Please, be critical for just one moment. What they banned was advertisements which basically stopped the games dead. What they did not ban were advertisements.
Again, be critical. Let's list some things that theoretically can still exist.
1) Add banners taking up the bottom 1/4 of your screen.
2) Constant nagging to buy premium stuff, Angry Birds style with the "purchase a golden eagle" banner.
3) Branded merchandise.
4) Loot boxes.
5) Branded goods appearing everywhere. Again, those fun logos are basically advertising.
6) "Non-invasive" advertisements. Imagine 80% of those billboards in GTA suddenly saying "buy Shark Cards" and you'll have an easy viable example.
I am tired of being the only person thinking about this...because so many people just want to believe that this is Valve benefiting everyone. It is not...and anyone with half an ounce of awareness would spend a nanosecond carefully considering that Valve is not doing this because it is good, only because it's killing a non-value added cost and simultaneously making it impossible for them to be held accountable like the mobile market sludge factory.
Let me put this into the most positive light I can. A few years back, Take2 patented a means to stop games during the quarters (basketball), and show an advertisement. This "organically replicated the genuine experience" of the between quarters experience. IE, they wanted to insert commercials into a full AAA game. Patent filed...and then ignored because they went down the whole annual release and loot box path. It was ignored because basically everyone thought it was distasteful, and my suspicion is that the patent filing was leaked as a soft means to discover if it was a deal breaker or not...because if you've got to always be online for your single player game you might as well also connect to a server to get paid and targeted advertising, right? Don't believe me? Maybe you are wary? 2009.
Google Patent Application
Yep, Valve is really on the ball here. 2024-2009 = 15 years. The reason that this effectively died was that loot boxes proved to be a much easier pill to swallow, and 0.01% chances of getting a game breaking character or bit of tech absolutely drove certain whales to plunge tens of thousands of dollars into the system.
So...square the circle for me. 15 years late to the party. Focused only on a very narrow type of advertising. Allowance of parallel streams, and a call to instead structure games such that they require payments that Valve gets a slice of. Tell me, in any other company this would be viewed as a basic protection that does almost nothing for the consumer, but you guys are lining up to pray at the Valve altar. Can you maybe see why anyone who has a long enough memory might see this as nothing special, or do I have to explain the enormous benefits of differentiating your platform from the mobile market when you release 10k games a year?
Note that the amount of games on the market is 89,000+, and the last few years have seen an average of more than 27 games a day being released (that's 10k/365, but 2024 was 42.25 per day) :
- 2024: 15,422 games released
- 2023: 11,583 games released
- 2022: 10,117 games released
- 2021: 9,819 games released
That kind of pipeline means banning a 15 year old monetization scheme (older, but the first patent I remember) is literally nothing but a PR win...and everyone here willing to pretend Valve is amazing for doing it basically needs to be intentionally blind to how late this was done. Wake me when they start requiring developers to disclose all drop rates, or ban intermediary currency conversions so the cost of goods is plainly understood. Those would be protections which might hurt them, but would absolutely make the industry as a whole better.
As a means to an end, Digital Extremes publishes a drop table for all their loot. You can see the 0.001% drop rates for certain things...and you know why buying the thing is a better use of your time, if you don't ignore that garbage completely. If FIFA listed a 0.001% drop chance and an average loot box costing of $5 it'd be apparent that they wanted an average cost for their stuff to be as astronomical as it actually is...but I see EA sports FC 25 on steam for $69.99 right now, with the "Buy FC points" option of $49.99 for 5900. Almost like you need to buy a full priced AAA, then spend multiple AAA games more money on unlocking content...for a yearly released game, that in lass than 360 days will reset. Not scummy at all, right (I say, dripping with sarcasm)?
