[Every so often, you may see some of these mini-features appear on the front page. They are just short editorial thoughts meant to start an interesting conversation in the comments and c-blogs. Enjoy! Now get to discussing!]
Would you ever give your credit card number to your local department store to hold onto? How about your favorite restaurant, or gas station? It might make the checkout process faster, but would it be worth it to take that risk? Would it be worth it to trust your financial security to relative strangers just to save a few minutes every time you buy some snacks or fill up the gas tank?
I’m guessing that for most of you, the answer is no. However, I’m also guessing that most of you are OK with the equivalent online practice. Registering your credit card with digital videogame distributors like Steam, PSN and XBLA is commonplace among gamers today. Most of us just take it for granted. That’s just the way games are sold online, with our credit card info entrusted to people that we’ve never even seen in real life.
Why are we so willing to take these risks when it comes to our online transactions? Is it because we’re slaves to convenience, or something worse?
I first started to notice that many gamers were in love with giving their credit card information out to strangers back whenBit.Trip BEATfirst hit WiiWare in 2009. I was quick to spread the word about how much I loved the game, and urged everyone I knew with a Wii to give it a shot. Though a few friends picked up the game right away, the great majority said, “WiiWare? I’ll pass.”
That really puzzled me. Did they think the game wouldn’t be fun just because it was on WiiWare, or was it because they didn’t have space on their Wii’s hard drive, or was there something else I was missing? It’s not like they could complain about navigating the Wii Shop channel (not in this instance, anyway). They knew exactly which game they were getting, so the need for navigation was at a minimum. As it turned out, hard drive space wasn’t really an issue, either, as few of them had ever bought a WiiWare game. No, more often than not, the reason they wouldn’t pick upBit.Trip BEATwas because they were just too lazy. “I’d rather just get a game on Steam or XBLA,” they’d say. “I don’t want to have to deal with entering my credit card information over and over again. It’s just easier to get a game on another service.”
Now that every PSN member has had their account information compromised, I wonder if they still think that small convenience is worth it.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not trying to slam PSN here. They aren’t the first service of this type to get hacked, and I’m sure they won’t be the last. However, I do blame gamers for creating a sales climate where laziness wins over safety. PSN could have given us the option for a WiiWare-style sales system, where you have to enter your credit card information each time you make a purchase. But they didn’t, because some particularly vocal gamers would inevitably have been dicks about it. They would have complained about the hassle and bad-mouthed the service for it, and PSN’s reputation would have suffered as a result. Maybe not as much as its reputation is suffering now, but that’s debatable.
Overall, I’m hoping this whole PSN disaster causes gamers to change their attitude towards the “fast and fun shopping vs. identity theft protection” argument. Just as the the best way to stay safe from STDs is to never store your genitals against someone else’s genitals, the best way to safely purchase goods online is to never store your credit/debit card info on someone’s else’s online database. It’s just that simple. If Sony does give us the option in the future to buy games from PSN without registering our credit cards, I hope gamers support it. The same goes for Steam and XBLA. It may not be quite as fun, but it’s worth the peace of mind to keep our junk, and our credit card numbers, in our pants.
Worst analogy ever? Worse still, am I overreacting? What do you think, Internet? Is it worth the time and energy saved to register your credit card numbers with the various digital videogame distributors of the modern day, or would you rather keep that info safely encrypted in your wallet?
