• sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    18 days ago

    They… kind of sort of already have.

    You can just throw money into your Steam account, via the mechanism they came up with for Steam Gift cards.

    So, buy a physical gift card, or just give Steam your bank/card info, take money out of bank, give to your Steam Gift balance.

    So uh, presumably, that Steam Gift Balance doesn’t exist in a bank anymore, beyond being a withdrawl from your account, its now just … a $USD value associated with your Steam account, that you csn now buy anything with, and your original bank/card company has no visibility into that second transaction.

    So… they could theoretically use what I just described above as a ‘workaround’, you just make the offending games only purchaseable via goon gift balance.

    • ugo@feddit.it
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      18 days ago

      Won’t work. I imagine PayPal’s stance here is along the lines of “we will not allow any payment to go through to Valve as long as there is content we don’t want on Steam”.

      If PayPal only stopped payments towards the content they don’t like, Valve wouldn’t have done anything. The fact Valve is removing content means that PayPal must have told them to remove the content or else they would stop allowing payments to Valve altogether. I can’t imagine a reality where this is not the case.

      • muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works
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        18 days ago

        PayPal wouldn’t dare attack Steam for accepting external payment methods with rules they don’t agree with and can’t change because they don’t own those companies. In addition to opening them up to potential lawsuits, it could catastrophically backfire if Valve simply said “fine, we don’t accept PayPal anymore, but we do accept crypto now.”

        PayPal would die in a week. The investors would drag out a guillitine by the next earnings call.

        • ugo@feddit.it
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          18 days ago

          I think that’s a naïve view. PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe are all american companies that are either happy or feel compelled to comply the administration of the fascist-in-command.

          Sure maybe this is PayPal doing their own thing, or maybe it’s part of a more organized scheme in which potential lawsuits don’t really matter.

          • muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works
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            17 days ago

            Paypal has a reputation for this kind of thing from before Trump 2.0 though. They’ve ben doing this since at least 2003.