A new lawsuit was filed earlier this month in the UK that alleges Valve, owner of Steam, has been overcharging 14 million PC gamers and abusing its dominant position in the UK.
As a consumer, I don’t care about this. Even if Valve’s cut were lower, the prices would remain the same. I don’t get a cheaper game, the publisher just gets a higher cut, so it doesn’t directly benefit me.
I’m totally cool with just downloading it from their website. Or they could send me a flash drive. Wasn’t Steam originally the cheaper, easier option instead of designing a box and writing a bunch of disks?
No, the problem steam was originally created to solve was distributing updates for pc games. Before steam getting updates meant visiting shitty dev websites or ad farms that also hosted update files and manually patching your game.
That’s literally when I did most of my PC gaming. What was even wrong with visiting a website to download a patch? It was way more convenient to update at your own leisure instead of having to log onto a service that would randomly install updates every week before you could even start the game up like nowadays.
You could even save the patches locally and when you had to reformat Windows, you could have your games installing before you even had the internet back up, hah.
There was literally nothing wrong with downloading updates from a “shitty dev website” because they worked just fine and the worst thing you had to do was decide whether you wanted to run the install wizard or not lol
That’s a valid opinion. It’s not one I share but if you preferred that situation then that’s fine. I feel pretty confident saying you are in a pretty small minority though.
-edit I just realized what you said and if it’s true that you did most of your pc gaming before steam got popular, you may be out of your depth in this conversation. It’s been like 20 years. If you did most of your pc gaming more than 20 years ago, I don’t see how your opinion is informed at all.
Steam hasn’t been popular for 20 years, my dude. 20 years ago, Steam was LOATHED. I’m not gonna google it because I’m at work, but you can find a gif of the Steam logo performing anal on a bent-over dude.
10-15 years ago it was still fairly common to avoid Steam on purpose. I personally started using it actively maybe 6-7 years ago, but I’ve been gaming for just a bit over 20.
Do you think you would get the same buggy mess if every single publisher had 30% more budget to work with?
Yes, 1000%.
Games are buggy because developers/publishers/players don’t care. Money has nothing to do with it and if they had more money, they would just pocket it and release garbage for people like you.
While I agree with everything else, I think it’s the opposite of this, money has everything to do with it. If people stopped preordering and buying day 1 every AAA game, they would rethink their strategy, but since money keeps coming the don’t need to change much.
I absolutely agree. Customers are just endorphin (dopamine?) riddled animals waiting for the next opportunity for expenditure to drop.
I’m not even joking, this is the problem with pretty much everything. If we could pace ourselves, the world would look very different, but we just can’t stop consuming. I have colleagues who kill boredom with shopping.
Shareholders always want more money, i.e. as much money as is extractable from the consumer. So yes, I think companies would still invest as little as possible to make a game profitable, even if that leads to bugs.
Steam, GameStop, Toys-R-Us, Walmart… Someone always makes a profit on selling games, or any products - even digital. Steam has not reinvented the wheel here. It’s not a new concept. Are you arguing that the idea of stores should be eliminated?
In return, the game is more likely to be seen, just like placing a product in a real store where people walk by it. It also gets advertised, reviewed, has another community outlet, and Steam uses their own servers and bandwidth to distribute it.
I’m mostly tired of seeing huge soft monopolies being defended. Whatever competition they have doesn’t actually compete with them. They lock people into their ecosystem just as much as Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony do.
And just like other shady companies like Walmart and Amazon, they should be regulated to death, or something. But not defended and treated like some gold furred lamb. Everytime a post pops up, dozens jump over themselves making excuses for Gaben.
Replace steam with Amazon and reread the thread and my point of view might be better understood. I don’t understand the veneration, they use and sell our data, they kill competition, they do all the bad stuff. They just have a better pr team and realized they could leverage Foss to save on OS dev costs.
No Man’s Sky came out to much fanfare, and was kind of shit. They took their massive profits (of which a significant chunk went to distributors, publishers, etc., just like back when physical copies were the norm) and used them to transform their initial offering into something that was far more like their vision than the original product.
Minecraft also followed this paradigm for a very long time.
Now, how many very successful game developers just took the money and ran? A lot? Yeah, a lot. The simple fact is not many companies are willing to spend already-earned profits for a fraction more sales.
i mean, games launched on epic arent perfect either… and devs get much more of a cut, and a bonus if its unreal engine.
FF7R for example ran poorly, stutters in directx modes due to a poor implementation of shader compilation and these bugs STILL exist in the game today last ive seen.
the developer didnt take a 30% cut for the game, being epic exclusive and being unreal means the oppisite, they got PAID and still released a buggy POS.
its a fallacy to assume if a dev had 30% more budget that a game would be bug free.
