I would think Steam is big enough to make deals with local card vendors in individual countries.
I bet that would also be a lot cheaper than PayPal.No need for Steam to make their own as some suggest, it would be insane to have a system just for one business.
They could, but in Europe each country has at least one local payment systems. It was just more convenient to provide a few global players instead of dozens local ones. Many online shops here too is just local player + visa/Mastercard. That might change now that the global players get too controlling. (Not speaking for entire EU, just the part I visited.)
That is true, I am also in EU, and I use Visa for purchases outside Denmark and also for Steam.
We also have local payment systems that are mostly exclusive to Denmark. Many have Visa but not all, so only accepting Visa may lose Steam some business.
To cover Denmark 100% they will need to accept Dankort or MobilePay by Danske Bank. Everybody here have both of those, and they are both cheap and excellent to use.
I personally don’t have PayPal because I despise the company for their high rates.Many online shops here too is just local player + visa/Mastercard.
In principle that would be the same for Steam, local player is the local service for the country the customer is in.
Steam is multinational, and has business enough in each country to support the local players. It’s extra work to set up, but also cheaper prices for Steam than Paypal and also cheaper than Visa in most cases.
So I think they’d make money on it over using PayPal.They could, but in Europe each country has at least one local payment systems.
Huh? https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/integration/retail/sepa/html/index.en.html
That works for account to account transfers and in shop payment with your card. The online payment world is still a lot more fragmented.
Um, no? They can provide an IBAN and then you can pay almost instantly with most banks, with the worst ones taking a business day or two.
That works for account to account transfers
Yeah, so? https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/sepa-instant-credit-transfer
The online payment world is still a lot more fragmented.
Valve literally only needs an EU bank account. Doesn’t help the rest of the world but the outlandish claim was that within Europe Valve would need to support “at least one local payment system” per country and that’s just wrong.
I believe Valve already supports all the local payment systems in Europe, though they’ll only show it to you if you’re in one of those countries (the payment processing flow asks you which country are you paying from upfront and then uses that to display the various payment systems available for that country).
Same for GOG, by the way.
The problem is mainly that to sell to anywhere in Europe a seller has to integrate with the many local payment systems out there, which is a lot of work for a small seller.
That’s for bank transfers, not for payments.
Mind you, you often can pay stuff online in Europe via bank transfer if it’s within the Eurozone (and the fact that it works from anywhere to anywhere in the Eurozone for the same cost as a local transfer, rather than just locally in each country is exactly because SEPA has been standardized and the regulator has forced banks to charge the same for transfers between different countries in the Eurozone as they do for transfers within their own country), but it’s not reliably available in sellers and is a bit more convoluted than pure payment systems (basically you have to use your bank’s online site or app to transfer money to the account the seller provides you).
No actual payment systems are standardized across Europe yet, though various country-specific ones have been getting together and setting up cross-compatibility, but none of those covers more than a handful of countries.
That’s for bank transfers, not for payments.
Let be blow your mind: Transfer money to Valve’s EU bank account, get the game in return.
As I wrote elsewhere, Steam already supports all the European national payment systems, which are all more convenient than bank transfers.
(I actually tested it when writing another post and the Steam payment processing flow first asks you the country you’re paying for and then lists the payment systems for that country, and there I could see the standard national one of the country I gave)
GOG too also supports all the European national payment systems (I know because I switched to using those after the whole VISA/MasterCard/PayPal censorship crap happened).
Mind you, a lot of sellers in Europe do actually support paying by bank transfer (which goes via SEPA) but a lot don’t, plus it’s a bit less convenient than a dedicate payment system (though if you do the bank transfer from a banking app in your smartphone it’s reasonably simple plus some of those payment systems are really just a convenience layer - say an app scanning a QR-code for automated payment - over the whole “open the transfer screen and manually enter 20-something digits and an euro amount”).
Mind you, a lot of sellers in Europe do actually support paying by bank transfer (which goes via SEPA) but a lot don’t
This is not about what “a lot of sellers” do, it’s what Valve could do as an easy alternative in one big region of the world.
though if you do the bank transfer from a banking app in your smartphone it’s reasonably simple plus some of those payment systems are really just a convenience layer - say an app scanning a QR-code for automated payment - over the whole “open the transfer screen and manually enter 20-something digits and an euro amount”
Making SEPA money transfer by scanning a Qr code from the bank’s app is literally a thing. That’s how I paid the dentist a couple of months ago.
C’mon Valve… Make me a credit card pretty please.
Based on the screenshot someone else posted, they do have some kind of payment/currency system of their own, Steam Wallet.
I guess you could buy a physical Steam gift card in a store via any mechanism the store accepts, including cash, and then transfer it to that.
Yeah, that seems to be the best option for people w/o credit cards. It was useful for me before I got mine.
Maybe it’s possible that they can make some sort of pre-paid card esque solution, rather than fixed amounts?
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Asking as an ignorant person, what’s wrong with PayPal?
They quite often steal your money.
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!”
Wouldn’t you use PayPal as a digital wallet for you credit cards & reverse fraudulent charges through your credit card company?
Now if you link an actual bank account to PayPal, pay with that bank account, and get scammed, then that’s your actual money spent, and no shit that’s harder to reverse. You’d probably have to refer to your bank, and they may not do it.
Well that’s how money transaction works. The only way for you to have any recourse in this situation is something that can enforce laws. Or avoiding the situation all together through a reputable escrow.
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.
The company has found ways to avoid some of the regulations that banks are held to
If you look at all the unicorns of the past few decades, a surprisingly large number of them did it with software that wasn’t in any way technologically advanced, but exploited technology to find loopholes in the kind of industry regulations that were there to stop companies from screwing people over.
