Kinda sucks for me, as I’ve almost exclusively used gift cards for the last few years. I get a bonus tax-free credit card by my employer, which I can only use at retail stores. So those were a great way for me to use that card to buy games. It was also a good option for people who wanted to avoid payment providers like Visa/Mastercard etc. Oh well.
The last time I was given a steam gift card obtained at a brick-and-mortar Gamestop, it was a hash of numbers printed on a receipt I had to (painfully) type into Steam manually.
It didn’t even come on a pretty card, and that was about ten years ago.
Largely regional. They were on a rack in half of all the convenience stores I saw in South Korea just last year.
If you don’t mind just a bit of AI , you can use your phone to capture the string of numbers and copy it to your clipboard these days.
It’s lame to trust the machines, but as I age I’m grateful for saving what vision I have left for the actual pixels in my games.
Is OCR even really AI?
It is, it’s just that AI is a word that means “expensive chatbots” nowadays. A shame for those of us who work(ed) in the field before openai became popular
I mean, when it’s the “Google button” that also summarizes the screen contents, implying at least some degree of data exfiltration from our devices, I would say so.