There’s a lot of money to be made as a middleman.
If there’s a gold rush, you want to be the guy selling shovels.
For a real comparison steam is the distributor, storefront, advertiser, and support. A bit more than just ‘a middleman’.
A vertically integrated middleman is even more profitable.
Who wants to stand up all day though
That’s why it pays so well
If there’s a gold rush, you want to run the railroads, build the houses, sell the shovels and open the general store I guess
Fortunately, that’s illegal now. If only those laws would be applied to modern things
You’re missing the actual biggest key component. It’s also a built in community forum with tons of user-requested settings. They mostly know how to cater and rarely backtrack a quality of life feature.
They’re multiple middle men at once
I would make the comparison to the monopolized railroad instead of selling shovels. There is Vanderbilt level moneys in setting up a transport network that only you control and rent seek from.
Your comment about guys selling shovels is in violation of my patent about commenting about shovels.
You’ll need to pay me a license of $300 USD for every day this comment is left online.
IDK, retail can be a tough business, just ask GOG and Epic.
It’s a lot of work becoming the de facto standard, but once you’ve made it, the money just rolls in.
At least gog has something unique in that they offer drm free games. Epic just buys fucking exclusives to try to force people over.
However, neither have learned the lesson from Valve: make it a really good experience.
GOG still doesn’t have as good of support as Valve, and I don’t think Epic is even trying with EGS. I’m happy to use a Valve competitor, but they need to make a good product first. GOG is close, and now that they seem to be sharing sales revenue with Heroic, I might buy more from them on my Steam Deck. But Valve just makes everything work so nicely that I’m hard pressed to find a reason to use another.
The thing with Valve is that they didn’t just build a store for PC games and that’s it.
Steam Input practically solved the issue of games not supporting your particular gamepad. There’s Steam Remote Play, Proton for Linux compatibility, workshop for mods, well built systems for player to player trades, cloud saves that actually work…
Steam is what makes the PC a gaming platform, rather than a box capable of technically running games.
And yet Valve’s competitors can’t even make a halfway decent store. They can cry about monopolies and whatnot, but at the end of the day, they just don’t have a compelling product.
I’m not expecting GOG or EGS to provide all those extra services, but they need to at least be a decent store, and that means better customer service and decent discoverability, yet they fail at actually being a store.
idk man, gog already has it pretty fucking good. Maybe it’s not as nice as steam, but DRM free games that just fucking work is about as good as you’re going to get really.
That fact that i can just stuff terabytes of games i own onto a disk and then fuck off is awesome. BTW, if you want a good gog interface, i’ve been using heroic games launcher for a bit with epic, it’s pretty good, do recommend it.
Yeah, I’m trying it out on my Steam Deck. This might just be what gets me to start buying from GOG instead of Steam:
We also started a partnership with GOG and now every game you buy from the GOG store inside Heroic will give us a commission, so it is another way of supporting the project. :)
Before then, GOG just didn’t support my platform of choice (Linux desktop and Steam Deck), so I always felt like a second class customer (though they did make installers, which was nice). Steam supported Linux since 2012 (I made my Steam account in 2013-ish because of that), and continue to support Linux through Proton enhancements.
However, now that Heroic makes something from GOG sales, maybe I’ll actually buy a few. That’s close enough to supporting me that I’ll give them a shot.
i wasnt even aware they had a partnership prior to this, that’s really cool actually. Hopefully that goes somewhere.
I updated Heroic and saw it in the changelog. I doubt it’s very much, but it’s still cool.
And there’s a lot of other guys selling shovels, too. It’s not that anticompetitive when someone is selling better shovels than anyone else and also charging a premium for them. Anticompetitive would be having the best and undercutting everyone else on pricing in order to make sure no other sellers had a chance.
Gabe has known it his whole life, build a product that people want and they’ll buy it. Seems more and more other big tech companies are trying to tell people what they want to buy, and people are hesitant about that.
The true meaning of “The Customer is Always Right”. It’s not referring to Karen trying to get 30 cents off shake n bake. It means if you make one product that you really believe in, but people don’t want it, then you should build the thing they want.
Valve has done that with Steam. They built something that is easier to use than any alternative. They listen to their consumers and build products that people actually want and use. And it’s turned into a cash cow.
