Steam Bans NFT Games, Epic Welcomes Them

This week Valve, the company behind the popular game platform Steam, updated their terms and conditions for listing a company on their marketplace to prevent “Applications built on blockchain technology that issue or allow exchange of cryptocurrencies or NFTs.” Within hours of Steam updating their terms of service, they removed every current and upcoming NFT game on the marketplace.

Age of Rust, an NFT puzzle game that was removed from Steam by this change, spoke about communications they’ve been having behind the scenes before this change. According to the team, Valve’s stance was that they did not want to list games that had items with real-world value on their platform.

Hours after this story broke, Epic Games, a major competitor to Valve, publicly took that stance that they support blockchain innovations in gaming. Their gaming platform is still in closed beta, so the games removed from Steam can’t immediately jump over to Epic--they have to manually be approved to be listed. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney clarified that they have no intention of using NFTs in their games, but they “welcome games that make use of blockchain tech provided they follow the relevant laws, disclose their terms, and are age-rated by an appropriate group.”