Aren't cards last century technology? I'm paying with my phone anyways. Seller can use phone as well. Why does it need to involve incumbent banks and terminal providers at all? If Valve started something like that the banks would bang on its door relentlessly just to not be left out of the loop.

Gaming is the business bigger than movies, music and books combined and Valve is Google of games.

> Gaming is the business bigger than movies, music and books combined and Valve is Google of games.

Valve is not Google of games, the app stores Google and Apple has dwarfs steam sales and the individual game consoles are similar size as the steam store.

> I'm paying with my phone anyways

Right, since the phone ecosystem is large enough to be its own payment processor, unlike steam.

Phone is the platform. You can put any payment system there. In various countries it was figured out in a lot of different ways. Valve with global reach could really compete.

Also Google Play store might have more consumers and or sales but they are of worse quality. It's scummy, it's exploitative. The whole system is propped up by whales decieved by gambling mechanics and deceptive ads. It's nowhere close to real world economy. Valve is much closer. Despite using Play Store since it came to existance I never paid for anything on Google Play because I don't trust it enough to add a single payment method there.

> Aren't cards last century technology?

I don't pay with credit or debit card for steam, I can use Blik, which is paying with my phone or one other payment processor, but I'm not in USA. This is USA problem.

My point exactly. Valve could easily introduce something like Blik globally.

You should maybe look up how paying with your phone works.

And what in your mind is the thing banks will be begging Steam to be let in on? This reads like payment processing fan fiction.

I know how it works because connecting your bank account to your phone can be crappy and fiddly as it goes through Visa/Mastercard. But it works that way just to ride on customers of legacy systems. It doesn't have to work that way if you bring your own customers. It would have to start online of course and eventually move through phones to the real world.

I don't trust Paypal, at all, because its brand is damaged beyond repair, but I would put enough money on Valve account to do all of my online shopping with it if Valve did even just what Paypal does (even without connecting Visa or Mastercard directly).

It seems like you're treating your personal knowledge and preferences as the basis for Valve to take on an entirely new source of revenue and risk. It's a fantasy.

Even if 100% of Valve's user base cared as much as you (they do not), why would Valve take on the massive risk of connecting to its users' bank accounts? Of having to collect on debts? etc.

> It's a fantasy.

Of course.

> Of having to collect on debts?

Why would they need to do that? "Credit" part of credit card is completely irrelevant when it comes to payment systems. It's a trick to milk the customers. Why would Valve lower themselves to that level?

My point is, with crystal clear, pro-consumer reputation Valve could be real alternative to gambling industry of Google Play store, payday loan business of VISA/MasterCard and gym membership style of extortion of other services. And betting on consumer was a recipe for success for Valve so far.

Why would they try? Because it's always good to 10x your revenue.

The backend of electronic payment is a huge mess of microservices, and lots of those services has portions of infra shared with Visa/Mastercard. So whichever alternative service you use is likely vulnerable to the same pressure.

The point is to cut MasterCard and Visa out of the loop entirely. Payment systems in many countries don't have them as intermediary. Payments in China work perfectly well without them. Or in Germany. Even Poland has widely used alternative payment scheme. With future European digital currency a lot of commerce will be done completely without any involvement from Visa and MasterCard.

> You'd have to onboard hundreds/thousands of banks

It's perhaps a good idea. It's likely that not very many banks and terminal makers and payment processors really matter. It would be a little delicate because the ones that matter would be pressured or at least would feel pressured NOT to participate on threat to their currently main business.

And the project doesn't have to become mainstream probably, just accepted "enough".

A better reason is that it's not really Valve's battle. They have plenty of other business. They don't need to fight this war. A company like OnlyFans, yeah perhaps they do - but they are likely much smaller.

Valve is in a situation that helps: they charge separately for each item. Some that the credit card networks are okay with and some that they are not. So they could support two regimes on their site: some items could only be paid through the Valve new card network (and gift cards and bitcoin), while other items could be paid through all the above plus the legacy credit card networks.

Valve (and/or OnlyFans) then gets paid for trying to enter the very lucrative payment network business. And gets to use these separate charges / two regimes of payments to distribute content that would be too dangerous within the current single payment framework.