All this makes me think of war on drugs and other similar failed attempts at regulation, and of the article "the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero". The stronger the zeal to prevent porn the more expensive it gets to do so, and the more they cause legit companies like yours to close, the more profitable it gets to do it illegally. Just cranking on the symptoms without looking at the cause often has the opposite effect to the one desired, not that the people pushing for this probably care.
Is it only available in Polish złoty for Polish citizens? Or could I, from a different EU country, open an account and use it to pay for games on Steam? My guess would be no, but it's worth asking.
It's supported by polish banks for PLN accounts, but I don't think there's a requirement to be a citizen to open an account. I know Revolut also allows using it, if you create a PLN account in it.
Revolut will only offer BLIK if your address is in Poland, it's not enough to just open a PLN subaccount. Same with Wero, it is only shown for customers in Germany and France IIRC. I have no idea why they did it like that, the backend clearly supports them all.
PSP S.A. is expanding abroad, so perhaps BLIK will be available in more countries in some time: "In September, the first BLIK transaction was made in Slovakia, and BLIK Romania S.A. received authorization from the National Bank of Romania to operate in the country. In November, the Polish Payments Standard transformed into a joint stock company, to support the execution of its strategic goals." [1] [2]
BLIK has one ugly caveat, though: it has no chargeback procedure.
Any young kid with a phone is cooked these days. NSFW content blocking makes such an insignificant dent into that issue that it pretty much rounds down to zero. What it does effectively though, is give the government an excuse to put in place more ways to control what people can read or watch.
People have been making the same argument for more than a decade now, meanwhile PC gaming has only kept growing. If that was the case, why hasn't it happened yet?
Every kid and teen I know wants one of those shiny gaming PCs. Much more than past decades thanks to all of their favorite streamers predominantly playing on gaming PCs. They have half an aisle of those PCs just at Costco. Seems out of touch to suggest this is a declining trend.
It’s arguing desktop gaming is dying not PC gaming. Q4 2024 shipped 13.6 million desktops (down 1.8%) vs 53.2 million laptops up (6.8%).
That trend of declining Desktops vs increasing laptops has been steady since 2010. There’s still plenty of desktops to justify major investments by gaming companies, but that’s not guaranteed long term.
That's just overall desktop and laptop sales though, right? So home multimedia desktop PCs could be falling off a cliff, business desktop PCs could be dropping, and gaming PCs could be growing a bit and the overall market of desktops could still be net down, right?
The overall market doesn't give us enough resolution to determine the health of gaming PC sales IMO. There's too many other possible ways we get to that same number.
You see a similar trend in gaming desktops vs gaming laptops, but that’s just a sideshow. People game on the hardware they have, gaming specific PC’s are a subset of the overall player base.
It used to be much easier to justify adding a dedicated GPU to the desktop's people where already getting, but when everyone is buying laptops that’s dying. As shown by end of generation mid range cards like the 4060 (2 years old, nothing newer) being relatively less common than they used to be on Steam.
#1 Laptop 4060 4.99%, #3 desktop 4060 4.41%. Overall gaming desktop PC’s are still more common than gaming laptops, but the trend is very much down. #2 is the 4 year old 3060.
That's a strange movement of a goal post, not to mention that using percentages conveniently hides whether PC Gaming as a whole is growing or shrinking.
