Gonna piggy back off this to drop a decent summary from coffeezilla about valve’s lootbox gambling problem that Valve has consistently dodged responsibility on. It’s really not new news but folks should be informed/reminded of it nonetheless.
I don’t watch CoffeeZilla in any large amount, but this pretty well sums up the situation in this instance.
I’m not bothering watching all the video. I hope they highlight that a good part of the company clients are kids.
you may think a company named valve would know a thing or two about cash flow
The valve is actually broken, stuck in the on position.
Might have something to do with getting underage kids hooked on gambling.
“It’s making more money per employee than Apple”
And how much are the game devs whos game are on steam making? If Valve ceo has enough money to buy a billion dollar worth fleet of mega yachts the share is simply off, Valve is making billions nobody else is.
70%…and devs are happy to pay the 30% to get on a platform that’s worth a fuck. Valve carries the servers, the bandwidth and service. Tons of indie devs have made it via steam. They’re a platform for games, not a healthcare company or apple that’s exploiting slave labor.
Plenty of villans out there, valve and gabe isn’t one of them.
That’s highly debatable. Maybe not for the specific reason being discussed, but Valve, and by extension Gabe, IS complicit in stuff like CS:GO gambling which preys on the underaged and and vulnerable.
valve and gabe isn’t one of them.
A guy who owns a billion dollar worth fleet of mega yachts in 2024 (climate crisis and everyone getting poorer) sounds quite the villain to me.
Tons of indie devs have made it via steam.
And even more didn’t make it. Steam being so big and the market spinning around it actually works against promoting smaller games because there’s just as much you can see on steam shelf.
So we’re at a point that, someone who owns something because they’re rich makes them evil?
Y’all have lost the damn plot if that’s the case.
No billionaire has clean hands. Think beyond just Steam. If an if an indy developer wants to independently release a game they’ll probably fail. Why? Because if you’re not on Steam or one of the other big services you won’t get noticed. They’re also big enough that no competing services are going to show up. They’re priced out. You’re automatically excluded from the market. Steam, Epic, et al by default are rent extractors first. You want to play as a dev? You’re forced to pay.
The fuck? Are you suggesting there is somehow a better way for people to find indie games? Let’s say steam doesn’t exist at all, and every indie dev has to host their own website and files…tell me how you plan on getting people to find their games?
You are on lemmy, a open source and decentralized platform where thousand of different instances federate with each others…
Cool, that still doesn’t answer the question…and if you’re suggesting that people build a decentralized platform to rival steam…no one is stopping them from doing so.
You are forced to pay either way or do you think hosting (both installers/updates and some sort of multiplayer matchmaking), marketing, payment providers,… all work for free? Without something like Steam you would just likely be forced to pay someone just to manage all of that for you as an extra employee (or multiple part time employees or outsourced services).
People forget what it was like matchmaking pre-steam. Games would vanish if they weren’t some huge game publisher with a big following.
You can absolutely do your own marketing, host your own infrastructure, etc, but that’s way more expensive than just paying Steam’s cut. Some games went that way (e.g. Minecraft), but most see a ton of success through Steam and decide their fee is worth the cut.
I don’t see how that’s a bad thing. Indie devs should focus on making a good game and creating promo content for it, and let Valve handle distribution, multiplayer, sales, etc.
Valve is successful because they make a good product that both users and developers like. EGS has a much lower profit share and provides far fewer services, and devs understandably choose Steam because it offers better value.
I wish their cut was lower, but the arrangement seems more than fair.
If devs think they can provide a better service, they’re free to sell their game directly on their website if they want. They can even sell Steam keys and not pay any cut on those from their own website, so they can compare direct sales and Steam sales easily.
So we’re at a point that,
We are at a point where if we don’t reduce emissions humanity is doomed. A fleet of private mega yachts is a smack in the face to everyone trying to change for good and so is a smack spending billions on “toys” when the average person is struggling to pay rent.
You seem to have lost track of the plot and of reality, look around yourself there’s a disaster or a tragedy happening every single day.
Mega yachts aren’t causing our issues. 3rd world countries with no regulations for environmental impact and consumerism is. Most of these yachts just sit in a port doing nothing but collecting dust 99% of the time. Thinking that getting rid of yachts is going to even scratch the surface of our environmental problems is a joke.
Exactly, it’s just virtue signaling.
