Valve is the company where we spend a lot of money and they deserve it.
The rest is companies that trick people into giving them money (battlepass! lootboxes!) and they don't deserve it.
People often forget that consumers as a whole are the ones holding the power, and the sad part is that rewarding a company with a good product with your money stopped being the business model and it's now the exception.
I don't disagree with most of your statement, but Valve has and continues to make lots of money from loot boxes in both CS and TF2. Just want to point out that they do do stuff like that too.
Valve is not literally the first but they played a big part in normalizing both lootboxes and micro transactions. Don't rewrite history just because you are a fan.
Not to mention their role in you not owning your games.
> Not to mention their role in you not owning your games.
I do use Steam to "purchase" games, and it irks me that they're still allowed to show "Buy" when in reality you're essentially leasing/renting the game, can't believe it's legal for them (and others) to trick people like this still.
What? Valve basically invented making money with skins and lootboxes, it started with TF2 hats. There is an insane amount of money in the CS2 skin market.
I didn't say Valve is perfect. But they're definitely worth the money I spend there. Great service, proper support, regional pricing, and the list goes on. Everything works today. The work they've put on Proton/Linux gaming easily wins my support.
Did they screw up sometimes? Sure. And I'm from the days when Steam didn't exist. I remember the NoSTEAM game versions in shady sites, including Half-Life 2. Steam was hated with a passion back then. They won by ultimately providing great value and service.
I had a rough time with Proton a few years ago and ended up setting up my most recent gaming rig as a Windows 11 machine. In retrospect it was probably unfair to judge it on dime-a-dozen Humble Bundle leftovers from a decade ago when most of the effort is spent on supporting new releases.
But yeah... just this week I was traveling for work and my kid reached out wanting to play a little Deep Rock Galactic with me. I couldn't believe how easy everything was from my Ubuntu 24.04 laptop. Steam, proton, Discord, all of it just worked and I wouldn't even have realised it wasn't running natively if I hadn't noticed the extra proton download in the Steam client.
> The work they've put on Proton/Linux gaming easily wins my support.
Lets not be naive here, this is the money they are saving in Windows licenses for the Steam Deck, and having their own store instead of Windows Store/XBox PC App.
Yet they are doing zero to foster native Linux games.
There isn't much they can do to foster native Linux support beyond trying to increase the number of people gaming on Linux. It's a chicken-and-egg problem, and you need to make the platform desirable to developers before they will start developing for it.
> Yet they are doing zero to foster native Linux games.
"zero" might be a bit harsh, considering that they do some things at least, compared to others who literally do nothing. Steam the platform has native Linux support, what games are natively available is visible on Store listings, and a bunch of the SDKs (all of them even maybe?) are available natively on Linux too. The situation could have been a lot worse.
It will get more worse, with Proton there is no value in e.g. using Vulkan, just use DirectX, and the convinience of modern GPU programming tooling in Visual Studio, HLSL code completion with CoPilot, PIX debugger, and then let Valve have to worry about running it on Linux.
I think there's a reasonable argument that the most stable Linux gaming API surface is actually Proton.
None of this is really going to change until we end up with a situation like the EA/Apple Store conflict: a major player unable to sell a game on Windows for some reason.
Also, it's something of a pragmatic choice -- Valve did put major effort into native Linux games around 2013, but the effort fell flat for a number of reasons.
Proton is them trying a different path towards severing or lessening the Windows dependence, in my opinion.
Totally agree with you there, as much as I love to hate non-transferability, revokable licenses, permanent VAC bans on accounts that got hacked, I still find Steam the most convenient path to "owning" games in one place.
The Linux work done for Steam Deck is fantastic and I do credit their efforts with inspiring others to work on similar projects that extend and complement what Valve achieved. Much of the hard effort did go into Windows games on Linux before Valve looked at it; everything the WINE project, Codeweavers did, gaming via Lutris since 2009, however Valve have definitely been a force multiplier.
Trust is earned and I think Valve are doing pretty well on that front, especially when you look at the differences to other PC stores, Ubisoft, EA, and to some extent Epic. GOG and Itch are very different beasts.
To some extent I miss the time where Steam was totally curated, you had to make an impact to get your game on the platform, back before it was a free-for-all of shovelware and low-effort slop. Occasional controversies aside, at least on Steam the tools / marketing funnel are there to keep the popular games at the forefront of the store whilst also being fairly open to allow devs to publish without being the chosen one.
Is there a danger of doing to games what Spotify has done to music? Maybe, but I reckon the super deep-discount sales have calmed somewhat and are happening later in game's long-tail part of the lifecycle or used as promo for sequels.
There are plenty of publishers that choose to mainly avoid going that route, often the traditional established publishers with console outlets they don't want to cannibalise, for example Sony and Konami.
> Is there a danger of doing to games what Spotify has done to music?
I think such business model ultimately doesn't scale well for games (several million-dollars production budgets sharing minuscule pieces of a ~$20 all-you-can-eat subscription pie).
