Then again, Valve gets 30% to 20% of the benefits from all sales from their platform. It’s easier to be generous when everyone has to pay you to make cash.
Valve doesn’t release games, it releases ads for Steam.
Which is fine. It’s great. Makes for great, cheap products and long-term strategies that aren’t trying to shake all the money off of you.
But that’s the end goal, still.
As a friendly reminder, Valve also universalized DRM, invented multiple new types of microtransactions and actually kinda invented NFTs for a little bit.
Honestly I’ll defend TF2 loot boxes til I die. There are valid complaints as far as casual gamers go but as someone who played the game for thousands of hours the cosmetic system added a lot of longevity to the game. It was a fun ecosystem to engage with and compared to modern games where you spend $15-20 on a single cosmetic item it was an absolute bargain. If you got tired of an item you could trade it for something else too.
Idk maybe I just got indoctrinated but I have so many positive memories of that game and interacting with the cosmetic system. These days every game you play is shoving their store front in your face. Every cosmetic is $20 and if you don’t buy it now it’s lost forever. Don’t want to spend money? Ok here’s an “event” where you need to play the game 2 hours a day for a week to unlock some meh items and if you don’t then fuck you those items are gone forever.
Agreed. It sounds weird saying, but I feel that Valve did these things right or at least fixed them quickly thereafter. I’ve never felt any sense of pay-to-win or being left out playing TF2. Quite the opposite. I’d get the new items quick enough, and if there was anything in there articular I’d want then there was a robust market willing to make it happen for cheaper than I thought. And “cheaper” referring to in-game items.
I actually agree that loot boxes aren’t intrinsically bad.
I mean, I was buying Magic the Gathering cards before anybody got mad at making blind purchases. The entire field is called Gacha because it’s modelled on analogue equivalents people don’t mind at all.
But that’s not what the community will tell you. Loot boxes are THE problem, if you ask this in a different context. Fundamentally predatory.
Unless you bring it up in this, and only this context. When Valve does it it’s fine. Never mind that they had and actual gambling problem around their retradeable cosmetic loot box drops. Or that their implementation is indistinguishable from others. Or that they have a pattern of innovating in the monetization space not just with loot boxes but with battlepasses, cosmetics and other stuff people claim to not like when other people do it.
The shocker isn’t the actual business practices, it’s the realization that you can get so good at PR that you can’t just get away with it, but have the exact same people that are out there asking for the government to intervene to stop those actively defend you against the mere suggestion that your business model is your actual business model.
Look, I was out there during the big loot box controversies that there were babies going out with thtat bathwater. I like me some Hearthstone and CCGs and other games that do those things. I like a bunch of free to play things. Got a TON of crap every time I even dared to float that online. UNLESS it comes up in a conversation about Valve. Then I get crap flung in the opposite direction.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t like them, I’m saying that brief “maybe I’m indoctrinated” moment of realization should make you take a minute and reassess your relationships with brands and corporations. We are all subject to PR influence.
The “hated industry standards” are in many cases directly copied from the Valve implementations that predate them, so… yeah.
I mean, I haven’t played CS2 yet, and definitely haven’t played CS:GO in a while, but I may need you to point me at the timecode in this video where the superior free-range loot boxes are way better than in, say, Call of Duty, because I’m not sure I caught it the first time.
And again, I’m not against these on principle. I think unboxing videos are a bit weird and I don’t see the appeal of opening tons of boxes in one sitting in real life, either… but this is the exact same implementation being criticized elsewhere.
Playing a touch of devils advocate here but, how are patreon only mods any different than what valve was trying to do?
It seems if mod makers wanna get paid for their work they should be able to monetize it in via any avenue that fits their fans abilities.
A lot of the stuff you’d find yourself in lovers lab for Skyrim has gone patreon only. As well as some rimworld mods. I also used to track a vr modder that released patreon exclusive builds (RDR2 was the primary one until R* DMCA’d them).
So access to the files in the first place is managed by Patreon, but the files are manually downloaded, belong to the users forever, and could theoretically be pirated if the users thought it was necessary?
As a communist, I don’t think we should pay anyone for their work.
