Yesh if you ignore the massive slap that is the steam machine.
Valve got so good at doing nothing for a decade they forgot how to do things again lol.
The Steam machine would’ve been amazing if it was affordable. You can hardly blame Valve for the AI bubble and current RAM pricing though.
“i am angry at the company who’s killing physical distribution on console. to comfort myself i’ll glaze the company who killed physical distribution on pc”
???
This is just kind of moronic. Valve didn’t kill physical PC games it was the Internet…
Valve isn’t in charge of CD production, they’re just providing a digital storefront. Game publishers choose digital because it’s more profitable when you can ignore logistics.
I don’t know about others, but as an end user, I hates having to deal with physical media. Being able to just download any game in twn minutes is great.
(I know that there are lots of potential drawbacks with that situation, but it’s really convenient, unless you’re in a third world country with no bandwidth, in which case it probably sucks)
For something like a PC or main console I don’t mind it but I’ve never been one to sell or trade. Something ostensibly portable, like the Switch, that I’m more likely to take somewhere without an internet connection? Sucks.
I admit I’ve never used a non pc platform, the deck was the closest I went to a console. I would possibly change my mind if I ever did, although it’s probably a bit late for that.
It’s nice for retro gaming too but the original storage media is falling apart so emulation is the inevitable future.
There’s two main reasons why I like physical media:
- Longevity. If the maker/publisher of the game doesn’t want to support it anymore or goes broke, I still have the game.
- Used game market. I’ve got a backlog of PS4 games I got cheap because they still existed after demand went down, so prices went down.
Steam meets both of those in different ways.
- Any game I’ve purchased on Steam has remained available to install, even though some of them aren’t available for sale anymore via Steam. If a publisher folds, Steam can still serve their files to people who bought the game before it folded. This might change in the future and there might be exceptions where a publisher went to court to stop Steam from serving the files (not that I know of any cases of this, just acknowledging the possibility exists here while it doesn’t for physical games you already own), but so far so good.
- Steam sales are often better than used game sales. Sure, not all publishers participate in them, but my steam backlog dwarfs my console backlog because I can often buy multiple games for the price of one used disc game.
They are both ultimately in it for greed, but a different kind of greed. Sony wants the short term make most profits this quarter every quarter, even if this quarter’s strategy hurts next quarter, that’s a problem for next quarter.
Valve seems to at least understand that not taking its users for granted and forcing shitty options on them to make a quick buck will mean they are more willing to continue spending money on their shit.
Also, Valve didn’t come in trying to end physical media, they were a digital service from the start. Similarly, I had no problem with some games on the PS store not having physical releases and I’ve even bought a few. My issue is that the physical disc drive is one of the main reasons I even have a ps5, so saying they won’t be doing them anymore mostly just means that the ps6 won’t be as interesting to me. I’m not even really mad, just disappointed and moving on.
To be fair physical media for PC has always been a bit different than the “insert disc, play game” you get on consoles.
For modern PCs most don’t have optical drives anymore and it’d have to be USB sticks and there’s no guarantee if It would outlast an optical disk. Kind of a tough situation for archival purposes.
And to be fair, there are so many games on steam or GOG that I want to play, we can wait until they are on sale. Usually for a fraction of the original price.
Turns out if you don’t have shareholders to report to, you can focus on making things better for consumers rather than squeezing every last penny out of them.
Yeah just squeezing every penny from developers instead.
You don’t afford a fleet of yachts without stealing something from someone.
Right? Damn. That’s why private companies are better
Whooaahhhhhhhhh there, bucko, let’s slow the fuck down there. There are PLENTY of terrible private companies out there! OpenAI, Anthropic, Pulte, and Kiewit come to mind.
That sounds like most of the terrible private companies are just companies that want to go public.
This is peak Gaben simp meme. Steam were the pioneers of “you don’t own the game, you just own a licence to play it” model which has caused massive amounts of enshittification of the gaming industry. Not to mention all the other bullshit they’ve pushed over the years.
But valve always gets a pass because dumbass games think “lord Gaben” is their best friend because he sells other peoples games for 90% off some times.
I hear this more frequently nowadays, but it really is kind of misplacing the blame for this change. Steam went for this model precisely because many of the bigger game companies to this day refuse to sell their games as anything but a heavily restricted license. And Steam as a storefront does have to cater to them in that regard, especially back then. Even physical disks as others pointed out were technically not something you owned, but rather that resale and such was not enforced or enforceable. (You would definitely get some stern letters if you started copying and selling those games at larger scale, even if you ‘owned’ the original copy).
