Valve is an online store first and foremost. Apples and oranges. The rest are playing catchup, as they’ve seen gabe get rich and fat, and they want in on that.
they’ve seen gabe get rich and fat
Hey, that’s not true! Gabe’s lost a lot of weight in recent times.
Yeah let’s keep this civil
I mean calling someone who’s fat fat is not really uncivil in my opinion.
Gaben made a deal with the devil, $10,000,000 for every pound lost! That’s the real story here!
And he is still fat. No longer morbidly obese, but definitely fat
Me and Gabe be like
Valve is a multi-faceted company with its hands in many pies.
New euphemism for fat.
I think that is one reason why Valve has remained dominant in this space for over 20 years.
I suspect wolfire is a useful idiot with a larger company funding this lawsuit. Whether or not the antitrust case has legs, this will cost valve money which is a win for whoever they may be.
Just conjectue o course. I know though that if steam were destroyed tomorrow only terrible more expensive garbage would come in its place.
So go go gaben
If Wolfire kept up Humble Indie Bundle instead of it being sold to IGN and losing any semblance of “indie” I’d take the complaint more seriously
I do really like Lugaru, but still
I am very ashamed that I own a single wolfire title.
I like receiver tho :\
I like Wolfire. Their head (David Rosen) had a really good procedural animation talk at GDC about a decade ago, their games are pretty good, and they started up Humble before it spun off on its own.
Before tarnishing their reputation, I’d suggest reading up on the actual complaints put forth in the lawsuit. I’ve done so extensively, I think they have very solid grounds to go after Valve (Valve’s behaviour is comparable to Amazon’s in terms of anticompetitive practices).
I read the complaints and I lost all respect. I will not be spending another cent with that company, nor will I attend any of his future talks.
The entire complaint seems to be centered around the idea that you can’t sell the game for different price off platform. That’s demonstrably untrue. You can sell the game for a different price of platform as long as they’re not using steam keys. Which is hardly an unreasonable onus, It’s not hard to generate your own keys.
The other complaint seems to be about the 30% but again you can just distribute yourself. Of course then you have to fund all your own server architecture, that’s what the 30% pays for.
If that is demonstrably true, I’d like to see the demonstration. In fact, the case alleges the policy extends to non-key sales (see pts 204, 205, 207, 208).
This has already been raised in the European courts and has basically been beaten down that that there is no basis. Feel free to link to an actual court decision that proves otherwise.
It’s an ongoing case, so I don’t know what you expect of me here. My reply was to correct your misunderstanding about the focus of the case, which is not limited to the use of steam keys as you originally claimed.
I am not aware of the european case you reference, would you mind pointing me to where I can learn more?
Why are you getting the idea that it extends to non-steam keys as well? That’s never been the case because that’s not actually true. They have no control over what price you sell a product at off the platform as long as it’s not using steam keys. So if they’re claiming that it also includes steam keys then that’s not true.
Don’t need that many employees to run a store, programmers/IT and marketing and you’re good to go. Employees wouldn’t count contractors either so they probably have a lot more “employees” than that.
Not only that, Valve has done a TON of work to outsource as much of the process of running Steam off to the users and developers. Self-publishing, a minimum of manual moderation, automated greenlight processes, automated ratings, database tags, controller configs…
Their entire business model is to make money with as little effort as possible. I’ve been saying for ages that people vastly underestimate how ruthlessly profitable their business is. We didn’t have the numbers, but we roughly knew this is what was going on.
Gabe owns six yachts, people should always keep that in mind when praising him, he’s not the friend of the average Joe, he just realized there’s profit to be made by not pissing people off, but he’s still making enough profit from us to be a billionaire while the majority of people live paycheck to paycheck.
he just realized there’s profit to be made by not pissing people off
It’s weird that I’m nostalgic for the good old days when the ultra rich understood that
he just realized there’s profit to be made by not pissing people off
I’m okay with this. Same deal with Costco’s founders and CEOs. It’d be nice if billionaires didn’t exist, but they do, and most of them made their profits while pissing everyone off.
I’ll praise the ones that at least try to do some “good” for people. Even if their “good” is “Let’s make obscene amounts of money by charging affordable prices and being the ‘good guy’ in the industry”.
