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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.
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.
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.
Who even does? Ad rot has diminishing returns
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.
I realize this is in the actual Steam community so I'll try to be gentle.
Why would they even want competitive advertisements on their product? They don't have official ad intergration ~buy~ ~one~ ~of~ ~our~ ~games~, because it would be like amazon advertising ordering and shipping from Walmart ~valve~ ~must~ ~remain~ ~holy~. They get advertisement dollars from the developers on their platform ~their~ ~actual~ ~customers~, they get a cut of every game sale ~we~ ~don't~ ~want~ ~last~ ~a~ ~"last~ ~click"~ ~compensation~, ~30%~ ~from~ ~a~ ~successful~ ~ad~ ~is~ ~way~ ~more~ ~lucrative~.
Steam already has plenty of advertisement plastered through it's entire platform ~you~ ~must~ ~login~, ~I~ ~will~ ~default~ ~spam~ ~you~ ~with~ ~pop-ups~ ~and~ ~a~ ~store~ ~page~ ~that~ ~will~ ~probably~ ~crash~. They've literally locked you into their advertising model already by forcing you to open their services every time you get an inkling to play a game you've purchased ~reinforced~ ~mental~ ~connection~ ~and~ ~integrated~ ~advertising~ ~ftw!~
It's quite perplexing that Steam has such a huge ravenous fan club on Lemmy. You can take a singular aspect of how they conduct business to any community on here and find examples of how it's given a pass because it's "Steam". I believe it's convinced me that people really don't mind big monopoly companies, just not ones that openly are hostile to it's users (even then some don't mind).
I think the reason they don't do that is because the costs of building an ad network that complies with regulatory requirements in every region is really expensive.
For existing ad networks, it's worth it because of the volume of customers. For Valve, the customer count would be low unless they wanted to make a play at becoming an ad network outside of Steam as well, which is not something that makes sense for them as a business. So for Valve, micro microtransactions and other forms of paid DLC are a much better business model for free-to-play games.
I think it's better than having ads too, but if Valve could have found a simple way to monetize the ads, I they would have gone that route. But this approach brings in more money, reduces cost of hosting games that don't bring Valve income, and brings good will.