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.
BTW the missing link: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/78E3-7431-1E88-AD59#retailers
Rip to the kids who’s parents don’t feel comfortable giving steam their credit card info
What about using a virtual credit card?
I guess, I’m just speaking from experience. My parents were slow to trust with stuff like that. Same thing with using their card for iTunes lol.
I think post pandmemic and as millennials become the dominant parental group, the number of people in that group is a lot smaller than it once was.
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.
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.
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Bummer. I used to buy a handful of these a year as gifts.
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.
What scams were those?
The main people impacted by this will be minors with no other way to buy anything from Steam…
Old people getting called/emailed, being convinced they owe either the government or the scammer money, and then bring told to go buy thousands in gift cards.
It’s a big business. Over $200 million a year in the US.
We live with a guy who’s been getting scammed for a while now. He just won’t listen when we tell him. I highly doubt this change will affect him. They’ll just go to a different type of gift card.
Sounds like getting rid of Steam gift cards won’t solve that problem, they can do the same with other gift cards or even entirely different methods. Is that worth it to exclude minors or other people with no other way to pay?
This won’t fix the problem, but it’ll make it somebody else’s.
They are not fighting scammers with this. It seems that they just do not desire to be caught in scammer business.
The fact that scamming people into buying fucking gift cards is a think just seems so odd to me.
It’s a great way to launder the money, as the gift cards aren’t tied to a person. Credit card and bank transactions can easily be tracked/reversed and crypto is too complicated to scam old people with.
I hope stores will still offer digital giftcards.
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.
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.
Well how the fuck is my family going to gift me credit when they don’t use steam,???
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.
Bad news. I think this was pretty cool.
Damn this was a nice stocking stuffer I’d get every year (either others getting for me or me getting for others).
This is a huge blow to me. I’m not sure what to do now, because the Steam Gift cards was a major reason to use Steam for me.
Technically pre-paid debit cards will serve the same purpose if you still want to use cash to buy a card to redeem steam cash with. You could also use something like PayPal if you don’t want to expose your card directly.
I got steam gift cards as presents growing up, so I feel ya though.