People do still sell DRM free games on Steam that you can copy and distribute to essentially your hearts extent without Steam ever getting involved. The license you have is for Steam to provide you the download service so you can get your digital copy (and a bit more). If you care about people owning games, then it’s up to you to support and buy from the kinds of companies that don’t provide you a license or (more likely) where the license is unrestricted enough to fit your description of ownership. The middleman like Steam you buy it from shouldn’t matter if they don’t exert undue control beyond that. And at least being on PC if you really must buy something with DRM you have options to remove it.
Microsoft pioneered the “your software is licensed, not owned” in the early 80s. Even before Steam, you didn’t own your games. Even if they are on physical media, you don’t own the software on the media; you just own the media it came on.
Idk man. I remember someone recommending spec ops: the line a few weeks ago, but said it’s not available on steam any more. I bought it eons ago and had no problem besides controls getting it on my deck.
Have you finished it yet? It’s best played through fairly quickly so you can remember different parts. There are a couple of frustrating encounters, but the story is top notch.
Fuck me! No I got like 2 hours in a while back but my god damned AuDHD had me focus on something else.
Not a particularly bad place to stop, I got a few hours in, stopped, then when I picked it back up I realised I’d basically stopped right before the story kicks in and was hooked for the rest.
I think I stopped right after the white phosphorus scene. Maybe it was emotionally fucking with me is why I dropped it. Now that I’m thinking about it, I’ll prolly pick it up after my family leaves town.
i still can download the crew
This meme is my pet peeve, it annoys me so much. It cannot be further from the truth.
Valve doesn’t do nothing. They intentionally operate their platform in ways that keep customers satisfied, while making long term investments into hardware and OS development. That’s not “nothing”. That’s doing a lot of things right.
A career in IT in a nutshell
Truth.
That’s why I hate the annual “what did you do this year to justify your salary?” reports we have to do. It’s like…“Was everyone else able to do their jobs? Yes? Did we get hacked this year? No? Then I was doing my job”
everything is broken
“What are we paying you for?!”
everything is working
“What are we paying you for?!”
it’s amazing to me how valve employees & gaben haven’t become out of touch with their customers (i.e. ordinary people), despite how rich they must have gotten. it’s documented phenomenon in psychology that the richer and more powerful you got, the less capacity you will have for sympathy. basically, as a company gets big and rich, they stop being able to understand what will piss their users off (think “dO yOu GuYs NoT hAvE pHoNeS?”).
this hasn’t seemed to have happened with valve yet, somehow. they still seem to be down to earth people. (btw, if you haven’t watched any of the steam sales promotion videos, they are pretty fun, take a look).
Not a public company, makes big difference
You say that, but spaceX wasn’t a public company 3 weeks ago either.
What did they do to gamers
Not surprising when I think about all the different ways the extremely wealthy have corrupted all of our democratic and regulatory institutions, but it’s pretty ironic that only privately held companies can respond to public feedback in a healthy way these days
Hyper-Capitalism? Nooo.
//RETRO//-Captialism? … significantly better by comparison.
Terrifying, but true.
‘Stakeholder Capitalism’ turned out to be approximately the same degree of bullshit as ‘Abundance Agenda’ is now.
I think it’s because it’s filled with competent people who genuinely like what they do. I definitely see that in their hardware division at least. Money isn’t so corrupting if it’s a tool to enable what you do and not the focus.
The entire company is somewhere between 300-500 people.
It literally fits into a few floors of a tower in Bellevue.
Meanwhile… Microsoft essentially bought the land area of a mid sized US city, and turned it into a sprawling corporate complex.
… and that is just their main campus.
Microsoft literally runs a private shuttlebus system in the Seattle-Bellevue-Issaquah area, to get people into and out of their campuses.
They then also have local private taxi services to get people from one building in a larger campus, to another.
There’s your scale difference.
Microsoft is essentially a semi-sovereign entity, occupies substantial territoty, got their own police too.
… Valve has something like 5-10 concurrent floors in a single building that is basically on top of a shopping mall.
I imagine because their work environment is laid back, it’s easier to just enjoy it and not worry about squeezing everything out of it.
