Treating your customers decently can lead to profits in the long run. What an insight. They should teach that at business schools.
Best I can do is create shareholder value by making our product shittier and more expensive. Take it or leave it kid
maybe someone should tell them we’re leaving it. it doesnt seem like theyre noticing.
Valve has fundamentally different goals from Microsoft and Sony
Microsoft and Sony want to increase profit a couple percentage for the next quarter
Valve wants to be profitable 10, 20, 30 years into the future
Thing is, they have been doing this for over a decade. Publicly traded companies can’t compete long-term, if there’s a well funded provate competitor
Publicly traded companies can’t compete long-term, if there’s a well funded private competitor
That’s why these companies love the idea of purchasing half the industry or using their resources to operate at a loss and squeeze out private competitors.
If they can’t compete, they can consolidate.
Then trust busting needs to happen
The gaming industry is fine. The “wall street gaming industry” is not.
It’s about time these corporate feral hogs start to feel the pain of the free market but they deserve much worse, bankruptcy. Xbox still exists, no leaders were laid off, their parent company still supports genocide, and this is all a problem.
Do you really want your games to pay for 8-10 figures a year for a hollow executive team’s risk free compensation? One where they have 0 liability, $0 of their own money on the line, literally not even gamers, to be the last word on what games make it into our hands and how they wring our wallets dry?
Online subscription is a joke at this point
But I need a return on my investment now! Short term profits! Short term profits! SHORT TERM PROFITS!
In case anyone’s not clear as to why: Sony has announced that they’ll stop producing discs and that they can take your content at any time for any reason.
Historically, Steam has promised they will never do that and will offer DRM-free (clarification: they’ll remove the Steam DRM) downloads.
Also, all of them have jacked prices up. Xbox, PlayStation, and Steam have raised hardware prices around 35-40%. However, Steam runs on PCs they don’t sell, as well as Macs, and they have a Linux distribution they provide for free called Steam OS.
Steam has promised they will never do that
Can you give us a credible source? I want it to be true, but I don’t want my only source to be hearsay.
Even if Valve promised DRM-free downloads if they go belly up there’s no chance in hell they’ll ever actually do that
I’ve heard it requires a DLL to disable steams basic drm, and it’s been that way for 20+ years.
You can do this right now with the Goldberg Emulator, but it doesn’t work well for games which are deeply integrated with Steam’s API (for example, to do things like Cloud Saves).
and that they can take your content at any time for any reason.
Its less that they can and more that they definitely will. The fact that they can has been fear-mongered and pearl-clutched over since the dawn of online sales.
Until now its been handwaved away as obviously nobody would actually shoot themselves in the fucking face like that. But then they did.
Sony and StudioCanal isn’t the first time it’s happened, though. It’s just making a lot more waves.
Remember when PC gaming was dead according to every outlet for two solid years?
I remember. I also remember it was started by Tim Sweeny when Gears of War was taking off. I also remember when Sweeny come crawling back to PC with EGS after Fortnite became BR king.
One appears to actually like their customers and the other two are actively hostile towards them. I’m sure somebody at Microsoft/Sony are scratching their heads trying to figure out what’s wrong.
Sony’s disc move just screams of a corporate accountant trying to improve the financials and they pick one of the dumbest options to cut costs on. Retailers are obviously upset as digital download cards probably sell like crap compared to physical copies. Outside of gifts I have no idea why anybody would bother.
Also worth mentioning Sony’s CEO and CSO sold 56% and 18% of their shares 2 days after the disc announcement to the tune of millions.
Sony has a 457m lawsuit against them for antitrust issues which they’ve historically defended with…physical disc sales. So I’m happy to see that decision blowing up in their face and I’ll wait for the outcome on that.
That’s the point. It’s not about the disc. It’s about cutting out retailers.
Games sell at the same price or cheaper at the retailer as they do digitally, and the retailer takes a cut. Games sold through PSN or the Xbox store make Sony and Microsoft way more money.
And that’s before we get to used sales.
Tell me again how many discs valve is selling? What happens to your steam account when you die?
I like valve, but don’t fool yourselves, Gabe N does not give a shit about the customers any more than Asha or Hideaki.
Well, that’s just objectively incorrect. Gabe at least recognizes that piracy is a service problem and being consumer friendly is more profitable in the long-term. People like Asha and Hideaki can’t seem to figure that one out no matter how much evidence is given to them.
i love steam but he does raise a good point. vavle explicitly said that steam acc is legally not transferable. there’s no second hand market and your library is legally gone for good when youre gone.
no matter how good valve is right now. the threat of enshittification is real, and will remain so until the discourse of the right of owning digital game is settled.
