Minecraft not on Steam due to restrictive ToS

Minecraft creator Markus 'Notch' Persson has added his voice to critique of Steam's vendor terms of service.

Writing on his blog, Notch said Valve's conditions don't allow for the kind of service Minecraft provides.

"Being on Steam limits a lot of what we’re allowed to do with the game, and how we’re allowed to talk to our users," he wrote.

"We (probably?) wouldn’t be able to, say, sell capes or have a map market place on minecraft.net that works with Steam customers in a way that keeps Valve happy. It would effectively split the Minecraft community into two parts, where only some of the players can access all of the weird content we want to add to the game."

Steam's anti-competitive content control has come under criticism recently after a number of EA titles were removed from the service. Notch echoed EA in this regard by professing ongoing negotiations.

"We are talking to Valve about this, but I definitely understand their reasons for wanting to control their platform. There’s a certain inherent incompatibility between what we want to do and what they want to do," he wrote.

"So there’s no big argument, we just don’t want to limit what we can do with Minecraft."

Having said that, Notch also had planty of praise for the platform.

"Steam is awesome. Steam is the best digital distribution platform I’ve ever seen. It runs great, offers great services like that shift+tab stuff, and it remembers my credit card details so there’s no barrier for me when I want to buy a game."

Thanks, Gamespy.