If you're a dev and think their cut is too high, you can generate infinite keys for your game through Steam for free and sell them through third parties - Valve doesn't even police this.

The fact that people still tend to buy throught Steam shows their cut is worth it.

There was news couple of seasons back that they've capped key generation to some function of on-steam sales.

Not to mention, you still get to leverage all of the benefits of Steamworks.

Ads can be disabled in the settings.

Not an excuse.

It is not okay to abuse someone just because they can ask you to stop.

Describing those 'ads' as "abusive" is quite a stretch. It's like going to the store page itself and complaining they're telling you about products they sell.

Particularly when you can easily disable them. No other game client I know of offers that.

Advertising in general is absolutely abusive. I like to think of advertising as mind rape: it forcibly inserts brands and trademarks into your mind while you're trying to read or watch something.

On the other hand, I don't classify what Steam is doing as advertising. When I open the Steam store, it's because I want to see the games it has on sale. It's not advertising, it's the exact information I asked for. It would have been advertising had it kept spamming me with game deals while I'm watching a film or something.

Just because most advertising is abusive doesn't mean that all of it is. The popups that Steam shows when you open it are definitely still advertising, as are the recommendations for other games and things like that.

Ironically, this is exactly the reason why most other ad networks go to such lengths to track you, because they think they want to show you ads you'd find relevant and thus worthwhile to click on.

Unfortunately, the way the ad networks go about doing this means that they're actually incentivising making money by any means necessary over actually showing relevant ads, so you get ads that are psychologically abusive, full-screen ads that pop up in the middle of a game, ad networks selling off the data they have on you, etc.

That is why I will permanently have an adblocker - since this is how things work now - but why I don't care nearly as strongly about the Steam ads.

We don't disagree. It's just that I have a funny definition of advertising. It's more narrow than what people usually mean. Basically, if I asked for it, then it's information, not advertising.

For example:

> as are the recommendations for other games and things like that

I asked for this when I opened the Steam store. It's not advertising, it's just the exact information I wanted. I went to the market to see products, and they showed me products.

If they start bringing the products to my home by plastering ads on billboards all over the place then it's advertising and abusive.

> That is why I will permanently have an adblocker

I recommend the same to everyone.

They are ads for games in a store that sells games, right?

I'm very anti-ad, but if there's one situation where I don't have a beef with it, it's the Steam app.

They are also surprisingly effective because they often show things that I might actually buy (especially when it's on sale, which is precisely when they show ads for it).

No, that's not an excuse because Steam is also a launcher to play your games. If the store was completely separate then sure it would be OK to promote games being sold in the store there.

You can easily disable the pop-up ads.

Not a fair comparison. I CHOSE to download and use steam when there are many alternatives. I enjoy their store page. Everything is consensual here.

They don’t force themselves onto your machines mate.

> shows pop up ads on startup

Steam is a store. When you open it, they highlight stuff in the store.

Settings -> Interface -> "Notify me about additions or changes..." to disable it, by the way.

Thanks, but it's still pretty scummy how hidden that is. This could have just been a checkbox on the pop up.

Yeah absolutely, I don't disagree.

Steam is also a launcher and when I use it as a launcher I don't want to see ads for the store and burying a setting to turn if off in the settings is not sufficient. At the very least let me turn it off on the pop up.

> pretty poorly optimized website

What are you on about? The steam store is pretty much always fast, efficient, and has lots of little touches that increase information density. It is one of the last remnants of the web from the good old days.

The steam store used to burn CPU on Windows until at least up to 2017 (on fresh install it would a strong PC stutter on startup). It tries to kill your DNS resolver on linux when downloading games (~20 requests/sec when) which actually decreases your download speed by a bunch. This bug has been documented in 2014, and was still present last time I had to debug this a year or two ago.

I measured an LCP or 3.5s + significant layout shift. The images are poorly optimized jpegs, instead of WEBP/AVIF. The start page takes a cool 6MB. A games page clocks in at around 12MB before the video starts loading including a whopping 4MB JS. None of the links appear to utilize preloading and it's and old school multi page app, so navigation takes a long time. I don't have a way to measure it, but subjectively it performs worse in the Steam client than in a browser.

I don’t mind the ads. They are actually about games and I may like some of them. If they start selling ad space for others that would be terrible.

> The highly addictive gambling mechanics in their games

Are you confusing apps sold on Steam with games made by Valve?

Maybe I'm not up to date. Are there no longer loot boxes in Counter Strike?