Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
1. Submissions have to be related to games
Video games, tabletop, or otherwise. Posts not related to games will be deleted.
This community is focused on games, of all kinds. Any news item or discussion should be related to gaming in some way.
2. No bigotry or harassment, be civil
No bigotry, hardline stance. Try not to get too heated when entering into a discussion or debate.
We are here to talk and discuss about one of our passions, not fight or be exposed to hate. Posts or responses that are hateful will be deleted to keep the atmosphere good. If repeatedly violated, not only will the comment be deleted but a ban will be handed out as well. We judge each case individually.
3. No excessive self-promotion
Try to keep it to 10% self-promotion / 90% other stuff in your post history.
This is to prevent people from posting for the sole purpose of promoting their own website or social media account.
4. Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
This community is mostly for discussion and news. Remember to search for the thing you're submitting before posting to see if it's already been posted.
We want to keep the quality of posts high. Therefore, memes, funny videos, low-effort posts and reposts are not allowed. We prohibit giveaways because we cannot be sure that the person holding the giveaway will actually do what they promise.
5. Mark Spoilers and NSFW
Make sure to mark your stuff or it may be removed.
No one wants to be spoiled. Therefore, always mark spoilers. Similarly mark NSFW, in case anyone is browsing in a public space or at work.
6. No linking to piracy
Don't share it here, there are other places to find it. Discussion of piracy is fine.
We don't want us moderators or the admins of lemmy.world to get in trouble for linking to piracy. Therefore, any link to piracy will be removed. Discussion of it is of course allowed.
PM a mod to add your own
Video games
Generic
Help and suggestions
By platform
By type
By games
Language specific
Love to have life dictated by puritanical religious nuts that like to blame their own urges on porn so everybody’s worse off in the end!
Not suprising, and given the nature of most of the games removed, debatably reasonably, but it still highlights the need to reduced reliance on the few big American payment processors like PayPal when they can effectively regulate what can and cannot be sold online.
Concur. I'm still banned from PayPal and I have been since the early 2000's because I used it to buy a "high capacity magazine," which PayPal declared was "illegal activity" with no appeal.
...An airsoft magazine. Not a single state in the union where that's illegal (or at least certainly not at the time).
Payment processors attempting to police the nature of online transactions should expose them to liability, not the other way around.
Inb4 they start flagging 3D printers because you can print mags with them.
you would have to declare them as internet utilities.
Which they obviously are 🤷
I got banned as well, and I'm still not sure why. I've never sold anything, and I've only bought a handful of things and sent money for rent a few times.
I think someone hacked my account, because I hadn't used it for ~10 years before noticing that I was banned when I tried logging in again.
I got perma'd I think because of my account having a small (<20) negative balance on it (due to some fuckery they tried to pull on their/eBay's end awhile back) and they had no way to get payment from me.
Only found out I was banned over a decade later when I was trying to login to transfer some money to a friend. Can't even make a new account it just gets locked and recovery options don't do shit, oh well 🙃
I thought by payment processor, they were talking about Visa, MasterCard, etc.
Same thing applies, but the article suggests that its probably PayPal in this case.
what the fuck is with all these payment processors trying to curtail adult entertainment?
it's fucking weird. they should stop being weird about what people do with their own money.
Yeah I don’t get it here. I kinda get them not wanting to deal with porn when you can’t verify consent and age of the performers, but the games don’t make sense because there aren’t live performers to worry about.
Mostly that stuff annoys me on Steam because it’s always at the top when I’m sorting by trending/popular, but I don’t think it needs to be removed either.
A lot of them want to use your financial data (what you buy, for how much and when) to sell to advertisers etc.
Maybe adding porn stuff in there taints the data?
Time for Steam to make their own payment process then!
They... kind of sort of already have.
You can just throw money into your Steam account, via the mechanism they came up with for Steam Gift cards.
So, buy a physical gift card, or just give Steam your bank/card info, take money out of bank, give to your Steam Gift balance.
So uh, presumably, that Steam Gift Balance doesn't exist in a bank anymore, beyond being a withdrawl from your account, its now just ... a $USD value associated with your Steam account, that you csn now buy anything with, and your original bank/card company has no visibility into that second transaction.
So... they could theoretically use what I just described above as a 'workaround', you just make the offending games only purchaseable via ~~goon~~ gift balance.
As much as I like Valve's work, I don't think thats a good fit for them. Their staff seem to enjoy working on difficult technical tasks, and lose interest very fast when it comes to mundane maintenance, thus their numerous underutilized and unmaintained features throughout Steam and their games. A payment processor seems like exactly the sort of thing that would get forgotten about a month or two after it gets finished.
Implementing direct debit shouldn’t be too hard and straining. Most of their staff is maintaining an e-commerce platform, they‘d do fine.
Yeah, also its less "valve staff get bored and dont do mundane tasks" iirc thier pay is based on what thier coworkers think the value of thier work was, which is usually in how visible/noticeable which discourages long projects thay take more than a year and mundane tasks that are not very clear and visible
~~From what I understand, they've moved on from that structure. I believe that was one of the things talked about after the release of HL:A, with one of the employees saying that it was part of the reason the game actually got finished. That said, its been a while and even assuming I'm not misremembering information rarely leaves Valve, so I could be wrong.~~
Edit: I'm wrong. See sp3ctr4l's comment below.
You appear to be wrong.
