Video Game Giant Steam Bids Adieu to Bitcoin and Here’s Why!
Conceived in 1996 and headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, the Valve Corporation, developers of the Steam software and operating system, is noted for its vast lineup of hit gaming titles such as Team Fortress, Dota 2 and Left 4 Dead. Launched by Valve in 2003, Steam is the digital distribution arm of the company, which specializes in digital rights management, social networking services, video streaming and multiplayer gaming.
This platform is regarded as the largest digital distribution platform for PC gaming, and had roughly a whopping 150 million registered accounts, and a peak of 18.5 million concurrent users online by early 2018. In terms of revenue, Steam raked in 3.5 billion U.S. dollars in sales revenue in 2016, owing mostly to the Sid Meier's Civilization VI game that generated $78.9 million in revenue from sales on the platform.
Steam last year started accepting Bitcoin as a payment method helped somewhat by the BitPay payment service in lieu of gamers in certain countries such as Brazil, China and India who often lacked traditional payment methods such as credit cards. However, in a twist of events mostly due to Bitcoin’s recent rollercoaster ride, Steam scrapped Bitcoin from its extensive list of payment options, which still includes PayPal, Moneybookers and WebMoney.
Reason for Steam’s Bitcoin Cutoff
According to Steam, the biggest reason to cancel Bitcoin was the crypto’s soaring transaction fees, which was just .20 cents when the company first starting accepting Bitcoin, but in recent months surged to a ridiculous 9,900% to $20. These high fees are shouldered by customers, making it more expensive when purchasing games online using Bitcoin. And if the value of Bitcoin drops, the total cost to Steam’s customers could be even higher.
Even if this volatility results in an increase in the value Bitcoin while the user completes a transaction on the platform, and Steam has to refund the difference to the customer, the transaction fees associated with the refund must be paid by the customer. On a brighter note, Steam did say that it would give some thought to adding Bitcoin to its list of payment options again once the cryptocurrency gains more stability.
QuickX to the Rescue
QuickX may be an ideal solution for the issues faced by Bitcoin such as transaction costs and scalability. This decentralized platform provides a solution to time, cost and scalability by completing transactions off the chain for the same blockchain assets. Transactions with QuickX are not only instant, compared to minutes if not hours with on-chain transactions, but are cheaper since the least cost option is selected automatically.
Moving forward, these transactions are set to drop further as more pooling facilitators join QuickX, and could even be almost zero. The QuickX protocol has got the attention of several leading names including Quick Heal and Vodafone, with more companies expected to join this list soon.
Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc are plagued with several issues, most if not all of them can be easily resolved with QuickX such as scalability issues and high transaction costs.
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