this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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Make your own payment processor, Gaben. It's the way.
actually what you want is card network, but even then that won’t do it
i gave a whole big rundown of why this is all way harder than everyone expects here
payments is an absolute minefield with so many layers of BS that gets closer to arcane wizardry and back room deals the deeper you go
Then people would have to get specific cards or crypto or whatever that aren't Visa/MasterCard in order to buy Steam games. That, of course, is if you can get banks to agree to carry "Steam cards". Either that, or everyone would need to buy Steam gift cards as an exclusive form of payment.
All of these are much less convenient than keeping your existing debit/credit card to pay for Steam games, and less convenience means less sales.
They would have to roughly make their own form of PayPal, alongside their own bank.
If you didn't know, PayPal technically isn't a bank, it and Venmo use Synchrony Bank... which is an actual bank.
If they did something like that, it could work, but it would have to be at a similar scale as PayPal, that is to say, massive....
Because doing this would/could basically be the nuclear option:
MC and Visa and PayPal would/could drop them.
So, they'd have to basically develop a massive project, in total secrecy.
... Which is something Valve has arguably done a number of times, they are notoriously opaque as a company.
......
Sort of as you mention, they already have a barebones backend framework to scale up from the steam gift card / user gift card balance system.
I am... uncertain if their backend for that already does or does not include an actual legally defined bank though.
...
Problem is that this would necessitate a massively costly undertaking, as well as ongoing maintenance costs, and Valve is also notorious for basically running on what most other firms would consider a skeleton crew for the size and scope of what they do.
Or you could just transfer funds to a steam card, then with that, but all you want.
Yeah, but SteamPay is the future
Steam does not have to only accept steampay. Tho? You fear visa and mastercard will blaclist steam?
Steam removed games because visa and mastercard threatened to blacklist it, so yeah. That's the whole point.
Is that kinda what PayPal is, or was intended to be?
Yeah but PayPal's awful. They literally arbitrarily deny you access to your own funds. At least the banks have rules.
If someone wants to pay me something they can use it literally anything other than PayPal. I don't trust them they've stolen money from me before.
There was an obviously fraudulent charge on my PayPal account and I submitted a request for a refund that got rejected by their automated system. I had to email back and forth PayPal support directly as well as the business involved, showing evidence of multiple address info change requests in quick succession and other strange things about the purchase. When things stalled I threatened to bring the issue to the FTC consumer protection bureau and finally that put the fire under their asses. Eventually I got my money back but it took considerable effort to get them to do the right thing.
Needless to say after all that I deleted my PayPal account.
Same. They stole a small amount (~10 USD), but at that time that was 2-3 days worth of groceries where I live (which would have helped a lot)
they've actually paid me after I was scammed by fake stock broker. without fussing about it too. Really easy to get payments reversed.
Either way I’d be happy to also switch to another method of payment if it were an option.
Yeah because in your case they didn't have your money. They're only real pain about trying to get money back, they always support businesses never customers.
So if I pay for a product and never receive it PayPal always takes the business's side.
Even Amazon has better customer support.
waves widely to above said post
That’s what I said happened to me. It was a scam. They still just ate the cost and paid me the money I lost.
Now I don’t know if maybe it was the amount, I don’t keep money on pp or I just did something different than anyone else did; I keep every piece of paper, email, name all contact information and detail(it’s kinda in line with my job)it was pretty undeniable I got scammed. Even showed I contacted a consumer bureau over it.
But either way I said I’d be open to a different way.
PayPal is almost as pornphobic as MastercardVisa
Yes
Just open bank in every country should do.