The customer is always right, in matters of taste.
They seem to use the extra money to try to create new product categories too. Failed with the steam machine and steam controller, but that laid the way for steam input so people didn’t have to mess with potentially sketchy software anymore for non Xbox controllers. And explored VR and tried a different take on the Steam machine with the Steam Deck the next go around.
Just to add: the Steam Controller may have been a commercial flop, but I still maintain that it is one of the best controllers out there, in particular for playing strategy games from the couch (right pad > mouse). I still use mine regularly and have a couple backups. The price of the Steam Controllers now reflects that it’s technically a niche success.
Edit: and the dual trackpad setup plus integrated configurator technically does live on for the Steam Deck
Trackpads have been quite nice on the Steam Deck. I’ve used it for papers please so normal mouse games seem great for it. And touch menus for shortcuts have been handy.
I’m really sad I missed the chance to get a Steam Controller.
However, you rarely want to make the product customers ask for. If you asked customers what they wanted when Valve started, they would’ve said a better way to store CDs. Or for the iPhone, customers wanted a better physical keyboard (like BlackBerry), whereas Apple provided an on-screen keyboard to provide more screen real estate.
A good company should listen to what customers say, and then design products the customer didn’t expect that solves the problem even better. But rarely should you build what the customers claim to want.
The customer knows the problems they have, they don’t necessarily know what an effective solution looks like.
“Piracy is a service problem.”
Customers always know they can resort to a hidden extra option. They choose not to because Steam makes it so easy and painless.
Streaming services are now going to learn that lesson the hard way.
build a product that people want and they’ll buy it.
Gabe knows better, they are a professional salesman. Nobody wants or wanted a third party launcher to launch their games, or borrowing them with DRMs, or getting all your personal information mined. With gimmicks such as releasing games that only work on steam or sales applied to products that never expire, they managed to build a monopoly and get so popular that steam self propel its need.
I mean… yeah no shit. You’re telling me the guys selling products other people make in an almost entirely digital system have a more profitability per staff than the people who develop their own products?
It’s always odd that people treat Steam like it’s this small almost indie company with it’s actually a gigantic monolith with a near monopoly in the PC gaming market
I feel like the people who think of steam as a small/indie company have that impression because it’s not public and is shockingly uncontroversial for a company its size (at least in terms of revenue).
From what I garnered this is revenue, not profit. Also comparing the companies to Apple, FB & Microsoft is not really a fair comparison. I know it was the Valve employees doing this. Probably a better choice would have been something like a restaurant chain or store like Walmart.
Valve also makes ridiculous buck from their games. Every VR user wants to play Alyx, and Dota 2 with Counter Strike 2 are two of the most popular multiplayer games without being complete shitshows (like Fortnite, Roblox and whatever the hell goes on on mobile phones). Not to mention an occasional instant classics like Portal 2.
IDK, I think the Microsoft comparison is fair. Yeah, Microsoft has a ton of software development, but they also have a massive software sales side, perhaps bigger than the development side. Like Microsoft, hardware and ads are a very small part of their business, and software sales is a large part.
Comparing to Walmart or a restaurant chain doesn’t make sense since they have physical locations and a high headcount to support that physical network.
Maybe Sony or Nintendo would be a better comparison since both make a ton of money from selling games on their platforms.
Yeah, when you sell loot boxes of digital skins that are widely used on 3rd party illegal e-sports gambling sites, you make billions. Great job, Valve. Ever wonder why e-sports teams have these “BETKING360”-sponsors? It’s because young men have money to gamble with and the potential for being the next generation of gambling addicts. Valve knows that, it just doesn’t facilitate gambling directly. It just plays bank
I have no love for Gabe Newell, even if he has these charming video skits he sometimes does for TI or whatever
Zuckerbeg
Abducting kids into gambling and mine their data sure it’s a profitable business, especially when many videogames are literally designed on purpose to be addictive like drugs.
This reads like “Videogames bad!!”
I’ll never understand the absolute cock worship of steam. They’re just a huge, near monopolistic gaming store that apparently requires daily fellatio on this platform. Apparently, I’m supposed to agree or get smashed with the typical vitriol one gets with disagreeing with the hive. You Assholes
I’ll never understand why some people look at the fact that steam is popular because of their policies, and can’t help but make a comment like this equating that popularity to cock worship.
