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Then again, Valve gets 30% to 20% of the benefits from all sales from their platform. It's easier to be generous when everyone has to pay you to make cash.
This.
Valve doesn't release games, it releases ads for Steam.
Which is fine. It's great. Makes for great, cheap products and long-term strategies that aren't trying to shake all the money off of you.
But that's the end goal, still.
As a friendly reminder, Valve also universalized DRM, invented multiple new types of microtransactions and actually kinda invented NFTs for a little bit.
Invented the loot box y'all love so much. Tried to invent paid mods. Valve is still a Corpo and corpos gonna corpos
Honestly I'll defend TF2 loot boxes til I die. There are valid complaints as far as casual gamers go but as someone who played the game for thousands of hours the cosmetic system added a lot of longevity to the game. It was a fun ecosystem to engage with and compared to modern games where you spend $15-20 on a single cosmetic item it was an absolute bargain. If you got tired of an item you could trade it for something else too.
Idk maybe I just got indoctrinated but I have so many positive memories of that game and interacting with the cosmetic system. These days every game you play is shoving their store front in your face. Every cosmetic is $20 and if you don't buy it now it's lost forever. Don't want to spend money? Ok here's an "event" where you need to play the game 2 hours a day for a week to unlock some meh items and if you don't then fuck you those items are gone forever.
Sorry I'm ranting.
Agreed. It sounds weird saying, but I feel that Valve did these things right or at least fixed them quickly thereafter. I've never felt any sense of pay-to-win or being left out playing TF2. Quite the opposite. I'd get the new items quick enough, and if there was anything in there articular I'd want then there was a robust market willing to make it happen for cheaper than I thought. And "cheaper" referring to in-game items.
I actually agree that loot boxes aren't intrinsically bad.
I mean, I was buying Magic the Gathering cards before anybody got mad at making blind purchases. The entire field is called Gacha because it's modelled on analogue equivalents people don't mind at all.
But that's not what the community will tell you. Loot boxes are THE problem, if you ask this in a different context. Fundamentally predatory.
Unless you bring it up in this, and only this context. When Valve does it it's fine. Never mind that they had and actual gambling problem around their retradeable cosmetic loot box drops. Or that their implementation is indistinguishable from others. Or that they have a pattern of innovating in the monetization space not just with loot boxes but with battlepasses, cosmetics and other stuff people claim to not like when other people do it.
The shocker isn't the actual business practices, it's the realization that you can get so good at PR that you can't just get away with it, but have the exact same people that are out there asking for the government to intervene to stop those actively defend you against the mere suggestion that your business model is your actual business model.
Look, I was out there during the big loot box controversies that there were babies going out with thtat bathwater. I like me some Hearthstone and CCGs and other games that do those things. I like a bunch of free to play things. Got a TON of crap every time I even dared to float that online. UNLESS it comes up in a conversation about Valve. Then I get crap flung in the opposite direction.
I'm not saying you shouldn't like them, I'm saying that brief "maybe I'm indoctrinated" moment of realization should make you take a minute and reassess your relationships with brands and corporations. We are all subject to PR influence.
Don't TF2 loot boxes contain weapons that alter the gameplay?
Playing a touch of devils advocate here but, how are patreon only mods any different than what valve was trying to do? It seems if mod makers wanna get paid for their work they should be able to monetize it in via any avenue that fits their fans abilities.
Uh, paid mods were around in the 90s. Probably earlier but that's what I can testify to.
Maybe it's a good idea to pay modders for their work?
So the greed can take over?
Nah, give me amateurs making silly broken mods over corpo market researched boring ones any day of the week.
Invented but never abused. Remember who the abusers are. I don't mind loot boxes in TF2 or CS. I simply don't have to open them or buy them. There's no pay to win there. And with paid mods they said it clearly, they underestimated their audience and returned the money. You think Bethesda has done such a thing or Blizzard?
