They are a privately owned company with 100% focus on customer service and sustainably.
Yeah they charge like 10% of profit for the games on there, and more if you make it big. To be on the only platform where people actually shop for PC games…
Nobody has ever given me a real problem with Steam where some other company isn’t already doing significantly worse shit in comparison.
Remember when Google’s motto was “don’t be evil”? Remember when Facebook was innovative? Remember when [insert any post-IPO platform] was privately owned?
Look at the past and future, not just the present. Corporations eventually go sour, and fight against the very users that they were supposed to serve. Give Steam/Valve enough power and it’ll do the same. We don’t need corporations serving us software; we need open systems.
That said Valve is situationally useful here because it’s eroding Microsoft’s power.
I mentioned IPOs as an example of things making a company take a 180°, from “we luuuv customers!” to “customers are things to be milked, not humans to care about”. There are a thousand other possibilities - being bought by another (and more abusive) corporation, being inherited by arseholes and/or fools, or even a change in the mindset of its current owners.
There’s absolutely nothing preventing all those shitty outcomes. Nothing. And when one of them happens, the suckers who “buy” games through the platform - including myself, and probably you - will be shown a middle finger, and hear a moronic “ackshyually u didn’t buy the games lol you licensed them lmao”.
I think you’re both right really. I don’t trust Steam the company I trust Gabe Newell the person. Once he’s retired or passed on they could easily go ipo and begin enshittification.
They did help usher in the age of microtransactions and lootboxes with their CS and TF2 stuff. That’s about the only major bad thing I can think of that they haven’t been particularly apologetic about.
Yeah they charge like 10% of profit for the games on there, and more if you make it big.
Which is the same as the vast majority of every other store (video game or otherwise). It’s really only a factor because Epic keeps bringing it up as a reason they’re better than Steam, and should be allowed to be the monopoly instead (though they don’t explicitly state that part).
Wasn’t it more mobile gaming that had a bigger impact on mtx and loot boxes with games there having consumers less willing to pay more than 99 cents at the time and having to rely on the freemium model as well as having an enormous user base with the accessibility of smartphones?
I keep hearing tf2 and cs go but maybe it’s because I got into PC games late, but had no clue about loot boxes. And average gamer or last least the younger ones grew up playing consoles and then mobiles games more than PCs at the time aside from PC only games like league of legends, cs, and so on.
Consoles were and still are more mainstream than PC with some companies claiming PC gaming is dying for so long that is took a long time for other companies to start giving a go at a storefront on PC.
I just don’t really buy the Steam factor, since most people’s exposure to mtx, iap, and in game ads has been through mobile gaming. Like if they don’t even play CS or TF2 they don’t even know about it at all which would be someone like me, but mobile gaming has been so easily accessible that even “non gamers” like old people were sucked into stuff like bejeweled.
Most games have also been console ports to PC than the other way around too. Steam and PC emergence has felt like more a recent thing that started taking hold last gen with companies finally coming around to porting stuff to PC.
That’s not to say they haven’t had a hand in it, but it seems overstated with rise in the freemium model across platforms being the main driver. Even the concept of gacha existed before video games.
I guess I don’t really get where you’re coming from. Are you saying that, because you don’t feel that PC gaming was important in your lifetime that decisions Valve has made don’t really make any difference? That even if they had made anti-customer decisions, that it wouldn’t really matter because “PC gaming is dying”?
Hell, a major reason some companies claim that is because of valves dominance on PC. They don’t want to admit that they don’t have as much control, so they do their best to dismiss it as a non-issue…
Which is really neither here nor there about the entire point I was making in the first place. At no point did I say that they were the spearhead or major push… just that they helped. Just because something doesn’t do 90% of the work doesn’t mean they made no impact at all, and that decisions they made have no moral or ethical emphasis. The point was that Valve is not some pristine god from the heavens sent down to cleanse our filthy gamer bodies. They’re a company like any other, who occasionally make missteps. Valve just tends to make more consumer friendly choices than most.
Point is traditional gamers overlook the juggernaut that is mobile gaming, since they are only fixated on consoles and PC not realizing how absolutely financially huge mobile gaming is on its own, and showed that the model is extremely effective by overtaking consoles and PC.
Why is steam/valve bad?
They are a privately owned company with 100% focus on customer service and sustainably.
Yeah they charge like 10% of profit for the games on there, and more if you make it big. To be on the only platform where people actually shop for PC games…
Nobody has ever given me a real problem with Steam where some other company isn’t already doing significantly worse shit in comparison.
Remember when Google’s motto was “don’t be evil”? Remember when Facebook was innovative? Remember when [insert any post-IPO platform] was privately owned?
