Valve kills its retail gift card program due to scammers

For years, Valve’s physical Steam gift cards have been the closest you could come to buying a Steam game at a brick-and-mortar store. Now, Valve says it is phasing out the production of new retail gift cards, citing a losing battle against scammers exploiting the hard-to-track payment method.

PC Guide was among the first to note the end of Valve’s retail gift card program, which was quietly announced in a recent update to a Steam support page. Since launching the retail cards in 2012, Valve says it has been fighting a constant battle with scammers, who instruct victims to purchase gift cards and share the pertinent details and security PIN. Those scammers can then resell the gift card details at a discount on gray-market sites to effectively launder the funds, creating an anonymous and hard-to-trace form of payment.

Valve says it has made various moves to slow scammers, including placing limits on redemption and availability and adding a prominent warning on the cards themselves: “Never share a pin via email, social media or over the phone.”

But the company now admits that “scammers have adapted” and “continue to have an impact on Steam customers and other unsuspecting individuals.” Rather than continue to fight against that “impact,” Valve writes that it has “made the difficult decision to end the Steam Gift Card program at retail stores.”

Steam users will still be able to redeem existing physical gift cards, and retailers will be able to sell physical gift cards that are already in stores. But Valve estimates that those existing stocks will be completely gone by the end of 2026 as it ceases new production.

Not in a sto’ no mo’

The end of physical gift cards effectively severs Valve’s last link to the old brick-and-mortar retail world that Steam so effectively killed across the PC gaming landscape. When Steam was announced in 2002, Valve’s Gabe Newell sold it as a way to get around those annoying retailers altogether, “eliminating the overhead of physical goods distribution” and “leverag[ing] the efficiency of broadband to improve customer service and increase operating margins.”

Over two decades later, though, Valve says there’s still a huge legitimate market for physical Steam gift cards, which are the most direct way for gamers to convert physical cash into digital PC games. In early 2024, Valve reported that it had tallied up $80 million in physical gift card redemptions during just the last 11 days of 2023.

That’s a significant market even for a multi-billion-dollar company like Valve, and one that Valve said has been a “massive benefit to developers.” At the same time, Valve wrote in 2024 that “physical cards are some of the most expensive payment methods we support,” no doubt thanks to the overhead associated with printing/shipping and support time devoted to dealing with scammed customers.

So while Valve will miss the significant revenue it derives from physical gift cards each year, it will probably welcome the opportunity to finally be able to completely ignore the retail market. Customers, meanwhile, will still be able to purchase digital gift cards directly from Valve or add Steam funds via some prepaid debit cards available at retail (as long as there’s an address attached).