Whoah, Small Spender! Steam Sets Limits For Users Who Spend Less Than $5 229
As GameSpot reports, Valve has implemented a policy that reduces the privileges of Steam users unless those users have spent $5 through the service. Along the same lines as suggestions to limit spam by imposing a small fee on emails, the move is intended to reduce resource abuse as a business model. From the article:
"Malicious users often operate in the community on accounts which have not spent any money, reducing the individual risk of performing the actions they do," Valve said. "One of the best pieces of information we can compare between regular users and malicious users are their spending habits as typically the accounts being used have no investment in their longevity. Due to this being a common scenario we have decided to restrict certain community features until an account has met or exceeded $5.00 USD in Steam."
Restricted actions include sending invites, opening group chats, and taking part in the Steam marketplace.
Thank god (Score:5, Insightful)
I know this sounds off to some people on /. but I get something like 5-10 invites _a day_ from people who are trying to trade scam me. $5 doesn't sound too steep but I'm hoping this cuts it back even to 1 per day or fewer, just so I stop getting annoying notifications.
Re:Thank god (Score:5, Insightful)
It'll sure make a huge cut in the bot accounts that are being used for scamming and spamming. Some of these scammers are probably looking at thousands of accounts used on a given day. Busting their "business model" is the best way to get rid of them.
Re:Thank god (Score:5, Interesting)
History [wikipedia.org] shows this will work. Similar problems plagued the postal system until the invention of the postage stamp. From the article...
"The first adhesive postage stamp, commonly referred to as the Penny Black, was issued in the United Kingdom in 1840. The invention of the stamp was part of an attempt to reform and improve the postal system in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, which, in the early 19th century, was in disarray and rife with corruption. There are varying accounts of the inventor or inventors of the stamp.
Before the introduction of postage stamps, mail in the UK was paid for by the recipient, a system that was associated with an irresolvable problem: the costs of delivering mail were not recoverable by the postal service when recipients were unable or unwilling to pay for delivered items, and senders had no incentive to restrict the number, size, or weight of items sent, whether or not they would ultimately be paid for. The postage stamp resolved this issue in a simple and elegant manner"
$5 is a small hurdle if you're going to be spending a lot of time on Steam.
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10 cents might be a bit excessive, even if it was just 2 or 3 cents.
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Of course that won't happen - these companies are selling you, so they will do nothing that will reduce their user base, even if it makes it a higher quality.
Plus, remember, Facebook, Twitter, etc make their livelihood on ads, and one of the metrics they can use to justify ad prices (not to mention silly stock valuations) is "active users". You better believe those millions of auto generated FB accounts spamming every popular page/celebrity/etc posts are "active users" (very active!)
Re:Thank god (Score:4, Insightful)
That's silly. People don't hate Google+. They do, however, find it irrelevant - and got really annoyed at Google's repeated attempts to force-feed it to all of their users.
Now that Google has finally (mostly) stopped doing that, everyone's back to simply finding Google+ irrelevant.
Re:Thank god (Score:5, Interesting)
Google+ is the only social network I use, because it's the only one that isn't a torrent of effluent. If you start by following a few well known people in your area of interest (mine are electronics and retro computing) you can quickly build up a network of interesting people who only post stuff relevant to you. For the most part G+ doesn't suffer from the Facebook/Twitter style "I just wiped my arse!" "updates". It's where the smart kids hang out.
Re:Thank god (Score:5, Insightful)
While I've been fortunate to have never received any of that junk, I do see this as a good move... and $5 is really low. Recall it's not $5 on any purchase, but $5 over the lifetime of your account. That's... well. If that's a problem for you, how exactly do you afford to have whatever it is you're running Steam on? I'll give you the internet - maybe public wifi (or stealing it)... but unless you dug the device out of the trash and are also stealing electricity, I think spending $5 at one time or another isn't much to require.
Re:Thank god (Score:4, Insightful)
While I've been fortunate to have never received any of that junk, I do see this as a good move... and $5 is really low. Recall it's not $5 on any purchase, but $5 over the lifetime of your account. That's... well. If that's a problem for you, how exactly do you afford to have whatever it is you're running Steam on? I'll give you the internet - maybe public wifi (or stealing it)... but unless you dug the device out of the trash and are also stealing electricity, I think spending $5 at one time or another isn't much to require.
The question really is, does the $5/account cover the costs of policing them if they do pay up.
