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Bitcoin Support is Coming to Steam

Last Updated March 4, 2021 4:48 PM
Samburaj Das
Last Updated March 4, 2021 4:48 PM

It has been a long time coming. Valve is gearing to implement Bitcoin support on Steam, going by screenshots taken from Steam’s private developer forums.

The rumors surrounding Steam’s support for Bitcoin payments came to a head in February this year, when new translation strings in Steam’s translation server suggested that the world’s biggest PC gaming distributor and store would soon offer the cryptocurrency as a payment option to its users.

Now, an update posted on the official and private developer forums confirms that Steam will soon start accepting Bitcoin as a mode of payment. The story originally broke via PCGamesSN , reveals no specific date set aside for the official implementation.

Bitcoin Support Coming Soon!

The post with the same heading as above was made as an announcement on Steam’s development forum, StemworksDev. It read:

We are excited to announce that Steam is going to start accepting payments via bitcoin.

“We’re using an external payment provider to process bitcoin payments to help partners reach more customers on Steam,” the post continued. The external payment provider that is almost certainly BitPay, as revealed by the February leak. CCN.com reached out to the payment processor at the time with a representative for BitPay stating “we don’t provide comment on internet rumors.”

The post continued:

Bitcoin is becoming an increasingly popular online payment method in some countries, and we’re enabling a system that insulates partners from risk and volatility while still providing value to the end customer.

The entire screenshot, taken from Reddit, is shown below:

Bitcoin Valve Steam

The acceptance of Bitcoin by digital distributor Valve for the biggest PC gaming platform in Steam, could very well prove to be substantially beneficial for the cryptocurrency due to the likelihood of increasing adoption by the global gamming community. Going by 2015 figures, Steam has some 125 million active users from all over the world.

An immediate and obvious application for bitcoin payments is the quickly mushrooming micro-transactions aftermarket for games, wherein users pay for in-game items and add-ons. With negligible transaction costs while transacting in the cryptocurrency, users may begin to look at the cryptocurrency as an alternative to paying for small denomination transactions with traditional currencies that incur transaction fees.

A representative for Valve could not be immediately reached for comment.

 Images from Youtube and Reddit.