Uh…just use your credit/debit card directly within steam?
Why rely on the scummiest third party payment app that’s ever existed in the world?
I agree with the sentiment, but the reason they’re looking at third party apps is to avoid the control that payment processing companies have over censorship following the whole Visa/MasterCard issue.
Because typing in bank details every time is a pain and saving them is a big no no as many companies seem to get hacked. Trusting only 1 company with bank details limits the blast radius.
What did PayPal do that it’s less usable than it was? Not that it was ever very usable
This can only hurt there stock price in the long run
I wouldn’t mind seeing a ValvePay system. 1% transaction fee, available to anyone who wants to use it, including OnlyFans, Itch, Kagura, DLSite, and others. Valve can team up with Japan, the EU, and Brazil to handle their respective ends of the business, so that Valve can focus on the United States.
Based off what? The option are credit cards or crypto.
They don’t need a valve pay for crypto. They could easily accept something like USDC to accept crypto and not deal with volatility.
For credit cards all that would do is bypass the intermediaries if they directly integrated to a credit card company, and then they’d still be subject to their rules that the intermediaries claim they violate to protect MC etc from having to say it themselves. It’d solve absolutely nothing.
Also a direct integration like that is a multi billion dollar business and all the effort and expenses that would come with that without even solving the root problem.
This kind of problem is the exact reason crypto exists and is really the only solution even if it’s not perfect yet.
Edit: sorry, they could do a bank integration through ACH / EFT / Wires etc, but that’s slow and realistically not an option. If people want to buy something they won’t want to wait days for it.
I think the point is that Valve has the reach to start their own credit card network. It might be far fetched, but I’m old enough to remember when Sears launched the Discover card. It’s totally doable for a company that already has the technical capabilities of Valve.
That is such a monumental task and valve only has between 350-400 employees.
Stripe has around 8500 employees, and they only integrate with
credit cardbanks who integrate to the credit card companies. But they finally got a license to directly integrate so we might finally see that in the near future.When sears made the discover card, they had hundreds of thousands of employees, and they didn’t need to deal with all the digital shit we gotta deal with now.
Are you aware you can just transfer money between bank accounts, usually for free?
Much like with a credit card, you could just transfer money to Valve, which would be credited to your account, and you can then use it to buy stuff.
There’s no need for crypto anything.
You have completely missed the entire point of the number one cryptocurrency in the world. You’ll wish you had done some research. If you don’t believe me or don’t get it, I don’t have time to try to convince you, sorry.
That takes time (days) that people don’t want to wait to make a purchase, nor do people want to leave a balance with companies or have to worry about topping it up so they have enough to buy the next game they happen to want without waiting.
Edit: Not to mention the risk of sharing bank account information.
Bank to bank transfers typically show up in under an hour in my country, and you would obviously be able to credit your account ahead of time.
Hours?? Lost of places (see EU, India, Japan) have instant transfers.
Even having to wait an hour is a fantastic way to lose a sale.
Monero works for anonymous payments for cocaine and fent across international boundaries, it can more than handle the illicit video game trade
Honestly fuck Paypal, don’t bring it back.
Asking as an ignorant person, what’s wrong with PayPal?
It’s pretty easy for a scammer to get your money from you via paypal with no recourse. Person claiming to be selling an item for x dollars. You purchase item. They get money. They disappear. No item. Paypal: “oh well!”
They quite often steal your money.
All the authority of a bank.
None of the responsibility.
Plus Peter Thiel and Elon Musk had a hand in it, and made their fortunes. It’s right up there with Hitler and Reagan in the “reasons to invent a time machine and go back and destroy something”.
Their policies, verification systems, KYC/AML processes, risk aversion, and customer support leave many PayPal users with unmet expectations, especially when there is an issue with the transaction and PayPal is asked to assist.
The company has found ways to avoid some of the regulations that banks are held to which is partly the reason for the issues.
If you search the web for PayPal experiences, you’ll find concerns such as their 1.3 star rating with almost 35,000 reviews on Trustpilot.
It’s also ridiculously difficult if not impossible to process a legal name change on your account, unlike a real bank. This means that married women, people who changed their name to avoid unsafe family members, and trans people are basically just not able to have accounts under their new legal names unless they’re willing to just make a new account if they can’t get anywhere with support. Supposedly, all you need is your legal documents, but I’ve heard a lot of horror stories about how convoluted they make it in practice.
A few matters - About 5-6 years ago - PayPal was going to make telemarketing your phone number a requirement in order to have an account - If you had an account, they were going to FORCE you to allow their 3rd party marketing calls. No opt-out available whatsoever.
