March 10, 2020 Steam purchases are back online.
The issue has since been fixed, but Steam‘s purchasing system was broken earlier today. If you attempted to buy a game, an error message would be displayed that reads: “There seems to have been an error initializing or updating your transaction. Please wait a minute and try again or contact support for assistance.”
The problem was first reported on Reddit, and we verified the issue in both our UK and US offices. Valve hasn’t classified the nature of the issue – the company’s developer interfacing team, Steamworks, simply issued a statement saying it is “currently experiencing unexpected downtime for purchases on Steam and [is] working on a fix”.
The problem occurred across the Steam desktop application and on its mobile store. You could, thankfully, ‘purchase’ any free-to-play games, but you were out of luck if you needed to actually hand over money from your card or PayPal account. The issue persisted for several hours, and Valve likely lost out on a lot of money.
At least the issue isn’t as problematic as the last one Steam faced.
Just a few weeks ago the storefront’s Google description said “Fuck Epic Games Store“. That quirk has long since been fixed, thankfully.