That’s actually a pretty realistic option given the 2 hour refund window.

Maybe allow it only after 1 successful deposit, and revoke it after 1 failure for a long period and X successful payments.

Also maybe only 1 game is playable if you happen to buy more than 1 in that time

The digital shit is so complicated it takes a huge amount of employees. Integrations with hardware (payment terminals), banks, setting up infrastructure so others can accept your payments, automated fraud detection, digital compliance in every country they want to target, it’s huuuuuuge. Thousands of employees.

It used to be do a carbon copy of the card and send us the receipt.

Valves internal structure wouldn’t scale to that size either, and they have no experience running a company of the size that would be required in a different structure.

And that’s back to my point of people not wanting to leave money places in case they want to buy a game in the future.

That is such a monumental task and valve only has between 350-400 employees.

Stripe has around 8500 employees, and they only integrate with credit card banks who integrate to the credit card companies. But they finally got a license to directly integrate so we might finally see that in the near future.

When sears made the discover card, they had hundreds of thousands of employees, and they didn’t need to deal with all the digital shit we gotta deal with now.

Even having to wait an hour is a fantastic way to lose a sale.

That takes time (days) that people don’t want to wait to make a purchase, nor do people want to leave a balance with companies or have to worry about topping it up so they have enough to buy the next game they happen to want without waiting.

Edit: Not to mention the risk of sharing bank account information.

The problem was the artificially congested network causing unreliable transactions that would take too long which would make the price too volatile. Additionally fees were getting ridiculous when they stopped accepting them due to this congestion

That led to too many refunds or failed payments or payments that were no longer sufficient.

That resulted In a customer service nightmare.

All of those problems can be avoided today using a stable coin not on the bitcoin network.

They could even issue their own stable coin if they were weary of being reliant on another. I think valve would be viewed as trustworthy in keeping the 1:1 backing in a bank account. They could partner with someone else to issue it, like coinbase and Gemini do USDC.

USDV

They know exactly how to do it as they did it before but had to stop because the bitcoin network was artificially congested with insane fees and it caused failed transactions or multi hour long transactions where the price dramatically changed. This resulted in complicated refunds or delays which resulted in unhappy customers.

They can avoid that all now by simply accepting stable coins like USDC. For every issued usdc there is 1 usd in a bank account somewhere. The value barely fluctuates. There are networks that can handle the volume this would create without getting congested nowadays as well.

Given the mess that happened last time though I imagine they are highly reluctant, although this could be enough motivation.

Based off what? The option are credit cards or crypto.

They don’t need a valve pay for crypto. They could easily accept something like USDC to accept crypto and not deal with volatility.

For credit cards all that would do is bypass the intermediaries if they directly integrated to a credit card company, and then they’d still be subject to their rules that the intermediaries claim they violate to protect MC etc from having to say it themselves. It’d solve absolutely nothing.

Also a direct integration like that is a multi billion dollar business and all the effort and expenses that would come with that without even solving the root problem.

This kind of problem is the exact reason crypto exists and is really the only solution even if it’s not perfect yet.

Edit: sorry, they could do a bank integration through ACH / EFT / Wires etc, but that’s slow and realistically not an option. If people want to buy something they won’t want to wait days for it.