13. Steam
We’ve somehow established a trend on this list. Company after company has reestablished the meaning of “service”, immediately bettering the way we look at that specific business sector. This is true when it comes to gaming, too. As PC gaming started taking off, you had to buy CDs of your favorite games. It was the only viable way of trying out what you wanted to play. There was simply no other way. Piracy came along as a free alternative, but it’s never a safe nor secure way to indulge in something. People needed a cloud service, just for games, where they didn’t depend on physical copies of games to play them. As a result, Steam was born.
Valve, the company behind Half Life, decided to provide their fans with the first gaming cloud service. All you had to do was purchase a game and you could download it to an unlimited number of computers and play all you want. Your machine could burn down, but it wouldn’t affect your Steam account. The payments were already easy and enjoyable, so Steam wanted to further facilitate the notion of online payments for PC games.
Thus, in 2016, Steam finally allowed users to pay for games using BitPay, something many people have disputed, but since understood. The move was a success, and it had higher motives than just capitalization.
Steam has users in many developing and less developed countries. There, access to credit cards is not so easy, especially for young people who aren’t independent yet. Because of this, Bitcoin provides everyone with an excellent solution to bypass any boundaries. Cryptocurrencies know no borders, taxes or similar primitive regulations that plague the economy of the entire world.