Re:Thank god (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't matter - they have to police scam accounts as it is. The biggest attraction to scammers is a zero-cost place to run scams, because most scams have such a low success rate that if it cost the scammer anything, they wouldn't do it.
If Valve restricts the accounts unless they have SOME money in the game, the scammers can't simply operate at full rate - they'll have to pick and choose the scams and targets more carefully, because there's overhead. That knocks 90% of the bozo population out of the game, and while you'll ALWAYS have scammers, the most annoying ones will go away.
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If Valve restricts the accounts unless they have SOME money in the game, the scammers can't simply operate at full rate - they'll have to pick and choose the scams and targets more carefully, because there's overhead.
Good news everyone - Steam is working on increasing scam quality!
Re:Thank god (Score:4, Funny)
Obligatory XKCD [xkcd.com]
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True that Valve has to police them anyway, but the more they do it out of scammers pockets and less out of users pockets the better ;)
Hand-me-down laptops from family members (Score:2)
unless you dug the device out of the trash and are also stealing electricity, I think spending $5 at one time or another isn't much to require.
Mostly I'm thinking of a middle school or high school student who received a hand-me-down device for the child's birthday or Christmas. Their parents provide free electricity and often free Internet, restaurants provide free Internet and often free electricity to laptop users, and child labor laws prohibit earning money for anything else.
Labor market doesn't accommodate all kids (Score:3)
We made plenty of money when we were young doing things like mowing grass and shoveling snow.
The demand for such services is limited. What steps should a child take to ensure that all the lawns on his block aren't already being mowed either by a resident or by another child on the block? And in winter, how should a child cope with the neighbor who runs a gasoline-powered snow thrower up and down the whole block for free out of 1. altruism and 2. wanting to walk to the bus stop without having to dodge cars in the street? (I am said neighbor.)
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"And in winter, how should a child cope with the neighbor who runs a gasoline-powered snow thrower up and down the whole block for free out of 1. altruism and 2. wanting to walk to the bus stop without having to dodge cars in the street? (I am said neighbor.)"
Just pawn that off on a kid and get the neighbors to chip in a little pocket money for him/her. Unless you truly enjoy running up and down the street with that snowblower.
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That's incorrect. I can no longer sell dropped items on the marketplace and I've spent ~$100 on my account over its lifetime. It's something like spend $x in the last y days... The last thing I bought was CS:GO, so I can no longer use the marketplace (I just sell the stuff that drops in CSGO, I'm up to like $50 in Steam credit and I only played like an hour a week for about a year or so) until I buy a new game via Steam.
I think it's a step in the right direction though... towards the end I was also getting
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You can buy wallet cards in various retail outlets with cash.
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I'd say that someone who's spent money on a service is justifiably a hell of a lot more entitled than someone who hasn't spent and won't spend any money on said service.
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I'd say that someone who's spent money on a service is justifiably a hell of a lot more entitled
In fact, this new feature (extra privileges for compensation/etc) is one of the primary *definitions* of entitlement...
Re: Thank god (Score:2)
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Not true, I haven't played TF2 in months but over the last two weeks or so have received a friend invite from a clearly bogus account about once a day. I suspect that's indicative of a major increase in these things because prior to just recently I hadn't had more than a dozen in the many years I've been on Steam.
Can't say as I blame them. (Score:5, Insightful)
While it is kinda crappy thing to do I cant say as I blame entirely I mean I get several invites a week from level zero or one community members I have never heard of never played a multiplayer session with never traded with. They all end up being begging bots and scams.
I don't think it is crappy (Score:2)
I mean it is a really, really minimal legit player base it could possibly effect. You would have to be someone who plays only F2P games, and has made so few in-game purchases that you haven't even spent $5. There are just extremely few people who are like that. Further, even people like that can still play, they just can't participate in some of the other Steam features. The games are still available to them.
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Imaginary lines on the dirt mean nothing to stupid. Stupid is everywhere people are.
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So (Score:3)
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The price of entry is now $5 (or equivalent after currency conversion). This is a price. Previous to this imposition of limits, the cost of setting up hundreds or thousands of bot accounts to spam people with friend invites and phishing links was effectively nil.
For a couple months I was getting two or three steam friends invites a day from what were clearly bots. I for one am glad that these limits have been put in place.