Microsoft always knew this, they didn't try to win the market, they tried to subvert the business model, probably expecting the industry as a whole moving towards it -- which didn't happen at all, at least not yet.
Simple math would prove this. There's no way acquiring half the good studios in the world and make them release flop after flop was a break-even operation. It's several orders of magnitude behind.
Most of the market talks Nintendo, Sony, XBox, Apple Arcade, Android.
Exactly because they aquired half the good studios, they happen to be one of the biggest publishers, people forget some of those studios keep using their own branding instead of anything Microsoft, and it would hurt Steam if Microsoft decides all those studios would pull out of it.
Microsoft moved to a subscription service because they botched the launch of the Xbox One, with users accumulating digital libraries on the PlayStation, and that failure is something that has continued to drag them further and further down.
I agree that turning CS into a casino wasn’t a tasteful choice on Valve’s part but as someone who has played CS at least once a week for decades I can understand that they needed to find a way to cover server costs somehow. I paid $15 dollars for CS:GO and have clocked 4,500 hours in the game. I don’t gamble but I’d rather those who choose to fund the server costs than Valve charge a monthly subscription to everyone. Skin sales alone would have accomplished this without having to have loot boxes and keys and that’s where I think Valve went overboard with it. Also, for a game that provides so much revenue I expect better anti-cheat and more VAC bans, which are rare.
They didn't need to cover server costs for CS 1.6. I wonder why that is? Hint: CS 1.6 wasn't designed from the ground up as a microtransaction vehicle so could have servers run by the community unlike CS:GO where centrally run servers are needed to make microtransactions work, not the other way around.
The lootboxes drop as a normal course of gameplay, you buy keys to open them. People still play TF2 so presumably some still open boxes. It's also the base unit of trading for high value items.
CS lootboxes are the least shitty ones in the entire industry. There is 0% pay to win, if anything the skins are a disadvantage because they usually stand out.
I didn't say that lootboxes were pay to win and most lootboxes in games are not. That doesn't mean it's not still profiting from and enabling gambling and addiction.
There's a lot of evidence showing that gambling as a child leads to gambling problems as an adult, and loot boxes are just gambling aimed to a large degree at children.
Valve games are even worse for this because Steam trading allows 3rd party sites to sell cosmetics directly for cash, and some of these cosmetics are worth tens of thousands of dollars. It's just children gambling money but with a thin veneer of video game over the top.
And I see no problem with that. I have never bought a single skin for Counter Strike nor Team Fortress 2 and I have bunch. Well, I used to, but then CS2 came out and all of a sudden my skins and unopened boxes were valued at hundreds of euros and I sold them on steam.
If you think enabling childhood gambling addictions and unregulated gambling systems aren't a problem then I don't know what else to say to you. Lootboxes are gambling, plain and simple.
Americans would rather mention TF2, a game with less than 10 thousand concurrent players and probably making a modicum of money, than ever pretend that game exists or has influenced other games.
Regardless of how many concurrent players it has now, TF2 was massively influential to other FPS games, and it's still held with high regard by the community. It was also one of the first major games to introduce loot boxes.
Valve uses battlepasses and lootboxes (i.e. gambling for minors) as much as the worst in the industry. They are far from a good corporation.
Gabe is just better at PR than the competition and gamers are irrationally tribal and will defend whatever they consider to be part of while ignoring all the bad parts.
I'd like to have an honest conversation about this, but imo Valve is no better than the iOS app store: it aggressively rent seeks and has essentially destroyed the shareware model (which was the best way to discover software in the 80s-90s). It has also willingly been complicit in underage gambling via loot boxes for more than a decade now.
I think Gabe Newell is a visionary for building Steam in 2003, way before Jobs had the same idea, but absolutely everyone and their mother hated Steam back then. I remember the memes on IRC and various forums (and I've been on Steam for a very[1] long time, the first or second day it came out I think). Two decades later, props to them and their useful acolytes for gaslighting the entire gaming community. No idea how Gaben is regarded as some sort of Christlike figure these days, but here we are.
Maybe it's just a "lesser of two evils" thing, as companies/platforms like EA and Ubisoft are the absolute scum of the earth.
I don't know about the rest of your claims ("shareware was the best way to discover software" is really a personal opinion), but this is just factually false.
Unlike iOS, where you cannot publish an app unless you pay the 30% cut, there is nothing that prevents you from developing and a Windows/MacOS/Linux game yourself. You can simply choose to not use Steam - but the benefits of developing and publishing with it (myriad SDKs, game servers, networking, social features, trading cards, anti-cheat, achievements, payment methods, reviews, discovery, forums, launchers, updates, CDN, and on and on and on...) are so overwhelming that it is simply worth it for the vast majority of gamedevs.
Fact: Steam is not rent-seeking - the value that they provide is tremendous, and you are not forced to use them, which makes them non-rent-seeking by definition.
