As games face censorship on Steam and beyond, Japanese site says fine, we'll make our own dang payment method, and actually pulls it off

The moral policing of games and other digital art by payment processors like Visa and Mastercard never actually went away following a spike in delisted and deindexed works on platforms like Steam and Itch.io earlier this year. Even if it were walked back overnight, the fact that this happened at all has sent many creators and stores searching for safe, reliable alternatives to handle sales. Japanese site DLsite, specializing but not exclusively dealing in adult games and comics, has found one by making its own.

As Automaton reports, DLsite announced a new payment method on October 6. The (machine translated) announcement reveals "Minna no Bank Payment," a payment method derived from a new branch of the Japanese digital bank Minna no Bank (loosely translated as Everyone's Bank) opened by DLsite's own parent company. DLsite really up and said it would build its own theme park with blackjack and hookers, but this time, it didn't forget the park.

DLsite is not a Japanese-only site; it has an English-version homepage, and there are even dedicated English-language awards for games and doujinishi (self-published works), which I won't be linking to because I'd be hard-pressed to find anything less safe for work on this side of Hell. Again, this is primarily an adult game and comics site, though there is an "All Ages" category for more tame and mainstream works.

But Minna no Bank is a Japan-only operation, so this new payment method won't be available to overseas customers. The partly in-house method stands out because it's a clear example of how storefronts may find stable workarounds to arbitrary, often scorched earth takedowns and restrictions.

Automaton explains that the new system allows users to make direct payments to DLsite without any intermediaries by linking their Minna no Ginko bank account to a viviON account ID.

It's not hard to imagine English businesses adopting a similar approach via other payment channels if longtime staples like Visa and Mastercard stick to, or indeed expand, their newly awakened (read: completely ridiculous) ethical standards.

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