I think you severely underestimate the cost of hosting servers for ~46.000 Games, across 9 regions, in 190 countries, with 500Mbit download speeds. On top of that billions of screenshots, trillions of lines of text, customer service, development of new features and hardware, etc.
Valve has an est. revenue (not profit) of roughly $10 Billion this year. Tencent Games has an est. $85. How is Steam even remotely considered to be a monopoly in gaming?
In fact I do think that, but it’s not like I’m arguing in the interest of his bank account either; I don’t see this directly affecting me, so I don’t care.
It’s affecting you because of a loss of quality in the product you are receiving, a loss directly caused by greedy middle men you are here defending.
The amount of companies being taxed by Gaben, Microsoft and Sony is vaste and not many of them would just take the 30% and run. There’s a lot of indie and medium sized companies that are barely making it.
You can plug your ears all you want, it is affecting you and you are boot licking for pretending it isn’t. Gaben isn’t your friend even though he probably spends a lot of money trying to make you think he is.
Again, I’m not defending Gaben. If you think I’m a bootlicker, you can lick my ass. As stated, I don’t agree that it affects the quality of the product to the extent you’re suggesting, and going “well, it does” isn’t going to change my opinion.
You were saying it didn’t affect you. Regardless of how much will go directly to shareholders, a good portion will be reinvested and lead to better games, which will affect your enjoyment.
I never talked about extent, you are the one that took the hard approach by putting the level at 0. When I pointed it out that it can affect quality and not just price, you came back with “well it doesn’t”.
I’m pretty sure in this context, saying a 30% increase of funds won’t lead to a jump of any kind in either the amount or the quality of products is being willfully blind.
I guess it might be hard to admit that some of these billionaires are directly stealing from us.
I maintain that it wouldn’t affect me. As for what would be reinvested, you say “a good portion,” I say an amount so low that its impact will be immeasurably low.
You talked about extent in that you’re suggesting the improvement in quality would be worth caring about; this is just you being pedantic. Allow me to be pedantic as well: I never retorted “well, it doesn’t” because, unlike you, I’ve made it very clear that I’m giving my opinion rather than speaking in absolutes.
I can admit that billionaires are getting more than their fair share, never having expressed otherwise here, which is also why I believe the money would largely be going from one well-padded pocket to another.
We’ve both expressed our views so I won’t be continuing this conversation.
I think it’s because there’s no real competition and nobody wants to be buying DVDs (blu-rays?) nowadays.
Consider that the only other storefront that treats its’ users with any sort of dignity is GoG and many major publishers would rather avoid it because it has a policy of being DRM free, so you lose out on a lot of games by sticking to GoG for everything.
You’re left with Steam, Epic Games Store, and some other platforms nobody’s ever heard of. Epic Games’ policy is “we don’t need a better store interface because it doesn’t affect sales” and “there’s no need to support Linux, nobody uses it”. Steam has a good-enough UI and not only supports Linux for Linux-native games, but also integrates Proton (which Valve also develops) so you can play Windows games on Linux.
Sure Epic will take less of a cut from publishers, but I’ll have an inferior experience and probably pay the same.
It’s clear that Valve’s cut has an influence because it being a % it means that as development costs go up the price of the games need to increase exponentially to compensate for the 30% Valve gets no matter the price.
To quote myself for some numbers:
It you need to make 30$/copy to cover costs in 2015 and Steam is taking 30% you need to sell for 43$/copy, Valve is making 13$/copy.
Development costs go up by 20% over the next 10 years, you now need to make 36$/copy to cover costs, with Steam’s cut you now need to sell for 51.50$, Valve is making 15.50$/copy.
If it was 15% instead? 35.50$ and 42.50$ would be the prices.
The profit in dollars increases exponentially as the price goes up, punch that in a graphics calculator and tell me it’s not a curve that becomes steeper.
you should really inform yourself what “exponential” means lmao. poster was right, it’s proportional growth(linear), not exponentional, there is no exponent here. The graphic with x for how much the product costs and with y for how much 30% of that are is a straight line:
Sounds like the claims people made saying move from physical to digital would result in cheaper prices. Then you see games when they weren’t on steam still going for $60 or $70 despite being launched on their own platform where they pay no cut. Same for games launched only on consoles by the console owners.
As a consumer, I don’t care about this. Even if Valve’s cut were lower, the prices would remain the same. I don’t get a cheaper game, the publisher just gets a higher cut, so it doesn’t directly benefit me.
Do you think you would get the same buggy mess if every single publisher had 30% more budget to work with?
