Kinda exposes the lie about entrepreneurship being about job creation. Not all high tides raise all ships.
A great deal of that money comes Valve running an illegal underage casino, and getting young kids addicted to gambling.
No, there’s companies that abuse valves market for their underground casinos.
I honestly don’t get why you are mad at valve when they are not even in the slighest involved in that process apart from offering the market system. That’s like being mad at cloudflare or AWS because a website that scams you uses it.
It’s because Epic Games is spending a shitload of money astroturfing these idiots into believing that Valve is personally running a massive counter strike casino and you need to THINK OF THE CHIILLLLDREEEEEEEN.
Which is ironic because fortnite is specifically tailored to children/teens and has had lootboxes until they got sued, had to remove it and were like: “Oh actually we always though lootboxes were stupid :( so we removed them :( pls like us :(.”
Now they’re probably trying to harm valve this way, which is dumb because counter strike is rated 18+.
And yeeees, no kid gives a shit about age rating - well aware of that. But I’m not sueing porn sites because kids can access porn with just clicking “Yes” on the popup.
I like lootboxes, if they’re done the way Heroes of the Storm does them.
You can’t buy them with real money, you can only get by playing the game, they can contain any random item from the game’s cash shop, and if you want to just buy the item outright instead of hoping it drops in a loot box…
Aren’t the kids mostly playing Fortnite and not Counter Strike? Doesn’t Fortnite outright advertise to children, have FOMO practices design to keep people addicted and spending money, and promote gun violence.
Well we need to see Valve in court over this how dare they make, host, and promote Fortnite!
Wait… Valve doesn’t make, promote or host Fortnite…
Curious
Tbh valve could stop this by making it only tradeble to your friends or make the skins non tradable so they are just that, skins for you.
But why would they? Trading skins is a big part of the game. I enjoy trading/selling/buying skins every now and then. There is nothing bad about being able to trade stuff.
The problem occurs when third party sellers abuse your platform - but why you would be mad at valve instead of those sellers is beyond me.
I was throwing out a nuclear option showing that there are options. This is valve where best of the best work here, and implementing locked down trading can work to thr point they cut out the external trades or make it so hard to move the trade of thr platform that it would effectively kill the casino portion. Albeit this would hurt their earnings.
Nuclear options rarely are the best ones, especially in a case where the harm caused doesn’t even remotely warrant it.
Parents should keep an eye on their kids so this can’t happen. That’s what parents are supposed to do. Removing a good feature because “MUUUH THINK OF THE KIDS” is wrong.
Lootboxes are literally gambling and redeeming them even look like slots.
Allowing the selling/trading of skins allows for a black market to emerge to convert them to currency. Valve created the conditions for this exploitive system to emerge and does nothing to stop it. You can debate whether valve has a duty to stop it but they are forever a black eye on gaming in my eyes. Just because they sell cheap games twice a year doesn’t white wash them
So amazon or ebay are responsible for a merchant scamming you?
Wüsthof is responsible for people being stabbed with their knives?
Ferrari is responsible for people driving too fast and crashing with their cars?
Or if we extend it into absurdity: Are you responsible for paying taxes that your country uses for bad purposes?
Yes eBay and Amazon is responsible for not vetting sellers and buyers on their platforms and why the experience is so terrible for honest sellers.
The other examples aren’t applicable because Ferrari, wüsthof, or local taxpayers don’t make money off of vehicular manslaughter, murder, or war crimes.
Yes eBay and Amazon is responsible for not vetting sellers and buyers on their platforms
Guess we fundamentally disagree on this point then.
TCGs did it first. Shake your fist at Magic.
Counter Strike is 100% a Valve-operated casino for kids.
Sorry to say but I’m not sure if you’re just dishonest as fuck right now or really stupid.
You pull random items out of cases and can sell these items - if you feel like it, you can buy specific items on the market. I don’t see the casino functionality.
Dude the whole thing is a casino lmao anyone can see it you have to be blind now too what are you talking about? Have you played csgo lmao? It’s built exactly like a casino and kids know exactly how to turn money to skins to money.
Idk if you unironically think that csgo is built like a casino you either never touched csgo or never set foot in a casino ngl.
You acquire items of arbitrary values for real life money by random chance and call the other guy stupid or dishonest for considering it gambling?
First of all, you don’t really get “real life money” - you get steam credits. There is no way to convert skins into real money without somehow using a third party sites which is already circumventing steams market. In a casino, if you gamble, you get either money directly or you get credits that you can exchange back to money after you leave.
So yes, I do call him stupid or dishonest for considering it gambling. Valves system is in no way, shape or form worse than stuff like yugioh, magic the gathering or pokemon TCGs that have been available for over 20 years now and much more easiely available aswell to children or even specifically marketed to them.
Not exactly.
You can’t directly convert steam credits into legal tender without third-party services. But you can buy products and then sell yhose if you wanted to for legal tender. Using CSGO2 + Steam Marketplace and Store , you could sell enough skins to buy Valve’s products, including hardware such as the Steam Deck and their VR headset. So yes, there are ways to convert the skins into value irl.
We should also keep in mind that Valve has behavioral psychologists from the casino industry working on this system. I wonder why.
But you can buy products and then sell yhose if you wanted to for legal tender.
In league of legends, I can get random essence from the chests. If I get enough of those, I can buy stuff from the store I could also buy for real money.
