When your employees are so efficient they start using their spare time to audit each other’s efficiency on an industry-wide metric.
I have heard that its not too hard to start your own project when working at valve.
Maybe it will turn into their next game, or a new steam feature or it will get canned.
I mean with that money printing machine and good reputation among users it’s no doubt be cozy for devs to start stuff without having someone breath down their neck for costing too much money or too high of a risk.
Back in 2021, indie developer Wolfire filed an antitrust lawsuit against Valve that accused the gaming giant of anti-competitive business practices—including a long-standing habit of taking unfair cuts from game developers on its store. Valve’s 30% fees have come under criticism before—and they are notably high when compared to some other online platforms.
Ouch. I didn’t realize they took such a big cut. On the other hand, authors trying to publish to Amazon’s kindle get hit with commissions from 30%-65% before any other fees, so Steam seems downright reasonable for that particular comparison.
From where I’m sitting, though, I’ve plenty of complicated feelings. Steam might be the best option out there, but monopolies aren’t great for anybody—at the same time, business is business.
Steam’s absurd efficiency could be a product of merciless penny-pinching from indie devs, but it’s just as likely we’re watching a well-oiled machine continue to belch out cash in an expected fashion.
Is it really a monopoly with everyone from EA to GoG delivering games? I guess it is dominant enough to count. I have a hard time complaining when employees are getting good pay and I’ve continued to get good service from them. It might get scarey if/when Gabe steps down, but this all feels pretty fair for now.
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The unusual though possibly wrong thing that differentiates steam is they don’t appear to engage in all that much anti competitive behavior. Possibly some, but not really that much. Ultimately if it’s better for the consumer but worse for ‘the economy’ who’s really losing out? By what metric?
For now, at least. But the secret to valves success here doesn’t appear to be very closed source. A fairly flat internal structure, moderately functional store and community reputation building, mostly keeping promises and having which reputation that when they don’t they can weather the storm. Nothing there seems unachievable unless your design philosophy is so cut throat and monetized that you just build a bad product.
Monopoly’s themselves are not necessarily bad. Its when they use the monopoly to spread into other areas where it becomes the problem.
Just because monopolies can have a fanbase, doesn’t mean they don’t negatively impact society.
The cult behind Steam doesn’t understand the problem that will arrive once Gabe retires. The amount of power they gave this single entity will come to.bite them in the ass.
It’s not like there are any better options.
GOG perhaps, but that doesn’t strive to deliver the conveniency, and ignores Linux players.
Epic? Lol.
Any other private company launcher? Well, just no.
Everyone will be gone one day, Gabe, Linus Torvalds… but that doesn’t mean other people don’t share their values and the original idea will be gone too.
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If your proposal is some sort of grant program to make that infrastructure easier to come by then that could be neat. Nothing about steams actual technology is unique though.
A federated indie store could also be neat, though like other federated systems with money involved especially you’ll need to be extra careful about how it’s all set up to make sure the result is any good.
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The point is, steam competitors don’t do badly because they lack the man hours of steams Dev team. They do badly because of terrible company vision and incentives. Open sourcing a tech doesn’t solve a problem that doesn’t exist. I don’t even think open sourcing steam really does… Anything, for developers. Philosophically cool, practically useless, everything that steam is exists in piecewise form already. Turning steam into a federated service is not meaningfully faster because you make steam open source.
Gog is the closest and does fine. The technology is about on par with steam, the philosophy of the service better, and they are doing fine. Not overwhelming steam no, but fine.
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Steam isn’t a monopoly; they have competition. As far as I’m aware, they also don’t have a mechanism to lock people out of the market, so there’s probably no danger of them becoming a monopoly. I have no idea why people are going around saying they’re a monopoly when they demonstrably aren’t.
“So we’re getting pay rises, right?” Annakin.gif “Right?”
You should dive down the rabbit hole. Valve does not have a workplace like anything you’ve seen before, and the pay is just as fucked.
Like… In a good way?
I’ve added a video link to my original comment. should clarify a bit.
Please invest some into the Linux client. The dropdown click-through problem exists for years already, the source of the problem is known and would be easy to fix on your side.
Or develop an API coupled with your DRM, so the community could develop some good interfaces already.
A whacking great cut of somebody else’s money will do that.
If people dont like the cut they can use another shop front or make their own. PC gaming isnt locked down to any specific store front
Praise GabeN.
Actually earned profit too
What does that mean? They take a cut of every game sold, they didn’t make that product. They make the platform the games other people made are sold on.
It’s a good platform nonetheless, but IDK how much of it is actually “earned” as opposed to just a big cut taken from someone.
It’s well known that server infrastructure and software development is free
I never said those things were free. I did say the platform is good, but their income is from the games sold on the platform that other people made.
I don’t know what metric would properly capture money/time spent on infrastructure and servers, but I don’t think it’s “money per head” if that money is from games sold and doesn’t strictly relate to how good their platform performs.
If games company’s could make more money by not releasing on Steam, they would. The fact that they accept the 30% cut means that Steam is in fact leading to more sales for those developers and thus earns its cut. No one HAS to sell their product on Steam, PC’s are a completely open marketplace
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I’ve despised steam ever since they forced it on me to play HL2.
I hate the store page that pops up whenever I want to play a game.
I hate the friends list.
I miss when I would just install a game and it was just an icon on my desktop. Now they think they should own my gaming experience and they’re so powerful I can’t say no.
You can download games using steamcmd (command line) and pick only games that are DRM free on Steam. Valve doesn’t force DRM (even it’s own one) so, if you see a game that require DRM (Steam or whatever) it’s solely because the publisher put the DRM into it.
Once you’ve downloaded your drm-free game through steamcmd, you can basically zip the folder and store your game wherever you want… even on the cloud (your own personal space, if you share it publicly it’s piracy).
Also, you’re not even forced to use Steam: itch.io and GoG are preferable ways to buy games and improve your drm-free wallet-vote situation.
I just want to comment that your comment covered all my bases so well I didn’t need to respond to OP myself
That last para is missing the fact that you’d have to go to a store and buy a CD and come back home and play vs downloading in a few minutes in today’s time plus get insane discounts. Not to mention easily conquer compatibility issues. Also use controllers very easily including dualshocks. You can still have desktop icons, you can ignore the friends list, and disable notifications/pop-ups.
The only one that seems surprising is Apple. All the others don’t really make products that are sold. They make revenue via advertising on things they give away free. Valve not only used to make games they still sell, but made a store platform not a social media network.
