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Steam will no longer offer physical gift cards
(pawb.social)
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.
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.