Valve is winding down physical Steam gift cards, and scammers are why.
Once existing retail stock sells through, Valve will not reorder. The company's move follows years of physical gift cards being weaponized in fraud schemes — tech support scams, grandparent scams, romance scams — where victims are pressured into buying cards at a store and reading the codes to someone impersonating Microsoft, the IRS, or a stranded relative. Digital codes sold through Steam's own storefront are unaffected. The change hits brick-and-mortar retail only.
Physical gift cards have long been fraud's preferred payment rail because redemptions are nearly impossible to reverse. Removing them from the equation closes a real attack surface. The cost, though, is genuine: unbanked users, teenagers without debit cards, and anyone who preferred paying cash at a convenience store just lost the simplest on-ramp to Steam's catalog. "We stopped selling them because of scammers" is a legitimate reason — it just lands differently depending on which side of a bank account you're on.
Apple, Google, and most major gaming platforms still sell physical gift cards at retail. Whether Valve's decision marks the start of an industry shift or stays an isolated call depends on how much fraud liability the remaining platforms are willing to keep absorbing — and whether their legal teams have been watching Valve's.