themachinestopsSteam Users Rally Behind Anti-Censorship Petition
🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 Need to petition Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and American Express. I don’t think trying to get Valve to reverse these recent changes will necessarily be effective, since they are being pressured by the payment processors and they definitely aren’t going to risk not being able to effectively do business at all.
i would expect the multi billionaire owners of the largest gaming platform on PC to have the ability to not fold like paper mache. I can also be mad at payment processors and valve at the same time
Valve is basically a small business one bad Monday from going bankrupt compares to payment processors.
Banks and payment processors are the single largest most powerful forces in a capitalist market.
You literally do NOT get bigger. Full stop.
IsoKieroValve is basically a small business one bad Monday from going bankrupt compares to payment processors.
Few quick searches around the internet says that (measured by revenue) Mastercard alone is roughly 3 times bigger than Valve. So even if Valve is pretty big player it’s not even close on major payment processors. And they’re not playing on the same rules either, any payment processor can vanish payments for anyone with just ‘fuck you, that’s why’ -reasoning buried in their contracts. There’s almost no one who could afford to fight with them even in theory and much less in practise.
You realize three times bigger is barely anything right? Also their power per user is significantly higher considering almost everyone who uses it cares for steam but almost nobody cares about their card. If Mastercard tried using their blacklist power people are few more likely to switch card than platform.
I’d bet that there are more mastercard users who haven’t even heard about Steam or Valve than there’s users on Steam. And MC with others are using their massive leverage right now, what you’re going to switch to?
Also 3 times bigger is definetly something. It’s like asking what’s the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars (answer is about billion dollars). Not quite, but effectively the same. And payment processors have the power to practically stop all money transfers to Valve (which they are threatening with already). Microsoft or Apple might have cash to fight that, Valve most definetly could not sustain legal fight with them if absolute majority of their income is cut off.