Merchant Accounts – Register your Interest

This form is for developers of adult video games who are interested in opening their own merchant accounts. We are creating a new bargaining collective composed of established adult game developers. We are engaging in group negotiation with the credit card industry to secure fair rates & contract terms for merchant accounts for our projects.

Benefits of having a merchant account:
- Significantly reduced fees (see chart below).
- Flexibility in how you update & deliver your games.
- Complete control over your own website.
- Payment processors take the time to review your business plans ahead of time, reducing the chance of a sudden deplatforming.
- Ability for us to find a bank that matches the content that we have, versus trying to censor our games to match the requirements of a bank (we won't be banking with an anti-furry bank, for instance).
- In the (hopefully unlikely) event of losing your payment processor, you don't lose your website & customer database, too. This is one of the major problems with creator platforms -- as soon as you're kicked off, you lose your website, your customer database, and all charging history, etc. With a merchant account, your website & customer database is unaffected from the payments outage. You can bring your payment gateway with your existing customer card database to a different processor. This allows continuity of business operations since the card data is not lost when you're deplatformed. You might even be able to set up multiple merchant accounts and have your payment gateway load balance between them for added resiliency to disruption (note: not all gateways/contracts allow load balancing of merchant accounts).

Things a merchant account will not solve:
- Content restrictions imposed at the government level or payment network level.
- Pay out speed: merchant accounts can sometimes have reserves applied for new merchants or suspicious transaction activity.

View image in new tab to zoom in; data is based on market research thus far. Final rate not guaranteed and is pending negotiation with the PSP & their bank.

Optional Background Info:
I'm currently in talks with a payment processor who is exploring onboarding adult game developers at low-risk rates. They are creating a presentation on our industry to take to their company president, and from there if approved, to the sponsoring bank.

I have been speaking with many processors so far (over 50+). A running theme thus far has been adult games being incorrectly considered in the high-risk adult category code, which comes with large $1,450/year VIRP/BRAM fees plus much higher rates. With enough developers together, we can make a pitch to the sponsoring bank to consider us under the proper gaming category code, as our low chargeback rates and lack of real-world performers should qualify us for the good low-risk rates. With a significant enough volume of developers, we have a lot more leverage to negotiate fair terms with the sponsor banks and their ISOs.

Even if this pitch fails, we may still be able to take our developer group to various ISOs and pitch starting a sub-ISO group. Or, with enough developers, we can take our group to the various sponsoring banks directly and pitch starting our own ISO if we have enough volume to justify it. The payments industry seems much more interested in talking to us as a large group versus as small individual merchants, which is basically why Patreon, Steam, SubscribeStar, etc are able to process payments but we struggle to do the same when we try to do this on an individual basis.

The creator/gaming platforms are great and we are appreciative for their support of our industry, but we also want the flexibility to take direct payments for customers who choose to support us directly. This is not intended as an attempt to create another or competing creator platform. Rather this is letting you as a developer have your own merchant account, which you can use to sell your game directly to your fans without a platform taking a cut.

Don't already have a website for your game? FYI one of our club members is working on a unrelated project called WhyCloud which can help you set up a wordpress site with various payment plugins.

Interested?
By filling out this form, you can express interest in joining this payments cooperative. You do not already have to be a member of the Adult Game Dev Club to join it, or listed on Horni.io. This is a separate project to those, though similar people involved in it.

This form merely expresses your interest and provides us data to show to the banks, there is no obligation to actually sign a merchant account contract. All this does is give us negotiation strength in numbers. That said, we cannot guarantee any particular outcome from our group negotiation.

Company & Contact

Where is your LLC registered in? (If you do not have an LLC, then this is yourself)
The owner of your company (or you directly) are a citizen of which country?
Check any groups you are a member of (not required!)

Game

Pg 2/4

For your game(s), only include active ones (games you are selling now or in the past six months.)

Please flag controversial content your game includes. Not all of these will necessarily preclude you from the program, but it gives us a good idea of what we need to talk specifically with the banks about for our group.

Finance

Pg 3/4 -- Almost done! This is the page with some of the most important information.

Monthly Volume: Your monthly volume is how much is charged to consumers (what is shown on their credit card statement.)

To determine your average monthly volume, add up your last six months total amount charged and divide by six. There is some tips on how to find this on various platforms here.

So if you have a $10 game, and 500 transactions each month for the last six months, your volume would be $5000. Since on average, you charged $5000 to customer cards.

You should add this up for all the platforms you are on (add Patreon monthly volume + Subscribe Star monthly volume + Steam monthly volume + ...)

^ This is per month. (If the above field gives errors, try without commas)

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All of the below fields are not required, but they will help us make our case that our chargeback rates should justify low-risk rates.

Transaction Count: This is the number of transactions (not the size of those transactions). For instance, if you sold 90 copies of your game over six months (ex: 15 per month), this would be 90).

(Include copies that were later refunded)

^ Remember, this is over six months.

Chargeback Count: How many times a customer issued a chargeback against you in the past six months.

The creator platforms don't show this clearly, so instead you can use an upper bound by following the steps here.

Be careful, especially on Steam where regular refunds are common. Not all refunds are chargebacks! Don't just put the all refunds number here as it will scare off payment processors. Voluntary refunds (like done via the steam refund system that customers use) don't count towards chargebacks.

^ This is over six months. So if you received one chargeback each month, enter 6.

Select which platforms you are making sales with. This will help cue the analysis that the true chargeback number is either precise or somewhat lower.

Documentation: This part is optional, so feel free to skip it if you want -- however, the payment processor has specifically been asking for documentation proof, so this will help us make our case if you can.

It is fine to just include the most recent six month history.

Also, I recommend not to drag files into the boxes, in case your browser gets confused and goes to a different page. Instead click the upload icons to use the file picker UI. Form progress is not saved until the end submit button! If it navigates away, progress is lost. Unfortunately this is a limit of the form software.

This page has suggestions on documentation that could be provided for each platform

Next page is final comment field & then done!

Submit

You can enter any relevant comments above if you like, but it's not necessary.

Click the below submit button to finish.

By checking the below box, you are agreeing to provide us the information. We may share it with the bank/MSP/ISO/others necessary to persue the goal of establishing a group rate for adult game merchant accounts. You are not obligated to actually establish a merchant account, nor does this obligate us to provide one. You also agree to be contacted with further updates regarding this project unless you decide you are no longer interested in it later on. If you wish to later opt-out, you may reach us via the contact form on Horni.io or in the e-mail footer.