https://voidfox.com/blog/payment_processor_fun_2025_making_your_own_msp/
Someone breaks down why it’d be a monumental task for Valve/Itch to vertically integrate the whole payment processing thing into their business. The essay is highly readable.
The only thing I had to look up was
Escrow: a financial arrangement w/ a third party who holds/manages funds on behalf of two parties in a transactionMy takeaway was that Valve/itch/GOG would still be beholden to the banks who track porn as high risk for fraudulent transactions.
So what can we do about it? ~asking in earnest, btw. I buy porn and toys like a regular ass person, too~
Monero or GNU-Taler TBH. There are OpenSource Core-Banking-Systems like Apache-Fineract
Use Monero I fucking guess?
Honestly fuck Paypal, don’t bring it back.
Asking as an ignorant person, what’s wrong with PayPal?
It was founded and continues to be run by some real shitbags.
They don’t like free speech, they’ve stopped processing payments on steam because they don’t like some of the games on the platform.
Isn’t that like all credit card payment processors? Maybe we should just use Monero
If valve had the power to enter the payment processing industry, I would support.
The most likely already half the knowledge, mainframe infrastructure is a different beast than servers but not a huge gab if you are Valve, they were responsible for half an EXABYTE of data traffic per month… IN 2015!!! Haven’t seen any new reports from them or Level 3 Com (unaware if they still partner with them), to know current levels but its for sure at least 10 exabytes annually
Okay, steam cards it is then.
Gotta find a way to a post-money world; money is the enemy.
Good riddance. Shady company from none other than the Muskrat.
No actually! Musks entire involvement with PayPal was being fired by the company he founded which then later down the road was bought out by PayPal when the people who fired him for incompetence turned it around and made it valuable enough PayPal wanted it
I think thiel is worse, also involved.
Good time to delete my PayPal. 👌
I can’t access mine, for about a year now. Suddenly, I’m not “verified” on the account I’ve had for years, and they require a phone number and license to verify (against what?). So, fuck em.
I thought that my account was deleted years ago, but recently found out it still existed.
Deleted now!
I haven’t used mine in several years, also deleted now 😁
Wish I could but Patreon uses it, and it’s the only way to pay with them.
Wow, really. That’s pretty crummy.
Yeah can’t even get paid without it. Believe it or not a lot of sites rely exclusively on Paypal. Lot of smaller businesses use it because it’s easier and cheaper then trying to build your own online payment processor. Tell truth I used it on my own sites when I sold things online. If I remember correctly Ebay was the first to make it the way to pay with them. I only remember that because its how I first ended up with Paypal.
Of course this was before Square, and Stripe was available.
Here’s a photo of the headquarters of PayPal in 2014, it explains why PayPal and eBay were so closely connected.
Wooow. Interesting tidbit. 🕵️♂️
Perhaps it’s time Valve get into its own payment business.
I expect the established banking/credit card industry is not likely to let Valve into their systems just to circumvent their restrictions. Vabve would need to be able to validate Visa/Mastercard/Discover etc cards issued by any any bank and be able to credit/debit them.
The problem is that if you make a PayPal equivalent, you’re still beholdent to MasterCard and Visa since you need them for people to actually add money to their account, and if you want to make a direct competitor to MasterCard and Visa, that’s basically impossible without government support because they’re way too entrenched, why would a business support a random new payment method that nobody is using yet.
I had heard that Steam used to accept crypto but the volatility of the currency was a major issue. Maybe try cryptocurrency again.
Perhaps they could set up a system where they could make a sale in bitcoin or something then immediately convert to USD. They could add a processing fee to the sale to cover any conversion fees.
I know nothing about actually doing any of this beyond having bought and sold BTC in the past. I was just wondering if it would be possible.
The fundamental flaw with all current crypto is that it’s far too volatile to use as a currency. The only reasonable use for it at the moment is as a high risk commodity which is the vast overwhelming majority of what we see. Any so called “currency” that regularly sees price swings of multiple percentage points in a day isn’t actually a currency and is unsuitable to be used as one.
Adding to this is the problem of transaction times. Actual payment systems typically have transaction times of less than a second, occasionally a second or two. Bitcoin in contrast can take multiple minutes, sometimes hours or even days to confirm a transaction. There’s no way for Valve to accept and then immediately convert Crypto to USD. The process would inherently involve at least two transactions, one to transfer the crypto to Valves wallet, then a second to transfer from Valves wallet to the exchanges wallet, and only then could Valve attempt to sell that crypto. The financial uncertainty involved in all of that is entirely unacceptable for a business.
