Steam’s Free-Cash-In-People’s-Accounts Mystery Solved

  There’s no such thing as a free lunch, as my dear ol’ pa used to say. You don’t get a damn thing for nothing in this world. Everyone’s out to look after number one, and take as much effing advantage of everyone else while they’re at it.  

The cynical old bastard was great fun at parties, but he was also damn right. Did you hear that news story about the guy who spontaneously combusted on a crowded subway, and nobody moved because they were all too entranced staring at their cell phones to notice that his ass was on fire? Probably not, as I just made it up, but that’s about where we are as a society right now.

As such, the phrase ‘free money’ is about as suspicious as a hand-scrawled Free candy in this white van (don’t mind the tear-soaked mattress on the floor) sign. That’s why there were a whole lot of befuddled Steam users earlier this week, on finding cash gifts in their accounts with no explanation at all.

The money concerned was a fairly half-assed amount (£5 or so; around $10 for those who don’t speak Brit), but it was an interesting mystery for a lil’ bit. The service’s screw-ups are many and well-known, after all.

For a good while, said users were left wondering if they’d sold their souls to Beelzebub for a piffling amount of Steam-cash and forgotten about it, or something, before an email from Valve finally arrived with the truth. This wasn’t BS or a scam, as Kotaku reports:

In short, Valve failed to apply a loyalty discount to Steam’s Dark Souls III + Steam Controller bundle for some eligible users, so they decided to retroactively make up the difference.

So there it is. I’m glad there wasn’t a more sinister explanation. Free cash from Steam? I thought the world was coming to an end.