I'm sure they do. Who would last the longest, VISA or Valve? The court proceedings would drag out long enough the kill Valve. Afterwards VISA and MasterCard would just ask "How else would you pay?".
As long as VISA and MasterCard are only targetting adult content they are pretty much free to do whatever they want because no politician is going to go out and defend pornography.
I'd pay for Steam content however they wanted me to. Up to and including hooking up my bank account details or buying gift cards in a store.
Steam has a large and dedicated user base. They are one of the companies that has access to enough users to conceivably build their own payment processor with enough volume to be profitable from the start.
Industry giants are often toppled by companies who started out in some niche the giant is ignoring/avoiding.
When it looked like Microsoft might close off Windows, Valve built their own SteamOS Linux distro. It now runs many AAA and indie titles, making Linux-based gaming very practical. This is something which was at one time considered impossible.
Valve also have an extremely loyal customer base. If they have to open an account at the Bank of Gaben to get their fix of smutty games, they just might.
>only a subset of that customer base is interested in smutty games.
the topic up chain was " if they block whole Steam, it will create way larger outrage. I am sure they will dare not.". But it seems Valve doesn't want to take the gamble there.
I wonder how feasible would it be for Valve to start a campaign that they will add a 10% discount on everything you purchase with an international bank transfer, instead of a card.
I'm quite sure it would cause a massive amount of people to start paying using bank transfer.
Honestly, in Europe, if they added SEPA transfers to fill steam wallet I think they would do fine. This is the company that has — albeit not singlehandedly — made Linux a viable alternative to Windows for many gamers. They are used to taking on much bigger fish than themselves, and being a private company not beholden to shareholder profits they have a lot more room to weather a short term loss.
The Proton / Steam deck play was a decade long strategic play that has clearly paid dividends and made Steam much less dependent on Microsoft. It would not be surprising to me if Valve in 10 years time has positioned itself to be much more independent of Visa and Mastercard than it is today.
Bank Transfer, Bitcoin, etc. Maybe even work with debit card rails, my local grocery store only takes debit and Discover. Steam could even include an error message, "Sorry, Mastercard has not approved purchases from Steam. You can call their customer support for more information."
To the extent there is someone gamers can pressure in this system, it's Valve. (Who would, in turn, take the mantle of organising gamers' interests against Visa and Mastercard.)
Given the rabid audience there, I'd bet on Valve to be honest. They are causing this much issue over a niche section of games. Imagine if every steam purchase was affected, there'd be legitimate riots.
I imagine they are girding for it, though. It simply wasn't a feasible battle until probably this year. FedNow and other things are just coming online. I suspect that Valve will begin incentivizing using that system rather than Visa/MC extremely strongly.
Huge companies don't care about lawsuits, but are very sensitive to dramas. They very much prefer quiet no-fuss money-making.
It's more like huge companies have a lot of internal politics, so public dramas are good occasion to fire a few managers here and there by their opponents.
They could still accept crypto/other methods as far as I’m aware steam has a low upkeep for the amount of profit they generate. Gaben has a whole fleet of gigantic yachts I’m sure they could stay a float for awhile ( pun unintended ) but now they gave them an inch and the next time a payment processor doesn’t like something they will take that down aswell until visa just becomes a second moderation team if they aren’t already.
