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.
I can keep buying porn games on steam with my third world country credit card. 🧐
Because, even if you do have a fully functional credit card which is not a given in many countries, US-based CC payment processors like Stripe are equally horrible third-party companies that gobble up all the data they can get their hands on somehow.
Seriously. You cannot even start “free trials” on US-based websites without handing over everything a bad actor would need for fraud or even identity theft.
In a lot of countries you cannot just use your debit card directly on Steam like you would a credit card which includes just entering the numbers and you are good to go. Or in some cases it directs you to the credit card provider where you have to authenticate the payment.
Here in NL we have to use iDeal if we want to pay online with most banks, this requires us to 2FA the payment by scanning a code using their app. iDeal will become Wero and will become an international system since a lot of countries had something similar to the Dutch iDeal.
Why is it set up that way
Being able to pay without 2FA is just risky business which is why the Dutch banks worked together (and so did the Belgium banks etc) to create a tool to make digital payments more secure. idk why it took so long to get one system for the entirety of the SEPA banking area though
Unless you have a debit card from a third world country bank and half of the time for online payment the authorization fail.
I’ve been in this situation several times and then though I don’t like it Paypal has often been the only payment option available to me.
Some people launder their money. It was the only I could send money out of the country without too many hoops to jump
Because its not really secure
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.
Make sure 2FA is enables on all your banking
Honestly fuck Paypal, don’t bring it back.
Asking as an ignorant person, what’s wrong with PayPal?
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.
They quite often steal your money.
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.
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.
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.
It was founded and continues to be run by some real shitbags.
Why isnt PayPal usable?
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.
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.
Good time to delete my PayPal. 👌
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.
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. Valve would need to be able to validate Visa/Mastercard/Discover etc cards issued by 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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
Monero works for anonymous payments for cocaine and fent across international boundaries, it can more than handle the illicit video game trade
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.
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.
Good riddance. Shady company from none other than the Muskrat.
I think thiel is worse, also involved.
Okay, steam cards it is then.
What did PayPal do that it’s less usable than it was? Not that it was ever very usable
The funny thing is that because Master Card is too afraid to actually accept any responsibility, using Master Card directly is still an option:
That means Master Card-powered PayPal Card should work.
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.
C’mon Valve… Make me a credit card pretty please.
