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Co-founder and Head of Steam stated fraud and false bitcoin payments as the reason for not accepting payments in crypto
Despite being an online and digital gaming distribution service provider, Steam does not accept payments in digital assets like bitcoin. The reason for this was explained by Head of Steam, Gabe Newell, while he was in conversation with a PCgamer representative. Surprisingly the cause was not its Volatility or irregularities but its fraudulent payments.
Co-founder Gabe said that the Steam video game company between 2016 to 2017 received an astonishing 50% false transactions in bitcoin. Gabe told since then, the company dropped out supporting bitcoin payments as it would not be beneficial in the long run and even turned out to be a loss making strategy.
Other than not integrating crypto, Steam is one of the companies in the gaming industry but doesn’t consider NFT integration. Today it’s a common belief that NFTs are and will be a crucial part of the digital world, especially the gaming industry. But Steam won’t allow NFTs on the platform, as reported earlier this year.
During the conversation, while discussing not accepting crypto payments by the company, Gabe said that the Volatility of crypto is another problem. Due to the Volatility of digital assets, users would either underpay or overpay for the same service.
But Gabe Newell was not completely against it. Although he said the company doesn’t want to have customers who make fraudulent payments, he did not dismiss the potential of blockchain as a technology. Moreover, he said that still, there was a lack of compelling use cases for the technology.
Specifically, Newell said that there is a lot of exciting technology in blockchain, and it is still figuring out how to use and act on the distributed ledger. But he thinks that people have not figured out their need for distributed ledgers yet.
Talking about NFTs, many people are riding the wave, either developers or buyers. Many experts and prestigious institutions consider NFT a frenzy and don’t find any sense in digital art. The same goes for Steam; Newell said that the problem with NFT was that mostly there were bad actors involved in it. Scams in NFTs seem apparent, although the marketplaces are doing their best in avoiding the incidents and removing the skepticism about digital art among users.
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Andrew is a blockchain developer who developed his interest in cryptocurrencies while pursuing his post-graduation major in blockchain development. He is a keen observer of details and shares his passion for writing, along with coding. His backend knowledge about blockchain helps him give a unique perspective to his writing skills, and a reliable craft at explaining the concepts such as blockchain programming, languages and token minting. He also frequently shares technical details and performance indicators of ICOs and IDOs.
