A question about Collective Shout

[Ondrashek06]

Here's one thing I still don't get:
- A fairly small activist group in Australia sends letters to payment processors to ban games.
- Payment processors ban games.
- People get reasonably upset and angry about it.
- People contact payment processors.
- Payment processors won't undo the ban despite the number of complaints being much larger than Collective Shout's.
- Payment processors double down on the ban by gaslighting people and saying that no bans were implemented, despite Steam/Itch saying otherwise.

Why did the payment processors listen to Collective Shout's demands and completely ignore the demands of the rest of their userbase?

 

[Reiten]

They, for some odd reason, thought that CS and the whole NSFW stuff could somehow damage their brand(or whatever). Top of my head, I think they didn't think anyone would make such a huge fuss over it and it would all happen hush, hush. Problem with that is, that neither CS or the payment processors made demands to get specific games removed, but just cited some rather abstract rule of theirs, which left all the shops with no real idea what to do with it, and it ended with the removal fiasco.

Funny thing is, no one was associating them with anything before this whole fiasco. I mean, they are like 2 to 3 layers removed from the purchases. When was the last time you actually thought about one of the payment processors, when you were purchasing a game(past the should I use option A or B to pay). Now they have associated themselves with the whole thing in the worst way possible.

TLDR: Corpos care more about their brand then the actual customers.

 

[tech3475]

I saw this the other day, don't know how true or not it is though so take with a pinch of salt:
https://www.engadget.com/gaming/vid...p-and-stolen-puritanical-valor-234220878.html

On a side note, payment processors doing this isn't new, such as with Only Fans:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news...terial-after-pressure-from-payment-processors

 

[Ondrashek06]

They, for some odd reason, thought that CS and the whole NSFW stuff could somehow damage their brand(or whatever). Top of my head, I think they didn't think anyone would make such a huge fuss over it and it would all happen hush, hush. Problem with that is, that neither CS or the payment processors made demands to get specific games removed, but just cited some rather abstract rule of theirs, which left all the shops with no real idea what to do with it, and it ended with the removal fiasco.

Funny thing is, no one was associating them with anything before this whole fiasco. I mean, they are like 2 to 3 layers removed from the purchases. When was the last time you actually thought about one of the payment processors, when you were purchasing a game(past the should I use option A or B to pay). Now they have associated themselves with the whole thing in the worst way possible.

TLDR: Corpos care more about their brand then the actual customers.

Why do the payment processors even need to protect their brand though? It's a de-facto duopoly, we don't really have any other choices than Visa/MC when it comes to card payments.

 

[Reiten]

Why do the payment processors even need to protect their brand though? It's a de-facto duopoly, we don't really have any other choices than Visa/MC when it comes to card payments.

Honestly, no idea, your guess is as good as mine. I've watched a few videos on the matter and read some articles, but none could really offer a compelling reason for the processors to do anything. At this point I'm chalking it up to either pure stupidity(someone wanting to virtue signal) or a power flex, to see what they could get away with.

The only explanation that made at least some sense was going from a legal standpoint, that they're enabling forbidden content, but even that was far fetched. As I said they are multiple layers removed from the actual responsibility, so any legal matters from NSFW content getting to them is highly unlikely.