The only difference with valve is that they just show the outright amount instead of hiding it behind vbucks or some other fictional currency.
you could sell enough skins to buy Valve’s products, including hardware such as the Steam Deck and their VR headset
Yes, but to me, this is even an upside. Playing CS:GO for years and being able to sell all the skins you collected and converting them into enough money for a steamdeck seems to be a great deal and awesome functionality. If I stop league of legends, all the skins I earned in the game are basically lost.
Is your critique solely because of loot boxes or something else? Because I feel we mess up two topics: Lootboxes being immoral (something I would agree with, but with much worse offenders) and third-party sites offering an illegal casino on valves platform. I just don’t see valve responsible for that but rather the third party sites.
You can’t convert steam credits to cash directly, that’s true. But if you put all the necessary systems in place to be a casino, but then just rely on 3rd parties to launder the credits to cash/crypto, I don’t consider that an real distinction even if it is a legal loophole. It’s just the same as a pachinko parlor.
I guess that makes it more on the level of Dave and Busters or Chuck E. Cheese, except nobody is really serious about exchanging prize tickets from those places to cash/crypto like they are on steam. I suspect if they had a black market like skin gambling in CS:GO does though, there would be a similar push back as there is vs Valve in this scenario.
I do agree with your point about TCGs, they get by on the fact that commons technically allow you to play the game but they are similarly exploitative.
But if you put all the necessary systems in place to be a casino
I don’t even see that.
What I see is valve offering random items in chests and third party sites gambling your skins away. But these things are not linked in the slightest. I just don’t see how valve is responsible for third parties misusing their platform.
In general, I much prefer the valve system because if I pull an item from a chest that I don’t like I can sell it and potentially get something I need instead of having a dead skin lying around (and therefore literally losing money).
Yeah. Valve runs the loot box system and the marketplace in which the winnings from those loot boxes are sold.
You pay Valve for a random chance at a rare item you can sell (with Valve taking a cut).
Valve running an illegal underage casino
Valve doesn’t run the casino. Valve owns the real estate under the casino and collects a rent. The casino is run by a kaleidoscope of fly-by-night marketing firms after being constructed with sweatshop labor from development studios in countries with abysmal labor laws.
Turns out, it takes very few employees to be the landlord of a casino. But the casino can’t make money without a battalion of scammy sales shits and a legion of cheap construction workers. Valve can’t make money without these workers. But because it collects rents on the real estate rather than revenues on the casino itself, it doesn’t need to include these staffers in its accounting books.
Valve is directly responsible for skins in Counter Strike which are gotten with 100% gambling mechanics. The fact that they can be sold for real life cash adds to this. I’m not saying its only Valve doing this, plenty of other games on Steam as well, but they certainly have a horse in the race.
Agreed, we should not make it seem like Valve has no responsibility just because it doesn’t directly own the casinos, gambling sites, etc. They benefit financially from the way the whole system is set up and they know it. Every round and transaction directly benefits Valve financially. The more underage people get addicted to the casino system they have going on, the more money Valve gets.
I mean, who made the GUI a copy of a slot machine?
They could end this whole thing tomorrow if they wanted to.
I watched my cousin get suckered by one of those a few years ago.
£50 Steam voucher in, fuck all out. Hooray for letting 14 year olds gamble their Christmas presents away…
Lets hope your cousin learned his lesson then.
He seems to have done. I think he’s a trainee accountant now and plays crown green bowling.
The government need to get involved and relegate MTX. I agree they are responsible for hosting the platform and developing the systems in the case of CS skins. It’s ugly but Valve are behaving as a rational business actor in this scenario.
With Trump in office soon you can forget about regulation.
And in any case, it’s tech-adjacent so legislators have zero idea how any of this works.
The EU and Australia seem to be inching towards serious legislation relating to MTX. Hopefully they can serve as an example.
I’m specifically talking about CS:GO, which is the most predatory and developed by Valve to be so.
CS:GO, which is the most predatory
Plenty of Gacha Games are more predatory than CS:GO. Valve is happy to host them all. CS:GO is a big money maker precisely because it has a large and enduring user base that isn’t fixated on Pay2Win game mechanics. Compare that to SummonerWars or Diablo Immortal or even just Candy Crush. There’s no contest.
It’s not just the tactics that make it the most predatory. It’s the massive platform and promotion that it gets by being a valve product.
Fucking lol. The lengths you things go to. Just shaking my head at how fucking stupid you must think the average person is. What an incredibly hostile world you have to live in.
What?
It’s funny that these publications only learned that this year when Valve has had a publicly available company directory on their website with names, pictures and email addresses since forever.
They didn’t just learn about it there have been articles about it for years and years they just post the same old article from a few years ago and act like it’s new
Their super high revenue/profit per employee has been reported on periodically for years. I remember hearing this fact literally ten years ago.
Is that just clever wording or are the employees actually seeing bigger checks?
For once, it looks like the answer is that they do see some big checks. From an article someone posted further down the thread:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/13/24197477/valve-employs-few-hundred-people-payroll-redacted
Lowest paid department is hardware, with an average of about $430k/employee.
Now, that is an average, and it’s hard to tell from here if a few highly paid employees in each department are throwing that number off.
It’s being phrased as an ROI per employee “asset”, not as compensation per actual employee.
Gabe is pocketing most of this.
