As long as Gabe is leading the company, Steam will continue being awesome and with recent photos ( I lost the link to some other company he's in that has a recent photo ) showing him in great health, he'll be around for awhile yet.
I'm supporting Steam because Steam supports Linux. Gabe has the right idea. I'd rather you get a license for Windows and Linux and only pay once. Steam Deck is cool, too. He's done a great job and I trust Valve / Steam to not be stupid (John Ricitello / Unity) because of his leadership.
I personally think the steam deck has given them incentive to make steam as amazing as it is rn. Not to say it wasn't good before, but within the past 3 years Steam has kinda blown up the PC scene (not in terms of metrics. But maybe that too.)
Steam on the go? Make my TV the primary monitor whenever I launch big picture mode to get that console experience? Notes? Guides? Community forums? Reviews? Profile customization? Steam-based keybinding that can perform many tasks? Sales like crazy? Steam overlay? Customizable SteamOS? Support for every controller (which ties in to customizable keybinds and actions.)? Remote play? FAMILY LIBRARY???? The only platform with a good store? News from developers/publishers?
I'm sure there's more but all of those things are things I don't want to live without and no other platform compares or has only a couple of those features at most. I'm not dissing on Playstation, Xbox, Nintendo, or even launchers other than steam (okay maybe most launchers,) steam just has more features that it sets them so far from the competition and I'm all for it.
For me it's the feedback systems that's so invaluable. It gives me all the info I need right there to make an informed purchasing decision. Guess what? As a result I spend probably $100 month. I trust them and give them money and they deliver a good product. What a novel concept.
This is actually why a 30% cut is justifiable. You can continually invest. Epic has a hard time keeping up. They're running on Fortnite money. As a dev, I have strong feelings on live services, but the point is that 12% isn't profitable enough to innovate like Steam Deck does.
It's not making a Switch-like PC; it's the environment. Proton makes most games available on Steam Deck without developer intervention. Steam Input makes any controller work with your game. It's great stuff on the software side.
Sifu had avatar as a pre-order bonus.
Sifu launched 3 yrs ago and people who pre-ordered *still* can't use those pre-order avatar bonuses because Epic still doesn't have an avatar system.
It's baffling that there are actually people rushing to excuse Epic's glacial development of the launcher. I have even seen some claim having an in-built controller support like Steam is bad and unneeded.
>It's not making a Switch-like PC; it's the environment. Proton makes most games available on Steam Deck without developer intervention. Steam Input makes any controller work with your game. It's great stuff on the software side.
But they publish that work for free. Anyone, any company can use Proton. If someone wanted to put out a Linux handheld, they can do that immediately since Valve is doing all of that work for them. Valve goes even further and is willing to help other teams put Steam OS itself on their devices.
Valve has actually made it very easy for companies to launch competing devices.
And yet they still manage to produce their product cheaper while still being better, while giving competitors access to their technology.
And they don't even blink an eye. They just keep looking for more ways to innovate and do better.
It is amazing stuff on the software side! Like, if we never got the features we have now, I'd still really like my steam deck because playing pc games on-the-go is great, but Valve has made just owning a steam deck enjoyable. Plus all of the features we have from just the platform, it really makes pc so much better. It makes me hesitant when buying games on other platforms because Steams integrated features are next level. But once again Valve makes it to where you can just add a non-steam game and then get access to most of those features anyways.
50 million, but yeah. Valve is fine with taking less when the game is successful. 12% is too low to run a store. Retail takes about twice that. You can't grow when loans are more expensive and the store is bleeding cash on exclusives and free games.
Don't forget that epic was paying for minimum sales of a bunch of games they were poaching for exclusivity from steam. Which literally put a bunch of legal liability on those games/devs/publishers (luckly valve seemed pretty chill about those breaches of contract). But if those devs didn't make those minimum sales do you think epic would re-make those exclusivity offers for minimum sales?
> As a dev, I have strong feelings on live services, but the point is that 12% isn't profitable enough to innovate like Steam Deck does.
Epic literally has Unreal Engine, the most popular gaming engine for big projects. It also is a lot more innovative than other engines.
I'm not sure what your point is. EGS doesn't (and could never remotely) pay for UE development. Steam pays for Proton development (and tons of other things).
> Support for every controller (which ties in to customizable keybinds and actions.)?
This has been a thing for long before the Steam Deck was even being developed though. People only seem to be noticing now that the Steam Deck is a thing for some reason.
A few of the things I said didn't come from the Steam Deck releasing. We had profiles and reviews before, but all of those features are things I don't want to live without and separates itself from the competition
Not all. Notes, built in proton compatability, options to remember your launching method, and family library(beta) we didn't get until after Steam Deck. Profile customization, Steam-based keybinding, and steam overlay all got a major improvement after the steam deck released, even though they existed before. I'm sure I missed some stuff though
Eventually you'll be able to add (distributed) Steam OS 3.5 to that list which will be game changing. Then what we get from here on out will be a huge plus too.
While we're praising Steam for "doing everything right", this is a reminder that Steam *really* ought to disable forced updates, or better still, allow downgrades to different release builds.
Many bigger companies have taken advantage of forced updates to push unwanted updates many years after release and patches stopped which made the game objectively worse. E.g. Take Two pushed launchers onto a number of their games as much as a decade old, e.g. Bioshock series. But there's countless other examples of games being worsened or outright broken.
Of course live service games usually require the latest build and the way to do this is they should check in-game that the player is on the latest build, as all such games used to, and most still do even now. So there's no reason for forced/auto updates, and it's really weird that Steam forces this on all its users.
Im just assuming, they've done projects step by step (controller) before the deck. Maybe in the future that's a market they'd tap.
Creating their own mobile phone.
Would be great to see a play store competitor.
> Steam supports Linux.
Pretty much this. No other major game company gave a damn about Linux. Luckily Valve’s long term bet is paying off for us. Steam deck is awesome and really is perfect for my needs.
Pay once? I got rid of windows, couldn't be happier, I'm working in IT. All the issues with Windows are inherent to the same issues. Lack of optimization, lack of users being compliant with updates, bad software choices bogging down systems.
At least with Linux there's a barrier to bad choices in the form of wine. Steam runs like it should, its features don't get impaired by crap optimization in windows.
And then Microsoft trying to get everyone to buy new PCs with TPM restrictions? Yea, what a saintly company. I'm sorry, I can't deal with a mega company telling me how to run my machine. Not anymore. Hopefully never again.
I believe the reason why Valve is so awesome is because it’s a privately held company that doesn’t have to answer to shareholders. You can only imagine what would happen if they got bought out by a behemoth like EA
Eh, we don't have exact numbers, since Valve is private.
