Steam was not long on the bitcoin train. Bitcoin was introduced as a payment method on Steem in April 2016 and was removed in December 2017 due to the volatility of the price of bitcoin and a “significant increase in fees for processing transactions on the bitcoin network”, Valve said. Time was written. Recently Valve angered crypto fans by banning crypto and NFT games from the store. Speaking to Valve President Gabe Newell last week about the Steam deck, I asked him about that rule, and his view on cryptocurrency in general.
Turns out: Not a fan, at least when it comes to Steam.
“The problem is that a lot of the actors who are in that space are not the people you want your clients to interact with,” Newell said. “We had a problem when we started accepting cryptocurrencies as a payment option. 50% of those transactions were fraudulent, which is a mind boggling thing. These were customers we didn’t want.”
Newell reiterated that bitcoin’s volatility was “an absolute nightmare” – people weren’t happy when a game could cost $10 one day and $100 the next.
His opinion has not changed with the recent rise of crypto games and NFTs.
“There is a lot of really interesting technology in blockchain and figuring out how to create a distributed ledger, [but] I think people haven’t figured out why you really need a distributed ledger,” Newell said.
“There’s a gap between what it should be and what it’s actually like in the real world currently. And that’s kind of where we were with the blockchain-based NFT stuff: a lot of it was ripping off customers. And we were like, ‘Yeah, that’s not what we want to do, we don’t want to be able to screw up a huge number of our customers,’ so that’s the decision. Something inherently good about distributed ledgers. It’s also not what makes them problematic. Yet it’s almost always what our experience has been.”
