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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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.
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.
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.
You can’t lock kids away from the internet and then do this. Pick one.
I remember being able to walk into any store and you’d see a huge wall of gift cards for WoW, PlanetSide, City of Heroes, etc. My childhood would’ve sucked if I hadn’t been able to pay for my MMO subscriptions that way.
Damn this was a nice stocking stuffer I’d get every year (either others getting for me or me getting for others).
Bad news. I think this was pretty cool.
Also RIP all those poor bastards who were using these gift cards to disguise the true amount of their gaming expenditures from a spouse or partner.
Old scenario - “I was just getting some stuff at the grocery store honey.”
New workflow - “Hey, what the fuck is this $59 transaction for steam games on our credit card?!?”
privacy.com and enable the mask option.
So to give someone a steam gift card now you have to send it directly to their steam account?
Rip to the kids who’s parents don’t feel comfortable giving steam their credit card info
What about using a virtual credit card?
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.
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
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 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.
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.
They just see gift cards as a small portion of the market and can’t be bothered dealing with their problems anymore. There are other ways they could approach the issue: eg gift cards can only be for buying games, not DLC or in-game credit. Would lower their utility to thieves/scammers enormously - as they attempt to on-sell the cards in grey markets asap, or buying in-game items and immediately trading them (before the scam is reported).
This response sucks and it feels pretty fucking weak for a company as filthy rich as Steam.
Credit cards have many of the same problems, but I’m sure they won’t be bailing on them anytime soon (and insisting on linked bank accounts or something).
G2A is a good example of a marketplace where steam games and keys are for sale that were purchased with stolen credit cards (through gift cards to launder accordingly).
It is a shitty situation, but as a former IT worker, this is a massive legal liability and the costs of protecting customers are likely to only grow, not level or shrink.
Also, steam accounts are quite easy to get ahold of that are off Valve’s radar. I’m not personally inclined, but there are things like CS and TF2 trading bot accounts that could be used as vectors to launder items (and like I said earlier, steam keys/games can be sold via gray market websites like G2A).
There is nuance here, and I’d imagine the staff members behind the scenes have more than enough data to make an educated decision (if they didn’t give a shit they would leave the cards on the shelves because they clearly make money).
Yes, there’s plenty of evidence that games and items purchased with stolen credit cards / gift cards exist. This is just a lazy response from Steam.
I’ve personally seen scammer accounts that impersonate users and send fraudulent friend requests and then engage in social engineering to blatantly try to steal Steam accounts go unpunished even after 6 months… While friends in Discord share post after post of the scammers on multiple accounts are identified, reported to Steam through their official channels, and then nothing is heard of again.
They’re lax as fuck.
gift cards can only be for buying games, not DLC or in-game credit
That’s even worse.
You’ll either have the balance on the actual gift card, not in your wallet anymore, and potentially a bunch of cards with a few bucks each lying around, that you need to keep track of.
Or you add a secondary wallet, just for physical gift cards, and people will get confused why they can’t buy something, when Steam says they have the funds.
I’m pretty whatever about this change, since it doesn’t impact me.
PaysafeCard is an alternative, if it’s available in your region, or depending on the amount of scams involving the physical cards, Steam should just eat the cost of the additional support needed to combat this better.
What? Why would cards with partial money be laying around. When you add a gift card to Steam you can only ever add the full amount.
People already have multiple paymen options in Steam whenever they have credit in their account: do you want to pay with your Steam wallet or credit card on file or other option. It’s been like that for maybe a decade, and is not confusing at all.
The bigger question is why do you care when it wouldn’t impact you, and bring up complaints that illustrate you don’t even use the system?
What are you adding here…
Your suggestion was to let physical gift cards only be used for games, no DLC, marketplace, or elsewhere.
That would mean you’d have to add those gift cards to a new pool of funds, separate from the “general purpose” wallet, that you charge with the digital gift cards, or by selling stuff on the marketplace.
100% there will be people who’re going to be confused by this. “Why can’t I buy this DLC, I have the money in my Steam Wallet?! Was I scammed?” and another support ticket is opened.
This is not the same as using different payment methods, because it’s not like your VISA can only be used for certain things.
If you want to avoid this possible confusion, you can make it so, the physical gift card doesn’t automatically get added to your wallet. You just use the funds you actually need during checkout. This would inevitably lead to some gift cards not getting fully used, so you got a few dollars here or there left over, which is just a massive pain. In hindsight this also has the same problem with possible confusion, when people can’t buy certain items with their gift cards and open support tickets again to complain.
why do you care when it wouldn’t impact you, and bring up complaints that illustrate you don’t even use the system?
I don’t buy physical gift cards, I either load up my wallet or pay directly for stuff. Even so, I know your suggestion was terrible.
