PSA: You Now Need To Spend $5 To Use Certain Steam Features
Most of us have spent ungodly amounts of money purchasing games on Steam, but if you only use it to play free-to-play games, you might now be shut out from gaining full access to Valve's gaming platform.
In an effort to combat people who make and discard free accounts for illegal activities like phishing, Valve has now instituted a restriction on accounts until they spend at least $5 with Steam. Among the features you'll be locked out from include sending friend invites, participating in the Steam Market, voting on Greenlight games, and opening group chat. Activating a game on Steam that you purchased elsewhere or received as a gift will not remove these restrictions -- you need to spend money directly with Steam.
Valve's rationale for making this change is explained thusly:
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. 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.
Like I said, I'd imagine that just about every legitimate player using Steam meets the $5 requirement, but there will be outlier cases. Is this going to affect you?
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About the Author
Jason Winter is a veteran gaming journalist, he brings a wide range of experience to MMOBomb, including two years with Beckett Media where he served as the editor of the leading gaming magazine Massive Online Gamer. He has also written professionally for several gaming websites.
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censorship on forums, fake reviews , overpriced games = digital download even more expensive then hard copy etc.
steam is a joke
I imagine the two most annoying things for most legitimate players would be being unable to send friend invites or opening a group chat. The thing is if you have friends you could just have them send you a friend invite or have them add you into a group chat. While this may be annoying this by no means will keep you from being in contact with your friends.
90% of steam users have spent money on games from steam
i also think it will cut down on scams ,fake invite, spam and so on
$5 buck to help stop this is worth it to me
Let 'em pay $25 a day to contact me, I won't even be mad then.
I've spent well over $5 so it won't affect me, I was pretty annoyed with all the random invites I receive each week, and with all the shitty games that get Greenlit so I think it's for the best. This may not end up fixing everything, but you won't know unless you try, it's better than not doing anything.