The PC games service Steam has needed curation for sometime now, both in terms of the content that gets uploaded, and the people who do the commenting. In an effort to work towards this, Valve have announced that Steam will have certain features locked behind a paywall within its community. In order to vote in Greenlight, send friend invites and submit content to Steam Workshop, among other things, users will need to pay $5 dollars now, whereas they were free before.
“We’ve chosen to limit access to these features as a means of protecting our customers from those who abuse Steam for purposes such as spamming and phishing,” the company wrote on the official site. “Malicious users often operate in the community on accounts which have not spent any money, reducing the individual risk of performing the actions they do. One of the best pieces of information we can compare between regular users and malicious users are their spending habits as typically the accounts being used have no investment in their longevity. Due to this being a common scenario we have decided to restrict certain community features until an account has met or exceeded $5.00 USD in Steam.”
This $5 pay wall will require users to spend $5 or more on a single purchase withing the service in order to access all locked features – this can be a purchse of a game, or games, for $5, adding the money to your wallet, or buying a gift for the amount.
The full list of features behind the pay wall are as follows:
- Sending friend invites
- Opening group chat
- Voting on Greenlight, Steam Reviews and Workshop items
- Participating in the Steam Market
- Posting frequently in the Steam Discussions
- Gaining Steam Profile Levels (Locked to level 0) and Trading Cards
- Submitting content on the Steam Workshop
- Posting in an item’s Steam Workshop Discussions
- Accessing the Steam Web API
- Using browser and mobile chat