Remember when parents raised their own kids, for free? I remember. These days it takes two incomes to raise a family, so the parents have to hire babysitters to watch the kids, so they can afford to have kids. That’s fucked up. Putting capitalism in childcare just resulted in neglected kids and parents who don’t get to see their families. I don’t think we should pay people for raising kids.
I don’t think we should pay people for any kind of work. I think we should do all kinds of work the same way we used to raise kids.
The appropriate response to capitalism’s existence is not to do more capitalism. We did parenting for free for a long time during capitalism. We did mods for free for a long time during capitalism. We should be working to create anarchic structures like the family or the modding community to de-capitalise our lives.
Invented but never abused. Remember who the abusers are. I don’t mind loot boxes in TF2 or CS. I simply don’t have to open them or buy them. There’s no pay to win there. And with paid mods they said it clearly, they underestimated their audience and returned the money. You think Bethesda has done such a thing or Blizzard?
That was slightly facetious. I just spent the entirety of the NFT bubble reminding people that tradeable tokens attached to JPGs is something that Valve invented to do with their dumb trading cards when they introduced those and we all saw in real time that all of them trend to zero value immediately.
I kept asking cryptobros to explain why their new tokenized JPGs were gonna behave any differently and it turns out there really wasn’t a particularly good answer to that one.
For the record, those get updated and get total overhauls because they are driven by cosmetics MTX and/or battlepasses, both of which Valve straight-up invented in their modern form.
So I guess yeah, they either make cutting edge innovations in monetization design for games-as-service things or they put out ads for Steam. I think the larger point holds.
I don’t understand your point. It’s bad that they give out free games and constantly update them because they make money on cosmetics? That’s somehow worse or as bad as companies that make the same game every year, charge an arm and a leg for it and then have micro transactions on top of it? Or they’re bad because they innovate and then other companies take their ideas and make them shittier? What’s your point, exactly?
No, they don’t make them shittier. My point is that they’re in it for the money, the money just flows in different ways. Their battlepasses weren’t any better or worse than anybody else’s, and neither are their cosmetics.
They just get a pass because their brand is rock solid and they run very quiet and very cheap with a very long term view enabled by being a private company. That’s not good or bad, it’s a corporation out to make corporation things and doing them very well.
No dog, you just really like the thing they’re talking about and it’s coloring your reaction. The points they’re making are actually very reasonable, but your responses read like they’re just criticizing Valve as a matter of opinion rather than practice.
To be clear, it’s not even criticism. I don’t mind Valve making money or being great at PR and branding or using MTX. I am way more chill with those things than the average gamer.
If there’s anything here that rubs me the wrong way is objectively identical practices being assessed in entirely opposite ways by the community based on who is doing them. And it doesn’t even bother me because I think the practices are bad or because I don’t recognize that Valve absolutely worked on positioning that exact way.
Mostly it just gives me a bit of anxiety to realize that you can get away with that and somehow nobody else seems able to do it.
Honestly, if I had to guess why I’d say it’s down to Valve being a private company. They genuinely can just never tell anybody what they’re doing or what their plans and make long term investments. But man, the outcome is kinda scary.
That is a hilarious statement for reasons I won’t get into here.
But also, it’s a concerning statement because… yeah, no, that makes them arguably more predatory. I mean, they didn’t have to attempt to dismantle an entire grey market of gambling built around their weird NFT-ish resell mechanics because it’s such a fair environment.
So no, I don’t love NFTs and I certainly don’t think Valve inventing the entire concept around trading cards and in-game cosmetics way back when was a step in the right direction. That whole ecosystem was always a mess and it only got better because they started siloing the really bad chunks and the rest of it just quietly died down.
Image tokening was around before valve trading cards and the cards don’t use blockchain verification (they never did). We’ve been embedding symbols as vectors for DECADES. It started as payment card technology.
That 20-30% tax also gives developers access to Valve’s massive infrastructure (content delivery ain’t easy or cheap) and Steam’s audience, and that’s something that can’t be replicated with exclusivity deals.
Oh, and they KNOW that, too. Valve’s entire business model is making other people work for them. Their third party relations talks are less keynotes and more thinly veiled, very pleasant shakedowns.
They can shake down corpos as much as they want, I don’t care. Sony and Microsoft have been shaking down corporations for 30% for decades, it’s fine by me if they get shook down.