Like, we get it bro. You’re thinking about cocks and you’re mad about a half decent game store. What compelled you to combine those thoughts on a public forum?
The weird thing is that this isn’t even the first comment I’ve seen like this. Dudes that are mad about steam want everyone else to know about steam’s massive, throbbing cock for some reason. This guy alone has posted 3 of these.
Valve abducts kids into gambling, mine people data, promotes DRMs and proprietary software. All of that out of geed and seeking profits.
Especially to kids videogames are really alluring, it’s important to warn everyone against evil and greedy companies.
Ok, let’s take this point by point:
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Steam doesn’t allow actual gambling. It’s illegal in the US and they typically don’t sell games that are not legal in the US. Conflating other types of games as gambling when there is no actual money on the line is a dishonest and transparent attempt to make steam look bad
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Valve has no control over the DRM policies of the games that they sell. Valve creates an anti-cheat and that’s about as involved as they get. DRM is a gaming company corporate decision not publisher or distributor. If simply allowing DRM is what you mean by “promoting” then that is another count of dishonesty.
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What data can they possibly mine? They get an email address, some gameplay time, location data, and Hardware data. All of this stuff is pretty freely available and doesn’t really sell for anything, nor is it really violating any privacy. And besides that, you can directly opt out of Hardware surveys.
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Asserting that video games are a problem for kids and that steam is evil or profit-driven because of that is also pretty dishonest given that there are basically no game distributors that keep kids from playing video games. What you are essentially saying is that we should start doing like China does and limit kids ability to gain at all. Even then that is a government regulation and not at all on steam.
I would like to just point out the absurdity of saying that kids should not be able to play video games because of steam. For the last 40 years video games have been marketed primarily to kids. Are you going to say the same about Nintendo or Atari? Are you now asserting that companies shouldn’t Market to kids at all? Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds?
- To round it all off, literally everything you listed are things that every gaming company or distributor does in some capacity and does not make Steam different or worse. It sounds like you just have a problem with the industry in general
Thank you for this. For some reason theres new accounts showing up on lemmy who just start spouting nonsense and lies just to get other people to hate on something thats trying to make a difference.
Steam is great. For all the bad decisions they may have made, the good ones they’ve made outweigh them by a thousand. Compared to Epic who i believe has done more damage to the gaming industry.
Also lets not forget, Epic was the one pushing for crypto games. Valve comepletely banned those on their store. So who’s getting kids addicted to gambling now?
I can see the rationality of it. Once anything gets big enough there are always going to be people who look at the flaws and decide that the thing shouldn’t exist or are maybe just upset because they don’t face enough scrutiny.
But also covert marketing is definitely a thing. That is to say that people who may have an interest in seeing steam fail or lose market share one day definitely are a presence on social media that is as open as lemmy.
Steam might not be perfect, but despite what the critics would have you believe, steam is still better than a lot of alternatives.
I’m pretty sure Epic has shills or a pr firm doing anti-valve posts. They always use the same handful of talking points. There was never much hate towards valve until these last few years, other than comments on lame sales.
Let’s take this point to point yeah:
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“Loot boxes are considered part of the compulsion loop of game design to keep players invested in a game. Such compulsion loops are known to contribute towards video game addiction and are frequently compared to gambling addiction. This is in part due to the use of a “variable-rate reinforcement schedule” similar to how slot machines dole out prizes. While many players may never spend real-world money in a loot-box system, such addictive systems can bring large monetary expenditures from “whales”, players who are willing to spend large amounts of money on virtual items. Gambling concerns are heightened in games that offer loot boxes and are known to be played by children. Loot boxes also feed into the social anxiety around the “fear of missing out” (FOMO), as some random drops from loot boxes may be available for only a limited time, and players will be more inclined to spend money to obtain loot boxes so they do not miss out on these items. The use of pity-timers in loot box redemption also can feed into the gambler’s fallacy, appearing to give credence to the player that they will be assured of a high-rarity item if they open enough loot boxes.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loot_box#Player_expenditures_and_gambling_concerns
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Simply allowing DRM in your proprietary platform, advertise product with these and locking your games in a library is more than just promoting DRM. Still i’ve only said they promote these.
