23 ms·

Steam bans all blockchain and NFT games on its platform

379 points by astlouis44 5y ago

amelius 5y ago
As much as I hate NFTs and many things related to blockchains, I don't like the idea of platforms throwing their weight around at all.
- quickthrower2 5y ago
  What i suspect you don’t like is having games in a walled garden at all then. Because app stores need rules of some kind, as they are liable for problems. The internet itself isn’t.
  - amelius 5y ago
    Steam is more than just a store though. Its "content filter" functionality could/should be separate from other functionalities they offer.
aww_dang 5y ago
Performance concerns aside, WASM + WebGL has never looked sweeter. Zero trust required from the user and no walled garden. File this latest incident with the other app store shenanigans.
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  There’s nothing stopping you selling downloadable games on your own web store either. The hard part is actually reaching an audience and then monetisation (and chargebacks). The ‘Steam effect’ is very diluted these days but a hell of a lot stronger than going without which is why everyone is still there. And I’m extremely pro-web games!
  - chrisco255 5y ago
    Nope and it's even easier now that Web3 standards like ERC721s and Ethereum exist. It's a few lines of code to make it so that users can sign and pay with crypto, so you don't have to go through third party gatekeepers.
    - meheleventyone 5y ago
      That just adds a further complication that you need to find people that want to spend ETH on a game download rather than a speculative asset to hold or flip.
- warvstar 5y ago
  100% agree and when WebGPU comes out, that's going to reduce performance differences by a ton.
- astlouis44 5y ago
  100% this. With all the talk of web3 and gaming, WebGPU + WASM + WebXR is the path forward to the metaverse. No walled gardens asking for a 30% cut, direct embedding of games inside a developers site, and for players they don't have to install anything locally. This is what my startup is building with our browser-games platform.
  - pshc 5y ago
    I can't imagine it will be easy to get low latency silky smooth 90FPS+ out of WebXR, even with a pure WASM app. Being at the mercy of the Chrome devs sounds like a challenge.
    - aww_dang 5y ago
      Web games are usually more casual. When the user is sold on the gaming proposition you can offer them a native client.
  - knownjorbist 5y ago
    The fact that by having a wallet you already have an pseudonymous account with every dapp that will ever exist is an exciting concept. Likewise, the developers don't have to really think about authentication or authorization or payments.
  - astlouis44 5y ago
    Link to our Discord: https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8 https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8 Link to our website:https://www.theimmersiveweb.com/ https://www.theimmersiveweb.com/
    - samb1729 5y ago
      No one responded to your comment asking for these links.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    You know you can just host game installers on your website today right? A big part of Steam's value is that you don't have to build your own distribution infrastructure, which you will still need even if your game is just a big ass WASM file.
- nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago
  Yeah, WASM and WebGL could use a fresh boost like that. Once they get proven in games we can finally start getting rid of legacy stuff like HTML, CSS, JS and start innovating again.
- sva_ 5y ago
  Any resources on using WebGL with WASM? Most stuff I find seems pretty mediocre projects. I feel like we'll have to wait for WebGPU.
  - astlouis44 5y ago
    Our team is building out upgraded support for UE developers that want to target WebAssembly. Here's a link to our Discord server: https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8 https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8
unethical_ban 5y ago
CSGO skins are pretty marketable. I think they don't want items with real world value that Valve doesn't control, for reasons of varying charity.
- vizzier 5y ago
  Indeed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_gambling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_gambling from a couple of years back was morally dubious to say the least.
- ushakov 5y ago
  i have a friend, who had $50k worth of CS:GO skins listed for sale on Steam
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    Aren't the on market listings limited to something like 1700€... Real pain I noticed when trying to realise the gains. Ofc, you could run multiple accounts, but still...
  - leereeves 5y ago
    How many actually sold?
    - bluejellybean 5y ago
      The market is very liquid for anything above 3 pennies. Source, I have over 150,000 market transactions.
arpu 5y ago
We released a blockchain market integration Today. you can earn Money today with your Webgl BAsed Game on vrland.io
AlexandrB 5y ago
Everyone mentions the scammy nature of NFTs and cryptocurrencies, but I think the bigger reason might be that Steam doesn't want to be subject to financial reporting requirements when people buy and sell crypto equities on their platform. KYC applied to Steam would be a nightmare.
- tpurves 5y ago
  This is the simplest and correct answer. Intentionally or otherwise, finding yourself operating as an unlicensed securities dealer, deposit holder, brokerage or money transmitter is going to give you a very bad time with any number of federal authorities that (heavily) regulate all of those things.
- HugoDaniel 5y ago
  Like many I am willing to buy NFTs and enjoy their many benefits. Steam will likely try to capitalize on it when it becomes an even bigger market by either introducing their own marketplace or token or something else.
  - X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
    I'd guess that in a couple years they'll roll out their own L2 system that has a long withdrawal window and reserve the right to freeze funds.
    - Ekaros 5y ago
      I doubt they ever allow withdrawal. They are in perfect position, they either keep getting 5 or 15% cut from market transactions over and over again or 20-30% cut of game sales. Or even 100% cut with certain items. Why allow money to go out when it is almost yours anyway.
      - X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