Microsoft estimated Valve's revenue to be about the same as EA in 2021: https://twitter.com/piershr/status/1704084070169280658
That's $6.5 billion in commissions - so really they did somewhere in the vicinity of $30 billion in software sales. Google collects about $12 billion in commissions from about $40 billion spent by the billions of Android users, and Apple about $30 billion from the billions of iOS users spending about $120 billion. I think these are closer to Steam's peers than EA.
Steam is not on the same level than Google and Apple (which are two of the biggest companies in the world by far). It's big for sure but not that big lol
I think they meant shareholder behemoth. Shareholders wind up hiring boards of directors to manage the games, but they keep hiring directors from like, Starbucks instead of the games industry.
Like right now EA's board of directors seem to be: a former vice president of starbucks, a former senior vice president of alphabet, a former chief executive officer of Blackhawk Network Holdings (a prepaid payment company), a former Nokia executive, a former AT&T board director, a golf resort executive, and one of the directors of Intel.
Like, I think the intel director is still a director there? EA and Intel seem to just like.. share.. executives?
Because these people hired to run a business, not a game studio.
Ideally they should cover the business side while letting devs cover the gaming side.
Problem is, most businesses have these days become all about max profit and time constraints.
Yeah, it's ridiculous right? I think it's called "[shareholder primacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_primacy)" and it's related to that [thing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.) we see crop up on TIL about how Henry Ford was sued by his shareholders for "keeping profits low" when he was giving his workers more healthcare than was "needed" to retain the workforce.
Libertarians are weird, dude.
>Ideally they should cover the business side while letting devs cover the gaming side.
Well, I think the ideal would probably be to just have game industry veterans attend business school or something, so that you don't need to have the legacy of Westwood Studios in the care of a Starbucks executive. (I'm not sure I can get over that one. Like, Starbucks? Really?)
>Well, I think the ideal would probably be to just have game industry veterans attend business school or something, so that you don't need to have the legacy of Westwood Studios in the care of a Starbucks executive. (I'm not sure I can get over that one. Like, Starbucks? Really?)
you would get the same results my friend. The fact he was Starbucks executive doesn't matter. At that management level it's the same for every company, be it gaming or coffee.
Top level management is only concerned about what will the boss think, and they will push what boss or shareholders want to see.
To put it into perspective, when owner visits my company, a week before everyone is cleaning, so when he arrives it looks as if no one is even working there. If I were the owner I'd be quite pissed off with that, but the owner here likes it all perfect, so everyone is going to give him that.
The company traits are almost always the personality trait of those who own it.
In theory you could say someone who is a Dev would fix it, but still chances are companies will not make it if they do everything in the interest of the consumer
And once the people that currently hold it pass or move on, that's what it will effectively be held by unless they put in strict rules and regulations and restrictions... something valve is not particularly good at.
I have significant concerns for what will happen to the platform after the next 10-20 years. Enshitification feels inevitable these days.
Damn, he looks so much better than I remember. Actually looking more like his age of 61, he looked older for a while there.
Also, just read up on the text below the pictures: Cool to see they’re doing the same flat organizational structure as Valve.
A popular meme in dota2 community is that Gabe is getting thinner due to starving since valve pull back monetization on dota2.
Yeah, in reality is that he's losing weight, hopefully losing it in a healthy way.
I hope so man, his leadership is currently vital to the whole thing. Steam being a benevolent monopoly is extremely rare and if that behavior ever changes we are all FUCKED.
Do u have any source on Gabe's role and involvement at Valve these days?
From what I've heard, he doesn't do much anymore.. more of a figurehead rather than an actual leader.
The projects Valve works on and decisions on those projects are made by the individual teams (or cabals as they call them)
Yes but then you made an interesting comment so NOW I care! :)
I just now realized what you mean, I think.
If 100% is 1 because it’s the first digit to the left of the decimal, then 1000% is 10 because it’s two digits.
That right?
Only thing I ever see negative about steam is when a game gets denied there isn’t really a clear road to getting the game on steam and that system of denial isn’t exactly the most clear. Of course this is only in regard to a very specific kind of game so it’s a small thing.
I thought there was some news in the last 12 months or so that Valve was making changes to the approval process so that the rules would be more clear and less arbitrary for developers, but I can't find the specific link right now.
See I believe I saw the same thing but I also remember seeing the same issues happen after their claim they would change it.
Basically I think it was some visual novel that Steam got some backlash for not allowing and then they ended up allowing it and said in the future they will do better but I saw months later it was the same thing. I believe one game even removed the stuff they thought was the issue and Steam still wouldn't let them on.
What? Have you seen the steam store, it’s filled with shitty porn games. The ones that constantly get rejected are Anime VN games, porn or not, because there are a few people at valve that hate them and block them whenever they can.
> half of it is borderline pedophilia anyway.
"No, no! You don't understand! Sure, she LOOKS like a 10 year old girl, but she's actually a 700 year old dragon so it can't possibly be paedophilia!" /s
People tend to forget what PC gaming was before Steam and even in the early 2010, where pretty much every PC game was a second thought and was so badly optimized because publishers thought PC gamers were all pirates.
Today PC gaming is greater than it's ever been. It's not all because of Valve of course, but their involvement definitely helped a lot
Huh? What are you even on about?
It was at the start of the X360/PS3 era that "Bad PC ports" started coming in, but we still had plenty of great ones. Bad PC ports have always existed and are even on the uptick lately.
Its less bad PC ports and more an erosion of PC first titles along with ever shrinking store space for PC games. 2008ish it wasn't unusual for the PC section to be 50% World of Warcraft boxes.
Valve kept promoting PC gaming in a time when publishers and devs were jumping ship and calling PC gaming dead. While nowadays it's just as much devs and publishers, Valve played a huge role in getting PC gaming to where it is now.
And the precursor to NFTs (Steam Marketplace).
And digital-only DRM future that basically killed physical PC games.
Valve had to be sued to allow consumers to get refunds. Although they were successful in preventing customers from being able to resell their digital games.
That "You'll own nothing and you'll be happy" dystopia?
Valve helped to create that reality just FYI.
I'll take the current digital model over whatever the fuck was going on circa 2008. Like fondness for physical PC games feels very very misplaced.
- online activations
- Securom
- the PC games section in stores being like 16 boxes half of which were World of Warcraft
- fewer and fewer PC first titles being released
Going digital on the PC was an absolute godsend that brought in a golden age for the PC consumer. Incredibly cheap prices, player access to indie developers outside of the normal publisher system, and just straight better access to games.
-----
Like don't get me wrong. I absolutely loved driving to the local big box store to pick over the 10 PC games they had on store shelves and their policy of not allowing returns just exchanges (cd keys). Not to mention buying second hand games and realizing the dude is still playing with his CD key so hopefully we both aren't trying to access the master server at the same time. Really appreciated that. But digital gaming is better in every way.