It’s not ‘clever wording’, it says what it is - dividing profit by the number of employees results in a higher number for valve.
The heading isn’t comparing employee paychecks,it’s about overall company performance.
Gonna piggy back off this to drop a decent summary from coffeezilla about valve’s lootbox gambling problem that Valve has consistently dodged responsibility on. It’s really not new news but folks should be informed/reminded of it nonetheless.
I don’t watch CoffeeZilla in any large amount, but this pretty well sums up the situation in this instance.
Honestly it’s both valve’s fault and the legal system. They’ve tried to combat these sites with the trade window system back in like 2015 2016 I think, but their csgo and tf2 trading economy struggles when you have to wait a week to do stuff.
It also doesn’t help when a lot of these sites dodge being legally a casino, and get away with it.
Lootboxes, such as the CounterStrikes lootboxes, have simply been banned in Belgium.
It’s not too hard to do it legally.
I mean, we can point at the legal system, but as you said, casinos just find new loopholes to circumvent the law. Ultimately, Valve is the group with the power to remove any gambling-adjacent mechanics from their games, but they have been pretty flaccid regarding changes because they know that they will lose money from it.
Crackdowns won’t stop the gambling on CS, legislation and enforcement won’t change it, but making items non-tradeable, or damaging item value or appeal through any method, can stop the gambling - but at the cost of CS’s financial success and overall appeal.
Is there a proposal to do this that doesn’t gut other legitimate parts of their trading system?
No, there we’ll always a way to work around the trading system to have gambling. The current proposal I have seen is doing an ID check before trades but that would hamper legitimate trades since people don’t want to hand out their ID info like that.
That’s the same thing I was thinking, and I’m really not a fan of the idea.
Considering the outcry from mobile auth back then, I dont think valve will ever try for id check.
casinos just find new loopholes to circumvent the law
They don’t “find new loopholes”, they explicitly lobby/capture the agencies/courts that write/interpret the rules and carve out loopholes.
Might as well say “You can’t keep money in a bank, the robbers will just find a way in” while a guy in a ski-mask walks through the front door, hands the teller a $20, and is lead directly into the vault with a complementary tot bag.
Crackdowns won’t stop the gambling on CS, legislation and enforcement won’t change it, but making items non-tradeable, or damaging item value or appeal through any method, can stop the gambling
There are countries that impose limits on what tech companies are allowed to advertise, distribute, and collect revenues on outside of the US. These countries don’t have President-elects who are joined at the hip with their country’s most wealth individuals, bending over backwards to make the billionaires happy.
No, they wanted to pretend like they were combating them while leaving them fully intact. There are pretty easy ways to combat it, but that also requires they destroy the market they profit so much off of. The trade window system (purposefully) did very little to stop this. It’s was purely PR, which some gullible people actually believed.
People like Valve, so they believe everything they do is honest and good. It isn’t. It may be better than some other companies, but it doesn’t make them good. You can recognize when they do the right thing while also recognizing when they’re doing the wrong things, and enabling gambling (underage or not) is bad. At a minimum, they control CS esports, so they could ban advertising from gambling sites if they don’t want to block it in its entirety.
I’m not bothering watching all the video. I hope they highlight that a good part of the company clients are kids.
Yeah, underage gambling is a big part of the topic.
I hope the employees are compensated well compared to the profit.
As of 2021, Valve employees made roughly $430K-4.5M, depending on role. Not bad, considering the average salary in WA is around $58k.
Source:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/13/24197477/valve-employs-few-hundred-people-payroll-redacted
They’re around a big city, so the Seattle metro is about $76k. Still great for the valve employees though.
Interesting. Looks like the hardware people are the lowest paid department.
Which maybe makes sense. They’ve started to see some success there, but not the way Steam or TF2 has.
Holy shit
As a private company with no board and stockholders to appease, with a guy in charge who is at least a descent person, employees at valve are doing fantastic. Way higher than “industry standards”.
with a guy in charge who is at least a descent person
There is no decent billionaire
You could sort of say that, just because he is a billionaire, but unlike virtually any others, his money has come from no oppression or cheap labor or dirty money, or slavery or anything else. He hasn’t drove up pricing, his employees are paid better than anywhere else, he doesn’t exploit a need, and he doesn’t use his money and position for political power.
So the only “not descent” thing he’s really done involving that money, is having that money. But with his company being a private company, he can also keep that money as a security nest egg in case the company somehow falls on bad times and keep paying his employees.
I’d argue valve spearheading microtransactions was a bad thing, traceable to tf2 items and cases. People don’t give them enough flak for filling games with monetization.
Honestly, the actual spearheading of microtransactions were physical collectible card game companies with games like MTG.
They made a free game and offered hats. I don’t see anything predatory or wrong with charging for skins that don’t make a game “pay to win” in a game that is free. Really, I call it the least terrible monetization form.
Exactly. The main problems are two-fold:
- chance-based item acquisition - if I can buy the thing I want, that’s fine, but if it’s all chance based, it promotes gambling
- market to resell items - now there’s a cash incentive to gamble
I don’t have a problem with paid cosmetics, I have a problem with promoting gambling.
That said, I think Valve has done more good than bad, so I like them. I don’t like everything they do though.
