Collective shout seems to have expanded its scope: games like cult classic Fear And Hunger have been removed from Itch.io, while horror game VILE: Exhumed has been delisted from Steam just a week after launch.
One thing I’m hearing a lot of is that this is a Christian lobby group. I did not see obvious signs of that on their website, though some of the language felt like an intentional alternative to how I (social worker) would discuss issues of women’s empowerment. Like they were holding space to later include “LGBTQ+” in their definition of problematic content. I am more than willing to believe an activist group from that demographic would lie to push their true agenda. Who has a good news source discussing their ideology?
The founder is a well-known Christian “pro-life feminist” from Australia.
This will be fun 🍿.
(before downvoting: don’t worry, this won’t go over well)
Isn’t there some hacker group putting Collective Shout in the crosshairs?
Hope so.
I think there are probably some skeletons in the closets of Collective Shout’s members. It’s always projection with these people.
Why cant the payment processors just fucking ignore them oh my god
The people who would typically be expected to push back against collective shout also typically wouldn’t be expected to do anything effective whereas the people involved with collective shout are the type of people who give politicians money.
That slope got real slippery real quick.
Honestly horrors get old when you can read in the news about “respected people” calling to exterminate Gaza and build beachfront cottages there. Even from just reading that and knowing that the same people can put anything onto your Android devices via a Facebook update or any of the Google applications update, on a whim. Nobody will even know.
About this - is it even legal to obey such pressure?
EDIT: I mean, how is it different from banning sellers by skin color when racists complain, or by religion when Muslims complain (all Hindus are Satan worshipers, didntcha knaw), or whatever else.
EDIT2: But it pains me to see how public offering was, in fact, an important part of market regulations, when everybody just ignores it without getting 9 lifetimes in jail for executives. I was against it at some point. That is - customer associations are important, and there are almost none, and when customer associations demand businesses to act like public offering, then it’s almost as good as if enforced, and no such regulation is a good stimulus for customer associations to keep existing. But - feels shitty when it’s in the law of most countries and hasn’t been removed.
Wait, that’s actually their logo? A butthole?
E Pluribus Anus.
So close to the Greendale flag from Community.
A stretched out pink butthole full of cum, yes
New punk band name found
And kids, that’s how I met your mother
gross, who would fuck them?
Yay were back to the 2000s again, Jack Thompson rises again !
don’t you mean Joe Lieberman?
Give them an inch, they’ll take a mile.
I don’t get why the gaming platforms are removing games instead of removing the objecting payment providers as a payment option for purchasing those particular games.
If visa doesn’t want people to purchase game X with Visa, then remove Visa as payment option for buying game X.
I don’t get why the gaming platforms are removing games instead of removing the objecting payment providers as a payment option for purchasing those particular games.
I think the issue isn’t that the payment providers don’t want to support the purchase of those games with their card. They want to stop offering their services to a platform that sells those games.
It appears that in the future, Itch will allow creators to opt out of payment providers, meaning that it’s probably on a per game basis, not per platform. That Itch and Steam are not making a per game solution now, is most likely because their current software doesn’t allow it and they need time to rework it. Itch has promised various changes already, Steam has been mum afaik.
Source for Itch: “For NSFW pages, this will include a new step where creators must confirm that their content is allowable under the policies of the respective payment processors linked to their account.”. https://itch.io/updates/update-on-nsfw-content
This is what Steam will probably do in the future, and Itch.io is already looking into it. There’s a reason all this garbage hasn’t splashed GOG. GOG is based in Europe, where protection laws would slap silly any financial entity trying to pull this stunt on an European company (pressure groups have weaseled censorship and moral panics with other strategies though, just not this one), and they have so many more payment processors that PayPal, Visa and MC would just be dropped entirely and immediately for any of the other dozen or so alternatives. The issue is that in the US and Australia, the three headed shit dragon already lobbied governments to pull the ladder behind them, so no other payment processor could take their place or compete with them, establishing a legal oligopoly of the old money finance club. They won and have this power due to systemic and political failures decades in the making.
Yeah, that’s not what the payment processors are requesting. They aren’t saying they don’t want to be used to buy this content. They’re saying, if your platform hosts this content at all then they won’t process any payments. It doesn’t matter if the option is removed if the content is still there. They’re using their power of monopoly to police content.
Do you have a source of where they are saying that?
I have seen an article about the Australian political action group that was claiming credit for getting the games banned. The story behind the start of the controversy.
And I have seen an article about the communication from Steam that they were banning games which were in conflict with the rules of their payment providers. The result basically.
But I’ve only seen conjecture and speculation about what went on to get from the start to the result. I haven’t seen any article that spelled out exactly what the different payment providers demanded from the gaming platforms, nor anything about what they discussed in between them.
Edit: after 12 hours there’s 4 downvoters and 0 sources. Another victory for vibes over facts.
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Itch has come out and said it’s not Visa, it’s PayPal and Stripe.
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Removing those payment options would cause a massive loss of revenue.
If this is true, all gamers who care about this issue of censorship should collectively boycott those payment processors. PayPal should be especially easy to disconnect from since they already suck.