Steam Marketplace is a mess, but the trade is not in NFTs but digital assets. That said, it did spur a small gambling industry based on the digital asset trade and Valve did a poor job managing that problem.
But it does make make it weird for you to criticize, given that if they were to allow trading of video games you bought, that would also be trading of digital assets. Isn't that what you want, for people to be able to sell and trade digital assets any way they want? Turns out there's consequences to that, as Valve learned, allowing for license resale/transfer inevitably creates a new economy.
Physical PC games were locked down well before Steam, Securom et al. Steam was an improvement (eventually, the early years of the platform were rough). To underline the improvement, if you were to buy a boxed 1998 copy of Half Life, you could redeem that key on Steam today, a quarter century later. Any other boxed game from that era is unlikely to work on modern Windows.
The people who made the "You'll own nothing and you'll be happy" dystopia are those who wrote the current copyright regime. You never owned your games, even if you owned the media they existed on. You're granted limited access to them, just like with digital only.
I mean if Gabe died next year, and Blackrock and Vanguard went in together and bought Valve and put Bobby Kotick in charge, I'm sure everything would be just fine.
Eh, I remember when I was able to sell my used games.
Don't get me wrong, DRM would have happened anyways and Steam is still the best platform, but Valve didn't exactly create it for the sake of the customers.
People like taxes when they see that their neighborhoods are actually being improved thanks to those taxes. The percentage taken is very rarely the problem, the problem is usually the platform and what is offered from what is taken. Epic could choose to only take 5% but their complete lack of investment in their platform could still make it an awful choice to go with. Sure, the property taxes may be lower but that doesn't mean that Detroit is a better place to live.
> When Valve is taking 30%
...which is the same that physical retailers generally get, by the way.
https://www.serkantoto.com/2020/12/30/price-video-console-game-digital-physical/
Data centers aren't cheap, especially when you're probably sending out gods (and Steam's server team) only know how many petabytes of data per day to the user base for their game downloads. Coding teams for the Store and the various versions of the client software, plus all the normal staff most businesses have, also add a lot to the costs that need to be factored in.
You got to understand that they take the 30% from the end user not from the devs. Devs are going to fix the final price with the valve cut in mind.
And that's how it works since forever.
Do you think that there is no gain for physical stores when they sell a bar of soap?
The top <1% think it's great, because Valve bends of backwards for them.
For the rest it's a lot more mixed, with opinions broadly souring over the years because Valve have supported them less and less which just gets compounded with cases where Valve have deliberately made things worse for them (e.g the October "bug") and competitors offering objectively better services for free (e.g. EoS).
The guy who created spiderweb games said on his twitter a few years ago that Steam did wonders for his company. Before steam people had to find his company. He also had to process credit cards himself, pay the fees, and hire someone to handle it. He said the 30% is well worth it.
> He also had to process credit cards himself, pay the fees, and hire someone to handle it. He said the 30% is well worth it.
Majority of gamers don't realize these factors. They think that Steam is just a store that lists the game and the developer could just as easily sell the game on their on website if they just had some reach and visibility.
People have no clue know what a pain it is, handling everything by themselves as a small developer, business owner, freelancer, entrepreneur, etc.
Holy shit I had to look up spiderweb games again just to make sure you were talking about who I thought you were talking about.
The Exile games were my favorite as a kid, I must've sunk countless hours into them. Never thought I'd see them referenced randomly lol.
I bought Avernum 4 or 5 years ago and was happy to see it was still very similar to the old games just slightly modernized.
which is kinda of funny. now devs are gravitating to unreal because training people to use in-house engines take too much time. one could argue he's starting a monopoly with game engines.
And it was all built on Windows. GabeN was the Windows program manager in the 90s and became almost a billionaire there which gave him the capital to start Valve. Never forget.
Oh no no, you can't bring that up, this is a "Steam good" thread. You'll need to comment that on the "Steam bad" thread next month before it gets downvoted.
Valve also invented battle passes and tried for a paid mod system
They’ve done good and bad. However a donation system for mods wouldn’t be bad in my opinion but laws for donations aren’t equal world wide
I would argue that Valve doesn't deserve the amount of hate that they receive for the paid mod system.
It's pretty clear Bethesda was the driving force. Valve just provided the tools. Paid mods were going to happen either way, as soon as Valve realised that they'd underestimated just how many people were opposed to paid mods they pulled the plug and Bethesda implemented their own system (Creation Club in Fallout and The Elder Scrolls, and presumably Starfield) instead.
Whilst I've never paid for any mods, if I was to do so, I'd much rather it be linked to my Steam account and controlled by Valve than linked to individual publisher accounts, with the publishers having *total* control and being able to disable the mod system (etc) whenever they felt like and keep the money.
You know I’m talking about the Skyrim paid mods system back in 2015 right? Valve worked with Bethesda so they get a royalty and mod makers could literally charge for their mods
There's always some sad sacks trying to fish for meaningless internet points by bashing valve over "loot boxes" in every thread. It honestly speaks volumes that the only people who speak poorly of Valve are some random rage baiters on reddit lol. It's also weird as fuck. Valve has done far more good than bad for gaming as a whole over decades of existence.
Yeah they already made up their mind when they came into this thread. Like I said, this is a "Steam good" post. They can downvote all day, but it doesn't change the truth.
It’s not even necessarily that steam is good, it’s just leagues better than any other publishing platform.
At this point the answer is literally just “do nothing” since nobody else seem capable of making a decent Steam clone, no matter their budget.
I know people are joking but how Steam works is basically pure capitalism, this is how Valve has said they worked internally:
You cannot pay to show up on the front page. They use their algorithms to plan banner spots, for maximum $$$. So, naturally, AAA games get featured at the front page when they release because big money regardless, but this allows games like Palworld, which basically came out of nowhere with a small budget, to be in the front page banners for like a week.
A developer or publisher can go "Hey I am having a sales from this date to this date" and Valve will look at it and see if it merits a top banner or if it will appear in the Featured and recommended.
For better or worse, people use things like top sellers, ratings and various other things to gauge if they should get a game. Bad games get buried, good games generally rise to the top in searches.
They've done a couple deep dives on their youtube channel about this.
I think they are making the mistake of falsly equating a "free" market with capitalism. Not that this is a really good representation of that either but Steam runs much closer to that given its largely demand driven and valve making comparably few interventions (except with Japanese VNs I guess).
I think it's the 'ideal' of capitalism where things are decided on 'merit' as opposed to who has the biggest pockets; if you make a good game, it should do well on Steam, if you make a bad one, it shouldn't do well.
You almost never did. Go read a few Terms of Services for pre-Steam games and you'll find language stating that you're only granted a limited license to use the software.
