If you, like most people on Earth, a frequent mobile gamer, you’ll be all-too aware of the bane of in-game ads. Because the freemium model proves by far the most successful way to release games on telephones, you pay by sitting through agonizing ads with fake countdown timers, ‘x’ buttons that don’t close anything, and faux-interactivity designed to trick you into tapping through to the store. Valve has now made it abundantly clear that anything like this on their PC store means an instant ban.
As spotted by GamingOnLinux, Valve’s encyclopedic Steamworks Documentation has been updated to refuse to sell any game that relies on in-game advertising for its business model. That means no games can require players to watch ads to be able to play, nor hide any elements of a game behind a commercial. And it goes further, banning the use of viewing ads to gain in-game advantages, rewards, or time.
“Developers should not utilize paid advertising as a business model in their game,” say Valve’s instructions, “such as requiring players to watch or otherwise engage with advertising in order to play, or gating gameplay behind advertising. If your game’s business model relies on advertising on other platforms, you will need to remove those elements before shipping on Steam.” The company suggests switching to an up-front payment, or keeping the game “free” but keeping upgrades as paid DLC. The rules then say,
Developers should not use advertising as a way to provide value to players, such as giving players a reward for watching or engaging with advertising in their game.
For people who never play games on mobile, these might seem quite bizarre things to need to rule out: while video games have, for decades, included in-game ads (or even existed to be advertising), gatekeeping actual play behind commercials has only been a very occasional, very egregious matter. On mobile, it’s the norm.
If you’ve played a match-3, or a merger game, or any number of mock-RTS games, you’ll be very familiar with the requirement to sit through 30 seconds of a puzzle game being played infuriatingly badly, or a flashing icon begging you to tap on an army unit, or the most extraordinarily high-quality CG animation promoting a game that plays like it was made on a VIC-20. A tiny circle counts down from 30 seconds, after which the advert doesn’t end, and then it cuts to a new screen with a new timer, replaced by an ‘x’ so tiny that if you don’t tap it with a tungsten needle it’ll take you to the store page. After all that, you’ve now got enough imaginary energy to take two more turns at the game you wish you were allowed to enjoy.
This is, however, extraordinarily profitable, and while you and I might scream into the void that we just want to pay $5 to own the game outright, the moment you put a price on an unknown mobile game it’s doomed to obscurity. And while Steam may not have been plagued by the same issues, it makes a lot of sense for Valve to make these rules clear for those hoping to just port their game and business model over to PC, wholesale.
If anything, it’s very surprising that this isn’t already a fire that needs putting out, rather than some preventative measures. The mobile market proves that are squillions of people who are content to sit through countless ads to play games, so you’d think there would have already been a bigger push to see if the same could happen with PC’s free-to-play audiences. Small mercies, I guess.
Valve makes clear companies can still advertise in games. Those awkward billboards and real-world brand cosmetics are still fine to include, although Steam does stipulate that these must not be “disruptive” and are “appropriate within the context of the game.”
It’s worth noting this does also block previous gross behavior we’ve seen from the biggest names, the likes of 2K, filling basketball games with unskippable ads and so on.
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