Mastercard’s ties to the esports world have led to more evidence of censorship. A source leaked messages from the Riot Games sponsor to livestream channels during the Valorant Champions Tour. The payment processor asked moderators to delete messages accusing it of forcing the ban of Steam games.
Isn’t Stripe one of the growing alternatives?
Stripe bans even more stuff https://stripe.com/en-de/legal/restricted-businesses , recently they banned payments for online dating platforms in the US.
Yeah, Stripe is the reason itch.io had to pull all paid NSFW games.
However, it isn’t exactly their fault, either:
This is why it’s so hard to fight this, every company blames another one but never by name, I’m sure it’s by design
In the Itch.io incident, Stripe laid the blame for that on “banking partner” rules, claiming they were looking for ways to fix it.
Stripe is a payment processor. It has different payment methods it supports. Which are MasterCard and Visa. But it does also support(if you can use it and the merchant accepts it): Giro card, other card options, Revolut Pay and other options. Those avoid the MasterCard, Visa ecosystem.
Regardless, not everyone wants to use or uses Stripe. And it’s a bad thing for everyone to use Stripe just because of their interoperability because that then gives stripe too much power.
Plus, for a company like Valve, the fees of Stripe would severely affect their revenue.