Steam didn’t stay on the Bitcoin bandwagon for very considerable time. Bitcoin was added to Steam as a means of payment in April 2016 but was withdrawn in December 2017 owing to the market fluctuations of Bitcoin and “a considerable rise in the costs to execute trades on the Bitcoin blockchain,” according to Valve.
Coin and NFT games were recently banned by Valve, a move that angered cryptocurrency enthusiasts. I inquired about that restriction and his thoughts on bitcoin in general when I spoke with Valve CEO Gabe Newell last week about the Steam Deck. As it stands, I’m not a big fan of Steam at all.
In Newell’s view, a large number of the participants in that arena are not individuals you want dealing with your consumers. “As a result of our decision to embrace cryptocurrency, we encountered difficulties. A staggering 50% of the transactions were bogus, making this a very shocking statistic. These were the kinds of clients we preferred not to deal with.”
When asked about the volatility of Bitcoin, Newell said that it was “a terrible disaster” and that customers weren’t pleased that a game might cost $10 one a particular day and $100 on the subsequent day. With the current emergence of cryptocurrency games and NFTs, his attitude hasn’t altered.
“I believe people have not yet worked out why they truly require a distributed ledger,” Newell observed. “There was a plethora of very intriguing technology in blockchains and finding out the manner of implementing a distributed ledger.”
“Things aren’t quite as they should be in the actual world, as we’ve seen in previous examples. It was a similar situation with blockchain-based NFTs, where clients were ripped off. The fact that we didn’t want to facilitate the mistreatment of a big number of our consumers was the driving force behind our action. As far as distributed ledgers are concerned, there is nothing intrinsically incorrect with them. As of now, that’s been the case for us almost every time.”
