Crypto Advocates Group Gets Together to Protest Steam
The largest online retailer of PC games is Steam but you won’t find any blockchain-based games on its platform. Recently the marketplace updated their TOS (terms of service) banning any games with blockchain or NFT technology, but a number of advocates within the community are now pushing back.
Yesterday digital rights group Fight for the Future wrote an open letter to Valve, encouraging the Half-Life creator to reconsider its recent change, and not ban crypto on its platform.
Joining an initiative are a number of NFT and blockchain gaming advocates, such as Enjin and BGA (Blockchain Gaming Alliance). Making up the BGA is the mega-developer Ubisoft, The Sandbox, Polygon, Atari, Ethereum, and many more.
“Valve, web3 games are a fast-moving and exciting category of games that have a place within the Steam ecosystem,” the letter reads. “Please consider changing your stance on this issue and permit tokens and, more broadly, the use of blockchain tech on the Steam platform. Don’t ban blockchain-based games on Steam.”
The group hopes at least to start a conversation, between developers and Valve, with the main goal being for Steam to reverse its ban entirely. The ban went into effect on October 14th, when Age of Rust developers tweeted that it could no longer host its NFT game on the platform, leaving many to speculate why due to Valve not explaining its reasoning.
Soon after the ban, the CEO of Steams rival, Epic’s Tim Sweeney, tweeted “Epic Games Store will welcome games that make use of blockchain tech provided they follow the relevant laws, disclose their terms, and are age-rated by an appropriate group. Though Epic's not using crypto in our games, we welcome innovation in the areas of technology and finance.”
Games developed using NFTs enable users to own digital items in-game such as characters, weapons, and land, which in turn could be sold or held to appreciate in value. Some games hope that these items can be transferable between games, an aspect I find hard to believe with many games using different engines, but if it can be pulled off, this will be seen as the next revolution within games.
Thornton believes Steam is not acting as consumer-friendly as it’s trying to promote, “This is another case of a gatekeeper wanting to retain their ability to extract value out of every single transaction on their platform,”.