Oct 17, 2021
Crypto games will have no place on Steam
This story about potential opportunity, boiled down, in 1:51 minutes.
What’s the fuss?
The world’s most popular digital gaming storefront is banning games that involve cryptocurrency. With many forecasting that crypto-based games are the future, will this be a damper on progress?
The situation
GameFi, the combination of DeFi (Decentralized Finance) and NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens), is the hottest new trend in gaming today.
- It allows gamers to earn financially-accretive awards just by playing the game, also known as “pay-to-earn”.
- Games such as Axie Infinity have allowed its players to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of NFTs, with its dedicated coin up 848% since inception.
Despite all of these “play-to-earn” games being on PC, the widely-used PC digital games storefront Steam will no longer allow these games to be hosted on their platform.
- A recent rule on the platform has banned game items that allow for real-world value.
- Upon the news, one of Steam’s biggest competitive threats came out to state they would be open to hosting blockchain-based games.
Boiling it down
With many gaming companies realizing how lucrative it is to have a platform that merely hosts and sell other developers’ games, Steam is facing more competition than ever before.
- Perhaps Steam is getting complacent from being the market leader for so long, which may represent an opportunity for other digital storefronts such as Epic Games to catch up.
Gamers resort to Steam time and time again due to the sheer variety of games, given their relatively lax guidelines of putting a game on the platform.
- Steam has even allowed for sexually-explicit games, which makes it odd they have decided to draw the line at crypto games.
- What’s even more odd is that some of its games actually do feature in-game items with real world value, with some selling for hundreds of thousands.
- More than likely, Steam doesn’t want to have to contend with the numerous legal issues related to crypto games.
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