this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025
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It sucks for FOSS projects, but you have to imagine their rules from the perspective of someone who is actively trying to bend the rules to avoid giving Valve their cut. If they make an exception for FOSS projects, then every indie developer will claim to be "Shareware" and solicit donations off-platform.
Even Epic Games tried this and ended up in a lawsuit with Apple.
FOSS and Shareware are very different things. It's easy for Valve to add an option for FOSS projects where the publisher must enter which license is being used (from a list of pre-approved licenses) and a link to the source code including all artwork.
They won't do it, because they don't want to become a FOSS rating and distribution service. They make money by selling proprietary software. FOSS goes against their business model.
And yet a valve has singlehandedly been the driving force to bring Linux desktop to mainstream users.
Since the day community tags were introduced on Steam I have been systematically adding tags like FOSS / Open Source / etc. to the FOSS games hoping to one day see one of them actually work as filter tags on the store, yet they never ever did. And yet tags like "Snooker" with only 11 games can be used as filter...
At this point I'm almost convinced that Valve has purposely blocklisted those terms from the allowed tags (it's known that they do have a blocklist). So I've resigned myself to depend on the curator system, to find which FOSS games are on Steam from within the store page: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/38475471-Libre-Open-Source-Games (and they are more than 11...)
Because in that very particular instance, it goes towards their business model. It helps them sell more games.