One Month in 2021 That Split PC Gaming: Steam Said No, Epic Said Yes

On 14 October 2021, a small studio called SpacePirate Games posted some bad news. Valve had told it that Steam was removing every blockchain-based project from the store, including its own NFT-powered action game, Age of Rust. The next day, the rule appeared in Steam's guidelines for developers: no "applications built on blockchain technology that issue or allow exchange of cryptocurrencies or NFTs".

Within hours, Epic Games' chief executive Tim Sweeney went the other way. The Epic Games Store, he said, would welcome blockchain games, as long as they followed the law. A month later, Xbox's Phil Spencer added a third view. In the space of about a month, the three biggest gatekeepers in PC and console gaming had drawn three different lines.

Valve's quiet wall

Steam's ban did not come with a press release. When the news broke, Valve had not explained it publicly and did not answer requests for comment. SpacePirate said the new rule extended an older Steam policy against in-game items that have real-world monetary value.

There were signs it had been coming. Another blockchain game, Light Nite from Satoshis Games, had already been pulled from Steam on 30 September 2021, according to its chief executive. Valve's co-founder Gabe Newell only gave his reasons months later, in February 2022, saying the ways the technology had been used so far were "pretty sketchy".

Epic's open door, with conditions

Sweeney's response was carefully worded. Epic's store would accept blockchain games that follow the relevant laws, disclose their terms and carry an age rating from an appropriate body. He added that Epic welcomed "innovation in the areas of technology and finance".

He also drew a line around Epic itself. Earlier in 2021 he had said that Epic would not get involved with NFTs in its own games, and the open-door policy did not change that: the company that makes Fortnite was offering to host other people's blockchain games, not to make its own.

That difference turned into a real business advantage. In the years that followed, the Epic Games Store became one of the main PC homes for web3 games that could not go on Steam, which gave Epic a stream of new titles at a time when it was paying heavily to attract developers to its store.

Xbox: not a ban, but a warning

The third voice came on 16 November 2021, when Microsoft's gaming chief Phil Spencer spoke to Axios. He said some of the NFT gaming work he was seeing felt "exploitive", and that there was "a lot of speculation and experimentation" going on. Because Xbox runs one of the world's biggest gaming storefronts, he said, Microsoft would act on anything it judged exploitive. "We don't want that kind of content," he said.

But Spencer stopped short of a ban. He said he did not think every NFT game had to be exploitive and that the industry was still working out the model. Eight months later, one of Microsoft's own studios went further: in July 2022, Mojang banned NFTs in Minecraft, saying the "speculative pricing and investment mentality" around them took the focus away from playing the game.

Why it still matters

Five years later, those three positions still shape where blockchain games can be sold. Steam's ban remains the single biggest barrier for web3 studios on PC, because Steam is where most PC players buy their games. Epic's conditions, legal, transparent and rated, have become the de facto standard that blockchain games point to when they want to look legitimate. And Xbox's case-by-case approach shows how platform holders can keep the door ajar without endorsing what comes through it.

For players, the split has an upside: you always know where you stand. If a game is on Steam, it is not supposed to contain tradeable crypto or NFTs. If you see a web3 game on the Epic Games Store, it has passed Epic's basic conditions, but that is a floor, not a seal of approval. Read the terms before you buy anything that claims to be worth money.

This article is not investment advice.