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This sort of shit is why I don't mind spending tons of money with Valve.
Fingers crossed Gaben outlives me <_<
I get weird replies when I mentioned this on reddit in the past, but it's true. He's the only one worth trusting at the place. The moment his inheritors sell out is the moment steam dies taking all our libraries with it.
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.
It can be both.
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.
They could have made their own advertising network and force it to be used instead.
They could. That takes a lot more employees than they have and would mean that they were the place with all the shitty free games.
Valve is such a weird company, on one hand they do things like this, on the other hand there is CS gambling.
I just don't see how they are responsible for CS gambling.
They created an open market, where people can trade and sell their items. Just like people want, instead of being locked down in the game you play at the time.
Of course people are going to gamble with the items, just like they do with anything else you can trade. but how is that not a regulatory issue and instead paved on valve?
Lootboxes.
Players have a random chance of getting crate while playing the game. Each crate is a pool of item cosmetics with various levels of rarity. To acquire one of them the player must purchase a one-use key with real money. Expending the key on a crate initiates a die roll that determines which cosmetic is unlocked.
That's the gambling they're responsible for. What gambling players may of afterward is not the same conversation.
You kinda missed the part where you get the skins by gambling in the first place. A ton of the gambling sites just emulate that and be done with it.
And then Valve uses the same underhanded tactics to get around gambling regulations. In France, players had (have?) to buy a certain skin before they can ~~gamble~~ open cases, and they can see the result of the case before "actually" opening it (but they can't open anything else before they do), because all this makes it not gambling, I guess.
They were also one of the first companies to put ads in video games with CS1.6.
Burnout Paradise woulda been banned from Steam.
I don't remember ads in that game when I played it on the PS3