Describing those 'ads' as "abusive" is quite a stretch. It's like going to the store page itself and complaining they're telling you about products they sell.
Particularly when you can easily disable them. No other game client I know of offers that.
Advertising in general is absolutely abusive. I like to think of advertising as mind rape: it forcibly inserts brands and trademarks into your mind while you're trying to read or watch something.
On the other hand, I don't classify what Steam is doing as advertising. When I open the Steam store, it's because I want to see the games it has on sale. It's not advertising, it's the exact information I asked for. It would have been advertising had it kept spamming me with game deals while I'm watching a film or something.
Just because most advertising is abusive doesn't mean that all of it is. The popups that Steam shows when you open it are definitely still advertising, as are the recommendations for other games and things like that.
Ironically, this is exactly the reason why most other ad networks go to such lengths to track you, because they think they want to show you ads you'd find relevant and thus worthwhile to click on.
Unfortunately, the way the ad networks go about doing this means that they're actually incentivising making money by any means necessary over actually showing relevant ads, so you get ads that are psychologically abusive, full-screen ads that pop up in the middle of a game, ad networks selling off the data they have on you, etc.
That is why I will permanently have an adblocker - since this is how things work now - but why I don't care nearly as strongly about the Steam ads.
We don't disagree. It's just that I have a funny definition of advertising. It's more narrow than what people usually mean. Basically, if I asked for it, then it's information, not advertising.
For example:
> as are the recommendations for other games and things like that
I asked for this when I opened the Steam store. It's not advertising, it's just the exact information I wanted. I went to the market to see products, and they showed me products.
If they start bringing the products to my home by plastering ads on billboards all over the place then it's advertising and abusive.
> That is why I will permanently have an adblocker
They are also surprisingly effective because they often show things that I might actually buy (especially when it's on sale, which is precisely when they show ads for it).
No, that's not an excuse because Steam is also a launcher to play your games. If the store was completely separate then sure it would be OK to promote games being sold in the store there.
