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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9714878" data-attributes="member: 18">Oh definitely. But when lies are the only thing being reported, and the subject isn't something people are familiar with, I think most people do still tend to buy them (it's almost not even a bad thing, because for several decades the press, was, as a whole, relatively truthful or at least adjacent to that, and has reverted to a sort of pre-WW2 level of casual dishonesty over the last couple of decades (particularly as billionaires - including Murdoch) have exercised increasing day-to-day control. It's not even just sensationalism-driven anymore either, there's far more active ideological control being exercised.Even non-billionaire-owned news media is very clearly being told what they're allowed report and how they can report it in a ideologically-motivated way - c.f. the BBC's approach to reporting on a certain issue changing overnight 2-3 months ago. I mean, maybe they just got a new person in charge? But it given it coincided with the papers and government similarly changing their tunes (over the course of about the same week or two), even if did happen, that was a choice too.(To be clear I'm not suggesting any kind of organised conspiracy or similar nonsense. Rather, the media and the government in the UK are all essentially run by upper-middle class people who know each other - indeed, I am part of that group, as many of my friends - and clearly the mood among that group changed. Patience ran out. Apologia became uncool. It wasn't the facts on the ground that changed, or access to reporting or whatever. But the people who made the decisions about what got reported and how changed their minds. For now.)I mean, it's really not that complicated. Steam and Itch should be allowed to host the games they want to, subject to the laws of the jurisdictions they operate in. If a game is illegal to sell in a country, they shouldn't sell it - and guess what? They don't! This is nothing new. A bunch of fairly mainstream games were not sold in Australia for quite a while because of this. Some in Germany too.Payment processors shouldn't have anything to do with it. If something is legal in a country, frankly major payment processors should not be allowed to not support that, or should have to go to court in order to win a legal exception to not support it, and argue their case publicly. We can't have both a society where cash/purchases are increasingly digital, and a society where unaccountable international payment processors get to override national laws to decide what's legal to buy and sell. Pick a lane.As I've noted before, payment processors are basically parasites who don't even know what's good for their own success - they kicked and screamed and bit and lobbied and threatened about being regulated into to having strict limits on what they could charge for transactions in the EU (and the UK separately), and guess what? They're still making fat stacks of cash, and now credit/debit cards and digital payments are far MORE widely accepted than they were, because the companies can no longer have unfair minimum fees that only applied to small business unable to negotiate with them.This situation seems similar - Visa and Mastercard are, as corporate entities, fundamentally too stupid and cowardly to understand what's good for them - which is following jurisdictional laws and enabling legal transactions in those jurisdictions. They'll make more money not being idiots, they're just like bad children who frankly the state needs to be a parent to. People often like to act like the "free market" always leads to rational decisions, but we can see very clearly the opposite is frequently true. That without regulation, many companies behave in ways adverse to their own profit, adverse to society, adverse to them even existing in a decade or three.</blockquote>

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