Steam singlehandedly stopped piracy overnight for me.
Developers were getting $0 from me before steam, and thousands of $$$ from me after steam.
The 30% cut is well worth it for developers, plus all the other services steam provides. Kids have no idea how buying, installing, modding, patching games used to be like.
You cant compare this to the apple app store
Name another platform that has gone 20 years without completely enshittifying itself.
We can start shitting on steam when they turn evil
Name another platform that has gone 20 years without completely enshittifying itself.
Wik*pedia?
I mean a for-profit corporation owned by an ex-microsoft employee…
Everything about that screams enshittification, but they’ve done a pretty good job to be relatively consumer friendly.
You cant compare this to the apple app store
True. Almost none of the iOS games I bought run anymore. It is why I stopped buying apps, specifically games, on iOS years ago. But others did a good job maintaining backwards compatibility whether through hardware or software.
This seems like such a nothing case. Steam is optional. It’s optional for publishers to use, it’s optional for users to install. Steam provides many many benefits for even free games or games not purchased on the Steam store.
Any publisher can publish their game on their own site, on other stores, on physical media. Even though Steam is dominant, you can buy games somewhere else as easily as you can download and install Steam itself.
I hope this case gets thrown out.
You can also use steam as a distribution platform completely free of the 30% cut by selling steam keys through your own site. Steam specifically gives developers unlimited free steam keys and games no cut from the sale of said keys. And it’s not even a work around, it is intentional.
I don’t have a problem with Steam but if they lose, games can get cheaper, and/or game development becomes more lucrative. You can’t lose by looking into the case and not throwing it out.
That’s naive. People already pay 80$-90$, publishers will pocket the cut and keep the price the same.
There are people who pay full price for games, yes. I do too for games I really love, but I wait for discounts. I’ve also profited from buying MSFT and SNE shares during console releases.
I’m happy to pay a premium for convenience. Steam is a great product that saves me from having 20 different store-fronts clogging up my computer, most of which wouldn’t have proper Linux support. If developers don’t like Steam’s terms of use then don’t use it, and best of luck selling your game that nobody ever sees.
What substantiates the claim that games will become cheaper? We already know games are one of the few commodities that are getting cheaper over time when taking inflation into account. I’ve seen this claim everywhere but I don’t understand what makes people think it’s true and nobody has been able to show me the logic or reasoning of it. Also, you claim that game development becomes more lucrative. It only becomes lucrative at all with a return on investment which requires that a developer be able to afford to make the game, market it, advertise it, and sell it to a wide audience all while handling the financial side of things (licensing agreements, handling the financial details of consumers in a secure fashion, providing refunds within the constraints of laws worldwide, etc).
These cases and the litigation process also cost money. You absolutely can lose by looking into it.
What substantiates the claim that games will be cheaper? You’re having to pay less money to Steam? Games go on discount all the time, and with less entities to pay, developers can afford to discount their games more often, or pay more talented developers.
I want you to draw me a line to connect the dots between some assumptions I’m seeing here.
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Valve lessening the percentage of a developers profit per unit from 30% to 25 or 15 % would make the developer put the game on sale more often or make the developer pass on those savings to you the consumer by lowering the price.
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That Steam doing so would somehow affect the price elsewhere (consoles, online retailers like Amazon, other online store fronts, physical brick and mortar stores).
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If Valve were not in the picture to take this cut (and to provide the services they provide) the developer would not otherwise have to provide such services for themselves (point of sale transactions and security, the production and distribution of product keys or physical media, services to market the game or product in question etc).
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That the 30% cut is strictly profit for Valve and they offer nothing for that cut.
Just because Valve is charging less doesn’t mean that that cost savings will be passed on to the consumer. We’re living in a time where companies have record price increases and are seeing record sales numbers and profits that have eclipsed inflation meanwhile gaming prices are actually on a continual downtrend as far as value for money and aren’t rising with inflation at all and pretty much never have been.
If what you’re supposing is true then games sold on Epic’s game store would be cheaper. They aren’t. Humble Bundle only charges a 25% cut of developer profits for a game. There are obviously some games available on both those store fronts. Point me to one of those and show me definitively that this has happened. That the developer of that game used that 5% savings with Humble Bundle to hire better talent to develop their game, or discount their games more often.
Simple economics says that the more plentiful a thing is, the more likely it is to be cheaper. By that metric we might extrapolate that games would be cheaper the more readily available they can be made (for instance not having to publish a game on physical media making game distribution cheaper and easier). We have not really historically seen that.
We might be able to conclude that it is a factor in why game pricing has stayed the same (meaning that games haven’t much gone above being $60 since the 80’s and so when taking into account inflation they are in fact cheaper). But that’s only one singular factor and there’s probably tens or hundreds of other factors in the mix.