> you are not forced to use them, which makes them non-rent-seeking by definition.
That's not how it works. Those two things aren't mutually exclusive. Plenty of businesses engage in rent seeking without having a captive (by most definitions) audience. All that's required is a very modest barrier (ex network effect, non-zero switching cost, etc) and a sufficiently large audience.
Rent seeking isn't even mutually exclusive with adding value. A business can do both simultaneously by virtue of being able to multitask. Most businesses offer more than a single product or service after all.
So first off, you start out by lying about my words, so we immediately know you're not operating in good faith.
What I said:
> Steam is not rent-seeking - the value that they provide is tremendous, and you are not forced to use them, which makes them non-rent-seeking by definition.
That's a compound statement that you cut off to change the substance of. What you quoted:
> you are not forced to use them, which makes them non-rent-seeking by definition.
And now that we've called out your lie, we can move on to the substance, which is also incorrect.
The definition of rent-seeking disagrees with everything that you've said:
"The attempt to profit by manipulating the economic or political environment, especially by the use of subsidies."
> Rent seeking isn't even mutually exclusive with adding value.
This is factually incorrect - both according to the dictionary definition of the phrase, and according to the way that it's used casually, which is extraction of value without creation of it.
I'm glad that this is happening in the open - when people have to actively lie to try to push a narrative about Steam, it really shows that they have no legitimate points - every thread where these lies are exposed just (justly) boosts Valve's reputation.
You are not assuming good faith, nor are you interpreting what I wrote in the most plausible manner.
I did not misrepresent you. You made two claims and I objected to the second. My objection stands regardless of the presence or absence of the claim about Steam providing value.
Notice that I took no position on whether or not Steam is rent seeking, instead merely disputing the reasoning that you expressed.
However even if I had taken a position to the contrary, I don't see how the definition you quoted would be at odds with that. I think it is fairly reasonably to see a dominant player with network effects as possessing sufficient economic power to meet the criteria you laid out. For that matter it's quite presumptuous on your part to assume that everyone else is on board with the particular definition that you selected there.
And it goes without saying that I disagree with your latter assertion of factual incorrectness. No dictionary disputes the ability of a business to multitask.
Actually interestingly enough if we use your definition then you can rent seek while simultaneously adding value to the same product just so long as you're also engaging in unreasonable market manipulation to increase your profit in the process. Amusingly my working definition had been somewhat more restrictive.
As someone who worked in game dev in 2008, we loved Steam, for the same reason we loved the iOS App Store. We take it for granted these days but the ability to self-publish on a first class platform and receive 70% of the sales revenue literally redefined the indie game dev industry.
Use of the term ‘rent seeking’ is, in my experience, often correlated with a sense of entitlement and a lack of appreciation for what is actually provided. It’s only rent seeking if no additional value is added which is clearly not the case here.
I'm surprised you haven't been flagged or just a dead comment. Any signals that Apple is not pure evil for taking 30% is not part of the echo chamber group think around here. People never want to admit that it costs money to retail your product no matter where it is. In the physical world, there's manufacturing and delivery costs. Getting shelf space at a retailer takes a lot of negotiating where you have very very little room to bargain. Retailers will even force you to buy back unsold product. Yes, software doesn't have all of that but have their own nuances. A lot of indie game devs don't have time/skill/want to do a lot of what an app store can do. Expecting to get all of that for free because it is software is just not sane. If you are self-hosting all of it, it will not be free as you will be paying for payment processors and a hell of lot more in attracting eyeballs.
You can sponsor a promotion; sales on a bunch of games - but it's not "Brought to you by the cool refreshing taste of Pepsi" it's like "Berlin Game Developers".
Steam as DRM is basically the best case scenario. It is opt-in for developers, meaning there is no DRM at all for some games on Steam. You can download it, back it up, run it without Steam. The games that do use Steam's DRM are trivial to "crack" by replacing a DLL in game folder with a stub (you can find open source ones on GitHub). If Steam had no DRM I think publishers would lean more on other options which are worse for customers.
Shareware died before Steam. Steam launched in 2003 and didn't sell any 3rd party games until 2005. Nobody gave a shit about shareware in 2003. Nobody gave a shit about shareware in 2010 when Steam seriously became useful as a place to play more than the Orange Box and Counter-Strike.
I hated Steam when I first encountered it, but it's not a requirement to publish a game on PC/Mac/Linux. Nor is the process to install non-Steam games full of scary warnings like Google Play even on their own platform SteamOS. And they do let publishers give keys to 3rd party stores to sell unlike virtually every other platform. They aren't perfect but they are nowhere near what Apple does with iOS.
"destroyed the shareware model". You know that they only sell games, and just have the games that they made in the list too(them just being amazing and popular). It's not some easy task as recovering old systems when there are every type of games imaginable. Even if valve made a option to do that, no one will since other companies don't do anything like that.
