this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2024
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I'd like to see a Sankey graph of where Valve's money goes before I praise them that much for helping out a Linux distribution a bit.
Lots of major companies like Microsoft and IBM also contribute to Linux, it doesn't make them saints nor even necessarily compare to what they get for using the volunteer dev work inside Linux.
Gabe Newell is a billionaire, Steam is a defacto monopoly that objectively charges more than they have to, and literally everyone who works at Valve is in the 1%. Let's not fall over ourselves dick-riding them.
Being cautious of a corporation is never a bad thing, but remember: Valve isn't a public company. They don't have the same incentives and fiduciary duties that led to the enshittification of most other companies and services.
Ultimately, yes, everything they do is entirely for their own benefit. But, they're also free to focus on their long-term growth and returns. As long as the leadership doesn't get changed to a bunch of shit-for-brains golden parachute MBAs, they're going to want to keep their customers happy. It's good for them, and it's not terrible for us. Everybody wins.
I would prefer they were a nonprofit, but I'm not going to complain when the mainstream alternatives to Steam are mostly comprised of shitty sales-focused storefronts created by companies beholden to their investors.
No, they don't. Literally every single gamer across the world pays 15% more on every single game purchase, for literally no reason except to make the 1% at Valve even richer.
And they don't have to hire MBAs because gamers dick ride them like Gabe isnt a self serving billionaire and keep forking over an extra 15% and then thanking them for the opportunity to do so.
Do you seriously believe that if a developer pays 15% less in platform fees to Valve, that savings will be passed on to us? Epic Games tried that. Guess what: games still cost us the same there as every other platform.
It literally either goes back to the consumer or back to the game developer.
Or, more likely, the publisher. But, that's beside the point.
As it has been demonstrated when Epic tried the "developers pay less fees here" approach, the average Joe Gamer doesn't benefit in any way whatsoever. Your premise of the savings being passed down doesn't exactly pan out.
To be fair, Epic Store was marred by exclusives and having way less features back then. Even now, their (Electron) launcher boots up way slower than (CEF) Steam, and their sales are way worse.
Is it Electron? Someone elsewhere mentioned it was actually an instance of Unreal Engine running for the webview component. Something about the EGS install directory containing the same UE settings file that games use for initializing Unreal
IDK then. spinning up an entire game engine just to do what Electron does seems unbelievably wasteful though.
I just downloaded and installed EGS to a Windows VM.
strings EpicGamesLauncher.exe | select-string "unreal"
returns some interesting results:FCommunityPortalManagerImpl::SetUnrealEnginePortalViewModel
{USER}Unreal Engine/Engine/Config/User{TYPE}.ini
UnrealHeaderTool
Cannot call UnrealScript (%s - %s) while stopped at a breakpoint.
UnrealVersionSelector
Created with FUnrealEngineFileAssociationServiceFactory at D:/build/++Portal/Sync/Portal/Source/Programs/EpicGamesLauncher/Layers/Domain/Private/UserDomain.cpp:866
A search for "electron" only matches the words "Electronic Arts"
...wait, what does it say about EA?
I already killed the VM, but it was something about an EA account if I recall correctly.
Oh really? Please do point me to the study you did where you gave 15% more revenue back to developers and then assessed their output quality.
Claiming that having the store take 15% less cut of revenue will have no effect is a quite frankly flat out absurd claim to make.
I'll tell you a secret: you don't need a proprietary launcher to run software
I'll tell you something you missed:
Steam's DRM is notoriously easy to bypass, allowing that. They also don't force DRM on their platform, it's entirely developer/publisher opt-in (and they are also free to add additional DRM on top if they wish), and many many releases on Steam run fine directly from the executable without the launcher running.
Edit: For the record, I pirate before I buy, buy on DRM free platforms (GOG mainly) where possible, and use a third party launcher to unify my collection across multiple storefronts and many many loose executables into one spot.
I'd say it's a lot more than "a bit". It's an enormous amount of help that pretty much everyone in the Linux (professional) community can, has, and will attest to.
I don't agree that they're a monopoly, because they've done absolutely nothing to prevent competition. Other stores do it to themselves.
I do agree though that their fees are exorbitant and their contributions to Linux are a teeny tiny fraction of their wealth, but I appreciate it regardless.
Yes they have. The steam friends network and the fact that you can't transfer your purchases, friends data, or community data to other platforms is an inherent form of lock in. Just because you're used to it because Facebook also does it, doesn't mean it's not.
What do you expect them to do? Not actively helping your competition is not remotely the same thing as being anticompetitive.
Lock-in != Monopoly.
This is ridiculously unrealistic in a capitalist society.
It costs the platform money whenever a user downloads a game, and a user who didn't buy from their store isn't a user that they make money from. No other platform would voluntarily accept a recurring cost like that unless they profit from user data.
Also, it's not like they stop publishers from doing that themselves. Ubisoft and EA use the cd-key generated by steam to associate the game with your U-Play and Origin accounts.
They asked if they did anything anti-competitive. Lock-in is inherently anti-competitive.
Not being able to transfer purchases seems like an other-platforms problem. Steam has authenticated API for users' game libraries.
Is it a form of lock in or not?
No.
Anyone is free to access purchases given the user chooses to give that info, they just don't. Skill izzue
Oh come on. Mr negativity over here. FFS Valve has been a godsend compared to the likes of EA or Blizzard. I bet you complain when you get ice cream that it's too cold
Valve has ripped off every single game purchase to the tune of billions and billions of dollars (taking an objective 15% more than they need to from the total cost of every single game), for the past 20 years.
