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Making Your Own Merchant Service Provider

-08-14: Payment Processor Fun 2025 -- Making Your Own MSP Valve and Itch have been in the spotlight for being more or less forced by "Payment processors" to pull certain adult content off their storefronts. The short story of it is Valve pulled a couple of games down while Itch pulled down everything marked mature/adult temporarily and had to sort through their entire library to find certain kinds of content to remove.

What happened here was the entire payment processing chain reached down and told Itch to stop taking swipes for not just "adult content" but specific titles they found morally objectionable. If you take anything from this awful wall of ADHD infodumping it should be this: No matter who you are in the stack of payment processing, you are beholden to someone that can be influenced either by a PAC, by moralizing busybodies, or by an annoying aggressive call-in campaign. People unrelated to transactions in any way except "They have the tech to facilitate them" deciding that entire industries don't get to make money and feed their staff because "It's risky to handle these payments" suck.

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