Steam Co-founder Reveals Why The Platform Dropped Bitcoin Support

Key Insights

• Steam co-founder and president Gabe Newell revealed the reasons behind the platform’s short journey with BTC in 2016 and 2017.
• Newell believes that blockchain technology is interesting, but it still needs a compelling use case.
• Steam had also banned games with NFT and crypto integration, recently.

Valve’s video game digital distribution service Steam was an early BTC adopter. However, the platform’s journey with the top crypto asset was short-lived. Bitcoin was introduced as a payment method on Steam in April 2016 and removed in December 2017.

In a recent interview, Steam co-founder and president Gabe Newell revealed the reasons behind the platform’s short journey with BTC.

Steam Still Not a Crypto Fan

Steam’s mere 20 month BTC adoption back in the day raised considerable concern among Bitcoin enthusiasts. At that time, Valve stated that the reasons behind discontinuing BTC transactions were the coin’s volatility and ‘ a significant increase in the fees to process transactions on the Bitcoin network.’

More recently, however, Newell revealed that when the platform accepted bitcoin payments, an astonishing 50% of transactions turned out to be fraudulent.

This was one of the primary reasons behind the platform’s dropping support for Bitcoin payments in 2017.

When asked about crypto payments in a recent interview with a PCGamer’s representative, Newell said:

“We had problems when we started accepting cryptocurrencies as a payment option. 50% of those transactions were fraudulent, which is a mind-boggling number. These were customers we didn’t want to have.”

Newell also added that BTC’s volatility acted spoilsport calling the same ‘a complete nightmare.’ He further said that ‘people weren’t happy when a game could cost $10 one day and $100 the next.’ This meant that users were either widely underpaying or overpaying for games due to the assets.

NFTs Too Not on Steam’s List

Steam also banned games with NFT and crypto integration more recently, citing bad actors.

Contrary to popular belief, however, Newell highlighted how he was not entirely dismissive of blockchain technology in the interview. On the other hand, he believed there was still a lack of compelling use cases for the technology. He said:

“There’s a lot of really interesting technology in blockchains and figuring out how to do a distributed ledger, but I think that people haven’t figured out why you actually need a distributed ledger.”

Earlier this year, it was reported that Steam would not allow NFTs on its platform. According to Newell, the problem with NFTs is that ‘many of those involved were bad actors.’

Despite the scams and number of bad actors in the NFT space, platforms like Ubisoft are keen to find ways to monetize on the growing sector.