Meh. Paypal deserves everything bad that happens to it. Barely used it in the last few years. Definitely do NOT keep funds on there unless you're okay with just losing them.
this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2025
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I mean, I don't want to keep funds in PayPal, but they make a good proxy for a credit card.
Credit card POS systems permit for me to do (reasonably, lack a trusted display or input mechanism) secure transactions. But I can't do that with my computer
I don't have a way to use a smartcard reader and purchase things online. I have to send my actual credentials to a vendor and trust that they're treating them securely.
But if you use PayPal to pay at a vendor and then send that payment to a credit card, you avoid the security problems inherent to direct personal use of credit cards.
I'm not comfortable sending credit card data to sketchy-looking sites. With PayPal, worst case they don't send me whatever I paid for.
You should see if any of your credit cards allow you to make virtual credit cards. I can make an entirely new card with a unique number, expiration and code then lock/delete them or even restrict them to the first retailer they’re used at. I have like a dozen virtual cards that only work at a single retailer and lock them all until I need to use them. While locked all attempts to use them are declined.
I don't know if they do, but I've used a service before that provides similar functionality, a "temporary proxy credit card", which also permits one to not even provide one's real name and address to a vendor.
But it's more work to set one up than it is to do a PayPal transaction. Like, I could do it if a vendor doesn't permit for PayPal payments and I really really want what the vendor is selling, but PayPal does the big "the vendor doesn't get your credentials" security fix and avoids creating extra hurdles for a purchaser to jump through.
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Use a virtual card like the ones from privacy. You can select if it’s a one time payment or a monthly payment and set limits.
It saved me many times from companies charging me way more than I agreed to. (Bought a phone and never activated it, they tried to charge me $150 the next year, but I used a virtual card!)
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Long ago, I used to work for a small business that did most of its sales through eBay using PayPal. They were the single biggest impediment to our business, yoinking money away at the slightest excuse. It seemed like they just lived to screw us over.
If digital payments are becoming a service problem, Steam might develop their own.
I actually think ramping up their gift card distribution to more countries might be more effective imo, since people have access to cash or payment systems at physical stores.
Tbh I could not be arsed to go somewhere to buy a gift card to then use it. I'm more likely to use another platform to buy a game.
It’s not that I don’t have values. I just don’t feel strongly enough about using Steam to make that trip just for a gift card.
Digital gift cards would be okay though.
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For all the people saying Valve should become their own payment processor. PayPal employs 24,000 people. Visa employs 31,000. Mastercard employs 35,000. Valve employs 400. They're not going to 60x their employee count anytime soon.
They could do it with significantly fewer people, for themselves and even for GOG, Itch and potentially others. Their use-case is digital payments for games, which is limited in scope and risk. PCI and compliance is a PITA, but manageable.
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PayPal/Visa/MasterCard do way more than just payment processing for one company.
Valve wouldn't need 25,000 employees just to process payments for their own platform.
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Uh...just use your credit/debit card directly within steam?
Why rely on the scummiest third party payment app that's ever existed in the world?
I agree with the sentiment, but the reason they're looking at third party apps is to avoid the control that payment processing companies have over censorship following the whole Visa/MasterCard issue.
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Because, even if you do have a fully functional credit card which is not a given in many countries, US-based CC payment processors like Stripe are equally horrible third-party companies that gobble up all the data they can get their hands on somehow.
Seriously. You cannot even start "free trials" on US-based websites without handing over everything a bad actor would need for fraud or even identity theft.
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Perhaps it's time Valve get into its own payment business.
I expect the established banking/credit card industry is not likely to let Valve into their systems just to circumvent their restrictions. Valve would need to be able to validate Visa/Mastercard/Discover etc cards issued by any bank and be able to credit/debit them.
The problem is that if you make a PayPal equivalent, you're still beholdent to MasterCard and Visa since you need them for people to actually add money to their account, and if you want to make a direct competitor to MasterCard and Visa, that's basically impossible without government support because they're way too entrenched, why would a business support a random new payment method that nobody is using yet.
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Good time to delete my PayPal. 👌
I thought that my account was deleted years ago, but recently found out it still existed.
Deleted now!
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I wouldn't mind seeing a ValvePay system. 1% transaction fee, available to anyone who wants to use it, including OnlyFans, Itch, Kagura, DLSite, and others. Valve can team up with Japan, the EU, and Brazil to handle their respective ends of the business, so that Valve can focus on the United States.
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So paypal is unreliable, is the takeaway.
What happened to paypal?
Paypal changed banks and cannot accept currencies from most countries, resulting in the failures Steam is seeing. Source:
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/bpXXUDhPvYgsNn4SsrcdwD-1200-80.jpg
It's written in the article, related to the currency used.
you can no longer
♫ pay your own waaaaaaaay ♫
https://voidfox.com/blog/payment_processor_fun_2025_making_your_own_msp/
Someone breaks down why it'd be a monumental task for Valve/Itch to vertically integrate the whole payment processing thing into their business. The essay is highly readable.
The only thing I had to look up was
Escrow: a financial arrangement w/ a third party who holds/manages funds on behalf of two parties in a transaction
My takeaway was that Valve/itch/GOG would still be beholden to the banks who track porn as high risk for fraudulent transactions.
So what can we do about it? ~asking in earnest, btw. I buy porn and toys like a regular ass person, too~
Monero/XMR or GNU-Taler may be good alternatives. As for Banking, well.... There are OpenSource Core-Banking-Systems like Apache-Fineract
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If valve had the power to enter the payment processing industry, I would support.
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"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," the message states.
"We hope to offer PayPal as an option for these currencies in the future but the timeline is uncertain.
There are currency conversion services all over the world that manage to do this. How hard can it possibly be to partner with an existing service to do the conversion as part of a transaction?
EDIT: I guess it's possible to do the conversion yourself and have a bank account in one of those currencies to use to do PayPal, so the practical impact is probably limited, but still. PayPal's whole point is to facilitate moving funds from Point A to Point B. You've got one job here, guys.
Monero works for anonymous payments for cocaine and fent across international boundaries, it can more than handle the illicit video game trade
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.
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Okay, steam cards it is then.
Why isnt PayPal usable?
The short is that the acquiring bank of PayPal has banned transactions to Steam in all non-Western currencies (exception being Japanese Yen).
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I would think Steam is big enough to make deals with local card vendors in individual countries.
I bet that would also be a lot cheaper than PayPal.
No need for Steam to make their own as some suggest, it would be insane to have a system just for one business.
And it would be a serious limitation for Steam, because many won't bother signing up for it.
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