Originally posted by Vanrick:

Steam can just disable direct payment of the game via Visa/Mastercard, and make the purchase of a game in these steps instead.

1. see game you like
2. press "Buy with steam wallet"
a. if the user doesnt have enough $ in the steam wallet , proceeds to add $ using Visa/Mastercard
b. if the user has enough $ in the steam wallet, buys the game like usual but using steam wallet balance. no more direct card payment.

Done.... the banks will never get informed of the game´s name or type of game.

And the banks will only be informed of things like this "5.50$ of steam wallet balance"

That doesn't solve it.

The financiers are not so easily fooled by these sorts of bureaucratic tricks. They INVENTED most of them after all.

Honestly, if you can explain your bureaucratic trick to people on steam, it's probably not complex enough to trick the banks...

you dont get what visa/mastercard actually said.

if Steam sell the games, no matter if they are bought with visa/mastercard or other methods, they will completely stop ALL business with valve.
so as long as the games were on the store, visa and mastercard would pull out.

and no way Valve was just gonna stand there and defend those games and lose the de facto leaders of online payment processing.

Originally posted by Vanrick:

Done.... the banks will never get informed of the game´s name or type of game.

also banks never knew what you bought.. check your bank statement, it just say that you paid XX to valve. In most cases when you buy stuff, banks just know you paid XX amount to this company/website/bank account.

if you bought wallet money, it will say the same.

Any payment method that is dependent in its obtainability or exchangability to another payment method will make ideas such as this one obsolete because credit card companies will still be part of this dependency chain and will pressure the lower level of the dependency chain to cease and desist, be it Valve directly, any retail store or exchange hub, both virtual and real.

Offering such games on Steam alone is enough to enforce a cease and desist, no matter the payment method. Neither Visa nor Mastercard want to be held liable for the sale of (potentially) illicit content.