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by jacobsimon 321 days ago
Maybe a silly idea, but here’s a solution to prevent financial censorship: make the game free. Or monetize via another way—ads, subscriptions, credits. There’s actually a lot of options for Steam if they aren’t being pressured directly to remove the content.
6 comments
gs17 321 days ago
> if they aren’t being pressured directly to remove the content.

The problem is that they aren't being told "we won't let people buy this through us", they're told "this needs to go entirely or no more credit cards for you".

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jacobsimon 321 days ago
Fair enough - so in reality they _are_ being pressured directly to remove the content and it has nothing to do with selling the products. A slippery slope indeed!
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gs17 321 days ago
And it proves that it's not about these games having high risks of fraud and chargebacks.
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WorldMaker 321 days ago
Most of the games that have been deindexed on itch.io and some of the ones that were banned/removed were free or Pay-What-You-Want/Donation-Ware (some even via Patreon or SubscribeStar rather than itch.io's own payment processing).

The problem isn't just "the Payment Processor doesn't want to support this game" but also "this game shows Guilt-By-Association that your platform's money might go to 'criminals' or 'sinners'."

Guilt-By-Association is real gross, but a large part of the current fight, too, especially looking at itch.io's payment processor-required actions, not just Steam's.

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jandrese 321 days ago
> Or monetize via another way—ads, subscriptions, credits

That don't use Visa/Mastercard? The bans aren't coming from the platforms but from the payment processors.

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axus 321 days ago
"Citizen's United" wasn't _wrong_ about money being a type of speech, that shouldn't be censored. Only wrong about who the first amendment is for.
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gqgs 321 days ago
>Or monetize via another way—ads, subscriptions, credits.

All of those are still prone to censorship if the attacking group is motivated enough. Even crypto, which should be the ideal solution to this problem, is not ideal because most transactions are performed through centralized exchanges which can easily blacklist whatever transactions they want.

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pfisch 321 days ago
F2P games are very different in design from regular games(and far worse imo)

You can't even realistically have a F2P game that requires a high spec machine because of how the market works.

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zer0tonin 321 days ago
There's quite a few F2P games requiring high spec machines, Throne & Liberty for example.
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