[HN Gopher] Steam payment headaches grow as PayPal is no longer ...
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Steam payment headaches grow as PayPal is no longer usable for much
of the world
Author : mrkramer
Score : 30 points
Date : 2025-08-13 17:51 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pcgamer.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pcgamer.com)
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| "In early July 2025, PayPal notified Valve that their acquiring
| bank for payment transactions in certain currencies was
| immediately terminating the processing of any transactions
| related to Steam. This affects Steam purchases using PayPal in
| currencies other than EUR, CAD, GBP, JPY, AUD and USD."
| lesuorac wrote:
| So, this means a bank that handles EUR, CAD, GBP, JPY, AUD and
| USD isn't afraid of Visa/MasterCard and is willing to process
| the transactions while the other currencies don't have a
| willing bank?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| It means PayPal's bank(s) don't want to take foreign currency
| risks in non-major currencies.
| lumost wrote:
| Watching this from afar, I'm deeply confused about the recent
| trend of payment processors determining what types of vice can be
| accessed using their payment systems. I understand legal
| compliance, and cases where legal compliance is ambiguous
| (marijuana transactions in the US). However why are payment
| processors collectively policing what is acceptable in video
| games?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Payment processors are being sued by essentially religious
| fundamentalists. They are anti-porn, have very very good
| lawyers, and keep winning vague cases.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_on_Sexual_Expl...
| jjk166 wrote:
| Well first certain activities are very difficult to directly
| police so rather than getting better at dealing with the actual
| criminal behavior, you instead go after the money which is
| merely a proxy for the behavior.
|
| Unfortunately tracking monetary transactions and finding the
| people doing heinous behavior you're supposed to be policing is
| still pretty hard, so you you hand off that task to someone
| else. The best way to go after the money is to put tight
| restrictions on money processors to collect data and high
| penalties for looking the other way, so they'll do your job for
| you.
|
| Unfortunately determining which transactions are actually
| illicit is also pretty hard, so the payment processors go
| employ intermediate firms which give various buisnesses scores
| based on how well they comply with the payment processor's
| guidelines, which is a proxy for transaction suspicion.
|
| Unfortunately scoring businesses on how well they comply with
| guidelines is also hard, so the intermediates make the
| businesses adopt operating guidelines and just compare how well
| those match up to the payment processor's, which is a proxy for
| how well the company complies. Typically these guidelines have
| certain moderation requirements.
|
| Unfortunately moderating content is hard, so businesses that
| handle transactions for 3rd party content put the onus on those
| using their platform to self moderate, and put in place overly
| conservative moderation designed to satisfy the intermediates.
|
| Repeat this a few times for a few different classes of behavior
| and suddenly the financial infrastructure is one of the most
| powerful tools to manipulate the population at scale in the
| world, much to the satisfaction of those who came up with the
| system. It's amazing how much extra you can get done by not
| doing your job.
| OgsyedIE wrote:
| The payment processors are complying in advance with laws that
| don't exist yet but are expected to be made. The Visa Global
| Government Affairs Department and the Mastercard Government
| Affairs & Policy Team hire historians and political scientists
| with years of policy industry experience to assess the
| political risks of failing to align with the ruling party of
| the country they are headquarted in.
|
| For example, one of the major banks in Weimar Germany was
| Mendelssohn & Co., which did not align with the ideology of the
| post-1933 government. In 1938 the bank was liquidated and the
| assets forcibly absorbed into Deutsche Bank. The executives of
| Mendelssohn & Co. who were not already members of the Nazi
| party were all arrested and later murdered in the Holocaust,
| with the exception of Rudolf Loeb who fled to Argentina and
| died in 1966 and Paul Kempner who fled to the United States and
| died in 1956.
| cozyman wrote:
| have you considered that maybe they don't want to do business
| with companies that host child pornography and rape? You
| cannot deny that porn sites host that type of content because
| they were caught red-handed. So do you think it's not a big
| deal or that peoples access to self gratification is more
| important than the abuse of women and young girls?
| OgsyedIE wrote:
| Porn sites that host such content do not deliberately
| choose to host it, they are forced to host it by criminal
| users, because the website allows user uploads without
| content scanning, which allows users to upload anything and
| have it only get moderated after it is already live.
|
| The existence of companies that fail to do an excellent job
| of preventing the upload of child pornography and rape is a
| trade off.
|
| In exchange for giving section 230 to everybody, including
| porn hosts that fail to perfectly vet their content, the
| existence of youtube, hacker news and [insert your
| favourite social media] is enabled. Having the wrong things
| only get moderated after they are put on the internet,
| instead of before, is the price we pay to allow good things
| to get put on the internet.
|
| After all, you certainly wouldn't like to be in a situation
| where you reply to me and have to wait three hours for a
| janitor to check that your reply is acceptable before your
| reply could go live, would you?
|
| The current system avoids that hypothetical negative.
| dpoloncsak wrote:
| Bro that exact content gets uploaded to YouTube everyday
| too, but nobody's cutting Google's payments off
| altairprime wrote:
| Is it Fiserv? I notice Mastercard invested into PayPal and Fiserv
| just a couple months ago, and PayPal was already in business with
| Fiserv via Fastlane.
| upseo wrote:
| Ironically, porn website keep accepting Visa/Mastercard like
| nothing happened
| jeffwask wrote:
| and all the sports betting sites are doing just fine.
| linotype wrote:
| I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but can Steam just
| accept Bitcoin?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Steam DID accept bitcoins for like a year. They shut it down
| because of high fees, volatility, and because _nobody actually
| buys things with bitcoins_
| linotype wrote:
| Sounds like there may be no other option for some soon.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| I would buy a Steam gift card from a
| Walgreens/Target/whatever before I would deal with the
| hassle of Bitcoin.
| immibis wrote:
| Of course there will. Monero, Ethereum, USDC... All of
| which do a better job as currencies than Bitcoin btw.
| zdp7 wrote:
| Bitcoin cannot handle Steam's transactions per second. When
| I got my Steam Deck, it took me 15 minutes to complete my
| purchase. Off the top of my head, I think I was about
| 130,000 in the queue.
| elpocko wrote:
| They did for a while.
|
| https://www.pcgamer.com/50-of-transactions-were-fraudulent-w...
| siva7 wrote:
| This screams so hard to buy a bank to solve this problems out for
| the gaming industry. Valve has the capital to do this but
| probably not the CEO...
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| I know someone who bought a defunct bank to solve a family
| wealth repatriation catch-22 issue.
|
| This might be a sensible approach.
|
| Or, if they had some sense, they'd get into the credit business
| with their own "store card" that doesn't use V/MC. With this,
| they'd have the leverage to tell credit card processors to "get
| bent" should V/MC try telling them how to run their business
| and what content is acceptable.
| Habgdnv wrote:
| First they came for the porn, and I did not speak out - because,
| officially I do not watch porn.
|
| Then they came for cryptocurrency, and I did not speak out -
| because I am not a crypto bro.
|
| Then they came for the games, and I am a gamer... but there was
| no one left to speak for me, because payment processors had
| already "ethically" deplatformed everyone else.
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(page generated 2025-08-13 23:02 UTC)