Re:So (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure some people will do that, and I'm sure Valve thinks so too. But adding a moderate hurdle like that will certainly cut abuse down, and I don't see it as being a real imposition at all on actual users, so I think this is a brilliant idea. /been getting Steam Spam lately.
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Indeed - like email spam, that kind of abuse just doesn't pay if you've got any kind of an overhead associated with volume.
Re:So (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have access to stolen credit cards why would you be trade scamming for TF2 hats?
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I think you should have included "I heard that" , "this TV show I watched said" or "so they say" "somewhere in your post.
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The point is to make the account cost more than the expected value gained via scamming.
Scams, in general, have a poor success rate. There may be a sucker born every minute, but there's 250 people born a minute. Even if a successful scam nets a large gain, losing $5 on each attempt makes it a losing proposition.
workshop (Score:3)
I would say some people may get annoyed due to following limitations:
>Submit content on the Steam Workshop
>Post in an item's Steam Workshop Discussions
Retail games dont give you full account, so if you buy some steam only game with a mod community (eg Civilization 5) you potentially lose quite a bit
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What I suspect is much more common is that the retail game introduces them to Steam, and along the way they start purchasing games, probably in the various Steam Sales.
This is all about understanding
Re:workshop (Score:5, Insightful)
I would say some people may get annoyed due to following limitations:
>Submit content on the Steam Workshop
>Post in an item's Steam Workshop Discussions
Retail games dont give you full account, so if you buy some steam only game with a mod community (eg Civilization 5) you potentially lose quite a bit
That is possible, but how many people are actually active in the Steam community who have never spent $5 on Steam?
Is there someone, somewhere in the world that is like that? Probably. Many people? Probably not.
It is what is called an edge case, and a business can't account for all of them. They are trying to get rid of the bot spammers and this is one way to do it.
Particularly since you can still play games (Score:2)
None of the restrictions are on buying or playing games. So even if you've never spent money (I'm not clear that retail doesn't count but let's say it doesn't) you can still play all the games you've got, and buy more games to play (at which point your account becomes unlocked). So you can do with it the main purpose: Play games, including free to play ones. It isn't like they are demanding money to unlock an account.
Also in the event this really was an issue for someone, they could just buy something cheap
Rated M (Score:2)
Team Fortress 2, the free-to-play game published by the company that runs Steam, is rated M by the ESRB for "blood and gore" and "intense violence [esrb.org]. How does the Steam service comply with the video game industry's self-regulation of sales of M games to minors?
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Actually it's not as insane as you might think. There's always a bunch of free-to-play games on Steam, along with games that go free temporarily over a weekend/week/etc. Bottom line, you CAN game on Steam without paying a penny. Plus I don't know if this would count towards your $5 requirement or not, but you can be gifted games from friends. That's how I started on Steam myself, when a friend had bought the X series as a bundle for a couple bucks and gifted it to me.
Sure, I understand that... but my point is... how many of those F2P players or gifted players are actually using the Steam community features before they buy a single game on Steam?
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So wait for a sale, buy a game for $5 that was $49 a year ago, and then you're good to go in Steam Workshop.
And why should Steam give you credit for buying games at Wal-Mart?
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Because the game bought in Wal-Mart includes features such as "Access to community updates" and "play with your friends".
When a game forces you to use Steam if you want to play it, and requires Steam for specific features mentioned on the box, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect to be able to access those features through Steam with no further expenditure.
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The Steam version has exactly the same features. And you don't have to support Wal-Mart.
The people who are being shut out of Steam Workshop are not people who are buying games at Wal-Mart, and if you don't want to use Steam, then why would you complain about not being able to access Steam Workshop?
I want to hear from one single person who is being legitimately put out because of this $5
Cap (Score:2)
The Steam version has exactly the same features.
I thought retail games were for people on slow or capped Internet connections, and the update was smaller than the full game. Good luck downloading a 10 GB game over a satellite or cellular Internet connection capped at 10 GB per month.
And you don't have to support Wal-Mart.
You still support Walmart if you buy Steam gift cards at Walmart.
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Yeah, but because of the updates required, you're probably still screwed.
I have a 10Gb cap, and it sucks. Still older games have few updates. Yay for retro gaming!
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OK. My friend's daughter. She has 3-4 games on her Steam account, one gifted by her father and the others gifted by me.
She's too young for a credit card, but not too young to build things for the Steam workshop, let alone download content from others.
