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.
They just see gift cards as a small portion of the market and can’t be bothered dealing with their problems anymore. There are other ways they could approach the issue: eg gift cards can only be for buying games, not DLC or in-game credit. Would lower their utility to thieves/scammers enormously - as they attempt to on-sell the cards in grey markets asap, or buying in-game items and immediately trading them (before the scam is reported).
This response sucks and it feels pretty fucking weak for a company as filthy rich as Steam.
Credit cards have many of the same problems, but I’m sure they won’t be bailing on them anytime soon (and insisting on linked bank accounts or something).
G2A is a good example of a marketplace where steam games and keys are for sale that were purchased with stolen credit cards (through gift cards to launder accordingly).
It is a shitty situation, but as a former IT worker, this is a massive legal liability and the costs of protecting customers are likely to only grow, not level or shrink.
Also, steam accounts are quite easy to get ahold of that are off Valve’s radar. I’m not personally inclined, but there are things like CS and TF2 trading bot accounts that could be used as vectors to launder items (and like I said earlier, steam keys/games can be sold via gray market websites like G2A).
There is nuance here, and I’d imagine the staff members behind the scenes have more than enough data to make an educated decision (if they didn’t give a shit they would leave the cards on the shelves because they clearly make money).
Yes, there’s plenty of evidence that games and items purchased with stolen credit cards / gift cards exist. This is just a lazy response from Steam.
I’ve personally seen scammer accounts that impersonate users and send fraudulent friend requests and then engage in social engineering to blatantly try to steal Steam accounts go unpunished even after 6 months… While friends in Discord share post after post of the scammers on multiple accounts are identified, reported to Steam through their official channels, and then nothing is heard of again.
They’re lax as fuck.
That’s even worse.
You’ll either have the balance on the actual gift card, not in your wallet anymore, and potentially a bunch of cards with a few bucks each lying around, that you need to keep track of.
Or you add a secondary wallet, just for physical gift cards, and people will get confused why they can’t buy something, when Steam says they have the funds.
I’m pretty whatever about this change, since it doesn’t impact me.
PaysafeCard is an alternative, if it’s available in your region, or depending on the amount of scams involving the physical cards, Steam should just eat the cost of the additional support needed to combat this better.
What? Why would cards with partial money be laying around. When you add a gift card to Steam you can only ever add the full amount.
People already have multiple paymen options in Steam whenever they have credit in their account: do you want to pay with your Steam wallet or credit card on file or other option. It’s been like that for maybe a decade, and is not confusing at all.
The bigger question is why do you care when it wouldn’t impact you, and bring up complaints that illustrate you don’t even use the system?
What are you adding here…
Your suggestion was to let physical gift cards only be used for games, no DLC, marketplace, or elsewhere.
That would mean you’d have to add those gift cards to a new pool of funds, separate from the “general purpose” wallet, that you charge with the digital gift cards, or by selling stuff on the marketplace.
100% there will be people who’re going to be confused by this. “Why can’t I buy this DLC, I have the money in my Steam Wallet?! Was I scammed?” and another support ticket is opened.
This is not the same as using different payment methods, because it’s not like your VISA can only be used for certain things.
If you want to avoid this possible confusion, you can make it so, the physical gift card doesn’t automatically get added to your wallet. You just use the funds you actually need during checkout. This would inevitably lead to some gift cards not getting fully used, so you got a few dollars here or there left over, which is just a massive pain. In hindsight this also has the same problem with possible confusion, when people can’t buy certain items with their gift cards and open support tickets again to complain.
I don’t buy physical gift cards, I either load up my wallet or pay directly for stuff. Even so, I know your suggestion was terrible.