Steam Bans Blockchain
Videogame developer Valve, known as the company behind the popular launcher, Steam, and games such as Portal, Half-Life, and Left 4 Dead have effectively banned NFTs on their platform. Steam is an app in which people can play, buy, and share games with their friends and has been the leading platform for games on PC since 2011. Leading many to believe that when Nft and Blockchain experiences made their way to games, they would be hosted on Steam. But that does not seem to be the case after a recent Twitter thread from a nft Video game project, Age of Rust, announced that not only had they been removed from Steam, but any and all Blochain/NFT projects would as well.
Community: A few minutes ago, we were notified that @Steam will be kicking *all blockchain games* off the platform, including Age of Rust, because NFTs have value. Behind the scenes, we've had good communication and have been upfront with Steam. #blockchaingames #NFT
— Age of Rust (@SpacePirate_io) October 14, 2021
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The tweet mentions that the reasoning behind the ban is "because NFTs have value.", which correlates with Steam’s recent update to its onboarding page saying "applications built on blockchain technology that issue or allow [the] exchange of cryptocurrencies or NFTs". This isn’t surprising as valve has come into some hot water in the past, with criminals violating their skin economy in games like CS:GO & TF2 to clean money, the company seems to be bracing for any future litigations that could come from Crypto regulation.