You know sometimes I actually straight up FORGET that Steam is run by the same company that created Half-Life?
They:
- identified a gradient of human wants
(Video games exist; I want them on my computer) - Created a vector for that want to be satisfied
(Digital distribution that conveys the games I want to my computer) - Stayed the FUCK OUT OF THE WAY
When you do something well, people don’t notice you’ve done anything at all.
They simply did what everyone else refused to do, get out of their own way.
I think the key was that Steam wasn’t created to make money, but to solve problems they themselves had, like “How do we get new versions of Counter Strike out to all these players?”
Then as Valve wasn’t the only company having these problems, the solution could easily be sold to others.
If the other companies really wanted to crack Steam’s near-monopoly, the solution would be to tackle the problems associated with not having all your games on Steam. Work together on a open-source launcher supporting all stores, similar to GOG Galaxy. First make something useful that tackles an unsolved problem, then you can make money off it when it becomes successful.
Instead they go in just trying to make a buck, and end up just being worse versions of Steam.
That ended up being a bit of a rant, but I’m frustrated at their shortsighted market strategies :p
Oh indeed! And that’s why I love GOG! I actually try to check GOG first just in case I can buy a game I want there before I go through with buying it on steam. I would actually gladly pay MORE for the GOG version because it removes bullshit like DRM!
I used to do the same, but I lost a lot of confidence in GOG after they retroactively restricted their cloud saves to 200 MB.
My hundred-hour Witcher 3 save is exactly the kind of thing I want backed up, but that’s no longer possible. And the very low limit they set, and the urgency with which they started deleting the very data they were expected to keep safe, reeks of a desperation to save money that makes me hesitant to invest more in their ecosystem.
I really want them to succeed though, and I think they have the right idea with Galaxy. Even Epic giving me games for free doesn’t make me actually use their client or store.
But somehow the obvious idea of forming a consortium to develop open standards and implementations for game clients, doesn’t seem like something that will ever happen.
- identified a gradient of human wants
Does nothing? DOES NOTHING?! He spent the last few years ripping Microsoft a new a@@hole, rendering their operating system meaningless for gamers! …but nice meme
Gaben has done lots of awesome shit. I fear what valve will become when he’s gone.
I’m not actually too worried. He surrounds himself with champions.
they’ll fuck shit up. Look what happened to apple after Steve died.
So. Many. Dongles.
you know they developed the iPod touch in secrete because they feared that if Steve saw the ugly prototype, he’d shitcan the project?
And where’s the iPod now, eh?
In the iPhone?
Same
Fun fact many don’t know, Gabe helped create the first versions of Windows and claims he learned more at Microsoft than he ever did elsewhere (at the time). So in a way, he’s transcended Windows, vs ripping it apart.
Just my two cents but as others have said, not being publically traded helps a lot. The focus on short term benefits that come with shareholders stops “master plans” when they come with mistakes. Learning from relative failures, like the steam controller and the like, ultimately contributes to major successes like the steam deck. Being able to stay committed to improving the software experience over time, instead of killing the product when it didn’t immediately succeed, is fairly rare in the tech industry. And in all honesty, it would be better if they released a polished profuct, but being committed to it made it a success.
I feel like the pressure to have a majorly successful product day one means that smaller companies can’t innovate the way they want to, so they have to find other ways to produce revenue. Huge companies, like Apple can afford to do both but still stumble, like with the vision pro. Maybe it’ll be a success, but for now its not great and iteration makes it more difficult to maintain the original vision.
eh, kinda think strapping a monitor to your face just isn’t the future movies seem to think it should be
Yeah, Apple was able to fall on their faces with the Lisa but still get to the Macintosh and greatness.
You can either be publicly traded and let greedy shareholders sell things for parts or you can have private ownership and pray to God that they’re benevolent. There has to be another option, surely. Maybe one where Valve becomes employee-owned with a trust/foundation backing it once Gabe dies?
Private company with long-term strategy VS public company chasing short-term profits to pump stock prices for shareholders.
That’s the primary reason I abhor the stock market. It no longer works for the creator/owner or the customers at all. It simply feeds the greed of the wealthy (special call-out to private equity here).
Yeah, the flaw there is that money can flow into and out of the stock market basically instantly, so you always have to manage their expectations to make sure your price doesn’t crash.
“Don’t interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.”
His plan isn’t based off trying to squeeze blood from stones, it’s to sell some video games. Not a very capitalist mindset, but there you have it.
Valve takes 30% from every sale on Steam, which is quite landlord-like. Although there are much worse practices in the market.
