Valve ban advertising-based business models on Steam, no forced adverts like in mobile games

I get weird replies when I mentioned this on reddit in the past, but it's true. He's the only one worth trusting at the place. The moment his inheritors sell out is the moment steam dies taking all our libraries with it.

It can be both. Steam wants their cut, but they also don’t want consumers seeing a free game on Steam, downloading it, and then complaining to Steam because it’s not actually free, it’s just riddled with ads.

It can be both.

I don't think it's cynical. Their review model would make it very hard to make payment fair (we can always argue about whether Steam overcharges for its services) since it would be a pain in the butt to track income from advertisement.

But the advertisement business model makes for worse games. I think it makes great sense for Steam to ban them. And if games on Steam are better then that's good for game developers that use their platform.

They could. That takes a lot more employees than they have and would mean that they were the place with all the shitty free games.

Lootboxes.

Players have a random chance of getting crate while playing the game. Each crate is a pool of item cosmetics with various levels of rarity. To acquire one of them the player must purchase a one-use key with real money. Expending the key on a crate initiates a die roll that determines which cosmetic is unlocked.

That's the gambling they're responsible for. What gambling players may of afterward is not the same conversation.