It's a credit card, you can dispute charges and will likely get a refund. I've done it a few times for different reasons.

When I calculate the "time of fun per euro spent" I'm always shocked how cheap videogames are. Even something like the new Doom, which is 70 euros for 16 hours of play comes down to €4.40 per hour.

I’ve had my account since _Portal_ was released, so that’s around 20 years ago? Frankly I’d be shocked if I’ve spent even $1k and over 20 years? That doesn’t sound too bad. Almost everything I’ve bought has been on sale, or fairly inexpensive to begin with.

There is also the cost of power and computer hardware to factor in, which probably raises the barrier to entry, but you're right. Once you have all the equipment or have it anyway for other purposes, it's very cheap.

I also pro-rate the value of my games like this. For instance, Helldivers 2: paid $39.99, played 537 hours. That's $0.001 or 1/10th of a cent per hour of play. Even if I add $2000 for the PC I play on that still only comes to $3.79 an hour. Hard to beat that price per hour of entertainment. My Steam spend over the lifetime of my account comes to $25 a month which is a decent monthly entertainment cost. Of course that doesn't account for additional spending on other entertainment but putting the total spent amount in perspective is definitely good to do, so thanks for pointing that out for those who need it.

Just accidentally memorize it from having to manually pay a bunch of bills online in a short span!

Yeah, but that's mostly because it's lumpsum. Over time, it's not much at all.

So far it either sounds like they are replaying the message, or it's just a (partial) list of numbers that used steam. Might be good for targeting, but that is about it. They would have to know the associated account to do any intercept attacks.

I would really like to auth my steam account with a normal TOTP app. I know you can extract the TOTP from Steam authenticator but there's risk involved with it.

One could probably also factor in hardware costs. But over years it may not be as bad as suspected like you're expressing.

For context, my account is over 15 years old, it has over $6k spent, and almost all of that is in the last decade. And it still comes out to under $50 a month, with thousands of hours played across a bunch of games. For comparison, I know people who have spent much more on their hobbies with cars, bicycles and home theater equipment.

So have I, but weigh that against the hassle of needing to call and be on hold and so on. Let alone the additional burden of knowing I have to stay on top of checking my statements for fraudulent charges I’d rather avoid all that by never letting it grow to be a problem

That’s for a very good reason that they don’t allow that. If it was allowed it would be a wet dream for credit card churning

Yeah, but you lose out on credit card rewards, aka free money, going that route. I’ve used them a couple times where my privacy was worth more, and once where I didn’t want a company having a card to put recurring charges on Technically it costs money even if their fees are forgettable.

I've always done it on the app, no phone call or chat. But regardless, it's not like _it's going to happen_. I have my cc info (and throwaway cards like privacy.com) in several websites and nothing like this ever happened. The convenience definitely beats the risk.

I also have an old account with ~$6,000 USD on it. I don't worry about it so much. Also, I don't think it includes when a game was purchased on sale, because on my account I have one of the Star Wars mega bundles that came with like 20 classic Star Wars games, but it says it was like $220 or something. I absolutely bought it when it was on sale, and not when it was full priced, because that money would fund Disney and I don't want to fund Disney any more than I feel is absolutely necessary. By comparison, I have put ~$10,000 USD into my car, with $7,000 on the engine alone. So seeing the $6,000 might have been scary initially, but given the value of the dollar, I am kinda surprised the number wasn't bigger. Also, my account is old enough that it doesn't include anything from before 2016? or some year like that.

Two factor auth clan

what risk?

Doing it wrong and losing access. Can you fallback to email pin if you lose your steam authenticator?

Yes, you can reset to email in case you break your phone or something. It's one of the account recovery options. Some logins now require an interactive prompt in the app instead of a TOTP code though. I see them when my IP address changes due to VPN endpoints lately.