oblig
I mean both true but yeah
I remain baffled at how few studios sell their games directly on their own site.
The practical barriers are virtually nonexistent, so I’m assuming there’s some form of capitalist fuckery going on behind the scenes that makes it financially unviable?
There are practical barriers still tho. You’ll have to either maintain or outsource maintaining:
- hosting infrastructure
- CDN
- Security (both frontend and backend)
- DRM (either serial numbering or yet another hosted verification services)
- user accounts and data handling
- payment processing
And that’s for a basic game, if you want feature parity with steam, add on top:
- version control and access (playtests, betas)
- version control for other platforms (Mac, Linux)
- hosting for savefile sync, achievements
- hosting for UGC (mods, screenshots, configs, recording)
- hosting and infrastructure for user livestreaming
- CDN for mods
- review (automated or manual) for mods or UGC
- legal protection and compliance against UGC
- multiplayer service infrastructure
- automated/manual moderation of game servers/lobbies
- anticheat system
- hosting for newsfeed (update announcements, news)
- and so on, you get the point…
By the time you implement the basic stuff and half of the extras, might as well pay the 30% commission and just focus on what you wanted to do: make games. Instead of having to cosplay as a sysadmin or orchestrate 15 different providers
The things on that list are all technically true but at the same time not really that big a deal? Certainly they’re all solved problems already. Making a good video game in the first place is harder than any of those things.
Yup, that’s my whole point. It leeches time and resources that might amount to more than what valve takes as commission
there’s some form of capitalist fuckery going on behind the scenes that makes it financially unviable?
Uhh. It’s that Steam is an effective monopoly?
They hold all the attention, all the recommendations, so if you aren’t on Steam you are practically invisible.
There are a few major games that only self publish. Starsector is one, of the top of my head. Hence it is practically invisible to most.
Ok but publishing yourself doesn’t block you from also listing on Steam, or does it?
It determines the price. If you “self-publish” on a web shop or something with DRM free downloads, you have to price it the same as on Steam, otherwise Steam may delist you. So devs can’t get around the 30% fee by offering a discount on their store.
And… practically, if the storefronts are the same price, most will just buy on Steam.
There can be other complications related to scammers, but that’s not Valve’s fault. Supporting both also takes more dev effort.
Rimworld took this route, at least for some time. It started only self published via the Ludeon Store yet ended up mostly on Steam because that’s where all the attention and mods went. I have the game bought both places, oddly enough.
Common misconception. You only have to price-match when selling Steam keys on another platform. If you sell a non-Steam copy of the game, you can price it however you want
also it didn’t particularly make sense on its own terms. Even if I am committed to pricing the same as on Steam, I still get to keep that extra 30% on the sales that I do make.
And it’s not as though the sum total of marketing you do for a game is stick it up on Steam and wait for the recommendations to pour in. But still most game promos and ads I see include a Steam link rather than one to the studio’s store.
There’s over 100,000 games on Steam now, so the notion that you’re relying them to market your game for you is highly suspect.
Do people here, on Lemmy of all places, still not worry about Valve being a monopoly?
It worries me, deeply. Especially with how the community already makes up excuses for them doing anticompetitive things.
There is only one way that ends.
I can’t think of a single example of a “happy sustainable monopoly” in history, but at best they must be vanishingly rare.
santa, gaben has been good this year, give him another boat
Yes they just have to be competent buisness people, GOG exists
GOG won’t take over with a no drm policy, it cuts too many games out.
I like the policy, just being realistic.
That is true
Do they realize that what they really said was: having shareholders destroys businesses.
Anyone who isn’t head deep in Capitalism understands that, yeah.
Lol, this is an unironically awesome takeaway.
shareholders in public companies dont care about the health of the business
The full quote in the context of the article makes it even worse:
“As long as Valve is independent and not a publicly traded company, they probably have a certain ambition, but not an extraordinary ambition,” Rosier says. “So I think they can still decide to make some decisions that are player-first, and that helps, right? To get the goodwill from the players.”
So, customers like using a product that focuses on the customers to create profits, rather than extracting profits by abusing the customer? How unambitious… /s
This is what is endemic in our current shareholder first sustem, it’s not about profits, it’s about leveraging the stock, products, customers, image and every other tool at their disposal to manage the value that the shareholders control so they can game the stock market as they see fit. Everything else is secondary.
I was thinking around the same, more specifically that what they’re saying is that “in the long run companies managed to produce value for shareholders actually produce less value that companies managed to produce value for a single private owner”.
This is actually pretty consistent with what we see in many industries with both kinds of companies and a pretty daming indictment of publicly traded companies as a mechanism for increasing value creation.
Private companies have shareholders as well.
That’s a new one for me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder
Both public companies and private corporation have shareholders.
