Steam, Valve’s PC gaming platform, has officially dropped Bitcoin as a payment option when using the service. Valve announced today. The company said it won’t accept the cryptocurrency any longer due to “high fees and volatility” in its value. Valve stated that the transaction fee charged to each customer has risen from 20 cents to almost $20 as of today. Unfortunately, Valve does not have control over the transaction fee and as a result isn’t keen on the cryptocurrency’s volatility.
Valve stated that this is problematic in part because Bitcoin’s value is only guaranteed for a set period of time. “So if the transaction doesn’t complete within that window of time, then the amount of Bitcoin needed to cover the transaction can change. The amount it can change has been increasing recently to a point where it can be significantly different,” Valve said.
Those who do trade Bitcoin can easily trade their currency for cash via wallets to be spent on the platform.
In other Steam news, the platform recently hit a milestone of 17 million concurrent players, read more about this achievement, here.
‘Steam, Valve’s online platform has just hit an amazing milestone, the gaming platform has just hit 17 million concurrent users which means, more people were playing Steam at the same time than ever bought a Wii U. Or PS Vita. Or Dreamcast. Or Sega Saturn. Just to be clear, concurrent refers to the number of people using the platform at once and not the total amount of users.’