Valve slamming the door on ad-rot mechanics? Finally a corp treating gamers like humans, not dopamine piggybanks. Mobile’s ad-infested hellscape stays where it belongs—in the pocket-sized Skinner boxes of despair. But let’s not kid ourselves: this isn’t altruism—it’s market hygiene. Steam’s dominance hinges on not becoming the digital equivalent of a bus station bathroom plastered in NFT billboards.
Meanwhile, Epic’s over there sharpening its shiv, ready to monetize your retinas if it means clawing back relevance. Capitalism’s funniest gag: competition via not being intolerable. Keep the ad-free oasis flowing, GabeN.
It’s not entirely altruistic.
Valve doesn’t get their 30% taste on ad revenue.
This will play into it. But Valve allows stuff that cuts into their immediate profits, like e.g. third party sales. I think ensuring market dominance by ensuring customer satisfaction is the more important part of the decision. Steam is imo meant to stay a quality product with a reliable turnover. They are not aiming to become a bookmaker, like the play store or apple store basically are nowadays.
Who even does? Ad rot has diminishing returns
Google and Apple.
That is the only reason here. But steam-lovers will always paint anything bad more favouribly.
I’m also strongly invested in steam (sadly so), so it’s not just hate.
That is the only reason here.
That’s not a bad thing though. It means their profitability is aligned with preferences of their customers rather than a kind of “managed dissatisfaction” business model.
I really like my Steam Deck, it basically retired my Switch, the last time I saw that it was caked in dust
When can I run Steam OS on my phone? :)
A Steam Phone would be a massive undertaking, but I’m so here for it. I would love if they used one of the actual Linux phone OSs and made it good instead of Android.
Everyone is acting like this is purely for good intentions, but I’ll point out they make most of their money from taking a cut of the sale price from games. Ad money probably would not go to them at all. This is almost certainly purely a business decision, not because they fundamentally don’t like the concept or want to protect you from it.
I honestly don’t really care about Valve’s motivations. It’s a good decision. This kind of trash can take over and ruin an entire marketplace if you let it.
Yes, when something half good finally happens, let’s complain it probably didn’t happen for better reasons
Why are we never happy again?
Removing choices to the consumer isn’t good. It may sound like they’re doing a good thing, but if a racing game can include non-intrusive ads and either make the game cheaper or make more content without harming the experience, that’s good for the consumer. If a company makes a shitty ad ladden game, you can always just not buy it. They aren’t defending you. They’re defending their method of making money and ensuring you can’t make money without paying them, while removing options for the consumer.
the state of current gaming should be enough prove for you that no, people cannot just choose not to buy them… same as you can probably not avoid AI in anything new you buy, they put it everywhere and you either eat it or give up X thing you loved
Maybe the look at the shitshow that is mobile gaming and they want to stay away from it. Good intention in my book.
a good thing done for a shitty reason is still a good thing.
Age is not what’s wrong with charging money inside video games.
Ban the entire business model.
They won’t because they’re the ones making money from it. The only reason they care about this is likely because they don’t get money from ads as they don’t have any related advertising business like Google and Apple does.
It’s the same as when they kicked EA off of steam. EA allowed buying DLC without going through Steam. If they’re not getting a cut, but you are being hosted/distributed by them, they don’t want it.
They won’t because they’re the ones making money from it.
I was (trying to) be tongue in cheek about it, so yes of course they won’t. I just don’t like the idea of propping up Valve as some incorruptible, can-do-no-wrong company. They know they’re causing children to gamble and it’s not that they don’t care, they actively encourage it.
So no recognition of any good until they are perfect?
I’d put intentionally getting kids to gamble pretty fucking far below ‘perfect.’
I really can’t think of how they would stop this.
Like genuinely.
The sites that manage these gambling rings aren’t owned by Valve, and reporting the sites doesn’t get them taken down by the domain providers.
In Steam the trades look the same as any regular trades between players, so if they wanted to stop the gambling trades it would require turning off all trades.
Do you know if anyone has come up with some way they could track and stop the gambling sites?
I think the issue is less the existence of gambling sites, and more the fact that underage gamers are often the target of the sites. An age verification for trading would be the easiest, but Valve has taken a hard stance against collecting identification for any reason. The age verification could come from the websites but that seems very unlikely since the websites are often illegal. If enough countries (especially America) legalized online gambling but required ID verification, the sites may be more likely to implement it, but that is so far of a scenario there really is no prediction.
Weren’t they the ones introducing forced ads in cs 1.6?
For the orange box?
Steam should make a mobile game store
They are working on Proton for ARM devices and will probably try to sell the next Steam Deck with an ARM processor. It wouldn’t be too far off for them to make Steam for phones if that becomes reality.
AFAIK Apple/Play Store do not allow this. They already got into a fight with Epic about it.
I think what they dont allow is having a store in their store. You can easily install a third party store on Android at least but you cant do it through googles store. They dont care if you do, they just wont help you do it. AFAIK, theres legislation in the works to prevent this since not offering third party stores is monopolistic akin to Internet Explorer being pre installed on windows.
Play services is not the same as Andoird. Manufacturers can decide what goes.
Epic actually won and google is appealing it
Rare Tim Epic W
Bans in-game ad but allows outside ad. The origin of drink verification can. There’s no good idea that can’t be made bad by marketing.