But only for companies participating in the equity ownership, right? I’m not fully versed with that, so need to ask here. I don’t know how this works with Gabe and Valve. I think the important detail here is, that Valve is not publicly traded and can decide who buys shares from their company and could reject any money. I don’t think this is possible with publicly traded companies, right?
Ownership of companies via shares is only for LLCs (which is a possibility but in practice uncommon) and Corporations and both Sole Proprietorships and Partnerships do not have shares.
That said, it is indeed possible for a company to have ownership by shares and not be publicly traded (i.e. not in the stock market) so for example a corporation with no traded shares would be a private corporation.~
This is what I found out for the US by searching for “types of companies” and “LLC shares”.
The countries I lived in and owned companies in Europe have similar things but with different names (for example what a Partnership in the US is roughly what’s called a “Society by quotas” in Portugal and is actually the most common kind of company).
In my experience people that never had their own registered business don’t usually know any of this because they have no need to look into it.
Yeah, often times if a company needs a loan then they open up a stake.
i think in private corporations only a very limited amount of shareholders can have shares
These guys are so privileged they think they are entitled to success without innovation.
THERE WAS NOTHING LIKE STEAM AT THE TIME.
If they want what Gabe has they need to do what he did: INNOVATE.
I cannot emphasize this enough. This is the entire modus operandi when it comes to venture capital and “entrepreneurs” in industry.
They have a singular talent: exploitation. Be it a mineral rich vein under a mountain, an oil/gas field, middle-class folks with spending cash, gig workers, or information economy workers (e.g. programmers), it’s just one more resource to convert into wealth. Left unchecked, all the social evils we see from this thinking come into play: inequality, slavery, usury, fascism, and so on. The above even applies to their own employees, as there is no distinction in class of human being outside of the status of “owner”. There is no higher calling, no alternative focus. There are only resources and money.
The instant you make “keeping the company alive”, “make a product people actually want”, or even "employ people"a focus, the goal is no longer exploitative. It’s arguably more socialist, even if the overall goal is to continue to thrive as a for-profit business. As a result, it’s not useful to these jackals as-is. It must first be converted into parts to be exploited.
Such a thing is also a pariah in capitalist circles. They fucking hate it. The bigger Valve gets, the more hit-pieces we see in the media. Also, the more we see CEOs circle the wagons when the likes of Epic attempts to topple their market dominance somehow, and it always fails. Socialist corporate ju-jitsu appears to be a winning strategy, and thank goodness.
Also not be shitbag garbage monsters.
His innovation was to create the modern online verification bullshit that plagues the industry. Before Steam, you bought a game, put in the disc, and played it. If it HAD and online component, you may have had to type in a CD key.
No extra launcher to access your library. No having to reconnect to the internet to renew your license. I had a dedicated gaming PC that didn’t even have a modem. And no mandatory updates. It’s unacceptable that any time I want to play a single-player game I have to hope there hasn’t been some 140 gig patch that I have to install because the multi-player suite I’ll never open added a new $30 outfit to a character and they just make everyone reinstall everything.
If Half Life 2 had come out a year earlier, I wouldn’t have been able to play it because I didn’t have internet connected to my gaming PC until college.
God I remember raging at having to go online and install this “Steam” bullshit thing just to play a game I bought from the brick and mortar store in my town.
All of those problems are easily avoided by not playing AAA slop
If you’re installing a game through Steam, you’re dealing with DRM, a third-party launcher, and online verification, and Steam is taking a 30% cut to insert those features into the process. It doesn’t matter how “indie” your game is.
I hardly deal with online verification. I travel a lot and have a laptop with singleplayer games I downloaded through Steam and play them with no internet connection whatsoever all the time
Valve will take the cut from the sale no matter what of course, but the DRM and even the in-game Steamworks integration is actually optional. You can publish DRM-free files on Steam which do not require Steam to run at all if you want. People might get grouchy if you skip achievements and save sync or whatever, though.
ETA: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam
And to further clarify, you do not need to eschew achievements and that other stuff if you want your game to work without steam. You can make your game check to see if steamworks is working and then provide those services if if available.
If Valve just made using Steam as soul-crushingly painful as we imagine it must, we might have a chance! Imagine what could be if the wizards behind the Google Play Store took a shot at making Steam!
when it first release, steam was ASS
Steam was ass because it was just a an update platform, and most of us still had 56k or isdn as their means to the Internet and gaming. Yea it sucked when updates came out and you had to patch, it was a new thing to get patches like that vs buying a physical disk and the game just worked and didn’t require a day 1 update.
True from what I’ve read, and honestly I never used it in that form. I was mostly gaming on consoles at that time.
Then they listened to feedback and changed it to be the leading and most preferred pc gaming platform. How something originates isn’t a constant standard to judge them by. The fact that they were shit at first kind of shows why they are successful now, they accepted that they needed to improve due to customer feedback and did, they didn’t decide what their customers needed and try to force it to be like that, they listened to what their customers were wanting and made themselves into a better product.
