50% of transactions were fraudulent – Faced with the emergence of Bitcoin, many companies are choosing to add the asset to their means of payment. However, a group of diehard gamers are not planning to take the plunge anytime soon.
Valve and Cryptocurrency: I Love You Neither
Valvethe company behind the gaming platform Steam to one complex history with bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. Thus, in April 2016 the Stream platform introduced payments in Bitcoin.
An addition that will only be short-lived. Indeed, the BTC is removed from the platform in December 2017. At that time, Valve pointed out the volatilities inherent in Bitcoin, both on the value of the asset and on transfer fees.
Since then the ecosystem has changed a lot. Indeed, more and more projects linking video games and NFT have emerged. An opportunity that Valve could have seized, but it decided otherwise.
Thus, in October 2021, Steam has changed its terms of service to prohibit any “applications built on blockchain technology that issue or enable the exchange of cryptocurrencies or NFTs. »
Following this decision, dozens of games implementing NFTs in their universe were banned from the platform.
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Gabe Newell explains this choice
Start of the week, Gabe Newell was interviewed by Wes Fenlon of pcgamer.com. During this interview, Fenlon took the opportunity to question the CEO of Valve on the subject of NFTs and cryptocurrencies in general.
First, Gabe Newell revealed new elements that led to the decision to withdraw Bitcoin as a means of payment.
“We had problems when we started accepting cryptocurrencies as a payment option. 50% of these transactions were fraudulent, which is a staggering number. These were the customers we didn’t want to have. »
In addition, he added that the various fluctuations of Bitcoin were “a real nightmare” to manage.
Although the latter recognizes that there are “interesting initiatives in the area of distributed ledgers”, this does not always perceive the need to which they respond.
Regarding NFTs, his opinion has not changed either. Indeed, according to him, the promise of NFTs is not yet complete. According to him, there is too great a “difference between what they should be and what they really are”.
This also highlights the excessive proportion of projects whose sole purpose is to scam customers.
“ We said to ourselves, “Yeah, that’s not what we want to do, we don’t want to allow a lot of our customers to be taken advantage of”, and that’s what led to this decision. »
Anyway, it seems that we are not ready to hear again about cryptocurrencies or NFT from Valve’s side.
For its part, the world of e-sport continues to embrace NFT initiatives, particularly via play-2-earn. According to the predictions of the Newzoo company, 2022 could well be the year of the metaverse and P2E.
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