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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Bad news. I think this was pretty cool.
So to give someone a steam gift card now you have to send it directly to their steam account?
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?!?”
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.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
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
BTW the missing link: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/78E3-7431-1E88-AD59#retailers
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…
Bummer. I used to buy a handful of these a year as gifts.
What scams were those?
The main people impacted by this will be minors with no other way to buy anything from Steam…
Old people getting called/emailed, being convinced they owe either the government or the scammer money, and then bring told to go buy thousands in gift cards.
It’s a big business. Over $200 million a year in the US.
We live with a guy who’s been getting scammed for a while now. He just won’t listen when we tell him. I highly doubt this change will affect him. They’ll just go to a different type of gift card.
Sounds like getting rid of Steam gift cards won’t solve that problem, they can do the same with other gift cards or even entirely different methods. Is that worth it to exclude minors or other people with no other way to pay?
This won’t fix the problem, but it’ll make it somebody else’s.
This isn’t the first time a company has canceled doing gift cards cause of this problem. It wouldn’t even be weird to watch the entire concept of gift cards die off due to this problem.
Hell Iv seen major stores flat out stop selling gift cards. Or require really absurd shit like 3 day wait periods to buy them. To try to combat the issue.
Where I live, gift cards are still very widely available.
They are not fighting scammers with this. It seems that they just do not desire to be caught in scammer business.
glorious cake day to you
The fact that scamming people into buying fucking gift cards is a think just seems so odd to me.
It’s a great way to launder the money, as the gift cards aren’t tied to a person. Credit card and bank transactions can easily be tracked/reversed and crypto is too complicated to scam old people with.
I hope stores will still offer digital giftcards.
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.