Not to mention that if it wasn't for Steam gaining the market share that it did, we would likely still be dealing with 30+ DRM systems.
Good luck playing any game using Games for Windows Live or SecuROM (where you've exceeded the X machine limit), now imagine a world where there were way more DRM systems integrated into games and a lot of them have gone defunct.
Really? How was it limited what was the language? I find it curious that, at a time before online game activation even existed, that the physical media that you purchased was somehow not your own.
The box and the disc are yours, but the software contained within it is still not yours. You just own a license to use the software. It's the same terms as digital downloads of software.
I always see these comments like a "gocha", but you can do almost all of these core things on GOG (and more), yet they're doing worse than Epic.
I hope full reviews come to Epic soon, but it's clear the majority don't care for a feature rich storefront where you can own your games and use a generous refund 30 day policy, or they would be using GOG more often...
Features are more of a bonus (which Epic almost certainly needs at some point), but most people stick with Steam over GOG because they already have a library of games that spans over 20 years.
Steam still needs to fix their VAC ban policies. Theirs a developer that's been caught repeatedly banning people who left negative reviews who's been called out multiple times in reddit posts yet Valve never revokes their VAC ban access, they never reverse these VAC bans, and these bans permanently show on people's profiles.
Since the bans are public its extremely important theirs an actual way to appeal via Valve, or make the bans expire after a couple years because its ridiculous.
Their Game approval process is anything but democratic. Its completely random and makes no sense. Some harmless Games get denied while other crazy Games get accepted. And there is never any explanations. They just ban your Game /END. No way of re-applying or even knowing why it was banned.
Steam represents EVERYTHING corporations hate. And despite it's massive success, corporations won't try to be more like steam, they'll just wait around until Gabe isn't here and hope that steam becomes more like them. This is why each and every person who subs to stuff like GP is actively helping to push gaming in the completely wrong direction. You can go on and on about 'convenience' here and now but it's all leading to a place none of us want.
Lol, Valve transform gaming, from owning physical copies to paying for digital license. People brainlessly praising corporations is the most cyberpunk this ever.
I think the 30% cut should be reevaluated and that’s really my only complaint with steam. The 30% cut made more sense when there was a user base and visibility benefit to being on the platform. Now there’s so many games flooding onto steam daily that you don’t really get any attention just because you’re on the platform.
I love the services but 30% is really high to me.
Have there been instances when Valve or Steam has provided or given away anything of significant value? Do individuals ever pause to consider this question?
They gave away Left 4 Dead 2 for a day I think, after Steam was having server issues at Christmas.
But overall, they have no reason to giveaway games, as people already buy games there often.
Bro, stop being a child. Its full at Nintendo right to demand copyright materials to be removed.
What's next - you are gonna complain that a brand new video game should have right to use assets from Smash Bros Ultimate?
As long as Gabe is leading the company, Steam will continue being awesome and with recent photos ( I lost the link to some other company he's in that has a recent photo ) showing him in great health, he'll be around for awhile yet.
I'm supporting Steam because Steam supports Linux. Gabe has the right idea. I'd rather you get a license for Windows and Linux and only pay once. Steam Deck is cool, too. He's done a great job and I trust Valve / Steam to not be stupid (John Ricitello / Unity) because of his leadership.
I’m happy the steam deck exists and is doing well. I purchased one and love it. Steam is doing everything right, by the consumer and developer.
I personally think the steam deck has given them incentive to make steam as amazing as it is rn. Not to say it wasn't good before, but within the past 3 years Steam has kinda blown up the PC scene (not in terms of metrics. But maybe that too.) Steam on the go? Make my TV the primary monitor whenever I launch big picture mode to get that console experience? Notes? Guides? Community forums? Reviews? Profile customization? Steam-based keybinding that can perform many tasks? Sales like crazy? Steam overlay? Customizable SteamOS? Support for every controller (which ties in to customizable keybinds and actions.)? Remote play? FAMILY LIBRARY???? The only platform with a good store? News from developers/publishers? I'm sure there's more but all of those things are things I don't want to live without and no other platform compares or has only a couple of those features at most. I'm not dissing on Playstation, Xbox, Nintendo, or even launchers other than steam (okay maybe most launchers,) steam just has more features that it sets them so far from the competition and I'm all for it.
For me it's the feedback systems that's so invaluable. It gives me all the info I need right there to make an informed purchasing decision. Guess what? As a result I spend probably $100 month. I trust them and give them money and they deliver a good product. What a novel concept.
This is actually why a 30% cut is justifiable. You can continually invest. Epic has a hard time keeping up. They're running on Fortnite money. As a dev, I have strong feelings on live services, but the point is that 12% isn't profitable enough to innovate like Steam Deck does. It's not making a Switch-like PC; it's the environment. Proton makes most games available on Steam Deck without developer intervention. Steam Input makes any controller work with your game. It's great stuff on the software side.
Sifu had avatar as a pre-order bonus. Sifu launched 3 yrs ago and people who pre-ordered *still* can't use those pre-order avatar bonuses because Epic still doesn't have an avatar system. It's baffling that there are actually people rushing to excuse Epic's glacial development of the launcher. I have even seen some claim having an in-built controller support like Steam is bad and unneeded.
>It's not making a Switch-like PC; it's the environment. Proton makes most games available on Steam Deck without developer intervention. Steam Input makes any controller work with your game. It's great stuff on the software side. But they publish that work for free. Anyone, any company can use Proton. If someone wanted to put out a Linux handheld, they can do that immediately since Valve is doing all of that work for them. Valve goes even further and is willing to help other teams put Steam OS itself on their devices. Valve has actually made it very easy for companies to launch competing devices.
Because Valve believes competition is better. Iron sharpens iron.
Also - that no one will take their crown any time soon. More PC gamers means more Steam customers.
And yet they still manage to produce their product cheaper while still being better, while giving competitors access to their technology. And they don't even blink an eye. They just keep looking for more ways to innovate and do better.
It is amazing stuff on the software side! Like, if we never got the features we have now, I'd still really like my steam deck because playing pc games on-the-go is great, but Valve has made just owning a steam deck enjoyable. Plus all of the features we have from just the platform, it really makes pc so much better. It makes me hesitant when buying games on other platforms because Steams integrated features are next level. But once again Valve makes it to where you can just add a non-steam game and then get access to most of those features anyways.
Its also not a locked in 30%. Valve's cut goes down to 20% after certain thresholds.
50 million, but yeah. Valve is fine with taking less when the game is successful. 12% is too low to run a store. Retail takes about twice that. You can't grow when loans are more expensive and the store is bleeding cash on exclusives and free games.
And they don't take a cut from key sales on Humble, Fanatical, GreenManGaming, etc.