Simple economics also says that there is a point where when something is in demand it will be more expensive. Because demand for it will drive up what people are willing to pay. In this instance the less competition there is, the worse prices get. If Epic and Humble Bundle didn’t have to compete with steam, would the cut they take decrease or increase?
Without steam enacting certain sales seasonally or during certain holidays, would those other storefronts have more sales or less sales? If steam didn’t exist would gaming storefronts treat consumers better or worse?
Too long, didn’t read. Cost savings probably won’t go to consumers, everything may go to the executives. But not all companies are beholden to shareholders. Smaller devs do offer games on discount more often. There are still passionate developers/non-managers out there that could take benefit.
Don’t be lazy. You only needed to read the 4 annotated summations of your points and back them up in a comment. If you can’t even do that I guess suffer in ignorance.
Think of it like the opposite of tariffs…
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When was the last time since you actually saw something get cheaper?
Haha not while I’ve been alive! Capitalism baby. 🫠
Yes because Steam is not part of capitalism. We all know if Ten Cent were the ones getting sued, we’d be all over it.
What about now with the Black Friday discounts? Also, I indicated two possibilities: games getting cheaper or game development getting more lucrative. More money means the gaming industry getting software dev talents.
That this is the only counter example you came up with should tell you enough.
I could’ve given more. If we’re only thinking of the industry giants, of course a slight reduction in expenses don’t matter. But the smaller devs will definitely benefit.
I bet you believe in “free market” as well huh
For indie devs, yeah.
free market mfs when consumers choose the option that doesn’t shit on them:
“Exactly! Simply do that for every product you need to live.”
Doesn’t shit on them… for now.
My extremely Baby’s First Monopoly take is that whatever your feelings about specific aspects of Steam’s service, or Valve in general, no individual company should exert this much power over the fortunes and overall culture of an artform. As such, I welcome efforts such as Wolfire’s to challenge Valve and Steam, even if I may not agree with the detail of the suit in question.
What a stupid take. Valve isn’t doing anything anti competitive, they just provide an objectively better service which is why everyone uses it. Anyone can put their game up on Steam, Gog, Epic, Uplay, and Origin at the same time. Valve doesn’t own the space, and tbh we’re probably getting the best deal we can get with them being the top dog, cuz you know Microsoft and the like would never treat us that well.
The closest thing I can think of wrt competitive rules is their price parity rule, where if you sell your steam keys (note that. not epic or uplay, just steam.) yourself, the price can’t be noticeably lower (or a sale can’t happen) without a comparable discount/sale on Steam within a reasonable timeframe.
The closest thing I can think of wrt competitive rules is their price parity rule, where if you sell your steam keys (note that. not epic or uplay, just steam.) yourself, the price can’t be noticeably lower (or a sale can’t happen) without a comparable discount/sale on Steam within a reasonable timeframe.
That’s pretty anti-competitive, unless I’m misunderstanding it.
If Epic takes a smaller cut, a developer might be willing to sell it at a lower price than on Steam. But if Steam says that the sale on Steam needs to be the same, then that means the developer can’t put out the same sale on Steam (since Steam takes a bigger cut).
So instead, they’d have to make the sale price equal to the price they’d be willing to accept after taking Steam’s cut into consideration…which would be higher than the price they’d be willing to sell for on Epic.
That’s bad for developers AND consumers.
You are misunderstanding it, and it’s been explained to you so many times that I feel I have to imply that you are misunderstanding it on purpose
It’s specifically Steam keys, even says so in the quote. If they sell it on Epic for a lower price and it doesn’t come with a Steam key then there are no restrictions on the price.
So we should be seeing lower All-Time-Lows on Epic than on Steam, right?
Do we?
Why would we? Companies want to make money. Epic taking a smaller cut isn’t a consumer benefit.
Lower prices can “unlock” more customers/sales
If they did then surely folks would have had lower normal prices on Epic and we’d hear them talking it up, either then or now, but overwhelmingly they don’t, because publishers don’t actually view uplay, epic, steam, etc. as different beasts.
Its just one more spot to throw their game on and make money. Epic just lets them make a little more off the same sale.
It does (allegedly) happen in non-NA regions though. I wonder if there’s something there.
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They can use alternative stores if they want. Its not our fault the alternatves bar gog are shit and anti consumer. Valve is the only one supporting linux so I’m buying my games there to support that effort.
Also steam has a lot more than just the store. The chats, the media sharing, the forums, cloud saves and input profiles. Epic can’t even show you a list of games in your library when you log in. I claim the free games each week but ive never even bothered to play them as with steam I can just click play and get on with it. As a long time linux user I value the just works approach and the work that wine and valve have put in.
I won’t use GOG till they make Linux use easy.
