How payment networks control the definition of acceptable sex in videogames

We speak to adult industry researchers and Stripe alumni about Steam and Itch.io’s NSFW content cull

Image credit:Take-Two Interactive

To speedily summarise a lot of very knotty reporting, last month a bunch of credit card companies and payment processors forced Steam and Itch.io to alter their definitions of acceptable sexual material in PC games. Seemingly faced with the prospect of having all transactions blocked, the two storefronts now require developers to comply with the extremely open-ended adult content policies of their financial partners. This has led to a spate of delistings or outright takedowns across Steam and especially Itch , with projects affected ranging from anime stepdaughter fantasies on Steam to bundles of self-described “games for girlthings with something wrong with them” .

Game devs and players affected by the policy changes have been pushing back. There’s now a counter-campaign underway to mass call Stripe, Paypal, Mastercard, Visa, Payoneer, PaySafe and Discover and harry them into changing course. The credit card and payment companies, meanwhile, are busily passing the buck, with Stripe attributing their leaning on Itch to pressure from one of their own financial partners , and Mastercard stonily insisting that they have “not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms”.

Image credit:doyboy

While following all this, I’ve had to confront my own ignorance about how exactly payment processors and related financial institutions work. Fortunately, being a journalist equipped with an email account, I have the means to start addressing that. Over the past week, I’ve been talking to a couple of academics about the role these companies have long played in upholding laws and policing notions of permissible sexual material.

Dr David L. Stearns is a former software engineer at Stripe, former senior lecturer at the University of Washington Information School, and the author of a book on the origins of the Visa electronic payment system . While not familiar with Itch, Steam and the adult content trade specifically, he gave me an opening steer on the ambiguous and changeable relationships between payment processors, the governments who produce laws and regulations, and the paying public.

A quick breakdown of the key financial parties involved in all this. On the one hand, there are the credit card companies and banks. Of those institutions, by far the most significant here are Visa and Mastercard, who account for the vast majority of all credit card transactions worldwide. On the other, there are payment processors, like Stripe - intermediaries who are licensed by the credit card companies and governments to handle the movement of money between a purchaser’s credit card company or bank and the bank of the merchant or seller.

The sheer ubiquity of Visa and Mastercard obliges them to play the part of extra-legal public guardians, enforcing laws by way of their control of economic activity. “In general, payment networks like Visa make revenue on every payment they process, so they have a natural incentive to process as many payments as possible,” Stearns told me over email. “But governments also have particular policies they want to enforce, and a convenient place for them to do that is via the banking and payments systems.

Image credit:Rockstar Games

“To be a bank, or to move money, you need a license/charter from the government,” he continued. “In exchange for those licenses/charters, banks and payment networks become subject to government regulations. If the government decides to impose a regulation that restricts the processing of payments for particular kinds of goods within their jurisdiction, then the banks and networks must comply. If they don’t, they may face significant fines or have their licenses/charters revoked.” Smaller payment processors such as Stripe are similarly “deputized” into the process of ensuring that individual merchants comply with regulations, devising content policies of their own that reflect those of the credit card companies and banks they do business with.

Payment processors and credit card firms have long had a complicated relationship with the adult content business, because the transaction of sexually themed and explicit material tends to be defined as “high risk”.

“Remember that in most countries, cardholders can dispute transactions if they claim they didn’t actually authorize them, or if the goods were fraudulent, or defective, or never arrived,” Stearns told me. “When that occurs, the merchant becomes liable for the money and fees unless they can prove the transaction was legit. If the merchant goes bankrupt, the merchant processor or acquiring bank then becomes liable.”

If a merchant has a high rate of disputed transactions, and especially if the amounts in question are gigantic, payment processors or banks may take steps to protect themselves. They might ask the merchant to put money into an escrow - that is, a mutually agreed-upon third-party with the power to dole out cash to resolve disputes between merchants and customers. Or they might just stop handling transactions from the merchant altogether, to avoid eroding trust in the payment processing network as a whole.

“This dynamic often comes into play with highly-recognizable sites that specialize in adult content,” Stearns noted. “Stolen card credentials are often used to purchase subscriptions to such sites, and even legit transactions may get disputed when the partner of the cardholder sees it on the card statement.” He’s not, however, very versed on how adult content creators do business. For more on that front, I turned to the work of Dr Rébecca Franco, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam’s Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences.

Franco is the author or co-author of several papers on the relationships between the adult content industry and the big finance firms. She has written extensively on the conflicts of interest inherent to asking big corporations to act as public safety sentinels, exploring how enforcement of regulations may slide into blanket, arse-covering suppression to avoid legal action or reputation damage when groups such as Collective Shout raise an outcry.