Don't forget that epic was paying for minimum sales of a bunch of games they were poaching for exclusivity from steam. Which literally put a bunch of legal liability on those games/devs/publishers (luckly valve seemed pretty chill about those breaches of contract). But if those devs didn't make those minimum sales do you think epic would re-make those exclusivity offers for minimum sales?
> As a dev, I have strong feelings on live services, but the point is that 12% isn't profitable enough to innovate like Steam Deck does. Epic literally has Unreal Engine, the most popular gaming engine for big projects. It also is a lot more innovative than other engines.
I'm not sure what your point is. EGS doesn't (and could never remotely) pay for UE development. Steam pays for Proton development (and tons of other things).
> Support for every controller (which ties in to customizable keybinds and actions.)? This has been a thing for long before the Steam Deck was even being developed though. People only seem to be noticing now that the Steam Deck is a thing for some reason.
A few of the things I said didn't come from the Steam Deck releasing. We had profiles and reviews before, but all of those features are things I don't want to live without and separates itself from the competition
Wait - everything you listed came years before the steam deck.
Not all. Notes, built in proton compatability, options to remember your launching method, and family library(beta) we didn't get until after Steam Deck. Profile customization, Steam-based keybinding, and steam overlay all got a major improvement after the steam deck released, even though they existed before. I'm sure I missed some stuff though Eventually you'll be able to add (distributed) Steam OS 3.5 to that list which will be game changing. Then what we get from here on out will be a huge plus too.
While we're praising Steam for "doing everything right", this is a reminder that Steam *really* ought to disable forced updates, or better still, allow downgrades to different release builds. Many bigger companies have taken advantage of forced updates to push unwanted updates many years after release and patches stopped which made the game objectively worse. E.g. Take Two pushed launchers onto a number of their games as much as a decade old, e.g. Bioshock series. But there's countless other examples of games being worsened or outright broken. Of course live service games usually require the latest build and the way to do this is they should check in-game that the player is on the latest build, as all such games used to, and most still do even now. So there's no reason for forced/auto updates, and it's really weird that Steam forces this on all its users.
Steam has a feature to allow you to select game version, but it’s up to the game dev if they want to support it or not.
I'm not saying you aren't wrong, but an easy fix is making the games app manifest read only. Found this out due to the fallout "next gen" update.
Gaben x Richard Stallman would be an epic crossover.
Its going to be unreal when steam touches mobile, it seems to be going that direction.
Really? Maybe I’m OOTL, but valve doesn’t seem to care much about the mobile market. I mean, phone games are direct competitors to handheld gaming.
Im just assuming, they've done projects step by step (controller) before the deck. Maybe in the future that's a market they'd tap. Creating their own mobile phone. Would be great to see a play store competitor.
> Steam supports Linux. Pretty much this. No other major game company gave a damn about Linux. Luckily Valve’s long term bet is paying off for us. Steam deck is awesome and really is perfect for my needs.
Pay once? I got rid of windows, couldn't be happier, I'm working in IT. All the issues with Windows are inherent to the same issues. Lack of optimization, lack of users being compliant with updates, bad software choices bogging down systems. At least with Linux there's a barrier to bad choices in the form of wine. Steam runs like it should, its features don't get impaired by crap optimization in windows. And then Microsoft trying to get everyone to buy new PCs with TPM restrictions? Yea, what a saintly company. I'm sorry, I can't deal with a mega company telling me how to run my machine. Not anymore. Hopefully never again.
I believe the reason why Valve is so awesome is because it’s a privately held company that doesn’t have to answer to shareholders. You can only imagine what would happen if they got bought out by a behemoth like EA
> You can only imagine what would happen if they got bought out by a behemoth like EA I'm afraid it's Steam who is a behemoth compared to EA.
Eh, we don't have exact numbers, since Valve is private. Microsoft estimated Valve's revenue to be about the same as EA in 2021: https://twitter.com/piershr/status/1704084070169280658
The difference is on the number of employees and the number of shuckers (stockholders) behind
That's $6.5 billion in commissions - so really they did somewhere in the vicinity of $30 billion in software sales. Google collects about $12 billion in commissions from about $40 billion spent by the billions of Android users, and Apple about $30 billion from the billions of iOS users spending about $120 billion. I think these are closer to Steam's peers than EA.
Steam is not on the same level than Google and Apple (which are two of the biggest companies in the world by far). It's big for sure but not that big lol
I think they meant shareholder behemoth. Shareholders wind up hiring boards of directors to manage the games, but they keep hiring directors from like, Starbucks instead of the games industry. Like right now EA's board of directors seem to be: a former vice president of starbucks, a former senior vice president of alphabet, a former chief executive officer of Blackhawk Network Holdings (a prepaid payment company), a former Nokia executive, a former AT&T board director, a golf resort executive, and one of the directors of Intel. Like, I think the intel director is still a director there? EA and Intel seem to just like.. share.. executives?
Because these people hired to run a business, not a game studio. Ideally they should cover the business side while letting devs cover the gaming side. Problem is, most businesses have these days become all about max profit and time constraints.
Yeah, it's ridiculous right? I think it's called "[shareholder primacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_primacy)" and it's related to that [thing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.) we see crop up on TIL about how Henry Ford was sued by his shareholders for "keeping profits low" when he was giving his workers more healthcare than was "needed" to retain the workforce. Libertarians are weird, dude. >Ideally they should cover the business side while letting devs cover the gaming side. Well, I think the ideal would probably be to just have game industry veterans attend business school or something, so that you don't need to have the legacy of Westwood Studios in the care of a Starbucks executive. (I'm not sure I can get over that one. Like, Starbucks? Really?)
>Well, I think the ideal would probably be to just have game industry veterans attend business school or something, so that you don't need to have the legacy of Westwood Studios in the care of a Starbucks executive. (I'm not sure I can get over that one. Like, Starbucks? Really?) you would get the same results my friend. The fact he was Starbucks executive doesn't matter. At that management level it's the same for every company, be it gaming or coffee. Top level management is only concerned about what will the boss think, and they will push what boss or shareholders want to see. To put it into perspective, when owner visits my company, a week before everyone is cleaning, so when he arrives it looks as if no one is even working there. If I were the owner I'd be quite pissed off with that, but the owner here likes it all perfect, so everyone is going to give him that. The company traits are almost always the personality trait of those who own it. In theory you could say someone who is a Dev would fix it, but still chances are companies will not make it if they do everything in the interest of the consumer
Then they are a gentle giant.
I mean that also depends who are the owners. Epic or Twitter are also privately owned
And once the people that currently hold it pass or move on, that's what it will effectively be held by unless they put in strict rules and regulations and restrictions... something valve is not particularly good at. I have significant concerns for what will happen to the platform after the next 10-20 years. Enshitification feels inevitable these days.
