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These comments…
Some day, Steam is going to enshittify, eat game devs for breakfast, and all these Steam fans will wonder how anyone could have possibly seen this coming.
Kind of like a certain online bookstore named after a river.
Not that I don’t enjoy Steam. But I trust them as much as any corporation: not at all.
Hearing those arguments for how many years now? Right …
The day Gabe is bo longer there things may get ugly, may.
But, Valve is not publicly traded, or has to cater to shareholders in any way. That is the reason they are still who they are.
They run a good service platform and aren’t as greedy as they could be, but they’re still not safe.
Use them, but no fangirling. They’re a business.
I’d be completely in agreement of what you are saying if it wasn’t for the fact that there are so many people acting like Steam is the worst platform in existence every time they get brought up. People are awfully quick to suck Tim Sweeney off for only charging 12% and fill up the comments with whatever the opposite of “fangirling” is.
They already take 30% on each game. It’s huge, considering they didn’t spent a dime on these games. That means they will take most of the profit margin on a game, if any, while a studio has to pay for dozens or hundreds of employees, tons of hardware, workspaces, etc.
Do You have any idea what the hosting infrastructure, steam works, and traffic costs?
Also, valve is giving massive contributions to open source from those 30%
Do You have any idea what the hosting infrastructure, steam works, and traffic costs?
Yeah, not 30% of all PC games. It’s how they turn out absurd profit.
Never said that. But what is better for the dev? Using those services or run their own?
And I am fine with Valve making absurd profits, after all, they have put at least 500.000.000 USD into open source (Around 100-200 external oss devs on payroll for projects like Mesa, SDL,…).
Will I leave steam and call valve out if they get toxic? Yes! Are they evil or the enemy right now? To the contrary.
Using those services or run their own?
If they could have still images and text on the Steam store and a link to their external site for everything else, it’d by far be running their own.
It’s the exposure that Steam has an effective monopoly on.
Not everything has to be black and white. I appreciate Steam, but 30% is absurd. They’re absolutely raising the price of games and taking money away from developers.
GOG takes 30%, most publishers take 30 to 50%, apple app store takes 30%, as does Google.
Is this to high? Maybe, I don’t publish games. But at least it is not absurd in means of industry standards :(
GOG’s fee is flexible, as are publisher contracts, which have no relevance to the discussion, as it’s in addition to store fees and involves major investments. Google is changing its fee to 20%. Epic’s is currently 0%. Microsoft Store’s is 12%, itch’s is adjustable. In the PC market, Valve is pretty much the main outlier at this point.
I looked at the lawsuit details. Steam basically did what everyone else does. Apple, google, EA, everyone.
They charge 30% of the sale. They require that the steam price be the same as an external price.
It’s the most nothing of nothings.
To compare, what MS did when they got smacked with their monopoly lawsuit is bundle IE with the OS and they both made it hard to switch the default and they’d constantly try to switch you back to IE.
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One of the most accurate descriptions of this entire beef.
Steam does nothing and just keeps winning.
it doesn’t just do nothing, it sticks to its core idea : we can’t do as much as the community can when it comes to making games, how do we maximise the community’s possible output?
People love to shit on valve working on lootboxes, but I was there to see how it developed. It was there as part of a way of getting money back to the people making stuff, which is why a shitload of the TF2 hats came from the community and steam workshop. The system came from a left wing greek economist, before , you know, he BECAME Minister of Finance for greece (for half a year)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanis_Varoufakis
This is why they have steam OS, steam greenlight, SFM, etc etc.
Valve doesn’t make games anymore, because they know hobbyists can make shitloads of more games than them, they need a platform to shove them into.
Also, the other goal is to improve and extend the PC gaming space, which is why they are working on SteamOS, the deck, and all the other shit they are working on. Because of the work they put into making steam work to make game distrobution better than piracy (LITERALLY said by Gabe), PC releases became synonymous with “Steam”, which is why whenever you have a game announcement, you get “New game : Available on (XboxLogo : PS5Logo : SteamLogo)”
Valve is doing stuff. Just not, you know, making HL3 or nothing.
In a service business, if you do things right, people think you’re doing nothing.
God?