In a 2024 paper on “payment processing and the moral ordering of sexual content” , Franco looks at how payment processors may entangle compliance with brand management, and how this may lead to “definitional creep”, as payment processors or card companies begin to conflate illegal material such as recordings of child abuse with anything that might be deemed harmful by a sufficiently large or influential group of people.

This conflict of interest becomes even more acute when payment processors or credit card firms use or encourage the use of automated moderation tools, because AI moderation tools are ill-equipped to register context. They cannot reliably distinguish between, say, a BDSM fantasy with consenting performers and a recording of a rape. One, more light-hearted example of busted AI moderation is the possibility of videos being flagged as bestiality because a performer’s pet happened to wander through the background.

Image credit:Konami

In another paper on the payment ecosystem and the regulation of adult webcamming and subscription-based fan platforms , Franco delves into the recent history of legislation and litigation against credit card companies that work with the adult content industry. She points to two pieces of linked legislation passed in the United States in 2018, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, which make credit card networks liable for potential involvement in criminal or civil litigation related to sex trafficking. She also cites a 2022 lawsuit against MindGeek, former owner of Pornhub, in which Visa was included as a defendant for allegedly profiting from Pornhub’s “trafficking venture”.

In her paper on webcamming, Franco suggests that Mastercard’s new requirements sometimes go beyond the letter of the law; they are as much defined by open-ended fears about profitability and market risk as they are precise legal definitions of obscenity and offensiveness. She posits that adult content is considered “high risk” by the payment networks because of wider social stigmatisation and the prospect of reputational damage - not because people who buy adult stuff are excessively prone to dispute transactions.

Could the game developer pushback against Mastercard, Visa and the payment processors succeed in overturning Steam and Itch.io’s policy changes regarding adult material? Again discussing the relationship between payment networks and merchants more generally, Stearns told me that it’s possible.

Image credit:Nadya Lev

If governments are ultimately responsible for defining what’s acceptable, “these sorts of regulations are always a bit squishy and negotiable”, he explained. “Lawmakers do their best to encode desired policies into laws, and regulators do their best to encode those laws into industry regulations, but sometimes the end result is too broad and ill-defined.” If the regulations are felt to be unreasonable or unenforcable, merchants can and have forced a change by bandying together and making their case in the court of public opinion.

“If those merchants have significant leverage over the voting public (or the regulators/lawmakers directly through lobbying) they may choose to use that leverage to push back on the regulations,” Stearns went on. “If pressured enough, lawmakers and regulators often clarify the regulations or even amend the laws to placate those powerful merchants and their highly-motivated voting customers.”

Another, popular solution to the sex game crackdown on Itch and Steam is for the platform owners to find alternative payment providers such as Segpay, Vendo, and CCbill, who specialise in the transaction of adult material. Itch recently announced that they were looking into it . Speaking to me over email, Franco characterised this as a sensible approach, noting that “some high risk processors will help merchants completely manage the relationship with the bank, which is helpful for platforms who might have difficulties finding a suitable bank that is willing to have them as a client.” Payment processors who cater to adult content may have the expertise and resources to help merchants navigate the opaque and shifting provisions of the credit card companies and banks, rather than leaving them to figure out compliance through trial and error.

But there are caveats that might yet make pressuring the likes of Stripe and Mastercard to change tack the better strategy. Payment processors who work with the adult content biz may have “significantly higher fees and strict compliance requirements”, Franco noted, especially in terms of “KYC” or Know Your Customer - aka, the mandatory process of verifying a client’s identity. And then there is the question of which payment processor you can trust. “You’d have to find an established one, like CCbill,” Franco told me, “because unfortunately some adult payment processors can also make use of the high fees and margins without investing in compliance, and adult-specific payment processors have suddenly folded in the past.”

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All 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints and where to get them

These areas have the highest chance of giving you Blueprints

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Looking for more Arc Raiders Blueprints? It’s a special day when you find a Blueprint, as they’re among the most valuable items in Arc Raiders. If you find a Blueprint that you haven’t already found, then you must make sure you hold onto it at all costs, because Blueprints are the key to one of the most important and powerful systems of meta-progression in the game.

This guide aims to be the very best guide on Blueprints you can find, starting with a primer on what exactly they are and how they work in Arc Raiders, before delving into exactly where to get Blueprints and the very best farming spots for you to take in your search.