        Depends on if they are starting to lose marketplace capture or not.
ShaneMcGowan 5y ago
Yet the CS:GO skin trading remains
- aaomidi 5y ago
  Yeah, cause CS:GO skin trading has nothing to do with NFTs.
  - ShaneMcGowan 5y ago
    If you swap out the SQL DB for a Blockchain it's basically the same thing
    - arcticbull 5y ago
      The SQL database is under the control of a central authority. That's actually the difference here.
      - ShaneMcGowan 5y ago
        One could argue that's worse
        arcticbull 5y ago
        One could argue that's better, too - for instance in support of AML, KYC and the ability to reverse erroneous transactions - but the point I was making is that they aren't basically the same thing in this case.
        progbits 5y ago
        You get a "worthless" digital asset either way but one of those doesn't burn a shit-ton of coal. So yes, you could argue the blockchain one is worse.
        practice9 5y ago
        Digital asset should not be worthless if somebody put some work into creating it. By your definition YouTube videos are worthless, but companies, individuals and Google burn a lot of gas to transport staff and tech, and a lot of electric energy to record videos, convert them into several formats and host them to billions of people.
HideousKojima 5y ago
In addition to the fact that the very idea of NFTs is a scam, Valve doesn't want to enable money-laundering lest financial regulators drop the hammer on them. Banning any games that involve real-world assets (or anything easily convertible to a real world asset like crypto) is just smart business given current financial regulations. It also gives them a complete monopoly on their internal marketplace, so that's a nice bonus.
- pcstl 5y ago
  I actually think in-game content is one of the most legitimate uses for NFTs. It's also cool that since the on-chain data doesn't go away if the game does, it allows for in-game collectables which are not tied to a specific game. Lots of possibilities there.
  - NikolaNovak 5y ago
    Pardon my ignorance - but if the game goes away, what precisely does the NFT token which remain grants you? Isn't it just a confirmation that you own an item in a game that you cannot access/use anymore? I guess as always, I am looking for benefit of NFT/chain solution over simpler non-NFT/chain solution. I hear persistency, but in this case I don't see it in practical terms.
    - pcstl 5y ago
      It can be used by a different game. The token is just a token, what it means depends on how it's used. A smart game producer that sees a NFT-based game go down could say "hey, you know all those items you had on <game X>? Come over to my game and you'll get <benefit> based on that stuff!" Since ownership of the token is publicly visible and not locked into Game X's database. It could also be used by anything else, really. Lots of ideas where cross-game promotion could be done using NFTs to validate ownership of something in Game A within Game B without requiring the game developers to set up a specific intergame data link.
      - afavour 5y ago
astlouis44 5y ago
Wonder what knuckleheads at Valve signed off on this one. The ability to provide true ownership to players, and the ability to make real income off of your time investment in a game is huge. I would argue that blockchain will eventually have it's biggest use case in gaming, and every studio/publisher/platform that doesn't get on board with this is going to miss the next big disruption for our industry. Games like Fortnite and World of Warcraft have shown that in-game currencies can be a big thing. What happens when that isn't centrally controlled by a developer, and is distributed throughout the community? Steam is effectively saying no to the metaverse with this move, in my opinion. Developers are going to go elsewhere to ship their titles. On this note, my startup is building a decentralized browser games platform that leverages WebAssembly to enable Unreal Engine developers to export any game to HTML5 at near native performance, and we're currently working on WebGPU support. We welcome all games, including those powered by NFT's and blockchain. We will be expanding the platform to support Unity games in the future as well. In addition to hosting, we provide a complete suite of end-to-end tooling for exporting binaries to the web using advanced compression and an asset streaming system so players can jump into the action quickly and experience desktop quality games right inside their browser of choice. If you're interested in our platform and tools, you can join our Discord here for more information: https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8 https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8
- coconut08 5y ago
  what do you mean true ownership? the only thing you can truly own on a blockchain is something that is internal to said blockchain. you get absolutely zero protection for things that are external to that blockchain. if you take a game like hearthstone and create nft's for the cards, there is nothing about an nft on the ethereum blockchain(or any blockchain for that matter) that restricts blizzard's ability to take your cards from you, inflate said cards supply, destroy said cards or give said cards to another person even if it violates the state on ethereum. for things external to said blockchain particularly when it comes to centralized products and services it offers no guarantees over what you would get from a centralized database.
  - iskander 5y ago
ushakov 5y ago
> Steam's point of view is that items have value and they don't allow items that can have real-world value on their platform pretty hypocrite, considering they have a p2p marketplace, which does exactly that https://steamcommunity.com/market/ https://steamcommunity.com/market/
- georgeecollins 5y ago
  I think you are misunderstanding the term "real-world". Obviously they sell digital content on their platform. That's the whole point. They don't sell "real-world" things like tee shirts or toys.
- plainnoodles 5y ago
  I think this is a bit of an uncharitable comparison though. NFTs and crypto are explicitly supposed to have real-world value and uses that are more or less completely divorced from their use in these games. If you delete the game, the items themselves still have the majority of their purpose. Whereas for the things on the p2p marketplace, their value is entirely predicated on the game they exist within. Given Steam is a games platform, I think it is pretty straightforward for them to want to keep non-game-related stuff away. Even if it's just from a pragmatic point of view: as weird as it is, lawyers and accountants at this point are very familiar with how to handle users trading in-game things. Pulling in things that exist sufficiently in real life to be in danger of being considered a security is absolutely a big departure from what Valve is used to supporting on its platform.