But let's thank them for that! Thanks Valve for making every single working class gamer poorer. We all love the fact that every single Valve employee is a multimillionaire, at the expense of literally every single game player and developer. What kind generosity! /S
How is it at the expense of the game player? Even if they paid less, the publisher and developers aren't going to pass the savings on to the consumer. That's wishful thinking in the same vain as hoping Starbucks would make their drinks cheaper because their rent went down.
If anything, one can argue that the 30% fee shelled out by the publisher pays for the various nice-to-haves that players get on Steam, like: a functional review system, free cloud save syncing, the workshop, game discussion forum, friends system, family sharing, game streaming, Steam input (which is a godsend for accessibility), etc.
This is the most dumbass asinine defense. So now you're pro landlord rent gouging?
Jesus fucking Christ how are people upvoting this flat out landlord simping crap.
It does not fucking matter if Ubisoft remains greedy. Every single independent self publishing dev gets 15% more money. If a landlord gogiges Starbucks, they're also going to gouge the independent business, and the family needing somewhere to live.
"Oh my corporate landlord might be owned by a billionaire and every single one of his employees might be a multimillionaire, but he's a good landlord because he gives us a washing machine. It might be old and clunky and never repaired, but hey that makes him a saint, right?"
The fucking fact that you brought up landlords rent seeking as a non issue is the dumbest fucking thing I've ever heard. You need to go outside, give your head a shake, and do fucking better.
No, they're anti Starbucks price gouging. It's like all those companies taking advantage of a little inflation to drastically increase retail prices.
It's the opposite.
I said Valve is taking 15% more that they don't have to, they said who cares if a landlord drops Starbucks rent 15%, the consumer won't save. I pointed out that that means that not just Starbucks is being gouged but also independent stores and places that might actually drop their prices, or not increase them as quickly in the future.
There is literally no way to defend rent seeking. It makes everything more expensive for everyone.
I'm not defending landlords or rent gouging. I'm pointing out that when production or operating costs become lower in a for-profit entity, they increase their profit margin instead of passing their savings down to the consumer. Welcome to capitalism.
If you can't see how that connects with the hypothetical scenario of having Valve to take a 15% cut instead of 30%, let me do it for you:
Ubisoft makes a new Assassin's Creed game. They publish it on Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox. All of them currently take a 30% cut, so they sell the game for $70. Now, suppose your petition to Valve works, and they lower their cut to 15%. Ubisoft is still going to charge $70 to buy the game on Steam, and the only thing changing is that they now make an extra $10.50 from Steam purchases compared to the others.
But, that's Ubisoft. What about an indie dev? Absolutely nothing different. Microsoft and Sony's distribution agreements make it a contract violation to have a lower MSRP on a competing platform.
In our current reality, that 15% more-than-necessry fee will never go into the hands of the consumer. You are not being a champion for the consumer by rallying against 30% platform fees, you're literally arguing to change the ratio of money going between two corporations.
Yes you are defending rent seeking behaviour, which is what rent gouging landlords do.
Its not arguing about shifting money between two arbitrary corporations, it's about shifting money to the people actually creating something, not the people who own the store that sells it to you.
Every dollar Valve gets, is one less that a game developer had to spend on staff and creatives to make a better game.
Valve is the city. Indie devs can easily use itch.io or GOG instead.
I agree, but could you elaborate on the indie dev part? Why would they have distribution on PlayStation/Xbox?
I used the term "indie" a bit loosely. I had games like Stardew Valley in mind, where it started as a solo project but became popular enough to warrant porting to other platforms.
Well, not all indie games become that popular.
We hate rent seeking. We'll hate Steam if they raise the profit margin. We're not talking about rent gouging. Piv's point is that large publishers dominate the landscape and won't bulge their prices. This is compounded by Steam's anticompetitive clause against having a lower price on other platforms. That part is bad. However, the washing machine is well oiled and speedy. Epic's is the clunky one, unfortunately. The only Steam alternative I'll happily use is GOG and itch.io, where indies can still publish.
Steam has what nobody else does and the only thing I pay for are games that are mostly on sale or from a keys site. It seems you have an extremely biased view, it seems om average Valve employees make about 107k or something close to that. They're certainly far from a terrible company like Nestle.
You don't seem to have idea of how much a billion is and how much money is valve making. Enjoy your icecream while it's cold because you can't afford too much of it.
Most of those companies actually contribute to the kernel or to foundational software used on servers, but few contribute to the userspace for desktop consumers on the level that Valve does.
So?
People more readily appreciate things that obviously directly affect them.
And the Linux Kernel which powers the whole thing directly effects them, so we should all praise Microsoft and IBM like we praise Valve right?
Userspace affects users much more. I value getting Wayland color management support much more than the following kernel gobblygook lifted straight from https://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxChanges:
So?
Just because you don't understand electrical engineering doesn't make it less valuable then paint. If Valve is a saint for contributing to Linux then so is Microsoft and IBM and we should all dick ride Microsoft and IBM like the Valve dick riders in this thread.
The point was "People more readily appreciate things that obviously directly affect them." The only ways that directly affects users are improved execution times and footprints that users won't notice. So no, we should not all praise MS and IBM like we praise Valve, especially when Valve also contributes to the Linux kernel.
So basically "we should all be little dumb dumbs who praise the shiny bauble in front of us, not the actual work and effort that goes into creating something".
Interesting point.
Are you saying that creating drastic usability improvements don't involve work or effort? You'd rather get a CPU 2 generations newer instead of a federated social media platform?