A Bad News Post - The elephant in the room just stepped on me!

Hey everyone. Incoming rant.

Today has been rough. I’ve been processing the new Steam news. They have implemented a new ultra vague rule where all games (and presumably all art as they expand their reach) must please the executives at Visa. Valve has bowed and are reversing their policy of letting gamers decide what is good or bad. They have become Patreon and are following orders to outlaw a lot of legal content Visa may disapprove of. Presumably if you bought these games you just get screwed. There is a mass purge of adult titles on Steam and it appears to still be in progress. 

The payment processors and their lapdogs have ridiculous double standards that are so absurd sometimes I feel like I am living in a satirical universe. I just never believed Valve would bow so easily or quickly but here we are. I think this will have huge consequences for all adult games, even the less spicy ones without nudity.

The example I see used is Game of Thrones - it is 1,000,000x banned on Patreon and anyone that likes it should be given 10 years in prison and be whipped with a hose. It explicitly violates many of Patreon/Visa’s rules. Including excessive violence, blood and gore, rape, and incest among other themes. It is 100% definitely not allowed! By their public standards it can never be sold. The author should live in complete poverty. Don’t even look at it-it’s trash.

But wait… is it? The elite love Game of Thrones. It reminds them of their dark, sordid lives. George has a mansion and so do all the Visa boys. So even though it is totally not allowed it would definitely be allowed on Patreon or on HBO etc (similar content is) because those people love it and they love money and revel in their double standards. They just want the random, arbitrary power to strike down people or free speech they don’t agree with. 

It is wrong to judge a complicated series like Game of Thrones as an incest or violence story. That’s not what it is about. It’s looking at a mountain and appraising the molehill. 

There is a very disturbing trend in our society where we have lost rule of law. Visa essentially makes world wide laws and decrees with zero democratic representation and it gets immediate enforcement. Outside the financial world, there are millions of laws, statutes, ordinances etc to the point that every single person alive is now a criminal of some sort in some degree. There is not a single person alive that knows all of the laws in their own country if it is a modern one.

This undermines respect for the laws, especially when it’s the most obvious double standard ever: Sexual deviant billionaires get shielded from major crimes while tiny artists get crushed for glancing towards taboo themes. The Puritan standard crushes the peasant but no rules apply to the elite at all. It’s the classic “do as I say, not as I do.”

Can you imagine Steam implementing a forced “no excessive violence” policy when literally almost all of their games contain violence? That would mean a removal of all games! Who polices or decides all this stuff? Not you, the culture, the government, the reader or gamer, not Lord Gaben, it’s up to some out of touch asshole that probably lives on a tropical island living a lifestyle so corrupt, I wouldn’t print it even as an adult author! We definitely need a corrupt council of elites to lower corruption - that has never failed at any point ever! Actually it is even worse, it will be a Reddit Moderator appointed by that guy on the beach. 

I’ve been dealing with this for years and it’s like a parasitic gremlin on my shoulder. The one shining beacon was Steam. It was a meritocracy where as long as you post legal content they won’t censor you. The gamers decide if a game is good or not. The income is so significant compared to Patreon that I can’t realistically give it up without major life consequences. So now they want me to suck Visa’s dick and make a worse game for everyone.

As a writer and artist I abhor censorship. But I realize now I’ve already been doing it for years. Patreon has indirectly silenced and censored me for a long time on behalf of these immense dickheads. The topics that are taboo here are rarely or never discussed. 

I don’t post the html because Patreon will shoot me in the back of the head and if I do that before a Steam launch then I’m toast. I’ve banked content so that I can release it more as a batch to reduce the chance I get critiqued and censored. I’ve delayed certain stories towards the end so that the game is as “Puritan Friendly” as possible even though they make up an estimated ZERO PERCENT of my playerbase. None of this makes sense in a logical, law-abiding society. Why can't a game dev just make legal games and sell them????

There are a bunch of subpar options going forward. I don’t want to censor myself or make a shitty patched version that is hard for a normal user to access. I don’t want to cut and redesign everything into a clipped version. I don’t want to starve or limit creativity. I also don’t want to wreck these pages I’ve built up. Should I ruin my life to maintain what I feel are my basic free speech rights? Or should I cower and bow to these people until I get enough cash to resist? Or do I just keep doing whatever quietly and cross my fingers that no one notices (or I pass the arbitrary “I know it when I see it” appraisals by some appointed weirdo puritan inquisitor smut grader) until the project is complete and I am free? 

I don’t want to live under Visa’s boots forever. I thought the years of being repressed by them would be over this summer but maybe I was wrong and it is a lifelong corporate servitude thing. As an indie dev, to say that rubs me the wrong way would be a huge understatement.

I always thought Patreon overreached by implying they fund me and creatives. They don’t. They never have. You do. The reader. The player. YOU are the person who decides! You have the power. These payment processors need to shut up and do their jobs, processing payments for YOU, the customer. They work for YOU, not the other way around. It would be ridiculous if Visa set the menu at a restaurant. Now they set the Steam catalogue. This is a slippery slope that will only end in bad places. If you are a gamer, open your eyes, be aware, and stand up when you can. Free speech and free expression are lynch pins of Western Society. If we give them up video games (and society) will suffer or be less impressive than they otherwise could have been.

I feel obligated to periodically warn my patrons that this page is in peril. It will always be in peril because that’s how it is designed. It could be randomly deleted tomorrow with no recourse. The one caveat is that Patreon is more efficient and economical than my alternate funding page https://subscribestar.adult/tango so even though I have many issues with its structure, it is still the preferred page for as long as they ignore it or choose to use common sense.

I’d love to hear some feedback. Do you think Visa has way too much arbitrary and extralegal power and should leave our fucking video games alone?