PayPal is also an owner of the extension Honey - an extension that promoted they would try every online coupon code to see if you could save money on a deal. Recently (within the last year) it was discovered that even if they didn’t provide you with any discount at all - they were still hijacking the referral links that brought you to the shop site in the first place. They were also striking deals to those same vendors about kickbacks to NOT keep the best coupons in their system. Essentially they were taking money from three sides, promoters, vendors, and the purchasers - all while NOT providing the best possible coupon codes - which was the whole advertised point of their service. Lawsuits on this are pending.
A non exhaustive list of what makes them awful: https://expertbeacon.com/why-is-paypal-so-bad/
Afaik, the issue that was making the most victims, was that they were facilitating scammers that targeted sellers:
5. Good Luck Recouping Losses as a Seller in Disputes.
89% of sellers experienced dispute resolution problems with PayPal in 2021 surveys. Despite providing evidence the item shipped or service rendered, they lost cases and sums averaging $622.
This is driven by PayPal‘s buyer-favored review round taking 1-2 weeks. This favors scamming buyers at the expense of legitimate businesses.Iirc, there was a time when Paypal always sided with the buyer, irregardless of evidence or past track record, the review process was useless. Once scammers picked up on this and began scamming sellers en masse, Paypal still kept their policy unchanged for years and sellers started to raise their prices on platforms that forced them to accept Paypal (ebay used to do this). Ebay has since tossed Paypal off their platform. I don’t know if Paypal ever improved.
If you sell things on eBay and the like, PayPal likes to fuck you over
They don’t like free speech, they’ve stopped processing payments on steam because they don’t like some of the games on the platform.
Isn’t that like all credit card payment processors? Maybe we should just use Monero
I’ve only heard of Visa, MasterCard and PayPal censoring content but I could be mistaken; but yes we do need a much wider variety of options.
It was founded and continues to be run by some real shitbags.
https://voidfox.com/blog/payment_processor_fun_2025_making_your_own_msp/
Someone breaks down why it’d be a monumental task for Valve/Itch to vertically integrate the whole payment processing thing into their business. The essay is highly readable.
The only thing I had to look up was
Escrow: a financial arrangement w/ a third party who holds/manages funds on behalf of two parties in a transactionMy takeaway was that Valve/itch/GOG would still be beholden to the banks who track porn as high risk for fraudulent transactions.
So what can we do about it? ~asking in earnest, btw. I buy porn and toys like a regular ass person, too~
Monumental, perhaps, but at this point it would seem well worth the effort.
Monero or GNU-Taler TBH. There are OpenSource Core-Banking-Systems like Apache-Fineract
Use Monero I fucking guess?
If Valve did it, they’d make crypto insanely popular. They are pretty incentivized to do it right now, so it would not surprise me if they tested it out soon.
How does using a cryptocurrency work in this instance? Does a game that costs 20 coins always cost 20 coins or is it going to be 10 one day and 60 the next depending on its value? If it stays at 20 coins are those 20 coins going to cost me 1% of my paycheck one day and then 3% the next? (Numbers just for example) Theres so many issues with just having to deal with another currency not just crypto. How can you guarantee its stability in relation to your original currency? How much are you going to have to spend to convert currencies and/or make transactions?
Some crypto are called stablecoins, which are backed by some currency (such as the USD for USDC) inside of a bank. There’s a bit more to it than that, but effectively what you get is one coin = one unit of currency.
They could even issue their own stable coin if they were weary of being reliant on another. I think valve would be viewed as trustworthy in keeping the 1:1 backing in a bank account. They could partner with someone else to issue it, like coinbase and Gemini do USDC.
USDV
Those are all really good questions, I don’t really know the answer to. Not all coins have the wild spikes like bitcoin. Monero has been fairly stable. I haven’t listened a game before, but I’m pretty sure you can pick which currency you want to get paid in. The conversion rates would be roughly the same for crypto.
However, Valve is no stronger to imaginary digital assets that wildly fluxuate in real world value. If there was any company that could figure out how to process crypto I think it would be them.
They know exactly how to do it as they did it before but had to stop because the bitcoin network was artificially congested with insane fees and it caused failed transactions or multi hour long transactions where the price dramatically changed. This resulted in complicated refunds or delays which resulted in unhappy customers.
They can avoid that all now by simply accepting stable coins like USDC. For every issued usdc there is 1 usd in a bank account somewhere. The value barely fluctuates. There are networks that can handle the volume this would create without getting congested nowadays as well.
