Based off what? The option is credit cards or crypto.
They don’t need a valve pay got crypto. They could easily accept something like USDC to accept crypto and not deal with volatility.
For credit cards all that would do is bypass the intermediaries of they directly integrated to a credit card company, and then they’d still be subject to their rules that the intermediaries claim they violate to protect MC etc from having to say it themselves. It’d solve absolutely nothing.
Also a direct integration like that is a multi billion dollar business and all the effort and expenses that would come with that without even solving the root problem.
Tinidril@midwest.social 2 weeks ago
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.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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 companies.
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.
Tinidril@midwest.social 2 weeks ago
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.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
Ilovethebomb@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
I wonder if it would be simpler to launch a digital only credit card, IE no physical card exists? If you can load the card onto a device that supports tap to pay, that would be a very useful card.
Gigasser@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I mean…I wouldn’t mind a physical card if it looked cool and shit.