You won’t see games on Steam that make money with ads in the game itself. That’s because Valve, the company behind the gaming platform, has banned that.
You’ve probably played a game on your smartphone that required you to watch advertisements before you can continue playing. Those games are often free, and their developers make their money by showing ads in their game. So they depend on it to offer their game for free.
If they want to do that on Steam in the future, they will have to come up with something else. Namely, developers will be prohibited from using ads in games as their revenue model when they offer their game on Steam. This is both good and bad news for gamers.
Steam games may not contain advertising
Steam is banning developers from requiring players to watch advertisements in order to play a game. It also prohibits showing ads that players must watch before they can continue gaming, the gaming platform writes.
Furthermore, from now on it will also no longer be allowed to place certain parts of a game behind a so-called ad wall. And players may also not receive any reward of value after watching an advertisement. Thus, in this way, when you play a Steam game as a gamer, you will no longer be exposed to advertisements.
Good and bad news
It is not clear how many Steam games used this revenue model so far. GamingOnLinux writes it has never seen such a game, but also mentions that there must have been games on Steam that made money with ads.
Developers must now come up with a new revenue model for their games. Steam offers some advice to do so. For example, a developer may choose to charge a one-time payment for a game. Thus, a game that is full of advertising and free to download on your smartphone may soon cost money when you download it on your PC.