Wouldn't the Steam digital demo system be the modern evolution of the shareware model? For free you can access a limited portion of the game to try it and consider eventually buying it.
Steam is just a storefront. They hold no monopoly position or power. It's not comparable to iOS app store. Devs are free to list their game on any other storefront concurrently.
This is the same argument Microsoft used ("we're just an OS, totally not a monopoly"). I think to anyone that spends any time doing any PC gaming, it's obvious that Steam is the only relevant storefront by a country mile.
Or did they just get there first, and stayed first due to network effects? Initially, nobody wanted steam. People definitely don't want a second steam - which in practice means sticking to the first one.
Could say the same thing about AT&T, Bell Labs, etc. There’s a lot of precedent here, but most saliently, how you become a monopoly is not really relevant. They absolutely are one. But I’m being already aggressively downvoted with no counter arguments so the Gaben fanboys are here. (Defending a deca-billionaire is hard work, after all.)
That a really silly comparison. An OS is a big deal, you can't just switch off. Steam is a video game store. You can install shit from anywhere. People stick to steam because it's good. It's not morally wrong to have the best product on the market.
If you want the audience as an indie developer, it would behoove you to launch on Steam (because they're a monopoly). Again, MS used all these cute arguments, and they don't really work. There's a reason Valve is always playing very nicely with regulators (especially w.r.t. the gambling stuff). They don't really want to rock the boat, but a benevolent monopoly is still a monopoly and I do think that a 30% cut for running a distribution platform is pretty predatory, especially as bandwidth has been commoditized.
What? You can literally just download an exe from any website and run it.
If you're complaining that Valve owns a big list of games and a ton of eyeballs, and not being on that list means those eyeballs don't see you when they look at that list, idk what to tell you because they seem to have earned that part of their business pretty fairly.
I think you are blaming Valve for forces way beyond Valve's control. Valve isn't perfect, but it is a way better steward for PC gaming and PC gamers than any other American tech company would be.
It's harder to say that when they invented loot crates. Sure everyone's doing it now, and someone else would've done it eventually, but Valve pioneered it.
I suppose, yeah, some things would be a lot worse without Steam, so there's that.
Yes, I was there. I sat through a presentation about their original concept for selling content in Team Fortress. Trust me when I say that it turned out nothing like they originally conceived of-- which is a whole different story. The whole idea that they "invented" loot crates is weird because the idea goes back to collectable card games and other things. I am not saying they are without fault.
That is not true. Gachapon mechanics existed long before, valve only took it to western market, not knowing the consequences. Remember this is way before gambling sites. It was a way to earn a cool random hat on TF2.
As much as I like Valve, it's difficult to ignore how large a part they played in shifting the PC market towards F2P.
I bought TF2 with the Orange Box, and for a few years it was amazing. Then it went F2P with hats, and overnight the player base turned into a cesspit (and the hats themselves completely ruined the aesthetic that they spent years painstakingly crafting).
They still do that, Valve popularized the concepts of battle passes (with Dota 2) and loot boxes (with Team Fortress 2). They also took a paid game with TF2 and added all that monetization after the fact.
Counter-Strike especially has a pretty nasty gambling scene that Valve refuses to control, even though its only possible because of their marketplace and APIs.
The only real in-game purchase in Counter-Strike is the game itself to gain access to the ranking system. The skins are a superfluous add-on.
They knowingly profit from gamblers if you will but gamblers are going to gamble.
The gamblers were offered e-sport or gambling and they chose the latter.
You could use Robinhood to build up a growth portfolio starting from a handful of dollars or you could use it to buy 0DTE OTM options on credit. Guess which one the gamblers chose.
I’d like to point out that TF2 was part of the Orange Box bundle that included Half Life, Portal, and TF2. Those single player games were never given away for free, so as a purchaser of the bundle, I wasn’t miffed TF2 went free to play. In fact, quite the opposite. Because TF2 is free, there are like 50k people to play with me everyday. I think $0 is the right price for TF2.
I agree CS is icky re: skins and gambling. But to say “refuses to control” is disingenuous. They’ve done many things to curtail gambling, like preventing tourneys from displaying gambling sponsors and adding trade restrictions that hampered bot activity. Valve is between a rock and a hard place here- they recognize gambling is a net negative on the value of their game (hence the curtailing and remonetization efforts). Remember, valve didn’t create skin trading with the expectation of third party gambling, so this is something unprecedented they’ve had to figure out as they go. Despite its drawbacks, the gambling market has some positives that valve can’t ignore. It creates liquidity and demand for the skins. People who pay hundreds of dollars for skins hate to see their value plummet. So if valve nuked gambling today, it would upset a lot of folks. I think valve has done a phenomenal job balancing their business needs with the social obligations with the players.
They also nickel and dime the adults, but only the ones who make the games.
It's fine though, because they're nice to players and they've brainwashed them into giving their money to Valve instead of to the developers who actually make the games they fucking play.