Tbh it’s more the getting users to gamble by paying for cases that got the ball rolling. Objectively, the least terrible monetization form is buying a game outright and then earning your items through playing as they used to do before free to play became normalized. That’s why all these shitty games come out with battle passes even though game developers did just fine supporting their game for a few years without the constant money churn. Because it’s the norm, people now think it’s impossible to have a game with updates that is bought outright, yet deep rock galactic does it just fine without $60/yr worth in battle passes.
But an online only game like team fortress? It doesn’t jive well. You can’t keep the servers going and the security and the anti cheat updated on a game that you pay once for unless you want the support and the game to be worthless two or three years after it was first released.
Your idea is great for single player games and noncompetitive team games like borderlands online play, and i own tons of games like that and its 90% of what i play. Not for games like team fortress, LoL, and Fortnite. For the latter games, it would mean support and servers would shut down while lots of people would still want to play them.
I played LoL quite a bunch over decade ago. Thousand+ hours over three years, probably. I spent a total of about $40. Had Hundreds of hours in on team fortress and never spent a dime.
his money has come from no oppression or cheap labor or dirty money, or slavery or anything else.
It came from loot crates.
So don’t buy loot crates if you don’t want to.
Also, his money came from Half Life episodes 1 and 2, and creating what would be known as the “Steam” store and getting it downloaded on every PC with Half Life 2 on it. Loot boxes were side jobs that came way later.
So insightful. Really contributes to the conversation.
It’s a bit weird (skip to 10:41 for specifically the pay system)
I’ll bet they all can afford a half-dozen yachts.
you may think a company named valve would know a thing or two about cash flow
The valve is actually broken, stuck in the on position.
Is Gabe taking a duck face selfie in the thumbnail?
Yeah it’s from a video where he was back seating on some voice actors doing announcement and he’s doing odd things background for comedic effect.
Yup. It‘s from the Cave Johnson Announcer Pack reveal video. Which is definitely worth a watch, even if you‘re not into Dota 2.
Might have something to do with getting underage kids hooked on gambling.
Valve takes 30% on every game sold and you don’t even own the games. That’s sick capitalism in action, yet everybody kisses their ass.
EDIT for the Steam jerkers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r0a7-qyjss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13eiDhuvM6Y
Honestly, I’ll probally care about this more when someone else tries to make a service remotely close to what steam provides. Hell epic is probally the closest we got and they are in the red AND lacking in function set that steam provides. Steam charges 30% up until 10m and then 25 till 50m then it’d 20% while giving a multitude of extra services the other companies charging similar rates don’t, seems fair to me.
some examples:
- gog: 30%
- store
- review system
- epic: 12% (isn’t turning a profit)
- store
- cloud save
- return system
- steam 30
- store
- mod workshop
- reviews
- discussion forum
- return system
- Microsoft store 12%
- store
- review system
Looking into it, IGN made a nice picture (2019 though so a little old perhaps) so I’ll add that too
- gog: 30%
They provide an easy platform for me to buy games so I use them. The steam deck too. Just because they have a competent product, i don’t think that justifies any arse kissing. Like you say, they’re a company and they’re in business to make money.
Yeah, I can see why developers would be unhappy about the 30%. Maybe there’s an argument to be made that the platform gives these games a greater potential market but I don’t know enough about the business to try making that argument.
Apple and Google commissions are around 15%.
They used to be 30%.
And Steam gives devs the option of selling Steam keys on their website without the cut, with the only rule that they can’t sell it for less on their website than on Steam. So Valve only takes a cut oft their platform leads to a sale, users can still use the platform to play the games without Valve taking a cut.
Neither Apple nor Google allow this afaik, and I don’t know enough about other platforms to know if this is common or unique to Valve.
Yes but they cut off their margins. As Microsoft did.
Steam key is not an advantage. It is a means of retention to keep a seller captive. A company should be free to sell its game in any way at any price without any restriction coming from one vendor.
A company should be free to sell its game in any way at any price without any restriction coming from one vendor.
People keep bringing this up like it’s some kind of a fact but any time I ask for a source I get no reply. So I’m going to ask again, can you please link the source because I’ve searched for it and I haven’t found it.
And I guess, yet again, no source is provided.
The source is Evian.
The water bottling company?
Microsoft cut their margins because they didn’t want to get sued.
A company should be free to sell its game in any way at any price without any restriction coming from one vendor.
And that’s exactly what Steam’s agreement is. If you sell on Steam, you can sell your game with or without Steam keys on your own website, you can sell on any competitor’s platform, and you can cancel your game from Steam at any time. There’s no lock in here. You can even add your own DRM or no DRM at all (or use theirs), you can make your game free and only sell additional content through your own website (where you keep all profit), etc. There’s no lock in whatsoever.
No lock with a key bringing you back to steam, with a unique price. Even the music industry doesn’t impose that.
Neither does Steam. The dev can sell their game directly, provide a Steam key, or a key for any other store. No lock in, this is merely an option if the dev decides to distribute it that way.
For example, I bought Factorio a little after launch (early 2013), and later got a key for Steam when they released there in 2016. I also bought FTL around launch (2012), but I didn’t have a Steam account because they didn’t yet support my OS (Linux), so I didn’t activate my Steam key until I made my account in late 2013. Some bundles also give you an option on how to get the game, and I’ve activated GOG keys instead when I already had the game on Steam.
Valve doesn’t care how devs sell their game, they only take a cut made through Steam itself. There’s no lock in whatsoever.
