The value of bitcoin has seen a tremendous rise recently, with it even going past $12,000 today. Valve initially joined in on the action last year when it started accepting bitcoin for purchases on its PC gaming store, Steam. However, in a new blog post today, the company announced that it would no longer accept the cryptocurrency.
As per the announcement, the reasoning behind this decision is two-fold: rising transaction fees and bitcoin value volatility. Valve explains that when it initially enabled bitcoin payments, the transaction fee was at roughly $0.20, but now it is close to $20. "These fees result in unreasonably high costs for purchasing games when paying with Bitcoin," the company added.
Moreover, Valve said that "The high transaction fees cause even greater problems when the value of Bitcoin itself drops dramatically." Basically, if the value of bitcoin changes while a customer is finalizing an order, the order will either need to be refunded or Valve must ask the customer to transfer more bitcoin to cover the purchase. However, as Valve explains, "In both these cases, the user is hit with the Bitcoin network transaction fee again," and the number of customers affected by this issue is reportedly increasing.
While it is pulling the plug on accepting the cryptocurrency for now, Valve isn"t ruling it out completely, with it concluding the blog post saying that it may "re-evaluate whether Bitcoin makes sense for us and for the Steam community at a later date."
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