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Valve ban advertising-based business models on Steam, no forced adverts like in mobile games
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this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2025
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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 call 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.