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'
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'
If digital payments are becoming a service problem, Steam might develop their own.
I actually think ramping up their gift card distribution to more countries might be more effective imo, since people have access to cash or payment systems at physical stores.
Tbh I could not be arsed to go somewhere to buy a gift card to then use it. I'm more likely to use another platform to buy a game.
It’s not that I don’t have values. I just don’t feel strongly enough about using Steam to make that trip just for a gift card.
Digital gift cards would be okay though.
Gift cards are an obvious way to bypass regional pricing, so a low-income country like mine could get more harm than good (as in fraud increases and the storefront gives up ın regional pricing from that point on).
Also, when convenience of online shopping is lost, why would I bother wearing my shoes and get out to sun to purchase a gift card, while I can buy a physical copy of the game instead?
I wonder if this will just make them return bitcoin as an option to pay. It's been 8 years since they dropped it and it has fewer large fluctuations now, it seems.
and it has fewer large fluctuations now, it seems.
106 to 76 to 120 in the last four months is not large fluctuation? 30 % variance is quite high to me.
It still fluctuates a lot. If they were going to accept bitcoin I as a game developer would want them to get it into something a bit harder almost instantly. I don't want it staying in bitcoin here it can lose its value, for no reason at all, at the drop of a hat. Under the current system steam tend to hold on to money until the end of the month and then pay you, that wouldn't work with bitcoin.
Honestly fuck Paypal, don't bring it back.
Asking as an ignorant person, what's wrong with PayPal?
All the authority of a bank.
None of the responsibility.
Plus Peter Thiel and Elon Musk had a hand in it, and made their fortunes. It's right up there with Hitler and Reagan in the "reasons to invent a time machine and go back and destroy something".
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.
They quite often steal your money.
They don't like free speech, they've stopped processing payments on steam because they don't like some of the games on the platform.
A few matters - About 5-6 years ago - PayPal was going to make telemarketing your phone number a requirement in order to have an account - If you had an account, they were going to FORCE you to allow their 3rd party marketing calls. No opt-out available whatsoever.
PayPal is also an owner of the extension Honey - an extension that promoted they would try every online coupon code to see if you could save money on a deal. Recently (within the last year) it was discovered that even if they didn't provide you with any discount at all - they were still hijacking the referral links that brought you to the shop site in the first place. They were also striking deals to those same vendors about kickbacks to NOT keep the best coupons in their system. Essentially they were taking money from three sides, promoters, vendors, and the purchasers - all while NOT providing the best possible coupon codes - which was the whole advertised point of their service. Lawsuits on this are pending.
It was founded and continues to be run by some real shitbags.
A non exhaustive list of what makes them awful: https://expertbeacon.com/why-is-paypal-so-bad/
Afaik, the issue that was making the most victims, was that they were facilitating scammers that targeted sellers:
5. Good Luck Recouping Losses as a Seller in Disputes.
89% of sellers experienced dispute resolution problems with PayPal in 2021 surveys. Despite providing evidence the item shipped or service rendered, they lost cases and sums averaging $622.
This is driven by PayPal‘s buyer-favored review round taking 1-2 weeks. This favors scamming buyers at the expense of legitimate businesses.
Iirc, there was a time when Paypal always sided with the buyer, irregardless of evidence or past track record, the review process was useless. Once scammers picked up on this and began scamming sellers en masse, Paypal still kept their policy unchanged for years and sellers started to raise their prices on platforms that forced them to accept Paypal (ebay used to do this). Ebay has since tossed Paypal off their platform. I don't know if Paypal ever improved.
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!"
It's got all the worst parts of extreme anti-fraud measures, like freezing your account and holding onto your money just because you did something suspicious like receive money, but without actually protecting anyone from fraud.
If you sell things on eBay and the like, PayPal likes to fuck you over
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.
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.
Is it a payment processor problem, or a card issuer problem though?
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.
PayPal/Visa/MasterCard do way more than just payment processing for one company.
