This Steam Change Has A Lot Of Players Very Angry

The Steam Winter Sale is here, which means PC gamers are coming in droves to check out the discounts and snap up some of the titles they missed out on. Unfortunately, a change to the way Steam dishes out rewards has a lot of players very, very upset.

In this year's Winter Sale, Festivity Tokens are the currency players can use to obtain new chat stickers, graphics for their profiles, and more. Steam typically offers tokens as a reward for making purchases during the sale, and also provides ways for users to earn tokens via quests. One user, however, noticed upon visiting the Winter Sale page that Steam will only award tokens for purchases made "using non-Steam Wallet funds." So if you were banking money in anticipation of the Winter Sale — or any other sale, for that matter — games bought using those funds won't get you anything.

"Yeah this is stupid," said one user on Reddit. "Currently have $170 on my account and I don't want to use another method to purchase games."

"It's punishing users for using their existing service. It makes no bloody sense," said another.

There's no word at this time on why Steam might have implemented such a restriction. And as the one user stated, it certainly doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Steam offers a Wallet feature, which essentially traps money in the Steam ecosystem when someone adds to it. Why would that payment method be less preferred than a credit card? Why would Steam treat those who purchase prepaid Steam cards like second-class citizens?

Hopefully Valve comments and sheds some light on this decision. There could be some kind of logical explanation behind the move; perhaps some Wallet users abusing the system or something. But right now, we only know what we know. And it sure looks like Steam is excluding Steam Wallet users from its latest event for no apparent reason.

We'll update you should we learn more.