LogFAQs > #986013786

willythemailboy posted...

We know damn well they aren't, since shows like Game of Thrones are still available. A game containing the same content would have been removed for containing quite a lot of their "harmful content".

When the Good Omens show first came out, a Christian group petitioned Netflix to take it down for being "blasphemous." That went about as well as you'd expect, given that it was an Amazon series, but the drive is definitely out there to censor television that contains "objectionable" content. Those efforts get more traction with video games because they're still new enough that the general public and legal systems don't understand them and are therefore more likely to buy into moral panics (Hot Coffee being an excellent example of this in that people just saw "the game has porn in it!" without grasping the whole "... if you search for and download a mod, install it through a process that the average user can't comprehend, and repeat that process to also apply a nude mod" part), but if a legal precedent is set for strong-arming companies into not selling "objectionable" games on the basis of protecting the image of credit card companies, it's a pretty short hop from there to applying the same logic to other media.

This is especially true given the current streaming landscape, where the market has become disastrously fragmented and every service is scrabbling desperately to survive. Amazon likely wouldn't be affected (if Visa or MC tried to say they wouldn't process Prime subscriptions anymore, Amazon could fire back by not accepting the card in question for any transactions and bankrupt them overnight, so I can't imagine either would ever take that risk), and companies like Disney or Paramount that have business other than their streaming services to fall back on could likely absorb it, but for a company like Netflix that only has their streaming service, that kind of competitive disadvantage would destroy them. That gives card companies quite a bit of leverage, should they choose to exert it, and it's only a matter of time before we start seeing activists take advantage of that (provided this strategy of threatening the reputations of those companies to kill games is successful enough to be worth repeating).

Revelation34 posted...

No Australian politician has any sway in America.

Anyone that can speak to anyone else has some sway over that person. Anyone that can give money to anyone else definitely has some sway over that person. Australian politicians can speak to Americans and Australian consumers can give money to American companies, and that means both have some sway in America.

Influence is not limited to formal legal authority. Suggesting that it might be is ludicrously out of touch with the most basic fundamentals of human interaction.