Its misleading to say that steam is pro consumer, they use their monopolistic position to maintain their much larger comision that their competition, besides the whole drama about them promoting online gambling. It’s just that they act decently enough that allows them to continue.
The commission/valve cut is tiered.
First $10m of revenue: 30% cut
Between $10m and $50m: 25% cut.
Over $50m: 20% cut.
Then you have all of the incredible things Valve offers to a game dev, beyond simply existing where most pc gamers are…
…here, use our achievement system, here, you can make in game items tradable, here, you can use our servers for multiplayer peer discovery and linking friends to friends easily, here, you have a whole storefront, news blog, and discussion board… oh you made your game for Windows? No sweat, you don’t need to port it to Linux, we got you there. Oh you wanna do DLC? We got a whole system for that. Oh we forgot to mention cloud saves, we’ll do that for you. And! If you want people to mod your game… we’ll host all their mods, and make it so users can just upload them and download them and such.
You know how many games I’ve seen start on itch.io, incubate, develop, then do an initial launch on Steam?
Way, waaay better plan than just jumping straight into Steam Early Access. You put a firewall between the people on Itch who know they are beta testers, and people on Steam who expect working product, and thus avoid the reputational damage of going through all or most of development on Steam.
Anyway… I’d call all that stuff pro-indie-game-developer.
I certainly agree that gambling, p2w loot drops are bullshit, and the Steam item market being able to convert into actual money is… not good, and should be changed.
(I will note though that a game dev can decide if their game’s items will be directly tradable, or marketable for basically SteamBucks, or both. You can just only allow them to be directly traded.)
But the rest of it? Yeah, a whole lotta games that start with little money can have a lot easier time developing and remaining financially solvent, with all the infrastructure that Valve/Steam provides… maybe the analogy would be they effectively help you up a few of the first rungs of the proverbial ladder.
Its also worth noting that Valve is not a publically traded company. They do not have stock. They do not have a board of investors or shareholders demanding line must go up.
They do things the old fashioned way, they build up a giant warchest of money, money they actually have, with no loan payment due, no strings attached… and then then deploy that money to do things like invent their own VR tech, fund Proton development, build the Steam Machine and Steam Deck, etc.
Every other company in the space that does anything like this is beholden to capitalist investors and the demi-gods of banking and finance in a way that Valve isn’t.
Its why Unity enshittified and then imploded, and why Godot hasn’t.
When you need to make line go up for somebody, when you very directly owe people money… shit comes out the end of the pipe. When you don’t… as long as you manage your own affairs well, you more or less are in charge of what comes out of the pipe.
This take always ignores the immense value of the Steamworks SDK.
Valve’s cut enables free: multiplayer, voice, chat, game notifications, in-game purchases, stats and achievements, rich presence, cloud saves, Steam Input to support any input device you could imagine including for accessibility, error reporting, persistent inventories and tradable items, game keys, leaderboards, matchmaking and lobbies, remote play, remote play together with a remote friend, screenshots, modding / workshop, authentication and ownership validation, anti-cheat and game bans, virtual/augmented reality, special/positional audio, multiple game builds and beta channels, global CDN, community discussion / forums / game guides, sales stats, playtesting, automated builds, developer streams direct to the store page, demos, DRM, automated compatibility tests, Linux support for Windows binaries via Proton, GoldSrc, Source, and Source 2 game engines, game cafe / licensing support, marketing and promotion tools, common runtime environments to target for Linux (and alleviate external dependencies), glmgr to translate DirectX to OpenGL for macOS, and much much much more.
That’s what the Valve cut covers. It’s an insane amount of functionality to put into your game and take a huge weight off your shoulders. It’s what enables one-man indie studios to be able to make a hugely popular multiplayer game that blows up overnight without needing to bare the burden of building all the required services yourself nor the cost of running them.
Epic etc take a smaller cut, but can’t offer anywhere near the amount support in return requiring end-users to have a subscription to cover the cost of the services.
Thank you, fartsparkles, I didn’t know any of that.
I’m fairly certain every platform offers an SDK with mostly the same things.
A lot of that stuff is just there to stop users from easily migrating in any case. Making mods only available inside a closed ecosystem so it’s easier to charge for them and grab a cut isn’t actually a good thing for instance.
There’s also the fact that valve could easily offer all that and only grab like 3%. 90% of the cut is there to cover Gabens new boat purchase, not for the features.
