Visa responds to backlash over its moral policing of video games on Steam

A campaign led by Collective Shout, an Australian-based group that fights the sexualization of women, has led to the changing of Valve's policy for what games can be made available on the Steam marketplace, and the vanishing of hundreds of legal games/content from the platform.

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Collective Shout pushed Valve to remove any games that contained depictions of rape and incest from the Steam marketplace, as the organization claimed Valve was profiteering off the normalization of violence and the abuse of women. Valve didn't respond to Collective Shout, resulting in the organization turning its attention to payment processors, such as Visa and Mastercard.

The open letter, which can be read here, attracted the attention of Visa and Mastercard, and resulted in Valve issuing a change to its "Rules and Guidelines" documentation, which states under the new 15th clause that developers are not allowed to have their game contain any "Content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam's payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers. In particular, certain kinds of adult-only content."

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Following this change, hundreds of games and the content associated with them have been removed from Steam, with the same exodus happening on itch.io, as that platform was also targeted by Collective Shout. These changes have garnered quite a lot of attention online, with Valve facing backlash over bending the knee to payment processors that are seemingly policing what content they can and will process. Critics of the new 15th clause on Steam have pointed out that these games aren't illegal, but were removed due to the content not meeting the moral standards of Collective Shout.

Visa has since responded to the backlash from gamers concerned about where the line is drawn between what is ok in a video and what is not, writing in a customer service response, "As a global company, we follow the laws and regulations everywhere we do business. While we explicitly prohibit illegal activity on our network, we are equally committed to protecting legal commerce. If a transaction is legal, our policy is to process the transaction. We do not make moral judgments on legal purchases made by consumers."

However, "Visa does not moderate content sold by merchants, nor do we have visibility into the specific goods or services sold when we process a transaction. When a legally operating merchant faces an elevated risk of illegal activity, we require enhanced safeguards for the banks supporting those merchants."

Judging from this statement, it appears Valve's Steam Store faced an "elevated risk of illegal activity," leading to the safeguards being put in place against the store. It appears Visa is doing some double-speak here. On one hand, it's saying that if a transaction is legal it will process the transaction, but on the other it says if that merchant is facing an "elevated risk of illegal activity," it will implement "safeguards," which, according to Valve, came in the form of Visa threatening to remove its payment processor from Steam, despite the transactions being technically legal.

"We were recently notified that certain games on Steam may violate the rules and standards set forth by our payment processors and their related card networks and banks. As a result, we are retiring those games from being sold on the Steam Store, because loss of payment methods would prevent customers from being able to purchase other titles and game content on Steam. We are directly notifying developers of these games, and issuing app credits should they have another game they'd like to distribute on Steam in the future," wrote Valve in response to the policy changes

In response to these changes, a Change.org petition has been started demanding that Visa, Mastercard, and other payment processors stop censoring legal fictional content and reject any influence from activist groups. Additionally, the petition requests that payment processors be fully transparent about content restrictions and the rationale behind them. The petition has gained 174,616 signatures as of writing.