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Five dollars. You can deposit five dollars into her Steam wallet right now and let her buy an indie game.
No credit card needed.
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Oh, it's trivial to work around - because unlike some Steam users $5 isn't half a day's salary for me. But until/unless someone is generous on her behalf she can not fully enjoy the platform or the games she owns on it.
Which has been the issue under discussion all along.
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I'm sure it wouldn't be hard for Steam to add an "or registers a code from a boxed game" alternate qualification if this became a huge problem. Of course that would depend on boxed game codes not being terribly easy to forge, but I'm assuming that's the case anyway for pure business reasons.
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You don't need to be online to play games you bought on Steam, unless they are online games, in which case, guess what? you need to be online to play anyway.
Offline mode bugs (Score:2)
In the past, Steam was full of defects that caused it to often lose the cached receipts* that allow offline mode to work. The earliest versions (in the Half-Life 2 era) wouldn't even try to download these receipts for offline use unless the user chose "Go Offline" while online. Even the current version still has bugs that appear to require the purchase of a UPS according to Valve's page about offline mode [steampowered.com]:
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But if there's an online requirement for those games, and you don't have a persistent internet connection you're not going to be buying those games right? Even if you buy them at Wal-Mart, you won't be able to play them.
It's not Steam's fault that EA and Origin have those always online requirements.
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Or they could, you know, consider an account that has at least one retail code registered to have spent at least $5? I doubt there are many Steam-based games that you can buy at retail for under $5, unless it's some kind of super clearance sale item.
The point is to restrict accounts that have with no purchase activity at all, because apparently it's easy (and free) to create a bunch of them with an automated script. You can't (or shouldn't be able to) generate retail codes with a script, so you can't use a
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Except when...You know... I plopped down $60 on a retail game that used Steam for DRM way back in the day with the promise of access to all features of Steam Workshop. Now I have to plop another $5 for some crap I don't even want just to continue with the functionality I had before? Nice to know your soul is good for the price of -$5. Tell me, what can you do for me that I can charge $5 for just so I can allow you to continue to use a service that I used to provide for free?
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There are, however, conceivable reasons why they might not want to (or be able to) give that $5 to Valve.
possible workaround. (Score:2)
1) greenlight scam game for $5
2) have all bots buy scam game to recoup costs.
They will still lose money, but it will be far less than $5
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I received three invites this week from scammers. rather than ignore, I accept, wait for the bait then report. Two sent fake steam community links that were typosquatting malware, I did not investigate further as I was not near a test box and did not want a drive by infection. One sent a bit.l
Missed Headline Opportunity (Score:2)
"Hey Small Spender - Spend, a Little Less Time with Me"
You know this is a trash headline (Score:2)
"Who small spender" implies that Steam is beginning to ramp actions up against players who don't spend money. This is an anti-spam measure, and it's actually pretty sensational to ever phrase it as being about "small spenders".
Could you fucking not? (Score:2)
So what are the scams on Steam? (Score:2)
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I was wondering about this also. I think the people targeted participate in the social features of Steam. I have 300 or so games (Corporate Lifestyle Simulator is my current burn time game) and have used Steam for many years. I have two "friends" on Steam.
Not one piece of spam or scammer contact, ever.
There are obviously sublevels of interaction I was not aware of. Until now.
Slightly interesting actually.
new rules (Score:2)
New at Steam: We replace people who don't give a fuck with people who really don't give a fuck.
No, don't get me wrong, it's a step in the right direction. But the step itself begs questions. In general, the great firewall is the first cent - people who spend nothing at all and people who spend something, no matter how much. If you don't believe me, try charging 10 cents or something ridiculously small for any free web service you offer, and you'll find your user numbers drop through the floor.
I don't think
Humble Bundle (Score:2)
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Why would it? L4D was like 20-30€ back in the day.
Re:should be higher (Score:5, Informative)
If you set the threshold that high, new users will probably be turned off by the price of entry. That's particularly true of people who buy indie games or wait for sales, since that $50 can easily buy a couple of dozen games.
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It doesn't prevent them from playing their games, it just prevents them from hassling other users.
If you want to spend $4.25 on a game on Steam, you can play that game to your heart's content. You just can't start spamming other users.
