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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.
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.
I, too, imagine at least 20% of this is altruism, while realistically I would expect ~~Vance~~ to Valva not lose much of that revenue entirely.~~ ~~
Of all of the ways to populate a steam wallet legitimately, Valve authorizing and paying for those keys to be printed on paper stock, and then distributed across the globe, and maintaining the support apparatus around that entire supply chain, has to cost more overhead versus someone just using their debit account or digital payment processor on the Steam website.
Edit : a word
Vance
Corrected, thank you!