Gabe doesn’t need to buy new boats, he owns a company that builds them…
much larger comision
GoG, every console, play store, and Apple store take the same cut. Itch io is strange and takes a smaller cut but only indie games publish there in the first place. Epic and (windows) Microsoft store take 12%, but they fucking suck and you know they’re evil fucks that would definitely fuck you and publishers over as hard as they could if they ever got the market share. I couldn’t immediately find numbers for all the various publisher run stores (I’m not even sure if arbitrary games can sell on them) like the ubisoft one but they also fucking suck and are run by evil fucks.
It would be awesome if steam took a smaller cut, but complaining about it like it’s not the same cut everyone else that has marketshare takes and accounting for the ones that do take less being garbage run by public companies trying to buy marketshare then enshitify is disingenuous.
GoG, every console, play store, and Apple store take the same cut.
Because they were following Steam. Steam set the standard. The IOS store came 8 years! after steam.
Steam practically invented the idea of monetizing consumer rights for profit. You used to own your games. It is law that copyrighted works can be resold. The specific case was that publishers were trying to restrict reselling copyrighted work for cheap.
That’s exactly the law Valve violates by saying “it’s not a copyrighted work, it’s a steam key.”
Gabe was the original tech bro- profiting from breaking the law by saying “it’s on a computer”
Link to refutations of this claim in another thread https://programming.dev/post/52898840/24679399
I agree with you that this doesn’t mean they are ethical or pro-consumer. But they do keep the consumers satisfied enough.
Same shit as amazon
I think it’s “proconsumer” because the alternatives are so awfully anticonsummer that you see them as the desired alternative.
I mean, if someone comes and tells you: hey, you have two options, I shoot you with a revolver in your head 5 times… or I kick you in the balls once.
Sure, the kick in the balls sounds awful, but if your only alternative is getting shot 5 times in your head with a revolver…
And right now, this is the videogames market.
Yeah, you really have to read between the lines. Like, if this guy wants to kick me in the balls, and the alternative is 5/6 shots from that revolver in my head, then what’s his plan for that sixth round? He’s obviously gonna shoot me in the balls. That’s what it means to be an informed consumer these days.
Okay but look if I’m gonna be stuck in this situation, the revolver has to be out of the picture. Otherwise what’s stopping him from just kicking me in the balls first and THEN shooting me?
I don’t know where this metaphor is going anymore but I simply refuse to die screaming and clutching my nuts. It’s so undignified.
They also profited like crazy from under age, unregulated gambling and did nothing to very little to curb it.
Yes. They profited (less than most of their competition) from it, and only acted when forced by governments (while their competition is still resisting).
I refer you to the meme. Do the least, win.
I suppose they mean that they do “nothing” because they are not figthing their opponents in the market. Valve’s opponents just keep shooting themselves in their feet.
Valve does a lot, but one of the reasons (maybe the main reason) they are so successful is that the others are all trying a speedrun to the bottom.
Because most users are too lazy to use a few brain cells and assume doing something means being on the news.
This meme is a pet peeve because sony is doing exactly the same thing that valve did when they released steam, of going digital-only and tying game ownership to digital accounts.
Playstation is a walled garden. Steam is nothing like that, like, at all.
Okay but, so many different machines can run Steam and play a huge chunk of its entire vast library.
I can go to my local college and buy some heavily abused Optiplex from their surplus for like $90, install Steam, and play anything from Half-Life to Stardew Valley lol.
PlayStation will sell you an expensive single-purpose console, then sell you the same single-purpose console with a little GPU and RAM boost as a “PRO” forced upgrade, and then sell you access to back catalogue emulators as a monthly service. Blegh.
…Also Steam’s got family sharing, so that’s cool.
The biggest advantage I thought consoles with physical media still had: You can check out games from many public libraries.
I bet Sony is champing at the bit to put the kibosh on *THAT. *
I’d say in the end, Steam robs the customer significantly less at every turn.
