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.
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.