- pzduniak 5y ago
  The only way to withdraw the money made on the marketplace is to buy marketplace items and trade them for money via online payments / cryptocurrency, which is against their ToS. Looks like they aren't enforcing that, though.
- q1w2 5y ago
  P2P is not the same as "crypto and NFTs". The reason they are doing this is so they do not become a money laundering platform.
sakidev 5y ago
It's a very "boomer" decision. I mean, I can understand Valve trying to protect their users against the unknown, but blockchain games / play 2 earn / metaverses are pretty much the future. Just imagine VRChat with unique collectibles, immutalized on a blockchain like Ethereum (so the item and the owner is completely verified), and being able to trade them for real money. It's like when Diablo 3 had a real money auction house. They were early, we still are, but these kind of game features will be the general norm in some years. So Valve will probably evolve in the future and accept them, when the space looks safer.
- DizzyDoo 5y ago
  Wow, hang on, you're bringing up Diablo 3's auction house as... a positive example?? That's a new one. It was, and still is, widely agreed to be a colossal, almost game-sinking failure, and Blizzard couldn't shut it down quick enough, once they understood the ramifications of their decision: [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-24152225 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-24152225 [1] https://www.wired.com/2013/09/diablo-auction-house/ https://www.wired.com/2013/09/diablo-auction-house/ [2] https://twitter.com/Tocelot/status/1439632031726456832 https://twitter.com/Tocelot/status/1439632031726456832
- Quarrelsome 5y ago
  > but blockchain games / play 2 earn / metaverses are pretty much the future Football index was a scam, I would argue these "metaverses" are the scams of the future. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_Index
  - dreyfan 5y ago
    > I would argue these "metaverses" are the scams of the future Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. The concept of metaverses have existed long before the cryptocurrency/ICO/DAO/DeFi/NFT community co-opted it. Same way they have, unfortunately, co-opted the term "web3" in current vernacular. It won't last though.
- dubcanada 5y ago
quickthrower2 5y ago
Or “Steam bans gambling, money laundering and scamming”
- elevenoh 5y ago
  Did steam ban fiat?
- Rebelgecko 5y ago
  Steam still has plenty of gambling
- chrisco255 5y ago
  Lol or Steam bans an open source standard for exchanging game content that threatens their business model.
- knownjorbist 5y ago
  More realistically, Steam is scrambling to develop their own L2 they can control to prevent secondary markets. HN seems blissfully unaware of how much momentum there is in crypto and the larger web3 space right now.
  - astlouis44 5y ago
    Web3 gaming, meaning decentralized games in the browser on the blockchain is the future. No 30% cut from walled gardens, and direct distribution for developers to their end users.
    - mixedCase 5y ago
      What makes these games decentralized and how are they different from hosting your own http server for distribution and taking crypto for payments? Or is "decentralized games" a marketing term for just that?
      - shinymark 5y ago
        I don’t understand the distinction. You can sell a game on your own website today without using any of these technologies if you want to avoid walled gardens.
carlosdp 5y ago
I don't see why NFT game devs should care about this to be honest. We shouldn't be putting decentralized games on one of the most centralized platforms in history. Love Steam, but you can do your own distribution pretty easily these days. If they want to miss out on the next platform evolution, that's a mistake they'll have to reckon with. I don't see it affecting the NFT gaming market one bit.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  The love their blockchains. So why not make a blockchain for distributing games? Patching would be lot more secure as it would be cryptographically secure and any player could just build the newest version from shared blockchain.
- astlouis44 5y ago
  Agreed. The browser route using WebAssembly and WebGPU is the path to decentralized distribution of games to players. This is what our team is working on! No 30% cuts from walled gardens, and developers have the freedom to whatever they want, and if that's to implement their game on the blockchain then they should be able to.
  - elevenoh 5y ago
    Beautiful. Keep going! I'll only be playing outside of walled gardens myself.
    - astlouis44 5y ago
      Join our Discord here for more info: https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8 https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8
- birdyrooster 5y ago
  What about NFTs make a compelling argument that they are "the next platform evolution"? Why should I want NFTs in a game?
  - 5y ago
xiii1408 5y ago
Considering all the crazy shit that goes down with CSGO skins, which have a much more controlled market than NFTs, I find this pretty unsurprising. For anyone unfamiliar with the CSGO skins market and the explosion of illegal gambling sites a few years ago, I highly recommend this video [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSkXFUw8tTU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSkXFUw8tTU
jimjimjim 5y ago
nfts are terrible. You're buying a url. what if that nft company disappears? Unless an artist or creator makes the nft how do they benefit? I hope people get distracted by the next squirrel that passes by and nft's fade into nothingness.
- Kiro 5y ago
  The URL is meaningless. The act of NFT Y being minted by X is what matters, even if the URL stops working. The value relies on a social contract.
- elevenoh 5y ago
  I can buy digital rights to anything via nft. I can buy a land property title. The whole point of blockchains like Ethereum is to not 'disappear'
- chrisco255 5y ago
