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Cake day: August 5th, 2023

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  • I actually still own one of these Alienware Alphas (a Windows variant). Traded out the HD for an SSD and it’s surprising how much they could be overclocked.

    Now that Steam OS is leaps and bounds better I really do hope Valve try again with this kind of gaming PC. It’s been a great entertainment center PC.
















  • When Ubisoft left steam and created their own store front their games not only didn’t get cheaper but they also laid a bunch of their staff off. Did they hire bigger better talent? No. They laid off 1700 people when they were making record profits.

    What you’re saying might be true potentially of indie developers but in the event that they could hire more staff/talent. But indie games aren’t expensive for the most part both because of the cost to make their games and subsequent game quality, and because they have less staff to pay and investors to please. It’s like you have no idea at all how this industry works and you’ve got a layman’s understanding of economics from the 1920’s.


  • I want you to draw me a line to connect the dots between some assumptions I’m seeing here.

    1. Valve lessening the percentage of a developers profit per unit from 30% to 25 or 15 % would make the developer put the game on sale more often or make the developer pass on those savings to you the consumer by lowering the price.

    2. That Steam doing so would somehow affect the price elsewhere (consoles, online retailers like Amazon, other online store fronts, physical brick and mortar stores).

    3. If Valve were not in the picture to take this cut (and to provide the services they provide) the developer would not otherwise have to provide such services for themselves (point of sale transactions and security, the production and distribution of product keys or physical media, services to market the game or product in question etc).

    4. That the 30% cut is strictly profit for Valve and they offer nothing for that cut.

    Just because Valve is charging less doesn’t mean that that cost savings will be passed on to the consumer. We’re living in a time where companies have record price increases and are seeing record sales numbers and profits that have eclipsed inflation meanwhile gaming prices are actually on a continual downtrend as far as value for money and aren’t rising with inflation at all and pretty much never have been.

    If what you’re supposing is true then games sold on Epic’s game store would be cheaper. They aren’t. Humble Bundle only charges a 25% cut of developer profits for a game. There are obviously some games available on both those store fronts. Point me to one of those and show me definitively that this has happened. That the developer of that game used that 5% savings with Humble Bundle to hire better talent to develop their game, or discount their games more often.

    Simple economics says that the more plentiful a thing is, the more likely it is to be cheaper. By that metric we might extrapolate that games would be cheaper the more readily available they can be made (for instance not having to publish a game on physical media making game distribution cheaper and easier). We have not really historically seen that.

    We might be able to conclude that it is a factor in why game pricing has stayed the same (meaning that games haven’t much gone above being $60 since the 80’s and so when taking into account inflation they are in fact cheaper). But that’s only one singular factor and there’s probably tens or hundreds of other factors in the mix.

    Simple economics also says that there is a point where when something is in demand it will be more expensive. Because demand for it will drive up what people are willing to pay. In this instance the less competition there is, the worse prices get. If Epic and Humble Bundle didn’t have to compete with steam, would the cut they take decrease or increase?

    Without steam enacting certain sales seasonally or during certain holidays, would those other storefronts have more sales or less sales? If steam didn’t exist would gaming storefronts treat consumers better or worse?


  • I mean. On the one hand you may have a point. But I wouldn’t have learned any of what I have learned in this thread by not engaging with the people making comments here. I’m not sure that Borg intends to be a troll. The rant was unhinged but Borg is correct in that Apple and their app ecosystem aren’t comparable to Steam and their storefront. They obviously have some feelings about development for app stores vs development for steam and obviously this wasn’t the place to do it, but I’m not sure they were intending to be a troll.

    Some people in this thread are obviously laboring under some pretty interesting and unfounded assumptions. We can’t understand how they came to such conclusions without interacting with them. Some of these discussions may be worth it. Others may not.


  • On one hand, Itch.io is supposed to be for indie games and while I personally have not got any experience with their platform their model does seem to be pretty incentivised towards developers if the only thing those developers care about is getting more profit from the games they are able to sell.

    However, on balance, indie game developers don’t often have the budget to create the kind of hype around a game that would push most consumers to buy it from just itch.io. So it’s in the best interest of lots of indie developers to make their game as accessible as possible and go where the users are.

    In that respect steam (and Microsoft and Sony) are the places to go. Of those three steam has less active competition from their company for games than either of the other platforms. Indies aren’t competing against Valve games the way they are against Sony or Microsoft produced games on the relevant platforms.

    At this point I’ve backed 4 games on Kickstarter or in one case the developer site, and I am very happy with each of them. They have (all except one) offered keys on steam, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony. Even when they didn’t release on all those platforms at the same time. Two of them I have purchased on a separate platform after receiving a key on my chosen platform so I can play those games in multiple places.

    On the other hand, I don’t necessarily like that Indies probably won’t see the same benefit of paying less per unit served after selling $10 million and again after an additional $5 million (Valve drops their percentage from 30% to 25% after a developer sells $10million worth of units and again to 20% for every copy sold after selling an addition $5 million sold on steam).

    This I feel is a boon to big development firms that not a whole lot of Indies can take advantage of. So there is definitely room for improvement there.