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Steam payment headaches grow as PayPal is no longer usable for much of the world: Valve hopes to bring it back in the future, 'but the timeline is uncertain' (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 17 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I think the point is that Valve has the reach to start their own credit card network. It might be far fetched, but I'm old enough to remember when Sears launched the Discover card. It's totally doable for a company that already has the technical capabilities of Valve.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

    That is such a monumental task and valve only has between 350-400 employees.

    Stripe has around 8500 employees, and they only integrate with credit card banks who integrate to the credit card companies. But they finally got a license to directly integrate so we might finally see that in the near future.

    When sears made the discover card, they had hundreds of thousands of employees, and they didn't need to deal with all the digital shit we gotta deal with now.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    they had hundreds of thousands of employees, and they didn't need to deal with all the digital shit we gotta deal with now.

    They needed hundreds of thousands of employees because they didn't have "digital shit". Today, the entirety of Discover Financial Services is around 21k, and probably falling.

    If Valve did it, it wouldn't be under the Valve organization anyways. It would be a subsidiary, and Valve has plenty of cash-flow to build it out.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    The digital shit is so complicated it takes a huge amount of employees. Integrations with hardware (payment terminals), banks, setting up infrastructure so others can accept your payments, automated fraud detection, digital compliance in every country they want to target, it's huuuuuuge. Thousands of employees.

    It used to be do a carbon copy of the card and send us the receipt.

    Valves internal structure wouldn't scale to that size either, and they have no experience running a company of the size that would be required in a different structure.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    What payment terminals? They could go years just being an online credit card. Hell, initially it wouldn't be very different from any company that bills their customers. Start it as a Steam only thing, then add select partners one at a time. It doesn't have to be in your grocery store on day one, or ever really. Fraud detection is easy when you can just yank the game back. Sears couldn't do that when you bought a washing machine. I worked in banking infosec and I have no idea what "digital compliance" means in this context. The hardest compliance standards in this space are PCI, and those are defined and enforced on clients by the payment card industry itself.

    Valves internal structure wouldn't scale to that size either

    Which is why I specifically said it would be run as a subsidiary.

    and they have no experience running a company of the size that would be required in a different structure.

    Gosh, where on Earth could they find people with experience running a company that would look like 99% of the companies in existence?

    You're just throwing shit on the wall and hoping something sticks. You could neigh say anything, and nothing in the world would ever be accomplished.

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