Valve is facilitating microtransactions on Steam, providing horse armor DLC and the like. The digital distribution platform's new Item store is starting with weapon cosmetics and clothing for survival simulator Rust.
Valve has been down this road before, and the Steam community lashed back to the generally endeared gamemaker and publisher as a result.
So last time, Steam launched a store that sold paid mods for Bethesda's Skyrim. Considering the sheer amount of free mods already available for aging game, many PC gamers expressed anger of what they felt was a system that encourage more money grabs and less products made from pure passion.
Valve reasoned that facilitating paid mods would encourage makers to keep creating. Steam was then filled with tens of thousands of paid mods in short order - over 25,000, according to our count back in April.
But even that didn't sit well with gamers because the company was taking a whopping 75 percent cut of the profits. That looked especially bad, considering Google and Apple's ratios are roughly the inverse - they pay out about 70 percent to app developers and keep about 30 percent.
So this time, Steam is starting with cosmetic mods that can be sold or traded. It's not clear how far Valve plans to take the microtransaction store. Maybe it only plans to facilitate the sale of cosmetic items or maybe it's just got one toe in as it cautiously moves to wade out into territory that got it into hot water before.
For now, the Item store is for developers only. Now Valve, a company that typically listens to its community, could just be easing one of the later barriers to entry for indie developers.
Instead of having to develop their own in-game stores to monetize their games, they can plug in their design into their respective pages on the Item store. Despite how unappealing microtransactions can be, they can make games free to play and can help studios live to create another game.
