Recently, payment processors Visa and Mastercard have begun directing their partner banks to enforce certain artistic limitations on merchants such as Steam[1] and Itch.io[2] as a condition of doing business.
This question resolves NO if PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, or JCB clearly expand the scope of the artistic limitations they (jointly) enforce on merchants, and this causes either Steam or Itch.io to “delist” at least 1 additional game from their storefronts. (Games whose authors were criminally charged with the creation of the game, and were actually convicted, or pled Guilty, Nolo Contendere, or Alford, will be excluded from this criterion.)
This question resolves YES if Steam adds any additional payment channels to checkout (including, but not limited to: ACH, SEPA, Gab Pay, Western Union, Monero, couriered cash, or any other payment channel), and as a result restores to its storefront at least 1 game which was de-listed in the July 2025 censorship purge.
This question resolves NO if Steam shuts down entirely, or generally stops selling games, before any other criterion resolves it.
1,000Visa and Mastercard both claim [1, 2] to be merely enforcing the law with their artistic demands. However, in the vast majority of reported cases these demands are not made in accordance with any court order, nor made out of an abundance of caution regarding any ongoing criminal investigation, nor even accompanied with a police report regarding the supposedly illegal content. This has led to[3], and may to lead to further[4], backlash from the highest levels of government.
I think this topic would be a much more apt referent of #StopKillingGames; currently, the term only means “stop publishing games that should have offline functionality as live-service online-only”
Visa and Mastercard both claim [1, 2] to be merely enforcing the law with their artistic demands. However, in the vast majority of reported cases these demands are not made in accordance with any court order, nor made out of an abundance of caution regarding any ongoing criminal investigation, nor even accompanied with a police report regarding the supposedly illegal content. This has led to[3], and may to lead to further[4], backlash from the highest levels of government.