Without steam, I'd still be playing my CD version of Homeworld 2.
I have paid $10 for every $1 of game I play, perhaps as high as $100:$1. A 30% cut of that seems totally reasonable. I have hundreds of games I keep just in case, and have played 10s of games I'd never have considered because they dont appear in Game Informer, PC Gamer, GoG, Twitch, Youtube, or other channels. They just are magically brought to me by steam, and I buy it and try it because I'm an adult now.
If game creators hate this, I feel bad for them, but I don't want anything to change as a consumer.
Of course 30% seems reasonble to you, you're not the creator of the games. It's quite confusing to me that you're endorsing the side that has an insane ROI instead of the side that is sufferring greatly to make ends meet.
A 70% take would have blown the minds of developers pre-Steam. Retailers took 40% and were ruthless about shelf space and inventory. Distributors took 20%. Plus you had to actually make a box/CD/etc. They were lucky to keep 30% not pay it.
This doesn't mean Valve is perfect but if a developer is "suffering" because of a 30% cut they probably need to improve their pricing/game/community/etc.
Retailers and distributors had actual costs they needed to cover for the services they provided. Steam largely does not seeing how profitable they are.
You're implying that Sales, Marketing, and Distribution is not a valuable service by saying 30% is not reasonable. I work in the electronics industry selling components. Suppliers regularly give us 30% margin, far more on some products, despite the upfront cost of making a new microcontroller or FPGA being far in excess of the most expensive video games ever made, with our value add being, to be frank, much less than Steam. 30% margin is about average for distribution, be it food, minerals, cars, or any other industry.
If I didn't have Steam (or equivalent service like GoG), I wouldn't buy new games. That's just reality. I would play the same games I have for decades. Instead, Steam has created a very effective recommendation engine that gives me a great selection. That's more than worth a 30% cut.
I'm endorsing my side. Not Steam's side, or the creator's side.
Maybe their business model is awful, but I love what they do, and what they have done. They have made my linux machine a top tier gaming option, freeing me from the only use of windows left. They have brought me the steam deck, which has a thriving accessory market due to their creative commons licensing. Etc etc. They are pro consumer.
I want steam to continue largely as is. In an ideal world all artists would be better compensated for the joy they bring to the world, but I'm quite happy as a consumer of art. Not to be too harsh, but frankly, the existence of struggle for recognition does not entitle artists to a penny of my money or a second of my time beyond the transaction they propose, nor does it entitle them to anything that Valve does or makes. That we can all work together well is a function of a local solution to the tension of conflicting interests. Valve is seeking a balance. It could be much worse for both sides.
But if you want, think of it this way - all of Steam's profits, billions of dollars, are only 30% of the sales they have brought. They made 17 Billion in rev last year, so nearly 25 Billion went to game makers / publishers. This is 2-3x what spotify paid to artists in the same year.
Regarding the 30% cut. Developers can actually generate steam keys and publish them on third-party sites which can be redeemed by users on Steam. Developers then get 100% of the profit.
They're demonstrably not. I'd advise you to read up on the concept of a monopoly.
> They made 17 Billion in rev last year, so nearly 25 Billion went to game makers / publishers. This is 2-3x what spotify paid to artists in the same year.
And? I don't understand why you're just comparing two values in absolute values. You're talking as if Valve is giving away money.
Steam gets me and many others to spend a lot more than 50% more on games than we would otherwise. I’m pretty confident that they push a lot more money to creators than they’d getting otherwise, even leaving aside the old publishing revenue splits that gave devs a lot less than 70%. A lot of those games, I’ve never even installed. Blasted Steam sales…
If they're suffering greatly to make ends meet, then why use Steam at all? The only reason I can think of is that Steam provides a great customer experience, making that 30% worth it for the developers.
You do not have hundreds of games. You have a non-transferable license to play those games while they are made available by Valve and while your account is not banned.
Aren't steam account suspensions pretty much limited to criminal activity? Any other kind of restriction doesn't prevent you from playing the games you have licenses for.
For the most part, yes. There have been rare instances of Games being removed from Steam though (not just the store) and more common cases of games being significantly altered compared to the version you paid for (e.g. removed soundtracks due to licensing disputes).
I agree that 30% is too large of a cut, but what would be appropriate? 15%? Steam does add a ton of value from an immediate audience, solid advertising opportunities, and amazing distribution for the developer.
As that has done both sides of games, I would like to propose some doubts for people to consider on that is dissimilar to the standard b2b saas; for to clarity I'm not saying 30% is good
- One chargeback for your 5$ game can consume you 55$ or more, handful and you permanently lose the ability to accept the payment anywhere including future businesses outside of games
- Amount of people that will take parents cards is eye watering
- The value of offline payment acceptance in the form of physical cards (kids do not possess standard payment rails but can acquire your game on steam in the cash)
- They don't take flat 30% for almost a decade now
- You don't often get to use Stripe or 2-3%. Your cost closer about 15% if you choose to process you own payments
> One chargeback for your 5$ game can consume you 55$ or more, handful and you permanently lose the ability to accept the payment anywhere including future businesses outside of games
This sounds like personal experience. Can you elaborate?