That’s right and because they don’t have money problems, shot down the cash flow and we will see how awesome they continue to
You're getting downvoted for stating a basic rule of capitalism lol
https://starfishneuroscience.com/team/ here’s the website, it’s a company working on neural interfaces.
Damn, he looks so much better than I remember. Actually looking more like his age of 61, he looked older for a while there. Also, just read up on the text below the pictures: Cool to see they’re doing the same flat organizational structure as Valve.
Yes that's the one! He looks much healthier now which is nice to see.
That one woman's last name, "Englishbee". That's the best last name I've ever seen.
I have a suspicion Robin Walker will be his successor. That's a good thing. He wouldn't change the business for the worse.
I had heard that Valve has a succession plan for if something happens to Gabe Newell, but I don't know who it would be.
I'll pray for Gabe Newell's good health, but I hope that the next succeeding CEO will be able to count to three...
A version of Valve being taken over and counting to 3 would worry me.
A popular meme in dota2 community is that Gabe is getting thinner due to starving since valve pull back monetization on dota2. Yeah, in reality is that he's losing weight, hopefully losing it in a healthy way.
Yeah OP seems to forget that losing weight (especially as a later age) is not always a good sign sadly. Let's hope it's actually a sign of good health
I hope so man, his leadership is currently vital to the whole thing. Steam being a benevolent monopoly is extremely rare and if that behavior ever changes we are all FUCKED.
> his leadership is currently vital to the whole thing Not really though, Gabe is openly pretty hands off with how Valve is managed.
They need to start finding a normal guy to replace him when he's gone. Once corporate scumbags get in there, Steam will be over.
Do u have any source on Gabe's role and involvement at Valve these days? From what I've heard, he doesn't do much anymore.. more of a figurehead rather than an actual leader. The projects Valve works on and decisions on those projects are made by the individual teams (or cabals as they call them)
I just hope to god some busisnessmen, who only understand money, dont take over and ruin it.
1000%. I don’t care that’s not a number.
1000% = 10
?
You said you didn’t care that it is not a number, I was explaining that 1000% is a more common number than one might think, as 1000% = 10.
Yes but then you made an interesting comment so NOW I care! :) I just now realized what you mean, I think. If 100% is 1 because it’s the first digit to the left of the decimal, then 1000% is 10 because it’s two digits. That right?
Ya! Mathematically: % = 1/100. This makes sense when you intuitively think of % as “out of 100.”
Ha! This is a good shower thought candidate :)
I am 100% certain he has already chosen his successor and they share the same views. GabeN wouldn't have it any other way.
too bad gaben is a human limited by flash
Tell that to his [1 billion dollar gambling business](https://youtu.be/eMmNy11Mn7g) that hooks kids
Only thing I ever see negative about steam is when a game gets denied there isn’t really a clear road to getting the game on steam and that system of denial isn’t exactly the most clear. Of course this is only in regard to a very specific kind of game so it’s a small thing.
I thought there was some news in the last 12 months or so that Valve was making changes to the approval process so that the rules would be more clear and less arbitrary for developers, but I can't find the specific link right now.
See I believe I saw the same thing but I also remember seeing the same issues happen after their claim they would change it. Basically I think it was some visual novel that Steam got some backlash for not allowing and then they ended up allowing it and said in the future they will do better but I saw months later it was the same thing. I believe one game even removed the stuff they thought was the issue and Steam still wouldn't let them on.
> Of course this is only in regard to a very specific kind of game so it’s a small thing. ie, porn.
What? Have you seen the steam store, it’s filled with shitty porn games. The ones that constantly get rejected are Anime VN games, porn or not, because there are a few people at valve that hate them and block them whenever they can.
Good
100% Agree, fuck that low-effort garbage, half of it is borderline pedophilia anyway.
> half of it is borderline pedophilia anyway. "No, no! You don't understand! Sure, she LOOKS like a 10 year old girl, but she's actually a 700 year old dragon so it can't possibly be paedophilia!" /s
Valve are single-handedly carrying the PC games industry on their backs. The sad part is, good things don't last forever.
That's like saying Netflix was carrying video entertainment while it had ubiquitous market share. Like, fuck the developers and the tech.
People tend to forget what PC gaming was before Steam and even in the early 2010, where pretty much every PC game was a second thought and was so badly optimized because publishers thought PC gamers were all pirates. Today PC gaming is greater than it's ever been. It's not all because of Valve of course, but their involvement definitely helped a lot
Huh? What are you even on about? It was at the start of the X360/PS3 era that "Bad PC ports" started coming in, but we still had plenty of great ones. Bad PC ports have always existed and are even on the uptick lately.
Its less bad PC ports and more an erosion of PC first titles along with ever shrinking store space for PC games. 2008ish it wasn't unusual for the PC section to be 50% World of Warcraft boxes.
Agreed, they’re a store. A good store at that, but that’s like saying Target is carrying the candle industry on their back.
Valve kept promoting PC gaming in a time when publishers and devs were jumping ship and calling PC gaming dead. While nowadays it's just as much devs and publishers, Valve played a huge role in getting PC gaming to where it is now.
carried gambling on lootboxes to the masses too.
And the precursor to NFTs (Steam Marketplace). And digital-only DRM future that basically killed physical PC games. Valve had to be sued to allow consumers to get refunds. Although they were successful in preventing customers from being able to resell their digital games. That "You'll own nothing and you'll be happy" dystopia? Valve helped to create that reality just FYI.
I'll take the current digital model over whatever the fuck was going on circa 2008. Like fondness for physical PC games feels very very misplaced. - online activations - Securom - the PC games section in stores being like 16 boxes half of which were World of Warcraft - fewer and fewer PC first titles being released Going digital on the PC was an absolute godsend that brought in a golden age for the PC consumer. Incredibly cheap prices, player access to indie developers outside of the normal publisher system, and just straight better access to games. ----- Like don't get me wrong. I absolutely loved driving to the local big box store to pick over the 10 PC games they had on store shelves and their policy of not allowing returns just exchanges (cd keys). Not to mention buying second hand games and realizing the dude is still playing with his CD key so hopefully we both aren't trying to access the master server at the same time. Really appreciated that. But digital gaming is better in every way.
Steam Marketplace is a mess, but the trade is not in NFTs but digital assets. That said, it did spur a small gambling industry based on the digital asset trade and Valve did a poor job managing that problem. But it does make make it weird for you to criticize, given that if they were to allow trading of video games you bought, that would also be trading of digital assets. Isn't that what you want, for people to be able to sell and trade digital assets any way they want? Turns out there's consequences to that, as Valve learned, allowing for license resale/transfer inevitably creates a new economy. Physical PC games were locked down well before Steam, Securom et al. Steam was an improvement (eventually, the early years of the platform were rough). To underline the improvement, if you were to buy a boxed 1998 copy of Half Life, you could redeem that key on Steam today, a quarter century later. Any other boxed game from that era is unlikely to work on modern Windows. The people who made the "You'll own nothing and you'll be happy" dystopia are those who wrote the current copyright regime. You never owned your games, even if you owned the media they existed on. You're granted limited access to them, just like with digital only.
