Mind you, a lot of sellers in Europe do actually support paying by bank transfer (which goes via SEPA) but a lot don’t

This is not about what “a lot of sellers” do, it’s what Valve could do as an easy alternative in one big region of the world.

though if you do the bank transfer from a banking app in your smartphone it’s reasonably simple plus some of those payment systems are really just a convenience layer - say an app scanning a QR-code for automated payment - over the whole “open the transfer screen and manually enter 20-something digits and an euro amount”

Making SEPA money transfer by scanning a Qr code from the bank’s app is literally a thing. That’s how I paid the dentist a couple of months ago.

That’s for bank transfers, not for payments.

Let be blow your mind: Transfer money to Valve’s EU bank account, get the game in return.

That works for account to account transfers

Yeah, so? https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/sepa-instant-credit-transfer

The online payment world is still a lot more fragmented.

Valve literally only needs an EU bank account. Doesn’t help the rest of the world but the outlandish claim was that within Europe Valve would need to support “at least one local payment system” per country and that’s just wrong.

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.

They could, but in Europe each country has at least one local payment systems.

Huh? https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/integration/retail/sepa/html/index.en.html