I’m not okay with this because it incentivizes companies and influencers to work together to lower people’s standards.
People are proud to accept garbage these days.
I ask genuinely – what alternative do we have?
I mean, in this case, yarrrr. but in other cases, i think, probably also yarrrr. but like, physically.
Steam won our over piracy, as did Netflix when it first came around. And even Uber – people stopped downloading cars for years when Uber was in its heyday!
That’s the thing though, they’re still overcharging you and 70$+ isn’t affordable prices for a game, you’ve just been brainwashed into thinking that your money is worth less than it is because a big chunk of it goes to enrich a few people.
Valve gets 30% for distributing it, the publisher takes another 10 to 20%, add other fees and 50% of what you’re spending goes to the people doing the actual work, that means that Valve gets 60% of what the dev gets for doing barely anything.
overcharging you and 70$+ isn’t affordable prices for a game
The last game I bought on Steam was less than $2 after tax.
Most games I buy on Steam are less than $20. The most expensive game I’ve ever bought on Steam was probably about $40. And I’ve done that maybe once.
And even at $70, games are cheaper now than they’ve ever been, adjusting for inflation. They’re also generally much more expensive to produce.
Just because they’re cheaper doesn’t mean you don’t get overcharged at the end of the day, what kind of mentality is that?
I provided numerous reasons why I don’t think I’ve been overcharged.
I really don’t understand what your point is. What do you mean by “overcharged”?
Holy shit Gabe Newell is a billionaire (it’s just at the second paragraph). This does change my view of him and steam. So uncool.
The dude’s the CEO of the most successful online gaming platform ever. Yeah, he’s gonna be a billionaire.
He was a billionaire before valve even existed.
Where did you hear that?
He early joined Microsoft and probably had some stock but he left by 1996 so I hardly doubt that made him a real billionaire, (especially given the time).
Afaik his family was always very well off
What did you expect? He owns Valve who has the place to buy video games on PC with Steam.
But you’ll be hard pressed to find a store front that is not owned by a billionaire or some publicly traded corporation.cough GoG cough
I’m agreeing with you, btw.
GoG
or some publicly traded corporation
CD Projekt is a publicly traded corporation.
Exactly. Even with their DRM-free practices and such and how people want to advertise so much for them here on Lemmy, they’re still a publicly traded multibillion dollar company.
I expected him to be cool, I guess
people should always keep that in mind when praising him
Why?? Good for him, stop being so envious. It’s thanks to Valve I started to buy games instead of pirate them anyway. Good prices and good practices.
A billionaire from a game industry is not the same as a billionaire from a real state company or a bank. Games are not a basic need.
Nah, a billionaire is a billionaire. There’s still people being exploited to get that much money. I don’t completely disagree, though - at least Gaben didn’t make Valve completely evil and yeah, it’s better than fucking up the property market for generations of people.
Billionaires shouldn’t exist. The government should regulate all these stores and force a max of 5%. They are clearly colluding and aren’t competing in good faith.
This is having a negative impact on the industry, a lot of indie studios would have an easier time surviving if they weren’t bled dry by what essentially is a soft monopoly.
Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony and Steam are all guilty yet you would never defend any of the other ones. Steam spends a lot of money convincing everyone Gaben is just a really cool dude and not your average billionaire.
Steam spends a lot of money convincing everyone Gaben is just a really cool dude and not your average billionaire.
Or maybe he is a really cool dude…
Gaben owns 6 yatchs and spends between 70 million and 100 million a year maintaining them. He’s in the same club as Bezos and the rest.
Stop it with the fucking yatchs already, seriously. Just look at the differences between Vale and the other companys you mention. If you can’t see any, you are just a troll.
You can’t say anything bad about Valve other than “they make a lot of money”. It gets boring.
Could use a few to develop a new linux distribution for entirely new markets and use cases, design and manufacture innovative cutting edge consumer hardware, and count to three.
I’m surprised they didn’t really try to make Steam OS a real distro for regular PCs, but at the same time there’s no real money to be made…
They tried that first, it didn’t go so well.
Yeah, that’s why I said they didn’t really tried, the distro isn’t even distributed anymore
Honestly it would probably be worth it as a flagship project to keep their staff engineers excited about something.
