Valve president Gabe Newell says that half of Bitcoin purchases on Steam were fraudulent.
Back in April 2016, Valve began allowing Bitcoin as a purchase option on Steam. Though support did not last long, as in December of 2017, the company announced it was dropping Bitcoin support.
During a new interview with PC Gamer, Valve president Gabe Newell revealed that fraud played a considerable part in Steam ditching Bitcoin, and it sounds like he’s not a fan of cryptocurrency in general.
“The problem is that a lot of the actors who are in that space are not people you want interacting with your customers,” Newell said. “We had problems when we started accepting cryptocurrencies as a payment option. 50 percent of those transactions were fraudulent, which is a mind-boggling number. These were customers we didn’t want to have.”
These comments from Newell coincide with Valve’s Steam Deck launch, which he’s hand-delivering to some early adopters.
Steam Deck, our powerful, portable gaming PC is now shipping! The first batch of orders are on their way to reservation holders. Learn more about Steam Deck at the all-new https://t.co/4oKFrYoxfW and reserve your own. #SteamDeck pic.twitter.com/taty0P7Se3
— Valve (@valvesoftware) February 28, 2022
All of this partly explains Valve’s banning of all NFT and cryptocurrency games from Steam last year. Newell did claim the technology is not without merits, though he didn’t mince words about certain people’s intentions with NFTs.
“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,” Newell continues. “There’s a difference between what it should be and what it really is currently in the real world. And that’s sort of where we were at with the blockchain-based NFT stuff: so much of it was ripping customers off.”
Newell has similar reservations about the Metaverse.
Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.
