment processors frankly sucks. If they were competing on a level playing field, I would not worry too much, if Visa rebrands itself as "smut-free" and Mastercard rebrands itself as "smut-friendly", then the market could sort it out and Visa would likely go the way of Betamax.
The problem is that both banks and payment processors are rather regulated, and the government has plenty of leeway to selectively enforce their interpretation of the law on uncooperative entities. So when some government official says off the record "trust us, dealing with porn companies/wikileaks/sex workers/arms dealers/... will be more trouble for you than it is worth", they are making a credible threat.
In theory, this could be solved with creating/enforcing a standard for real-time cashless money transfer, but the very entities which would have to push this are the governments who like to has this additional power without any judicial oversight.
In my opinion, cash transfer without government oversight was the real problem which cryptocurrency was meant to solve, but few except for dark net markets ever used it that way. Instead, the unwashed masses decided that BTC would be a great investment, so you got an endless procession of shitcoins and NFTs instead.
Yeah, it's actually worse than that. Go on a retro journey and you'll find so many files that Windows Defender tries to block. Old official game patches, mods, cd-cracks. Now I'm told the cd-cracks are false positives, but I judge the sketchiness of gamecopyworld's array of mirrors not worth the risk. Side note, I can't believe gamecopyworld still exist, virtually unchanged from the early 00's.
You can override WD, though. You're making the choice not to, because you think it might be malware.
Windows has gotten significantly worse about anti-user features since 10, but you can still run code MS doesn't like AFAIK (can't speak to Win11, as MS is on my hatelist since they started bankrolling OpenAI).
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Hard agree, I actually got two separate false positives not too terribly long ago when trying to fix up a copy of Civ 3: Complete that I had bought from GOG. The first false positive was because the original Civ 3: Conquests disc that had the missing scenario that I wanted to be able to play had Gamespy on it, which was unsigned code and the second was that I was attempting to install command-line software that would allow me to unpack the .CAB file to grab the single scenario file from the CD that was missing in my install of Civ 3.
GUH.
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I find this a weird conclusion given that Congress just passed a big series of crypto regulation and specifically of stablecoins which seem like a very clear candidate for an alternative to payment processors.
Now Circle and Tether do still have a sort of similar problem to Visa and MasterCard, but the ground isn't exactly the same as it was then years ago and you ought to acknowledge it.
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Yeah, it's very hard to beat the PC when it comes to running arbitrary code, without going to something like Linux. Steam, in turn, has been one of the (though not the most) less restrictive marketplaces.
The Microsoft App Store is pretty restrictive, and a large part of what has driven Steam toward Linux support in recent years has been concerns about that becoming a more central part of the next Windows operating system, but MS has thankfully not stepped any further toward that since Win8 first came out.
By contrast, Apple has been pushing code signing for a decade now, and have made it increasingly difficult to run unsigned code, and has revoked code signatures before. Their App Store is also a little more heavily integrated, though like Windows it isn't mandatory either.
Android varies heavily on implementation. By default you can run unsigned code, but it's possible to block third-party APKs. I think some Amazon tablets come like that?
... mostly. SmartScreen's actually a bit complicated: you can submit software to Microsoft for free, or buy a license to sign a file, or wait til enough people use a specific application for it to get through their algorithm. Officially, they're not supposed to be looking at anything but the malware analysis. For solo small-audience devs, I can speak (for both adult game and non-adult-game stuff) that options 1 and 3 don't really work in any plausible timeframe.
Yes, largely. Sony actually had a consumer-friendly dev console back in the PS1 era that could run unsigned code, but it was very expensive and intentionally limited to only run smaller programs. Most of the others don't allow third-party unlicensed software, or only allow developers to run things locally, or only are available through hacks.
Even if it could be solved without government assistance, there are a lot of regulations that would get involved for a privately-produced easy real-time cashless money transfer tool. That sorta know-your-customer and anti-laundering stuff (along with technical issues) is charitably part of why coins haven't really been able to engage with that outside of darknet markets.
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