The key doesn’t have to go back to steam. Check Humble, plenty of games give you the choice of Epic or GOG, or even directly from the publisher if they have the servers.
As far as capitalism goes they are not the shittiest of companies out there.
They have predatory tactics with lootboxes on their popular games though.
But most of their practices are not anticonsumer.
And they do not enforce drm and their own drm is a joke, so you can basically own most games if you want with very little effort. Just copy the files and have a generic steam crack around and you are golden for most cases.
They do provide a good service. There’s no subscription fee. They maintain delisted games so you can download games you bought years ago that are no longer available. Not to mention steam OS and other projects like the steam deck that put pressure on other gaming companies to do better.
This could go up in a cloud of smoke at any point and it likely will as soon as Gabe passes on and the in fighting begins. So this is a “good king” situation and the system itself will not be sustainable long term by any means.
Did you ever read their terms of use ? This company is not a work of charity. They collect all kind of datas about you. It is voracious capitalism.
I have read the Subscriber Agreement, most of it is standard legal boilerplate. I don’t see anything about collection of data. Steam is a vehicle for capitalism, no one has claimed otherwise.
Because somehow their competition is even worse
Ah, yes, capitalism. Because they don’t have to pay to maintain servers and infrastructure or anything, right?
Nor do they pay for bandwidth when you download your 100gb game for the nth time in the past month.
Nor do they have a ton of functions and services for both devs and consumers like easy refunds, regional pricing, steam keys, trading cards, steam workshop, steam forums, chatrooms, remote play… just to name some.
Yeah, such moneygrabbing comic book villains that just sit in their pile of money and don’t provide anything good.
I like Steam but come on, they are more profitable per employee than Apple. They are clearly not hurting even if I download my games over and over.
And they provide a better service than Apple.
Absolutely. There are iOS apps and games I bought that don’t run anymore and Apple wants us to accept this as normal.
Ah, yes, capitalism. Because they don’t have to pay to maintain servers and infrastructure or anything, right?
They are stacking billions. It means they are paying peanuts compared to what they are making.
I read somewhere most of the cost is payment providers, scams, chargebacks and refunds they can’t offload onto the publishers.
How does valve’s ass taste?
Delicious :)
Why would I care about Valve taking a 30% cut when they’re the best platform around? You do realise what makes them the best platform, right?
deleted by creator
Exactly. Why would you care about anything else than you own selfish little ass? You do realize that you’ve been brainwashed by capitalism, right?
Brainwashed by capitalism!? Jesus, what world do you live in? XD
Clearly not one where paying for a good service is acceptable.
Good service is not taking 30% of the revenue on projects that took years to developp and create loot system to get kids addicted to gambling. Life must be so easy when you only care abour you and yourself.
Yes it is, if the service is actually… you know… good. Let’s see what Valve offers for its 30% cut:
- The most robust catalogue on the internet, complete with user-generated tags, search functionality, recommendation algorithms, and fast download speeds.
- Steam servers for online multiplayer games, which even supports multiplayer mods like Skyrim Together.
- In-depth lifetime analytics for every item on their platform, accessible to everyone.
- Reviews, discussion threads and forums for every single game on their platform.
- The Steam workshop.
- Research and development towards VR, both on the hardware and software front.
- Research and development towards their own console.
- Funding towards open-source compatibility tools, such as Proton.
- Giving employees of Valve an actual good salary, which is unheard of in the gaming industry outside of Valve or the occasional indie team.
- The cost of maintaining all the above.
Pro-consumer practices, such as:
- Keeping games on their servers, and installable by the customer, even when they’re delisted.
- Allowing customers to refund games.
- Refunding games when the publisher pulls some garbage, like Sony this year… on several occasions (look into Helldivers and the PSN mandate).
- Supporting repairability and modability for their console, the Steam Deck, complete with blueprints and tear-downs.
Find me any platform or company that does all of these things. But I guess you want everything to be free and handed to you on a silver platter?
Lol, you steam fanboy are the biggest jerker on the Internet. You hate video games, what you want is “convenience” because the only thing you can think of is your ass. Let’s be clear, the very second Valve believe it can make more money by selling you buttplugs with Gabe’s face it instead of videogame, they will do it. They have less then 100 employees and take 1/3 of revenue from studios with thousand of employees and people like you will make 30 minutes to jerk them while spitting on those who makes the games. Gamers are the stupidest, most easily manipulatable loser on the planet.
Ok, so, read what you just wrote, carefully. And I do mean actually read what you wrote, because I do hope you will realise how much like a parody you sound like.
- Take high profit
- Don’t allow you to resell any games
- Lock your localization for buying
- Resale your datas aggregate or not to relate your habits, usage patterns, and demographics of customers as a group or individual to 3rd party
- Can close your account without any notification
- Everything publishing on steam is the facto their property. This content can be use by Valve for steam offering, promotion, etc… Same for your workshop contributions.
- They use cookies, web beacons, pixels, ad tags to track you.
- They store your datas as long as they need to
- They share your personnal data with third party service providers … The prices charged are similar to those for games that you can buy outright. Prices are only increasing, with licences now exceeding $120 for some AAA. What is the benefit for the customer? Steam only represents 79 jobs. The price of infrastructure and servers has gone down, operating costs are going down, but Valve is not reducing its margin. About indie productions we can read everywhere about the financial difficulties faced by devs. At valve the per-employee profit are evaluated about $15 million per year (2021). So yes this is not fair and totally disproportionate.