At this moment there is only one potentially viable way of approaching this and it’s government regulation of some kind. Either government needs to regulate that payment processors get no say in the contents of customers business, or else they need to regulate the adoption of a neutral digital payment system. One possible example of what that could look like would be the GNU Taler system which might eventually become a payment system in Switzerland but isn’t yet.
Genuine question, but what about stable coins?
At this moment there is only one potentially viable way of approaching this and it’s government regulation of some kind. Either government needs to regulate that payment processors get no say in the contents of customers business, or else they need to regulate the adoption of a neutral digital payment system.
I think it’s more likely for me to win the mega jackpot, and I don’t even buy lottery tickets.
Bitpay allows companies to accept crypto payments and receive it as real currency automatically.
Your debit card transaction does not happen in seconds, it actually takes days to complete.
There’s no way for Valve to accept and then immediately convert Crypto to USD.
I didn’t realize that. It does seem an insurmountable problem.
What about the so called ‘stablecoins’?
(Although those sound dodgy AF to me?, not backed 1-1 anymore?)
Stablecoins are the answer here. Theoretically though if cryptocurrencies were very widely used they’d be more stable, like actual currencies (probably $100T market cap of actual use, not just investments, so could be decades or never).
Note stablecoins have “institutional/existential” risk. Dai is decentralized but as seen with Terra/Luna they can be attacked in many ways.
Generally… Just keep a small balance in crypto, whatever you plan to spend in the next few months.
Stable coins… Aka gold? I heard gold is pretty stable.
Yes sir, I’d like to buy this game with this bar of gold. At Steam’s headquarters.
Cryptocurrency that is pegged 1-1 against a normal currency. I think they have some limitations though.
Why not crypto?
No genuinely, why not something like Monero?
For all the people saying Valve should become their own payment processor. PayPal employs 24,000 people. Visa employs 31,000. Mastercard employs 35,000. Valve employs 400. They’re not going to 60x their employee count anytime soon.
PayPal/Visa/MasterCard do way more than just payment processing for one company.
Valve wouldn’t need 25,000 employees just to process payments for their own platform.
They could do it with significantly fewer people, for themselves and even for GOG, Itch and potentially others. Their use-case is digital payments for games, which is limited in scope and risk. PCI and compliance is a PITA, but manageable.
Is it a payment processor problem, or a card issuer problem though?
It sounds like some payment processors are treating mastercard’s contractual requirements as a hard risk in this case - maybe it’s justified, maybe not. Try getting corporate lawyers to be risk averse in the finance world. Mastercard doesn’t seem to want to soften their wording but talks platitudes in public statements. Shrug.
Meh. Paypal deserves everything bad that happens to it. Barely used it in the last few years. Definitely do NOT keep funds on there unless you’re okay with just losing them.
I mean, I don’t want to keep funds in PayPal, but they make a good proxy for a credit card.
Credit card POS systems permit for me to do (reasonably, lack a trusted display or input mechanism) secure transactions. But I can’t do that with my computer — I don’t have a way to use a smartcard reader and purchase things online. I have to send my actual credentials to a vendor and trust that they’re treating them securely.
But if you use PayPal to pay at a vendor and then send that payment to a credit card, you avoid the security problems inherent to direct personal use of credit cards.
I’m not comfortable sending credit card data to sketchy-looking sites. With PayPal, worst case they don’t send me whatever I paid for.
Use a virtual card like the ones from privacy. You can select if it’s a one time payment or a monthly payment and set limits.
It saved me many times from companies charging me way more than I agreed to. (Bought a phone and never activated it, they tried to charge me $150 the next year, but I used a virtual card!)
Look into the Privacy app (kind of a terrible name honestly). It’s effectively a Paypal type system but one that issues CC numbers for each vendor or transaction and allows you to easily audit and manage them. It’s not perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than Paypal.
You should see if any of your credit cards allow you to make virtual credit cards. I can make an entirely new card with a unique number, expiration and code then lock/delete them or even restrict them to the first retailer they’re used at. I have like a dozen virtual cards that only work at a single retailer and lock them all until I need to use them. While locked all attempts to use them are declined.
I don’t know if they do, but I’ve used a service before that provides similar functionality, a “temporary proxy credit card”, which also permits one to not even provide one’s real name and address to a vendor.
But it’s more work to set one up than it is to do a PayPal transaction. Like, I could do it if a vendor doesn’t permit for PayPal payments and I really really want what the vendor is selling, but PayPal does the big “the vendor doesn’t get your credentials” security fix and avoids creating extra hurdles for a purchaser to jump through.
