you can filter them out by blocking the adult content tag, no?

edit: just checked: yes, you can filter it out under your account preferences. there’s a toggle there wether or not you want to see that in the store

I got perma’d I think because of my account having a small (<20) negative balance on it (due to some fuckery they tried to pull on their/eBay’s end awhile back) and they had no way to get payment from me.

Only found out I was banned over a decade later when I was trying to login to transfer some money to a friend. Can’t even make a new account it just gets locked and recovery options don’t do shit, oh well 🙃

Which they obviously are 🤷

PayPal wouldn’t dare attack Steam for accepting external payment methods with rules they don’t agree with and can’t change because they don’t own those companies. In addition to opening them up to potential lawsuits, it could catastrophically backfire if Valve simply said “fine, we don’t accept PayPal anymore, but we do accept crypto now.”

PayPal would die in a week. The investors would drag out a guillitine by the next earnings call.

Ah.

That’s true.

In fairness, I was trying to assess the capability of Valve to just make their own payment processing system, which they still largely could do.

Granted, this would be a bit of an endeavor…

But uh, fintech stuff is pretty common these days, Valve has a lot of money, and they could easily poach or hire some experts to guide the process of making their own version of something like Plaid or Chime or CashApp or Remitly, etc. but only for their ecosystem, not allow actual user to user direct cash txns, and work that into their own pre-existing Steam and Steam Mobile frontends.

Valve does kinda know a thing or two about servers and server code, I’ve worked a bit on both game network code (as an enthusiast/mod maker/etc) and on import/export transactions amd dbs (professionally)… the actual coding involved in a video game server stack is way, way more complex imo… Valve really only need help with the legalities and regulations of setting up a compliant psuedo bank and payment systems in different countries and such.

Then they could tell PayPal to go fuck themselves.

I am not saying this is likely to happen, just saying it is hypothetically possible… and Valve is kind of known for innovating the gaming space, pushing the envelope, raising the bar, as they say.

But, that being said… all that effort vs just delisting some shitty RenPy smut e-novels based on incest?

Yeah, I’d just can the goonslop too.

I’m seeing about 7000 ‘adult only’ games on the store right now… so… its not like they’ve just banned porn games.

You raise good points. It’s great that other store fronts still exist where you can sell adult games. But I do worry if credit card companies will come for them too one day.

Re: crypto. Some of what you said is true. Transaction fee are comparatively expensive (but also note credit card companies charge transaction fees too, just not directly to the consumer). But other points aren’t necessarily true. Transaction times have improved a lot, there are networks designed for fast transaction times, and usually the payment can complete in seconds. The volatility problem is solved by stable coins, which have their values fixed relative a currency. (Of course stable coins can, and have failed in the past. But that only concerns you if you keep your money as stable coin. For one-off payments this shouldn’t matter). Retailers don’t have to hold cryptos if they don’t want to. Crypto markets have pretty good liquidity nowadays, it’s not hard to get rid of the coins immediately after you get them (well to be fair if you are getting Valve volumes it could be a problem, should be fine for smaller stores).

Crypto is a fast evolving field, so problems are being solved by the day.

I have never heard anything from any Valve interview to the effect of how specific pay rates for specific employees are actually set.

I think (as in, this is my semi-informed speculation) it is closer to:

You get hired to fill a specific role, with a specific pay rate (Valve still like, lists specific job openings with specific role requirements), and then uh, you have tasks within that realm that are fairly clearly your responsibility… but at the same time, everything going on at the company is essentially one big github issues list, a whole bunch of feature requests and bug reports, and everyone can contribute to any of those, assuming they’ve got their core responsibilities covered as well.

(This is appealing to anyone who has ever worked in a tech corp or really any corp ever, because the standard way this works, at least in American corps… is you get hired for a role, that often has an exceptionally all encompassing job desc, or an absurd number of requirements… and then your boss and their boss just continuously, hierarchically, assign you new and more ever growing responsibilities…ie, your job has ‘scope creep’ the way a poorly developed game does. Valve inverts this and makes the ‘scope creep’ much, much more voluntary for the employee.)

(If you’ve never worked a software dev focused or adjacent role, you would be amazed at how often and regularly management and C Suite just demand you learn and do things entirely not in your job description, just treat you as a ‘computer person’, as if a heart surgeon is also a brain surgeon and also a metabolic expert and also a pharmaceutical designer.)

Like, there are probably still yearly reviews / the ability to try to negotiate yourself a raise… but I don’t think there is some kind of… formal, everyone votes in some sense on how much everyone else should be paid.

Valve is still a private company, not an actual worker cooperative that votes up or down an entire business budget for the whole year or w/e.

They are just a lot more flat of an organizational hierarchy, have a lot more unconventional work culture, but still ultimately a private corp.

From what I understand, they’ve moved on from that structure. I believe that was one of the things talked about after the release of HL:A, with one of the employees saying that it was part of the reason the game actually got finished. That said, its been a while and even assuming I’m not misremembering information rarely leaves Valve, so I could be wrong.

Edit: I’m wrong. See sp3ctr4l’s comment below.