(It's ok I will still give you a hug tho)
https://www.geekwire.com/2020/behind-scenes-half-life-alyx-valve-revived-classic-franchise-vr-era/
GeekWire: So you’ve been working on this (HL Alyx) full-steam since 2016?
Robin Walker: We started in February of 2016, I think, with a small team, and we brought out a small prototype. Then people started to play that, understood what we were trying to do afterward, and started joining up.
We had 80 people on the team when we were about midway through. The exact size of the team I wouldn’t be able to tell you. The way things work at Valve, people organically join once they’ve finished up what they were doing before, and if what you’re doing makes sense to them.
So it was always full steam ahead, I guess, but not in the sense that all 80 people were there from day one.
Also I'm just gonna LOL at Valve making HL Alyx, basically the first ever AAA VR game, in 4 years, with a max team size of 80, compared to uh, Concord, Skull and Bones, Marathon, etc.
Fucking lol.
Literally almost all Valve has to do is nothing and just watch half of their competition implode around them due to their unimaginable stupidity.
ah, didn't hear that, yeah its from heard a long time ago
Maybe time for some to start a adult only game store that uses crypto to settle payments?
Nutaku exists but I don't think they use crypto?
Also you can buy adult games on itch.io, again, don't think they do crypto though.
The whole problem with ... you know, actually using crypto for retail...
transaction times are abysmally, orders of magnitude more slow than using PayPal or Visa or MC,
crypto is exceptionally volatile, way, way less price stable than actual currencies,
transaction fees tend to be way, way worse than using traditional payment processors, because what you are actually doing is closer to a realtime forex currency conversion service,
or, if 3 is not the case, that means the retailer themself is directly holding a crypto wallet, which means they have massive financial risk and instability due to the extreme volatility of crypto, when all their other expenses are in USD or w/e
There are reasons why basically every single retailer that has ever tried to directly accept crypto either cancels that after a year or two, or goes bankrupt, or both.
I guess it could work if you convince game devs/publishers to directly accept payment in crypto...?
But that still seems kinda unlikely.
Also kinda like it would immediately be flooded with NFT/cryptobro scamslop, you know, like every single crypto basdd or crypto funded game, literally ever?
Case in point, itch.io just wiped all adult games as well.
No pun intended:
Well fuck.
You're right, they literally did just do this, almost tagged everything NSFW/Adult no longer appears in itch.io's search, I just made a new account and specifically checked the 'show nsfw stuff' setting and.... yep.
Currently I am only seeing like uh... 3 games.
There used to be 100s, probably more like 1000s.
They have not taken down the actual urls for actual games, but you have to know them directly.
Kotaku seems to have an actually decent overview, very recent:
https://kotaku.com/itch-io-nsfw-porn-games-delisted-collective-shout-1851786841
Well uh... if itch actually sticks with this decision... either as you say, somebody is gonna have to figure out how to run a crypto based adult game platform of similar scale to itch, which will not be easy for all the reasons I've described, or create their own nsfw-friendly payment processor system, which would also not be easy.
So, that means that largely donation based nsfw game development is now effectively over, at a stand still, untill someone figures out how to at least semi-automate some kind of workaround via probably some kind of much, much sketchier 'sending money to a friend' type loophole in venmo/cashapp/chime, etc, which is also probably very legally dubious/iffy at a platform level.
The whole problem with all this (aside from the business/platform end costs and complexities) is that even if you do switch over to crypto, or make your own payment processor, or use some kind of loophole, its now much more difficult for an average person to go through all these steps.
I guess this is the -current year- version of back in the 90s and early 00s, the FCC and RIAA cracking down on 'explicit' music, the younger generations will now have to get clever and do something analagous to invented torrents, but that actually results in money moving around to support devs.
EDIT:
A quick search shows that there are indeed alternative, minor payment processors oriented toward or friendly to things like strip clubs / sex toy shops, who transact in USD.
https://www.merchantmaverick.com/adult-payment-processing-merchant-account/
Probably the most straightforward business solution for an adult game platform would be to use one of these, but uh, they'd likely have to make a whole new brand name, a new website/domain, a different company legally, to avoid what PayPal would otherwise possibly see as you violating their policies.
Again, you could use crypto, and wow hey, finally an actual compelling use case for it!, but uh, either route you go is gonna be complex and risky for platforms, creators, and users/consumers... tradeoffs.
This made me think. For an European, are there any good alternatives to Visa/Mastercard/Paypal? Seems like we're dependent on US payment systems
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wero_(payment)
Very limited market.
I am interested to see how it's going to develop (considering the lagacy of paydirect
I think Wero is supposed to become the replacement for all of that, though I'm not sure if it's gonna have similar features. For now it's only available in a few countries unfortunately.
Monero
In Spain you can use bizum, which is a system made by Spanish banks. I've been reading that it's supposed to be interoperative with other european systems but I've never used that way personally.
The ECB have been working in the digital euro for ages, which is supposed to allow payments directly processed by the ECB. But it is taking ages....
What's the appeal of a porn game over just watching a video? Seems like the interaction is a hassle
I’d imagine it’s sort of like reading porn rather than watching porn. Different people are activated by different things.
Fair enough
More role play I suppose?
Immersion and customizability
People like porn involving characters they like. Look at all the rule 34 content. Games give you a chance to engage with the characters before the fucking.
There is also a bit of T&D as you build anticipation while playing the game.