Not corpos, though. Corpos have deals with all platforms, they’re not concerned about positioning on Steam. Valve will go to them, and if they don’t their marketing budget will carry them.
No, it’s the indies who end up bending over backwards to fit Valve’s marching orders. It was contentious for a while, during the awkward period when Steam was figuring out how to crowdsource store placement. Now that they’ve successfully done so they invest very little and get to tell indies what to spend their budgets on, which they do often and explicitly.
If I had to compare the relationship, it’s closest to Youtube and content creators. Have you noticed how every Youtube video now has a little intro with highlights from later on? Like that.
I feel like your first statement is a massive stretch.
Through Steam, GoG, and Epic the Indies can avoid the far more expensive 30-70% cut publishers take.
I’m not going to pretend content creators on Youtube don’t massively benefit from youtube. There’s a reason kids now-a-days want to be youtubers not astronauts or something. Does it suck to be beholden to corporate overloards? Yeah. But if you work at EA, Google, Valve, CDPR, Epic, Apple… you’re shook down for your wages all the same.
You get nothing from those compared to Steam, though. The only third party that can compete, and that’s declined a bit, is Nintendo. And Nintendo is a bit of an additive thing, anyway. It’s where you go when you can afford it or got big enough on Steam to get some attention.
I’m not gonna say it’s impossible to survive around the edges of Steam, but man, if you’re an indie dev and Valve says jump you are up in the air before you even ask how high.
I have to say, it’s crazy how many things get more palatable in these conversation when you point out that Valve does them. Microtransactions, cosmetics, NFTs, content creation guidelines… it’s a lot easier to get people to admit the upsides when it’s those guys.
Which is fair. The thing is I’m not even against most of those practices in principle, and I agree that Valve are good at making them smooth and friendly. The big exceptions are the absolute mess they made of crowdsourcing store curation and the ungodly mess of the CSGO skin grey market. And they have more than enough brand clout to get those swept under the rug. Coca Cola wishes they had the brand loyalty Valve gets.
I’m not gonna say it’s impossible to survive around the edges of Steam, but man, if you’re an indie dev and Valve says jump you are up in the air before you even ask how high.
I’m just saying that’s any employer. If you make all your money through Steam then Valve is your employer. If you make all your money through Youtube then Google is your employer. If you make all your money through Twitch then Amazon is your employer.
On PC you get to pick who you’re going to have fuck you. You can pick to Minecraft it and open your own website and hope that works out or you can have Valve/CDPR/Epic in your pants telling you what you can make and how much you can have of it.
Not services, they are offerning their status. That’s different.
You don’t go to Valve and get services any more than you do from Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft. Valve isn’t looking for content, though. They have all the content. The entire firehose.
To be clear, I’m not saying Valve is worse. But it’s at best about the same, and arguably harder to work with on anything but getting out of your way to let you publish. The one thing I begrudge them is taking the social media model of making others work for you for free into game publishing, which I do think is a bit iffy. Maybe I’m just old fashioned there.
They did the work for global credit card transactions, tax, distribution, forums, cloud saves, multi-player support, anti-cheat, achievements, controller support, friends lists, unlimited game keys, workshop for mod support, add drm, voice chat, and more. All that for a 30% cut.
Yes, we’ve established they are a first party like any other. For the record, if you manage to get Microsoft/Activision, Sony, Nintendo, EA or Ubisoft to publish your game they’ll also throw QA, marketing and localization into the mix.
The difference is you’ll sign a specific deal and have a publisher at that point. Valve will tell you what they want you to do, then poof out into the distance and give you a link or at best an API to access all of those things at no extra cost to themselves. Their entire business model is for others (both devs and users) to work for them within their systems. Which is fine. I’m also less hostile to the gig economy than many around here, but even I am not gonna actively cheerlead for it.
I think you’re missing the principle. They could still charge for it, they simply won’t. Think of it this way, if it was EA in that situation would they give it away for free? Somehow I doubt it because EA does things for profit. This is a potential avenue for profit and which means not asking money for it would go against the goal of EA.
