Valve Restricts Steam Service For Non-Paying Users

Valve Restricts Steam Service For Non-Paying Users

| Source: Steam Author: Mark Campbell

Valve Restricts Steam Service For Non-Paying Users

Valve have chosen to limit access to certain Steam features as a means of protecting our customers from those who abuse Steam for purposes such as spamming and phishing, Meaning that users will need to spend $5 on the service before they can use them.

Here is what Valve have to say on the matter;

"Malicious users often operate in the community on accounts which have not spent any money, reducing the individual risk of performing the actions they do. One of the best pieces of information we can compare between regular users and malicious users are their spending habits as typically the accounts being used have no investment in their longevity. Due to this being a common scenario we have decided to restrict certain community features until an account has met or exceeded $5.00 USD in Steam."

This means that users of the Steam Service will be unable to use features like opening group chat, sending friend invites, using the steam market and using browser based and mobile based chat.

If you wish to use these features on Steam you will be required to have spent the equivalent of $5 US on Steam, either on Steam Games, a Steam Gift or on your Steam Wallet. Your Steam purchases will be tracked in USD, so non-US users will need to take account of this, especially as Valve converts it using daily exchange rates.

These changes will be very disappointing for users who only use Steam for Free-To-Play games or only has games which were gifted to their account or obtained from 3rd party key resellers. Hopefully this change will have the attended affect on malicious users, as the affect on certain legitimate Steam users will be substantial.

The cost of $5 is a very small amount, which converts to around £3.35 today. Most users of Steam will have already spent more than this amount, especially if you take advantage of Steam's many sales. To most new Steam users this be an annoying little niggle which pushes back them messaging their friends on their new Steam account by a few minutes, or however long it takes them to spend money on the service. Even if new users have no games which they want to purchase at this time they can simply put $5 onto their Steam wallet for later use.

You can find more information on these Steam Restrictions and how to get around them on Steam's Support site here.

You can join the discussion on Valve restricting the Steam Service to New Users on the OC3D Forums.

Valve have limited access to certain steam features for users who have spent less than $5. http://t.co/zbH49caZyD pic.twitter.com/TZKHLupnWp — OC3D (@OC3D) April 18, 2015

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