I was happily using this for a year or so now. Feels fairer than using an ad blocker. But now they apparently want more money out of people. Feels like some sort of internet video apocalypse is happening, where the services become extremely fragmented and expensive, like YouTube, netflix, hbo, Hulu, Disney+ and whatnot. Each wants some 10-20€ out of your pocket.
I guess that means back to ad blockers and piracy…
Literally pretty much every online service - especially subscription ones - want a card. Not necessarily a credit card, but at least debit.
Even in Europe many people have credit cards and pretty much everyone with a bank account has a debit card.
I have a bog-standard bank account and yes of course it comes with a debit card that doesn’t mean that it works with the US-centric “enter card number and expiry date” system, though. Way too insecure anyway.
Steam manages to use Giropay, I can understand if a US company doesn’t want to deal with that kind of solution1 but accepting SEPA transfers is dead-simple, dirt cheap, and covers 100% of the EU (and more) market.
1 The German banking sector, alas, in in the habit of pioneering stuff and then be incompatible with what big financial players elsewhere come up with. Other times the rest of the world simply doesn’t care, e.g. when it comes to HBCI/FinTS.