Valve Says No

There are a lot of things I don't like about Valve and Steam. Their
worrying dominance over the marketplace. Their intentional (and
self-profiting) blindness to the gambling on their platform. The mess
that is their marketplace, with thousands of valueless asset-flip scam
games crowding out 'real' games. That god-damned auto-patching and not
being able to play games on deprecated computers.

But for all that, I still think that Valve remains the /best/ company
to curate the PC marketplace. (This actually says more about its
competitors though). And their recent announcement putting the foot
down against ad-supported products is one reason why.*

Basically, Valve said: No. Not on Steam. If your product depends on
showing customers adverts in order to make money, sell it somewhere
else. Or change the product to a 'single-purchase paid-app' or use MTX
or other upgrades to bring in revenue. But don't sell a game that
keeps slipping adverts into the experience and expect to sell it (or
distribute it, since many of those sorts of games are typically given
away for free) on our Steam platform."

Now, technically this isn't new policy --as Valve is quick to point
out, this actually was implemented five years ago-- but Valve is
making this restriction much more clear and is apparently being more
pro-active in enforcing it.

Which, I think, is welcome news to pretty much every PC gamer, who
looks at the offerings on Apple's App Store and Google's Play Store
and shudders with disgust. It's not the sort of thing we want
infecting our games, and kudos to Valve for taking the stand against
it. Admittedly, it is a stand they can only make because they have
such
overwhelming control of PC gaming, and because they're already raking
in so much cash that they can ignore the additional profits allowing
such games would allow, but still, I take these victories where I can
get them.

Epic has made no comments on whether it intends to follow suit.**






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* details here
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/advertising

** actually, it's quite possible that Epic has a similar policy and I
didn't bother to check (or ask them); I just like poking fun at the
Epic Game Store. Anyway, they're fine with NFT games (which Valve has
also disallowed) so I wouldn't be surprised if they're equally okay
with ad-supported games too.