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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Yeah, this is kind of old news though. Steam gift cards, along with razor cards, stopped being sold in stores years ago.
Now all the scammers have moved on to play store and apple cards, and we’ve had to store them behind the counter because people steal them. Yes, even though they’re worthless until you pay, people still steal it.
Maybe in your area, but I buy them in stores regularly.
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.
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.
Largely regional. They were on a rack in half of all the convenience stores I saw in South Korea just last year.
If you don’t mind just a bit of AI , you can use your phone to capture the string of numbers and copy it to your clipboard these days.
It’s lame to trust the machines, but as I age I’m grateful for saving what vision I have left for the actual pixels in my games.
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.
I, too, imagine at least 20% of this is altruism, while realistically I would expect Vance to not lose much of that revenue entirely.
Of all of the ways to populate a steam wallet legitimately, Valve authorizing and paying for those keys to be printed on paper stock, and then distributed across the globe, and maintaining the support apparatus around that entire supply chain, has to cost more overhead versus someone just using their debit account or digital payment processor on the Steam website.
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.
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.
Worth mention, every Market is very very different. In the US, we tend to think of three very clearly defined Lanes of credit cards, bank accounts, and then all of the weird middlemen products that sit on top of bank accounts like Zelle or Venmo, and we consider all of them either slow, expensive or both. Bank to bank methods are considered the ABS the worst because most of them have been built on top of the ancient, antiquated ACH Network, which basically predated the fax machine and sometimes has 72 hour delays on either end of the transaction.
In much of the world people can just whip out their phones and use their Bank numbers like phone numbers to send $$ point to point, instantly and with zero transaction fees.
I made a friend in another country (while I resided there) who was willing to buy me $200 USD worth of steam wallet funds in their local currency, and I had to pay them with a separate transaction for the favor using PayPal of all things, as if it were 2002. LOL. It was worth it to get at their regional pricing, however it disallowed me from paying for any of my friends games I would normally gift to friends, since Valve wisely restricts cross region gifting and cuts down on a lot of their scam & arbitrage traffic with that.
Tl;Dr - - money comes in dozens, hundreds of different flavors, speeds, and behavior. ALSO, kudos to Valve for being able to think of it in enough dimensions to garner the widest audience possible.
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
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.
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.
So to give someone a steam gift card now you have to send it directly to their steam account?
just give them $, everyone would orefer $ to a gift card
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.
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.
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.
