You can purchase physical Steam gift cards at stores like GameStop, Walmart, or drugstores. If you don't use PayPal, there's another option for buying games on Steam. Just make sure you use a strong PayPal password to protect the sensitive details it holds. If you already trust PayPal with your payment info, there's no additional risk to using it on Steam. This lets you sign into your PayPal account to buy games without ever providing your details to Steam. Thankfully, Steam supports PayPal for purchases. If someone steals the credit card info that you used on dozens of sites, removing the card from them all and trying to figure out where the intrusion happened is a pain. Steam Lets You Buy With PayPal or Gift CardsĮven if you trust a website, you might want to avoid entering your credit card details into it. Only you and Steam can see the data.įor more on this, see our explanation of website security certificates. This means that anything sent to Steam's servers is unreadable to anyone who might intercept it. The information that you sent to Steam for your purchase, including your credit card info, is encrypted. When you buy a game on Steam through your browser or the Steam client, your purchase is as secure as any other website that uses modern HTTPS encryption.

If it wasn't, someone would have surely exposed this by now, which would be a huge story. Obviously, such a major website is going to use industry-standard security measures to protect your information. And, Steam has been around since 2003 (though it started selling video games a bit later). At the time of writing, Alexa, which determines how popular a website is, ranked Steam at 398 globally (meaning only 397 websites in the entire world are more popular than Steam). Steam stated that, in 2019, it had as many as 95 million monthly active users. We'll provide some specific reasons why below, but let's think about the big picture first. In short: Yes, it is safe to buy video games from Steam. We'll provide some reasons for Steam's security, plus consider some of the potential risks and how to avoid them. Let's consider whether it's safe to buy games from Steam. However, before buying from anywhere online, it's always wise to stop and ask whether an online store is safe. Because Steam is the de facto marketplace for buying PC video games, chances are that you use it to buy at least some of your games.

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