That 20-30% tax also gives developers access to Valve's massive infrastructure (content delivery ain't easy or cheap) and Steam's audience, and that's something that can't be replicated with exclusivity deals.
Oh, and they KNOW that, too. Valve's entire business model is making other people work for them. Their third party relations talks are less keynotes and more thinly veiled, very pleasant shakedowns.
They can shake down corpos as much as they want, I don't care. Sony and Microsoft have been shaking down corporations for 30% for decades, it's fine by me if they get shook down.
Not corpos, though. Corpos have deals with all platforms, they're not concerned about positioning on Steam. Valve will go to them, and if they don't their marketing budget will carry them.
No, it's the indies who end up bending over backwards to fit Valve's marching orders. It was contentious for a while, during the awkward period when Steam was figuring out how to crowdsource store placement. Now that they've successfully done so they invest very little and get to tell indies what to spend their budgets on, which they do often and explicitly.
If I had to compare the relationship, it's closest to Youtube and content creators. Have you noticed how every Youtube video now has a little intro with highlights from later on? Like that.
I feel like your first statement is a massive stretch.
Through Steam, GoG, and Epic the Indies can avoid the far more expensive 30-70% cut publishers take.
I'm not going to pretend content creators on Youtube don't massively benefit from youtube. There's a reason kids now-a-days want to be youtubers not astronauts or something. Does it suck to be beholden to corporate overloards? Yeah. But if you work at EA, Google, Valve, CDPR, Epic, Apple... you're shook down for your wages all the same.
You get nothing from those compared to Steam, though. The only third party that can compete, and that's declined a bit, is Nintendo. And Nintendo is a bit of an additive thing, anyway. It's where you go when you can afford it or got big enough on Steam to get some attention.
I'm not gonna say it's impossible to survive around the edges of Steam, but man, if you're an indie dev and Valve says jump you are up in the air before you even ask how high.
I have to say, it's crazy how many things get more palatable in these conversation when you point out that Valve does them. Microtransactions, cosmetics, NFTs, content creation guidelines... it's a lot easier to get people to admit the upsides when it's those guys.
Which is fair. The thing is I'm not even against most of those practices in principle, and I agree that Valve are good at making them smooth and friendly. The big exceptions are the absolute mess they made of crowdsourcing store curation and the ungodly mess of the CSGO skin grey market. And they have more than enough brand clout to get those swept under the rug. Coca Cola wishes they had the brand loyalty Valve gets.
I’m not gonna say it’s impossible to survive around the edges of Steam, but man, if you’re an indie dev and Valve says jump you are up in the air before you even ask how high.
I'm just saying that's any employer. If you make all your money through Steam then Valve is your employer. If you make all your money through Youtube then Google is your employer. If you make all your money through Twitch then Amazon is your employer.
On PC you get to pick who you're going to have fuck you. You can pick to Minecraft it and open your own website and hope that works out or you can have Valve/CDPR/Epic in your pants telling you what you can make and how much you can have of it.
Welcome to capitalism I guess.
But indie devs don't work for Valve.
I guess technically video creators don't work for Youtube, although that one is murkier. Steam is a storefront.
Think of Amazon, actually. That's probably a better comparison. Amazon workers work for Amazon. Their relationship with Amazon has to do with labour conditions and so on.
But if you're a seller, or a small store that tries to sell online your relationship with Amazon is not a labour relationship but it's still extremely asymmetrical. You have no power in that dynamic.
I mean, you're absolutely right, that's modern late-stage capitalism. The astounding thing is how well Valve manages to position itself outside that. Just look at all the pushback that pointing that out gets you in this and other threads. Poeple HATE the idea that Valve exists in that space. "Good guy Valve" is deeply ingrained and it demands that you think about them in a different way than Amazon and Youtube.
Woah that's some gig economy bullshit like saying Uber drivers don't work for Uber or something. I refuse to engage in glorifying that corporations aren't responsible for people who rely on them for their livelihood.