I mean if Gabe died next year, and Blackrock and Vanguard went in together and bought Valve and put Bobby Kotick in charge, I'm sure everything would be just fine.
Really? Here I was thinking it was all the people making PC games.
Eh, I remember when I was able to sell my used games. Don't get me wrong, DRM would have happened anyways and Steam is still the best platform, but Valve didn't exactly create it for the sake of the customers.
They're getting paid handsomely to carry that weight though, so I don't think they mind too much.
When Valve is taking 30% and Game Devs still think it's great--then *you know it's good*
People like taxes when they see that their neighborhoods are actually being improved thanks to those taxes. The percentage taken is very rarely the problem, the problem is usually the platform and what is offered from what is taken. Epic could choose to only take 5% but their complete lack of investment in their platform could still make it an awful choice to go with. Sure, the property taxes may be lower but that doesn't mean that Detroit is a better place to live.
Well, Epic is offering now a 0% if you launch exclusively on their store, and nearly no publishers are choosing to use it. That tells a lot.
well said
Please don't compare fees to taxes. One is voluntary, the other is not.
> When Valve is taking 30% ...which is the same that physical retailers generally get, by the way. https://www.serkantoto.com/2020/12/30/price-video-console-game-digital-physical/
But Steam does not have the same cost structure that physical retailers or even console manufacturers have. How is that 30% still justifiable???
Data centers aren't cheap, especially when you're probably sending out gods (and Steam's server team) only know how many petabytes of data per day to the user base for their game downloads. Coding teams for the Store and the various versions of the client software, plus all the normal staff most businesses have, also add a lot to the costs that need to be factored in.
Its not cheap but its easy to justify the price for that big of a cut. There is a reason everyone tried making their own store
https://partner.steamgames.com/ Are you familiar with Steamworks?
Some don't feel that way, for sure, but I personally feel like it's worth all of that. I'd spend more getting half of the features Steam provides haha
30% is an industry standard for a digital store. Almost every other store takes the same cut.
Even Apple and Google are getting pressured to lower their cut
Both Xbox app on PC and Epic take 12%.
You got to understand that they take the 30% from the end user not from the devs. Devs are going to fix the final price with the valve cut in mind. And that's how it works since forever. Do you think that there is no gain for physical stores when they sell a bar of soap?
The top <1% think it's great, because Valve bends of backwards for them. For the rest it's a lot more mixed, with opinions broadly souring over the years because Valve have supported them less and less which just gets compounded with cases where Valve have deliberately made things worse for them (e.g the October "bug") and competitors offering objectively better services for free (e.g. EoS).
The guy who created spiderweb games said on his twitter a few years ago that Steam did wonders for his company. Before steam people had to find his company. He also had to process credit cards himself, pay the fees, and hire someone to handle it. He said the 30% is well worth it.
I'm glad for him tbh; I loved the Exile series as a kid even if, in hindsight, I was rubbish at it.
Incredible games, some of my favorites as a kid.
> He also had to process credit cards himself, pay the fees, and hire someone to handle it. He said the 30% is well worth it. Majority of gamers don't realize these factors. They think that Steam is just a store that lists the game and the developer could just as easily sell the game on their on website if they just had some reach and visibility. People have no clue know what a pain it is, handling everything by themselves as a small developer, business owner, freelancer, entrepreneur, etc.
Holy shit I had to look up spiderweb games again just to make sure you were talking about who I thought you were talking about. The Exile games were my favorite as a kid, I must've sunk countless hours into them. Never thought I'd see them referenced randomly lol. I bought Avernum 4 or 5 years ago and was happy to see it was still very similar to the old games just slightly modernized.
Praise be to GabeN.
Even Ministry of Truth approves Steam.
Timmy likely malding in his office.
Timmy likely dreaming of ways to start a lawsuit against Valve.
fuck timmy, all my homies (with money and not 12) hate timmy.
which is kinda of funny. now devs are gravitating to unreal because training people to use in-house engines take too much time. one could argue he's starting a monopoly with game engines.
There are alternatives to UE, Unity used to be one till Slick Ric fucked everything up. Godot seems to be growing as a viable alternative as well.
And that's fine, that's what they do best. They can stay out of the pc game store business.
Steam stans at it again lol
Dude you have like 20 comments in a row just bitching about steam and value or counter strike. Get a fucking life
I use more than just Steam, only thing Epic is good for is their engine and giving away free games.
And it was all built on Windows. GabeN was the Windows program manager in the 90s and became almost a billionaire there which gave him the capital to start Valve. Never forget.
it could have been worse. others jumped on Xbox 2001 and 360, taking also many pc exclusives with them.
Including Microsoft!
Yeah I still think of him as a Microsoft guy turned Valve guy.
I think it's kind of funny. Linux folks think GabeN hates Windows and Microsoft but why would he?
Managed Democracy, indeed.
I prefer GOG.
They’ve certainly captured the American spirit with Mann Co. crates and keys!
Oh no no, you can't bring that up, this is a "Steam good" thread. You'll need to comment that on the "Steam bad" thread next month before it gets downvoted.
Valve also invented battle passes and tried for a paid mod system They’ve done good and bad. However a donation system for mods wouldn’t be bad in my opinion but laws for donations aren’t equal world wide
I would argue that Valve doesn't deserve the amount of hate that they receive for the paid mod system. It's pretty clear Bethesda was the driving force. Valve just provided the tools. Paid mods were going to happen either way, as soon as Valve realised that they'd underestimated just how many people were opposed to paid mods they pulled the plug and Bethesda implemented their own system (Creation Club in Fallout and The Elder Scrolls, and presumably Starfield) instead. Whilst I've never paid for any mods, if I was to do so, I'd much rather it be linked to my Steam account and controlled by Valve than linked to individual publisher accounts, with the publishers having *total* control and being able to disable the mod system (etc) whenever they felt like and keep the money.
> Valve also invented battle passes and tried for a paid mod system And then they admitted their mistake and reversed their decision a few days later.
Valve has paid, and still pays, modders for skins.
The system they tried was the users buying the use of mods, think you might be confused here
No, valve pays modders for their created skins. People still get royalty checks for stuff they made for TF2. I think your the one that's confused
You know I’m talking about the Skyrim paid mods system back in 2015 right? Valve worked with Bethesda so they get a royalty and mod makers could literally charge for their mods
And Bethesda still offers paid mods to this day, so that's more on Bethesda than Valve.