  A lot of NFTs are backed by IPFS URLs. Some are pure on-chain SVGs. But even the ones that are mere API URLs are still far superior to arbitrary, closed-standard in-game proprietary marketplaces that prevent user ownership and exchange of digital assets they've earned. What if Steam rugpulls your game that you spent 2 years of your life working on? Can't do shit about it. Say what you will about crypto but plausible neutrality of the platform itself is a huge win for content creators and users.
elevenoh 5y ago
The game devs I know are gonna go direct the chains. Glad steam's cards are on the table now rather than later :)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
javier123454321 5y ago
Steam just banned itself from the metaverse
- Ekaros 5y ago
  Why join when you can run your own market and own most of non-crypto market. And get the nice 5% cut on each transaction.
- astlouis44 5y ago
  This x 1000.
imaginationra 5y ago
Now I know why they "retired" our recent game in progress that had two QR codes in it that linked to an NFT for the game. Steam was TERRIFIED of our little erc721 token haha.
mminer237 5y ago
This seems like a positive move. I can't imagine that a game would ever be improved by having a blockchain waste my electricity as opposed to just having an efficient database store the same data on AWS. Realistically, these are all just scams, and they aren't trying to improve games at all.
- elevenoh 5y ago
  The more I hear scam w/o reasoning, the more likely i am to buy nfts. This is just like bitcoin in 2011.
  - mminer237 5y ago
    Okay? NFTs are still fundamentally stupid and only exist because people can make money selling worthless...nothings. That meets the definition of "scam" in my book. Bitcoin at least has theoretical uses, although practically it is definitely a negative force in the world. Their current price does not logically make them useful.
    - X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
      > NFTs are still fundamentally stupid and only exist because people can make money selling worthless...nothings. What about games, or art?
      - ALittleLight 5y ago
        Neither of which use or benefit from NFTs.
      - djur 5y ago
        NFTs are not games or art and are not necessary or useful to sell games or art.
      - mminer237 5y ago
        If I buy a license of a game, I gain the legal ability to play the game. If I buy a print of and associated license to art, I gain the legal ability to look at and resell my copy the art. If I invest and buy the copyright to something, I can sell the above rights to others. If I pay to record on a blockchain my ownership a hash, I gain...nothing. I guess I could brag about how I paid money for a hexadecimal string when no one else was willing to? The theoretical advantage is that I can try to pawn it off on someone else for more money by convincing him that he can do the same to someone else.
anonporridge 5y ago
Moxie's recent post is a fantastic illustration of how NFTs as they are currently implemented are bullshit, https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1448066579611234305 https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1448066579611234305 I'm not sure I'd go so far to call them an outright scam, but they're highly fragile assets that likely won't stand the test of time. I would be interested to see if someone is working on implementing NFTs in a way that I can feel confident that the digital art will remain provably attached to the NFT for decades and centuries in future.
- azeirah 5y ago
  From this tweet, it sounds like NFT's are not much more reliable than html <a> tags? If the host is down, the NFT is nothing more than just a pointer to a 404?
  - anonporridge 5y ago
    Pretty much. And worse, the host of the image could theoretically change it on you and you'd have no way to prove (at least in a trustless way) what the original image was.
  - X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
    Yup. Here's a tool for checking most ETH based NFTs: https://checkmynft.com/?address=0x5c61afa47570ab2b562606fa578221305b12c307&id=1 https://checkmynft.com/?address=0x5c61afa47570ab2b562606fa57...
  - knownjorbist 5y ago
    Some NFTs point at images hosted in a traditional, centralized fashion. Others point to IPFS hashes which are basically permanent.
  - kooshball 5y ago
    it depends on how it's implemented. its much harder to implement onchain so a lot of projects will do things like <a> tag which is not trustworthy long term like moxie said. there are well respected projects that are fully onchain such as cryptopunks and autoglyphs
X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
They've been issuing non-fungible-tokens that have some real world value since TF2 went free to play. It's just that they control the entire system and can remove the real world value from them at will.
- mminer237 5y ago
  TF2 items are not NFTs. They're just entries in Valve's databases. There are several times where someone hacked someone else's account and stole hats which Valve returned, and I remember at least one time when a bug gave out hats by mistake and Valve trade-locked them to prevent the abusers from tanking the market and profiting from their abuse.
  - X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
    Oh I suppose not all of them are differentiable, so they would be fungible. I thought they had some that do things like track ownership/number of kills etc which would make them non-fungible & I'd say they are tokens. You as the end user just don't own them.
randomhodler84 5y ago
I’m not against this move, Valve reserves the right to vet any product they have on their platform. The PC is an open platform, and unlike say ios, there are alternatives including plain old shipping a binary. Valve has made significant leaps with Windows compat in Linux with proton /wine/dxvk Valve seems like a good player that is helping open systems. Good guy gaben Blockchain games are probably not going to be distributed as PE/ELF bins anyway. They will be wasm delivered via the browser and interact with the web3 wallets. The closed economy of steam has never liked attempts to take value “offshore”. It’s probably for the best for platform integrity.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
imaginationra 5y ago
If you want to see early innovative work on crypto native games check out this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UByPeT5O-c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UByPeT5O-c

