Valve’s Steam service is unarguably the most popular and successful digital video game platform ever. With a daily concurrent users count somewhere between 4 to 10 million users simultaneously, Steam could make some serious revenue by adding some adverts on their site. Valve’s Erik Johnson, however, quelled this thought in an interview with GameSpot, saying the video game distribution site won’t be given ads anytime soon.
“We don’t see a case for that ever getting user value,” he said when asked if a product like Doritos might be given advertisement space on Steam. “So we wouldn’t do it. I don’t think that those ever work, either. To take it a step further, I don’t think anybody buys Doritos as a result of that.”
“We tend to focus on long-term relationships. It would be a bad business decision, let alone just dumb.”
Instead, Valve is apparently working on a tool to help its 125 million users sift through the over 6000 games found on Steam. As well, they’re continually improving their discovery algorithms to help players find new games they might like faster.