Over 50% of Bitcoin Transactions on Steam Were Suspicious
Gabe Newell explained why Valve abandoned bitcoin payments. It turns out that more than half of such transactions on Steam were linked to some kind of fraud.
Valve's boss Gabe Newell gave an interesting interview to PC Gamer. One of the issues raised was the company's changing attitude towards cryptocurrencies and NFT.
Why Valve abandoned cryptocurrencies and banned NFT on Steam
- In the interview, Newell revealed that when Valve accepted bitcoin payments on Steam more than 50% of transactions made using this method were found to be linked to some sort of fraud or other illegal activity (such as money laundering).
- Valve was prepared for a maximum of a few percent of such transactions, but the situation where they accounted for more than half of all transactions was unacceptable and the company didn't want to do business with this type of customer.
- The volatility of bitcoin was also a problem. Therefore, in December 2017 the company removed the cryptocurrency payment option from Steam.
- In the case of NFTs it was similar. Gabe Newell doesn't think that the technology itself is bad, but most of the games using it were designed to take unfair advantage of players and Valve doesn't want to tolerate such behavior from its users.
- As a result, in October last year Vave made the decision to remove all games using blockchains that allow for cryptocurrency or NFT exchange from Steam.
Gabe Newell emphasizes that the use of blockchain in video games is not necessarily a bad thing. The very idea of having tokens confirming the ownership of virtual items and the idea of transferring them between different games are interesting proposals. However, the head of Valve does not currently see beneficial examples of the implementation of such technologies for players and therefore there is no approval for their presence on Steam.