Oh no, a sales platform that takes a cut of revenue.
Valve isn’t a charity, and they provide very good services for what developers pay.
Devs don’t need to host download servers, they don’t need to staff customer service reps, they don’t have to set up banking infrastructure or worry at all about handling payments from hundreds of different banks across hundreds of countries.
It’s not like valve takes 30% and sits on it. They put that money to use.
I am not against it.
you gotta take into account the insanely good service both devs and players get in exchange for those 30% here is a list
EGS finally has a shopping cart now, so it’s basically equal now, right?
now it just needs to stop sucking
Don’t ask TF2 player how they feel about this meme
TF2 released in 2007
I mean it’s true for TF2 also, overwatch killed itself lol
They did the bare minimum of banning bots so TF2 has been going pretty great recently. I think I’ve encountered 1 or 2 bots in the last 2 weeks and I’m pretty sure those were just blatant cheaters and not actually bots
I have a mixed feeling about Gabe and Valve.
While I am insanely grateful for proton (even if it was strategically important for them, they didn’t do it out of kindness of heart), some other stuff disturb me:
- Valve being so lenient on CS2 skin gambling, hurting the young people
- A steam account being un-inheritable, making you defacto a tenant of your games
- The 30% percent cut, stealing money from devs
- Gabe spending his money on multiple mega yachts, like every asshole billionaire, instead of making the world a better place
- Gabe claiming to be a libertarian, like Elon and other pieces of shit
- The 30% percent cut, stealing money from devs
Sigh. Here we go again. I’ll just copy one of my older comments about that attitude.
Steam is not a parasitic middle man, it is a collection of services that would have to be provisioned and operated by the developer otherwise. The 30% cut pays for:
- A massive infrastructure to store and deliver the game and its updates, worldwide, and at an acceptable bandwidth that Valve operates
- A storefront that enables monetizing the game
- The audience and discoverability that would not exist otherwise
- The Steam API, achievements, cloud saves
- The client itself, content management, validation, and Linux compatibility tools
- Network and operational security
- Also keep in mind that Steam and its services are operated by experts. A game developer would have to hire the experts or get training.
If the revenue from the cut exceeds the operational costs: it’s called profitability, not theft. The world doesn’t run on good vibes.
Yeah you’re of course right, they are not a charity and shouldn’t have to provide their service for free.
I expressed myself too quickly (the rage!). What I meant is the this cut of 30% is fucking predatory, mafia or middle-age money lender style. You get one third of the rewards of my efforts just for delivering my product? And don’t talk about promotion because this store is now stuffed with too many games for visibility.
You can argue “but this is it the standard rate of the industry”. Well it is predatory everywhere else and I hate Google and Apple as much for it.
A cut of 10% would be more humane. Or whatever to reach a “normal” profitability. But now the discussion becomes complex because we don’t have the concrete numbers.
What is sure, is that it is possible without pain to take way less than 30%. This is something EGS got right, even if I dislike them for many other things (Epic and Tim Sweeney).
predatory, mafia or middle-age money lender style.
Your words have lots of sentiments, but present no facts. I know that Wolfire and Sweeney are independently throwing a tantrum, and we all hate taxes, but I don’t see public exposés showing game developers who went hungry because they couldn’t afford the 70-30 split.
I’ll also remind you that the EGS (12%) is barely profitable, and operated for years at a loss, only sustained by Fortnite (which used dark patterns to extract money from kids, in case you want to see something actually predatory).
I have read your link but they didn’t say the EGS is at loss specifically because of the 12% cut nor that the Fortnite money is subsidizing the lower cut.
It could be that the EGS is at loss because creating a new store and client from scratch costs money ?
To be honest here, we don’t have the numbers to say exactly how much margin Valve is making. But my guess is the following: if EGS estimated that with a 12% cut they could be profitable if they had enough customers, it makes me think that the cut of valve is way overinflated in regards to their costs.
And yes Fortnite is awfully predatory. But the topic is Valve and Steam there 🙂
You get one third of the rewards of my efforts just for delivering my product
you have not read the comment you responded to.
and forgot or ignored that it often is not the dev who gets most of the money at all but publishers like ea and ubisoft. why should customers act in defense of those companies who actively try and make gaming worse for everyone?
an indie dev paying 30% is expensive but steam is really a premium platform for distributing games. it would be nice if it were cheaper but I don‘t really understand the outrage here
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The 30% percent cut, stealing money from devs
This is a pretty spicy take. Let’s consider two possibilities:
-
Game devs choose to distribute independently, and sell their game for $20. They sell 100,000 copies and make $2 million in revenue, and keep the entire $2 million.
