Like I enjoy a lot of what Valve does but people who simp to the extreme levels we see on Lemmy are honestly wild to me.
Two points to be contended with:
- Valve are getting 20-30% of every sale. Other marketplaces - notably Google and Apple - are rightfully despised for this level of rent seeking
- Valve popularized the concept of the loot box in Western games, making money off of children gambling
I think there’s something to be said between mobile app stores and what Valve offers through Steam though.
There’s an argument to be made that yes, developers are functionally giving up an entry fee to Steam’s userbase, but Steam also does run a very compelling platform. If it was just a storefront, I’d agree about rent seeking. But you get a pretty elaborate set of features that are legitimately what sets Steam apart from other stores:
- Steam community forums
- News feeds to make publishing patch notes easier
- Steam workshop for easy integration of community content
- A robust social network, with integration into the game for an easy means of inviting, hosting and joining games to meet parity with Consoles
- Steam’s whole CDN/versioning depot
- a swath of marketing tools, Proton for multi-platform compatibility, etc.
For both its users and the sellers, Steam is a consistently improving platform. I think they’ve made some less great decisions over the years, or fail to enforce their own guidelines, but largely they continue to innovate and make it clear there’s an interest in making it as complete and accessible am experience as possible.
To your second point, agreed. I despise the loot boxes and I think Valve is pulling some horseshit there. There’s also no forgetting they had virtually no customer support for longer than they’ve had it. Refunds weren’t even an option until 2015, and only came about as the result of multiple consumer rights suits. To their credit, they’ve made a point of doing that as well as they can too, but I still think there’s room for improvement.
Valve are getting 20-30% of every sale. Other marketplaces - notably Google and Apple - are rightfully despised for this level of rent seeking
The contention is that you’re using Epic’s dishonest framing of this argument. Retail fees are not rent seeking, and the only “despising” of Google and Apple came from Epic themselves because they did not want to get any less than all of their MTX money from Fortnite on mobile.
The 30% cut is the standard retail fee. It’s the standard for all storefronts except for two: EGS and Microsoft.
Google and Apple both take 30% on everything, but that recently changed it to 15% for a developer’s first 1million dollars, and for subscriptions.
Valve is the least shitty option in a sea of garbage. If you find an oasis in the desert, do you complain that the water isn’t cold? Someone could do better, yes; but they haven’t.
Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Google and Apple all take 30% to the point that it is accepted as the standard market rate. Epic points at Valve following the same standard and says they are greedy and now everyone parrots the Valve is bad claim. I’m sorry but I never bought this argument Maybe we should claim it’s a problem with the industry as a whole instead of pointing to just one company following what others have been charging.
It’s an equally large problem on each platform, yet for some reason Valve gets vigorously defended any time they receive criticism.
Probably because, out of all those entities doing the same shit, Valve is the only one who bothers to give even so much as a passing thought towards treating their customers right too. The rest of them just view us as walking wallets who are unfairly keeping their money away from them.
Valve absolutely fucks up too, but when you’re surrounded by psychos, it’s easy to see the guy who’s merely kind of a dick as the good guy.
So I can guarantee you that there’s a lot of good things coming out from for example Google - massive amounts of contributions to open source for example.
We don’t forget the bad things Google do, however, nor do we defend them, because we understand what they are.
Understand what Valve is as well.
Google is a terrible example. They are assisting in the destruction of the Internet for their own gain, never mind the while AI data centers destroying the environment thing.
Is there any way to replicate their success? Like ultimately giving their customers better deals than shareholders isn’t that what every mom and pop are trying to do?
Anticompete laws are a thing, but I don’t know if they’re applicable at this point to anything valve does.
Epic could also just try to not be utterly shite. I personally won’t touch it as long as sweeny is involved and they are deep-throating AI.
Of course it’s not fixable! It would have to be broken first.
Unless he’s referring to the failure of EGS. That’s not fixable for other reasons.
Valve “made a better product than we ever could” former Epic dev says “I don’t think we can ever build something that isn’t slop”
It’s just as much that epic shit the bed when they first introduced their launcher/store by very clearly taking the “shitty capitalism” path that tries to compete by killing off competition with exclusivity deals and later throwing money at players with free games. Not to mention not even trying to compete on some of the things that gives steam more value to many users.
It was clear they were trying to do to video games what uber and abnb tried to do to taxis and hotels and use venture capital money to undercut the existing market with the intent of being able to set whatever price later when their competition died off but were even less successful than the other two corps, who still managed to become big players in their market even if they didn’t kill off the competition.
For me personally, not only am I uninterested in epic’s store, but I don’t wasn’t to see them succeed. Even if they started doing the good things, I wouldn’t trust that they’d keep it up if they managed to get to steam’s market position. They showed their cards too soon with trying to open up with exclusives.
Mfs do you think this is a game ?
But seriously, he’s not entirely wrong. Steam is an established monopoly and while now it’s fine as a platform it will inevitably enshittify and at that point it will be hard for customers to drop steam for a better alternative (if one will even pop up at all).
More like it’s compatition is so shit, it doesn’t have to lift a finger to stay in the lead.
Uh-oh an economic discussion in a gaming Forum?
This will be very informed and up to economic standards in the field 😂
Valve lives rent free in Epic’s heads
Atari was saying the exact same thing about “PONG” back in the late 70’s. Hello PONG? Where are you PONG? PONG?
Steam has problems, Epic games could fix that. They choose to whine about it on social media instead.
Fixing those problems wouldn’t get anyone to move over. It’s another launcher and store. Who the fuck wants that? Until GabeN dies, Valve is taken public, and things get straight up shitty on Steam, nobody’s going to start buying games on another platform.
They could, but they won’t.
The major way they broke capitalism was by not going public. Gabe has to answer to nobody, so the usual gang of corporate fucking idiots can’t force him to do short sighted shit to make a short term squeeze at the cost of long term viability.
This is the key. It’s the WHOLE thing. A runaway cap table destroys companies, always. Investors have different exit horizons and they are fundamentally incompatible with long term viability.
All you need to do to compete with a publicly owned company is capitalism is wait for their investors to get too greedy.
I’ve been screaming this exact sentiment into the void for a long time, so it’s nice to see someone else who understands.
The main reason companies are getting so shitty right now isn’t a blanket “capitalism bad”. Companies need to have a clear goal that they pursue with a coherent vision, and that is impossible when you auction away control of the driver’s seat to a comittee of random people with varying interests.
Valve wins by doing absolutely nothing
that’s what gets me. they just provide a simple, relatively unchanging service, that mostly just works.
I curse Microsoft daily for the shit I have to put up with just trying to do my job (it’s actually crazy to me how much wasted labour there is because of dumb changes from Microsoft) because they are endlessly searching for even more profit. and they could just… still be raking in cash if they just provided a service that worked. like Valve. but that’s not enough
Given the fact I used their OS all summer long as my sole business computer and then my sole gaming console tells me they are doing something.
Something nobody else seemed to be interested in doing.
i mean. they did just release a fantastic controller and a damn fine new vr headset. they aren’t doing nothing.
And funded a massive amount of Linux and Linux software development. People who say Valve does nothing are either oversimplifying for a joke or, if serious, grossly ignorant about what Valve does.
People are tired of being milked and anti consumer practices.
Steam is the only company doing what we expected.
itch and gog are both great storefronts and I continue to buy games from both of those. At this point the only person who can defeat Steam is Steam itself. You might laugh but I’ve seen a change in leadership absolutely destroy companies before. Let us all pray that Gaben lives forever. The next person might run Steam into the ground to make himself richer, just like all our American CEO’s.
I’m liking itch’s new launcher too