379 points by astlouis44 5y ago

As much as I hate NFTs and many things related to blockchains, I don't like the idea of platforms throwing their weight around at all.

quickthrower2 5y ago
What i suspect you don’t like is having games in a walled garden at all then. Because app stores need rules of some kind, as they are liable for problems. The internet itself isn’t.
- amelius 5y ago
  Steam is more than just a store though. Its "content filter" functionality could/should be separate from other functionalities they offer.

aww_dang 5y ago

Performance concerns aside, WASM + WebGL has never looked sweeter. Zero trust required from the user and no walled garden. File this latest incident with the other app store shenanigans.

meheleventyone 5y ago
There’s nothing stopping you selling downloadable games on your own web store either. The hard part is actually reaching an audience and then monetisation (and chargebacks). The ‘Steam effect’ is very diluted these days but a hell of a lot stronger than going without which is why everyone is still there. And I’m extremely pro-web games!
- chrisco255 5y ago
  Nope and it's even easier now that Web3 standards like ERC721s and Ethereum exist. It's a few lines of code to make it so that users can sign and pay with crypto, so you don't have to go through third party gatekeepers.
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    That just adds a further complication that you need to find people that want to spend ETH on a game download rather than a speculative asset to hold or flip.
warvstar 5y ago
100% agree and when WebGPU comes out, that's going to reduce performance differences by a ton.
astlouis44 5y ago
100% this. With all the talk of web3 and gaming, WebGPU + WASM + WebXR is the path forward to the metaverse. No walled gardens asking for a 30% cut, direct embedding of games inside a developers site, and for players they don't have to install anything locally. This is what my startup is building with our browser-games platform.
- pshc 5y ago
  I can't imagine it will be easy to get low latency silky smooth 90FPS+ out of WebXR, even with a pure WASM app. Being at the mercy of the Chrome devs sounds like a challenge.
  - aww_dang 5y ago
    Web games are usually more casual. When the user is sold on the gaming proposition you can offer them a native client.
- knownjorbist 5y ago
  The fact that by having a wallet you already have an pseudonymous account with every dapp that will ever exist is an exciting concept. Likewise, the developers don't have to really think about authentication or authorization or payments.
- astlouis44 5y ago
  Link to our Discord: https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8 https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8 Link to our website:https://www.theimmersiveweb.com/ https://www.theimmersiveweb.com/
  - samb1729 5y ago
    No one responded to your comment asking for these links.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  You know you can just host game installers on your website today right? A big part of Steam's value is that you don't have to build your own distribution infrastructure, which you will still need even if your game is just a big ass WASM file.
nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago
Yeah, WASM and WebGL could use a fresh boost like that. Once they get proven in games we can finally start getting rid of legacy stuff like HTML, CSS, JS and start innovating again.
sva_ 5y ago
Any resources on using WebGL with WASM? Most stuff I find seems pretty mediocre projects. I feel like we'll have to wait for WebGPU.
- astlouis44 5y ago
  Our team is building out upgraded support for UE developers that want to target WebAssembly. Here's a link to our Discord server: https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8 https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8

unethical_ban 5y ago

CSGO skins are pretty marketable. I think they don't want items with real world value that Valve doesn't control, for reasons of varying charity.

vizzier 5y ago
Indeed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_gambling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_gambling from a couple of years back was morally dubious to say the least.
ushakov 5y ago
i have a friend, who had $50k worth of CS:GO skins listed for sale on Steam
- Ekaros 5y ago
  Aren't the on market listings limited to something like 1700€... Real pain I noticed when trying to realise the gains. Ofc, you could run multiple accounts, but still...
- leereeves 5y ago
  How many actually sold?
  - bluejellybean 5y ago
    The market is very liquid for anything above 3 pennies. Source, I have over 150,000 market transactions.

arpu 5y ago

We released a blockchain market integration Today. you can earn Money today with your Webgl BAsed Game on vrland.io

AlexandrB 5y ago

Everyone mentions the scammy nature of NFTs and cryptocurrencies, but I think the bigger reason might be that Steam doesn't want to be subject to financial reporting requirements when people buy and sell crypto equities on their platform. KYC applied to Steam would be a nightmare.

tpurves 5y ago
This is the simplest and correct answer. Intentionally or otherwise, finding yourself operating as an unlicensed securities dealer, deposit holder, brokerage or money transmitter is going to give you a very bad time with any number of federal authorities that (heavily) regulate all of those things.
HugoDaniel 5y ago
Like many I am willing to buy NFTs and enjoy their many benefits. Steam will likely try to capitalize on it when it becomes an even bigger market by either introducing their own marketplace or token or something else.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
  I'd guess that in a couple years they'll roll out their own L2 system that has a long withdrawal window and reserve the right to freeze funds.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    I doubt they ever allow withdrawal. They are in perfect position, they either keep getting 5 or 15% cut from market transactions over and over again or 20-30% cut of game sales. Or even 100% cut with certain items. Why allow money to go out when it is almost yours anyway.
    - X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
      Depends on if they are starting to lose marketplace capture or not.

