Duncan’s Limited Steam Account
Duncan’s friend Lincoln was over to visit today, and the two of them wanted to play Team Fortress 2. That’s fine, Lincoln’s parents gave us their old laptop that runs TF2 acceptably so that’s fine. The problem, though, is that Duncan only has one Steam account - easy enough to fix, just create a new one for Lincoln. Then I tried to add him as a friend on Duncan’s account, and I can’t, because Duncan’s account is limited as it hasn’t spent five bucks yet.
Apparently, you have to spend at least $5 USD, and gifts don’t count (our normal way of giving Duncan games). I didn’t feel like heading out to EB games to get a Steam card just to put money on his account. I heard Bitcoin was high recently and I still had a little left over, and I heard that Steam accepts Bitcoin via Bitpay now. Do I have $5 USD?
Not only do I have $5, I had nearly $11 at current prices. So I went through the process which was incredibly painless. After clicking “return to Valve” from the paid invoice, it told me the transaction was pending, but by the time I reloaded the “account details” page the $5 was in his wallet. But what to buy?
I could find almost nothing on the Steam store for exactly $5, most things were $4.99 or some equivalent thereof. Bugger.
While looking around, I just happened to try adding his friend, and it let me do it - you don’t apparently need to even buy anything. I checked his account (append ?xml=1 to the end of the Steam Community URL to a user’s profile and inspect isLimitedAccount) and it still says it’s limited, but he can add friends now, so that will do.
We ended up buying him LEGO Marvel Super Heroes, leaving him a solitary cent in his wallet. I’ll probably add another $5 to his account at some point just to make sure he’s over the $5 limit.
They ended up abandoning the TF2 idea right after purchasing, and opted to play Lego Worlds instead. I have to admit I’m impressed with how well this game works for an early-access game. The Xbox 360 Controller support is flawless, and plugging a wired controller in and pressing a button jumps straight into split-screen multiplayer exactly like you’d expect it should.
My only gripe about it was that they advertised that if you bought the game, you’d get a free copy to gift to someone else. Sabriena already had it, which meant that Duncan could only play it via family sharing when she wasn’t using her library. I figured I’d go in the morning, get a Steam card and buy a copy so that both Duncan and I could have one. Unfortunately, that deal was shortlived and we missed it - but during the Steam Summer Sale we ended up picking it up at a discount anyway so we just bought two copies. We’ll have to try out the internet multiplayer at some point.
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