Yup happened to me, I tried half life since it was free and absolutely loved it, yes and that’s why I bought the complete pack (around 8 games iirc) for the 6€ (around 6.5$), and it was an absolute steal imo
Epic, Bethesda, Blizzard and others are not paying for those 30% to Valve. So what’s their excuse? Bethesda resold Skyrim enough times to shame anyone. Blizzard remade Warcraft3 and we all know how that went. I for one am happy Valve did this. They gave an old game a new life for at least a short time by giving it for free to keep, added new multiplayer maps and added some servers. Let people have some fun at anniversary instead of being greedy.
Yeah, but it’s still more profitable for indie game studios to put their game on steam, since they have a larger market to sell to, also valve doesn’t just take the money and goes, they spend it to make really good products that aren’t profitable and wouldn’t be possible else like the steam deck and proton
People behave as if Valve is holding a gun to indie dev’s head and forcing them to pay those 30%. Steam has so many users for a reason. It’s not a monopoly on a whim. They offer a huge benefit to their users at no charge and as little annoyance as possible. People who don’t want to sell on Steam, don’t have to. Easy as that. Sure Valve charges a lot, but they use that money to create a really good quality service that will give them the ability to charge that much without having to resort to timed exclusives and other vile tactics.
On the other hand they pay for all the liabilitys, server capacitys and everything regarding the store and let everyone put their games up i think its fair. Also steam is trusted by almost everyone to always be available and never loose your games. And it does advertising for the games as well.
Yeah, this is cool and all, but it’s like Epic posting a game for free, which they do every week or so. People still complain about Epic being greedy or whatever though. I like the products Valve makes, but this isn’t particularly amazing, just fairly nice to have.
Epic paid people for exclusivity in an attempt to force the customer to use its shitty platform. The free games are just bribes to try to get us to use it. And it’s still not working very well for them.
Nobody would have complained (well ok, some would have, but few) if they just tried to make a better store than steam and get people to use it that way.
They could still do the free games as a bribe, to get people to check out the store, but the store would actually need to not be garbage. The exclusivity payments really rankled people though.
I bought one timed exclusive on Epic (Stranger of Paradise), it left the entire redundant download behind without moving it and devoured 220 GB of my SSD in the process, and I decided I never wanted to use the Epic store again.
I’d love to move to GOG, but then I’d have to go through Lutris, which is currently in the process of crashing constantly for reasons the devs don’t fully understand, so RIP to that I guess.
Is it though? The only reason other platforms take 15% is to try to break through valve’s market. Once they make it (like Epic) you better trust they’re going to take as much as they can.
Plus, it’s apparently not easy to be generous, Apple and Google make far more money, where are they being generous? Gaben is a gem
(Google and apple also take 30% of transactions on their store). You get much more for you 30% to valve than 30 or 15% anywhere else.
Blizzard, Bethesda, Epic and many others don’t pay those 30% to Valve. So what’s their excuse for not giving free games?
Valve is also not holding a gun to developer’s head and forcing them to pay those 30%. Valve takes that money and makes a great service that users want to use. That in turn gives them the right to charge that amount of money.
When you look at all the features from cloud saves, chat and voice communication, simple networking without having to mess with routers, Proton, family sharing, streaming, card collecting, trading, achievements, huge sales, anti-cheat, workshop, communities with forums and bug reporting tools, lax refund policy, etc. When other companies start offering same value instead of forcing your hand with exclusives, then we can talk about monopoly
Then again, Valve gets 30% to 20% of the benefits from all sales from their platform. It’s easier to be generous when everyone has to pay you to make cash.
This.
Valve doesn’t release games, it releases ads for Steam.
Which is fine. It’s great. Makes for great, cheap products and long-term strategies that aren’t trying to shake all the money off of you.
But that’s the end goal, still.
As a friendly reminder, Valve also universalized DRM, invented multiple new types of microtransactions and actually kinda invented NFTs for a little bit.
Invented the loot box y’all love so much. Tried to invent paid mods. Valve is still a Corpo and corpos gonna corpos
Honestly I’ll defend TF2 loot boxes til I die. There are valid complaints as far as casual gamers go but as someone who played the game for thousands of hours the cosmetic system added a lot of longevity to the game. It was a fun ecosystem to engage with and compared to modern games where you spend $15-20 on a single cosmetic item it was an absolute bargain. If you got tired of an item you could trade it for something else too.
