Valve is introducing a new policy meant to protect paying users from scammers and spammers.<\/p>\n
When a new account is created on Steam, its privileges will now be heavily limited at first. The short way to sum it up is to say that it now costs $5 to have full access to Steam, but it\u2019s a bit more nuanced than that. Once you\u2019ve spent money \u2013 whether by purchasing games or simply transferring $5 to your Steam Wallet \u2013 all privileges open up.<\/p>\n
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Before that, though, the following actions are off-limits:<\/p>\n
Things like activating retail games, playing demos and participating in free to play titles won\u2019t unlock these, either, nor will activating gifts. Also, just in case you want to transfer $5 and then do a chargeback on your credit card for some reason, those privileges will be revoked. As long as your total historical spending on Steam is over $5 U.S. (or the rough equivalent of that in your local currency), the full feature set is available.<\/p>\n
The most important effect these limitations will have is to keep newly created accounts from tricking users into situations where they can lose things like\u00a0Team Fortress 2<\/em> items, gifted games, or even access to their Steam library. It\u2019s easy to imagine someone creating a bunch of junk accounts and then using those accounts to push games through Steam Greenlight, either at a particular group\u2019s whim or for a fee paid by the developer.<\/p>\n The $5 fee is nominal, something most users spend the first day their account is active, and the fact that Valve isn\u2019t asking users to suddenly pay a membership fee \u2013 just simply show good faith by buying from the store \u2013 makes it a pretty good way to cut out a lot of problem users without adversely affecting people actually using the service legitimately.<\/p>\n