What actually doesn’t benefit you is the hundreds of millions being accumulated in gabbens bank account.
I’m totally cool with just downloading it from their website. Or they could send me a flash drive. Wasn’t Steam originally the cheaper, easier option instead of designing a box and writing a bunch of disks?
No, the problem steam was originally created to solve was distributing updates for pc games. Before steam getting updates meant visiting shitty dev websites or ad farms that also hosted update files and manually patching your game.
It was awful.
That’s literally when I did most of my PC gaming. What was even wrong with visiting a website to download a patch? It was way more convenient to update at your own leisure instead of having to log onto a service that would randomly install updates every week before you could even start the game up like nowadays.
You could even save the patches locally and when you had to reformat Windows, you could have your games installing before you even had the internet back up, hah.
There was literally nothing wrong with downloading updates from a “shitty dev website” because they worked just fine and the worst thing you had to do was decide whether you wanted to run the install wizard or not lol
That’s a valid opinion. It’s not one I share but if you preferred that situation then that’s fine. I feel pretty confident saying you are in a pretty small minority though.
-edit I just realized what you said and if it’s true that you did most of your pc gaming before steam got popular, you may be out of your depth in this conversation. It’s been like 20 years. If you did most of your pc gaming more than 20 years ago, I don’t see how your opinion is informed at all.
Steam hasn’t been popular for 20 years, my dude. 20 years ago, Steam was LOATHED. I’m not gonna google it because I’m at work, but you can find a gif of the Steam logo performing anal on a bent-over dude.
10-15 years ago it was still fairly common to avoid Steam on purpose. I personally started using it actively maybe 6-7 years ago, but I’ve been gaming for just a bit over 20.
We can argue all day over when steam “got popular”. For me, I’d consider the launch of HL2 to be the most reasonable point in time to choose.
I believe that was the time it was hated the most because it was forced on people
Yes, 1000%.
Games are buggy because developers/publishers/players don’t care. Money has nothing to do with it and if they had more money, they would just pocket it and release garbage for people like you.
While I agree with everything else, I think it’s the opposite of this, money has everything to do with it. If people stopped preordering and buying day 1 every AAA game, they would rethink their strategy, but since money keeps coming the don’t need to change much.
Yes, the issue is the low standards.
I absolutely agree. Customers are just endorphin (dopamine?) riddled animals waiting for the next opportunity for expenditure to drop.
I’m not even joking, this is the problem with pretty much everything. If we could pace ourselves, the world would look very different, but we just can’t stop consuming. I have colleagues who kill boredom with shopping.
Anti Commercial-AI license
Shareholders always want more money, i.e. as much money as is extractable from the consumer. So yes, I think companies would still invest as little as possible to make a game profitable, even if that leads to bugs.
“There’s this flaw with capitalism.”
“No no, it’s a feature!”
Steam, GameStop, Toys-R-Us, Walmart… Someone always makes a profit on selling games, or any products - even digital. Steam has not reinvented the wheel here. It’s not a new concept. Are you arguing that the idea of stores should be eliminated?
In return, the game is more likely to be seen, just like placing a product in a real store where people walk by it. It also gets advertised, reviewed, has another community outlet, and Steam uses their own servers and bandwidth to distribute it.
It’s not a bad deal for the devs and publishers.
I’m mostly tired of seeing huge soft monopolies being defended. Whatever competition they have doesn’t actually compete with them. They lock people into their ecosystem just as much as Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony do.
And just like other shady companies like Walmart and Amazon, they should be regulated to death, or something. But not defended and treated like some gold furred lamb. Everytime a post pops up, dozens jump over themselves making excuses for Gaben.
Replace steam with Amazon and reread the thread and my point of view might be better understood. I don’t understand the veneration, they use and sell our data, they kill competition, they do all the bad stuff. They just have a better pr team and realized they could leverage Foss to save on OS dev costs.
Has capitalism given you cause to think otherwise thus far?
We have plenty of examples of this.
No Man’s Sky came out to much fanfare, and was kind of shit. They took their massive profits (of which a significant chunk went to distributors, publishers, etc., just like back when physical copies were the norm) and used them to transform their initial offering into something that was far more like their vision than the original product.
Minecraft also followed this paradigm for a very long time.
Now, how many very successful game developers just took the money and ran? A lot? Yeah, a lot. The simple fact is not many companies are willing to spend already-earned profits for a fraction more sales.
i mean, games launched on epic arent perfect either… and devs get much more of a cut, and a bonus if its unreal engine.
