Valve’s boss also revealed why Steam had moved away from bitcoin as a payment method quite quickly.

In an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun, Gabe Newell said acquisitions and mergers in the games industry should be about creating more value for developers and consumers alike. “If you aren’t doing something like that, then those sorts of acquisitions and consolidations don’t end up positively, and if you do do it, then you know, good, you’re making the gaming market better,” Newell said. He claims that the PC industry would not tolerate people moving towards closed platforms and rules out the possibility of consolidation, making games unavailable to PC users or those with Steam Decks.

“People like the PC, and despite lots of people preferring other outcomes, PC gaming continues to improve year after year after year, the relative growth versus other closed and proprietary platforms continues to get better,” Newell added. He then got a question about Valve’s stance on NFTs and blockchain-based games. He thinks it’s an exciting technology, and there’s a rationale for some of the ideas that proponents are saying (e.g. owning digital objects).

“The people in the space, though, tend to be involved in a lot of criminal activity and a lot of sketchy behaviours. With the actors currently in this NFT space, they’re not people you want to be doing business with. That doesn’t say anything about the underlying technology; it’s just a reflection of the people right now who are viewing it as an opportunity to rip customers off or engage in money laundering or other things like that,” Valve’s boss said. Steam has previously accepted bitcoin as a form of payment, but we will come back to that later.

Regarding Steam Deck, Newell said that the price of the entry model ($400) was more critical for them than it should have been. “I think we obsessed about it very hard, and then the people who preorder it are all buying the most expensive SKU, way more so than we expected, so the signal that we’re getting from customers is that they would have preferred… I mean, not preferred; we’re selling many entry-level SKUs. But if you’d asked me, I would have thought it was 60-70% of that were going to be the low-end SKU, and it’s reversed.”

But let’s talk about bitcoin. Steam introduced it as a payment option in April 2016 and then removed it in December 2017, as it was very volatile in price and transaction processing costs had increased significantly. PCGamer also had a chat with Gaben, who openly said, “The problem is that a lot of the actors who are in that space are not people you want interacting with your customers. We had problems when we started accepting cryptocurrencies as a payment option. 50% of those transactions were fraudulent, which is a mind-boggling number. These were customers we didn’t want to have.” One day, a game could cost ten dollars and one hundred the next one.

“There’s a lot of exciting technology in blockchains and figuring out how to do a distributed ledger, [but] I think that people haven’t figured out why you need a distributed ledger. There’s a difference between what it should be and what it is currently in the real world. And that’s sort of where we were at with the blockchain-based NFT stuff: so much of it was ripping customers off. And we were like, ‘Yeah, that’s not what we want to do, we don’t want to enable screwing large numbers of our customers over,’ so that’s what drove that decision. There’s nothing inherently about distributed ledgers that makes them problematic. It’s just so far that’s almost always what our experience has been,” Newell added. And we can’t argue with this mindset.

Source: Gamesindustry, PCGamer