Given the mess that happened last time though I imagine they are highly reluctant, although this could be enough motivation.
If valve had the power to enter the payment processing industry, I would support.
They most likely already have half the knowledge, mainframe infrastructure is a different beast than servers but not a huge gap if you are Valve, they were responsible for half an EXABYTE of data traffic per month… IN 2015!!! Haven’t seen any new reports from them or Level 3 Communications (unaware if they still partner with them), to know current levels but its for sure at least 10 exabytes annually.
Edit: Getting some downvotes but unless proven other wise the data is there, I can understand not everyone in c/technology works in the industry like some of us but unless your source is this fucking idiot mainframes are still peak efficiency and peak speed and peak space efficiency and peak… you get the point. Ask IBM, at this point they own half the mainframes in the world and they still release enterprise Linux distros.
Anyway, clearly I was still under the impression L3C was still a thing, now they are part of lumen and while no longer in the S&P500 they still move around a fucking gazillion of exabytes everywhere.
Still regarding Vajve, turns out my predictions were very moderate, I was 33.3% of the way there, turns out in '18 they broke the 30 exabytes mark. With a very conservative trend analysis we can bet on Steam being responsible of 40% of Asia’s bandwidth by the end of the decade and 30% of North America’s. All in all they are on track to break the 50 exabyte mark this year alone.
Okay, steam cards it is then.
Good riddance. Shady company from none other than the Muskrat.
No actually! Musks entire involvement with PayPal was being fired by the company he founded which then later down the road was bought out by PayPal when the people who fired him for incompetence turned it around and made it valuable enough PayPal wanted it
I think thiel is worse, also involved.
Gotta find a way to a post-money world; money is the enemy.
We need to be post scarcity before we can be post money.
Nope. Backwards.
Next up: Un-inventing fire!
Totally comparable. Yes. A way of trackibg social entitlement totally alienated from any concept of valye or materiwl reality is as important fundamental and useful as fire.
Ever heard of “humor”? 🤔
Explain the joke?
Good time to delete my PayPal. 👌
I can’t access mine, for about a year now. Suddenly, I’m not “verified” on the account I’ve had for years, and they require a phone number and license to verify (against what?). So, fuck em.
I thought that my account was deleted years ago, but recently found out it still existed.
Deleted now!
I haven’t used mine in several years, also deleted now 😁
Wish I could but Patreon uses it, and it’s the only way to pay with them.
Wow, really. That’s pretty crummy.
Yeah can’t even get paid without it. Believe it or not a lot of sites rely exclusively on Paypal. Lot of smaller businesses use it because it’s easier and cheaper then trying to build your own online payment processor. Tell truth I used it on my own sites when I sold things online. If I remember correctly Ebay was the first to make it the way to pay with them. I only remember that because its how I first ended up with Paypal.
Of course this was before Square, and Stripe was available.
Here’s a photo of the headquarters of PayPal in 2014, it explains why PayPal and eBay were so closely connected.
Wooow. Interesting tidbit. 🕵️♂️
Perhaps it’s time Valve get into its own payment business.
I expect the established banking/credit card industry is not likely to let Valve into their systems just to circumvent their restrictions. Vabve would need to be able to validate Visa/Mastercard/Discover etc cards issued by any any bank and be able to credit/debit them.
The problem is that if you make a PayPal equivalent, you’re still beholdent to MasterCard and Visa since you need them for people to actually add money to their account, and if you want to make a direct competitor to MasterCard and Visa, that’s basically impossible without government support because they’re way too entrenched, why would a business support a random new payment method that nobody is using yet.
I had heard that Steam used to accept crypto but the volatility of the currency was a major issue. Maybe try cryptocurrency again.
Perhaps they could set up a system where they could make a sale in bitcoin or something then immediately convert to USD. They could add a processing fee to the sale to cover any conversion fees.
I know nothing about actually doing any of this beyond having bought and sold BTC in the past. I was just wondering if it would be possible.
It was the support cost as far as I remember. Way too many people were too confused about how Bitcoin works.
Volatility was not the concern, at least for Valve. They’ve utilized a payment gateway that just swapped the BTC to USD right away. Which was still a single point of failure, but in case of bitcoin, the company switching a payment gateway does not affect the UX for the customer as much.
The problem was the artificially congested network causing unreliable transactions that would take too long which would make the price too volatile. Additionally fees were getting ridiculous when they stopped accepting them due to this congestion
That led to too many refunds or failed payments or payments that were no longer sufficient.
That resulted In a customer service nightmare.