I have a great idea! What if we censor every negative review! People would see all these
amazingshit games with amazing reviews and buy them!
A lot of people don’t seem to understand that Steam is DRM.
No one wanted to use Steam when it was released and the only reason anyone did is vendor lock-in on copies of Half-Life that were purchased at retail with no mention of Steam until Valve altered the bargain.
Some “innovation” to force people to use your service to keep playing a game they already purchased.
I’m surprised that people are so pro steam here. I guess more younger people than older people that remember how garbage it was. It was GameSpy arcade with extra steps. I’ll get down voted all day but this is how steam was looked at. No one wanted it and it was a complete disaster for a long time. Like let’s add a monstrous background task when everyone had single core cpus.
Because most people started using Steam when it became good, and not the clunky pile of shit it was before 2008.
Solid point.
Who is really denying or surprised by the idea that Steam is a form of DRM?
In some industries and markets, copycats can come along and undercut the original without actually improving things, but just offering a better price. For whatever reason, nobody else seems to be able to meaningfully compete with Steam on that front, either.
- Provide a good and cheap service.
- Improve the service over time with some of the money you make.
- Make pro-consumer choices knowing full well you can afford it.
- ???
- Watch competition repeatedly shoot itself in the crotch.
- Profit.
It helps that the industry seems to always be inhabited by the greediest, most misanthropic companies on the planet.
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More money now temporarily is better then always getting money forever.
Yeah, but have you considered being an MBA demon and wanting even more money?
Investing into customers and their overall happiness and loyalty works out, go figure.
The King who has never seen grass will starve to death on an iron throne.
Even if I’m playing a game I bought from GoG, I still need Steam involved for its controller support or Proton if I’m on Linux.
You can run proton without Steam.
Steam is to convenient. I’ve stopped with trying to get games for cheap anywhere else. Because it’s too simple to have them inside our steam library. Updates and Saves files are synced too with steam.
As long as they do what they have been doing, this deal will just go on. And they know it.
Let’s hope the plans after Gabe’s passing (if he is indeed a mortal human) is the same.
I do think steam needs competition because a monopolistic marketplace always ends bad, but also fuck epic and their whinging. It just feels like they expected to enter into the digital gaming marketplace landscape and valve would just roll over and give up.
Make. A. Better. Product. you dolts, its that easy. If you want to disrupt valves monopoly in the marketplace, you have to make something disrupting. A storefront that has 10% of the features steam has then trying to snipe developers into exclusive deals by trying to offer them lower rates isnt going to do the trick.
There’s also the whole thing where Tim Sweeney is such a dick constantly running his mouth that I hate him so much I won’t even use his platform for free stuff. And there have been games I actually wanted that were offered. I still chose Steam and / or GoG over literally free because fuck that guy and the AI slop version of a horse he rode in on.
Make. A. Better. Product.
Certainly easier said than done when it comes to Steam, given how much of a head start they have and the resources available to them to compete with any serious attempt, but it feels impossible to Tim because he spent all of Epic’s time and money whining, litigating, and giving out free games instead of making the EGS better for consumers.
Coming up on 8 years since its initial launch and they’re only now adding “advanced digital commerce technology” like a shopping cart. All bluster no substance.
Exactly, this very much gives off “We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!” vibe.
Not saying I have a clue what they could do to disrupt steams monopoly, but id gather one of the suits that Epic pays 7 figures to probably should get on that.
All they have to do is try to make something actually focused on customers, rather than focused on extracting wealth from people. Honestly, at this point, I think not sucking would be more than enough to get a foot in the door and suck up all the people who hate Steam for some reason
That’s an interesting rewording of “If you’re a PLC, you can be harpooned at any time”. It’s almost like investors are useless.
Generally you can tell when a company will end up on the downward spiral towards the customer and that is about 4 seconds after they IPO.
GOG might one day, but they need to step up their experience before that even becomes a possibility.
Maybe other competitors should start offering a better experience to compete instead of trying to shovel enshittified garbage onto everyone and then complain about other companies that don’t shit all over their customers (looking at you, Tim Sweeney, you turd of a CEO).
Maybe gog should send a few more accidental Nazi emails to really get the point across.
One one hand, I’m glad Steam isn’t abusing their market position and treats customers well.
On the other hand, why are our rules and laws setup such that it is impossible to compete with a company which has a de-facto monopoly on a service.
But they don’t have a monopoly…they just provide a superior product. Anyone can open another marketplace up, a lot have. There are no laws saying they can’t and valve has never tried to suggest they can’t.
They’re still a de-facto monopoly.
Windows is a de-facto monopoly, and there are stuff where Windows is still better than Linux. I actually worked with Linux API, and while the base Posix stuff are okay-ish, others make you appreciate the COM interfaces on Windows.
“Oh, just use SDL!” SDL abstracts away a lot of things.
because this is how capitalism has evolved. it’s always this kind of shit.
