Never liked gift cards. Money you can only use in one place, and you don’t even save any money when buying it.
You can walk down to a local Walmart and slap a $20 on the counter, walking away with funds even if you have no car and no credit card.
Hard for a teenager to get steam games without this.
I was not aware that could be a problem (had a debit card £ as a teen when online buying/downloading games started).
I’ll concede your point, though there are generic pre-paid cards that are not linked to a specific store.
Those have fees, though. Back when I didn’t have a bank account, it was already over $5 per card, so I assume it’s much higher 15 years later.
I always get them at Sam’s Club, they’re around 5% off the face value there. Can’t remember the exact price but was somewhere around $18.92 for a $20 card. Not a huge discount but will definitely miss it.
A coffee shop used to offer a $10 gift card for every $40 gift card you bought (or something like that) around Christmas. It was meant to get people to buy them as gifts but we knew we were going to go there throughout the year anyway so we loaded up for ourselves.
Same but with haircuts. My mom used to get 4 for $40 cards around the holidays. She was very astute when it came to finding actually good deals.
and you don’t even save any money when buying it.
The only time gift cards really make sense is when you can buy them for less than face value.
Bad thing in my opinion.
I used them to menage my funds to not to overspend.
Need to connect card to account, leaks happen.
More info to steam, you could use steam even without giving any personal details just by buying physical gift cards.
I had given them few times as gift.
Revolut single use cards. No saving, no leak.
I think there are others as well
One thing that can help with leaks is to not save your CC info with the account. Then it just gets used for the transaction and isn’t saved outside of the payment system, so less of a vector for it to make it on a leak database. Also helps control spending by adding more inertia between this side and the far side of a purchase.
Change to a bank that cares enough of their customers to enable virtual cards, you can create and revoke numbers as much as you like.
You good bro? ;)
I remember saving up for those and then spending the money in Steam sales. Shame for all the kids who want to buy games that can’t use their parents credit card.
Like others have said, I only have debit cards, as does the large majority in my country. Credit cards are only ever useful while traveling. And I’m not going to gift my private info to data brokers like paypal just because I want video games. Meaning I’m literally looking at the end of an era, because I don’t know of any other way to purchase games on steam anymore.
What’s the difference ? I only ever heard of credit cards
I’m not sure, since I’ve never owned a credit card. Debit cards pull directly from your account and you have very limited credit available. Also you don’t have card numbers etc. you could use online.
I think you’re imagining the difference between them from a technological point of view to be much bigger than it actually is.
I have debit and credit cards, Visa and Mastercard for both. Using them feels identical; one draws from your bank account balance and the other goes towards an invoice sent to you at the end of the month.
When you pay with them, the vendors themselves don’t see any private information about you, other than the card number and the way your name is written on the card. Some of my cards only have my first initial and my last name.
They can, however, track that card number across multiple purchases or with partners to build a profile.
Visa and Mastercard themselves can see a lot more, but that’s a given if you use any kind of banking services anyway.
In terms of where they’re accepted, I’ve used them all over the world and the only time it mattered which type I use, is this one flight where Ryanair was not accepting debit when I was trying to buy water… Somehow you have to borrow money to eat/drink on board, which is just silly.
Also some Citi cards let you make a virtual account number that is revocable so you never send your real card data somewhere online
A debit card in DK is exactly like a credit card in every way except one; you can’t get credit, or anything related to credit.
How is that card even used if it doesn’t have a number? Can you use it only physically with payment terminals? I have a debit card and it can be used just like credit card but without the loans part obviously.
Can you use it only physically with payment terminals?
Yup. Every business has them tho. The modern terminals are barely bigger than the card itself.
Ok, that sounds almost like what we call a “credit card” here (FR) except they do have the numbers for online use…
that’s interesting. Here a debit and credit card are functionally identical (both have numbers etc) and only the source of the money changes
You have a debit card?
Who doesn’t? Basically every adult has one. Or do u pay everything in cash? And don’t u get automatically a debit card when u open a giro bank account?
My point is you can add that into steam
What I learned from this thread is that you’re either in a region that allows debit as payment method, or your debit card has a credit card number. Sadly neither of those apply to me.
Oh, huh.
Credit card system continues to suck. Sorry.
Debit and credit card are not the same card.
Not everyone is american
Gonna buy up all the local stock and re-sell it for profit
Tap for spoiler
/s
Scalping gift cards. Now that is a million dollar idea! (in debt)
Word on the street is that a $20 steam gift card today is worth $22 tomorrow.
Well, no more Steam gift cards as birthday presents from my employer, I guess. The colleagues will have to come up with something else. How annoying.
This really sucks. I give and receive Steam cards as gifts frequently and I know many people that only use steam because they can use cash to buy them. Most of these people will just pirate games now I imagine.
I hate gift cards but work gives them out for our birthdays each year. I always request games related gift cards. To hear that Steam are no longer selling them is disappointing considering that it’s my main gaming platform.
That sucks, they were the best for shady deals. Buy em with cash, and treat it like cash.
Say you didnt read the article without saying it
Scammers use steam cards to launder money. Hence the shady deals I talk about. I reread the article and I don’t see how my initial comment would make you think I didn’t read the article.
So, what scams are happening? Is this a “do not redeem” type of thing?
There are a lot of scams out there but a common one is to trick people into buying gift cards and giving scammers the info.
(Like calling your grandma and telling her you got kidnapped with an AI impersonation of your voice) or (stealing credit cards, using them to buy a shit load of cards and flipping those cards before the credit companies can cancel them)
Scammers sell the cards on 3rd party sites for cash and those sites resell them for a profit. You can often find deals for less than in retail stores.
It’s a grey area tho as there are some legitimate people just selling cards they got for a holiday and don’t want.
