The reason why Valve does all this cool shit is because it’s a private company and not publicly traded. It owes nothing to no one.
As soon as a company goes public, it owes its shareholders its profits and has an obligation to make as much as possible and use whatever means it can to do so.
Gabe doesn’t care. He does what he wants and he knows what his customers want.
Don’t forget the part where they’re able to do that because they basically own the Windows market so pursuing projects that won’t see a RoI in the short term is possible for them but wouldn’t be for others.
This is super true in so many ways. I worked for a private company for several years and about 2 years ago they were bought out by a public company. Things changed real quick lol. The original owners swore they would never sell too. I til they did one day lol
I hope my company does because I have shares
“HE kNoWnS whAT CuStoMeRs WaNT”
No he doesn’t, people kept saying HL3 and there’s no HL3. The company committed crimes and illegal activities in many countries.
Stop the propaganda nonsense.
Those are quite the claims. Got any sources to back them up?
I put an admittedly low amount of effort into searching (skimmed a couple dozen links or so) for evidence of crimes and came up empty. I’d be curious to see trustworthy sources about this as well.
Re: HL3. It’s a particularly infamous example of a game cancelation, and it does suck but studios canceling games happens.
Edit: Excepting antitrust lawsuits. I wasn’t surprised to see that and glossed over it, but it does qualify as a crime and I would say is a reasonable accusation. I didn’t read more in to it than that, yet.
Edit 2: The TL;DR: of the antitrust lawsuit if you weren’t aware (I wasn’t) is that Steam is taking a cut of up to 30% which they’re arguing is excessive. Game makers don’t really have a choice given that Steam is the market leader. Here’s a random newer article, more about Gabe having to appear in court, but it covers the basics. https://www.techspot.com/news/100969-gabe-newell-ordered-testify-person-valve-antitrust-lawsuit.html
30% has been the industry standard rate for decades and unlike consoles or mobile, PC game developers have more choices than any other even down to self-selling. It’s such a nothing lawsuit.
This is one dev upset because their game they spent what felt like 50 years developing one of the first “big” Indie titles didn’t make them enough money.
While I won’t comment as to the validity of the lawsuit (that is for the courts):
- The “standard” for selling video games involved needing a publisher who could coordinate with manufacturers and distributors to fight to get your big box onto a Best Buy shelf. Steam is one of the biggest “disruptors” in history. They don’t get to make the “that is just how it always was” argument*
- PC Game developers very much do not have more choices. Because, with very few exceptions, the response to “we are selling this on our own store” or “we are selling this as a gog/humble/epic exclusive” is “Fuck you, wake me up when you are on steam”.
I don’t know enough of the math behind the Steam CDNs and services to know if it is worth the cut. But, much like I am always going to whinge at DLC prices even as I acknowledge that it is “a good deal”, I am also going to generally side with “devs deserve more money”.
*: Take this with a grain of salt since it is a large claim and there are obviously no citations. But Steam did not invent digital distribution and companies like Strategy First (?) existed. And their cut for the massively inflated game prices (80 USD in the early 2000s…) was a LOT higher than 30%. Ironically, Valve used the same “you get more money if you sell with us” argument.
People don’t even know what people want. Gabe knows people expect HL3 to be some godly game and he knows what they make will in all likelihood not live up to that image. Why bother if it will just bring disappointment to everyone? Just save the effort and enjoy the memes.
You’re not very good at this
I generally avoid liking any companies or brands, but it’s difficult to not appreciate some of the things Valve does.
They do things for their own benefit, but it benefits everyone because they don’t try and lock things down quite like other companies.
I would argue they do many things that are against their own benefit.
Yeah, they’ve got a monopoly and it sucks, but they don’t seem to have a desire to push it to the point of drawing attention. I know why Epic does what it does, because they have to compete with the near complete market dominance of Valve. However, it’s not like Valve has used their position to increase prices or anything like that. They also invest in doing things that improve the experience rather than just trying to harm the competition.
I don’t like the monopoly, but I do appreciate Valve as a company.
I keep seeing “Monopoly” repeated, but I’m having a hard time understanding the logic.
They haven’t bought competitors. They don’t do anything to hinder others progress in this market, sometime to the detriment of their customers (see: Steam launches another launcher, to launch the game). They haven’t openly shown anything anti-competitive, in fact they have stuck to their guns (30% cut) when others have attempted to compete.
What they have done is cultivate the best platform that continues to evolve, add features, and maintain stability. Consumers continue to choose to use Steam overwhelmingly, but outside of Valve’s own games, there is no threat of exclusivity or punishment.
It’s the opposite of monopolistic behavior. Any company is free to compete, build their own platform, and offer software. It’s expensive, and tricky to get right, but nothing is stopping them, Valve included.
A monopoly doesn’t care about actions. There’s only one place people think about when they think to purchase a game on PC. That means it’s a monopoly. Sure, it’s not a horrible situation, and they don’t seem to be significantly exploiting their position, but that doesn’t change that they have no real competition.