-
Game devs choose to distribute via Steam, promote it with a 50% off sale, it goes to the Steam front page, sells 500,000 copies at only $10 each, for a total $5 million in revenue. Steam takes $1.5 million and the devs take $3.5 million.
In scenario 2 the devs make 75% more than in scenario 1. Did Valve steal from the game devs?
Obviously Valve and the developer collaborated to steal money from the consumers who wouldn’t have bought the game without the promotion.
to make sure: /s
-
I love Valve for a lot of things but I’ll never forget that they spearheaded some of the most predatory microtransactions in the industry (loot boxes and battle passes) and were happy to help Bethesda try to sell mods until players raised a huge stink.
A steam account being un-inheritable, making you defacto a tenant of your games
Can’t you just give your kids your steam password ? How would they notice ?
Yes you can workaround it. But this is still a society right they forbid you. And who can say that in 2100 they won’t implement a cleanup job that lock all accounts that are over 100 years old ? 🤪
I’m not sure about that either - unless you really want your real name on a Steam account, you just change the password and the payment method and you should be fine, right?
You can’t change the login username. That’s about it. You can change the profile link, profile name, avatar and other cosmetics, and edit payment methods.
I didn’t knew about he claiming to be a libertarian. Rothbard must be turning over in his grave.
Here’s the thing - Theoretically we shouldn’t give a shit about his political leanings and we don’t have to, because he and his company deliver a good service. I can privately think he’s another asshole libertarian tech bro whose only guiding principle is “everyone should be able to do what I want, but only some people should have the money to do those things”, but it doesn’t change anything about Steam or Half-Life 3.
But this is a problem right ?
Because the libertarian view of the world DOES have an impact on Steam: they have so much inertia to fight against hate speech and extreme right, they do nothing against gambling, and so on. All under the pretense “free speech” which is so convenient.
IMO this is the view of the modern libertarian: all the money, none of the accountability.
It is a problem, you’re right. We shouldn’t have to rely on people with the motivation to do good. Capitalism is failing because without regulation, it motivates people to fuck each other over for an extra dime.
A steam account being un-inheritable, making you defacto a tenant of your games
This is unenforceable under US Law
Well I am European 😂
don’t you guys have better consumer protections?
Maybe, maybe not.
Frankly I don’t even know if this clause can be enforced in Europa. I wanted to point out that we shouldn’t rely on the customer protection laws of each country to address that: this clause shouldn’t exist in the first place.
But to be frank, it most likely doesn’t come from Valve and rather from the games company themselves.
Not to mention his insane Porsche collection, yeah he’s just another billionaire
Valve ruined my favourite game (dota) by flooding the game with ridiculous cosmetics that even change particle effects with no way to disable any of this
There’s nothing wrong with having money or expensive hobbies. It’s not like he’s collecting Senators or buying himself a seat in the Oval Office
“If you have the patience to sit by the river and wait, eventually, the corpses of your enemies will float by.” Sun Tzu
Wu wei is a polymorphic, ancient Chinese concept expressing an ideal practice of “inaction”, “inexertion” or “effortless action”,[a][1][2] as a state of personal harmony and free-flowing, spontaneous creative manifestation.
Ancient Chinese philosophy has an answer for everything man
They had some thinkers back then for sure
The “do nothing and win” strategy.
I can’t really get my head around why people dislike Gabe Newell. As best I can tell, he’s been a fantastic steward for Steam.
Gabe Newell has a net worth of $9.5 billion and there is no such thing as an ethical billionaire. Steam is great and as long as the company behaves well there’s no reason not to use it, but billionaires are not your friends.
They are some rare cases where someone becomes a billionaire because something suddenly took off.
Had she not went TERF, JK Rowling would be next to Gabe.
She would arguably be better, because she doesn’t provide gambling services to minors.
Even then, a person can survive just fine with $900 million dollars, and $100 million to the right charity can do a world changing amount of good.
There are no ethical billionaires.
Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
That statement is an absolute.
Steam is selling lootbox and profiting from cs skins gambling. Pretty fucking scummy.
Yes, their profits.
Eron Wolf might be one of these exceptions. FUTO is trying to support and make sustainable small software projects.
Sort of agree but look how much he’s done for Linux gaming. Also the steam deck was well thought out and designed to be user serviceable.
Sort of agree but look how much he’s done for Linux gaming.
