Gaming firm Valve’s president Gabe Newell revealed in an interview that half of the Bitcoin payments executed on Steam Deck were fraudulent. Steam is the subsidiary of Valve, a gaming firm.
Valve had announced that it is discontinuing support for Bitcoin less than two years after it was added as a payment option on Steam in 2016. And then, Last Year in October, Valve enraged crypto enthusiasts by removing blockchain, crypto, and NFT games from the store.
Earlier Newell said that “The problem is that a lot of the actors who are in that space are not people you want interacting with your customers. We had problems when we started accepting cryptocurrencies as a payment option. 50% of those transactions were fraudulent, which is a mind-boggling number. These were customers we didn’t want to have,”.
Another issue, he said, was volatility, which meant that users were either underpaying or overpaying for games. The unpredictability of Bitcoin’s price made it “a complete nightmare” to use for transactions.
Newell, on the other hand, was not entirely dismissive of blockchain technology.
“There’s a lot of really interesting technology in blockchains and figuring out how to do a distributed ledger, [but] I think that people haven’t figured out why you actually need a distributed ledger,” he said.
