Steam:
realitaetsverlust@piefed.zip 2 months ago
One of the most accurate descriptions of this entire beef.
Steam does nothing and just keeps winning.
aeronmelon@lemmy.world 2 months ago
red_tomato@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Valve is winning because they don’t enshittify
brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 2 months ago
Valve is winning because the average gamer doesn’t care much about owning his videogames.
UnspecificGravity@piefed.social 2 months ago
Steam is a great example of how a privately held company can out compete publicly traded and venture capital funded corps.
REDACTED@infosec.pub 2 months ago
Seriously, we need more companies doing nothing and taking 30% fee, becoming super rich corporations making more money than any other company per employee, while devs wonder if they’ll break even
realitaetsverlust@piefed.zip 2 months ago
“doing nothing”
Global distribution of exabytes of data, handling the entire e-commerce side and offering great toolings with steamworks while requiring onyl 100 dollars upfront is now considered “nothing”. Yeah, we should definitely go back to a time when steam wasn’t a thing and indie devs were required to have a publisher to even get their games into stores, and those publishers often took 80% of the entire profits. I’m sure indies had a much better time back then when they didn’t have to pay steam!
REDACTED@infosec.pub 2 months ago
You missed my point. I’ll repeat it.
30% cut was fine when infrastructure was just not there yet, but 64GB HDD no longer costs 100€ and internet is not metered in megabytes. Like I said, they’re making more money per employee than other corporations. If you genuinely think Valve and Gabe’s fleet of Yachts is not monopolistic pricing, then keep on defending corpos
realitaetsverlust@piefed.zip 2 months ago
30% cut was fine when infrastructure was just not there yet, but 64GB HDD no longer costs 100€ and internet is not metered in megabytes.
Steam isn’t just storing stuff and letting people download it. They’re an entire distribution network. There’s not just the tech (which is already expensive in itself), but also the entire legal stuff. Invoicing, legal compliance, fraud prevention, chargeback processing, the customer support (which actually got fairly helpful in the last 2 years) etc.
If you genuinely think Valve and Gabe’s fleet of Yachts is not monopolistic squeezing/pricing
It’s not. Valve has not adjusted their pricing once, at least not upwards. They have reduced the pricing for extremely high-grossing games, but other than that, the price has stuck at 30%. How is that squeezing? Wouldn’t that make them INCREASE the percentage point instead of leaving it where it is?
Also, it’s funny that you talk about “monopolistic”, because epic has probably engaged in more monopolistic behavior with the EGS than steam ever has. And if we compare the features of the EGS (which didn’t even have a shopping cart for the first year of it’s existence) with the feature set of steam, I can absolutely see that a 30% cut is fine.
Now, could they lower it? Probably. But 30% is still worth it for any indie dev and significantly less than any other entity with the size and reach of steam would take for all their services.
Honytawk@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
You mean like those paid mods they were trying to introduce together with Bethesda?
Valve does not always win. Users are just more tolerant towards Valve than any other platform because of the cheap games they can buy during a sale. Nothing more.
realitaetsverlust@piefed.zip 2 months ago
They introduced a feature, the community didn’t like it, and they canceled it a few days later because of that feedback. What exactly is the problem? Making a mistake and rectifying it within days is not a bad thing at all.
Users are just more tolerant towards Valve than any other platform because of the cheap games they can buy during a sale
If that was the case, people would be extremely tolerant towards the epic game store which regularly throws out games for free, but they aren’t.
architect@thelemmy.club 2 months ago
It’s funny that they tried to get indie devs paid for their contributions to these games (and therefore incentivizing more great mods) and gamers were like FUCK THAT SHIT! Typical, honestly. So now there’s no legal way to charge for mods and you get to do it only for fun asking people for coffee tips.
Imo this was Bethesda more than valve, anyways, and while it would make both of them too much money doing that it would have gotten regular people paid, too. Which they deserve, by the way.
