Never liked gift cards. Money you can only use in one place, and you don’t even save any money when buying it.
You can walk down to a local Walmart and slap a $20 on the counter, walking away with funds even if you have no car and no credit card.
Hard for a teenager to get steam games without this.
I was not aware that could be a problem (had a debit card £ as a teen when online buying/downloading games started).
even if you have a debit card, in much of the world unless it’s a visa/mastercard it’s not going to be accepted in many places online
my debit card (in canada) uses interac. it’s accepted basically everywhere in physical stores, but online it’s pretty much useless if you don’t also have paypal (which is also not accepted everywhere a credit card would be)
That sucks. Hopefully something can change that :/
I’m hoping GNU Taler takes off.
I’ll concede your point, though there are generic pre-paid cards that are not linked to a specific store.
Those have fees, though. Back when I didn’t have a bank account, it was already over $5 per card, so I assume it’s much higher 15 years later.
We see today how bad it is to rely so much on visa and paypal for steam payments when they can control what they want and what they don’t want to see being sold on steam. I think gift cards could be an interesting alternative but idk.
IMO we need regulation. Banks and payment processors should not be allowed to refuse service to any legal activity.
That concerns are also really inconsistent. They don’t seem to have a problem with cigarettes and alcohol, and are quite prepared to authorise payments to strip clubs.
But they have a problem with porn games. How does that track?
I’m with you but I also can see them useful to a degree. Children often want to get games from steam/nintendo store/EGS vbucks/etc and parents really do not want to enter their credit/debit card data everywhere under the anxiety of child abusing that card. Gift cards solve this problem.
Couldn’t they just implement a credit system? Parent does a one time purchase for Steam bucks and then they use that until they run out.
They do have such a system. If you click your username on the top of your desktop client (I’m on the Linux client but believe the windows one also works like this), there should be an item “View my wallet”, this will take you to a page where you can add money to it.
Or if it only shows up for me because I have a balance (sold some steam cards), go to Steam -> Settings and there should be an “Add funds” button right below your profile pic in the Account tab.
They only seem to support specific values (mine does 5, 10, 25, 50, 100). Oh and there’s a link to redeem gift card codes; you might already use this page to get there if you use gift cards.
I always get them at Sam’s Club, they’re around 5% off the face value there. Can’t remember the exact price but was somewhere around $18.92 for a $20 card. Not a huge discount but will definitely miss it.
A coffee shop used to offer a $10 gift card for every $40 gift card you bought (or something like that) around Christmas. It was meant to get people to buy them as gifts but we knew we were going to go there throughout the year anyway so we loaded up for ourselves.
Same but with haircuts. My mom used to get 4 for $40 cards around the holidays. She was very astute when it came to finding actually good deals.
I’m not the biggest fan of them either, but there are lots of ways to get them for an amount greater than you paid.
Also there is something to think about with gift cards I asked a friend why they always got me them as gifts and found what they said interesting. For them they wanted to get me a game, a Lego Set, or something similar. The gift cards let my friend give a gift while I get to choose which specific thing I get.
and you don’t even save any money when buying it.
The only time gift cards really make sense is when you can buy them for less than face value.
Bad thing in my opinion.
I used them to menage my funds to not to overspend.
Need to connect card to account, leaks happen.
More info to steam, you could use steam even without giving any personal details just by buying physical gift cards.
I had given them few times as gift.
Relatives would give them as gifts to me as well.
I am sad about this.
One thing that can help with leaks is to not save your CC info with the account. Then it just gets used for the transaction and isn’t saved outside of the payment system, so less of a vector for it to make it on a leak database. Also helps control spending by adding more inertia between this side and the far side of a purchase.
Change to a bank that cares enough of their customers to enable virtual cards, you can create and revoke numbers as much as you like.
Revolut single use cards. No saving, no leak.
I think there are others as well
You good bro? ;)
I remember saving up for those and then spending the money in Steam sales. Shame for all the kids who want to buy games that can’t use their parents credit card.
parents should just use PayPal. it requires you to approve purchases.
that or setup a steam family.
No one should use PayPal if they can help it.
I have to use it for a side gig I do. I make sure that as soon as money hits PayPal it goes right out and into my bank account. Fuck PayPal.
My bank lets me set up a kid debit card, I can see and approve purchases and set limits.
Also, IMO kids should either ask their parents to buy a game for them, or be old enough to have their own bank account.
Giving your kid a credit card is how they end up with a gambling addiction because AAA is an unsanctioned casino.
If my parents had that for me I wouldn’t have been able to buy and play half the games I did.
Gonna buy up all the local stock and re-sell it for profit
Tap for spoiler
/s
Scalping gift cards. Now that is a million dollar idea! (in debt)
Word on the street is that a $20 steam gift card today is worth $22 tomorrow.
Well, no more Steam gift cards as birthday presents from my employer, I guess. The colleagues will have to come up with something else. How annoying.
They can still do digital steam gift cards
This really sucks. I give and receive Steam cards as gifts frequently and I know many people that only use steam because they can use cash to buy them. Most of these people will just pirate games now I imagine.
That sucks, they were the best for shady deals. Buy em with cash, and treat it like cash.
Say you didnt read the article without saying it
Scammers use steam cards to launder money. Hence the shady deals I talk about. I reread the article and I don’t see how my initial comment would make you think I didn’t read the article.
I hate gift cards but work gives them out for our birthdays each year. I always request games related gift cards. To hear that Steam are no longer selling them is disappointing considering that it’s my main gaming platform.
So, what scams are happening? Is this a “do not redeem” type of thing?
There are a lot of scams out there but a common one is to trick people into buying gift cards and giving scammers the info.
(Like calling your grandma and telling her you got kidnapped with an AI impersonation of your voice) or (stealing credit cards, using them to buy a shit load of cards and flipping those cards before the credit companies can cancel them)
Scammers sell the cards on 3rd party sites for cash and those sites resell them for a profit. You can often find deals for less than in retail stores.
It’s a grey area tho as there are some legitimate people just selling cards they got for a holiday and don’t want.