Edit: OHH perhaps you are saying this is one of the benefits of Steam; that it shields you from all this.
> Edit: OHH perhaps you are saying this is one of the benefits of Steam; that it shields you from all this.
Yes. In a sijmilar way: regular companies get Stripe at commodity pricing, games get xsolla, paysafe, tebex, and a massive compliance questionnaire, games are software (to you) but closer to porn or gambling on risk (to MoRs and processors).
People are less "likely" to charge back Steam because of their other games being frozen and Steam has volume to dilute chargebacks whereas you starting out may hit double digit dispute rates in one. Whether this is fair is an exercise best left to the reader ;.
likely what they are implying is that chargebacks have indirect costs that you can ballpark around $50 per chargeback. So steam would likely take back the $5 revenue from the developer for the $5 chargeback, but the costs of processing the chargeback are absorbed by steam. i do not know if they have a separate chargeback fee they charge developers for it but it wouldnt make sense to as steam is the one validating and processing payments
EA presented their numbers for their online store. They were making something like 12%, and losing money.
They ran it at a loss and try to use its existence to declare everyone else overcharging. Apple, Google, Steam. Meanwhile, they were unable to make money, just proving they don't know how business works.
And doesn't forbid you from using their platform for free if you sell the keys by yourself and you can also decide to publish your game to other stores...
How about charging for services rendered based on cost to produce them rather than some arbitrary number. Some effective competition would be good, but likely outcome is publishers taking more.
I never understood people who argue steam doesn’t have real competition.
The number of fully funded attempts to compete with steam is impressive. Steam has more competition than any other of the major app stores. Steam also had to provide additional value over pre-existing methods of installing games on the PC in a way the Android Play Store or the PlayStation Store did not have to.
It is incredible how much the other stores fumbled the implementation. As a rule, Epic, Origin, etc apps were terrible. Laggy, bad UI, sometimes difficult to even complete a purchase.
You would have thought that close relationship with the games industry- someone must know how to make a high performance native application. Yet it always felt like web developers pumping out another half assed Electron platform. The Steam store must generate billions in revenue -put some real manpower behind the engineering.
I feel like that just becomes another situation where bigger organizations get more bargaining power and get better deals, so you’re just kind of shifting problems. I’m not saying a flat percentage like they have is necessarily the best solution, but I’m not sure trading problems is a good idea either. Just seems like a different way for smaller developers to get screwed.
Developers choose to give Steam 30% of their revenue because they know the steam channel increases their revenue by more than 30%. Doesn't that make it a good deal for developers?
Attention span is finite and Steam took a big chunk of it from gamers, in other words there is a chance that in a world where everyone hated closed platforms like steam (for not allowing reselling or any other reason) direct ads would be more favorable for developers than steam, or word of mouth, or any of it's alternatives.
Ok, so now you're criticizing them for being too successful.
They don't own the OS, they don't (until very recently) own the hardware, they haven't really made any major uncompetitive or anti-consumer moves I'm aware of, and they provide a service that the majority of devs consider worth it.
I guess you could argue they're taking advantage of a bit of a "natural monopoly", but there's still plenty of room for other people to eat their lunch, and things like itch seem to have carved out a niche for devs that would rather keep their money than get the additional services Steam offers.
I don't think Steam is flawless, but for how powerful they are, they sure seem a lot less evil than almost every other large corporation.
Sure, if we were in an alternative reality, things would be different.
Valve built a platform that gamers like, and gamers like it for all the choices Valve made.
I also find it interesting you chose "not allowing reselling" as a thing that would have made users not like steam... but not allowing reselling is probably the feature that game developers like the most! I wouldn't be surprised if developers would choose to keep the 30% fee over dropping the fee but changing to allow reselling.
Vendors give the Mafia 30% of their revenue because they know the protection racket increases their revenue by more than 30%. Doesn't that make it a good deal for vendors?
When I'm interested in an indie game, I always go first to the developer's website to see if I can just buy a copy directly from them. The vast, vast majority of the time I have to buy it through Steam, maybe Epic, and itch/gog if I'm lucky. It's vanishingly uncommon for them to host the game themselves.
For indies Steam's network lock-in effects are so strong that if you sell without their cut off Steam, instead of same price eating their cut on Steam, you likely do worse. Because selling off-Steam takes one sale out of their algorithm.
Same reason to embed your trailer on your site with YouTube, even if you could afford the bandwidth and keep users from having to watch ad-rolls--self-hosted and the YouTube algorithm will punish you.
A huge part of the high profits portions of the economy is based on this kind of winner take all capture.
My understanding is the tools that Steam provides as part of it's developer platform are top notch. And there are a lot of integration points such as cloud saves, social, match making, achievements, store, and so on. There is also a robust CD pipeline.