FF7R for example ran poorly, stutters in directx modes due to a poor implementation of shader compilation and these bugs STILL exist in the game today last ive seen.
the developer didnt take a 30% cut for the game, being epic exclusive and being unreal means the oppisite, they got PAID and still released a buggy POS.
its a fallacy to assume if a dev had 30% more budget that a game would be bug free.
I think you severely underestimate the cost of hosting servers for ~46.000 Games, across 9 regions, in 190 countries, with 500Mbit download speeds. On top of that billions of screenshots, trillions of lines of text, customer service, development of new features and hardware, etc.
Valve has an est. revenue (not profit) of roughly $10 Billion this year. Tencent Games has an est. $85. How is Steam even remotely considered to be a monopoly in gaming?
i think if steam took 0%, the number of bugs in larger games would remain completly unchanged.
It might help the smaller devs, but not the big games.
In fact I do think that, but it’s not like I’m arguing in the interest of his bank account either; I don’t see this directly affecting me, so I don’t care.
It’s affecting you because of a loss of quality in the product you are receiving, a loss directly caused by greedy middle men you are here defending.
The amount of companies being taxed by Gaben, Microsoft and Sony is vaste and not many of them would just take the 30% and run. There’s a lot of indie and medium sized companies that are barely making it.
You can plug your ears all you want, it is affecting you and you are boot licking for pretending it isn’t. Gaben isn’t your friend even though he probably spends a lot of money trying to make you think he is.
Again, I’m not defending Gaben. If you think I’m a bootlicker, you can lick my ass. As stated, I don’t agree that it affects the quality of the product to the extent you’re suggesting, and going “well, it does” isn’t going to change my opinion.
You were saying it didn’t affect you. Regardless of how much will go directly to shareholders, a good portion will be reinvested and lead to better games, which will affect your enjoyment.
I never talked about extent, you are the one that took the hard approach by putting the level at 0. When I pointed it out that it can affect quality and not just price, you came back with “well it doesn’t”.
I’m pretty sure in this context, saying a 30% increase of funds won’t lead to a jump of any kind in either the amount or the quality of products is being willfully blind.
I guess it might be hard to admit that some of these billionaires are directly stealing from us.
I maintain that it wouldn’t affect me. As for what would be reinvested, you say “a good portion,” I say an amount so low that its impact will be immeasurably low.
You talked about extent in that you’re suggesting the improvement in quality would be worth caring about; this is just you being pedantic. Allow me to be pedantic as well: I never retorted “well, it doesn’t” because, unlike you, I’ve made it very clear that I’m giving my opinion rather than speaking in absolutes.
I can admit that billionaires are getting more than their fair share, never having expressed otherwise here, which is also why I believe the money would largely be going from one well-padded pocket to another.
We’ve both expressed our views so I won’t be continuing this conversation.
It’s weird to me how people(are they?) here bend over backwards to defend a monopolistic drm platform like steam.
I get gamers like their games. But come on.
I think it’s because there’s no real competition and nobody wants to be buying DVDs (blu-rays?) nowadays.
Consider that the only other storefront that treats its’ users with any sort of dignity is GoG and many major publishers would rather avoid it because it has a policy of being DRM free, so you lose out on a lot of games by sticking to GoG for everything.
You’re left with Steam, Epic Games Store, and some other platforms nobody’s ever heard of. Epic Games’ policy is “we don’t need a better store interface because it doesn’t affect sales” and “there’s no need to support Linux, nobody uses it”. Steam has a good-enough UI and not only supports Linux for Linux-native games, but also integrates Proton (which Valve also develops) so you can play Windows games on Linux.
Sure Epic will take less of a cut from publishers, but I’ll have an inferior experience and probably pay the same.
The inverse of 70% is not 130%
Then you go after the publishers next.
It’s clear that Valve’s cut has an influence because it being a % it means that as development costs go up the price of the games need to increase exponentially to compensate for the 30% Valve gets no matter the price.
To quote myself for some numbers:
That’s just how numbers work. Those aren’t exponential increases, they are proportional. 30% will always be 30%.
There’s no benefit to sensationalizing the math.
The profit in dollars increases exponentially as the price goes up, punch that in a graphics calculator and tell me it’s not a curve that becomes steeper.
you should really inform yourself what “exponential” means lmao. poster was right, it’s proportional growth(linear), not exponentional, there is no exponent here. The graphic with x for how much the product costs and with y for how much 30% of that are is a straight line:
f(x) = 0.3x
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Sounds like the claims people made saying move from physical to digital would result in cheaper prices. Then you see games when they weren’t on steam still going for $60 or $70 despite being launched on their own platform where they pay no cut. Same for games launched only on consoles by the console owners.