My provider unfortunately doesn’t, so I have to rely on PayPal as the proxy. I use USD, so I guess I won’t be too affected, but it is a bummer that I can’t seem to ditch them.
It’s not a credit card, but I use Revolut and they have temporary virtual debit cards on their free plan even. They work a single time per generated card only. Great also if you want a 1 month subscription of something and don’t trust yourself to cancel it.
Btw this feature is exactly why certain companies are also banning Revolut cards; turns out authorizes for payments on a card that is about to disappear is a great way to not have to pay for anything (the Dutch OVPay had fraud issues with these cards for example).
Long ago, I used to work for a small business that did most of its sales through eBay using PayPal. They were the single biggest impediment to our business, yoinking money away at the slightest excuse. It seemed like they just lived to screw us over.
The funny thing is that because Master Card is too afraid to actually accept any responsibility, using Master Card directly is still an option:
That means Master Card-powered PayPal Card should work.
This sort of situation is exactly why I got a PayPal card 18 years ago when they first started offering it.
If digital payments are becoming a service problem, Steam might develop their own.
I actually think ramping up their gift card distribution to more countries might be more effective imo, since people have access to cash or payment systems at physical stores.
Tbh I could not be arsed to go somewhere to buy a gift card to then use it. I’m more likely to use another platform to buy a game.
It’s not that I don’t have values. I just don’t feel strongly enough about using Steam to make that trip just for a gift card.
Digital gift cards would be okay though.
you don’t have to make a trip just for that. you can just visit the shop next time you’re nearby.
That’s fair. The ball is in Paypal’s court anyway, but I guess digital/prepaid gift cards could also be on the table as well.
Gift cards is ab obvious way to bypass regional pricing, so a low-income country like mine could get more harm than good (as in fraud increases and the storefront gives up ın regional pricing from that point on).
Also, when convenience of online shopping is lost, why would I bother wearing my shoes and get out to sun to purchase a gift card, while I can buy a physical copy of the game instead?
For a lot of games, especially games with low budgets that don’t make physical distribution possible (most indies on PC), they’re reliant on digital distribution, and Steam is the place for the majority of PC gamers to obtain their library. Also generally speaking for PC, physical distribution (apart from pirated files and niche scenarios), is basically already dead.
As for the regional pricing issue, Steam/Valve already looks at IP and regional activity (say a NA user temporarily VPN’s into Ukraine for a cheap price and then kills the VPN and plays from an NA ip afterwards) to flag accounts and restrict them from purchasing games in the future or gifting them to others. Because of that, I don’t think an increased volume of gift cards would be the issue (stolen credit cards are far more of a headache for Valve).
I wonder if this will just make them return bitcoin as an option to pay. It’s been 8 years since they dropped it and it has fewer large fluctuations now, it seems.
and it has fewer large fluctuations now, it seems.
106 to 76 to 120 in the last four months is not large fluctuation? 30 % variance is quite high to me.
There are better cryptocurrency options to Bitcoin now, including stabletokens that are specifically designed for this purpose. Hopefully they go to one of those instead.
I don’t understand why people first think of memecoins when there are a few stablecoins like USDT or USDC?
it’s also not always easy to buy those. nobody wants to use cryptocurrency unless it is easy to get cryptocurrency
isn’t USDT tether, which is completely unbacked?
Because the “have fun being poor (as I gamble my life savings on a website with pump and dump basically in the name)” crowd outnumbers and is much louder than the “I am using this decentralized currency because authoritarians will inevitably strangle anything with a single point of control” crowd.
Branding and public image is a large part of currency circulation, as far as I’m aware. My first impression and instinctual thoughts on cryptocurrencies as a whole are vehicles for money-laundering and general fraud, even if there are examples to the contrary.
Same reason why the Russian ruble or the Chinese Yuan aren’t generally used as foreign reserve currencies for the majority of nations - too volatile, and histories of manipulation.
It still fluctuates a lot. If they were going to accept bitcoin I as a game developer would want them to get it into something a bit harder almost instantly. I don’t want it staying in bitcoin here it can lose its value, for no reason at all, at the drop of a hat. Under the current system steam tend to hold on to money until the end of the month and then pay you, that wouldn’t work with bitcoin.
Bitcoin cash maybe as it’s not limited to a small block size, but as others have said, there are probably better options out there now.
Is PayPal still a musk toy?
So paypal is unreliable, is the takeaway.
