Valve updates guidelines to reign in predatory advertisement practices

After cracking down on developers that misuse their "Early Access" tag, Valve has added some much-needed guardrails to keep greedy 'free' to play devs in check. GamingOnLinux spotted some new directives on the company's website that talked about how developers can and cannot advertise their games.

One of the main takeaways it that developers cannot wall off content behind advertisements. Additionally, users cannot be incentivized to watch advertisements for in-game awards. These tricks used by just about every mobile game out there, and it has pretty much become an industry standard now.

Instead, Valve encourages developers to monetize via microtransactions and post-launch content, another scourge of the industry that isn't going away anytime soon. While this hasn't been a widespread problem on PC, it is good to see it get nipped at the bud. Then again, developers engaging in such practices can always look at other platforms or self-host.

Unfortunately, developers can still advertise products in game. Death Stranding did this tactfully with Monster Energy, while EA was a lot less subtle with full-screen ads in UFC 4. Thankfully, this trend never picked up, but if it ever does, it is perfectly okay by Steam.