Recently, the President and co-founder of Valve Corporation (a video game platform) as well as the developer at Steam (a software distribution venue) – Gabe Newell – elaborated the reasons at the back of the company’s decision to eliminate support for Bitcoin (BTC) as a payment system on Steam.
Steam is known as a service by Valve to perform the digital distribution for video games and it was introduced as an independent software client during 2003’s September to assist Valve in the provision of their games’ automatic updates, and broadened to incorporate games presented by third-party publishers. The respective service has turned into a mobile and web-based digital storefront. As per a report on the behalf of PC Game, it was April 2016 when Bitcoin was presented as a means of payment on Steam.
As per Valve, BTC was eliminated in 2017’s December because of its price volatility as well as a considerable elevation in the charges for the processing of the transactions over the Bitcoin network. In recent October, Valve has updated the guidelines thereof regarding the game developers to take account of a unique crypto-related principle which is included in the Steamworks documentations’ ‘Onboarding’ section.
The latest rule states that developers will not be permitted to publish the applications, which are constructed on blockchain technology, on Steam for issuance, or allowance for NFTs or cryptocurrencies. As per a report from The Verge, the respective modification was initially mentioned on 14th October on the behalf of the developer of Age of Rust (a game based on NFT), stating that it was eliminated from the Steam venue due to the latest rule.
A couple of weeks ago, a report revealed that Wes Fenlon asked the president of Valve to remark on cryptocurrency. Newell responded to Fenlon that the issue relates to a large number of actors across the industry that the companies do not want to have any interaction with their consumers. He added that they underwent issues when they began embracing crypto for payments. Half of the respective transactions turned out to be fraudulent, showing a considerable proportion.
In his words, they did not want to entertain the performers of such transactions. He moved on to say that at present a considerably exciting technology exists in blockchains nevertheless there is a requirement for people to figure out why they require a distributed ledger technology.
