With this new security measure, Valve hopes to reduce phishing, spam and other bot related things on Steam. This new security measure is to limit what people can do on Steam if they haven’t spent $5 on the platform.
Valve quote;
“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,” They also went on to say; “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. Due to this being a common scenario we have decided to restrict certain community features until an account has met or exceeded $5.00 USD in Steam.”
Anybody who uses Steam will now have to pay $5 before they can:
- Send friend invites
- Open group chat
- Vote on Greenlight, Steam Reviews and Workshop items
- Participate in the Steam Market
- Post frequently in the Steam Discussions
- Gain Steam Profile Levels (Locked to level 0) and Trading Cards
- Submit content on the Steam Workshop
- Post in an item’s Steam Workshop Discussions
- Access the Steam Web API
- Use browser and mobile chat
However, this isn’t the only security upgrade announced by Valve as earlier this week they announced their two-step mobile authentication model and a beta group for it, where users can test the new security feature. If you don’t already use it, you should as it sends you a text and inside the text is a new password every time you login, to ensure that you and only you can access your account. This feature should roll out to all users soon.