ShaneMcGowan 5y ago

Yet the CS:GO skin trading remains

aaomidi 5y ago
Yeah, cause CS:GO skin trading has nothing to do with NFTs.
- ShaneMcGowan 5y ago
  If you swap out the SQL DB for a Blockchain it's basically the same thing
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    The SQL database is under the control of a central authority. That's actually the difference here.
    - ShaneMcGowan 5y ago
      One could argue that's worse
      - arcticbull 5y ago
        One could argue that's better, too - for instance in support of AML, KYC and the ability to reverse erroneous transactions - but the point I was making is that they aren't basically the same thing in this case.
      - progbits 5y ago
        You get a "worthless" digital asset either way but one of those doesn't burn a shit-ton of coal. So yes, you could argue the blockchain one is worse.
        practice9 5y ago
        Digital asset should not be worthless if somebody put some work into creating it. By your definition YouTube videos are worthless, but companies, individuals and Google burn a lot of gas to transport staff and tech, and a lot of electric energy to record videos, convert them into several formats and host them to billions of people.

HideousKojima 5y ago

In addition to the fact that the very idea of NFTs is a scam, Valve doesn't want to enable money-laundering lest financial regulators drop the hammer on them. Banning any games that involve real-world assets (or anything easily convertible to a real world asset like crypto) is just smart business given current financial regulations. It also gives them a complete monopoly on their internal marketplace, so that's a nice bonus.

pcstl 5y ago
I actually think in-game content is one of the most legitimate uses for NFTs. It's also cool that since the on-chain data doesn't go away if the game does, it allows for in-game collectables which are not tied to a specific game. Lots of possibilities there.
- NikolaNovak 5y ago
  Pardon my ignorance - but if the game goes away, what precisely does the NFT token which remain grants you? Isn't it just a confirmation that you own an item in a game that you cannot access/use anymore? I guess as always, I am looking for benefit of NFT/chain solution over simpler non-NFT/chain solution. I hear persistency, but in this case I don't see it in practical terms.
  - pcstl 5y ago
    It can be used by a different game. The token is just a token, what it means depends on how it's used. A smart game producer that sees a NFT-based game go down could say "hey, you know all those items you had on <game X>? Come over to my game and you'll get <benefit> based on that stuff!" Since ownership of the token is publicly visible and not locked into Game X's database. It could also be used by anything else, really. Lots of ideas where cross-game promotion could be done using NFTs to validate ownership of something in Game A within Game B without requiring the game developers to set up a specific intergame data link.
    - afavour 5y ago

astlouis44 5y ago

Wonder what knuckleheads at Valve signed off on this one. The ability to provide true ownership to players, and the ability to make real income off of your time investment in a game is huge. I would argue that blockchain will eventually have it's biggest use case in gaming, and every studio/publisher/platform that doesn't get on board with this is going to miss the next big disruption for our industry. Games like Fortnite and World of Warcraft have shown that in-game currencies can be a big thing. What happens when that isn't centrally controlled by a developer, and is distributed throughout the community? Steam is effectively saying no to the metaverse with this move, in my opinion. Developers are going to go elsewhere to ship their titles. On this note, my startup is building a decentralized browser games platform that leverages WebAssembly to enable Unreal Engine developers to export any game to HTML5 at near native performance, and we're currently working on WebGPU support. We welcome all games, including those powered by NFT's and blockchain. We will be expanding the platform to support Unity games in the future as well. In addition to hosting, we provide a complete suite of end-to-end tooling for exporting binaries to the web using advanced compression and an asset streaming system so players can jump into the action quickly and experience desktop quality games right inside their browser of choice. If you're interested in our platform and tools, you can join our Discord here for more information: https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8 https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8

coconut08 5y ago
what do you mean true ownership? the only thing you can truly own on a blockchain is something that is internal to said blockchain. you get absolutely zero protection for things that are external to that blockchain. if you take a game like hearthstone and create nft's for the cards, there is nothing about an nft on the ethereum blockchain(or any blockchain for that matter) that restricts blizzard's ability to take your cards from you, inflate said cards supply, destroy said cards or give said cards to another person even if it violates the state on ethereum. for things external to said blockchain particularly when it comes to centralized products and services it offers no guarantees over what you would get from a centralized database.
- iskander 5y ago

ushakov 5y ago

> Steam's point of view is that items have value and they don't allow items that can have real-world value on their platform pretty hypocrite, considering they have a p2p marketplace, which does exactly that https://steamcommunity.com/market/ https://steamcommunity.com/market/

georgeecollins 5y ago
I think you are misunderstanding the term "real-world". Obviously they sell digital content on their platform. That's the whole point. They don't sell "real-world" things like tee shirts or toys.
plainnoodles 5y ago
I think this is a bit of an uncharitable comparison though. NFTs and crypto are explicitly supposed to have real-world value and uses that are more or less completely divorced from their use in these games. If you delete the game, the items themselves still have the majority of their purpose. Whereas for the things on the p2p marketplace, their value is entirely predicated on the game they exist within. Given Steam is a games platform, I think it is pretty straightforward for them to want to keep non-game-related stuff away. Even if it's just from a pragmatic point of view: as weird as it is, lawyers and accountants at this point are very familiar with how to handle users trading in-game things. Pulling in things that exist sufficiently in real life to be in danger of being considered a security is absolutely a big departure from what Valve is used to supporting on its platform.
pzduniak 5y ago
The only way to withdraw the money made on the marketplace is to buy marketplace items and trade them for money via online payments / cryptocurrency, which is against their ToS. Looks like they aren't enforcing that, though.
q1w2 5y ago
P2P is not the same as "crypto and NFTs". The reason they are doing this is so they do not become a money laundering platform.

