Steam Stops Bitcoin Support

Valve Stops Bitcoin Support In Steam

While Bitcoin breaks all possible records and grows in price with every day, Valve decided to stop the support for purchases with this currency through Steam. In the latest blog post, the company explains this decision. Among the other reasons, Valve listed high fees and volatility in the value of Bitcoin.

In the past few months, we’ve seen an increase in the volatility in the value of Bitcoin and a significant increase in the fees to process transactions on the Bitcoin network. For example, transaction fees that are charged to the customer by the Bitcoin network have skyrocketed this year, topping out at close to $20 a transaction last week (compared to roughly $0.20 when we initially enabled Bitcoin). Unfortunately, Valve has no control over the amount of the fee. These fees result in unreasonably high costs for purchasing games when paying with Bitcoin. The high transaction fees cause even greater problems when the value of Bitcoin itself drops dramatically.

The Steam team mentions that the value of Bitcoin has always been volatile, but over the last couple of months it had become extreme. Thus, Valve has become unable to support Bitcoin as a payment option. The company may re-evaluate the decision at a later date to see if Bitcoin makes sense for them and the Steam community alike. Initially, Bitcoin support was added in 2016 as a part of Valve’s partnership with Bitpay.

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