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They don’t.
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That’s not unique to Valve.
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That’s not unique to Valve.
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There is no evidence that Valve sells your data. And they wouldn’t even need to.
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Are you a scammer? Why would you be concerned about them closing your account?
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That’s a blatant lie.
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Same as the selling data point.
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Yes, they’ll store your data forever if necessary. Because your data is… You know… Evidence of all the things you bought… On their catalogue. That’s a service, not a problem.
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This is the third time you mention Valve selling data. Then you go on a random tangent… Let me try to dissect that…
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Prices increase for games… Except Valve doesn’t dictate that, the game’s publishers do.
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Valve only represents 79 employees… OK? And? So what?
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Indie devs financially struggle… Yes, as an artist myself I am very well aware of the struggles any sort of passion project, or ambitious creative work, has. This has nothing to do with Valve.
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Tim Sweeney, is that you?
Honestly, I pay for the service alone.
Pirating games is easy-ish enough so if Valve ever enshittifies I will be quickly learning how to remove Steam’s DRM and put all my games on a server and never purchase another video game in my lifetime.
Yeah. Really wish they were more like gog or itch
I believe this is something to be aware of and if this is something you don’t want use GOG instead. But in reality as long as Steam exists you will be able to download and play your games. If Steam ceases to exists then you will not be able to download them, but there will be ways to still play them, if you previously downloaded them. It is not like “owning” movies on Amazon (or just recently on the Playstation Store), where you always need to stream the movies.
I know according to their license if steam ceases to exist you lose everything, but I can’t see them ceasing to exist and having it not end up being a bloody mess. There is no way with how large steam is that if they decide to file for closure tomorrow that regulators wouldn’t get involved in trying to provide a way that everyone doesn’t lose their games. I believe steam has hit the point that banks are where enough people use the platform that if it tried to close government is going to get involved
Of course this is under the understanding that it’s a just choose to close situation, if it is a financial issue, I would expect that people would see that coming ahead of time and they would have a longer period of trying to find out a solution. And that solution could very well end up being a court order saying every purchase that’s been on Steam has to be able to be played without the steam client when they close the doors
And the share of Valve in the computer video game market is around 75% and even more than 80% in Europe. This company is clearly in a monopoly situation that prevents any competition. This situation is clearly undesirable.
They’re not preventing competition. Valve did not go out of its way to kill Epic, Epic just sucks. They’re not doing anything to kill GOG either.
There’s a difference between a monopoly, and people just choosing one thing over another.
There’s Xbox, but when that’s the alternative it is clear why Steam still dominates
The problem does not come from other plateforms but from the abuse of dominant position.
In what way did Valve abuse their monopoly position?
having a monopoly isn’t illegal but abusing it is
“It’s making more money per employee than Apple”
And how much are the game devs whos game are on steam making? If Valve ceo has enough money to buy a billion dollar worth fleet of mega yachts the share is simply off, Valve is making billions nobody else is.
70%…and devs are happy to pay the 30% to get on a platform that’s worth a fuck. Valve carries the servers, the bandwidth and service. Tons of indie devs have made it via steam. They’re a platform for games, not a healthcare company or apple that’s exploiting slave labor.
Plenty of villans out there, valve and gabe isn’t one of them.
That’s highly debatable. Maybe not for the specific reason being discussed, but Valve, and by extension Gabe, IS complicit in stuff like CS:GO gambling which preys on the underaged and and vulnerable.
I think it just goes back to “their competition is even worse”. “They let people prey on the vulnerable” doesn’t hit as hard when the competition is literally preying on them themselves.
Valve is the least shitty of the competition. Maybe GOG is better, but then CDPR is only viable because they can underpay Polish devs.
GOG support is pretty awful, and they make weird development decisions.
People were pleading for Linux support for GOG Galaxy before Steam Deck released, and that’s precisely the crowd that would be most interested in DRM-free games. And when Steam Deck came out, they could have made official support for it and maybe worked with a hardware manufacturer to make a GOG-version of a Deck competitor, but no, they didn’t, even when Valve did all the work to improve Linux compatibility.
GOG has good policies, but their service is only so-so. I would be spending most of my gaming money with them (hundreds per year) oft they had proper Linux support, but I guess they don’t value my business. Valve does, and they have decent support, so they get my money.
Devs are happy to loose 30% ? Uhrffdruhehu jirddrhuduh
30% when you get hosting/friends/multiplayer support/advertising/bandwidth out of that, and you don’t have to do anything? Yes, they are happy to pay that.
Apple and google take half of that with a great visibility. Microsoft takes 30% of sales made through the digital store. Howevee, for PC releases, Xbox shifted to 12% in line with Epic’s revenue-sharing model. So I doubt that everybody is as glad as you pretend. Where did you get that BTW ?
Apple and Google used to take 30%, but they were forced to take less due to Epic’s lawsuit. They are in a very different position since they control the platform and thus have a monopoly.
Valve, on the other hand, lets devs make keys for free and sell them on their own website (or competitors’), has no exclusivity agreements, and only owns their Steam Deck platform (which you could install alternative stores on at launch, and launch thist competitor games through their compat layer).
Valve goes out of their way to not abuse their position, whereas Apple and Google needed a lawsuit to force them to act somewhat reasonably. If devs didn’t think the 30% was worth it, why wouldn’t they just sell on EGS, GOG, etc and directly on their website? Because Steam improves sales dramatically and provides a ton of value for that fee.