sakidev 5y ago

It's a very "boomer" decision. I mean, I can understand Valve trying to protect their users against the unknown, but blockchain games / play 2 earn / metaverses are pretty much the future. Just imagine VRChat with unique collectibles, immutalized on a blockchain like Ethereum (so the item and the owner is completely verified), and being able to trade them for real money. It's like when Diablo 3 had a real money auction house. They were early, we still are, but these kind of game features will be the general norm in some years. So Valve will probably evolve in the future and accept them, when the space looks safer.

DizzyDoo 5y ago
Wow, hang on, you're bringing up Diablo 3's auction house as... a positive example?? That's a new one. It was, and still is, widely agreed to be a colossal, almost game-sinking failure, and Blizzard couldn't shut it down quick enough, once they understood the ramifications of their decision: [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-24152225 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-24152225 [1] https://www.wired.com/2013/09/diablo-auction-house/ https://www.wired.com/2013/09/diablo-auction-house/ [2] https://twitter.com/Tocelot/status/1439632031726456832 https://twitter.com/Tocelot/status/1439632031726456832
Quarrelsome 5y ago
> but blockchain games / play 2 earn / metaverses are pretty much the future Football index was a scam, I would argue these "metaverses" are the scams of the future. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_Index
- dreyfan 5y ago
  > I would argue these "metaverses" are the scams of the future Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. The concept of metaverses have existed long before the cryptocurrency/ICO/DAO/DeFi/NFT community co-opted it. Same way they have, unfortunately, co-opted the term "web3" in current vernacular. It won't last though.
dubcanada 5y ago

quickthrower2 5y ago

Or “Steam bans gambling, money laundering and scamming”

elevenoh 5y ago
Did steam ban fiat?
Rebelgecko 5y ago
Steam still has plenty of gambling
chrisco255 5y ago
Lol or Steam bans an open source standard for exchanging game content that threatens their business model.
knownjorbist 5y ago
More realistically, Steam is scrambling to develop their own L2 they can control to prevent secondary markets. HN seems blissfully unaware of how much momentum there is in crypto and the larger web3 space right now.
- astlouis44 5y ago
  Web3 gaming, meaning decentralized games in the browser on the blockchain is the future. No 30% cut from walled gardens, and direct distribution for developers to their end users.
  - mixedCase 5y ago
    What makes these games decentralized and how are they different from hosting your own http server for distribution and taking crypto for payments? Or is "decentralized games" a marketing term for just that?
    - shinymark 5y ago
      I don’t understand the distinction. You can sell a game on your own website today without using any of these technologies if you want to avoid walled gardens.

carlosdp 5y ago

I don't see why NFT game devs should care about this to be honest. We shouldn't be putting decentralized games on one of the most centralized platforms in history. Love Steam, but you can do your own distribution pretty easily these days. If they want to miss out on the next platform evolution, that's a mistake they'll have to reckon with. I don't see it affecting the NFT gaming market one bit.

Ekaros 5y ago
The love their blockchains. So why not make a blockchain for distributing games? Patching would be lot more secure as it would be cryptographically secure and any player could just build the newest version from shared blockchain.
astlouis44 5y ago
Agreed. The browser route using WebAssembly and WebGPU is the path to decentralized distribution of games to players. This is what our team is working on! No 30% cuts from walled gardens, and developers have the freedom to whatever they want, and if that's to implement their game on the blockchain then they should be able to.
- elevenoh 5y ago
  Beautiful. Keep going! I'll only be playing outside of walled gardens myself.
  - astlouis44 5y ago
    Join our Discord here for more info: https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8 https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8
birdyrooster 5y ago
What about NFTs make a compelling argument that they are "the next platform evolution"? Why should I want NFTs in a game?
- 5y ago

xiii1408 5y ago

Considering all the crazy shit that goes down with CSGO skins, which have a much more controlled market than NFTs, I find this pretty unsurprising. For anyone unfamiliar with the CSGO skins market and the explosion of illegal gambling sites a few years ago, I highly recommend this video [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSkXFUw8tTU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSkXFUw8tTU

jimjimjim 5y ago

nfts are terrible. You're buying a url. what if that nft company disappears? Unless an artist or creator makes the nft how do they benefit? I hope people get distracted by the next squirrel that passes by and nft's fade into nothingness.