I know they earn piles and piles of money, but some people just quit when they’ve got enough cash, so you need an other sort of carrot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution https://distrowatch.com/search.php?status=All
There are almost one thousand distros. What’s one more?
Exactly, proton was much more usefull
Well that explains why they don’t make many games.
I heard half life alyx was pretty good. I also heard rumors that they’re making a TF2 successor. Also, didn’t a new counter-strike just come out?
Still, you have a point. Artifact was a disgusting trend-chasing cashgrab. They still haven’t commented on Half life 3, which is despicable behavior imo.
Don’t let any TF2 fan hear you call Deadlock its successor. It appears to be Overwatch gameplay mixed with Moba style map layouts.
But yeah HL:A was indeed amazing.
Tbh, deadlock is more moba than overwatch imo.
Alyx is great. Probably the closest thing to Half Life 3 we’re going to get. But even that’s four years old now.
I think we’ll get more half life but not for 5 - 10 years
Half life alyx was great, and they are not making a TF2 successor. They are making an overwatch looking game, TF2 will be better still and I will continue to play TF2. (I’m the TF2 fan the comment below said not to let hear you, the only video game I play is TF2)
And one of their employes doesn’t have depth perception.
I’m sure that he can perceive the depth that the shaft of that valve is drilling into his eye socket when you turn it. That should count for something.
You legitimately don’t need a lot of employees to make a good product or have a successful company.
I genuinely believe a lot of the bloat in modern companies comes from hiring people just to hire them, not because they add any significant value to either the company or customers.
I want to add to this that valve is also very clearly an anomaly in todays business environment. They are not striving for infinite growth but methodical, strategic steady growth.
That in my mind is how you grow a company, maximising returns for investors is a good idea only for the investors, it deviates the company from the objective which is providing a solution to a problem. It seems to me that Valve despite all the criticism it receives for the high fee on the sales of copies is doing a terrific job on resolving that problem. Also, extending the market to Linux is not a monetary driven decision at all, but it buys back the fidelity of many customers which gain a new feature without any repercussion on stock prices, which are non existent since there aren’t any investors to obey to. The hope is that Gabe will continue on this way and when the problem of passing the baton will present itself, it will be dealt with the future of the company and the industry at large in mind.
It seems to me that Valve despite all the criticism it receives for the high fee on the sales of copies is doing a terrific job on resolving that problem.
The only issue I have with this is that Valve seems to be the only company that gets this critique, yet they seem to provide way more services for said 30% fee.
Apple started charging 30% on everything over two decades ago with iTunes, which continued into their app store in 2008. They only recently started a “small business program” that is application based, reportedly unresponsive to the users, and by default still charges 30% to app developers making under $1m in revenue. So, instead of making it based on how much you earn, they force you to apply and ignore you, effectively still making it a 30% base rate. IMO, sort of predatory since they don’t really advertise the program. I feel like if it mattered to them, they would automatically apply the rate to >$1m revenue, instead of making it per-app (or dev account) application based and letting users sit in limbo wondering if they were accepted or not.
Google takes 30% as well, also having introduced a 15% on the first million of revenue for subscription based payments, so if I understand correctly, it’s not even individual sales getting that lowered rate. Oh, but don’t worry, in case you were worried music streaming services can go as low as 10% rates, so if you have a datacenter that you can stream licensed music to app users over well hey, you’re in luck little guy!
Microsoft actually moved down from 30% entirely to 12%, it looks like. They don’t really offer much, so good on them for that. Know your worth, am I right? But it’s only for PC sales, which seems kind of odd considering the hassle it can be to apply and develop for the Xbox. So, not as good, but still alright. Meanwhile, Sony and Nintendo… (30%). Hm, odd that it never seems to be raised as an issue for the consoles, oh well.
All of these were pushed by Epic who was mad they couldn’t make more money off their mobile game, except Microsoft which I think just followed suit. But from the backend when you look at what each of these services offer for their costs… It’s a bit laughable that Valve is the one getting critiqued for this point when they offer at least double the amount of services to the publisher/developer. In short, these fees cover the cost of a bunch of background junk as well as to generate some revenue for the store selling it, but don’t offer much else in terms of support for the users or the developers. Meanwhile the Steam Overlay can completely change your controller scheme, use community templates, access to per-game notes, all of which can be transparently overlaid on your game if you want, and the Steam Workshop for internal modding/community content, in addition to whatever other peripheral things like cloud saving, in-home/remote streaming and remote play together, the recently added recording feature, and generating as many Steam keys as the dev wants for certain purposes.
