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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   21145 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025

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There has been a recent crackdown on naughty games on steam and itch.io. The game platforms say the crackdown has come from payment processors. Payment processors have said they don't want their business associated with unsavory practices, and that adult products have higher charge back rates. Some people have blamed activist religious groups on aggressively lobbying the payment processors for this crackdown.

I mostly feel a sense of annoyance. My libertarian leanings have me feeling certain ways about all this.

  1. The biggest problem is that payment processors are usually an unholy alliance of governments, banks, and financial groups. This makes them allergic to competition and new entrants to the market. The Internet has reshaped society over the last three decades and I'd say only 1.5 payment processors came out of it. PayPal, and the crypto market. The term "coup complete" got thrown around a lot in the Biden presidency to describe what was necessary to build a competing Internet ecosystem.
  2. I'm worried this might signal the revival of the religious culture wars that happened in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000's. It's frustrating to me but a lot of people seem to gravitate towards religion of some kind. I think woke culture has plenty of religious elements. The atheist movement in the 2000s seemed genuinely anti-religious. But it seems the longer term strategy is just have a different religion.
  3. Neutrality as a default. This is the end goal. Once you accept that a thing is subject to politics it becomes entirely subject to politics. We are cancelling thots and porn this year. 4 years ago it was lab leak conspiracies. I certainly think some things are more important to not be censored, but the machinery of censorship seems to work regardless of the subject being censored. Once it is built it will be used.

Some people have blamed activist religious groups on aggressively lobbying the payment processors for this crackdown

Last time we saw this exact same play, Operation Choke Point came directly from the DOJ. I can easily understand how Federal investigations and lawsuits would apply significant pressure; I have to wonder how much pressure activist groups can really apply to these institutions? They seem unlikely to me to be the real driving force. On the other hand, Trump's first DOJ shut down Operation Chokepoint, so I don't see why his 2nd one would boot it back up. Maybe this really is just something payment processors have decided is in their own interest.

I don't have any special insight into the payment processors internal discussions of these policies. I suspect they are happy to go along with these requests, and just want someone else to be blamed or sued for the decision.

As I said the most important thing is the very incestuous relationship between government and private industry, and the lack of competition that this relationship causes.

In my head the optimal response to "these three payment processors don't accept porn games" should be something like "use one of the other dozen payments processors". Right now those other dozen mostly don't exist. That was supposed to be the dream of crypto.

I mean, it seems clearly possible to run a business with crypto and extra steps. The fact that no one is doing it for this indicates either A) thé niche isn’t profitable enough to be worth it or B) thé difficulties with payment processors arent bad enough.

I’m pretty sure it’s B.

The calculus for B has just changed, so I guess we will see if that leads to more adoption of crypto.

I don't think the big picture on B has changed. Legal smut peddlers have always had difficulties getting and keeping payment processors - it is arguably the core competence of big platforms like Mindgeek and Onlyfans. What has changed is that the Kangaroo Karens convinced the system that Steam qualified as a smut peddler if it got 10% of its revenue from smut.

(FWIW, I think this is a reasonable close call from the bank's point of view. If my employer has chosen not to bank smut, do I want to bank a stream of payments which is 90% clean and I don't know which 10% is the smut? Probably not, but does that change if it's fricking Steam?)

With Itch, it looks more like a website that had successfully deceived a small business banker in a hurry as to how smut-dependent it was, and got narced on by the Kangaroo Karens. This bank back-office professional sees an easy call - close the account, dock the small business banker and his boss's year-end bonusses, assign the whole team extra online training on customer onboarding, and warn your wife that the next few weekends are going to be spent on tedious paperwork.

Itch is still majority non-smut. With, admittedly, its own issues: they owe the Vintage Story people six figures worth. But they’re no more a smut peddler than Steam or Patreon.

Since one itch processor is/was Stripe, the rules there have also changed: itch signed onto them back before Stripe went category no on smut.

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