As much as I like Valve’s work, I don’t think thats a good fit for them. Their staff seem to enjoy working on difficult technical tasks, and lose interest very fast when it comes to mundane maintenance, thus their numerous underutilized and unmaintained features throughout Steam and their games. A payment processor seems like exactly the sort of thing that would get forgotten about a month or two after it gets finished.
IndiBrony@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Time for Steam to make their own payment process then!
PlzGivHugs@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
duchess@feddit.org 1 day ago
Implementing direct debit shouldn’t be too hard and straining. Most of their staff is maintaining an e-commerce platform, they‘d do fine.
HexadecimalSky@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yeah, also its less “valve staff get bored and dont do mundane tasks” iirc thier pay is based on what thier coworkers think the value of thier work was, which is usually in how visible/noticeable which discourages long projects thay take more than a year and mundane tasks that are not very clear and visible
PlzGivHugs@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
From what I understand, they’ve moved on from that structure. I believe that was one of the things talked about after the release of HL:A, with one of the employees saying that it was part of the reason the game actually got finished. That said, its been a while and even assuming I’m not misremembering information rarelt leaves Valve, so I could be wrong.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
You appear to be wrong.
geekwire.com/…/behind-scenes-half-life-alyx-valve…
GeekWire: So you’ve been working on this _(HL Alyx) _full-steam since 2016?
Robin Walker: We started in February of 2016, I think, with a small team, and we brought out a small prototype. Then people started to play that, understood what we were trying to do afterward, and started joining up.
We had 80 people on the team when we were about midway through. The exact size of the team I wouldn’t be able to tell you. The way things work at Valve, people organically join once they’ve finished up what they were doing before, and if what you’re doing makes sense to them.
So it was always full steam ahead, I guess, but not in the sense that all 80 people were there from day one.
HexadecimalSky@lemmy.world 1 day ago
ah, didn’t hear that, yeah its from heard a long time ago
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
I have never heard anything from any Valve interview to the effect of how specific pay rates for specific employees are actually set.
I think it is closer to:
You get hired to fill a specific role (Valve still like, lists specific job openings with specific role requirements), and then uh, you have tasks within that realm that are fairly clearly your responsibility… but at the same time, everything going on at the company is essentially one big github issues list, a whole bunch of feature requests and bug reports, and everyone can contribute to any of those, assuming they’ve got their core responsibilities covered as well.
HexadecimalSky@lemmy.world 1 day ago
They may have moved on from the structure they had ~10 years ago but there was documentation and interviews about that internal structure. yes it worked similar to that, there where tasks to be done but employees could largely choose whatever they want to work on, there where no formal managers but plenty de facto managers, there was base pay scales but most of the pay was bonuses, that where indeed based on the reviews of your coworkers based on how much work/value you appeared to make for the company. Because valve is private is why it had such a unique structure. Alot of former employees spoke about how that pay structure killed alot of projects and deincetivised maintenance tasks. Then because there was no formal management, if you wanted to work on larger projects you had to convince coworkers to work with you there was no assigned teams or bosses, and if your project took longer then the year, it would be likely there would be no fruit of your labor and you would likely be rated lower, i.e. less pay. Of course no formal bosses does not mean there was not cliques employees that had been there longer and/or had more influence with more coworkers had more power to form teams and trusted when working longer projects, also employees would connect with coworkers so that the work they did would be noticed. Who completed your employee review would be basically random, so you had to hope/ensure everyone knew what you where doing.
Obviously there are alot of issues with this, I hope they have since moved on but last I heard there wasn’t much traction to change it. There is no board to appease and Gabe is the one who made the system, change is difficult for valve.
nialv7@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Maybe time for some to start a adult only game store that uses crypto to settle payments?
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
nutaku exists but I don’t think they use crypto?
Also you can buy adult games on itch.io
nialv7@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
You raise good points. It’s great that other store fronts still exist where you can sell adult games. But I do worry if credit card companies will come for them too one day.
Re: crypto. Some of what you said is true. Transaction fee are comparatively expensive (but also note credit card companies charge transaction fees too, just not directly to the consumer). But other points aren’t necessarily true. Transaction times have improved a lot, there are networks designed for fast transaction times, and usually the payment can complete in seconds. The volatility problem is solved by stable coins, which have their values fixed relative a currency. (Of course stable coins can, and have failed in the past. But that only concerns you if you keep your money as stable coin. For one-off payments this shouldn’t matter). Retailers don’t have to hold cryptos if they don’t want to. Crypto markets have pretty good liquidity nowadays, it’s not hard to get rid of the coins immediately after you get them (well to be fair if you are getting Valve volumes it could be a problem, should be fine for smaller stores).
Crypto is a fast evolving field, so problems are being solved by the day.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 hours ago
Transaction times have improved a lot, there are networks designed for fast transaction times, and usually the payment can complete in seconds.
Hrm, well, if that is true, then that is a considerable improvement.
The volatility problem is solved by stable coins, which have their values fixed relative a currency. (Of course stable coins can, and have failed in the past. But that only concerns you if you keep your money as stable coin. For one-off payments this shouldn’t matter).
