(note, that changes when the payment process has been legally made aware, with acknowledgement, of a specific seller being in violation of the law, and the payment processor continues to facilitate sales for that seller. But that's not the case. The products sold are "morally reprehensible" but not explicitly legal)
Yeah but here's the thing though: if the "games" in question are considered illegal in Australia, then if Steam was already trivially demonstrably breaking Australian law by selling them in the Australian market and could have been taken to court.
That is not what happened here. Instead an Australian group demanded Australian law be applied globally, and now you can fuck right off and maybe learn about the fact that an entire planet exists outside of where you live, with not just wildly different laws, but also wildly different attitudes towards what is considered real or not.
Yes, Steam should have followed Australian law (it was even part of their pre-existing rules that were being poorly enforced).
The Australian group said to Visa and Mastercard "people have taken your merchants to court before, and you weren't able to get out of those cases. We're going to take Visa and Mastercard to court for Australian law infractions, and you're going to be part of the defendants, again."
Visa and Mastercard then put pressure on Steam and Itch to remove anything that might bring Visa or Mastercard into court too, and if Steam and Itch didn't, they would drop them as merchants.
From the article:
> “We raised our objection to rape and incest games on Steam for months, and they ignored us for months,” reads a blog post from Collective Shout. “We approached payment processors because Steam did not respond to us.”
Payment processors do not want a repeat of what happened before...
> On Friday, July 29, a federal court issued a decision in ongoing litigation involving MindGeek, the owner of Pornhub and other websites. In this pre-trial decision, the court denied Visa’s motion to be removed from the case on a theory that Visa was complicit in MindGeek’s actions because Visa payment cards were used to pay for advertising on MindGeek sites, among other claims. We strongly disagree with this decision and are confident in our position.