Valve wouldn't need 25,000 employees just to process payments for their own platform.
Quantity is not quality.
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?
Because, even if you do have a fully functional credit card which is not a given in many countries, US-based CC payment processors like Stripe are equally horrible third-party companies that gobble up all the data they can get their hands on somehow.
Seriously. You cannot even start "free trials" on US-based websites without handing over everything a bad actor would need for fraud or even identity theft.
Because it most of the world you'll be dependent on Visa or Mastecard, US companies that have been exerting their power to effectively block payments to content they deem inappropriate, such as adult websites.
In a lot of countries you cannot just use your debit card directly on Steam like you would a credit card which includes just entering the numbers and you are good to go. Or in some cases it directs you to the credit card provider where you have to authenticate the payment.
Here in NL we have to use iDeal if we want to pay online with most banks, this requires us to 2FA the payment by scanning a code using their app. iDeal will become Wero and will become an international system since a lot of countries had something similar to the Dutch iDeal.
Unless you have a debit card from a third world country bank and half of the time for online payment the authorization fail.
I've been in this situation several times and then though I don't like it Paypal has often been the only payment option available to me.
Because its not really secure
Some people launder their money. It was the only I could send money out of the country without too many hoops to jump
Because typing in bank details every time is a pain and saving them is a big no no as many companies seem to get hacked. Trusting only 1 company with bank details limits the blast radius.
Make sure 2FA is enables on all your banking
Perhaps it's time Valve get into its own payment business.
I expect the established banking/credit card industry is not likely to let Valve into their systems just to circumvent their restrictions. Valve would need to be able to validate Visa/Mastercard/Discover etc cards issued by any bank and be able to credit/debit them.
The problem is that if you make a PayPal equivalent, you're still beholdent to MasterCard and Visa since you need them for people to actually add money to their account, and if you want to make a direct competitor to MasterCard and Visa, that's basically impossible without government support because they're way too entrenched, why would a business support a random new payment method that nobody is using yet.
I had heard that Steam used to accept crypto but the volatility of the currency was a major issue. Maybe try cryptocurrency again.
Perhaps they could set up a system where they could make a sale in bitcoin or something then immediately convert to USD. They could add a processing fee to the sale to cover any conversion fees.
I know nothing about actually doing any of this beyond having bought and sold BTC in the past. I was just wondering if it would be possible.
The fundamental flaw with all current crypto is that it's far too volatile to use as a currency. The only reasonable use for it at the moment is as a high risk commodity which is the vast overwhelming majority of what we see. Any so called "currency" that regularly sees price swings of multiple percentage points in a day isn't actually a currency and is unsuitable to be used as one.
Adding to this is the problem of transaction times. Actual payment systems typically have transaction times of less than a second, occasionally a second or two. Bitcoin in contrast can take multiple minutes, sometimes hours or even days to confirm a transaction. There's no way for Valve to accept and then immediately convert Crypto to USD. The process would inherently involve at least two transactions, one to transfer the crypto to Valves wallet, then a second to transfer from Valves wallet to the exchanges wallet, and only then could Valve attempt to sell that crypto. The financial uncertainty involved in all of that is entirely unacceptable for a business.
At this moment there is only one potentially viable way of approaching this and it's government regulation of some kind. Either government needs to regulate that payment processors get no say in the contents of customers business, or else they need to regulate the adoption of a neutral digital payment system. One possible example of what that could look like would be the GNU Taler system which might eventually become a payment system in Switzerland but isn't yet.
It was the support cost as far as I remember. Way too many people were too confused about how Bitcoin works.
Volatility was not the concern, at least for Valve. They've utilized a payment gateway that just swapped the BTC to USD right away. Which was still a single point of failure, but in case of bitcoin, the company switching a payment gateway does not affect the UX for the customer as much.
Good time to delete my PayPal. 👌
I can't access mine, for about a year now. Suddenly, I'm not "verified" on the account I've had for years, and they require a phone number and license to verify (against what?). So, fuck em.