Idk maybe I just got indoctrinated but I have so many positive memories of that game and interacting with the cosmetic system. These days every game you play is shoving their store front in your face. Every cosmetic is $20 and if you don’t buy it now it’s lost forever. Don’t want to spend money? Ok here’s an “event” where you need to play the game 2 hours a day for a week to unlock some meh items and if you don’t then fuck you those items are gone forever.
Sorry I’m ranting.
Agreed. It sounds weird saying, but I feel that Valve did these things right or at least fixed them quickly thereafter. I’ve never felt any sense of pay-to-win or being left out playing TF2. Quite the opposite. I’d get the new items quick enough, and if there was anything in there articular I’d want then there was a robust market willing to make it happen for cheaper than I thought. And “cheaper” referring to in-game items.
I actually agree that loot boxes aren’t intrinsically bad.
I mean, I was buying Magic the Gathering cards before anybody got mad at making blind purchases. The entire field is called Gacha because it’s modelled on analogue equivalents people don’t mind at all.
But that’s not what the community will tell you. Loot boxes are THE problem, if you ask this in a different context. Fundamentally predatory.
Unless you bring it up in this, and only this context. When Valve does it it’s fine. Never mind that they had and actual gambling problem around their retradeable cosmetic loot box drops. Or that their implementation is indistinguishable from others. Or that they have a pattern of innovating in the monetization space not just with loot boxes but with battlepasses, cosmetics and other stuff people claim to not like when other people do it.
The shocker isn’t the actual business practices, it’s the realization that you can get so good at PR that you can’t just get away with it, but have the exact same people that are out there asking for the government to intervene to stop those actively defend you against the mere suggestion that your business model is your actual business model.
Look, I was out there during the big loot box controversies that there were babies going out with thtat bathwater. I like me some Hearthstone and CCGs and other games that do those things. I like a bunch of free to play things. Got a TON of crap every time I even dared to float that online. UNLESS it comes up in a conversation about Valve. Then I get crap flung in the opposite direction.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t like them, I’m saying that brief “maybe I’m indoctrinated” moment of realization should make you take a minute and reassess your relationships with brands and corporations. We are all subject to PR influence.
Your argument rests on the claim that Valve’s implementation of these practices is indistinguishable from hated industry standards, but I disagree.
The “hated industry standards” are in many cases directly copied from the Valve implementations that predate them, so… yeah.
I mean, I haven’t played CS2 yet, and definitely haven’t played CS:GO in a while, but I may need you to point me at the timecode in this video where the superior free-range loot boxes are way better than in, say, Call of Duty, because I’m not sure I caught it the first time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJGY6RGPCnY
And again, I’m not against these on principle. I think unboxing videos are a bit weird and I don’t see the appeal of opening tons of boxes in one sitting in real life, either… but this is the exact same implementation being criticized elsewhere.
Don’t TF2 loot boxes contain weapons that alter the gameplay?
Playing a touch of devils advocate here but, how are patreon only mods any different than what valve was trying to do? It seems if mod makers wanna get paid for their work they should be able to monetize it in via any avenue that fits their fans abilities.
I’ve never heard of patreon only mods, tell me more
A lot of the stuff you’d find yourself in lovers lab for Skyrim has gone patreon only. As well as some rimworld mods. I also used to track a vr modder that released patreon exclusive builds (RDR2 was the primary one until R* DMCA’d them).
It’s a good way to generate revenue for creators.
So access to the files in the first place is managed by Patreon, but the files are manually downloaded, belong to the users forever, and could theoretically be pirated if the users thought it was necessary?
Uh, paid mods were around in the 90s. Probably earlier but that’s what I can testify to.
Maybe it’s a good idea to pay modders for their work?
As a communist, I don’t think we should pay anyone for their work.
Remember when parents raised their own kids, for free? I remember. These days it takes two incomes to raise a family, so the parents have to hire babysitters to watch the kids, so they can afford to have kids. That’s fucked up. Putting capitalism in childcare just resulted in neglected kids and parents who don’t get to see their families. I don’t think we should pay people for raising kids.
I don’t think we should pay people for any kind of work. I think we should do all kinds of work the same way we used to raise kids.
