That sounds like a really bad idea. It would be insanely difficult to pull off, require thousands of devices, deals with government, be incredibly expensive up front, etc.

Steam wallet cards sold in store already do the same thing and cost basically nothing to set up.

Stores can already do those. Many in Asia have this type of kiosk transactions available.

The biggest issue with them is adding funds to the wrong account, going by the number of people that have used such kiosks.

Originally posted by elasumare07:

Hello, Steam team and community,

I’m from Peru and I want to share an idea that could help many players in countries where not everyone has access to credit or debit cards.

The idea is to implement Steam cash machines or authorized kiosks where:

A player can log in with their Steam account.

Pay with cash the exact amount of a game or wallet funds.

Instantly receive the game or funds in their account.

This would:

Allow more players without digital payments to buy original games.

Increase Steam’s sales by reaching new markets.

Reduce piracy by making it easy to buy legally.

I believe this would be a win-win for both players and Valve.

Thank you for reading my suggestion 🙌.

That’s a thoughtful suggestion, and you’ve hit on the real issue: access. For many regions, it isn’t about willingness to pay, but about the rails available to actually complete the transaction.

Where I think this connects with the bigger picture is that we already have “digital kiosks” in the form of decentralized payment rails. With stablecoins and modern networks, a player doesn’t need a card or a machine, just a phone app that moves funds peer-to-peer like cash. Merchants are already adopting these rails globally because they reduce friction and expand access.

I’ve been putting together a broader proposal on this idea, explaining how censorship-resistant rails could make Steam more resilient and accessible worldwide. You can read it here: Future Proof Steam: Add Censorship-Resistant Payment Methods.

The goals overlap: expand access, reduce piracy, and give more players a way to purchase games directly.

While a “Steam cash machine” doesn’t exist today, cash-to-crypto kiosks already do. They let people deposit cash and receive a digital equivalent like USDC or BTC. The hurdle is that these kiosks aren’t everywhere, and asking Valve to build and maintain its own global kiosk network would be a tall order.

This is where DeFi rails stand out. A censorship-resistant payment option on Steam could act like a “digital kiosk” that already works with existing global infrastructure. Players with access to cash-to-crypto kiosks could plug in immediately, while others would benefit as adoption grows. With DeFi rails, this kind of access could technically exist tomorrow without waiting for Steam to reinvent hardware.

@Fatality

Valve said no to crypto due to 50% of transactions being fraudulent.

Originally posted by Nx Machina:

@Fatality

Valve said no to crypto due to 50% of transactions being fraudulent.

Digital cash is not safe either- once dirty money enters ATM you cant distinguish them.
Why valve bends to VIsa and will keep removing game instead of allowing crypto non controlled by Visa/Amextr/discovery

Originally posted by Nx Machina:

@Fatality

Valve said no to crypto due to 50% of transactions being fraudulent.

“Isn’t crypto just ‘Bitcoin’? Didn’t Steam already try this and it didn’t work?”

• “Crypto” is an umbrella term: it covers many categories (Bitcoin, stablecoins, Layer 1 networks, Layer 2 networks, DeFi apps). Treating it all as “just Bitcoin” oversimplifies the landscape.
  
• Bitcoin: valuable as a store of value, but not optimized for day-to-day retail. Steam’s prior trial used BTC directly, which meant slow settlement, high fees at times, and price volatility. Those frictions increased refund fraud and chargeback risk, making it unworkable in practice.
  
• Stablecoins (USDC, USDT, DAI): designed for stability, pegged to the dollar, and already used daily for global settlement. They behave more like digital dollars than speculative tokens, eliminating the volatility that plagued Steam’s first attempt.
  
• Modern networks: Polygon, Lightning, Arbitrum, Optimism, Solana, etc. provide near-instant, low-fee settlement with fraud checks handled by regulated gateways. This makes payments cheaper, faster, and more secure than in 2017.

The key difference is that Steam never actually tried DeFi rails or stablecoins. What failed was relying only on Bitcoin at a time when the tech wasn’t suited for high-volume retail. The tools today solve the very problems that drove Valve away back then.

Originally posted by Princess Luna:

Originally posted by Nx Machina:

@Fatality

Valve said no to crypto due to 50% of transactions being fraudulent.

Digital cash is not safe either- once dirty money enters ATM you cant distinguish them.
Why valve bends to VIsa and will keep removing game instead of allowing crypto non controlled by Visa/Amextr/discovery

Every rail has fraud risk, whether it’s dollars, cards, or crypto. The difference is who holds the switch. Right now Visa and MC can dictate terms globally, while DeFi rails give Valve a parallel option that no single intermediary can shut off.

And here’s where systems thinking comes in: fragile systems break under shocks, antifragile systems get stronger. If censorship attempts only push more users toward alternative rails, then those attempts backfire. That’s resilience by design, a system that doesn’t just survive pressure, it learns and grows from it.

The more likely solution would be like what we see with Coinstar machines in the US. While you can use them to count coins and get like 90% the value in paper money, they also give out eGift card codes to numerous online retailers, including Steam. You put your money in, and the machine prints out a receipt with a code that you enter into your Steam account and you get wallet funds. Many of their machines will also take paper money so you don't need a bunch of coins to get a code.

Having to log into a Steam account on some 3rd party device is a huge security risk as there's no way to know whether the device is saving you login credentials.

Originally posted by elasumare07:

Hello, Steam team and community,

I’m from Peru and I want to share an idea that could help many players in countries where not everyone has access to credit or debit cards.

The idea is to implement Steam cash machines or authorized kiosks where:

A player can log in with their Steam account.

Pay with cash the exact amount of a game or wallet funds.

Instantly receive the game or funds in their account.

This would:

Allow more players without digital payments to buy original games.