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.
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.
but that’s slow and realistically not an option.
Neither are cryptocurrencies for most people.
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.
Fuck credit cards they are terrible for your finances.
So paypal is unreliable, is the takeaway.
What happened to paypal?
Paypal changed banks and cannot accept currencies from most countries, resulting in the failures Steam is seeing. Source:
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/bpXXUDhPvYgsNn4SsrcdwD-1200-80.jpg
It's written in the article, related to the currency used.
you can no longer
♫ pay your own waaaaaaaay ♫
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
Monero/XMR or GNU-Taler may be good alternatives. As for Banking, well.... There are OpenSource Core-Banking-Systems like Apache-Fineract
Use Monero I fucking guess?
If Valve did it, they'd make crypto insanely popular. They are pretty incentivized to do it right now, so it would not surprise me if they tested it out soon.
How does using a cryptocurrency work in this instance? Does a game that costs 20 coins always cost 20 coins or is it going to be 10 one day and 60 the next depending on its value? If it stays at 20 coins are those 20 coins going to cost me 1% of my paycheck one day and then 3% the next? (Numbers just for example) Theres so many issues with just having to deal with another currency not just crypto. How can you guarantee its stability in relation to your original currency? How much are you going to have to spend to convert currencies and/or make transactions?
Monumental, perhaps, but at this point it would seem well worth the effort.
If valve had the power to enter the payment processing industry, I would support.
They most likely already have half the knowledge, mainframe infrastructure is a different beast than servers but not a huge gap if you are Valve, they were responsible for half an EXABYTE of data traffic per month.. IN 2015!!! Haven't seen any new reports from them or Level 3 Communications (unaware if they still partner with them), to know current levels but its for sure at least 10 exabytes annually.
Edit: Getting some downvotes but unless proven other wise the data is there, I can understand not everyone in c/technology works in the industry like some of us but unless your source is this fucking idiot mainframes are still peak efficiency and peak speed and peak space efficiency and peak... you get the point. Ask IBM, at this point they own half the mainframes in the world and they still release enterprise Linux distros.
Anyway, clearly I was still under the impression L3C was still a thing, now they are part of lumen and while no longer in the S&P500 they still move around a fucking gazillion of exabytes everywhere.
Still regarding Vajve, turns out my predictions were very moderate, I was 33.3% of the way there, turns out in '18 they broke the 30 exabytes mark. With a very conservative trend analysis we can bet on Steam being responsible of 40% of Asia's bandwidth by the end of the decade and 30% of North America's. All in all they are on track to break the 50 exabyte mark this year alone.
Good riddance. Shady company from none other than the Muskrat.
I think thiel is worse, also involved.
No actually! Musks entire involvement with PayPal was being fired by the company he founded which then later down the road was bought out by PayPal when the people who fired him for incompetence turned it around and made it valuable enough PayPal wanted it
Monero works for anonymous payments for cocaine and fent across international boundaries, it can more than handle the illicit video game trade
"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.
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.
This sort of situation is exactly why I got a PayPal card 18 years ago when they first started offering it.
Okay, steam cards it is then.
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.
They could, but in Europe each country has at least one local payment systems. It was just more convenient to provide a few global players instead of dozens local ones. Many online shops here too is just local player + visa/Mastercard. That might change now that the global players get too controlling. (Not speaking for entire EU, just the part I visited.)
They could, but in Europe each country has at least one local payment systems.
Huh? https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/integration/retail/sepa/html/index.en.html
That is true, I am also in EU, and I use Visa for purchases outside Denmark and also for Steam.
We also have local payment systems that are mostly exclusive to Denmark. Many have Visa but not all, so only accepting Visa may lose Steam some business.
To cover Denmark 100% they will need to accept Dankort or MobilePay by Danske Bank. Everybody here have both of those, and they are both cheap and excellent to use.
I personally don't have PayPal because I despise the company for their high rates.