Look at the past and future, not just the present. Corporations eventually go sour, and fight against the very users that they were supposed to serve. Give Steam/Valve enough power and it’ll do the same. We don’t need corporations serving us software; we need open systems.
That said Valve is situationally useful here because it’s eroding Microsoft’s power.
Post-IPO? Valve is privately held. Which is why they make strategic decisions that stakeholders would never approve of.
I mentioned IPOs as an example of things making a company take a 180°, from “we luuuv customers!” to “customers are things to be milked, not humans to care about”. There are a thousand other possibilities - being bought by another (and more abusive) corporation, being inherited by arseholes and/or fools, or even a change in the mindset of its current owners.
There’s absolutely nothing preventing all those shitty outcomes. Nothing. And when one of them happens, the suckers who “buy” games through the platform - including myself, and probably you - will be shown a middle finger, and hear a moronic “ackshyually u didn’t buy the games lol you licensed them lmao”.
You can’t trust it.
I think you’re both right really. I don’t trust Steam the company I trust Gabe Newell the person. Once he’s retired or passed on they could easily go ipo and begin enshittification.
That’s how publicly traded companies work, profits above all else.
Good thing Valve isn’t publicly traded!
They charge 30%, and only goes down after making $10 million in sales.
But Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft charge just as much.
They did help usher in the age of microtransactions and lootboxes with their CS and TF2 stuff. That’s about the only major bad thing I can think of that they haven’t been particularly apologetic about.
Which is the same as the vast majority of every other store (video game or otherwise). It’s really only a factor because Epic keeps bringing it up as a reason they’re better than Steam, and should be allowed to be the monopoly instead (though they don’t explicitly state that part).
Wasn’t it more mobile gaming that had a bigger impact on mtx and loot boxes with games there having consumers less willing to pay more than 99 cents at the time and having to rely on the freemium model as well as having an enormous user base with the accessibility of smartphones?
I keep hearing tf2 and cs go but maybe it’s because I got into PC games late, but had no clue about loot boxes. And average gamer or last least the younger ones grew up playing consoles and then mobiles games more than PCs at the time aside from PC only games like league of legends, cs, and so on.
Yes, it was more mobile gaming, but that doesn’t mean Valve had no hand in it at all. It certainly had a huge impact on desktop variations of it.
That doesn’t mean they’re wholly evil or some other bullshit like that, because of it, but their hands are definitely not clean of it.
Consoles were and still are more mainstream than PC with some companies claiming PC gaming is dying for so long that is took a long time for other companies to start giving a go at a storefront on PC.
I just don’t really buy the Steam factor, since most people’s exposure to mtx, iap, and in game ads has been through mobile gaming. Like if they don’t even play CS or TF2 they don’t even know about it at all which would be someone like me, but mobile gaming has been so easily accessible that even “non gamers” like old people were sucked into stuff like bejeweled.
Most games have also been console ports to PC than the other way around too. Steam and PC emergence has felt like more a recent thing that started taking hold last gen with companies finally coming around to porting stuff to PC.
That’s not to say they haven’t had a hand in it, but it seems overstated with rise in the freemium model across platforms being the main driver. Even the concept of gacha existed before video games.
I guess I don’t really get where you’re coming from. Are you saying that, because you don’t feel that PC gaming was important in your lifetime that decisions Valve has made don’t really make any difference? That even if they had made anti-customer decisions, that it wouldn’t really matter because “PC gaming is dying”?
Hell, a major reason some companies claim that is because of valves dominance on PC. They don’t want to admit that they don’t have as much control, so they do their best to dismiss it as a non-issue…
Which is really neither here nor there about the entire point I was making in the first place. At no point did I say that they were the spearhead or major push… just that they helped. Just because something doesn’t do 90% of the work doesn’t mean they made no impact at all, and that decisions they made have no moral or ethical emphasis. The point was that Valve is not some pristine god from the heavens sent down to cleanse our filthy gamer bodies. They’re a company like any other, who occasionally make missteps. Valve just tends to make more consumer friendly choices than most.
I’m saying I believe mobile gaming has played a stronger role in pushing the industry towards the freemium model.
With mobile gaming becoming bigger than consoles and PC combined years ago and it wasn’t through selling titles.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2021/05/27/mobile-games-spending/
Point is traditional gamers overlook the juggernaut that is mobile gaming, since they are only fixated on consoles and PC not realizing how absolutely financially huge mobile gaming is on its own, and showed that the model is extremely effective by overtaking consoles and PC.
They charge 30%, and less if you make it big
Lol
I think they charge 30% but yeah.
gambling (both lootboxes and the skin site kind), big fees
Industry standard fees, actually.
Epic is the outlier, and only because they want to seem like the good guy. If they had market dominance, they’d charge just as much, if not more.
How would steam crack down on gambling sites they don’t own and trades they don’t know are linked to those sites?