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Name, address, credit card number, e-mail, age, IP address, device unique id, chat logs, forum posts, voice chat recordings, hardware enumeration, browser history. Go ahead and type all these information here for the public since it’s not big deal, if you are afraid keep in mind that i can just pay Valve a bunch of money to get these anyway
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What you are saying is that since everyone does it than it’s ok. Fine than what i’m going to do is pick the biggest company in the market that does that and call them out for being the scammers they are. I never said that kids shouldn’t be allowed to play videogames you made this up yourself. If anything shouldn’t be allowed it’s these greedy companies to trick kids. One thing is to market games to kids another to target them with shady and hostile business practices .
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There’s plenty of better companies and developers that make games that don’t exploit you. https://libregaming.org/play-libre-games/
To add one last thing, even if every part of your discussion lends to legitimate concerns, the statement as you originally made
Valve abducts kids into gambling, mine people data, promotes DRMs and proprietary software. All of that out of geed and seeking profits.
Is just alarmist bs, which is transparently and intentionally trying to make Steam look bad about things that are loosely related to that statement at best.
Valve abducts kids into gambling
Valve isn’t abducting anybody. Game devs are encouraging gambling like behaviors
mine people data
Data you either opt out of the collection of, give freely to everyone all the time, or is illegal to sell
promotes DRMs and proprietary software
“allows” does not equal “promotes”
All of that out of geed and seeking profits.
They exist to make money. Steam costs money to operate. This is not controversial. Every single game company and storefront does else they would release their products for free.
I didn’t mean for this to become another long comment. I think it’s absurd that you are nitpicking tiny aspects that are theoretical or ethical in origin, most of which steam doesn’t directly control anyway, and playing that off as steam being some evil big bad corporation. It’s dishonest, full stop
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Loot boxes may be similar to, but are not gambling. Compulsion loops in some form are part of pretty much any game. Micro transactions are awful, but they aren’t steams fault for existing. Looking at feedback loops that aren’t in the least steams decision to include, and concluding that steam supports gambling is a reach. You’re mad at game devs for using this tactic, not steam.
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Being loosely affiliated with games that have DRM isn’t even promotion. Locking games to your library? Really? Are you going to say that steam shouldn’t do what every other digital store front does? Are you suggesting that they open themselves up to piracy by not enforcing that they keep their products confined to the users that bought them? So what, steam is supposed to just give their games away?
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Most of that information can be discovered about you through a background check. Steam isn’t selling your credit card info. That’s nowhere close to legal. Hardware information and ip aren’t protected information. You blast that to the world every time you get on the internet unless you are explicitly using a browser that stops it. First of all, nobody is going to pay for information your browser gives for free. Secondly, just because they collect that information doesn’t mean they’re selling it in the first place. And thirdly, even if they were selling “chat logs and browser history”, if just being able to collect that data means that they must be selling it, you better not be using discord or lemmy or any other non-encrypted medium to talk to your friends, because they’re all selling your conversations for fractions of pennies. That doesn’t sound a little paranoid to you?
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No, what I’m saying is that you aren’t mad at steam. You’re mad at the industry. If you’re trying to affect change, flaming steam on an almost unknown social media site for doing something that’s industry-standard like marketing to kids is missing the target so hard you might as well be talking to the moon.
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Again, steam is hardly exploiting anyone. Every single point you made is an industry standard that steam isn’t explicity stopping.
Look, I made all my points. It’s abundantly clear that you’re just angry because of the state of the industry as a whole. That’s your right. But the more you try to dishonestly paint steam as actively malicious when it’s pretty obvious they’re just another company, and a less invasive one than most at that, the less inclined you are to change my mind.
I’m out.
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Valve promotes lootboxes and even add them in their own games.
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You don’t need a third party launcher to use Blender or Krita, neither to play Minetest, Mindustry, Endless sky, 0ad, Wesnoth and many other games.
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Why are you so paranoid posting your name, address, credit card number, e-mail, age, IP address, device unique id, chat logs, forum posts, voice chat recordings, hardware enumeration, browser history? Never mind if you don’t want to share these information, my cousin work for Valve i can ask him for these anyway
4/5. Valve is not a machine, they are humans, they are not forced to be scummy just because everyone does it. Valve is pretty much a monopoly, they shaped the industry as it is more than everyone else. Who should we blame for lootboxes? 10 years old kids because they are stupid and buy these?