I see 2 main points against steam in this comment section.
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Steam is doing price fixing for games: False, this accusation came from Epic Games CEO, but the actual steam policy only blocks the selling of steam keys for a lower price, not the game itself.
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Steam is a monopoly and monopolies are bad: I agree that monopolies are bad, but in my opinion only if they take action to harm the user and the market. From my knowledge steam is pretty known as being pro customer and haven’t taken any monopolistic actions to block other stores from growing.
The reason why the games are not usually cheaper on other platforms is because publishers practice standard prices, so the game publishers take the extra profits from a lower store cut.
I am not trying to be a fanboy, I am just trying to look objectively at the facts, if someone can prove me wrong, I am willing to change my mind.
The other, less factual observation to make is: With the wealth of frivolous lawsuits against Valve in the past months, as well as pushes against Linux for age verification, it seems very likely that there is a well-funded group conducting lawfare to de-value the company. Whether this is simple retaliation for winning a case against a patent troll, or a long-term strategy to find a way to turn the company public and aggressively take it over, I can only guess.
Other community moderators have reported influxes of bot accounts, and it’d be naive in the age of AI to claim that all forum participants are human. Given the funding behind the attacks on Valve, I’d conclude it’s entirely possible that some proportion (certainly not all) of the accounts responding on the topic of Valve are either paid astroturfers, or complete bot accounts seeking to generate negativity towards them.
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What maintains Steam’s dominant market position is user lock in, not any policy they enforce or any monopoly laws they violate. The only thing that would break user lock in would be allowing migration of licenses for games between platforms, and making friend/multiplayer/mod-management systems interoperable across platforms.
Valve has made no effort to implement these kinds of systems. BUT NETHER HAS ANYONE ELSE. (Well except gog and DRM free games, but that’s only part of the issue.)
The fact that one privately owned company has such huge control of the industry is a huge risk, undeniably. But breaking up valve wouldn’t solve the problem, it would just let someone else take their place.
monopoly laws they violate
A monopoly is holding a large marketshare. It is a label determined by courts. That the marketshare is from consumers picking the product is irrelevant to being declared a monopoly.
In the late 90’s Windows was the overwhelming market leader for OS’s because the alternatives weren’t good. Linux didn’t have good consumer focused distros and was therefore used on servers. MacOS at the time was still cooperatively multitasked like Windows 1.0 from almost 20 years earlier. So Microsoft was declared a monopoly and had restrictions placed on what it could do despite all other competitors already doing what Microsoft did (like including a web browser). That’s why years later Apple was able to make Safari the ONLY web browser (all “alternatives” were just reskins of Safari) whereas Microsoft was forced to include support so that you could switch the default web browser.
Microsoft was not declared a monopolist because of their dominant market position in operating system space.
They were declared a monopolist because they used that market position to actively disincentive the use of competitor’s browsers, beyond “just including a browser”, but actively doing things to make other browsers difficult to download and use on their operating system.
Apple is not declared a monopolist because they do not own and control chrome, the really dominant market player derived from WebKit, and apple are not using some dominant market position to enforce that.
If you see things differently and think the same logic as these cases could be applied to steam, go ahead and contact epic’s legal department.
I do buy games off other platforms and import them into Steam all the time.
I’ll admit a 30% fee is egregious these days though, extortionate. I think it should be capped at 10%, then a further smaller cap planned every decade as technology improves.
When you “add a game” to the steam library, you’re just creating a link to another file on your system, not really shifting the management of it over to steam (so no updates or the like), and if you logged in on another machine you wouldn’t be able to download the game through steam.
more importantly you can’t take a steam game and move over your license to use it, or ability to install/update it to some other platform. If you decided you never wanted to use steam again, that you liked some other platform better, you would still have to use steam to access any games you purchased there.
Edit: just an after thought to clarify my thinking on this. You payed to accesses that code. That series of instructions to be run on your computer. Everyone who worked to make it has been payed. If they don’t have money to keep maintaining it, they should stop doing that, or ask for further money to keep doing so. But if you want to just run the code you paid for already, it is absurd that someone restrict in what way you run a series of commands on your computer. It is indefensible, and corrosive to society.
