Valve ban advertising-based business models on Steam, no forced adverts like in mobile games
Valve have updated the developer guidelines for releasing a game on Steam, making it clear that the scourge of mobile gaming advertising-based business models are not going to work on Steam.
That's awesome! Good that they keep a bar of minimum quality.
How would Steam get paid for their services if all your income was from ads?
Well, they could just require publishers to share the ad revenue.
Damn, I was coming here to say this is a meaningful curation step and I couldn't give Steam my usual cynical reality check, but you found the angle and now I can't unsee it.
It can be both. Steam wants their cut, but they also don’t want consumers seeing a free game on Steam, downloading it, and then complaining to Steam because it’s not actually free, it’s just riddled with ads.
It can be both.
I don't think it's cynical. Their review model would make it very hard to make payment fair (we can always argue about whether Steam overcharges for its services) since it would be a pain in the butt to track income from advertisement.
But the advertisement business model makes for worse games. I think it makes great sense for Steam to ban them. And if games on Steam are better then that's good for game developers that use their platform.
They could have made their own advertising network and force it to be used instead.
They could. That takes a lot more employees than they have and would mean that they were the place with all the shitty free games.
Valve is such a weird company, on one hand they do things like this, on the other hand there is CS gambling.
They were also one of the first companies to put ads in video games with CS1.6.
I just don't see how they are responsible for CS gambling.
They created an open market, where people can trade and sell their items. Just like people want, instead of being locked down in the game you play at the time.
Of course people are going to gamble with the items, just like they do with anything else you can trade. but how is that not a regulatory issue and instead paved on valve?
Lootboxes.
Players have a random chance of getting crate while playing the game. Each crate is a pool of item cosmetics with various levels of rarity. To acquire one of them the player must purchase a one-use key with real money. Expending the key on a crate initiates a die roll that determines which cosmetic is unlocked.
That's the gambling they're responsible for. What gambling players may of afterward is not the same conversation.
Burnout Paradise woulda been banned from Steam.
I don't remember ads in that game when I played it on the PS3
