Kinda sucks for me, as I’ve almost exclusively used gift cards for the last few years. I get a bonus tax-free credit card by my employer, which I can only use at retail stores. So those were a great way for me to use that card to buy games. It was also a good option for people who wanted to avoid payment providers like Visa/Mastercard etc. Oh well.
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Rip to the kids who’s parents don’t feel comfortable giving steam their credit card info
Wouldn’t a Visa gift card still work?
Yeah, but that $5 fee is kind of a killer. Maybe one of those reloadable cards like greendot? Their fees are usually not bad if you use them regularly.
Worth mention, every Market is very very different. In the US, we tend to think of three very clearly defined Lanes of credit cards, bank accounts, and then all of the weird middlemen products that sit on top of bank accounts like Zelle or Venmo, and we consider all of them either slow, expensive or both. Bank to bank methods are considered the ABS the worst because most of them have been built on top of the ancient, antiquated ACH Network, which basically predated the fax machine and sometimes has 72 hour delays on either end of the transaction.
In much of the world people can just whip out their phones and use their Bank numbers like phone numbers to send $$ point to point, instantly and with zero transaction fees.
I made a friend in another country (while I resided there) who was willing to buy me $200 USD worth of steam wallet funds in their local currency, and I had to pay them with a separate transaction for the favor using PayPal of all things, as if it were 2002. LOL. It was worth it to get at their regional pricing, however it disallowed me from paying for any of my friends games I would normally gift to friends, since Valve wisely restricts cross region gifting and cuts down on a lot of their scam & arbitrage traffic with that.
Tl;Dr - - money comes in dozens, hundreds of different flavors, speeds, and behavior. ALSO, kudos to Valve for being able to think of it in enough dimensions to garner the widest audience possible.
I think post pandmemic and as millennials become the dominant parental group, the number of people in that group is a lot smaller than it once was.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
BTW the missing link: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/78E3-7431-1E88-AD59#retailers
Its almost certainly part of the ongoing lawsuit Valve is having with New York.
NY AG claims (among other things) that Valve knows their Steam Wallets and Steam Items and giftcards form part of a system which allow the proceeds of alleged gambling to be converted into real world money, and that Valve doesn’t do enough to stop this.
Valve claims they do their best to find and shutdown secondary markets (which are against their TOS) that facilitate that, and well now they’re just pulling the plug on another part of that loop, where all of it has to exist for all of NY AG’s claims to be true.
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Yeah this kinda sucks. For me the move was buying the cards at Sams Club for the slight discount (about $1 off per $20 card). This move paired with Steam sales was the justification I needed to include gaming in the budget at all.
Classic “can’t have nice things because people like pulling fast ones” moment, unfortunately.
The last time I was given a steam gift card obtained at a brick-and-mortar Gamestop, it was a hash of numbers printed on a receipt I had to (painfully) type into Steam manually.
It didn’t even come on a pretty card, and that was about ten years ago.
Largely regional. They were on a rack in half of all the convenience stores I saw in South Korea just last year.
If you don’t mind just a bit of AI , you can use your phone to capture the string of numbers and copy it to your clipboard these days.
It’s lame to trust the machines, but as I age I’m grateful for saving what vision I have left for the actual pixels in my games.
Is OCR even really AI?
It is, it’s just that AI is a word that means “expensive chatbots” nowadays. A shame for those of us who work(ed) in the field before openai became popular
I mean, when it’s the “Google button” that also summarizes the screen contents, implying at least some degree of data exfiltration from our devices, I would say so.
On the one hand, I can understand the people who used Steam cards being pissed. On the other hand, I’m impressed with Steam for putting scamming victims over profit.
Remember: Valve made money from gift cards, whether from scammers or legit users. They chose to give up this money just to avoid supporting the scammers. If everybody did this, scammers would have a much harder time.
I, too, imagine at least 20% of this is altruism, while realistically I would expect
Vanceto Valva not lose much of that revenue entirely.~~ ~~Of all of the ways to populate a steam wallet legitimately, Valve authorizing and paying for those keys to be printed on paper stock, and then distributed across the globe, and maintaining the support apparatus around that entire supply chain, has to cost more overhead versus someone just using their debit account or digital payment processor on the Steam website.
Edit : a word
Vance
Corrected, thank you!
Bummer. I used to buy a handful of these a year as gifts.
Damn this was a nice stocking stuffer I’d get every year (either others getting for me or me getting for others).
I hate this.
People who are going to get scammed like this will get scammed in much stupider ways too. Not to mention the stores around here have most Steam gift cards right next to the Paysafe cards.
Bad news. I think this was pretty cool.
Well how the fuck is my family going to gift me credit when they don’t use steam,???
They have a guest checkout option for this
My family likes to act like doing anything outside of their usual routine will kill them. If they can’t buy it while picking up frozen dinners, I won’t be getting it.
I hope stores will still offer digital giftcards.
So to give someone a steam gift card now you have to send it directly to their steam account?
just give them $, everyone would orefer $ to a gift card
There are a lot of corners of society that consider just giving cash still very rude. There are a lot of Kool-Aid drinkers out there.
This is a huge blow to me. I’m not sure what to do now, because the Steam Gift cards was a major reason to use Steam for me.
Technically pre-paid debit cards will serve the same purpose if you still want to use cash to buy a card to redeem steam cash with. You could also use something like PayPal if you don’t want to expose your card directly.
I got steam gift cards as presents growing up, so I feel ya though.