Oh yeah, Steam is not perfect by a long stretch. It mostly looks good by comparison with it’s competitors who appear to take being gently asked NOT to shit directly down their customers throats as basically a death threat. Was just pointing out that saying Gabe doesn’t give a shit is incorrect, as he does give a shit insofar as giving a shit has actually turned out to be the best long term strategy for Steam’s profits.
That said, Steam actually does have a history of honouring wills to transfer a dead persons library to someone else on death, despite that technically being disallowed by their ToS. So they aren’t bound to do it legally, but they do currently tend to. Which honestly might get them into some legal hot water if they ever try to enforce that term.
Valve is one of the few companies that has historically honored people’s bequests and allowed bequeathing their libraries to others after they die. Unlike say Apple who has outright said that your iTunes purchases disappear into the ether when you die.
The key is being consistent and transparent. We got gut punched by the Steam Machine price, but it was an expected and transparent outcome. XBOX and Sony are so volatile that it’s making Steam look like a saint. From laying people off, to constant price increases, to the disc situation. Both these companies need to chill tf out.
Add to this MS buying up all of these game studios to do nothing with them and then kill them because they’re so inept.
Their actions look like a typical monopoly. Buy competition to destroy it later so you’re the only one in business.
That is the entire content of the Microsoft’s Guide to Business Practices.
One page, one sentence.
Embrace, Extended, Extinguish.
Microsoft, monday morning: “how the fuck do we buy Linux?”
I mean…on one hand, it’s pretty easy for
SteamValve to be doing well. They’re the only major platform that’s released a new console this year (except for Nintendo), they’re the hardware manufacturer with the biggest recent success (except for Nintendo) in the Steam Deck, and they’re the only major platform without any well-publicized egg on their face (except for Nintendo). It also helps that they basically own the entire PC space outright, where the other platforms are fighting amongst themselves (except for Nintendo).But that brings up the Italian-plumber-with-a-powerup-that-turns-him-into-an-elephant in the room. Nintendo has been doing really well, too; and while, since the Wii, they’ve largely abandoned the power gamer space to the three players mentioned in this headline, the Switch 2 was a crazy release.
Obviously, Steam has made a lot of great bets that have paid off, they’ve managed to keep up customer goodwill by limiting anti-competitive behavior and focusing on good product and service over vendor lock-in, and they’re clearly the least anti-consumer player in the space right now. But Nintendo’s strategy of “make the games so compelling and polished that people won’t care about the lock-in” is basically the polar opposite, and it’s working too; so I don’t know how well we can draw conclusions about the industry from this.
Nintendo got a lot of hate and took a big loss with the palworld lawsuit.
I don’t know how big a hit they actually took from that. If you ask the average gamer, I don’t know if they even are aware that it happened. I think the Sony physical media thing and the Microsoft layoffs have broken containment much more than the Palworld thing, though I don’t have any evidence of that.
Valve is the only only one supporting Linux!. The rest are greedy fucks.
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More importantly, the entire software (shops, operating system) and hardware are not a locked down platform and controlled by a single company. And the Steam prices (one word: sales) and rights (refund policy, games never get rewoked) are the best among the industry.
Post it. You know which meme.
I want an edit of the “he can’t keep getting away with this” to “he can’t keep winning” lol.
ANOTHER $200 BILLION DOLLARS TO STEAM &VAVLE!
Steam sales.
Are poop now.
Its clear that PC is the future console. I’ve been buying in GOG primarily, and Steam only when it is not available there and has no chance of ever being there. Even your Android TV can play light games with GameNative installed
The crossplatform gaming is way better than even two years, I play games with friends on xbox or playstation all the time, no special software it all just works. So yeah im definitely never buying a conolae again lol.
I never got a PlayStation but I was holding out for a PlayStation 6 once it finally got released. If there is no version for physical discs I will definitely not be getting one. Nothing worse then wanting to play a game you haven’t played in a while and then having to redownload it because you had to delete it to free up space for other games.
So much nicer just to be able to throw a disc in and go.
Or run into weird licensing issues you have no control over and the $80 game you bought no longer exists.
Or you still have the game but they just removed the sound track and changed some of the character’s faces.
Nothing worse then wanting to play a game you haven’t played in a while and then having to redownload it…
Not even Dermatobia hominis? Or anthropogenic climate change? Or like, genocide?
Now if only they can bring down the cost of the Steam Deck and Steam Machine