We’ll also go over how to get Blueprints from other unlikely activities, such as destroying Surveyors and completing specific quests. And you’ll also find the full list of all 75 Blueprints in Arc Raiders on this page (including the newest Blueprints added with the Cold Snap update , such as the Deadline Blueprint and Firework Box Blueprint), giving you all the information you need to expand your own crafting repertoire.

In this guide:

• What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?
• Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes
• Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders Blueprints obtained from quests Blueprints obtained from Trials Best Blueprint farming locations

What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?

Blueprints in Arc Raiders are special items which, if you manage to extract with them, you can expend to permanently unlock a new crafting recipe in your Workshop. If you manage to extract from a raid with an Anvil Blueprint, for example, you can unlock the ability to craft your very own Anvil Pistol, as many times as you like (as long as you have the crafting materials).

To use a Blueprint, simply open your Inventory while in the lobby, then right-click on the Blueprint and click “Learn And Consume” . This will permanently unlock the recipe for that item in your Workshop. As of the Stella Montis update, there are allegedly 75 different Blueprints to unlock - although only 68 are confirmed to be in the game so far. You can see all the Blueprints you’ve found and unlocked by going to the Workshop menu, and hitting “R” to bring up the Blueprint screen.

It’s possible to find duplicates of past Blueprints you’ve already unlocked. If you find these, then you can either sell them, or - if you like to play with friends - you can take it into a match and gift it to your friend so they can unlock that recipe for themselves. Another option is to keep hold of them until the time comes to donate them to the Expedition.

Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes

Below is the full list of all the Blueprints that are currently available to find in Arc Raiders, and the crafting recipe required for each item:

Note: The missing Blueprints in this list likely have not actually been added to the game at the time of writing, because none of the playerbase has managed to find any of them. As they are added to the game, I will update this page with the most relevant information so you know exactly how to get all 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints.

Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders

Below is a list of all containers, modifiers, and events which maximise your chances of finding Blueprints:

• Certain quests reward you with specific Blueprints .
• Completing Trials has a high chance of offering Blueprints as rewards.
• Surveyors have a decent chance of dropping Blueprints on death.
• High loot value areas tend to have a greater chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Night Raids and Storms may increase rare Blueprint spawn chances in containers.
• Containers with higher numbers of items may have a higher tendency to spawn Blueprints. As a result, Blue Gate (which has many “large” containers containing multiple items) may give you a higher chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Raider containers (Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, Medical Bags, Grenade Tubes) have increased Blueprint drop rates. As a result, the Uncovered Caches event gives you a high chance of finding Blueprints.
• Security Lockers have a higher than average chance of containing Blueprints.
• Certain Blueprints only seem to spawn under specific circumstances: Tempest Blueprint only spawns during Night Raid events. Vulcano Blueprint only spawns during Hidden Bunker events. Jupiter and Equaliser Blueprints only spawn during Harvester events.

Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, and other raider-oriented container types have a good chance of offering Blueprints. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints have a very low chance of spawning in any container in Arc Raiders, around 1-2% on average. However, there is a higher chance of finding Blueprints in particular container types. Specifically, you can find more Blueprints in Raider containers and security lockers.

Beyond this, if you’re looking for Blueprints you should focus on regions of the map which are marked as having particularly high-value loot. Areas such as the Control Tower in Dam Battlegrounds, the Arrival and Departure Buildings in Spaceport, and Pilgrim’s Peak in Blue Gate all have a better-than-average chance of spawning Blueprints somewhere amongst all their containers. Night Raids and Electromagnetic Storm events also increase the drop chances of certain Blueprints .

In addition to these containers, you can often loot Blueprints from destroyed Surveyors - the largest of the rolling ball ARC. Surveyors are more commonly found on the later maps - Spaceport and Blue Gate - and if one spawns in your match, you’ll likely see it by the blue laser beam that it casts into the sky while “surveying”.

Surveyors are quite well-armoured and will very speedily run away from you once it notices you, but if you can take one down then make sure you loot all its parts for a chance of obtaining certain unusual Blueprints.

Blueprints obtained from quests

One way in which you can get Blueprints is by completing certain quests for the vendors in Speranza. Some quests will reward you with a specific item Blueprint upon completion, so as long as you work through all the quests in Arc Raiders, you are guaranteed those Blueprints.

Here is the full list of all Blueprints you can get from quest rewards:

• Trigger Nade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Sparks Fly”.
• Lure Grenade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Greasing Her Palms”.
• Burletta Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Industrial Espionage”.
• Hullcracker Blueprint (and Launcher Ammo Blueprint): Rewarded after completing “The Major’s Footlocker”.