I wish they would reduce their cut, but I also think they provide a fantastic service, so I’m actually okay with it, and it seems devs are as well.
They can keep that 30% if they sell their keys (free to generate BTW) on their own website. I’ve bought a few games that way and it totally works. They can sell their games on other stores with a smaller cut (e.g. EGS) without any issues with Valve.
Many game devs don’t bother doing it though, which tells me Valve’s marketing is doing its job selling games.
They can sell their games on other stores with a smaller cut (e.g. EGS) without any issues with Valve.
No, they can’t. Valve’s TOS forbid devs from offering lower prices on other stores. If not for this, a dev could list a game for $60 on Steam, $50 on Epic, and $42 on their own website and let the customer decide where to buy it from while making the same amount of money from either of these sales. Valve is not competing fairly.
If they didn’t have this rule, devs could list at a ridiculous price on Steam and sell on their store for a more reasonable price to take advantage of Steam’s marketing without paying. That’s unfair for Valve. Either list there and charge the same prices everywhere, or don’t.
I would be surprised if other stores didn’t have similar policies.
Steam also reserves the right to remove a game for any reason. If a developer does that they would have their game removed and probably receive a ban. There’s no reason for that policy other than price fixing to keep consumers from making an informed decision. Stop defending the multibillion dollar company.
The only time I’ve heard of that happening is if the key was purchased with a stolen credit card or something. Steam actually goes out of their way to retain access to purchased games that have been delisted by the dev.
They’re one of the better actors in this regard the industry. In most cases, they’ll side with the customer, which is exactly what you want a company to do.
Stop defending the multibillion dollar company.
I don’t care how much they’re worth, if they provide a good service, I’ll help clarify misunderstandings. I really don’t care if people and companies get rich, as long as they do it by making a good product people want.
Uhh that’s completely wrong. I’ve bought keys from tons of different stores (humble being the majn one) when there were sales going on for the game. All registered with steam keys.
All registered with steam keys.
So they’re not games on other stores, are they?
They are sold cheaper than on steam…the fuck are you talking about, literally you said they can’t sell them cheaper. And that’s completely false.
A key that will send you where ? On steam. It is just a way to keep the Devs captive. 30% is absolutely insane specially for a licence, not something that you own.
A key that will send you wherever the Publisher and Distribution platforms allow for. Look at Humble for an easy example, a bunch of their games provide keys that will work on Steam, Epic, GOG, and even direct download if the publisher/developer has the servers for it. It doesn’t keep any one captive.
They can sell a direct download as well, the key is merely an option.
If they want to do their own marketing, they can still piggy back off Steam’s infrastructure with the only cost being the keys sold directly through Steam.
30% is not insane if it’s completely opt in and there are other competitors. Google and Apple charging that much was insane because they completely control the hardware and OS, and as such there was no competition either by policy (e.g. Apple) or scare tactics (Google). Steam only controls the hardware and OS on their Steam Deck, and there’s no barriers to installing competitor platforms whatsoever, and they make it easy to play those in the main Steam interface as well (I play EGS and GOG games through Heroic all the time).
The reason people sell through Steam is because Steam provides a better service vs DIY or any of their competitors. Users buy from Steam because it offers a better experience than either directly buying or buying through a competitor. Everyone wins here.
I wish the fee was lower and Valve can certainly afford to take a smaller cut, but they totally make up for that cost in the value they provide. People are willing to stick with Steam even though it doesn’t have the most popular games (Minecraft and Fortnite), their competition gives away free games and has exclusives, and they aren’t installed by default. Steam doesn’t win because they’re a monopoly, they win because people prefer their service to the competition.
valve and gabe isn’t one of them.
A guy who owns a billion dollar worth fleet of mega yachts in 2024 (climate crisis and everyone getting poorer) sounds quite the villain to me.
Tons of indie devs have made it via steam.
And even more didn’t make it. Steam being so big and the market spinning around it actually works against promoting smaller games because there’s just as much you can see on steam shelf.
So we’re at a point that, someone who owns something because they’re rich makes them evil?
Y’all have lost the damn plot if that’s the case.
So we’re at a point that,
We are at a point where if we don’t reduce emissions humanity is doomed. A fleet of private mega yachts is a smack in the face to everyone trying to change for good and so is a smack spending billions on “toys” when the average person is struggling to pay rent.
You seem to have lost track of the plot and of reality, look around yourself there’s a disaster or a tragedy happening every single day.
Mega yachts aren’t causing our issues. 3rd world countries with no regulations for environmental impact and consumerism is. Most of these yachts just sit in a port doing nothing but collecting dust 99% of the time. Thinking that getting rid of yachts is going to even scratch the surface of our environmental problems is a joke.
If a single person throw the garbage out of the window it isn’t going to cause much of pollution so why don’t you just throw trash out?
As the ceo of a company with millions of clients many of which are kids you are entitled more than everyone else to show the good example.
What you are saying is simply wrong anyway, mega yachts and billionares are indeed a big cause of pollution.
All of those studies are flawed as fuck. They assume the products the rich sell as polution. Do you sit there and include farmers in it as well because they sell/grow the food you eat which is a huge contributor to climate change. The yachts they buy, sit in dry dock 99% of their lives. You bitching about it is pure ignorance.