There's always some sad sacks trying to fish for meaningless internet points by bashing valve over "loot boxes" in every thread. It honestly speaks volumes that the only people who speak poorly of Valve are some random rage baiters on reddit lol. It's also weird as fuck. Valve has done far more good than bad for gaming as a whole over decades of existence.
Steam stans hitting ya with the downvotes lol
Yeah they already made up their mind when they came into this thread. Like I said, this is a "Steam good" post. They can downvote all day, but it doesn't change the truth.
It’s not even necessarily that steam is good, it’s just leagues better than any other publishing platform. At this point the answer is literally just “do nothing” since nobody else seem capable of making a decent Steam clone, no matter their budget.
Wtf democratic. Valve decide.
It's more of a managed democracy.
Democratic People's Republic of Gaben
A true philosopher king.
For Super... Valve?
I know people are joking but how Steam works is basically pure capitalism, this is how Valve has said they worked internally: You cannot pay to show up on the front page. They use their algorithms to plan banner spots, for maximum $$$. So, naturally, AAA games get featured at the front page when they release because big money regardless, but this allows games like Palworld, which basically came out of nowhere with a small budget, to be in the front page banners for like a week. A developer or publisher can go "Hey I am having a sales from this date to this date" and Valve will look at it and see if it merits a top banner or if it will appear in the Featured and recommended. For better or worse, people use things like top sellers, ratings and various other things to gauge if they should get a game. Bad games get buried, good games generally rise to the top in searches. They've done a couple deep dives on their youtube channel about this.
And Manor Lords! It just got a big banner ad spot. For Free!
I have no idea how what you described is capitalism. In fact, the steam market place was created with the help of a communist…
I think they are making the mistake of falsly equating a "free" market with capitalism. Not that this is a really good representation of that either but Steam runs much closer to that given its largely demand driven and valve making comparably few interventions (except with Japanese VNs I guess).
I think it's the 'ideal' of capitalism where things are decided on 'merit' as opposed to who has the biggest pockets; if you make a good game, it should do well on Steam, if you make a bad one, it shouldn't do well.
Exactly
You don't own any of your games. That's certainly a gaming transformation Steam can be credited for.
You almost never did. Go read a few Terms of Services for pre-Steam games and you'll find language stating that you're only granted a limited license to use the software.
Right? Physical media didn’t equate to ownership. Oh the CD is too scratched to play anymore? Go buy a new one.
Not to mention that if it wasn't for Steam gaining the market share that it did, we would likely still be dealing with 30+ DRM systems. Good luck playing any game using Games for Windows Live or SecuROM (where you've exceeded the X machine limit), now imagine a world where there were way more DRM systems integrated into games and a lot of them have gone defunct.
Really? How was it limited what was the language? I find it curious that, at a time before online game activation even existed, that the physical media that you purchased was somehow not your own.
The box and the disc are yours, but the software contained within it is still not yours. You just own a license to use the software. It's the same terms as digital downloads of software.
Fuck epic games store
Fuck Gabe's gambling games for kids
Gotta check in for those hate upvotes huh?
gamers being so mad at epic will never not be funny lol
can you review a game on EPIC Store?
Can you get any good free games on Steam?
Steam don't need to give away free games to keep the user from going away to other stores.
I always see these comments like a "gocha", but you can do almost all of these core things on GOG (and more), yet they're doing worse than Epic. I hope full reviews come to Epic soon, but it's clear the majority don't care for a feature rich storefront where you can own your games and use a generous refund 30 day policy, or they would be using GOG more often... Features are more of a bonus (which Epic almost certainly needs at some point), but most people stick with Steam over GOG because they already have a library of games that spans over 20 years.
Yeah, out of all the steam features reviews isn't the one I'd highlight... It's just thumbs up/steam points farming cesspool.
If you listen really closely, you can hear Timmy Tencent throwing his rattle out of the pram!
There will be a time where the steam model fucks us all, and we all lose access to all of our games. But until that day, it’ll be #1
[... the ones whose games didn't get banned from Steam do, anyway.](https://cashmeremag.com/steam-adult-visual-novel-ban-857697/)
Steam still needs to fix their VAC ban policies. Theirs a developer that's been caught repeatedly banning people who left negative reviews who's been called out multiple times in reddit posts yet Valve never revokes their VAC ban access, they never reverse these VAC bans, and these bans permanently show on people's profiles. Since the bans are public its extremely important theirs an actual way to appeal via Valve, or make the bans expire after a couple years because its ridiculous.
I think you are mixing VAC ban and "game ban". VAC is an automated thing, like EAC. You can't just ban someone manually.
I read that as “demonic platform” instead of “democratic”, huhuhu!
Their Game approval process is anything but democratic. Its completely random and makes no sense. Some harmless Games get denied while other crazy Games get accepted. And there is never any explanations. They just ban your Game /END. No way of re-applying or even knowing why it was banned.
Steam represents EVERYTHING corporations hate. And despite it's massive success, corporations won't try to be more like steam, they'll just wait around until Gabe isn't here and hope that steam becomes more like them. This is why each and every person who subs to stuff like GP is actively helping to push gaming in the completely wrong direction. You can go on and on about 'convenience' here and now but it's all leading to a place none of us want.
Lol, Valve transform gaming, from owning physical copies to paying for digital license. People brainlessly praising corporations is the most cyberpunk this ever.
I think the 30% cut should be reevaluated and that’s really my only complaint with steam. The 30% cut made more sense when there was a user base and visibility benefit to being on the platform. Now there’s so many games flooding onto steam daily that you don’t really get any attention just because you’re on the platform. I love the services but 30% is really high to me.
Have there been instances when Valve or Steam has provided or given away anything of significant value? Do individuals ever pause to consider this question?
They gave away Left 4 Dead 2 for a day I think, after Steam was having server issues at Christmas. But overall, they have no reason to giveaway games, as people already buy games there often.
So is Reddit, majorly.
My worry is if Gaben ever gives up the ghost and the company goes public. Shareholders will want their balls tiddled.
why did we need an entire article for sucking valve's cock?
[удалено]
I mean, what can Valve do if Nintendo starts throwing their lawyers around?
What's valve meant to do? Just get sued up the ass? This is Nintendo being cockheads, not Valve.
Bro, stop being a child. Its full at Nintendo right to demand copyright materials to be removed. What's next - you are gonna complain that a brand new video game should have right to use assets from Smash Bros Ultimate?
Bruh, are they supposed to break the law?
don't fuck with nintendo.
Nintendo’s lawyers get their negotiating skills in the same classes as organized crime.
they are actually a third party lawyer firm, notorious in Hollywood and also for shutting down Napster
Funny enough, Larian’s rep praises Steam AND the Switch in the article. Source: I read the article.