That’s not what I’m saying. We live in a capitalist society, so people need to be paid
The appropriate response to capitalism’s existence is not to do more capitalism. We did parenting for free for a long time during capitalism. We did mods for free for a long time during capitalism. We should be working to create anarchic structures like the family or the modding community to de-capitalise our lives.
So the greed can take over?
Nah, give me amateurs making silly broken mods over corpo market researched boring ones any day of the week.
Invented but never abused. Remember who the abusers are. I don’t mind loot boxes in TF2 or CS. I simply don’t have to open them or buy them. There’s no pay to win there. And with paid mods they said it clearly, they underestimated their audience and returned the money. You think Bethesda has done such a thing or Blizzard?
DOTA 2, Counter-Strike 2, TF 2 are all maintained and get updates or total overhauls.
What’s their opinion on NFTs now?
That was slightly facetious. I just spent the entirety of the NFT bubble reminding people that tradeable tokens attached to JPGs is something that Valve invented to do with their dumb trading cards when they introduced those and we all saw in real time that all of them trend to zero value immediately.
I kept asking cryptobros to explain why their new tokenized JPGs were gonna behave any differently and it turns out there really wasn’t a particularly good answer to that one.
For the record, those get updated and get total overhauls because they are driven by cosmetics MTX and/or battlepasses, both of which Valve straight-up invented in their modern form.
So I guess yeah, they either make cutting edge innovations in monetization design for games-as-service things or they put out ads for Steam. I think the larger point holds.
I don’t understand your point. It’s bad that they give out free games and constantly update them because they make money on cosmetics? That’s somehow worse or as bad as companies that make the same game every year, charge an arm and a leg for it and then have micro transactions on top of it? Or they’re bad because they innovate and then other companies take their ideas and make them shittier? What’s your point, exactly?
No, they don’t make them shittier. My point is that they’re in it for the money, the money just flows in different ways. Their battlepasses weren’t any better or worse than anybody else’s, and neither are their cosmetics.
They just get a pass because their brand is rock solid and they run very quiet and very cheap with a very long term view enabled by being a private company. That’s not good or bad, it’s a corporation out to make corporation things and doing them very well.
Their cosmetics are miles better because you can resell them on a market that they maintain. You really don’t know what you’re talking about.
No dog, you just really like the thing they’re talking about and it’s coloring your reaction. The points they’re making are actually very reasonable, but your responses read like they’re just criticizing Valve as a matter of opinion rather than practice.
To be clear, it’s not even criticism. I don’t mind Valve making money or being great at PR and branding or using MTX. I am way more chill with those things than the average gamer.
If there’s anything here that rubs me the wrong way is objectively identical practices being assessed in entirely opposite ways by the community based on who is doing them. And it doesn’t even bother me because I think the practices are bad or because I don’t recognize that Valve absolutely worked on positioning that exact way.
Mostly it just gives me a bit of anxiety to realize that you can get away with that and somehow nobody else seems able to do it.
Honestly, if I had to guess why I’d say it’s down to Valve being a private company. They genuinely can just never tell anybody what they’re doing or what their plans and make long term investments. But man, the outcome is kinda scary.
I mean, they are. Most of what they’ve said is demonstrably untrue.
That is a hilarious statement for reasons I won’t get into here.
But also, it’s a concerning statement because… yeah, no, that makes them arguably more predatory. I mean, they didn’t have to attempt to dismantle an entire grey market of gambling built around their weird NFT-ish resell mechanics because it’s such a fair environment.
So no, I don’t love NFTs and I certainly don’t think Valve inventing the entire concept around trading cards and in-game cosmetics way back when was a step in the right direction. That whole ecosystem was always a mess and it only got better because they started siloing the really bad chunks and the rest of it just quietly died down.
It makes them more predatory that I can sell cosmetics for games I no longer play to recoup that investment to use it on games I do play?
K
Image tokening was around before valve trading cards and the cards don’t use blockchain verification (they never did). We’ve been embedding symbols as vectors for DECADES. It started as payment card technology.
That 20-30% tax also gives developers access to Valve’s massive infrastructure (content delivery ain’t easy or cheap) and Steam’s audience, and that’s something that can’t be replicated with exclusivity deals.
