Users have been lobbying for Valve to introduce bitcoins as a form of payment to the digital marketplace for years, and it looks like the company has finally agreed.
This post originally appeared on Kotaku.
A user on Reddit has posted a screenshot from the private Steamworks Development group on Steam, where it was supposedly announced today that Steam will begin accepting bitcoin payments.
The post reportedly says that users are charged the local currency price at checkout — that’ll be US dollars for Australians, because AUD still isn’t supported — and then an external payment processor will convert that figure into bitcoins using a daily exchange rate.
“The user pays [the developer] in bitcoin, and the processor pays us in traditional currency. At no point does Valve receive or hold bitcoin,” the post reads.
Valve also confirmed to CoinJournal that they sent a letter to publishers and developers about the upcoming change.
Update: We’ve heard from Valve, confirming that the letter was sent from them to developers and publishers #Bitcoin pic.twitter.com/u7N9wiJPTN
— Coinjournal (@CoinJournal) April 22, 2016
Some sites already accept bitcoins as a form of payment for third-party Steam keys, and the alliance between the digital marketplace and the digital currency makes sense.
I can imagine who stocked up on bitcoins early on, and now wants a HTC Vive is feeling pretty good. It also represents the first opportunity Australians will have to pay for games in local currency, as we would be able to convert AUD to bitcoin first, rather than having to convert AUD to USD.