So no, new users will NOT be probably turned off by the price of entry into the community, even if the threshold is $50. Personally, I think the threshold should be $25 and three
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The threshold doesn't have to be high though -- it only has to be higher than the opportunity cost for spamming. Once you hit that point, going further does little or nothing to help your cause but can negatively impact additional legitimate edge cases.
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Yeah, you're right. $5 seems like a good threshold to keep out the spammers.
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I agree - I worked at a store and when we started charging $0.05 a bag, the change in behaviour in the customers was dramatic. A token payment achieves the goal but you can't make the argument that it's too expensive.
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Ack. The post about charging $50 or $100 didn't come up until after I signed in. Naturally, I can't delete the comment I made now.
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Ack. The post about charging $50 or $100 didn't come up until after I signed in. Naturally, I can't delete the comment I made now.
That is why people should quote the parent. It's even a button now. 150% of everything on Slashdot is read out of context, accounting for duplicates.
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Slashdot is read out of context
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You do realize that retail games dont count, right? So all the people with several AAA titles bought in their local store (or just somewhere else on the internet) lose their ability to for example participate in mod discussions (workshop). In some parts of the world steam prices for new games (without big sales) are extremely high compared to those in stores.
Re:should be higher (Score:4, Insightful)
If you've only spent $4.50 on games, what they hell are you doing trying to get involved in mod discussions. The last thing those discussion forums need is more spammers.
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Read the parent again. Particularly the part of
You do realize that retail games don't count, right?
Because these people put down on a AAA title in a retail outlet that isn't counted towards the Steam ecosystem, they have lost the ability to take part in the Mod discussion for the game they just put a good chunk of change on. They've also lost the ability to post Mods they've created to the Workshop. Valve just made the declaration: "Oh...you want to use the features of the game you just paid for? You need to pay us at least an additional $5 for that pr
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Wait, people buy games as boxes, in stores? Did you buy the game that way in Ye Olde 20th Century, and haven't bought anything since? Have the Amish started gaming now?
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I mean, I've definitely spent less than 100. I'm not even sure I've spent 50. I'm certainly no heavy user, but GoD Factory: Wingman isn't anywhere else.
Their goal isn't to shit on light users like me, it's to prevent fucking SPAMMERS. At 5 bucks per account, spamming is nowhere near profitable. At 50 bucks per account, they just shit on casuals.
Re:Tired of this from valve (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you understand that this just blocks accounts from doing certain "spam tasks" until the account has spent FIVE FUCKING DOLLARS? Five is not a lot of dollars. It's not five dollars a week, a month, or a year. It's over the life of the account.
Because Steam accounts can be made in an automated fashion, this will greatly ramp up the effort needed by spammers- they'll have to steal cards or spend money.
This is to shut down spammers. Do you seriously mean to tell me you've been using Steam and have never spent five dollars, ever?
Re:Tired of this from valve (Score:5, Informative)
bullshit, buy wallet credit from gamestop etc.
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This is not correct. You can pay cash.
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> I am calling attention to your failure.
No, you are calling attention to *yours*.
I said:
"Because Steam accounts can be made in an automated fashion, this will greatly ramp up the effort needed by spammers- they'll have to steal cards or spend money."
This is factual. If each account must spend $5, they must either spend their OWN money, or spend someone ELSE's money.
An AC responded with:
"Also to spend money you have to hand over your personal information such as your full home address."
This is NOT CORRE
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Wait, you left this anonymous comment [slashdot.org]? Because that was really fucking douchey. I assumed, since it was an anonymous comment, that comment was a reply from the same person who left this comment [slashdot.org].
Now yeah, I did fail to put the comment together correctly — I failed to include the anonymous comment that would have made it make sense — but you failed to log in for just one comment you made in the thread.
So everything you said was factual, but it was not clear, because it wasn't clear that you said a
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Sigh. "Posted from my iPhone!". Yea, sorry about that. This makes sense if you route the comment to a different point based on assumed source.
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Also to spend money you have to hand over your personal information such as your full home address.
Oh, so a private company that has servers and services that you want to access wants your information before giving you access?
Oh the horror!
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Not to Steam, you don't. I buy games on Steam using PayPal.
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Not even that - they are just limiting what the bots can do.
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Meanwhile, placing restrictions
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The actual support article [steampowered.com] explicitly says that adding $5 to your steam wallet (which is the only way to buy stuff on the steam community marketplace) will count as $5 of purchases.
Co-incidentally, $5 is the minimum amount you can add to your steam wallet.
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