There's nuance to it. You can't ever get good enough at driving that Uber gives you a special deal, and you aren't selling each of your rides to people on multiple services at once. The power dynamic isn't quite as lopsided, at least not for everybody.
But... it's also not completely different, especially for the smaller devs. Valve definitely comes from that same tech upstart mentality, and it only drifted further into it as they stopped being primarily a game developer and became primarily a storefront.
To add to this comment, remember that the base cut is 30%, but it goes down to 25% and later to 20% as the game reaches certain thresholds of revenue. This isn't meant to shake down the large corporations (indies benefit the least from this policy), but to make their system appealing enough to developers large enough to be able to try their luck somewhere else.
Exactly, they're offering useful services for monetary compensation. How dare they?
Not services, they are offerning their status. That's different.
You don't go to Valve and get services any more than you do from Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft. Valve isn't looking for content, though. They have all the content. The entire firehose.
To be clear, I'm not saying Valve is worse. But it's at best about the same, and arguably harder to work with on anything but getting out of your way to let you publish. The one thing I begrudge them is taking the social media model of making others work for you for free into game publishing, which I do think is a bit iffy. Maybe I'm just old fashioned there.
You are fundamentally misunderstanding what services they offer.
For starters, the infrastructure. Publishing a game, or any online content, is a massive undertaking. You need a robust solution for both storage and delivery. It needs to be scalable with the number of downloads, able to handle the bandwidth of parallel downloads, and resilient to hardware failure. You need a CDN to overcome geographic obstacles. You need a solution to orchestrate the distribution of software updates. In current year, most of these issues are solved by various platforms and the process is extremely streamlined. You upload a video to Youtube and soon enough a person in Timbuktu can watch it in full HD. Steam's infrastructure does the same thing for games. Storage, distribution, updates, and lots of smaller online services that make up a robust gaming platform.
Steam is a fairly competent storefront. I'm not a game developer, I can't speak for the full experience, but at the very least, Steam implements discoverability, payment processing, and license management. All things that a fully independent developer would have to implement or pay to have someone else do it.
Finally, you can't just equate Steam's large audience with their status. Community features, the almighty algorithm, discoverability (again) and recommendations are all features that would not exist without Steam.
If you can't see how all of those are valuable services to game developers, you're beyond reason.
No, yeah, Steam's business model is very comparable to Youtube's. That's my exact point. I've made that specific comparison elsewhere here. I don't know how long you've been around the "Fediverse", but when you're not actively defending a corporation you like way more than a human should like a corporation that's not typically considered a defense around these parts.
But hey, yeah, that's a good mental model for it.
Look, I'm aware of the work Steam and other gaming first parties do. Like, very aware. Way more aware than most. You're Internetsplaining the crap out of this to me right now. And I'm telling you Steam has been actively cutting down the amount of those things they do based on their quasi-monopolistic positioning. Their entire business model and concept is to create a platform that runs itself (or is crowdsourced to its audience and creators as much as possible). That goes all the way down to content creation, discoverability, curation and more. Their idea is to do game-publishing-as-social-media.
I have very mixed feelings about that, but I don't think it's fundamentally invalid. They've staved off enshittification so far because they have SO much money and they're a private company, so they aren't mandated to drive endless growth out of that model.
The observation I'm making is that Steam hangs in the same space, ideology and business practices as Amazon or Youtube, but they absolutely don't get the same crap for it as Amazon and Youtube. Which demonstrates a somewhat horrifying fact: It's not the existence of the billionaires like Musk, the monopolistic behavior like Amazon or the black-box gig economy algorithm that pisses people off. It's just the enshittifiation of the end product. If the incentive system in publicly traded companies wasn't so terrible at doing its job people would just live in the shadow of Google and Amazon and Twitter for the rest of their lives and actively love it.
I mean, I guess in a way it's comforting, in that it's proof positive that the liberal assumptions about the market self-regulating optimally are absolutely wrong, but it's still kinda disappointing to see the true power of branding.