Let’s not forget that Steam is a proprietary third party launcher that doesn’t share any values with linux. Valve built the apple store of videogames, while they are now moving in a better direction keep in mind that they are part of the problem.
Sort of agree still. Steam deck is a great example. They built it to be user serviceable, and you can literally switch to the Linux desktop and use root, and reinstall your OS if you want. It’s not locked down crazy like other systems. Remember the PS3 other os? Didn’t even get graphics drivers, then they ultimately removed it when it was used to jailbreak it.
Was that all Gabe? Or was that people at Valve who had the ideas and executed the ideas and Gabe is given credit for?
“yes”? He’s definitely not building any significant fraction himself, but if he didn’t care for these things he wouldn’t let the company put so much resources into them.
Credit for the things built goes to the people building them. Credit for it being possible to build goes to the people who founded and funded the teams
Some people hate all rich people regardless of what they have gotten due to their work.
Just wait till he dies and the next person in charge decides to go public to make a quick buck. That’ll begin the immediate enshitification of Steam. How many years do we got till he croaks? Ten? Fifteen? Better hope we have a better alternative before then.
A very typical arc for innovation is that the first organizational goal is getting people to buy it, then the next goal is getting them to keep buying it again and again. The original visionaries who were trying to solve a problem tend to lose interest by then and drop out, and the money weasels completely take over. New versions are released on a marketing schedule regardless of whether they’re necessary, and the thing begins to suck progressively more and more until some new player shows up to solve that problem.
Rinse and repeat.
doesnt gabe already do basically nothing though? afaik there are other people managing valve and he only acts as valve’s face
also theyd have to be extremely stupid to start enshittification when they already have the best ways to monetize games (skins in cs2, hats in tf2, etc)
im not saying its not possible, im just a very optimistic person
also theyd have to be extremely stupid to start enshittification when they already have the best ways to monetize games (skins in cs2, hats in tf2, etc)
Micro$oft also has the most dominant operating system in the market. Yet, with every update, I find an increase in “switched to GNU/Linux” and “Debloat Windows” stuff
Google once had the best search engine in the world, delivering the most relevant search results. Now it delivers the most relevant ads.
Mozilla was initially the innovator of the internet, seemingly destined to dominate the market. Then, it abandoned^(†) its main product, the browser, to pursue other endeavors that ultimately failed. The only reason that Firefox is relevant is due to the fact that even when stale, Firefox is much less enshittified than its competitors (and not dependent on Chromium).
^(†) Mozilla basically stopped innovating with Firefox until recently. On desktop Firefox, vertical tabs are absent; only recently, in nightly versions, have they been implemented. On Android, Firefox still lacks cross-site isolation, which has been in Chromium for basically forever now.
and steam is the largest game store, but that’s not what i was talking about.
microsoft’s money doesn’t come just from windows, and from seeing how shitty it has (and will) become, they want to get more money from it than they already have. that could be because windows doesnt produce enough money for microsoft or for other reasons.
google’s money comes from advertisements. as google grew to be used everywhere, there needed to be a better way to get money from it, so they started doing more advertising.
just like google’s search engine, firefox doesn’t produce money by itself. but mozilla didn’t have any other means of producing money, so they had to do something else for that, even if it didn’t work.
valve’s money comes from the games and items sold in steam. people aren’t going to stop producing or buying games and in-game items any time soon.
all of the other companies had to change their main way to produce money, because that wasn’t producing enough money. but if valve changes anything they’ll just be shooting themselves in the foot, because steam already produces an almost ulimited amount of money for valve.
I’m not going to use something that’s shitty now in hopes it will be better later in order to avoid using something that’s better now out of fear it might become shitty later.
If Steam becomes shitty I have no issue dropping it and pirating my already paid for collection.
I’d like you to point to where I said you should use something shitty now.
Ah, so that’s who this guy is. Thanks! Tbh I had no clue and thought it might be George R. R. Martin.
We are on lemmy, a decentralized and open source platform. Steam is closed as much as reddit is.
Promoting gambling to kids and use the profits to buy multiple mega yachts is peak scum.
A massive, massive astroturfing campaign Epic Games paid for in hopes of tarnishing Valve and Gabe Newell’s reputation to try and bolster their failure of a shop ecosystem.
Unfortunately, it worked, because there are people on the net who don’t remember the and days before steam, or even the initial versions of steam that people had Actual problems with, and not just made up ones.
You can’t become a billionaire ethically. Steam has a pretty big market for lootboxes and cs skins gambling is pretty widespread.
It’s called making a product/service for their customers instead of for the shareholders bank balance.
This is why Gabe is the goat