I just do a double take everytime I see it not being directed at the companies that actually do seem to be abusing their fees and don’t offer nearly as much feature presence. Like Valve seems to be attempting to innovate, even if they are just taking ideas from things like Moonlight, and Parsec. They didn’t lock it down either, you can jank it up by playing Non-Steam games or emulated games via Remote Play Together with your friends. Ever wanted to relive the days of DoubleDash? Did Slippi not exist in this timeline and you wanted to play Smash Melee with a friend?
Like, there’s things to complain about for Valve. But is the 30% for what they offer really unreasonable, especially when compared to current competitors? I personally don’t think so. If Epic wants to start making their launcher as fully fledged as Steam is then we can talk. Until then, when I see this argument presented I have a hard time reading it as anything but “big Valve bad” with the subtle implication that Epic is the saving grace of the gaming industry. Otherwise, Epic is able to offer 12% because they don’t host nearly as much for the user, and have had to actively rely on Valve for things like community support, VR support, and don’t have basic things like repair game installations, or re-installing a game in its folder (you know, to prevent having to redownload 90+gb every time their launcher breaks the game). It’s also hard to see them as a good guy when they also have had shady practices, such as not paying out devs per claim during the “Free Claim” giveaways, but rather only upon when the user actually downloads the game. In addition to that, they just throw tons of money at you to make it exclusive, then they ghost you and good luck getting any actual support from them if you need something.
Tl;Dr hypocrisy of picking what 30% fees are okay and which are screwing over game developers, I look at it from the perspective of received services for said fee.
P.S. to OP of comment, I am merely responding to you, I know your comment isn’t saying that Valve or any of these companies are at fault for it. Franky, I don’t think 30% is an issue if the fee that’s taken has fair returns for it, and I think this whole fandango is only an “issue” at all because of mad old Tim Sweeny.
I meant terrific in a positive way, if that’s the issue. I’m still learning English, if I expressed myself in the wrong manner I hope the message gets across. I’m saying that Valve is doing a good job providing extensive services to developers, since it means less of a burden for developers in programming and implementing features. A launcher isn’t only a place to make available for download your product, as Sweeney seems to understand it.
Oh no at all! As I said I was merely responding :)
They’re not beholden to investors, so the company can be exactly as big as Gabe thinks he can manage.
Prior to the mass layoffs of late, companies like Google and Facebook used to hire developers just so their competition could not.
The easiest way for a manager to justify a raise is to increase the headcount under them.
This is like comparing Spotify and Taylor Swift.
I personally think that if valve with their size managed to make a game and maintain their infrastructure for other publishers to use, wtf did the competitor do this whole time?
wtf did the competitor do this whole time?
It’s definitely a cultural problem. Companies like EA are completely clueless on the needs or desires of the average gamer. Their idea is to shape those needs and desires how they see fit. It’s why they spend so much on advertising and viral marketing rather than making good products.
They hire 1/10th of Valves developer count and spend the entire budget on marketing.
It appears to work really well seeing how people keep buying Ubitrash and EA games no matter how bad the previous one was.
Removed by mod
They spend billions to shoot themselves in the foot
Well, they don’t develop any games. You don’t require a lot of people to run a store.
“Their” last game, Counter Strike Global Offensive, is 12 years old, and was developed by a contractor: Hidden Path Entertainment. Ony then Valve took over to maintain it. And anyone familiar with the current situation around the game (CS2) knows how much “development” is going on there.
Half Life Alyx is far more recent
The most polished VR game ever made.
All the little attention to details, the design, the narrative, everything shows how much they care about that game.
Alligatoah looking ahh
Who on Earth is surprised by that. Primarily a store front most of their staff will be customer support.
I don’t think they have many employees in customer support; I think they outsource almost all of that work.
If they’re looking at employee count then I worry that Valve isn’t going to lose this
