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Valve, the company behind one of the world’s largest digital distribution platforms in Steam, made a choice in October 2021 that’d come back to haunt the company in the years to follow. The company surreptitiously altered Steam’s policies to ban blockchain video games and applications that make use of cryptocurrencies or NFTs. 

At the time, a lot of people saw it as a logical, sensible move: Blockchain games were still in their early days, NFT scams were everywhere, and crypto was still dealing with the worst of its growing pains. Fast forward to 2025, and the image can hardly be more different. Now a $73 billion industry, blockchain gaming has seen daily activity pass the 4 million mark, and for Steam to have dismissed it early would have to be one of the worst strategic blunders in Valve’s history

As Steam turned its back on blockchain innovation, its rivals were quick off the mark to recognize the potential and capitalize on it. The Epic Games Store, for instance, went the other way in big fashion. Instead of going for the full banhammer, Epic let in blockchain games while casting itself as a guardian of developer freedom and consumer choice. This policy also included the launch of games like Blankos Block Party, and allowed blockchain experimentation to flourish, despite Epic’s own stringent content policies (it doesn’t want issues with regulators around gambling and play-to-earn models).

This realization also dawned on other online entertainment sectors. Online poker websites, for example, were among the first to demonstrate that cryptocurrency could revolutionize the economics of gaming. In that niche, some brands have launched crypto-friendly poker sites, where players can use cryptocurrencies and rely on decentralized random number generators (RNGs), so that gamers can play the classic game while reaping the benefits of blockchain’s openness, security, and actual asset ownership (source: https://coinpoker.com/online-poker/).  Unlike Steam, such platforms wholeheartedly adopted the technological revolution, enabling users to take ownership of their in-game items and be a part of a decentralized gaming economy, much like the same decentralized ownership that Epic Games now supports within its own store.

In just four years since Steam banned it, blockchain gaming has gone from a sideshow to the main event. The global blockchain gaming market, valued at several billion dollars in early 2021, has reached a value of $37.55 billion in 2025, and will eventually be worth a staggering $182.98 billion by 2034, according to projections. Its number of daily active users peaked at over 4.2 million toward the end of 2024. 

Play-to-earn (P2E) models, long dismissed as unsustainable crazes, have reinvented themselves as comprehensive economic ecologies worth $3.5bn in 2025. They’ve gone from simple token rewards to become complex in-world economies with trade volumes and GDP equivalent to that of small nations.

The technology has also come a long way. The environmental problems that plagued blockchain-based gaming are mostly solved, thanks to the industry-wide adoption of energy-efficient consensus algorithms. Security is far better, and once-common scams that plagued the industry are less common.

Ironically, despite Steam’s ban, blockchain games have wiggled their way into the platform through intelligent loopholes. Game developers have produced what they are calling “Steam-compliant” versions of their games, which strip out explicit cryptocurrency and NFT elements while keeping game’s core mechanics. These editions would serve as an on-ramp to the full blockchain experience on a stand-alone basis. 

For example, games including Evaverse debuted on Steam pre-ban and continue to operate using third-party player accounts to power NFT usage outside the bounds of Steam. Most Steam users wouldn’t know how the blockchain functions either, the games in general have scored good reviews, only based on how fun the games are. 

Creators like Gala Games have released limited versions of their blockchain games on Steam to get a name and user presence, with all crypto action residing on third-party platforms. Those kinds of strategies highlight the difficulty of enforcing such bans in a changing technological climate. In forbidding blockchain games instead of embracing them, Steam lost potential income it could have earned from transaction fees, licensing, or development partnerships.

Basically, Valve allowed billions to pass under its nose in crypto and NFT sales cash that could easily have been skimmed. Instead of taking control of this new market and reaping its rewards, Steam’s ban resulted in those profits going elsewhere, to rivals and to other marketplaces.

With all that being said, it’s safe to say that Valve has a decision to make now. The growth of the blockchain gaming world is unrelenting. Steam can exist independently of this space, or it can readjust based on the sector’s maturity and broad acceptance. The platform’s 2021 turn, which was rational at the time, has proved very costly. 

Steam not only lost the opportunity to make money from one of the fastest-growing segments of the video game market, but it’s in danger of driving innovation creators to rival platforms, which could pose a threat to its position in the market in the future

The lessons for digital platforms are stark: blanket bans on emergent technologies may be well-intended, but often self-defeating once those technologies mature and gain wide acceptance within an industry. This kind of more accommodating approach to regulating legitimate concerns without stifling creativity would have done Steam and Valve a favor in the long run.