All of those problems can be avoided today using a stable coin not on the bitcoin network.
The fundamental flaw with all current crypto is that it’s far too volatile to use as a currency. The only reasonable use for it at the moment is as a high risk commodity which is the vast overwhelming majority of what we see. Any so called “currency” that regularly sees price swings of multiple percentage points in a day isn’t actually a currency and is unsuitable to be used as one.
Adding to this is the problem of transaction times. Actual payment systems typically have transaction times of less than a second, occasionally a second or two. Bitcoin in contrast can take multiple minutes, sometimes hours or even days to confirm a transaction. There’s no way for Valve to accept and then immediately convert Crypto to USD. The process would inherently involve at least two transactions, one to transfer the crypto to Valves wallet, then a second to transfer from Valves wallet to the exchanges wallet, and only then could Valve attempt to sell that crypto. The financial uncertainty involved in all of that is entirely unacceptable for a business.
At this moment there is only one potentially viable way of approaching this and it’s government regulation of some kind. Either government needs to regulate that payment processors get no say in the contents of customers business, or else they need to regulate the adoption of a neutral digital payment system. One possible example of what that could look like would be the GNU Taler system which might eventually become a payment system in Switzerland but isn’t yet.
Genuine question, but what about stable coins?
At this moment there is only one potentially viable way of approaching this and it’s government regulation of some kind. Either government needs to regulate that payment processors get no say in the contents of customers business, or else they need to regulate the adoption of a neutral digital payment system.
I think it’s more likely for me to win the mega jackpot, and I don’t even buy lottery tickets.
Bitpay allows companies to accept crypto payments and receive it as real currency automatically.
Wait. Bitpay is still around? That was the company Valve has used before. It was the de-facto standard for every eshop accepting bitcoin. Until they decided to implement identity checks, and only support payment from wallets implementing certain protobuf-based payment protocol. Which made them slide into obscurity pretty fast.
There’s no way for Valve to accept and then immediately convert Crypto to USD.
I didn’t realize that. It does seem an insurmountable problem.
What about the so called ‘stablecoins’?
(Although those sound dodgy AF to me?, not backed 1-1 anymore?)
Afaik no current stablecoin is proven via audit to be 1-1 backed, not sure if any are still claiming it.
Algorithmic stablecoins on the other hand are only stableish; see the terra/luna fiasco
Stablecoins are the answer here. Theoretically though if cryptocurrencies were very widely used they’d be more stable, like actual currencies (probably $100T market cap of actual use, not just investments, so could be decades or never).
Note stablecoins have “institutional/existential” risk. Dai is decentralized but as seen with Terra/Luna they can be attacked in many ways.
Generally… Just keep a small balance in crypto, whatever you plan to spend in the next few months.
Stable coins… Aka gold? I heard gold is pretty stable.
Yes sir, I’d like to buy this game with this bar of gold. At Steam’s headquarters.
Cryptocurrency that is pegged 1-1 against a normal currency. I think they have some limitations though.
It was a joke. Mocking stable coins for how they never compare to golds stability.
Your debit card transaction does not happen in seconds, it actually takes days to complete.
Yes, but actually no. In the strictest sense that is true in that it isn’t “officially” settled typically for a day or two. However, the reason why businesses are willing to accept credit card transactions is that there’s a soft approval that happens pretty much instantly and weeds out nearly every non-fraud instance of non-payment. Once that soft approval comes back (which remember happens within a second or two) the retailer can be confident that the card is tied to a valid account, that has a large enough balance to cover the transaction, and barring fraud dispute it will go through and they’ll get paid. If something were to go wrong in that process there’s also banks and the CC processor that the business could go after in court to get their money.
In contrast crypto takes several minutes to go through if not significantly longer, and if something goes wrong in that process there’s no legal recourse of any kind. If a business were to allow product to leave their store prior to that minute+ approval process and it fails, they’re screwed, they just have to eat that cost.
Yes. That’s why cryptocurrencies won’t work in a physical store because the customer would have to stay in store for several minutes until the merchant can release the product.
But this is not an issue for online marketplaces like Steam. Customers should be willing to wait 10-20 minutes to get their video game key, or for Amazon to start processing a delivery. Faster cryptocurrencies like Litecoin actually take around 3 minutes to confirm transactions. Mullvad’s model is pretty good, where your account doesn’t get updated until the transaction is confirmed.
It sounds like a good compromise, unless dealing with payment processor policies is not as bad as they make it sound.
For all the people saying Valve should become their own payment processor. PayPal employs 24,000 people. Visa employs 31,000. Mastercard employs 35,000. Valve employs 400. They’re not going to 60x their employee count anytime soon.
