#mastercard debacle

What Happened:

Steam, the largest videogame marketplace in the world, caved to pressure from payment processors like Mastercard and Visa to delist games and effectively censor content that goes against the TOS of the payment processor.  This is incredibly shitty.

Visa and Mastercard now have direct say in what content is “objectionable” on the world’s largest gaming marketplace.  They are the entities that get to decide what art is “degenerate” and what art is suitable for their advertisers.

Adult content has long been a target of Mastercard, which has been constantly putting pressure on companies like Etsy, OnlyFans, Patreon, Pornhub, Fansly, and more for multiple years now to deplatform and censor not only real-life content featuring real people, but also overtly fictional and drawn content as well.

LGBT+ art is a prime target for being slandered as deviant; we’ve seen it throughout our history, and this is only becoming more evident as queer sex workers, content creators, and artists are getting financially deplatformed all across the internet.

Several ultraconservative groups are behind the pressure on Mastercard, including swerf and terf clubs.

This goes beyond region or payment method.  It doesn’t matter how you pay for Steam games; once a game is delisted, it cannot be purchased via any method. 

Since this change to Steam’s TOS and as of this writing, over 80 adult games have been delisted, and I’d like to take a second to emphasize what this means.  Being delisted on Steam is the same as having a game functionally permabanned.  Delisting means that anyone who has the game can still access it, but the title is taken off the marketplace completely, and new players will never see it or be able to access it.

Steam is effectively being held at gunpoint.  Without the ability to accept payments from the two largest, most duopolistic processors in the world, its continued resistance would likely destroy them as a marketplace. This attack on Steam gives Mastercard and Visa an unprecedented amount of power over gaming as a whole and has already had huge consequences.  This sets a disturbing and wholly unfair precedent of disproportionately silencing queer and/or politically charged art.

What’s shocking about this is that in the past, Steam has worked to maintain a high level of neutrality in its content offerings.  As long as games were rated properly and appropriate themes were disclosed during the rating process, Steam generally let explicit content slide even if their content was questionable to some.  The problem now lies in the fact that corporate overlords have now taken the power to decide what is and is not artistic expression, and historically, that does not bode well for anyone challenging or commenting on the status quo.  If you’re queer like me, you know you challenge the status quo by simply existing.

The Future is Unknowable

Unfortunately, it just got a lot murkier for me and for TCM.  Because TCM’s queer leanings, its focus on sexualized men and monster fucking, the game will certainly be seen as transgressive to any remotely conservative leaning weirdo looking for a power trip.  I don’t know if we’re on the chopping block and there’s literally no way to prepare.

I’ve heard several people mention Itch.io as an alternative, and, firstly, please understand that I adore Itch.  Itch is where TCM got its initial start and early community from, and I owe a lot to Itch’s commitment to its devs and the freedom to produce whatever content they want.  The problem is that if payment processors put pressure on Itch, too, they will be forced to acquiesce.  I can’t stress enough that Steam is astronomically larger and more powerful than Itch- and if they didn’t have the resources or independence to hold to their ideals in the face of pressure from Mastercard, Itch won’t either.  At this point, it's less of a criticism or doomerism on my part and simply an ugly, unfair fact.

This kind of uncertainty alone is enough to stagnate a lot of business in any industry.  This puts the burden on me to either pre-emptively censor the game myself or to cope with the immense financial instability of going forward with unclear and/or unfair guidelines that- once again- disproportionately target queer creators.   

We saw it with the widespread tariff confusion earlier this year that had a pronounced effect on global commerce.  Stephanie Sterling elaborates on the burden of uncertainty in this video about YouTube’s unclear and inconsistent demonetization rules and the clamps it puts on artistic content.  She’s a lot more articulate than I am and paints a really robust picture about why having vague content policies- like the ones Mastercard is pushing- throws a wrench in the whole creative cycle, especially for artists hoping to make a living via their art.

What This Means for TCM

Honestly, this could mean a lot of things, and unfortunately, I just don’t know what the road ahead will look like in 6 months.  Or even next week.  Because I really value transparency, I wanted to lay the situation out for y'all so you can hopefully see where I’m coming from and why this is so incredibly devastating to hear about.

I invested a ton of money into making this game.  More than that, it's been about five years of my life with no other projects on deck, building this game and community from the ground up.  I believe in this project, and I believe in queer adult entertainment that’s inclusive and fun and sexy.  I really do.  

But if I get financially deplatformed, I can’t create.

Essentially, I planned to invest my own money up front, offer the base game (Amir, Mori, and Akello’s full routes) for free, and then make DLC in the form of additional character routes and charge money for those to recoup costs and eventually get me out of the hole.  I hoped that people would really enjoy the base game, get a feel for my writing style and Atlas’ art, and hopefully find that a paid DLC for another character is a worthwhile purchase.  Now, I’m reevaluating how I want to move forward, and I wanted y'all to be a part of that 1) because I need you to see what factors I’m dealing with and 2) I’d like to give as much of a heads up as possible if plans change.