Oh, and they KNOW that, too. Valve’s entire business model is making other people work for them. Their third party relations talks are less keynotes and more thinly veiled, very pleasant shakedowns.
They can shake down corpos as much as they want, I don’t care. Sony and Microsoft have been shaking down corporations for 30% for decades, it’s fine by me if they get shook down.
Not corpos, though. Corpos have deals with all platforms, they’re not concerned about positioning on Steam. Valve will go to them, and if they don’t their marketing budget will carry them.
No, it’s the indies who end up bending over backwards to fit Valve’s marching orders. It was contentious for a while, during the awkward period when Steam was figuring out how to crowdsource store placement. Now that they’ve successfully done so they invest very little and get to tell indies what to spend their budgets on, which they do often and explicitly.
If I had to compare the relationship, it’s closest to Youtube and content creators. Have you noticed how every Youtube video now has a little intro with highlights from later on? Like that.
I feel like your first statement is a massive stretch.
Through Steam, GoG, and Epic the Indies can avoid the far more expensive 30-70% cut publishers take.
I’m not going to pretend content creators on Youtube don’t massively benefit from youtube. There’s a reason kids now-a-days want to be youtubers not astronauts or something. Does it suck to be beholden to corporate overloards? Yeah. But if you work at EA, Google, Valve, CDPR, Epic, Apple… you’re shook down for your wages all the same.
You get nothing from those compared to Steam, though. The only third party that can compete, and that’s declined a bit, is Nintendo. And Nintendo is a bit of an additive thing, anyway. It’s where you go when you can afford it or got big enough on Steam to get some attention.
I’m not gonna say it’s impossible to survive around the edges of Steam, but man, if you’re an indie dev and Valve says jump you are up in the air before you even ask how high.
I have to say, it’s crazy how many things get more palatable in these conversation when you point out that Valve does them. Microtransactions, cosmetics, NFTs, content creation guidelines… it’s a lot easier to get people to admit the upsides when it’s those guys.
Which is fair. The thing is I’m not even against most of those practices in principle, and I agree that Valve are good at making them smooth and friendly. The big exceptions are the absolute mess they made of crowdsourcing store curation and the ungodly mess of the CSGO skin grey market. And they have more than enough brand clout to get those swept under the rug. Coca Cola wishes they had the brand loyalty Valve gets.
I’m just saying that’s any employer. If you make all your money through Steam then Valve is your employer. If you make all your money through Youtube then Google is your employer. If you make all your money through Twitch then Amazon is your employer.
On PC you get to pick who you’re going to have fuck you. You can pick to Minecraft it and open your own website and hope that works out or you can have Valve/CDPR/Epic in your pants telling you what you can make and how much you can have of it.
Welcome to capitalism I guess.
Exactly, they’re offering useful services for monetary compensation. How dare they?
Not services, they are offerning their status. That’s different.
You don’t go to Valve and get services any more than you do from Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft. Valve isn’t looking for content, though. They have all the content. The entire firehose.
To be clear, I’m not saying Valve is worse. But it’s at best about the same, and arguably harder to work with on anything but getting out of your way to let you publish. The one thing I begrudge them is taking the social media model of making others work for you for free into game publishing, which I do think is a bit iffy. Maybe I’m just old fashioned there.
They did the work for global credit card transactions, tax, distribution, forums, cloud saves, multi-player support, anti-cheat, achievements, controller support, friends lists, unlimited game keys, workshop for mod support, add drm, voice chat, and more. All that for a 30% cut.
Yes, we’ve established they are a first party like any other. For the record, if you manage to get Microsoft/Activision, Sony, Nintendo, EA or Ubisoft to publish your game they’ll also throw QA, marketing and localization into the mix.
The difference is you’ll sign a specific deal and have a publisher at that point. Valve will tell you what they want you to do, then poof out into the distance and give you a link or at best an API to access all of those things at no extra cost to themselves. Their entire business model is for others (both devs and users) to work for them within their systems. Which is fine. I’m also less hostile to the gig economy than many around here, but even I am not gonna actively cheerlead for it.
30% is the industry standard.