PayPal/Visa/MasterCard do way more than just payment processing for one company.
Valve wouldn’t need 25,000 employees just to process payments for their own platform.
They could do it with significantly fewer people, for themselves and even for GOG, Itch and potentially others. Their use-case is digital payments for games, which is limited in scope and risk. PCI and compliance is a PITA, but manageable.
The hard part isn’t processing payment… They already basically do that for themselves with the steam wallet.
The problem is getting the ability to withdraw funds from your customers’ bank accounts. That requires a commercial relationship with your customer’s bank and going through an insane amount of red tape. And there is no standard worldwide protocol for this, you’ll be starting from zero in every market by cold-calling major banks.
The only viable approach is to have an army of salespeople, accountants, and project managers to do all those individual negotiations.
The EU has been trying for years to have an indigenous continent-wide payment processor. The first attempt failed, now Wero is poised to succeed in the next few years but that’s building off negotiations that started a few years ago with pressure from the EU and buy-in from the financial sector, and still only a handful of European markets have been integrated at this point.
Now imagine all this difficulty but you have to also get active buy-in from every market worldwide. There’s a reason Visa/MC have a near monopoly on international payments in the western world, and it’s not that no-one else thought to get a piece of that very juicy pie that’s making them literally billions in profit every year.
Is it a payment processor problem, or a card issuer problem though?
It sounds like some payment processors are treating mastercard’s contractual requirements as a hard risk in this case - maybe it’s justified, maybe not. Try getting corporate lawyers to be risk averse in the finance world. Mastercard doesn’t seem to want to soften their wording but talks platitudes in public statements. Shrug.
Meh. Paypal deserves everything bad that happens to it. Barely used it in the last few years. Definitely do NOT keep funds on there unless you’re okay with just losing them.
I mean, I don’t want to keep funds in PayPal, but they make a good proxy for a credit card.
Credit card POS systems permit for me to do (reasonably, lack a trusted display or input mechanism) secure transactions. But I can’t do that with my computer — I don’t have a way to use a smartcard reader and purchase things online. I have to send my actual credentials to a vendor and trust that they’re treating them securely.
But if you use PayPal to pay at a vendor and then send that payment to a credit card, you avoid the security problems inherent to direct personal use of credit cards.
I’m not comfortable sending credit card data to sketchy-looking sites. With PayPal, worst case they don’t send me whatever I paid for.
Use a virtual card like the ones from privacy. You can select if it’s a one time payment or a monthly payment and set limits.
It saved me many times from companies charging me way more than I agreed to. (Bought a phone and never activated it, they tried to charge me $150 the next year, but I used a virtual card!)
Look into the Privacy app (kind of a terrible name honestly). It’s effectively a Paypal type system but one that issues CC numbers for each vendor or transaction and allows you to easily audit and manage them. It’s not perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than Paypal.
You should see if any of your credit cards allow you to make virtual credit cards. I can make an entirely new card with a unique number, expiration and code then lock/delete them or even restrict them to the first retailer they’re used at. I have like a dozen virtual cards that only work at a single retailer and lock them all until I need to use them. While locked all attempts to use them are declined.
I don’t know if they do, but I’ve used a service before that provides similar functionality, a “temporary proxy credit card”, which also permits one to not even provide one’s real name and address to a vendor.
But it’s more work to set one up than it is to do a PayPal transaction. Like, I could do it if a vendor doesn’t permit for PayPal payments and I really really want what the vendor is selling, but PayPal does the big “the vendor doesn’t get your credentials” security fix and avoids creating extra hurdles for a purchaser to jump through.
Some Citi cards and privacy.com let you do this. Privacy.com takes a business day or two to verify you though
My provider unfortunately doesn’t, so I have to rely on PayPal as the proxy. I use USD, so I guess I won’t be too affected, but it is a bummer that I can’t seem to ditch them.
It’s not a credit card, but I use Revolut and they have temporary virtual debit cards on their free plan even. They work a single time per generated card only. Great also if you want a 1 month subscription of something and don’t trust yourself to cancel it.
Btw this feature is exactly why certain companies are also banning Revolut cards; turns out authorizes for payments on a card that is about to disappear is a great way to not have to pay for anything (the Dutch OVPay had fraud issues with these cards for example).
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Long ago, I used to work for a small business that did most of its sales through eBay using PayPal. They were the single biggest impediment to our business, yoinking money away at the slightest excuse. It seemed like they just lived to screw us over.