Valve's entire business model is giving users what they want. People praise Gaben for a reason. When faced with piracy he didn't go and add Denuvo or something equally stupid. Instead he localized games and provided a better service to users than pirates did.
Trend these days with every company is to blame the customer. If it's Bethesda, then yeah you computer sucks you need to upgrade, optimizations be damned. If it's Epic, then it's exclusive deals with developers who later run to Steam in attempts to get some more money. Blizzard released Warcraft3 reforged in such a sorry state people couldn't play, but they made sure people couldn't use original WC3 game and had to buy reforged.
He literally made online authentication DRM mandatory for the biggest single player PC game of 2004 in an absolutely unprecedented move.
People were furious.
How has everyone forgotten how big of a ragefest it was to force everybody who bought HL2 in a box to connect to Steam? I swear that guy stumbled upon the One Ring or the spear of Longinus or some mass mind control device, because it's absolutely nuts how much people have memory holed all this stuff.
I think the mind control device is speaking to values people actually hold and then doing something completely different, kind of like mainstream political parties here in Australia. There's an imaginary honest, oldschool merchant Valve that lives in people's heads, and there's the actually practicing Valve the megacorp.
Or, more broadly, just the incredible power of cultivated charisma and rhetorical prowess and a cult of personality. The fervour with which people take any impersonal criticism of a business as a personal attack on a close friend, family member, or community is evidence of that.
See also a certain Square-Enix director spouting conservative, transphobic rhetoric and somehow being hailed as an ally, minus a small amount of people who saw through the smoke and mirrors act.
I swear there's a cohort of people that could have gotten into politics but decided the games and tech industries would make them more money.
Okay, by your own account Valve's good standing is "imaginary honest,old school merchant". So can you point out at least some malicious acts they performed?
I am not just blindly defending them, I have no benefit in doing so. But in reality, especially compared to other publishers, they are really benign. I can't remember when was the last time Valve screwed over their customers. Sure they disappointed some people with bad game releases, but all those people got their money back. Compare that to what Blizzard, EA or Bethesda do. It's night and day.
Again the memory hole.
Valve fought against pressure from regulators to have a returns policy tooth and nail. Memory holed.
The first major platform to establish one of those was actually EA's Origin. Valve only agreed eventually when the rest of the competition started making that a standard and it seemed easier to just go with regulator requests at that point. Memory holed.
I'll say this for your argument: Valve is much more likely to screw over devs than end users, as a matter of both strategy and corporate culture. Most of my issues with them historically go in that direction.
But still, there are plenty of examples of Steam getting weird about these things. You just acknowledged them using their position to enforce DRM minutes ago, and that's already down the memory hole.
I actually agree that Valve is pretty solid operationally when it comes to customer service, at least for their size. They have a good view of short versus long term gain. But there's a big, big gap between being good at community management and customer service and being "night and day" against the "malicious" competition. That narrative is nuts.
They did abuse their position to push Steam as a distribution service. Valve was ground breaking in many moves, good and bad. As for how people forgot how big of a ragefest it was, because people love to rage and Steam turned out good.
They did the work for global credit card transactions, tax, distribution, forums, cloud saves, multi-player support, anti-cheat, achievements, controller support, friends lists, unlimited game keys, workshop for mod support, add drm, voice chat, and more. All that for a 30% cut.
Yes, we've established they are a first party like any other. For the record, if you manage to get Microsoft/Activision, Sony, Nintendo, EA or Ubisoft to publish your game they'll also throw QA, marketing and localization into the mix.
The difference is you'll sign a specific deal and have a publisher at that point. Valve will tell you what they want you to do, then poof out into the distance and give you a link or at best an API to access all of those things at no extra cost to themselves. Their entire business model is for others (both devs and users) to work for them within their systems. Which is fine. I'm also less hostile to the gig economy than many around here, but even I am not gonna actively cheerlead for it.