Exactly, it’s just virtue signaling.
If you look at sources for pollution, it’s largely:
- energy production (esp. in industrializing countries)
- personal transportation (esp in US, we’re the second top polluter, and transportation is #1 or #2, depending on how you count it)
- heating and cooling houses and offices - in the US (from previous EPA link), household use is #1 or #2 depending on how you count it, and heating and cooling uses the lion’s share of that
From this data, the most effective thing to focus on in combating climate change is improving efficiency of energy production (solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, etc instead of coal, gas, etc). The next most effective thing is improving efficiency of transportation, followed by improving efficiency of heating and cooling (e.g. getting people to use heat exchanges instead of separate gas and AC). Yachts, cruise ships, and other related luxury items don’t even register on the list of priorities and are merely a blip. They’re very visible wastes of energy, but they’re lately harmless.
Mega yachts fall into the personal transportation problem. If everyone would go around in a mega yacht we would be long time extinct.
No billionaire has clean hands. Think beyond just Steam. If an if an indy developer wants to independently release a game they’ll probably fail. Why? Because if you’re not on Steam or one of the other big services you won’t get noticed. They’re also big enough that no competing services are going to show up. They’re priced out. You’re automatically excluded from the market. Steam, Epic, et al by default are rent extractors first. You want to play as a dev? You’re forced to pay.
You can absolutely do your own marketing, host your own infrastructure, etc, but that’s way more expensive than just paying Steam’s cut. Some games went that way (e.g. Minecraft), but most see a ton of success through Steam and decide their fee is worth the cut.
I don’t see how that’s a bad thing. Indie devs should focus on making a good game and creating promo content for it, and let Valve handle distribution, multiplayer, sales, etc.
Valve is successful because they make a good product that both users and developers like. EGS has a much lower profit share and provides far fewer services, and devs understandably choose Steam because it offers better value.
I wish their cut was lower, but the arrangement seems more than fair.
If devs think they can provide a better service, they’re free to sell their game directly on their website if they want. They can even sell Steam keys and not pay any cut on those from their own website, so they can compare direct sales and Steam sales easily.
You are forced to pay either way or do you think hosting (both installers/updates and some sort of multiplayer matchmaking), marketing, payment providers,… all work for free? Without something like Steam you would just likely be forced to pay someone just to manage all of that for you as an extra employee (or multiple part time employees or outsourced services).
People forget what it was like matchmaking pre-steam. Games would vanish if they weren’t some huge game publisher with a big following.
The fuck? Are you suggesting there is somehow a better way for people to find indie games? Let’s say steam doesn’t exist at all, and every indie dev has to host their own website and files…tell me how you plan on getting people to find their games?
Yes. They did that decades without sharing their profits.
Uhh no…no they didn’t. B&Ms existed before the net and digital copies became Common place. The indie scene exploded with steam/itch/gog storefronts. The hell are you talking about, find me multiple indie games that have awards from decades ago. I’ll wait.
You are on lemmy, a open source and decentralized platform where thousand of different instances federate with each others…
Cool, that still doesn’t answer the question…and if you’re suggesting that people build a decentralized platform to rival steam…no one is stopping them from doing so.
Considering their only major competitor has enough money to keep trying to lure players to their significantly worse store system with free games for years now instead of going the route of actually providing a decent product I think Valve making money off their good product strategy is a good thing.
Exactly. Steam’s main competitors:
- EGS - literally bribes users with free games and pays for exclusivity agreements
- Microsoft - bought Activision Blizzard, Mojang and others to try to corner the game dev market, probably hoping people would use the Microsoft and Xbox stores
- PlayStation - owns the biggest console and has tons of exclusives
- GOG - major game studio (Witcher, Cyberpunk) and distribution platform that caters to DRM-free crowd
Except EGS, all of them sell their games on Steam, and Steam completely dominates PC gaming. They don’t have any exclusives other than the handful of Valve-developed games, they don’t bribe players with free games (and their sales are rarely the best), and the only hardware they make is open to direct competition if competitors bother to make a client for it (and users can play non-Steam games through Steam as well).
The only “bad” thing Steam does is charge a 30% fee, but they also let devs sidestep that through selling free Steam keys on other stores (or directly). Valve isn’t the villain here, and they’re arguable the least bad in their industry, except maybe GOG, but their DRM-free stance has less weight due to Steam’s good policies and superior customer support.
The entry ticket means billions… They lock the game market.
Nobody at Valve is preventing anyone from making a good alternative. Network effects are what makes one platform better than multiple platforms in this space, especially in the multiplayer match-making and other features where players are interacting.
did pcgamer learn it by reading a similar article awhile back?
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Cool story. Where is Half-Life 3?
Hey moneybags Gabe…where is Half-Life 3?
According to Valve itself Half Life 3 doesn’t exist because they are out of ideas, Valve has always been a clan of tech wizards rather than writers
And they refuse to release a game unless it does something interesting. They don’t want to be a game studio, but they will make a game to prove a point:
- Steam - exists so Valve could easily update its games
- Half Life: Alyx - drive demand for VR
- Portal - interesting tech demo of portal mechanic
Their pace of game dev has reduced because the Steam service and hardware ventures are taking top priority. Why make a game when there’s much more interesting stuff to do elsewhere that will drive the core business?
If you think there is ever going to be a HL3 then you are a sucker.