PayPal was a way to do banking without registering as a bank. Uber, Doordash and other gig economy apps are exercises in sidestepping employment law. Airbnb, despite its origins as a couchsurfing app, didn’t get huge until professional “hosts” started using it as a way to run apartment hotels without having to meet the expectations or obligations of one.
If you want to build a tech unicorn, all you need to ask yourself is, “how can I make something 5% more convenient and 200% more shit?”.
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.
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Isn’t that like all credit card payment processors? Maybe we should just use Monero
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It was founded and continues to be run by some real shitbags.
If you sell things on eBay and the like, PayPal likes to fuck you over
It’s got all the worst parts of extreme anti-fraud measures, like freezing your account and holding onto your money just because you did something suspicious like receive money, but without actually protecting anyone from fraud.
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”.
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.
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.
If digital payments are becoming a service problem, Steam might develop their own.
I wonder if this will just make them return bitcoin as an option to pay. It’s been 8 years since they dropped it and it has fewer large fluctuations now, it seems.
It still fluctuates a lot. If they were going to accept bitcoin I as a game developer would want them to get it into something a bit harder almost instantly. I don’t want it staying in bitcoin here it can lose its value, for no reason at all, at the drop of a hat. Under the current system steam tend to hold on to money until the end of the month and then pay you, that wouldn’t work with bitcoin.
Bitcoin cash maybe as it’s not limited to a small block size, but as others have said, there are probably better options out there now.
BCH has been dead for years (even if it doesn’t know if yet)
and it has fewer large fluctuations now, it seems.
106 to 76 to 120 in the last four months is not large fluctuation? 30 % variance is quite high to me.
There are better cryptocurrency options to Bitcoin now, including stabletokens that are specifically designed for this purpose. Hopefully they go to one of those instead.
I don’t understand why people first think of memecoins when there are a few stablecoins like USDT or USDC?
Branding and public image is a large part of currency circulation, as far as I’m aware. My first impression and instinctual thoughts on cryptocurrencies as a whole are vehicles for money-laundering and general fraud, even if there are examples to the contrary.
Same reason why the Russian ruble or the Chinese Yuan aren’t generally used as foreign reserve currencies for the majority of nations - too volatile, and histories of manipulation.
isn’t USDT tether, which is completely unbacked?
it’s also not always easy to buy those. nobody wants to use cryptocurrency unless it is easy to get cryptocurrency
I was gifted crypto from two crypto projects for my (crypto-unrelated) open source work. It was a baffling hassle to pay out. Over multiple conversions and significant gas fees and waiting for hours for a transaction and having to juggle wallets and exchange platform service… yeah. From my experience, cryptocurrencies are not feasible for normal, regular payments.
There’s no better payment infrastructure for USDT than for €. It adds additional concerns and technical complexities.
Because the “have fun being poor (as I gamble my life savings on a website with pump and dump basically in the name)” crowd outnumbers and is much louder than the “I am using this decentralized currency because authoritarians will inevitably strangle anything with a single point of control” crowd.
I actually think ramping up their gift card distribution to more countries might be more effective imo, since people have access to cash or payment systems at physical stores.
Gift cards are an obvious way to bypass regional pricing, so a low-income country like mine could get more harm than good (as in fraud increases and the storefront gives up ın regional pricing from that point on).
Also, when convenience of online shopping is lost, why would I bother wearing my shoes and get out to sun to purchase a gift card, while I can buy a physical copy of the game instead?
do they still make physical copies? if so, I’m pretty sure most indie developers cannot afford that…
For a lot of games, especially games with low budgets that don’t make physical distribution possible (most indies on PC), they’re reliant on digital distribution, and Steam is the place for the majority of PC gamers to obtain their library. Also generally speaking for PC, physical distribution (apart from pirated files and niche scenarios), is basically already dead.
As for the regional pricing issue, Steam/Valve already looks at IP and regional activity (say a NA user temporarily VPN’s into Ukraine for a cheap price and then kills the VPN and plays from an NA ip afterwards) to flag accounts and restrict them from purchasing games in the future or gifting them to others. Because of that, I don’t think an increased volume of gift cards would be the issue (stolen credit cards are far more of a headache for Valve).
Tbh I could not be arsed to go somewhere to buy a gift card to then use it. I’m more likely to use another platform to buy a game.
It’s not that I don’t have values. I just don’t feel strongly enough about using Steam to make that trip just for a gift card.
Digital gift cards would be okay though.
you don’t have to make a trip just for that. you can just visit the shop next time you’re nearby.
Of course, but that would mean delaying a purchase by a day or more
Not if you buy a gift card before you find a game you want
That’s fair. The ball is in Paypal’s court anyway, but I guess digital/prepaid gift cards could also be on the table as well.
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.
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!)
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.
Revolut literally has this as a feature, single-use cards.
Additionally at least in Europe 3Dsecure is very common. It’s opt-in which makes it kinda weird, but still widely used.
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.
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.
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).
Is PayPal still a musk toy?
No, you can tell because the name makes sense and doesn’t sound like it comes from a tween edgelord.
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?
Okay, steam cards it is then.
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. 🕵️♂️
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.
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Perhaps it’s time Valve get into its own payment business.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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
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.
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.
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 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.
If valve had the power to enter the payment processing industry, I would support.
The most likely already half the knowledge, mainframe infrastructure is a different beast than servers but not a huge gab 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 Com (unaware if they still partner with them), to know current levels but its for sure at least 10 exabytes annually
What happened to paypal?
Paypal changed banks and cannot accept currencies from most countries, resulting in the failures Steam is seeing. Source:
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/bpXXUDhPvYgsNn4SsrcdwD-1200-80.jpg
you can no longer
♫ pay your own waaaaaaaay ♫
It’s written in the article, related to the currency used.
Started buying steam giftcards for myself now instead.
