Technology

If digital payments are becoming a service problem, Steam might develop their own.

For all the people saying Valve should become their own payment processor. PayPal employs 24,000 people. Visa employs 31,000. Mastercard employs 35,000. Valve employs 400. They're not going to 60x their employee count anytime soon.

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?

Perhaps it's time Valve get into its own payment business.

Good time to delete my PayPal. 👌

So paypal is unreliable, is the takeaway.

What happened to paypal?

I wouldn't mind seeing a ValvePay system. 1% transaction fee, available to anyone who wants to use it, including OnlyFans, Itch, Kagura, DLSite, and others. Valve can team up with Japan, the EU, and Brazil to handle their respective ends of the business, so that Valve can focus on the United States.

https://voidfox.com/blog/payment_processor_fun_2025_making_your_own_msp/

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 transaction

My 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~

If valve had the power to enter the payment processing industry, I would support.

Good riddance. Shady company from none other than the Muskrat.

"In early July 2025, PayPal notified Valve that their acquiring bank for payment transactions in certain currencies was immediately terminating the processing of any transactions related to Steam. This affects Steam purchases using PayPal in currencies other than EUR, CAD, GBP, JPY, AUD and USD," the message states.

"We hope to offer PayPal as an option for these currencies in the future but the timeline is uncertain.

There are currency conversion services all over the world that manage to do this. How hard can it possibly be to partner with an existing service to do the conversion as part of a transaction?

EDIT: I guess it's possible to do the conversion yourself and have a bank account in one of those currencies to use to do PayPal, so the practical impact is probably limited, but still. PayPal's whole point is to facilitate moving funds from Point A to Point B. You've got one job here, guys.

Monero works for anonymous payments for cocaine and fent across international boundaries, it can more than handle the illicit video game trade

The funny thing is that because Master Card is too afraid to actually accept any responsibility, using Master Card directly is still an option:

That means Master Card-powered PayPal Card should work.

Okay, steam cards it is then.

Why isnt PayPal usable?

I would think Steam is big enough to make deals with local card vendors in individual countries.
I bet that would also be a lot cheaper than PayPal.

No need for Steam to make their own as some suggest, it would be insane to have a system just for one business.
And it would be a serious limitation for Steam, because many won't bother signing up for it.

Gotta find a way to a post-money world; money is the enemy.

C'mon Valve... Make me a credit card pretty please.