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Loot boxes aren’t gambling if you earn them in game and don’t buy them. Personally, I believe that micro transactions for loot boxes should be outlawed altogether, but especially for kids. That doesn’t mean the practice of having those in games falls more on steam than the developers who push the practice in the first place.
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No one is stopping indie devs from releasing their own games. Steam provides a service with tools and structure. Don’t pretend like steam just sells the game and takes a cut.
(3) Telling me to post my information is asking me for a show of good faith in an inquiry you are explicitly making in bad faith to bludgeon your point. There’s no good faith way to assert “well if it doesn’t matter than do it coward”. I don’t want to get doxxed. You don’t get doxxed when a company sells your info. There’s an extremely basic difference and you know it.
You’re just forcing your false equivalency to pretend your point has legitimacy, and in doing so have completely lost any credibility you might have had with me to begin with.
If your argument is in good faith, post yours. Otherwise don’t pretend like my not posting it proves anything except that you’re willing to stoop to bullying to push your point.
- Why don’t you blame regulations on gambling that enable this behavior in the industry you so clearly despise. You’ll get further petitioning your government than yelling into the void about practices you don’t like.
Deciding that steam is the be-all end-all in the whole system is just asinine. You’ll argue that steam can be better and that’s the only reason you’re saying any of this, but the harsh truth is that steam could be quite a lot worse.
But seriously though, I am completely done with this conversation. You have shown multiple times in every single comment you have made so far that good faith isn’t really a thing for you.
I don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish but it certainly isn’t changing my mind. I’m definitely not going to change yours. Someone who makes a comment like “Valve is abducting kids into gambling for greed and profit” isn’t looking to accept logic except in a way that confirms their own bias.
This is pointless.
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When I want top-level, triple-AAA journalism, I get my news from a shitty blog site that looks like it was built in the Year 2000.
You really love posting this comment in every post about steam, don’t you?
When I see the exact same post on three different gaming subs I belong to, then yeah. Why change my comment if they can’t be bothered to change their headlines.
Honestly, I think some of it is a bit over the top. At the end of the day, they’re a company producing a product and not the chosen savior. But as far as giant companies go, they’re almost everything you could want.
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Lots of pro-consumer policies. From making returns a thing, to never taking away access like some stores, to big sales. If the idea of buying a digital game in 2004 and still having access to it in 2024 doesn’t sound revolutionary to you, it’s because you haven’t paid attention to how other companies run their stores.
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Open source contributions. Gaming on Linux is getting a huge shot in the arm from Valve, Steam, and the Steam Deck, both through direct contributions and indirectly through showing it’s viability.
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Employees, by all accounts, are well taken care of and enjoy their jobs.
They aren’t perfect, but the bar for a company, especially in the gaming industry, being ethical is so low that the way Valve operates makes them basically saints by comparison.
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They got me to stop pirating by making it easier and safer, so I think they’re pretty neat.
What can I say? They treat me right.
Are steam workers particularly happy or something?
From everything I’ve seen they really take care of their employees.
I don’t think steam has been this boon for gamers either. In fact I no longer PC game because I can’t hardly get access to AAA games anymore without DRM. Of course now consoles are heading that way with requiring installs to on board storage and neglecting to include the game on disc in a playable state.
In my use case, Steam is basically bloatware. I download mods from outside sources, don’t play online with friends, and use better 3rd party platforms for chat and VOIP. It’s a frankenstein’s monster whose primary use case is DRM. That being said, it does provide value that other people care about. We are in the niche segment that cares about game licenses and ownership rather than conveniences.
I can agree with that. 👍
Kids (the majority of steam customers) are really easy to brainwash and manipulate. Valve probably also spends millions on advertising
“Probably”? I think the only advertisement I’ve ever seen from Valve was for Half Life: Alyx when it came out a few years ago. Not exactly brainwashing kids
Additionally, kids are not the largest group on steam. According to Statistica’s Consumer Insights Global Survey, the majority of users are 30-39, with the next largest group being 20-29 https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1242344/steam-us-user-share-by-age
Maybe the money they spend on ads don’t go on billboards but on fake online reviews.
When i was a teenager on steam i was a 40 years old guy born on 1 january 1970