Yeah, the big difference is you don’t have to use Steam on PC, nor does Valve appear to pursue exclusivity agreements to for consumers to get any particular game only from them. For Playstation, you use the PS Store or you don’t play.
i will not say that Steam has a lot of pro-consumer functionality. but in this particular case, the thing that sony is being critizied for is something Valve has already done, 20 years ago
You can’t stop selling physical copies if you never sold physical copies in the first place
Valve did sell physical copies for quite some time you know
Oh you’re right the first game I ever bought was Portal lmao they did stop selling physical copies
‘doesn’t make there products intentionally shit’ and ‘competition shoots themzelfs in the head’. I think I know why they are winning the race
you see, legally, the completion must shoot itself in the foot.
The moment you have shareholders it is the legal obligation to pursue unlimited growth, sacrificing everything to reach the quarterly quota. leading to enshitification.
We keep taking like these are individual leadership choices, but they aren’t. It is the legal duty of EA, Sonic, Microsoft… to sacrifice long term sustainability for a quick buck.
invest in open ecosystem
maintain and develop platform for user
70/30 cut to offer thing on market
run gambling system
“nothing”
“When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.”
– God (In Futurama)
Threaten companies who want to sell their own games elsewhere, possiblly even different versions, for less than on steam due to cut differences
Can’t find it now but I read that that drama was over the dev using steam servers, then also giving away the game for free on a separate site.
So yeah, no free infrastructure.
It’s currently in the courts in multiple countries. The accusation is that Valve has an unwritten rule that Steam must have the best retail prices. For example, Ubisoft, who runs their own platform, could not sell Assassin’s Creed on Steam for $60 and on Uplay for $50.
This would make some sense from Ubisoft’s position, as they don’t have to pay anyone a commission on their own store, and customers may be willing to come to them for a lower price than Steam. In this scenario, no Valve infrastructure is used for the Uplay sale.
So, again, the accusation (currently unproven, but alleged in court) is that Valve strong arms others into not being able to do this. Still it for cheaper on your own store or elsewhere that takes a smaller cut? We’re gonna kick you off Steam.
This is believable, because Steam commands a dominating user share. So the threat of losing access to those users is very powerful. It’s also believable because people don’t become billionaires by being ethical.
However, naturally, Valve denies this unwritten policy exists. The cases are ongoing.
people don’t become billionaires by being ethical.
I always think this because hoard money is unethical, not because cannot earn billion without play dirty.
It’s both.
Is there any proof? Or just survivorship bias?
Survivorship bias is kind of how capitalism works. The most unscrupulous ways are the easiest and fastest ways to gain money and money-adjacent things. Its not always good for long-term earning, but by that point the capitalists have moves on to something else leaving the workers to shoulder the loss. The less capable capitalists end up sharing that burden with the workers sometimes, meaning they end up not surviving to billionaire-hood.
Basically, to become a billionaire you have to survive all the other people trying to get there as well. Being more ruthless and more conniving, and more willing to throw others under the bus.
We can say there are exceptions, and Gabe and Valve certainly seem like ones… but as others have pointed out, they’ve resorted to less than savory methods on occasion to make sure they come out ahead. Its unlikely that its to an extreme reached by other industries (diamonds and chocolate come to mind first), but that doesn’t mean they have no guilt to bear. Just more forgivable to most in light of alternatives.
*when selling steam keys
There must be more specifics about that too. I know games I backed on patreon needed to make the price for a key higher since steam wouldn’t allow it to be gifted at a lower cost. But Humble Bundle does that, so I’m not sure where the line is.
RELEASES NOTHING ON DISK
jajaja Valve is god amen!
WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS HYPOCRITICAL SHIT, LEMMY?
Sure, but at least Steam allows you to burn backups of games to a disc. Haven’t seen other platforms let you do that yet
There’s a whole platform whose whole shit is selling you games that you can back up and keep forever. GOG is the only one that will never take your library away from you, unlike Steam who can and has before
Ahh, I forgot about GOG, fair enough
Steam is platform, not game developer/distributor. CD is up to those, not to steam.
No shareholders to demand unlimited growth and constant enshitification.
Meme with the guy that helped removing discs for video games on PC in the context of Sony saying they’re going to phase out games on discs.
Steam does not force you to only buy games from Steam, even on hardware they sold.
Yup, Gabe did it first. DRM is not your friend
The big difference being that you can easily get to the game files on PC.
Of course that still doesn’t give you a second hand market.
Destroy physical games on PC, and set the precedent for other platforms People don’t care and still buy games Other platforms, seeing that physical games are not profitable and digital games sell as well, begin to shrink that market People hate them and praise you Profit
Looks like a good application of neutral jing.