But removing them from the specific games they object to would not lose any more revenue than removing the games entirely, and reduce the backlash significantly, as long as they could find 1 obscure payment provider to handle the obscure games and keep some form of access.
According to the statement someone else linked now, they will ask devs about whether they comply with the payment processors’ terms, and it sounds like those processors will otherwise be unavailable. They just had to blanket remove like this for now because they don’t actually have sufficient knowledge about all the games’ content.
We’ll see what will happen, and if it turns out devs are getting screwed in the long run, someone will fill the new market niche anyway.
Likely not worth the effort.
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You overestimate the adaptability of the average software stack. I worked at companies where even adding another button to the cart screen was a monumental undertaking
I only use Steam myself, so I hadn’t checked Itch Io’s communication yet. I don’t know the platform myself so it’s quite possible that I’m misinterpreting this, but to me it appears that Itch Io will allow creators to delist payment options that they are not compliant with: “For NSFW pages, this will include a new step where creators must confirm that their content is allowable under the policies of the respective payment processors linked to their account.”.
And then use what?
A few options include American Express, Discover, JCB, and the Steam Wallet, which can be funded through Steam gift cards.
Wow… This count have happened in the 2010’s with the anti-gaming feminist and conservative movement at the time.
If only they knew to go after payment processors instead of identity groups.
First, I don’t understand why processors give a fuck. Do they imagine people are going to just stop using credit in protest of how other people spend their money? Tell me another fucking joke.
Second, I’m not a game developer, but I suddenly want to make a horror game that includes graphic, exploitive, gratuitous depictions of everything they complain about. And name the game Collective Shriek.
The worm that keeps getting put into payment processor’s brains is that they might somehow be held criminally liable for games people purchase. It’s like telling a bus driver that they might be liable because they gave a ride to someone who robbed a store.
NOW that they’ve started curating, that has become way more likely to actually happen. They could have claimed to be a neutral carrier before. Actively filtering means they’ve decided to take on that responsibility, and the consequences for missing stuff.
They’re morons
i assume you’re allowed to buy guns with them in the US? that’s WAY more directly attributable
Time to sue my credit card company for preventing my purchases, but failing to prevent a purchase that was detrimental to me
That’s one way to not understand what I meant, I guess.
I’ve heard this reasoning a few times. I don’t buy it. Illegal content is already illegal. You aren’t allowed to sell it. Policing particular content beyond that doesn’t cover your ass. In fact, it implicates you if you do process payments for illegal content.
I’ve never seen any argument from them that this is the reasoning. The only rule they need is that you aren’t allowed to sell illegal content on your platform. That covers everything. Going beyond that implies there’s a different reason. They’re being influenced by something else other than the law.
Illegal content is already illegal.
I think it actually is more complicated. There are anti obscenity laws in the United States where these companies (Steam and Itch.io, but also Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and Paypal) are based. The way those laws have been applied have been mostly permissive in the recent past, but I think there’s reason to believe that this could change quickly. We may find ourselves in a situation where the highest court decides that this has all been illegal this whole time. Procedural and legal norms are feeling a bit shaky these days. People wonder why payment processors would bend over backwards on behalf of some group of aussie weirdos, but maybe being on their good side isn’t the concern. Maybe it’s that they’re trying to self regulate to get ahead of any government action. Collective Shout may just be highlighting to them the most risky instances, making it so that they have no plausible deniability with regards to the content they are processing payments for.
I’ve never seen any argument from them that this is the reasoning.
What argument have you seen from them that is their reasoning?
We don’t know their reasoning. However, we do know their requirement, which is not “no illegal content.” It’s “no content involving rape or incest” or something like that. They have also stated publicly they do not want to be involved in regulating legal content, but, again, that isn’t what they required. If they only cared about illegal content then that’s what their requirement would say, but it isn’t.
Okay so none then.
And also none from the person above, but the logic doesn’t check out. Using basic inference, we know it isn’t about legal content. That already wasn’t allowed, so no changes needed to be made. There must be another reason. What is it? I don’t know. I’m not making a claim to knowledge of what it is. I’m only proving that it isn’t what the other person claimed. Burden of proof is on the person making a claim, not the one disputing it.
The point is “I haven’t heard them say this” is not a legitimate argument, because you haven’t heard them say anything about anything, because they haven’t said anything, and speculation is all we have.
That what I just dont get about this.
If payment processors think they are liable because these games cause harm then where does it stop? Supermarkets sell cigarettes and so on…I hate corpos as much as the next guy, but I don’t think that’s a good rule to have.
It should also be bullshit in most if not all countries.
The Collective Shout logo looks like a butthole.
Thank you! First thing I thought when I saw that logo.
Six seasons and soon a Movie!
It’s an asterisk…
TIL the thing under a cat’s tail is an “assterisk.”
as
terisk
Can we go after CollectiveShout Now ??
We should, but also they aren’t the root cause. If they’re gone, there’s nothing stopping a different group from doing the same thing (except for fear of retaliation). The ideal solution is to force payment processors to process any payment for legal content.
But they can be used as an example