So, right now, the game is in a state called “Early Access”.  This tells players that the game is still in development, still getting updates, and generally taking player feedback/bug reports into account as development furthers.  Once the game is “completed,” I was going to take it out of Early Access and into “Fully Released”.  

One option I’m now considering is charging for the game once it hits that fully released state.  

People who already have the game will not be affected by this at all.  You’ll get the Full Release without having to pay.  (Anyone who has the game in their Steam Library before the changeover will get the Full Release for free.).  The Full Release won’t have significant content changes but will probably have minor bug fixes, polish, things of that nature.  I’m not sure what price point I would set it at.  But like most options, there are pros and cons to this- namely, I made it clear that I wanted to keep this chunk of the game free, but I’m worried that might not be possible.  The benefit to structuring things this way is that I may be able to recoup some of the development costs before a potential delisting, which would essentially terminate my ability to make extra content like I’d intended.

Talking Numbers

I would like to share my budget with you so that you can see the figures I’m looking at.  Again, my ultimate goal here is gaining yall’s understanding first.  I know it’s disappointing to talk money and numbers when we’re all surviving out there, but things are getting dire.  (Note that these numbers are general but close estimates.)

Artwork includes: Sprites, CGs, Logo Design, Menu, GUI/UX assets and implementation, other In-Game Assets, Commissions for birthday posts/special occasions, Trailers, Animations, Capsule Artwork, etc

Ads, Hosting, and Business Misc includes: Ad runs on websites like Furaffinity and Tumblr, Hosting and Domain fees, Business Name Registration, Studio Peaches logo

Custom Music includes: 6 custom-performed and recorded tracks exclusive for TCM

Equipment/Tools includes: Software licenses, computer hardware, graphic design tools.

The game does pull in some money on the regular, and I cannot stress enough how grateful I am for my patrons, kickstarter supporters, and for my itch donors because your generosity and loyalty have helped add some stability to this situation, and I’ve gotten good at making your every dime count.

And just for transparency, here’s what the Kickstarter ended up looking like:

Now, with Kickstarter, I have to emphasize that these numbers don’t represent failure- this was pretty much what I expected going in.  Kickstarter is a great way to raise awareness of projects, and in that respect, the TCM Kickstarter was very successful, even if I cut it perhaps a little closer than I had intended.

So, now you can kind of start to see where the stress is growing.  Over the past five-ish years, I’ve invested close to twenty thousand dollars into this project, and although I have wonderful patrons, backers and itch donors, I’ve barely put a dent in that debt.  This is what game development costs for a game of TCM’s quality.  Currently, I pay Atlas commission rates for their work, but I had hoped to be able to actually employ them.  I personally have never been paid for the time and labor I’ve put into this game, and I work on it about 30 hours a week, every week. 

TLDR

To recap, there are several reasons I’m taking the time to write this up today:

Prepare TCM community for the possibility of changes coming to the plans going forward

Inform the community of some very alarming developments happening on gaming platforms

Help show the community just how much game development costs, and how imperative it is to find a financially viable future for this project.

Prayer circle we don’t get delisted

The bottom line is:  TCM needs to make money if it is going to continue being developed. If the game gets delisted and deplatformed, I might need to make serious changes to keep this project alive.  I may need to make serious changes to mitigate what’s already happening to adult games.  

Things are scary out there for artists and especially for queer artists.  I have absolutely no idea what the future holds for TCM and no idea how much worse things are going to get before they get better.  Transparency has always been a priority for me, so definitely expect updates and announcements as things evolve and change over the coming months. Just please understand that I may have to pivot or change tact depending on what Mastercard decides is a violation of their content guidelines. 

For better and for worse, nothing is set in stone today, but that does mean I’ll need to continue monitoring the situation closely, and I’ll do my best to keep everyone informed of TCM’s development with as much notice as I can.

Finally, I encourage all of you to do further research into this on your own.  I encourage you to sign the petition that the ACLU has been circulating as a first step towards fighting this unfair hold payment processors have on our content.  I encourage you to talk to performers excommunicated from OnlyFans and Patreon for having “objectionable” material. I encourage you to talk to Furries who were booted from Fansly for being incorrectly labelled as deviants with bestiality kinks.  I especially encourage you to look into the oppressive, hateful groups pushing for this kind of artistic suppression and pressuring Visa and Mastercard to tighten (comprised largely of swerf, terf, and bog-standard conservative purity politics).  Send angry emails, support your favorite creators, and cultivate safe online spaces for queer adult content.

As always, please hit me up with any questions you might have- I can be reached in all the usual places:  Here on Tumblr @tricitymonsters, on discord @pockatuck or via the TCM server, or even email if you have something longer to send > [email protected]

Some source links for you:

ACLU Petition: https://action.aclu.org/petition/mastercard-sex-work-work-end-your-unjust-policy PCgamer Article Breaking the Story: https://www.pcgamer.com/software/platforms/steam-introduces-new-rule-prohibiting-certain-kinds-of-adult-content-that-might-make-visa-or-mastercard-unhappy-financial-deplatforming-in-action/