Digital currencies have evolved so much over the years that you can now earn by playing certain games on portals like Steam and Epic.
Age of Rust is one of the blockchain games that was banned by Steam in a move that seems to want to whittle down the influence of forward looking games on the platform.
About Steam
Steam is an online game platform of Valve where players can play crypto oriented games and earn rewards of NFT or Non fungible tokens prior to the ban.
A Non fungible Token or NFT is a type of digital asset that is unique and so cannot be exchanged with another. They have peculiar usage in the sense that they are representative of things like artworks, game character skin art, logo arts and game rewards.
Like Bitcoin, each NFT is unique to whatever collectibles it’s used to purchase and can be traced to its issuer.
Recently Steam readjusted their business rules by banning NFT earning on one of their puzzle game called “Age of Rust.”
This was discovered by SpaceRocket a developer of first-person adventure game puzzles on Steam’s online gaming portal about 6 days ago and made the discovery known to the Twitter community at the time.
Items of Value
The reasons Steam gave for the ban was that they don’t want have games that reward players with items that can be converted to money or items that have value.
Another reason, according to Valve the parent company controlling Steam gave for the ban is the fact that game developers have capitalized on NFTs to scam people and they cite the experience of one game called “Evil Ape” where people were scammed large sums of money for the sale of the Ape skins in order to unlock more levels in the game.
These reasons coupled with the fact that NFTs like Bitcoin and other digital currencies, require more computing power to mint and process is why the platform seeks to restrict them.
Epic has decided to allow game players and developers earn cryptocurrencies and NFT on their platform. However Epic hasn’t implemented the new rule yet on their game portal.
Why Stem Should Reconsider Ban
According to Enjin, the game development company, Steam should reconsider their stance on the ban of NFTs on their game portal on the grounds that NFT can actually make gamers and game developers to interact and make it possible to repurchase and keep old game art items like Pokemon Red’s “Charizad” and other game characters that existed between 1990 and early 2000s.
Another reason Steam should lift the ban is that not all game developers are fraudulent. For example the creator of “Age of Rust” Chris Loverne is an Indie developer who was a network engineer in NASA and had been implementing crypto-oriented rewards in his game development since 2018. This was long before NFTs became popular. Enjin ended by stating that it is unlikely for a former NASA network engineer would resort to scamming people through his game.
With all these reasons by Enjin, it’s not certain Steam’s decision to ban NFT on their game portal will be reversed soon.
Last week, Steam banned forward-thinking games built with blockchain and NFT technology, starting with our long-time adopter @SpacePirate_io.
Here's why we believe they should reconsider: https://t.co/DJlJzRSC4U#Steam #Valve #NFTs #BlockchainGames pic.twitter.com/0GkG3DEZE5
— Enjin (@enjin) October 19, 2021