If you look at sources for pollution, it’s largely:
- energy production (esp. in industrializing countries)
- personal transportation (esp in US, we’re the second top polluter, and transportation is #1 or #2, depending on how you count it)
- heating and cooling houses and offices - in the US (from previous EPA link), household use is #1 or #2 depending on how you count it, and heating and cooling uses the lion’s share of that
From this data, the most effective thing to focus on in combating climate change is improving efficiency of energy production (solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, etc instead of coal, gas, etc). The next most effective thing is improving efficiency of transportation, followed by improving efficiency of heating and cooling (e.g. getting people to use heat exchanges instead of separate gas and AC). Yachts, cruise ships, and other related luxury items don’t even register on the list of priorities and are merely a blip. They’re very visible wastes of energy, but they’re lately harmless.
Mega yachts fall into the personal transportation problem. If everyone would go around in a mega yacht we would be long time extinct.
If a single person throw the garbage out of the window it isn’t going to cause much of pollution so why don’t you just throw trash out?
As the ceo of a company with millions of clients many of which are kids you are entitled more than everyone else to show the good example.
What you are saying is simply wrong anyway, mega yachts and billionares are indeed a big cause of pollution.
All of those studies are flawed as fuck. They assume the products the rich sell as polution. Do you sit there and include farmers in it as well because they sell/grow the food you eat which is a huge contributor to climate change. The yachts they buy, sit in dry dock 99% of their lives. You bitching about it is pure ignorance.
Considering their only major competitor has enough money to keep trying to lure players to their significantly worse store system with free games for years now instead of going the route of actually providing a decent product I think Valve making money off their good product strategy is a good thing.
Exactly. Steam’s main competitors:
- EGS - literally bribes users with free games and pays for exclusivity agreements
- Microsoft - bought Activision Blizzard, Mojang and others to try to corner the game dev market, probably hoping people would use the Microsoft and Xbox stores
- PlayStation - owns the biggest console and has tons of exclusives
- GOG - major game studio (Witcher, Cyberpunk) and distribution platform that caters to DRM-free crowd
Except EGS, all of them sell their games on Steam, and Steam completely dominates PC gaming. They don’t have any exclusives other than the handful of Valve-developed games, they don’t bribe players with free games (and their sales are rarely the best), and the only hardware they make is open to direct competition if competitors bother to make a client for it (and users can play non-Steam games through Steam as well).
The only “bad” thing Steam does is charge a 30% fee, but they also let devs sidestep that through selling free Steam keys on other stores (or directly). Valve isn’t the villain here, and they’re arguable the least bad in their industry, except maybe GOG, but their DRM-free stance has less weight due to Steam’s good policies and superior customer support.
Valve takes 30% on every game sold and you don’t even own the games. That’s sick capitalism in action, yet everybody kisses their ass.
EDIT for the Steam jerkers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r0a7-qyjss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13eiDhuvM6Y
Ah, yes, capitalism. Because they don’t have to pay to maintain servers and infrastructure or anything, right?
Nor do they pay for bandwidth when you download your 100gb game for the nth time in the past month.
Nor do they have a ton of functions and services for both devs and consumers like easy refunds, regional pricing, steam keys, trading cards, steam workshop, steam forums, chatrooms, remote play… just to name some.
Yeah, such moneygrabbing comic book villains that just sit in their pile of money and don’t provide anything good.
Ah, yes, capitalism. Because they don’t have to pay to maintain servers and infrastructure or anything, right?
They are stacking billions. It means they are paying peanuts compared to what they are making.
I read somewhere most of the cost is payment providers, scams, chargebacks and refunds they can’t offload onto the publishers.
How does valve’s ass taste?
Delicious :)
Because somehow their competition is even worse
Honestly, I’ll probally care about this more when someone else tries to make a service remotely close to what steam provides. Hell epic is probally the closest we got and they are in the red AND lacking in function set that steam provides. Steam charges 30% up until 10m and then 25 till 50m then it’d 20% while giving a multitude of extra services the other companies charging similar rates don’t, seems fair to me.
some examples:
- gog: 30%
- store
- review system
- epic: 12% (isn’t turning a profit)
- store
- cloud save
- return system
- steam 30
- store
- mod workshop
- reviews
- discussion forum
- return system
- Microsoft store 12%
- store
- review system
Looking into it, IGN made a nice picture (2019 though so a little old perhaps) so I’ll add that too
- gog: 30%
They provide an easy platform for me to buy games so I use them. The steam deck too. Just because they have a competent product, i don’t think that justifies any arse kissing. Like you say, they’re a company and they’re in business to make money.
Yeah, I can see why developers would be unhappy about the 30%. Maybe there’s an argument to be made that the platform gives these games a greater potential market but I don’t know enough about the business to try making that argument.
Why would I care about Valve taking a 30% cut when they’re the best platform around? You do realise what makes them the best platform, right?
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Exactly. Why would you care about anything else than you own selfish little ass? You do realize that you’ve been brainwashed by capitalism, right?