If we’re going deep into the literal meaning of monopoly, the “mono” prefix means “one” but they have several legitimate competitors so that’s simply untrue.
For launchers there’s Epic, GoG, Ubisoft, EA, Microsoft Gamepass, R*. If we’re talking game sales there’s a litany of other websites to purchase games from Humble Bundle, Fanatical, Itch.io, Green Man Gaming.
Players can buy directly from the publisher in most cases. For outside those, there are options of DRM free or whatever Epic supposedly has to offer.
Steam may have a dominant position, but I’m not entirely sure that’s a monopoly. If we had no other options? Sure. We have multiple other options. Steam Keys are the most common for a number of the sites, but I’d also consider that none of these launchers have the set of features that Valve offers with theirs.
Does people choosing a better service make it a monopoly? I think if Steam didn’t have even 1/3rd of what it offers then the other options would be more widely used. Rather, if the other options put as much effort into the quality of life of their launchers, they’d be more popular.
But personally I also think the Epic-backed Wolffire lawsuit claiming Valve has a monopoly is kind of BS, unless it comes out to be true that Steams market power forced developers to keep games off other stores and keep it on their own. If Valve were forcing its competitors to be shit, then sure it’s a monopoly.
Up to this point, it seems to me that Steam has dominated the market because of reliability. The consistent sales, refunds are consistent, the program has a number of uses from communities to guides to per-game control schemes, to little things like the soundtracks of games being in one spot.
Is it a monopoly? Or is it the people’s choice?
Well they kind of have used their position to indirectly increase prices… If they take a 30% cut then the games need to sell for more to make the same profit (and there’s the geolock and anti price-competition thing too)
Ah yes, the monopoly, a business with competitors such as ea origin, Ubisoft dunno what they called it, epic store, gog. The word monopoly must break down like monopol-y as in like a monopole, a magnet with only one polarity that is separate from the other polarity.
I was going to say something to the effect of "I’m thrilled for what they’ve done for the state of gaming in Linux, even if it is in self interest, but I wish they’d contribute their code upstream. ".
I did a little search and turns out a lot of it is, so that’s cool. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Valve-Upstream-Everything-OSS
They do lockdown things.
On EU they tried to geolock customers.
Steam Deck works on selected Linux systems, Steam Deck operating systems isn’t open source after many people demand it to be released for the public.
Alyx is still VR only game and must buy VR game, unless you mod it. Valve refused to release PC version.
Exclusivity is the number one reason they are making money. You can not buy certain games outside of Steam and Valve hasn’t released their own games outside of Steam.
Valve isn’t the good guys and they are criminals with multiple history of lawsuits and abuse to their employees. You shouldn’t keep supporting them.
Source on
Steam Deck works on selected Linux systems, Steam Deck operating systems isn’t open source after many people demand it to be released for the public.
?
In reading this article https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/02/linux-on-steam-deck-what-you-need-to-know-what-currently-works/ the only limitation that stuck out is you’re supposed to install your distro on a different partition.
Alyx is still VR only game and must buy VR game, unless you mod it. Valve refused to release PC version.
It’s a matter of opinion if this is good or bad I guess, but I think VR specific titles are a good thing. More of an opportunity to take advantage of the medium rather than shoehorn the functionality on to a desktop game.
Any body who tries to install any other operating system knows it’s going to cause problems. We aren’t talking about the popular Linux like Ubuntu, Mint or Debian. The really small Linux community like pop, Qubes, CentOS. They don’t work because Steam Deck doesn’t support them. It’s why Steam Deck should be open source to allow people fix the problems Valve refuses to solve.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A talk this week at the Linux Foundation Europe’s Open-Source Summit highlighted some of the great and ongoing contributions by Valve and their partners.
FFmpeg is widely-used throughout many industries for video transcoding and in today’s many-core world this is a terrific improvement for this key open-source project.
This tool for interacting with the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) is extremely common with server administrators while now its development is in a temporary state of limbo due to GitHub.
This Rust-based version of cp, mv, and other core utilities is reaching closer to parity with the widely-used GNU upstream and becoming capable of taking on more real-world uses.
The Maintainer Of The NVIDIA Open-Source “Nouveau” Linux Kernel Driver Resigns Hours after posting a large patch series for enabling the Nouveau kernel driver to use NVIDIA’s GSP for improving the support for RTX 20/30 series hardware and finally enabling accelerated graphics support on RTX 40 “Ada Lovelace” GPUs, the Red Hat maintainer has resigned from his duties.
Rocky Linux Shares How They May Continue To Obtain The RHEL Source Code Following Red Hat’s decision earlier this month to limit access to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux source code and that leading to downstreams scrambling to figure out their paths forward to avoid tracking CentOS Stream instead and still aiming to offer 1:1 RHEL compatibility without being restricted by the Red Hat Customer Portal, the Rocky Linux distribution today expressed a few of the ideas they are considering.
The original article contains 1,112 words, the summary contains 246 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Yaaaas Valve!