Bought Skyrim and Doom II then proceeded to spend 45 minutes struggling to getting them to work. Decided that it wasnt worth the effort when Steam just works™️ and bought them there.Id prefer if valve took less from developers but I value being able to actually play my games more than I value a couple bucks. Also their cloud saves make multi device gaming so much better. If steam eventually enshittifies and takes my games away I’ll just pirate them and struggle with ‘Wine’ then.
Heroic Games Launcher and/or Lutris are what you’re looking for on Linux.
With HGL it’s simply login and install GOG, Epic Games and Amazon Games games like Steam games. No huge issues I’ve ever really run into.
for GOG Games you can use the process i described here; just download the offline installers and go from there.
(just a small remark: lutris sometimes chooses the wrong executable to run, especially with unity games (it tends to select the crashhandler instead of the game exe) - if you run the game and nothing happens, check the settings.
itch.io isn’t anti consumer! It’s a good store. (Not a lot of big brand games there though.)
lol, replace Valve with Apple and Steam with App Store and everyone would have a very different tone on here despite the fact that they both charge 30%.
This will always be funny to me. In no other aspect of my life do I even know the charge of distributors or shops is, and I dont give a fuck. I still don’t know why I as a consumer should give a fuck because that aint my problem.
I go where the best service and the best options for me are. In terms of digital games stores, Steam is easily that platform. In terms of phone platforms, for me it is easily not apple, I coule not care how much people charge to sell in their stores.
I do care about dumb monopolistic limitations though, things like apple forcing browsers to use webkit. That would be like steam forcing all games to use the source engine. Apple not allowing people to install their own store fronts, Google making that more difficult, Steam not allowing you to install Epic… oh wait.
one of those cares about its customers, another doesnt. But which is which?
Delusional to thing one cares. We live in a capitalist civilization. No one gives a flying fuck about us.
let me rephrase, one has undestood its more profitable to not shit on customers which is the best we are going to get
If Valve went public Newell could exit with a golden parachute equitable to the GDP of Germany.
He kept it private and kept >50%. He is responsible for the mostly decent business practices Steam has simply because he has the final say on all policy.
That’s not saying he can’t fall from grace, but the guy seems to care considerably more than the operators of every other digital storefront aside from maybe GOG.
Steam isn’t a publicly traded company. Which means they can focus on customers and not investors.
I didn’t learn things but I can count two sides which, since they are sides, that means they’re the same.
/s
it’s almost like these 2 companies have wildly different practices regarding how they treat their customers and business partners.
Didn’t the Epic lawsuits against Apple and Google end up showing Valves Steam cut ended up working out to something closer to 20% after all the key sales and whatever other factors. Plus EGS already does less than 20% cut and it’s been like 6+ years and that client is still bare bones and they don’t even do gift cards or price lower. Same for Microsofts store which I believe is lower on PC while still 30% on console.
Regardless at best this lawsuit would just mean an end to 3rd party steam key sales or Valve taking a 30% cut on those too. At best a victory against Valve would mean more expensive games with the loss of keysite stores pricing advantage
Also games used to MSRP $10 cheaper on Steam when there was an argument that going digital was a major cost savings compared to physical products/packaging, shipping, and retailler cut. Eventually publishers stopped caring and made physical and digital prices the same while adding an assortment of DLC and subscriptions
Comment sections under these articles are always filled with two kinds of people:
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Ones who won’t miss the water until the well runs dry.
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Ones who understand what it means to have a well.
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Does this mean cheaper games on the Steam store? Might be good for indie developers, but I bet most publishers will pocket the difference.
I’d love to see valve just blacklist devs who are on this lawsuit :D Go back to epic ig you care about your cut and not your customers.
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Watch out for valve pr team shilling online
The only actually decent big company I can think of with a decent product and a track record of investing in open source and consumer benefiting solutions is being defended online. Shock.
Private companies, for better or worse, are beholden only to the boss. No shareholder value to worry about.
That’s the only reason steam hasn’t been turning the thumbscrews on developers for stage 3 enshittification profit seeking.
And why I’m clenching it for the day Gaben leaves. It will probably be disastrous.
Idk the internal company culture is supposed to be pretty damn good and stable. Flat management structure with everyone getting to work on whatever they please…
Seems like a replacement council would probably do fine.
The only actually decent big company I can think of with a decent product
A company that promotes gambling to underage kids with a proprietary third party launcher.
What are you doing on dbzer0 btw?
A company that increases mental health of all users through entertainment, pushes the boundary of corporate responsibility and basically solves depression through their carefully crafted launcher.
See, I can also make up bullshit by extrapolating to the extreme.
A company that increases mental health of all users through entertainment, pushes the boundary of corporate responsibility and basically solves depression through their carefully crafted launcher.
Excuse me, how does a third party proprietary launcher solve depression?
