Only Valve? I can name a few more companies.
I seem to remember a company that thought this sort of thing gave users “a sense of pride and accomplishment”
Maybe since they own Steam, they’d cascade the ruling to games sold on their platform.
Maybe this is what we need in a way. So many governments are jumping down valves throat specifically that they might actually cause valve to go bankrupt, deleting all of our multiple thousands of dollar libraries, and then (hopefully) causing riots. Which will (hopefully) cause the laws to be changed forcing these companies to SELL GAMES not fucking licenses for the temporary use of a game…
Idk. I don’t want Valve to fail. I think that’d overall make things worse for gamers. I just want them to stop operating a casino.
If Valve fails, we’ll have so many great alternatives, though!
- Epic Games Store, with it’s… uh… better fee structure that benefits the publishers.
- EA’s Origin, with direct access to the exact same Origin website but instead presented through an Electron app.
- Ubisoft Connect, with the latest access to Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed games and related reskins sold under different IP.
- Battle.net, with the feature to run partially-downloaded games and stream missing assets in on demand.
- GOG, with real installers for its games that you can hoard to a hard drive sitting in your closet. (No sarcism. This one isn’t terrible)
- The Microsoft Store, with its incredible ability to revoke your license for the Notepad.exe program that comes installed with Windows.
Who needs a forum, mod portal, user reviews, or Linux support anyways?
I’m not sure where I stand there. Steam is a great platform, but for purely capitalistic reasons. The only reason they aren’t as bad as other platforms is because they’re privately-owned and take the long view because they don’t have to worry about the day-to-day fluctuations on stock value.
Gabe isn’t your friend. He’s a billionaire yacht-collector who makes the vast majority of his money by taking a massive cut from other company’s products because of their virtual monopoly that exists because they launched an online marketplace in 2004.
Let’s be a bit fair, your local store selling a physical copy is also taking a cut of the other companies profits. The 30% valve charges would be just the same as GameStop/other store would be marking up the game from wholesale prices. (I still would rather have physical copies, but valve charging a percentage on each sale has always been a bs argument against them)
30% makes sense for a physical store with high overhead, inventory, staffing, and other expenses.
Valve could take a 5% cut and still make a ton more than a retail store for the same product.
Open steam settings > Downloads, click the dropdown at the top. That whole dropdown menu? That’s what their cut pays for. Rack space, network capacity, and storage, to deliver ALL games on steam efficiently, across the planet. That ain’t cheap. And that’s only part of what it pays for.
You know what it costs to run a retail store? And even in 2025 GameStop had 10 times as many retail store locations as Valve had employees.
And it’s not like retail has no tech infrastructure expenses.
If they called them prediction boxes would it be ok then? Seems to work great for kalshi and other prediction market platforms.
next thing they’ll be saying is that loot boxes were in the epstein Files.