But it absolutely does matter if you are a retailer that builds or uses a payment processor system around a ‘stable’ coin that suddenly flatlines one day.
There goes your ability to sell things!
Or, even worse, if the retailer does hold a standing balance in the ‘stable’ balance, or pays the sellers directly in a crypto… welp, theres, what, half of a months operating revenue, poof, gone, all the sellers? Now totally broke, unless they’re also active crypto traders at the same time as being people who make things to sell.
Crypto markets have pretty good liquidity nowadays, it’s not hard to get rid of the coins immediately after you get them (well to be fair if you are getting Valve volumes it could be a problem, should be fine for smaller stores).
I mean, you kind of showed a major flaw right there.
Yep, volume is much better.
But… not sufficient for actual large scale retail, or many, many small to mid size retailers.
Also, to the best of my knowledge… no ‘stable’ coin has anywhere near the volume of say BTC or ETH.
Crypto is a fast evolving field, so problems are being solved by the day.
No, hard disagree.
Most coins haven’t even figured out how to actually be significantly, meaningfully untraceable, other than XMR.
Even a tornado blender thing can be unwound… or it can just steal some of your money.
What else has crypto figured out in almost 20 years now?
Well, aside from being an optimal vector for scamming people…
A new verification paradigm that still leaves it orders of magnitude more energy intensive than traditional payment processors?
NFTs? Who cares, its the least efficient FTP protocol ever devised, quite easy to poison or social hack.
I guess if payment processing speeds are now comparable to existing payment processors… wow, crypto is slightly less useless than what proceeded it?
I’ve beem following this shit since before Mt Gox opened the first online trading market.
Crypto has managed to become the most speculative, fundamental-less investment ‘asset class’ of all known human history.
It still isn’t really private, and you still can’t generally buy things with it, barring a few niche exceptions.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
They… kind of sort of already have.
You can just throw money into your Steam account, via the mechanism they came up with for Steam Gift cards.
So, buy a physical gift card, or just give Steam your bank/card info, take money out of bank, give to your Steam Gift balance.
So uh, presumably, that Steam Gift Balance doesn’t exist in a bank anymore, beyond being a withdrawl from your account, its now just … a $USD value associated with your Steam account, that you csn now buy anything with, and your original bank/card company has no visibility into that second transaction.
ugo@feddit.it 1 day ago
Won’t work. I imagine PayPal’s stance here is along the lines of “we will not allow any payment to go through to Valve as long as there is content we don’t want on Steam”.
If PayPal only stopped payments towards the content they don’t like, Valve wouldn’t have done anything. The fact Valve is removing content means that PayPal must have told them to remove the content or else they would stop allowing payments to Valve altogether. I can’t imagine a reality where this is not the case.
muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
PayPal wouldn’t dare attack Steam for accepting external payment methods with rules they don’t agree with and can’t change because they don’t own those companies. In addition to opening them up to potential lawsuits, it could catastrophically backfire if Valve simply said “fine, we don’t accept PayPal anymore, but we do accept crypto now.”
PayPal would die in a week. The investors would drag out a guillitine by the next earnings call.
ugo@feddit.it 1 day ago
I think that’s a naïve view. PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe are all american companies that are either happy or feel compelled to comply the administration of the fascist-in-command.
Sure maybe this is PayPal doing their own thing, or maybe it’s part of a more organized scheme in which potential lawsuits don’t really matter.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Ah.
That’s true.
In fairness, I was trying to assess the capability of Valve to just make their own payment processing system, which they still largely could do.
Granted, this would be a bit of an endeavor…
But uh, fintech stuff is pretty common these days, Valve has a lot of money, and they could easily poach or hire some experts to guide the process of making their own version of something like Plaid or Chime or CashApp or Remitly, etc. but only for their ecosystem, not allow actual user to user direct cash txns, and work that into their own pre-existing Steam and Steam Mobile frontends.
Valve does kinda know a thing or two about servers and server code, I’ve worked a bit on both game network code (as an enthusiast/mod maker/etc) and on import/export transactions amd dbs (professionally)… the actual coding involved in a video game server stack is way, way more complex imo… Valve really only need help with the legalities and regulations of setting up a compliant psuedo bank and payment systems in different countries and such.
Then they could tell PayPal to go fuck themselves.
I am not saying this is likely to happen, just saying it is hypothetically possible… and Valve is kind of known for innovating the gaming space, pushing the envelope, raising the bar, as they say.
But, that being said… all that effort vs just delisting some shitty RenPy smut e-novels based on incest?
Yeah, I’d just can the goonslop too.
I’m seeing about 7000 ‘adult only’ games on the store right now… so… its not like they’ve just banned porn games.
ugo@feddit.it 1 day ago
Absolutely. I suspect Valve might do just that if / when processors try to slip down the slippery slope. What if PayPal demands all adult games to be gone? What if they demand games with LGBT+ themes to be gone? At some point Valve will have to draw a line and tell them to fuck off if this happens.
But since there are only a handful of payment processors, what if they all collude and do this?
I imagine that if they weren’t already, this event has likely spawned a payment processor independence project internally.