I can easily see this providing value above and beyond most other retailers that would sell video games. For example, Best Buy takes a 30% cut for physical merchandise, without providing any of the above mentioned features.
to be fair, every gaming company nowadays is also doing this and still choosing go nickel and dime the adults and not do anything positive for the community
Steam lets you trade your items with others. with all the copycats that came out, im not sure any of them allow for you to trade things you bought with other players within the same game, let alone letting them buy it off you for virtual currency you could use to buy other games with
To be fair, the trading feature is part of what enables the gambling system to work (i.e. selling weapon skins). Most game companies will explicitly try to not have a trading system on any items that are obtained by random chance because, well, gambling.
except a lack of trading features encourages more gambling because youre not allowed to directly purchase or trade for items you want that are only dropped through random chance and are thus forced to gamble for them.
without trading they effectively remove everything about exchanging money for goods except the gambling part. and for regular microtransaction stores without gambling, it just kills the second hand market for sake of profits
steams dollar system is very clearly 1 directional as well. you put money into steam and it never comes out without violating their terms of service
the point isnt to eliminate gambling. the point is to make sure the people gambling are doing it responsibly. and if you do that and enable trading then you have other benefits to the ecosystem and make it easier to engage with it however you want, even if it's just to only buy old unpopular items for cheap. because if thats all you want to do, you are forced to pay for fewer "fresh" items from the shop in other games or gamble a little bit and live with whatever you get (which will also likely be less total items for same price in addition to likely not being the unpopular items you would have selected)
so i have a hard time believing the companies that dont have a trading system are doing so for any reason other than try to squeeze more money out of normal users who would have otherwise spent less in a more robust market system.
I too disapprove of the csgo/dota2 gambling markets on principle, but how many people actually participate in it? Like, 10k? 100k? 1 million? That seems hard to believe.
Valve engaged in price fixing by preventing publishers from selling games at a lower price than other platforms. They're committed to openness to the extent that it helps them undercut consoles, but not to the extent of allowing others to undercut them. Selling cheap open hardware seems like classic "commoditize your complement" tactics. (Especially since most gamers will probably just buy from the steam store when using their hardware anyways...)
I'm glad valve exists, but they are not a charity and do not need your sympathy.
The term you are looking for is price gouging (i.e., having a higher price than everyone else). However, these terms (price fixing, gouging, undercutting) are completely vaccuous, and can be equally applied to any market price, making the accusation moot. Monopoly law is just a racket designed to allow rent seeking behavior by companies who do not want to compete.
I am not holding that against them whatsoever. I just not count this as one of their good deeds for industry because it was done under regulatory pressure.
I really wish the company would talk more about the post-Gabe transition, or at least begin to give us a rough indication of where the company plans to go.
Those of us who have been customers over 20 years often have a pretty significant investment in Steam content, and Gabe is getting old.
No company will ever do that. Even if they did, no one on the planet should expect it to play out as described. The whole anti-DRM position is based on the fact promises aren't worth a damn thing.
Publicly announced succession plans happen fairly regularly, especially for a company as stable as Valve. Tim Cook is 65 and just did so for Apple. The announcement of Ternus was hardly a bolt from the blue, either. Gabe is 63, and there is little to no indications.
Ignoring how many counter examples of this there are, why wouldn't Gaben do this given that he's majority owner of the company? He can do whatever he wants.
Scuba diving is a pretty risky activity on the scale of things that rich people do in their everyday life. Golf and cycling are a lot safer.
Scuba fatalities fall into a few buckets, the big two are inexperience/bad decision making, and older folks with health issues (underwater heart attacks/respiratory distress, basically).
As a former dive pro, an overweight 63 year old is someone that I would keep a very close eye on while diving.
The odds are pretty low, but there is a reason that many life insurance companies exclude scuba divers from their coverage.
That said, I'm happy to let him live as dangerously as he wants, he deserves it.
It's not that risky Scuba diving is about as dangerous as driving in terms of fatality per 100,000. The mitigation of this risk is different too. Theoretically if you do everything correct in scuba your chance of death is virtually zero which means that your risk profile decreases with experience. Driving does not enjoy the same luxury you could be a perfect driver and get obliterated by a semi-truck running a red light at any time.
The most common reason people die while on scuba is running out of air, if you always buddy and you have a bail-out cylinder that should be essentially impossible while rec diving
"but there is a reason that many life insurance companies exclude scuba divers from their coverage."
They will refuse to cover you outside of rec diving because of all the reasons I just stated
The stats you cited normalize for participants but NOT frequency. The average diver spends several hundred times less time diving than they do driving. Most certified divers dive once or less per year.