Alas, that’s only 4 Blueprints out of a total of 75 to unlock, so for the vast majority you will need to find them yourself during a raid. If you’re intent on farming Blueprints, then it’s best to equip yourself with cheap gear in case you lose it, but don’t use a free loadout because then you won’t get a safe pocket to stash any new Blueprint you find. No pain in Arc Raiders is sharper than failing to extract with a new Blueprint you’ve been after for a dozen hours already.

One of the best ways to get Blueprints is by hitting three stars on all five Trials every week. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints obtained from Trials

One of the very best ways to get Blueprints is as rewards for completing Trials in Arc Raiders. Trials are unlocked from Level 15 onwards, and allow you to earn rewards by focusing on certain tasks over the course of several raids. For example, one Trial might task you with dealing damage to Hornets, while another might challenge you to loot Supply Drops.

Trials refresh on a weekly basis, with a new week bringing five new Trials. Each Trial can offer up to three rewards after passing certain score milestones, and it’s possible to receive very high level loot from these reward crates - including Blueprints. So if you want to unlock as many Blueprints as possible, you should make a point of completing as many Trials as possible each week.

Best Blueprint farming locations

The very best way to get Blueprints is to frequent specific areas of the maps which combine high-tier loot pools with the right types of containers to search. Here are my recommendations for where to find Blueprints on every map, so you can always keep the search going for new crafting recipes to unlock.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Dam Battlegrounds

The best places to farm Blueprints on Dam Battlegrounds are the Control Tower, Power Generation Complex, Ruby Residence, and Pale Apartments . The first two regions, despite only being marked on the map as mid-tier loot, contain a phenomenal number of containers to loot. The Control Tower can also contain a couple of high-tier Security Lockers - though of course, you’ll need to have unlocked the Security Breach skill at the end of the Survival tree.

There’s also a lot of reporting amongst the playerbase that the Residential areas in the top-left of the map - Pale Apartments and Ruby Residence - give you a comparatively strong chance of finding Blueprints. Considering their size, there’s a high density of containers to loot in both locations, and they also have the benefit of being fairly out of the way. So you’re more likely to have all the containers to yourself.

Buried City

The best Blueprint farming locations on Buried City are the Santa Maria Houses, Grandioso Apartments, Town Hall, and the various buildings of the New District . Grandioso Apartments has a lower number of containers than the rest, but a high chance of spawning weapon cases - which have good Blueprint drop rates. The others are high-tier loot areas, with plenty of lootable containers - including Security Lockers.

Spaceport

The best places to find Blueprints on Spaceport are the Arrival and Departure Buildings, as well as Control Tower A6 and the Launch Towers . All these areas are labelled as high-value loot regions, and many of them are also very handily connected to one another by the Spaceport wall, which you can use to quickly run from one area to the next. At the tops of most of these buildings you’ll find at least one Security Locker, so this is an excellent farming route for players looking to find Blueprints.

The downside to looting Blueprints on Spaceport is that all these areas are hotly contested, particularly in Duos and Squads. You’ll need to be very focused and fast in order to complete the full farming route.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blue Gate

Blue Gate tends to have a good chance of dropping Blueprints, potentially because it generally has a high number of containers which can hold lots of items; so there’s a higher chance of a Blueprint spawning in each container. In my experience, the best Blueprint farming spots on Blue Gate are Pilgrim’s Peak, Raider’s Refuge, the Ancient Fort, and the Underground Complex beneath the Warehouse .

All of these areas contain a wealth of containers to loot. Raider’s Refuge has less to loot, but the majority of the containers in and around the Refuge are raider containers, which have a high chance of containing Blueprints - particularly during major events.

Stella Montis

On the whole, Stella Montis seems to have a very low drop rate for Blueprints (though a high chance of dropping other high-tier loot). If you do want to try farming Blueprints on this map, the best places to find Blueprints in Stella Montis are Medical Research, Assembly Workshop, and the Business Center . These areas have the highest density of containers to loot on the map.

In addition to this, the Western Tunnel has a few different Security Lockers to loot, so while there’s very little to loot elsewhere in this area of the map, it’s worth hitting those Security Lockers if you spawn there at the start of a match.

That wraps up this primer on how to get all the Blueprints in Arc Raiders as quickly as possible. With the Expedition system constantly resetting a large number of players’ Blueprints, it’s more important than ever to have the most up-to-date information on where to find all these Blueprints.

While you’re here, be sure to check out our Arc Raiders best guns tier list , as well as our primers on the best skills to unlock and all the different Field Depot locations on every map.

ARC Raiders

PS5 , Xbox Series X/S , PC

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