Home News Eric Chang April 23rd, 2016 - 7:04 PM

Valve is starting to move towards using other forms of payment. Steam is reported to have said that “We’re using an external payment provider to process bitcoin payments to help partners reach more customers on Steam, if customers choose to pay via bitcoin, they’ll still be charged the price already set in the local currency.” With Steam using bitcoin this opens a new door to payment for the games you want to play! With this online currency this would allow people to spend less “real” money to purchase the entertainment that they want.

Although bitcoin prices change around Steam says that you will not need to keep track of the fluctuation of the bitcoin prices, since the prices will remain the same regardless. By having the prices stay the same, people could abuse this by buying a bunch of bitcoins when they are cheap to spend a lot less on games. However, these reports are not completely official, they are just reported from an announcement found on reddit. This would be great for their market since Microsoft has already been accepting bitcoin to purchase their games and other entertainment. With Steam joining Microsoft they would be able to attract more customers to also use their services. By doing this would give more variety for purchasing things.

Although this idea sounds great for consumers, this could potentially harm companies and Steam since people could spend a lot less on the games decreasing the amount of profit these companies can get. However, Steam has not officially announced this is happening, so they might be able to figure out some way to keep it fair without having to constantly change the prices as bitcoin changes.