Valve announces new Steam Store rules that begin in September

Valve has taken to its blog to announce new rules coming to the Steam Store, with the company introducing a bunch of new rules that developers will have to abide by when filling out a store listing.

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The world's biggest PC gaming client will be introducing the new rules in early September, and they will remove the ability for developers to place any links within the description boxes of their games, as Steam believes the links typically don't provide any information about the game that informs players purchasing decisions. That last point is the essence of these changes, and the ability to place links will be removed from the following four specific areas: "About The Game", "Short Description", "Special Announcement", and "Awards".

Moreovoer, the four aforementioned sections will no longer be able to host embedded imagery that minics Steam store UI or buttons, along with the any images, links, or widgets pointing to other games on Steam. It appears Valve is making it difficult for developers to use Steam Store listings as a way of advertising other products that are either on Steam or off of Steam, which speaks to the player-focussed sentiment mentioned earlier.

"Starting early September, we'll roll out an update that automatically hides any instances where a URL is included in a game's written description or other text section. This includes any contents within [url] tags on your page, as well as any other URLs," reads the Steam post

However, these changes raise the question as to how players will get access to further information about specific details of a game.