Every year, many games are disappearing, for various reasons. Every game that disappears from distribution is potentially lost to game preservation efforts. It is particularly worrying when games are potentially vanishing due to external pressure."
More like, video game companies can give a shit less about preservation unless it is making them money. They don’t care. And if anyone thinks that they care with all of the remasters/remakes they manage to make, that is only banking on your nostalgia and that is hand picked by them as to what they decide is worth making profit on. Sadly it works and sadly, they won’t bother with every game so I would stop getting your hopes up by now on video game companies in doing that.
And anyone is even lucky that video game companies lift a finger on aged copyrights that take decades somehow for them to get to, despite them raking in billions a year. You would think money would talk there but nah, just their laziness and carelessness.
Here in Europe, GOG support pretty much all the local payment systems (they’ll make available as selection the ones for your country on checkout) most of which are pretty straightforward to use nowadays an even come integrated with the banking phone apps.
Personally I switched from Paypal to one of those on my GOG purchases due to the whole censorship debacle.
PS: Steam is the same, by the way.
This whole payment crackdown situation seems like one of the actually valid uses of crypto.
It extremely is, unfortunately the whole space is still unregulated and 99.9% of coins are just vehicles for speculation and serve no real use as a financial product due to transaction speeds and fees.
I’ve been around the crypto space for quite a while now and its way more regulated than it ever was. 10 years ago, it seemed like it was a way for the people to control their money (before investment minded crypto bros ruined it all). Steam accepted it, you could buy things with it. Now it’s hard to get it without sending a photo of your ID to some exchange.
Sure but I’ve bought things where the site used a credit card crypto system where you bought some crypto that got immediately paid to the site. Sure it’s a shifty middle man situation but adding crypto address to steam payments could be a way to get around credit cards. Ie you can only buy Tentacle Demon Titty Twisters with Solana or whatever.
Tentacle Demon Titty Twisters
I checked… This isn’t a real game (yet).
I’m slightly disappointed.
Sorry you’re learning this now but… you just paid through a normal card. The crypto is just sold in real time and makes up the balance
It wouldn’t help in the situation where the payment processor refuses
We need a proper KYC-less way of paying in crypto, and have games that can only be bought in crypto instead of being removed from the store
But regulating crypto is the best way to kill it. It’s a pain to have to go though KYC currently
True, the best bet currently would be to stick to a ‘stable coin’ to avoid the drastic price fluctuations - but even having to deal with that will largely be a bridge too far for most would-be customers, I fear.
Even getting stable coins is an annoying process for the average person since either they take on large fees to get it, or have to get verified taking pics of themselves and give their ID to try to get into an exchange with lower fees.
Just an overall annoyance. And number of people willing to do that is so small compared to a majority of consumers which is what gives payment processors such influence.
It’s like trying to convince people to use fediverse alternatives over mainstream social media.
And biggest move payment processors have is pulling out completely if alternative payment methods they don’t like are added, which would pretty much lose all the consumers that matter financially.
Most realistic solution is likely Europe coming up with their own mainstream alternative to visa and mastercard than crypto to serve as an actual viable alternative with financial institution backing.
100% in agreement; those are the factors that I was alluding to when I said it would be too much for end users to deal with…
…and that’s all before we even begin to take into consideration regional pricing!
You could allow buying store credit or steam wallet funds in this case. Your crypto gets converted to a “stable currency” at the time of sale. You can do that right now by buying steam gift cards, just not directly from steam.
That’s definitely another workaround, for sure! I think our supermarkets here carry Steam gift cards - for example.
Though I imagine that those same payment processors could threaten to pull out of stores that carry Steam gift cards, and we’d be back to square one.
Additionally, it puts more burden on the end users to have to physically shop somewhere ahead of time - lowering convenience. Ultimately, as Valve themselves put it - piracy is a service problem. Any additional hurdles will deter some potential customers.
So in order for people to be able to spend their own money how they see fit, we need a new player in the field - either fiat (eg. via the EU) or reliable, low/no fee stable coin(s).
Ok, but who cares about the 99.9% of coins… If you’re buying something, use Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is the one that’s useless. It was the first crypto using very inefficient methods that don’t scale well, resulting in extremly high fees, times and power consumption, which equals to consumption of entire AI industry
But it’s the easiest to acquire and the most universally accepted, I’ve used it to buy things and it wasn’t hard.
I’m not saying it’s perfect, I’m not commenting on the ethical aspects, the environmental impact, any of that. Your thoughts on that are probably perfectly valid. But, if your goal is to use money that nobody can stop you from using, right now, Bitcoin is the right choice.
I mean, there is another good reason - privacy. Bitcoin is hardly private, which is the reason even dark web stopped using it and moved to privacy coins.
I mean as a buyer, use whatever coins you want, that’s fine. It’s not like you have to choose just one. You’re only limited by what coins any given store is willing to accept. That said, Bitcoin is accepted in more places than any other crypto. Similarly, there are more people with Bitcoin accounts than any other crypto. So as a seller, if you want to offer an option that more people can use, Bitcoin also makes sense from that angle.
But honestly, do whatever you want. Really that is the strength of crypto, the freedom to make your own choice and the inability of anyone else to stop you.
Bitcoin is probably one of the worse options for regular transactions imho
Use monero, it’s what bitcoin was supposed to be.
