this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2025
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Huh? https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/integration/retail/sepa/html/index.en.html
That's for bank transfers, not for payments.
Mind you, you often can pay stuff online in Europe via bank transfer if it's within the Eurozone (and the fact that it works from anywhere to anywhere in the Eurozone for the same cost as a local transfer, rather than just locally in each country is exactly because SEPA has been standardized and the regulator has forced banks to charge the same for transfers between different countries in the Eurozone as they do for transfers within their own country), but it's not reliably available in sellers and is a bit more convoluted than pure payment systems (basically you have to use your bank's online site or app to transfer money to the account the seller provides you).
No actual payment systems are standardized across Europe yet, though various country-specific ones have been getting together and setting up cross-compatibility, but none of those covers more than a handful of countries.
Let be blow your mind: Transfer money to Valve's EU bank account, get the game in return.
As I wrote elsewhere, Steam already supports all the European national payment systems, which are all more convenient than bank transfers.
(I actually tested it when writing another post and the Steam payment processing flow first asks you the country you're paying for and then lists the payment systems for that country, and there I could see the standard national one of the country I gave)
GOG too also supports all the European national payment systems (I know because I switched to using those after the whole VISA/MasterCard/PayPal censorship crap happened).
Mind you, a lot of sellers in Europe do actually support paying by bank transfer (which goes via SEPA) but a lot don't, plus it's a bit less convenient than a dedicate payment system (though if you do the bank transfer from a banking app in your smartphone it's reasonably simple plus some of those payment systems are really just a convenience layer - say an app scanning a QR-code for automated payment - over the whole "open the transfer screen and manually enter 20-something digits and an euro amount").
This is not about what "a lot of sellers" do, it's what Valve could do as an easy alternative in one big region of the world.
Making SEPA money transfer by scanning a Qr code from the bank's app is literally a thing. That's how I paid the dentist a couple of months ago.
Well, as I said, Steam already supports all the national payment systems in Europe and yeah, since I've switched away from PayPal in GOG, my game payments have also been done by scanning a QR code from the banking app (which goes via an intermediary but ultimately gets turned into a SEPA transfer).
Sure, Steam could add bank transfer payments. They don't need to as in Europe they already have the VISA/MasterCard/PayPal mafia problem solved, but it would be nice if they did (actually the whole split between payment-system and bank-transfer disappearing and it becoming a single mechanism is probably a good idea).
The lack of a pan-European payment system that's accepted anywhere in the World isn't a problem for Steam, it's a general problem for Europeans wanting to avoid using VISA/MasterCard/PayPal in all their payments no matter where the seller is located (plus even in Europe a bunch of things such as car rental often require a Credit Card). It's solved for the likes of Steam, but not for other sellers (for example I buy eBooks books from a US based seller who doesn't support anything but PayPal, VISA and MasterCard and the same when I buy stuff from AliExpress),
When it comes to Steam, the problem of them being dependent for payments on VISA/MasterCard/PayPal is outside Europe, not in Europe.
That works for account to account transfers and in shop payment with your card. The online payment world is still a lot more fragmented.
Um, no? They can provide an IBAN and then you can pay almost instantly with most banks, with the worst ones taking a business day or two.
Yeah, so? https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/sepa-instant-credit-transfer
Valve literally only needs an EU bank account. Doesn't help the rest of the world but the outlandish claim was that within Europe Valve would need to support "at least one local payment system" per country and that's just wrong.
I believe Valve already supports all the local payment systems in Europe, though they'll only show it to you if you're in one of those countries (the payment processing flow asks you which country are you paying from upfront and then uses that to display the various payment systems available for that country).
Same for GOG, by the way.
The problem is mainly that to sell to anywhere in Europe a seller has to integrate with the many local payment systems out there, which is a lot of work for a small seller.