Increase Steam’s sales by reaching new markets.

Reduce piracy by making it easy to buy legally.

I believe this would be a win-win for both players and Valve.

Thank you for reading my suggestion 🙌.

and steam should buy ATMs with limited customer reach in 190 countries?

No sane customer would drive hundreds of kilometers to get to such to be able to buy games.

Originally posted by Nx Machina:

@Fatality

Valve said no to crypto due to 50% of transactions being fraudulent.

Just to emphasize how big 50% is: Imagine it the other way around. Imagine that half the time when you bought something on Steam, they would take your money and not give you a game, or they would take your money without you trying to buy a game, or so on.

Now imagine that setup but the percentage is only 1%. That's still massive, and it's 50 times smaller.

Even 0.1% fraud is a huge amount of fraud. That's 500 times smaller. Plenty of people on Steam have over a thousand games on their accounts. Imagine that Valve had stolen from each of those people once. Steam would be a ghost town.

50% fraud is ridiculously big. A system doesn't end up like that by accident.

Steam has already implemented over the years many kiosk solutions in other territories with different degrees of success.

Originally posted by Ben Lubar:

Originally posted by Nx Machina:

@Fatality

Valve said no to crypto due to 50% of transactions being fraudulent.

Just to emphasize how big 50% is: Imagine it the other way around. Imagine that half the time when you bought something on Steam, they would take your money and not give you a game, or they would take your money without you trying to buy a game, or so on.

Now imagine that setup but the percentage is only 1%. That's still massive, and it's 50 times smaller.

Even 0.1% fraud is a huge amount of fraud. That's 500 times smaller. Plenty of people on Steam have over a thousand games on their accounts. Imagine that Valve had stolen from each of those people once. Steam would be a ghost town.

50% fraud is ridiculously big. A system doesn't end up like that by accident.

This line gets repeated a lot, but the number isn’t what most people think. The “50% fraud” figure came from Steam’s 2016-17 trial with direct Bitcoin payments. At that time every purchase had to be done in BTC itself with slow confirmations, volatile prices, and no integrated refund/fraud rails. What Valve called “fraud” was mostly people gaming the timing: buying during a dip, charging back if price moved, and exploiting volatility against Steam’s rigid settlement window. That’s a structural flaw, not tens of thousands of scam artists.

The landscape today is very different:

• Stablecoins: pegged to the dollar, no price swings to game.
  
• Modern networks: Solana, Lightning, Polygon, Arbitrum, etc. settle instantly with negligible fees.
  
• Regulated processors: KYC, AML, and fraud screening exist to filter abuse before it clears.

It was a product of early rails and saw volatility abuse, not of “crypto” as a category. Continually recycling that talking point without context only highlights a shallow engagement with the issue. DeFi rails built on stablecoins and real processors don’t replicate those conditions. They turn a fragile setup into an antifragile one; resilient to abuse, resilient to censorship, and stronger the more stress is applied.

Originally posted by Fatality:

This line gets repeated a lot, but the number isn’t what most people think. The “50% fraud” figure came from Steam’s 2016-17 trial with direct Bitcoin payments. At that time every purchase had to be done in BTC itself with slow confirmations, volatile prices, and no integrated refund/fraud rails. What Valve called “fraud” was mostly people gaming the timing: buying during a dip, charging back if price moved, and exploiting volatility against Steam’s rigid settlement window. That’s a structural flaw, not tens of thousands of scam artists.

I don't think you understand how cryptocurrency works if you think people were able to "charge back" their transactions. And you definitely don't know how Steam works if you think people were able to "charge back" repeatedly.

Originally posted by Ben Lubar:

Originally posted by Fatality:

This line gets repeated a lot, but the number isn’t what most people think. The “50% fraud” figure came from Steam’s 2016-17 trial with direct Bitcoin payments. At that time every purchase had to be done in BTC itself with slow confirmations, volatile prices, and no integrated refund/fraud rails. What Valve called “fraud” was mostly people gaming the timing: buying during a dip, charging back if price moved, and exploiting volatility against Steam’s rigid settlement window. That’s a structural flaw, not tens of thousands of scam artists.

I don't think you understand how cryptocurrency works if you think people were able to "charge back" their transactions. And you definitely don't know how Steam works if you think people were able to "charge back" repeatedly.

You’re confusing the mechanics. No one was reversing Bitcoin transactions. The issue was that Steam’s processor bolted BTC onto the card-era dispute framework without rebuilding the protection layer that cards rely on. In card rails, fraud and refunds flow through a structured system: retrieval, chargeback, representment, pre-arb, arbitration. Consumers and regulators expect that.

Steam had settlement finality with BTC, but none of those guardrails. That left a gap people exploited. They weren’t “charging back” Bitcoin, they were gaming Steam’s rigid refund and volatility window. Buy during a dip, watch price move, and force disputes through the processor’s stopgap refund system. That’s not scam artistry, that’s bad system design.

This is why future-proof rails recreate consumer protections directly:

• Escrow windows to hold funds until delivery
  
• Attested receipts tied to the payment hash
  
• Independent arbitration networks with published rules
  
• Opt-in insurance priced by risk
  
• Refund rails that give parity with card returns

The takeaway isn’t “crypto = fraud.” It’s that dispute frameworks were never rebuilt for blockchain settlement.

So yes, I understand how crypto works. The real question is whether you understand how fraud prevention actually works.

If you don’t know what terms like systemic risk, settlement finality, escrow windows, or arbitration networks mean, I’d suggest looking them up before replying. These are the actual concepts regulators, risk managers, and system designers use when analyzing financial rails.

Steam Wallet cards are far easier and accomplish the same thing. Can buy them from physical stores with cash or any payment method the store accepts, even crypto.