Lets all pray they stay out of the stockmarket
the day gaben dies and the company falls into the grubby hands of investors, its over.
Valve is a private company, so depending on who owns a majority of the shares, not much might change after Gabens earthly demise.
My understanding was that a large percentage of Valve is employee owned. Would love to know if that’s true or not.
That just means that buying it spreads the money to slightly more people. They’re practically just as easy to acquire.
It also means that more people have to be willing to sell (or that if only a few sell, investors hold less power)
Makes sense they don’t want games supported by ad revenue on Steam.
Mobile games started off with that business model and the result is that users are very rarely open to purchasing mobile games, which is where Steam makes money.
I don’t even bother gaming on my phone anymore with everything filled with iaps and ads. Would rather just pay to have the license and play on the Steamdeck instead. Hell, with the sales I’m more likely to just get them even if I don’t get around to playing it.
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.
BASED
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.
Of course everything a company does is in the best interest of the company. Even as simple as “let’s make excellent products with lifetime warrantees” benefits them by making people want to shop there.
But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a good thing when companies realise the customers best interest are also their best interest. We should encourage that, not scoff at it.
Of course everything a company does is in the best interest of the company.
That is not true, but that is part of the problem and also why Steam is at least a little better for us customers. Most companies only do what is good for the stakeholders short term, Valve does what is good for the company/single owner long term. And happy customers are good long-term, but not so important short-term.
It is still capitalism, and thus still terrible. But a tiny bit less terrible.
Also known as free market capitalism 100% working as it should.
Good guy Steam.
Realistically they’re probably doing this mostly because they don’t get the 30% cut on ad revenue. They want to force publishers to actually charge money through Steam.
Even when this is true. Adding ads is in my opinion unethical. As you shove the user pictures that can trigger him. You dont know what the neurodivergent Gamer has. OCD? Or smth else?
Ads are made to catch an eye and clickbait. Flush some dopamine or other emotions. Just to break the wall and make the user buy something against his own real motivation.
At the end some ads are even scams and you dont even get what the manipulated motivation directed it towards to. Mostly the motivation is directed, because the user is being told it recieves something valuable for himself, but at the end doesnt even recieve that.
Ads are just scams and destroying the mentallness. I dont feel psychologically well for 3 days after seeing the wrong picture. Obssessive thoughts unrelated to your life but bothering you, while having your own issues is not nice.
Yeah, I agree with you. Banning ads is a good thing. I just wanted to point out that Valve isn’t doing this purely for our benefit. Valve also does some anti-competitive or anti-consumer stuff to keep their near-monopolistic status.
Hmm. Fair. Thats something we should keep in mind…
Anyways. Im happy to get a broken 140€ Valve index cable replaced for free. Its a Month outside the warranty
Weren’t they the ones introducing forced ads in cs 1.6?
For the orange box?
They’re not banning games with ads, ads are still allowed. Read the article.
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.
I’d be most excited if they just worked on SteamOS for phones too…Then the rest of the community could piggyback on that to catapult phone-Linux as our long awaited practical third option!
(And no, Android, especially modern googlized Android, is not Linux or FOSS enough by a longshot.)
