Interesting Links for 11-02-2025

[andrewducker]

1. Valve bans all Steam games that force players to watch advertisements

(tags:advertising games valve steam GoodNews )

2. Most misinformation is spread by the far right

(tags:lies misinform politics fascism )

3. UK among top five most expensive countries for childcare - with most nurseries making a loss.

(tags:uk nursery )

Comments

[hilarita]

1 - yay!
2 - sigh. We really need to get on top of this for our democracies to stay that way
3. :-(((

[simont]

Tangentially relevant to #1:

A couple of years ago a co-developer of my puzzle game collection was adapting the puzzles to run on "KaiOS", a minority mobile phone OS in which apps are basically HTML+JS running in a fixed browser. (The puzzles could already build to HTML+JS in general to run in a desktop browser, but various further tweaks were needed for limited control inputs, small screen size, the OS's browser being old, ...)

Of course, after you get the puzzles to run at all, you want to get them into the official KaiOS store. And apparently there's a rule that apps in the KaiOS store have to implement the "KaiAds" API. But if you're the kind of sensible person who I accept as a co-developer on any of my projects, you're 100% against shoving unsolicited ads into the user's face. What to do?

Answer: for the Kai Store version of the puzzles, he added an entry to one of the dropdown menus, labelled "Display an advert". If you select that entry on purpose, the KaiAds API is invoked and you get whatever ad it delivered. Apparently this was enough to satisfy the store's policy,

[andrewducker]

That's a ridiculous stipulation!

I can understand insisting that you don't use other people's ad services, but insisting you must have adverts?

Also: I just checked what KaiOS was - and I'm amazed that someone went on to use FirefoxOS! Shame it was never more successful.

[simont]

I think he initially read the rule as "don't use anyone else's ad service", but then read it more carefully. Still, this seems to be an answer that satisfies everybody – even me!