Statement: https://www.mastercard.com/us/en/news-and-trends/press/2025/august/clarifying-recent-headlines-on-gaming-content.html

Mastercard has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms, contrary to media reports and allegations.

Our payment network follows standards based on the rule of law. Put simply, we allow all lawful purchases on our network. At the same time, we require merchants to have appropriate controls to ensure Mastercard cards cannot be used for unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content.

Media contact

Seth Eisen

seth.eisen@mastercard.com

  • paraphrand@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    Is this why it appeared Steam only took down Incest and other spicy things?

    Or did all the reporting just read the top of the list, and that had all the incest front loaded?

    • orclev@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      That’s what it started with but it seems to have quickly expanded to include a lot of more mundane things. Initial reporting was only on the first wave of censored games and didn’t include the stuff that was removed later on.

      • paraphrand@lemmy.world
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        7 days ago

        Ah, I didn’t hear that Valve did the take downs in waves.

        But I did hear itch.io took down everything, including things with labels that happen to frequently overlap with porn, but are not in-fact, porn.

        I’m interested in seeing reporting on the different stages of take downs. Anyone have a link? My Google fu is failing me.

        • orclev@lemmy.world
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          7 days ago

          I don’t know that anyone has put together a complete list of games taken down specifically because of this, but you can look at steam-tracker.com and sort by date to see what has been removed recently. It doesn’t show why a game was removed, but you can usually infer a lot from the title and cover art.

          Also I should clarify it wasn’t specifically multiple large waves, there was a large initial group, but the remainder have been slowly trickling in. I’d guess there’s someone going through Steams catalog slowly flagging games to remove. The first group was likely an easy keyword search, while the rest are being evaluated on a case by case basis most likely.