I think you're missing the principle. They could still charge for it, they simply won't. Think of it this way, if it was EA in that situation would they give it away for free? Somehow I doubt it because EA does things for profit. This is a potential avenue for profit and which means not asking money for it would go against the goal of EA.
Is it though? The only reason other platforms take 15% is to try to break through valve's market. Once they make it (like Epic) you better trust they're going to take as much as they can.
Plus, it's apparently not easy to be generous, Apple and Google make far more money, where are they being generous? Gaben is a gem
(Google and apple also take 30% of transactions on their store). You get much more for you 30% to valve than 30 or 15% anywhere else.
Well it's easier even to want more money, cooperations giving something away for free that could have earned them money is not that common.
It is when it gets people on your platform, and more likely to spend money on other things on the platform. It's called a loss leader.
Yup happened to me, I tried half life since it was free and absolutely loved it, yes and that's why I bought the complete pack (around 8 games iirc) for the 6€ (around 6.5$), and it was an absolute steal imo
Epic, Bethesda, Blizzard and others are not paying for those 30% to Valve. So what's their excuse? Bethesda resold Skyrim enough times to shame anyone. Blizzard remade Warcraft3 and we all know how that went. I for one am happy Valve did this. They gave an old game a new life for at least a short time by giving it for free to keep, added new multiplayer maps and added some servers. Let people have some fun at anniversary instead of being greedy.
Yeah, this is cool and all, but it's like Epic posting a game for free, which they do every week or so. People still complain about Epic being greedy or whatever though. I like the products Valve makes, but this isn't particularly amazing, just fairly nice to have.
Epic paid people for exclusivity in an attempt to force the customer to use its shitty platform. The free games are just bribes to try to get us to use it. And it's still not working very well for them.
Nobody would have complained (well ok, some would have, but few) if they just tried to make a better store than steam and get people to use it that way.
They could still do the free games as a bribe, to get people to check out the store, but the store would actually need to not be garbage. The exclusivity payments really rankled people though.
i love it when the epic games store flashbangs my eyeballs when i claim the free shit they give out. what an amazing marketing strategy
fr even though it's a very petty thing to complain about it just shows how little care they put into their platform
I bought one timed exclusive on Epic (Stranger of Paradise), it left the entire redundant download behind without moving it and devoured 220 GB of my SSD in the process, and I decided I never wanted to use the Epic store again.
I'd love to move to GOG, but then I'd have to go through Lutris, which is currently in the process of crashing constantly for reasons the devs don't fully understand, so RIP to that I guess.
Yeah, but it's still more profitable for indie game studios to put their game on steam, since they have a larger market to sell to, also valve doesn't just take the money and goes, they spend it to make really good products that aren't profitable and wouldn't be possible else like the steam deck and proton
People behave as if Valve is holding a gun to indie dev's head and forcing them to pay those 30%. Steam has so many users for a reason. It's not a monopoly on a whim. They offer a huge benefit to their users at no charge and as little annoyance as possible. People who don't want to sell on Steam, don't have to. Easy as that. Sure Valve charges a lot, but they use that money to create a really good quality service that will give them the ability to charge that much without having to resort to timed exclusives and other vile tactics.
They take nothing if you sell your game via keys on other sites like itch.io
Exactly. It's not like Valve is forcing people to sell their games on Steam. People simply like using Steam. End of story.
The power of monopoly
Blizzard, Bethesda, Epic and many others don't pay those 30% to Valve. So what's their excuse for not giving free games?
Valve is also not holding a gun to developer's head and forcing them to pay those 30%. Valve takes that money and makes a great service that users want to use. That in turn gives them the right to charge that amount of money.
When you look at all the features from cloud saves, chat and voice communication, simple networking without having to mess with routers, Proton, family sharing, streaming, card collecting, trading, achievements, huge sales, anti-cheat, workshop, communities with forums and bug reporting tools, lax refund policy, etc. When other companies start offering same value instead of forcing your hand with exclusives, then we can talk about monopoly