Valve's list of things that cannot ship on Steam has included "applications built on blockchain technology that issue or allow exchange of cryptocurrencies or NFTs" since 2021, and the line, which still sits in Valve's onboarding documentation for developers, never asked anyone to stop building on a blockchain so much as it made them pick which store their product would live in. Somnium Space, which had auctioned its virtual land as NFTs since 2019 and launched its CUBE token a year later, ended up on the wrong side of that line and off the store. It now has a Steam page again, listed as a free-to-play Early Access release for December 2026, and for anyone who ships to more than one storefront the date is less interesting than the documentation, which already marks the parts of the platform that will not make the trip.
Somnium Space Is Back on Steam in December, Minus Its Tip Jar
The listing describes "an always-online, 18+ Social VR platform," makes age verification mandatory and free, runs on Windows through SteamVR or as a desktop app, and says "there are no features locked behind a paywall." Road to VR, which covered the listing this morning, notes that the page plans to stay in Early Access "for the next 1-2 years," and a post on Somnium's news page says the release includes Steam Deck and Steam Frame support. An adults-only store page is also a gated one: when we checked, a browser that was not signed in to Steam was sent to a sign-in screen instead of the listing, which matters to a platform counting on Steam search to do some of its discovery.
What the documentation says stays off Steam
Somnium's Tip Jar documentation carries a parenthetical that explains more about the Steam build than anything on the store page: "(Not available on Steam)." The Tip Jar is how users pay creators directly in-world, with payments processed by Stripe, and the platform fees page puts Somnium's cut at 7.5% on top of Stripe's 2.5% to 4.5%, says creators keep about 90% on average, and notes that the Stripe payout path is "currently limited to the Tip Jar." Paid in-game items, meaning the avatars, wearables and building items creators sell, are listed as "currently unavailable, as we are migrating to STRIPE for payments". The parcels page still describes land as "Land you own inside Somnium Space," in small, medium and extra large sizes, and does not mention NFTs at all.
None of those pages lists every difference between the Steam build and the one Somnium distributes itself, and neither does anything else the company has published. UploadVR, which wrote up the listing on Tuesday, reported that the non-Steam PC version still advertises blockchain and NFT features, while Somnium's current homepage and documentation mention neither, and Road to VR said only that the return "ostensibly" means compliance with Valve's ban. Until Somnium publishes a feature comparison, a three-word parenthetical in a help article is the clearest statement there is.
Anyone who has maintained an Android app with a Play Store flavor and a sideload flavor will recognize the shape of this: one codebase, two builds, one of them trimmed to pass a store's review, and the hard problems turning up not in the build system but in the product, once people on both builds share the same space. In Somnium they will share Base Reality, the persistent city every user spawns into, which means a performer collecting tips at a concert will be playing to a room in which, going by the documentation as it reads today, the people who arrived through Steam cannot tip.
Why come back at all
Steam is where PC VR users already keep their libraries, and Somnium has been preparing for this release since at least July, when version 3.1.6 rebuilt the platform around private instances and server-side scripting ahead of the return. A free listing on the store where Steam Frame owners buy their games is worth a split economy to a platform that has spent five years distributing itself, and so far the only feature the documentation marks as missing from the Steam build is a payment one.
The open question is the one the documentation leaves blank. Steam has its own system for in-game purchases, and whether Somnium's creator sales, once the Stripe migration finishes, run through it or stay off the Steam build the way the Tip Jar does decides how much of the creator economy a Steam user can take part in. Somnium holds its Connect event on November 28, a few days before the listing's December window opens, which is the natural place to answer it.
For a creator planning a ticketed event or a tip-funded performance in the first half of 2027, the practical number is what share of the room arrives through Steam, because under the documentation as written that share cannot pay them directly. Somnium can publish that figure after December. Nobody outside the company can estimate it before then.