Brainwashed by capitalism!? Jesus, what world do you live in? XD
Clearly not one where paying for a good service is acceptable.
Good service is not taking 30% of the revenue on projects that took years to developp and create loot system to get kids addicted to gambling. Life must be so easy when you only care abour you and yourself.
Yes it is, if the service is actually… you know… good. Let’s see what Valve offers for its 30% cut:
- The most robust catalogue on the internet, complete with user-generated tags, search functionality, recommendation algorithms, and fast download speeds.
- Steam servers for online multiplayer games, which even supports multiplayer mods like Skyrim Together.
- In-depth lifetime analytics for every item on their platform, accessible to everyone.
- Reviews, discussion threads and forums for every single game on their platform.
- The Steam workshop.
- Research and development towards VR, both on the hardware and software front.
- Research and development towards their own console.
- Funding towards open-source compatibility tools, such as Proton.
- Giving employees of Valve an actual good salary, which is unheard of in the gaming industry outside of Valve or the occasional indie team.
- The cost of maintaining all the above.
Pro-consumer practices, such as:
- Keeping games on their servers, and installable by the customer, even when they’re delisted.
- Allowing customers to refund games.
- Refunding games when the publisher pulls some garbage, like Sony this year… on several occasions (look into Helldivers and the PSN mandate).
- Supporting repairability and modability for their console, the Steam Deck, complete with blueprints and tear-downs.
Find me any platform or company that does all of these things. But I guess you want everything to be free and handed to you on a silver platter?
Lol, you steam fanboy are the biggest jerker on the Internet. You hate video games, what you want is “convenience” because the only thing you can think of is your ass. Let’s be clear, the very second Valve believe it can make more money by selling you buttplugs with Gabe’s face it instead of videogame, they will do it. They have less then 100 employees and take 1/3 of revenue from studios with thousand of employees and people like you will make 30 minutes to jerk them while spitting on those who makes the games. Gamers are the stupidest, most easily manipulatable loser on the planet.
Ok, so, read what you just wrote, carefully. And I do mean actually read what you wrote, because I do hope you will realise how much like a parody you sound like.
Tim Sweeney, is that you?
A great deal of that money comes Valve running an illegal underage casino, and getting young kids addicted to gambling.
Valve running an illegal underage casino
Valve doesn’t run the casino. Valve owns the real estate under the casino and collects a rent. The casino is run by a kaleidoscope of fly-by-night marketing firms after being constructed with sweatshop labor from development studios in countries with abysmal labor laws.
Turns out, it takes very few employees to be the landlord of a casino. But the casino can’t make money without a battalion of scammy sales shits and a legion of cheap construction workers. Valve can’t make money without these workers. But because it collects rents on the real estate rather than revenues on the casino itself, it doesn’t need to include these staffers in its accounting books.
Valve is directly responsible for skins in Counter Strike which are gotten with 100% gambling mechanics. The fact that they can be sold for real life cash adds to this. I’m not saying its only Valve doing this, plenty of other games on Steam as well, but they certainly have a horse in the race.
Agreed, we should not make it seem like Valve has no responsibility just because it doesn’t directly own the casinos, gambling sites, etc. They benefit financially from the way the whole system is set up and they know it. Every round and transaction directly benefits Valve financially. The more underage people get addicted to the casino system they have going on, the more money Valve gets.
I mean, who made the GUI a copy of a slot machine?
They could end this whole thing tomorrow if they wanted to.
The government need to get involved and relegate MTX. I agree they are responsible for hosting the platform and developing the systems in the case of CS skins. It’s ugly but Valve are behaving as a rational business actor in this scenario.
With Trump in office soon you can forget about regulation.
And in any case, it’s tech-adjacent so legislators have zero idea how any of this works.
The EU and Australia seem to be inching towards serious legislation relating to MTX. Hopefully they can serve as an example.
I’m specifically talking about CS:GO, which is the most predatory and developed by Valve to be so.
CS:GO, which is the most predatory
Plenty of Gacha Games are more predatory than CS:GO. Valve is happy to host them all. CS:GO is a big money maker precisely because it has a large and enduring user base that isn’t fixated on Pay2Win game mechanics. Compare that to SummonerWars or Diablo Immortal or even just Candy Crush. There’s no contest.
It’s not just the tactics that make it the most predatory. It’s the massive platform and promotion that it gets by being a valve product.
Fucking lol. The lengths you things go to. Just shaking my head at how fucking stupid you must think the average person is. What an incredibly hostile world you have to live in.
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Cool story. Where is Half-Life 3?
Hey moneybags Gabe…where is Half-Life 3?
If you think there is ever going to be a HL3 then you are a sucker.
