Valve kills its gift card program due to corruption

Not in sto’ no mo’

The end of physical gift cards removes Valve’s last link to the old brick-and-mortar world that Steam so successfully killed for PC gaming. When Steam was announced in 2002Valve’s Gabe Newell marketed it as a way to connect with vendors that are both annoying, “removing the burden of distribution” and “leverag(ing) the potential of broadband to improve customer service and increase operating margins.”

Twenty years later, Valve says there is still a large legitimate market for Steam gift cards, which are the most direct way for gamers to turn physical money into PC games. In early 2024, Valve report that it earned $80 million in gift card redemptions in the last 11 days of 2023.

That’s an important market even for a multibillion-dollar company like Valve, and one that Valve said has “made a big difference to developers.” At the same time, Valve wrote in 2024 that “physical cards are one of the most expensive payment methods we support,” no doubt due to the amount associated with printing / shipping and the support time spent in dealing with fraudulent customers.

So, even though Valve will miss out on the huge amount of money it receives from physical gift cards every year, it will welcome the opportunity to finally ignore the retail market. The customer, meanwhile, will be gone buy digital gift cards directly from Valve or add Steam money through other prepaid cards commercially available (as long as there is an address attached).