Kiro 5y ago
The URL is meaningless. The act of NFT Y being minted by X is what matters, even if the URL stops working. The value relies on a social contract.
elevenoh 5y ago
I can buy digital rights to anything via nft. I can buy a land property title. The whole point of blockchains like Ethereum is to not 'disappear'
chrisco255 5y ago
A lot of NFTs are backed by IPFS URLs. Some are pure on-chain SVGs. But even the ones that are mere API URLs are still far superior to arbitrary, closed-standard in-game proprietary marketplaces that prevent user ownership and exchange of digital assets they've earned. What if Steam rugpulls your game that you spent 2 years of your life working on? Can't do shit about it. Say what you will about crypto but plausible neutrality of the platform itself is a huge win for content creators and users.

elevenoh 5y ago

The game devs I know are gonna go direct the chains. Glad steam's cards are on the table now rather than later :)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

javier123454321 5y ago

Steam just banned itself from the metaverse

Ekaros 5y ago
Why join when you can run your own market and own most of non-crypto market. And get the nice 5% cut on each transaction.
astlouis44 5y ago
This x 1000.

imaginationra 5y ago

Now I know why they "retired" our recent game in progress that had two QR codes in it that linked to an NFT for the game. Steam was TERRIFIED of our little erc721 token haha.

mminer237 5y ago

This seems like a positive move. I can't imagine that a game would ever be improved by having a blockchain waste my electricity as opposed to just having an efficient database store the same data on AWS. Realistically, these are all just scams, and they aren't trying to improve games at all.

elevenoh 5y ago
The more I hear scam w/o reasoning, the more likely i am to buy nfts. This is just like bitcoin in 2011.
- mminer237 5y ago
  Okay? NFTs are still fundamentally stupid and only exist because people can make money selling worthless...nothings. That meets the definition of "scam" in my book. Bitcoin at least has theoretical uses, although practically it is definitely a negative force in the world. Their current price does not logically make them useful.
  - X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
    > NFTs are still fundamentally stupid and only exist because people can make money selling worthless...nothings. What about games, or art?
    - ALittleLight 5y ago
      Neither of which use or benefit from NFTs.
    - djur 5y ago
      NFTs are not games or art and are not necessary or useful to sell games or art.
    - mminer237 5y ago
      If I buy a license of a game, I gain the legal ability to play the game. If I buy a print of and associated license to art, I gain the legal ability to look at and resell my copy the art. If I invest and buy the copyright to something, I can sell the above rights to others. If I pay to record on a blockchain my ownership a hash, I gain...nothing. I guess I could brag about how I paid money for a hexadecimal string when no one else was willing to? The theoretical advantage is that I can try to pawn it off on someone else for more money by convincing him that he can do the same to someone else.

anonporridge 5y ago

Moxie's recent post is a fantastic illustration of how NFTs as they are currently implemented are bullshit, https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1448066579611234305 https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1448066579611234305 I'm not sure I'd go so far to call them an outright scam, but they're highly fragile assets that likely won't stand the test of time. I would be interested to see if someone is working on implementing NFTs in a way that I can feel confident that the digital art will remain provably attached to the NFT for decades and centuries in future.

azeirah 5y ago
From this tweet, it sounds like NFT's are not much more reliable than html <a> tags? If the host is down, the NFT is nothing more than just a pointer to a 404?
- anonporridge 5y ago
  Pretty much. And worse, the host of the image could theoretically change it on you and you'd have no way to prove (at least in a trustless way) what the original image was.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
  Yup. Here's a tool for checking most ETH based NFTs: https://checkmynft.com/?address=0x5c61afa47570ab2b562606fa578221305b12c307&id=1 https://checkmynft.com/?address=0x5c61afa47570ab2b562606fa57...
- knownjorbist 5y ago
  Some NFTs point at images hosted in a traditional, centralized fashion. Others point to IPFS hashes which are basically permanent.
- kooshball 5y ago
  it depends on how it's implemented. its much harder to implement onchain so a lot of projects will do things like <a> tag which is not trustworthy long term like moxie said. there are well respected projects that are fully onchain such as cryptopunks and autoglyphs

X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago

They've been issuing non-fungible-tokens that have some real world value since TF2 went free to play. It's just that they control the entire system and can remove the real world value from them at will.

mminer237 5y ago
TF2 items are not NFTs. They're just entries in Valve's databases. There are several times where someone hacked someone else's account and stole hats which Valve returned, and I remember at least one time when a bug gave out hats by mistake and Valve trade-locked them to prevent the abusers from tanking the market and profiting from their abuse.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
  Oh I suppose not all of them are differentiable, so they would be fungible. I thought they had some that do things like track ownership/number of kills etc which would make them non-fungible & I'd say they are tokens. You as the end user just don't own them.

randomhodler84 5y ago

I’m not against this move, Valve reserves the right to vet any product they have on their platform. The PC is an open platform, and unlike say ios, there are alternatives including plain old shipping a binary. Valve has made significant leaps with Windows compat in Linux with proton /wine/dxvk Valve seems like a good player that is helping open systems. Good guy gaben Blockchain games are probably not going to be distributed as PE/ELF bins anyway. They will be wasm delivered via the browser and interact with the web3 wallets. The closed economy of steam has never liked attempts to take value “offshore”. It’s probably for the best for platform integrity.

deleted 5y ago

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imaginationra 5y ago

If you want to see early innovative work on crypto native games check out this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UByPeT5O-c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UByPeT5O-c