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 2 months ago
it doesn’t just do nothing, it sticks to its core idea : we can’t do as much as the community can when it comes to making games, how do we maximise the community’s possible output?
People love to shit on valve working on lootboxes, but I was there to see how it developed. It was there as part of a way of getting money back to the people making stuff, which is why a shitload of the TF2 hats came from the community and steam workshop. The system came from a left wing greek economist, before , you know, he BECAME Minister of Finance for greece (for half a year)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanis_Varoufakis
This is why they have steam OS, steam greenlight, SFM, etc etc.
Valve doesn’t make games anymore, because they know hobbyists can make shitloads of more games than them, they need a platform to shove them into.
Also, the other goal is to improve and extend the PC gaming space, which is why they are working on SteamOS, the deck, and all the other shit they are working on. Because of the work they put into making steam work to make game distrobution better than piracy (LITERALLY said by Gabe), PC releases became synonymous with “Steam”, which is why whenever you have a game announcement, you get “New game : Available on (XboxLogo : PS5Logo : SteamLogo)”
Valve is doing stuff. Just not, you know, making HL3 or nothing.
hayvan@piefed.world 2 months ago
In a service business, if you do things right, people think you’re doing nothing.
P1k1e@lemmy.world 2 months ago
God?
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 2 months ago
TIL a greek minister of finance is responsible for TF2 hats. Fucking wild.
Goodeye8@piefed.social 2 months ago
I might be misremembering the timeline but I think he was brought on board after the market was created because Valve started to see the same economic patterns (and issues) Varoufakis had talked about. He was brought in to make sure the skin economy would have a solid foundation. So he isn’t really responsible for TF2 hats. CS skins however he could be considered responsible.
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Oh, right. Well, I’m editing his Wikipedia page in that case.
Zanshi@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I knew I know the name from somewhere, so I checked on my Kobo. He also wrote Technofeudalism
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’m baffled that I didn’t already know that lootboxes were created by the husband of the woman that the Pulp hit Common People was most likely written about.
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I… what?
Bane_Killgrind@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
There’s a song “common people” performed by a band called “pulp” you philistine, the song is about a real person
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
The William Shatner song?
brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 2 months ago
Valve is a for profit company, one of their main goals is to make money and they work daily to do that. There are people at Valve who work 8h a day on how to boost profits.
I think you are confusing lootboxes with the items market which was there mainly to compensate the free to play model. If you were there i hope you remember too no DRMs and no third party software launchers to run games.
They have steam OS because microsoft become one of their competitors
Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
“They have steam OS because microsoft become one of their competitors” Lmfao riiigght like Microsoft just got into the video game selling business, jfc.
Valve makes steamOS because windows fucking sucks and there needs to be an alternative OS for running game without a bunch of garbage like Windows or a completely locked down OS like Macs that they could use on their hardware.
brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 2 months ago
Steam is part of the garbage, you don’t really need a third party launcher to run a software.
In the past years microsoft made big and aggressive acquisitions in the videogames industry like bethesda and blizzard. The new xbox portable which is a direct competitor to the steam deck doesn’t have cd anymore, the only way to get games is through microsoft store.
architect@thelemmy.club 2 months ago
Other way around? Steam was Microsoft’s competitor back in the day. Steam killed them once already.
Mozingo@lemmy.world 2 months ago
We don’t have Steam Greenlight anymore, but otherwise 100% agree.
kn33@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Deadlock would like a word with you.
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 2 months ago
oh, what was the release date for deadlock?
Yes, valve do make some games, for special occasions. They just aren’t making genre defining single player games like some of us want them to… except for HL:A , but who has the money to get that VR setup and spare room to put it in?
To be fair to them, valve have released or kept updating several games recently, CS2 , DOTA2, HL:A, Artifact, and as you mentioned, Deadlock.
It’s just that the stereotypical person that liked Half Life 1, the game, aren’t being targeted as much by valve, and it’s because they want to save that kind of work for pushing new things they develop, which for now, is more hardware or games as a service oriented.