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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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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.
Who even does? Ad rot has diminishing returns
Google and Apple.
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 vasically are nowadays.
valve is at this point basically just the good old "luigi wins by doing absolutely nothing", they just avoid obviously being dickheads and try to be like 5% nicer than is strictly most profitable, and due to the state of the rest of the world this makes them one of the most saintlike companies most people know of.
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'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 disagree in this situation - it is being painted more favourably, but it's not bad. Their motivation may be self-interest, but I see it more as killing two birds with one stone. I will also note that Valve could provide official ad integration through steam APIs, but at least so far they chose not to.