When you buy a game, doesn’t matter the platform, you pay for it with a credit card. The credit card companies are holding the game platform hostage, saying either they start censoring what games they sell or they lose the ability to process any credit cards for any games at all.
That is essentially holding a gun to their heads, if they can’t process credit cards they can’t bring in any money and they might as well just close shop and go home because their business is finished.
You can boycott steam or itch or whatever else, but they all use the same credit card processing systems- Visa, MasterCard, Discover, etc. if they start applying these policies to all game retailers, it will simply become impossible to buy any vaguely pornographic game. Period. Anywhere.
Thus, boycotting steam or itch is counterproductive. They are victims just as much as the consumers. They have no desire to ban these games, they were happily selling these games a week ago. But when they are being told ‘ban a bunch of low volume games or you cease to exist as a company’ that is what they do.
Thus, this phone call campaign. It is focusing on the credit card companies, the ones who are actually applying this pressure to game companies.
It is telling them we do not want them dictating what people are and are not allowed to spend money on. We do not want them to enforce morality. And if they got the impression we did, it’s because a small minority made a couple of phone calls.
The idea is if 1,000 people call in and complain about the porn game, and 100,000 people call in and complain about the censorship, hopefully they will get the message.
Two problems here.
One is jurisdiction. If the website is not incorporated in Florida, has no offices in Florida, and does not use Florida servers, why should they be subject to Florida law? Everything they do is completely legal in their home jurisdiction.
This sort of enforcement is basically impossible on the internet. If anybody can access any website from anywhere, how is the website supposed to keep up with hundreds or thousands of changing jurisdictions each with their own legal requirements? And why should they have to?
Second is interstate commerce clause of the Constitution. It reserves to the federal government the right to regulate interstate commerce. I would think that demanding that a out of state business change its business practices would fall afoul of that.
Now it could be argued that since the website advertises in Florida and accepts sign ups from Florida residents, that they do business in Florida. However the simple solution there would be to disable payment for Florida residents.