Many online shops here too is just local player + visa/Mastercard.
In principle that would be the same for Steam, local player is the local service for the country the customer is in.
Steam is multinational, and has business enough in each country to support the local players. It's extra work to set up, but also cheaper prices for Steam than Paypal and also cheaper than Visa in most cases.
So I think they'd make money on it over using PayPal.
C'mon Valve... Make me a credit card pretty please.
Based on the screenshot someone else posted, they do have some kind of payment/currency system of their own, Steam Wallet.
I guess you could buy a physical Steam gift card in a store via any mechanism the store accepts, including cash, and then transfer it to that.
Yeah, that seems to be the best option for people w/o credit cards. It was useful for me before I got mine.
Maybe it's possible that they can make some sort of pre-paid card esque solution, rather than fixed amounts?
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.
Nope. Backwards.
From paypal to nopayforyoubuddy
What did PayPal do that it’s less usable than it was? Not that it was ever very usable
Started buying steam giftcards for myself now instead.
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.
This can only hurt there stock price in the long run
Do they accept UnionPay?
Why not crypto?
No genuinely, why not something like Monero?
One thing that goes into mind is ease of usage. Crypto is difficult for newcomers and it is easy to do something that you didn't want to.
Another problem is with standardization, there are too many tokens available. Monero seems like the way but people still view bitcoin as THE coin - despite its many issues.
Yeeeeah geht the point about that. The thought about crypto for me was Mord like a "when i would somebody trust to help normies To get info crypto then i would trust valve 😁 And yeah... Fu*k bitcoin...
Why don't they implement crypto already? Nano would be perfect
because me and many others hear "
<coin you never heard about>
would be perfect" and cant help but to immediately think scamDon't get me wrong, i like the idea, crypto just generally has a super bad track record
fair point
Finally somebody with a Good reply instead of a "downvote and fuck off..."
Though nowadays most places that accept cryptocurrency payments only do so through the most well-known stable coins. Generally, just Bitcoin, Monero, USDC (fixed to the dollar), and maybe Ether or such. Random coins like DOGE or [insert strange acronym] aren't really accepted for payments most anywhere. And this is just as a payment option, so it's not like you need to use it. Like paying on Amazon through Klarna or whatever. Anyone who prefers payment through a bank account or bank card would continue to be able to do so.
Hello-ooo Klarna!
Shit data hoarding company.
Meh. Paypal deserves everything bad that happens to it. Barely used it in the last few years. Definitely do NOT keep funds on there unless you're okay with just losing them.
I mean, I don't want to keep funds in PayPal, but they make a good proxy for a credit card.
Credit card POS systems permit for me to do (reasonably, lack a trusted display or input mechanism) secure transactions. But I can't do that with my computer --- I don't have a way to use a smartcard reader and purchase things online. I have to send my actual credentials to a vendor and trust that they're treating them securely.
But if you use PayPal to pay at a vendor and then send that payment to a credit card, you avoid the security problems inherent to direct personal use of credit cards.
I'm not comfortable sending credit card data to sketchy-looking sites. With PayPal, worst case they don't send me whatever I paid for.
Use a virtual card like the ones from privacy. You can select if it’s a one time payment or a monthly payment and set limits.
It saved me many times from companies charging me way more than I agreed to. (Bought a phone and never activated it, they tried to charge me $150 the next year, but I used a virtual card!)
Look into the Privacy app (kind of a terrible name honestly). It's effectively a Paypal type system but one that issues CC numbers for each vendor or transaction and allows you to easily audit and manage them. It's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than Paypal.
It's not a credit card, but I use Revolut and they have temporary virtual debit cards on their free plan even. They work a single time per generated card only. Great also if you want a 1 month subscription of something and don't trust yourself to cancel it.
Long ago, I used to work for a small business that did most of its sales through eBay using PayPal. They were the single biggest impediment to our business, yoinking money away at the slightest excuse. It seemed like they just lived to screw us over.