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Comment on 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'

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Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

As I wrote elsewhere, Steam already supports all the European national payment systems, which are all more convenient than bank transfers.

Mind you, a lot of sellers in Europe do actually support bank transfer payments (which go via SEPA) but a lot don’t, plus it’s a bit less convenient than a dedicate payment system (though if you do the bank transfer from a banking app in your smartphone it’s reasonably simple plus some of those payment systems are really just a convenience layer - say an app scanning a QR-code for automated payment - over the whole “open the transfer screen and manually enter 20-something digits and an euro amount”).

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woelkchen@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

Mind you, a lot of sellers in Europe do actually support paying by bank transfer (which goes via SEPA) but a lot don’t

This is not about what “a lot of sellers” do, it’s what Valve could do as an easy alternative in one big region of the world.

though if you do the bank transfer from a banking app in your smartphone it’s reasonably simple plus some of those payment systems are really just a convenience layer - say an app scanning a QR-code for automated payment - over the whole “open the transfer screen and manually enter 20-something digits and an euro amount”

Making SEPA money transfer by scanning a Qr code from the bank’s app is literally a thing. That’s how I paid the dentist a couple of months ago.

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- Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Well, as I said, Steam already supports all the national payment systems in Europe and yeah, since I’ve switched away from PayPal in GOG, my game payments have also been done by scanning a QR code from the banking app (which goes via an intermediary but ultimately gets turned into a SEPA transfer).
  
  Sure, Steam could add bank transfer payments. They don’t need to as in Europe they already have the VISA/MasterCard/PayPal mafia problem solved, but it would be nice if they did (actually the whole split between payment-system and bank-transfer disappearing and it becoming a single mechanism is probably a good idea).
  
  The lack of a pan-European payment system that’s accepted anywhere in the World isn’t a problem for Steam, it’s a general problem for Europeans wanting to avoid using VISA/MasterCard/PayPal in all their payments no matter where the seller is located (plus even in Europe a bunch of things such as car rental often require a Credit Card). It’s solved for the likes of Steam, but not for other sellers (for example I buy eBooks books from a US based seller who doesn’t support anything but PayPal, VISA and MasterCard and the same when I buy stuff from AliExpress),
  
  When it comes to Steam, the problem of them being dependent for payments on VISA/MasterCard/PayPal is outside Europe, not in Europe.
  
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