Steam payment headaches grow as PayPal is no longer usable for much of the world: Valve hopes to bring it back in the future, 'but the timeline is uncertain'
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They could do it with significantly fewer people, for themselves and even for GOG, Itch and potentially others. Their use-case is digital payments for games, which is limited in scope and risk. PCI and compliance is a PITA, but manageable.
The hard part isn't processing payment... They already basically do that for themselves with the steam wallet.
The problem is getting the ability to withdraw funds from your customers' bank accounts. That requires a commercial relationship with your customer's bank and going through an insane amount of red tape. And there is no standard worldwide protocol for this, you'll be starting from zero in every market by cold-calling major banks.
The only viable approach is to have an army of salespeople, accountants, and project managers to do all those individual negotiations.
The EU has been trying for years to have an indigenous continent-wide payment processor. The first attempt failed, now Wero is poised to succeed in the next few years but that's building off negotiations that started a few years ago with pressure from the EU and buy-in from the financial sector, and still only a handful of European markets have been integrated at this point.
Now imagine all this difficulty but you have to also get active buy-in from every market worldwide. There's a reason Visa/MC have a near monopoly on international payments in the western world, and it's not that no-one else thought to get a piece of that very juicy pie that's making them literally billions in profit every year.
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Steam payment headaches grow as PayPal is no longer usable for much of the world: Valve hopes to bring it back in the future, 'but the timeline is uncertain'
The problem first came to light about a month ago, but Valve has only now offered an explanation.
PC Gamer (www.pcgamer.com)
Uh...just use your credit/debit card directly within steam?
Why rely on the scummiest third party payment app that's ever existed in the world?
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This post did not contain any content.
Steam payment headaches grow as PayPal is no longer usable for much of the world: Valve hopes to bring it back in the future, 'but the timeline is uncertain'
The problem first came to light about a month ago, but Valve has only now offered an explanation.
PC Gamer (www.pcgamer.com)
What did PayPal do that it’s less usable than it was? Not that it was ever very usable
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Asking as an ignorant person, what's wrong with PayPal?
They quite often steal your money.
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Someone breaks down why it'd be a monumental task for Valve/Itch to vertically integrate the whole payment processing thing into their business. The essay is highly readable.
The only thing I had to look up was
Escrow: a financial arrangement w/ a third party who holds/manages funds on behalf of two parties in a transactionMy takeaway was that Valve/itch/GOG would still be beholden to the banks who track porn as high risk for fraudulent transactions.
So what can we do about it?
~asking in earnest, btw. I buy porn and toys like a regular ass person, too~Monumental, perhaps, but at this point it would seem well worth the effort.
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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.
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Wooow. Interesting tidbit.
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️Ebay owns PayPal. Probably the others listed there as well, though I haven't checked.
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Uh...just use your credit/debit card directly within steam?
Why rely on the scummiest third party payment app that's ever existed in the world?
I agree with the sentiment, but the reason they're looking at third party apps is to avoid the control that payment processing companies have over censorship following the whole Visa/MasterCard issue.
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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.
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We need to be post scarcity before we can be post money.
Nope. Backwards.
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This post did not contain any content.
Steam payment headaches grow as PayPal is no longer usable for much of the world: Valve hopes to bring it back in the future, 'but the timeline is uncertain'
The problem first came to light about a month ago, but Valve has only now offered an explanation.
PC Gamer (www.pcgamer.com)
This can only hurt there stock price in the long run
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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.
Some Citi cards and privacy.com let you do this. Privacy.com takes a business day or two to verify you though
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Based off what? The option are credit cards or crypto.
They don't need a valve pay for crypto. They could easily accept something like USDC to accept crypto and not deal with volatility.
For credit cards all that would do is bypass the intermediaries if they directly integrated to a credit card company, and then they'd still be subject to their rules that the intermediaries claim they violate to protect MC etc from having to say it themselves. It'd solve absolutely nothing.
Also a direct integration like that is a multi billion dollar business and all the effort and expenses that would come with that without even solving the root problem.
This kind of problem is the exact reason crypto exists and is really the only solution even if it's not perfect yet.
Edit: sorry, they could do a bank integration through ACH / EFT / Wires etc, but that's slow and realistically not an option. If people want to buy something they won't want to wait days for it.
Are you aware you can just transfer money between bank accounts, usually for free?
Much like with a credit card, you could just transfer money to Valve, which would be credited to your account, and you can then use it to buy stuff.
There's no need for crypto anything.
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Are you aware you can just transfer money between bank accounts, usually for free?
Much like with a credit card, you could just transfer money to Valve, which would be credited to your account, and you can then use it to buy stuff.
There's no need for crypto anything.
That takes time (days) that people don't want to wait to make a purchase, nor do people want to leave a balance with companies or have to worry about topping it up so they have enough to buy the next game they happen to want without waiting.
Edit: Not to mention the risk of sharing bank account information.
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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.
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That takes time (days) that people don't want to wait to make a purchase, nor do people want to leave a balance with companies or have to worry about topping it up so they have enough to buy the next game they happen to want without waiting.
Edit: Not to mention the risk of sharing bank account information.
Bank to bank transfers typically show up in under an hour in my country, and you would obviously be able to credit your account ahead of time.
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Asking as an ignorant person, what's wrong with PayPal?
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!"
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Bank to bank transfers typically show up in under an hour in my country, and you would obviously be able to credit your account ahead of time.
Even having to wait an hour is a fantastic way to lose a sale.
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Based off what? The option are credit cards or crypto.
They don't need a valve pay for crypto. They could easily accept something like USDC to accept crypto and not deal with volatility.
For credit cards all that would do is bypass the intermediaries if they directly integrated to a credit card company, and then they'd still be subject to their rules that the intermediaries claim they violate to protect MC etc from having to say it themselves. It'd solve absolutely nothing.
Also a direct integration like that is a multi billion dollar business and all the effort and expenses that would come with that without even solving the root problem.
This kind of problem is the exact reason crypto exists and is really the only solution even if it's not perfect yet.
Edit: sorry, they could do a bank integration through ACH / EFT / Wires etc, but that's slow and realistically not an option. If people want to buy something they won't want to wait days for it.
I think the point is that Valve has the reach to start their own credit card network. It might be far fetched, but I'm old enough to remember when Sears launched the Discover card. It's totally doable for a company that already has the technical capabilities of Valve.
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I think the point is that Valve has the reach to start their own credit card network. It might be far fetched, but I'm old enough to remember when Sears launched the Discover card. It's totally doable for a company that already has the technical capabilities of Valve.
That is such a monumental task and valve only has between 350-400 employees.
Stripe has around 8500 employees, and they only integrate with
credit cardbanks who integrate to the credit card companies. But they finally got a license to directly integrate so we might finally see that in the near future.When sears made the discover card, they had hundreds of thousands of employees, and they didn't need to deal with all the digital shit we gotta deal with now.