As I stated, the most common way to die diving is from a heart attack or other health incident according to DAN. Running out of air is a very uncommon cause of death in rec diving absent a primary factor like entanglement. So no, you are absolutely not reducing your chance to 0 by doing everything right. You are eliminating the chance of suffering a death from one of the things that doesn’t kill a lot of divers. An overweight old person doing an activity that stresses your lungs and circulatory system in an unforgiving environment is inherently high risk no matter how thorough their skills and preparation.
Double check your health insurance, many exclude rec diving as well.
Every single dive instructor has a story of seeing an old guy have a heart attack, myself included (he survived, barely). The only other death I know of besides old guy heart attacks where I worked was a young guy that had a heart attack.
Not when you normalize by time spent doing the activity.
If you normalize by incidents per participant, sure.
Keep in mind that the average recreational diver does one or fewer dive trips per year, with maybe 10 dives on a very dive intensive trip. A small population of divers are massively more active. Drivers on the other hand have the opposite distribution. A very active driver spends more time in their car in a week than even the most active recreational divers.
It's just due to one person (GabeN) holding majority of the stock and choosing to run the company this way. Gabe will retire or die at some point and then anything might happen.
Our culture only deserves what we feel strongly enough to enshrine and enforce as law.
Americans like to clown on the EU, but consumer protections and privacy laws don’t magically pop up on their own, and businesses don’t all magically act in the consumers’ best interests unless they are legally made to.
I agree, but I think two factors are at play here:
1) Valve is not in desperate need for capital, Steam and their older games are money printing machines therefore they don’t feel the need to release new games all the time. This is a pro and a con, they don’t feel the need to release same-y, barely iterative titles to make ends meet which means the overall quality of the games we do get is much higher. But at the same time it’s no telling when Valve just decides the juice isn’t worth the squeeze anymore.
2) the games that Valve do release are always a standard deviation above the other games of that similar genre at the time. Their ability to take a mechanic, or an engine, or a combination of the two and meaningfully expand and revolutionize in that space cannot be understated - and as game technology progresses, making similar impacts at that scale takes longer and is much harder than the previous title. Half Life Alyx was such a quantum leap in VR quality and I don’t think it’s talked about enough. Deadlock takes the MOBA genre to a whole new level in terms of gameplay depth and complexity. I think they’re taking their time with titles and they know the predecessors that came before them.
Still essentially Steam is a DRM system + another invasive program running on your pc, that absolutely doesnt need to, in addition to the game you want.
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I vote with my wallet, I avoid buying anything from Steam.
Gog and Itch.io are where I go out of my way to spend my money.
Itch.io is amazing! All the coolest games are there + the developer experience is about a million times better than Steam, just sensible and utilitarian. Steam dev experience is a kafkaesque nightmare.
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Back in 2000 because of these features Steam was the epitome of digital evil. it's just that all other tech companies (google, apple, MS, sony, samsung, etc.) have become so supremely evil over time, whereas Valve has remained at its year 2000 level of evil and so now seems positively angelic compared to its peers.
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I will also note that Valve probably are one of the biggest heralds of the year of the Linux desktop just by doing tonnes of work making games run in it well and hassle free. The biggest barrier to entry for Linux had long been that games dont work, thats basically solved now.
So they get a bonus point for that.. Steam is still filth I dont want or need on my system tho.
> I will also note that Valve probably are one of the biggest heralds of the year of the Linux desktop just by doing tonnes of work making games run in it well and hassle free. The biggest barrier to entry for Linux had long been that games dont work, thats basically solved now. So they get a bonus point for that..
And that's not charity either. Valve realized they needed to hedge their bets when Microsoft threatened to fuck them over with the Windows Store. Linux (or more specifically, SteamOS) is their backup plan.
This seems like the opposite of almost every family dynasty company that has ever existed. The second generation might keep things on track. The third generation never will.
I was recently saying to a friend and fellow fan (after getting a Steam Deck, for work purposes obviously) that the stuff Valve does is absolutely how “f#%k you” money should be used.
Not that I defend all of Valve’s business practices, but last I heard, you’re only prevented from sell games cheaper on other platforms if the thing you’re selling is Steam keys.
AFAIK, this restriction doesn’t apply if you’re distributing via a different market place.
If that’s true, that seems fair since you’re relying on Valve’s infrastructure to support the sale.
I mean are we forgetting about kids gambling lootboxes in CS and Valve doing nothing to regulate it?
I mean yes compared to the rest of the gaming companies that are long way gone like Blizzard etc, Valve seems to be the better, but its not like they are saints...
It always amazes me how us as people forget the past (which is not even far away).
venture capital are the real enemies here. valve has stayed out of that game which is why they've managed to focus on delivering value to their users. as soon as venture capital gets involved, investors are now the customer and the customers are effectivly the product.
Valve is the company where we spend a lot of money and they deserve it.
The rest is companies that trick people into giving them money (battlepass! lootboxes!) and they don't deserve it.
People often forget that consumers as a whole are the ones holding the power, and the sad part is that rewarding a company with a good product with your money stopped being the business model and it's now the exception.