This sort of shit is why I don’t mind spending tons of money with Valve.
That’s awesome! Good that they keep a bar of minimum quality.
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.
I don’t think it’s cynical. Their review model would make it very hard to make payment fair (we can 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.
Valve is such a weird company, on one hand they do things like this, on the other hand there is CS gambling.
They were also one of the first companies to put ads in video games with CS1.6.
