‘50% of transactions were fraudulent’ when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments, says Gabe Newell
No wonder Steam stopped taking cryptocurrency.
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Steam wasn’t on theBitcointrain for long. Bitcoin was introduced as a payment method on Steam in April 2016 andremoved in December 2017due to the volatility of Bitcoin’s price and “a significant increase in the fees to process transactions on the Bitcoin network,” Valve wrote at the time. More recently Valve raised the ire of crypto fans by banning crypto and NFT games from the store. Last week while talking to Valve president Gabe Newell about theSteam Deck, I also asked about that rule and his take on cryptocurrency in general.
Turns out: Not a fan, at least when it comes to Steam.
“The problem is that a lot of the actors who are in that space are not people you want interacting with your customers,” Newell said. “We had problems when we started acceptingcryptocurrenciesas a payment option. 50% of those transactions were fraudulent, which is a mind-boggling number. These were customers we didn’t want to have.”
Newell reiterated that Bitcoin’s fluctuations were “a complete nightmare”—people weren’t happy when a game could cost $10 one day and $100 the next.
His opinion hasn’t changed with the recent rise of crypto games andNFTs.
“There’s a lot of really interesting technology in blockchains and figuring out how to do a distributed ledger, [but] I think that people haven’t figured out why you actually need a distributed ledger,” Newell said.
“There’s a difference between what it should be and what it really is currently in the real world. And that’s sort of where we were at with the blockchain-based NFT stuff: so much of it was ripping customers off. And we were like, ‘Yeah, that’s not what we want to do, we don’t want to enable screwing large numbers of our customers over,’ so that’s what drove that decision. There’s nothing inherently about distributed ledgers that makes them problematic. It’s just so far that’s almost always what our experience has been.”
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Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites likeThe WirecutterandTestedbefore joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he’ll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.
When he’s not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it’s really becoming a problem), he’s probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).
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