Doesn’t change that it’s a lot lol they’re also basically “the industry”
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I think you’re missing the principle. They could still charge for it, they simply won’t. Think of it this way, if it was EA in that situation would they give it away for free? Somehow I doubt it because EA does things for profit. This is a potential avenue for profit and which means not asking money for it would go against the goal of EA.
Well it’s easier even to want more money, cooperations giving something away for free that could have earned them money is not that common.
It is when it gets people on your platform, and more likely to spend money on other things on the platform. It’s called a loss leader.
Yup happened to me, I tried half life since it was free and absolutely loved it, yes and that’s why I bought the complete pack (around 8 games iirc) for the 6€ (around 6.5$), and it was an absolute steal imo
Epic, Bethesda, Blizzard and others are not paying for those 30% to Valve. So what’s their excuse? Bethesda resold Skyrim enough times to shame anyone. Blizzard remade Warcraft3 and we all know how that went. I for one am happy Valve did this. They gave an old game a new life for at least a short time by giving it for free to keep, added new multiplayer maps and added some servers. Let people have some fun at anniversary instead of being greedy.
Yeah, but it’s still more profitable for indie game studios to put their game on steam, since they have a larger market to sell to, also valve doesn’t just take the money and goes, they spend it to make really good products that aren’t profitable and wouldn’t be possible else like the steam deck and proton
People behave as if Valve is holding a gun to indie dev’s head and forcing them to pay those 30%. Steam has so many users for a reason. It’s not a monopoly on a whim. They offer a huge benefit to their users at no charge and as little annoyance as possible. People who don’t want to sell on Steam, don’t have to. Easy as that. Sure Valve charges a lot, but they use that money to create a really good quality service that will give them the ability to charge that much without having to resort to timed exclusives and other vile tactics.
They take nothing if you sell your game via keys on other sites like itch.io
Exactly. It’s not like Valve is forcing people to sell their games on Steam. People simply like using Steam. End of story.
On the other hand they pay for all the liabilitys, server capacitys and everything regarding the store and let everyone put their games up i think its fair. Also steam is trusted by almost everyone to always be available and never loose your games. And it does advertising for the games as well.
Yeah, this is cool and all, but it’s like Epic posting a game for free, which they do every week or so. People still complain about Epic being greedy or whatever though. I like the products Valve makes, but this isn’t particularly amazing, just fairly nice to have.
Epic paid people for exclusivity in an attempt to force the customer to use its shitty platform. The free games are just bribes to try to get us to use it. And it’s still not working very well for them.
Nobody would have complained (well ok, some would have, but few) if they just tried to make a better store than steam and get people to use it that way.
They could still do the free games as a bribe, to get people to check out the store, but the store would actually need to not be garbage. The exclusivity payments really rankled people though.
i love it when the epic games store flashbangs my eyeballs when i claim the free shit they give out. what an amazing marketing strategy
fr even though it’s a very petty thing to complain about it just shows how little care they put into their platform
I bought one timed exclusive on Epic (Stranger of Paradise), it left the entire redundant download behind without moving it and devoured 220 GB of my SSD in the process, and I decided I never wanted to use the Epic store again.
I’d love to move to GOG, but then I’d have to go through Lutris, which is currently in the process of crashing constantly for reasons the devs don’t fully understand, so RIP to that I guess.
Is it though? The only reason other platforms take 15% is to try to break through valve’s market. Once they make it (like Epic) you better trust they’re going to take as much as they can.
Plus, it’s apparently not easy to be generous, Apple and Google make far more money, where are they being generous? Gaben is a gem
(Google and apple also take 30% of transactions on their store). You get much more for you 30% to valve than 30 or 15% anywhere else.
The power of monopoly
Blizzard, Bethesda, Epic and many others don’t pay those 30% to Valve. So what’s their excuse for not giving free games?
Valve is also not holding a gun to developer’s head and forcing them to pay those 30%. Valve takes that money and makes a great service that users want to use. That in turn gives them the right to charge that amount of money.
When you look at all the features from cloud saves, chat and voice communication, simple networking without having to mess with routers, Proton, family sharing, streaming, card collecting, trading, achievements, huge sales, anti-cheat, workshop, communities with forums and bug reporting tools, lax refund policy, etc. When other companies start offering same value instead of forcing your hand with exclusives, then we can talk about monopoly