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Comment by ryaniscool | Hacker News Reader

A long time ago, I used Paypal to purchase a steam game. This was like 15 years ago. For some reason Paypal marked it as suspicious and immediately cancelled the transaction. Steam then locked me out of my account. I had several dozen games. I couldn't get anyone to reply to me from Steam. To this day, I'm locked out of that account and all of the games I had purchased. I started a new account but yeah it's scary.

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I don't really play games much. I bought something on steam a few years ago. It was annoying dealing with their crappy desktop app but whatever.

Then I wanted something else - literally a second game: and it wouldn't recognise either of my cards; all kinds of shenanigans.

I gave up and found Gog. Zero issues. No need to deal with their desktop app if you don't want it. I even bought the original game I had on steam, again, on Gog just so I don't have to deal with their stupid shit.

I realise not everyone has the "luxury" of starting over but I will never understand why if you're forced to start over, you'd choose the same company again.

I'm glad you found an alternative but I feel compelled to say that Steam's desktop app has improved by leaps and bounds over the last decade.

As an expat I cannot even purchase games due to Steam's region locks. The same Paypal account I use to settle invoices worldwide, cannot be used by Steam. Apparently this is due to users attempting to buy games at cheaper regional rates. However, they will not allow me to switch to a more expensive region to buy a video game. They propose that I should travel back to my home country to purchase a game.

That's scary. I use PayPal to pay for steam games just out of convenience.

My account is almost 20 years old (I signed up because you had to in order to play HL2) and I've purchased a lot of games over the years.

Out of curiosity, what convenience? How is using Paypal easier than just inputting your card info once?

It's only convenient because I already use Paypal.

I only buy maybe 2-3 games a year from Steam directly. Most of the games in my library are from humble bundle (or similar sites). It's just been easier to click the Paypal button for the occasional impulse buy than to track down my wallet.

I'll probably go ahead and put my CC details in now that I know Paypal carries risk.

It's been several years since I used a card on Steam, but IIRC I had to regularly re-input the card details, whereas I rarely have to re-log into PayPal.

As someone who currently uses a card on Steam, I can confirm Steam asks for the card security code every time I make a purchase.

Cards expire every few years

I have to use PayPal to buy games on Steam, simply because my bank account (Revolut) is from a different country to where I live (both in EU). It's the same price region in Steam, but still annoying.

Epic did that to me a couple of years back.

Once burned twice shy.

I just stole the games instead!

Our Intellectual Property utopia is such that you need to steal back what you owned, because its been impounded by an 800 pound automaton.

Maybe someone will create a gaming model that 'borrows' from every known game in existence, so that we'll finally get an Artificial Gaming-you Intelligence.

With streaming services you can never own the content. My partners mother wanted to see something, tried to get it out of the library, but only available streaming. It's weird what it means when content is not longer available in physical form, for cultures and review clips. If every copy is drm ed..

with the current console games. Even with disk, it's a huge download on first play. I wonder how playable these games are in there initial state without download...

I had a bunch of 32bit Mac games that will never run again, when they transitioned to 64bjt only software. I don't often replay and like many have a backlog o steam games I'll likely never get too. With steam and proton I have high confidence things will continue to run in the future..

Your confidence is misplaced. Digital assets rot away soon after their maintenance ceases. Gabe Newell is 61 years old. Who knows what will happen after the BDFL gets tired of all this?

I know proton isn’t exactly emulation, but the “windows” target platform might be supported for a while..especially since it’s running on Linux pretty well. (Any game on steam deck is a running on linux)

Kind of like emulation keeps working.. or I can play my old doom wad files in a new doom executable.

But you are right that I’m kinda betting that things will continue as is with steam.

Only available on streaming or illegally

Recently the Steam client stopped working with old Nvidia cards. So now you can’t start your games anymore even though they technically still work because they have to be started via the client. And you can’t go back to an older, working, client.

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