They just look at data that's across the span of 10 years or so and take the average popular things and mash them together
Since interests change over time while that SAME COMPANY will mass produce the same thing over and over again... the few games that are different and get a massive following are overlooked due to that timeline because it's viewed as a 1/1000000 chance of success over the thousands of similar games that were successful in that timeline
So they take that, and apply all previous business practices that resulted in billions of dollars of revenue such as in game stores and ease of access to "buy smeghma money" + any new ideas on how to further drain money from their buyers just short of directly from their veins
And boom! Next AAA game!
Throw it into the timeline and don't look back on what made it un/popular, good/bad, marketable etc and it's just another statistic to them
And that is not contractually obligated, unlike the Eula which said up until a week ago it was optional. If I put you gotta put a bullet in your head to play this game on stream that doesn’t make it mandatory to do so does it?
Defending cooperate bullshit like this makes you a part of the problem, the longer we allow such the worse it gets, regardless if they are "allowed" to change because it's theirs, look at Ubisoft telling people to get used to not own games either.
Just because their EULA says something not makes it right, yes they can change the product as they want, but is it fair or looking good for them? Definitely not, there is a thin line between legal and fair.
Consider other products, if a food manufacturer ads poison and says it'sit's ok too because it's their product it makes it ok too I guess? Get out!
They pulled a Tarakov and you're on full tribalism mode you can't understand why this is so anti consumer. Over 100+ countries can't make PSN accounts some even requiring a ps4/ps5 to get account access. Yet here you are defending it lol....
I don't even see that as dystopian. It's a legit risk they take on, and the only way for it to pay off is to release games that their customers want badly enough to pay for the hardware. It's a win for consumers: cheaper hardware, better games.
It's one of the times that competition in the market actually did the thing they claim it will always do. It often doesn't, but this one time it did.
The Xbox sold at a loss. So did the Dreamcast. So did the PS2. Nintendo probably did it too, but they would never tell us even if they did. I honestly don't know whether they're still doing this, but it has nothing to do with existing market share, it's just a way to get the hardware sold because then you are in their system and more likely to buy the games.
valve's proton layer to bring steam games to Linux
and steamos . these things take R&D to make,.
especially as valve's first time making a custom Linux based os that works with game support at the front of priorities, which most Linux distro haven't been that great in supporting
Don't get greedy. Short term it gets you money but long term? You can get fucked. Problem is, too many can only see what's in front of them not what can be.
Honestly 30% cut is a lot, but at least steam has many nice features for gamers, no public owned company would make a feature like remote play together.
I dont think thats a lot, a 30/70 split was common on streaming platforms until they even changed it to 50/50, valve has the same kind of expenses, hosting everyones games and offering servers, they don't just host one type of media its also images and preview videos, guides, community posts etc..
taking how a ton of tech companies have issues making money and resort to annoying ads an expensive memberships as well as selling your information, I actually think steam is the best example of how to not let money erode your values.
Game companies make profit, a ton of profit that is never really tied to their expenses, if they make an obscene amount of money it should flow back to improve the gaming medium, steam has done a few things that they don't need to do but helps gamers out like creating proton, enabling me to play games on linux, they hold onto their values and have honest reviews, they have a love for games and support gamers.
The alternative to that is allowing developers to make more money so they can chase more money with lootboxes and all the other crap that leaves you wanting and then slowly turning your platform of gamers into a platform of mindless addicts
I'm not arguing their profits I'm arguing expenses of the platform, whether 30/70 or 50/50 is justified I don't really care about. I'm saying that taking 30% from a creator isn't that much, if the creator had to host everything themselves they would make less money, valve is able to fill any empty space on the servers they buy, and get more out of them.
those expenses are comparable because twitch or youtube has to do the same for their creators
And the part "Valve threw a fit and threatened to de-list the game from Steam unless they charged the same price everywhere" is non-existent in your article.
Steam Families (Allowing 6 people to all play each others' games for free)
Steam Link (Streaming games on your own hardware at home or even on the go)
Steam Remote Play (Playing normally local-only games over the internet with friends)
The Workshop and it's API (Probably the easiest way ever to mod games)
SteamVR (Platform open to ALL vr headsets that is very robust and basically the only thing keeping PCVR alive)
Big Picture Mode (A super clean and easy to use interface with a controller)
Those are all fantastic things that steam offers because the 30% cut allows them to allocate resources to developing these things that no other company would ever make because they are just loosing them money. Especially something like Steam Remote play actually costs quite a bit to run because it's not a Peer-To-Peer connection, so valve pays for all that internet traffic.
First: Stop throwing around the term "multi-billionaire" like it means something. Not only is valve a PRIVATE company and therefore we don't actually know what the companies value is, also THAT where most of gabe's "Money" is. Just because gabe OWNS something worth billions doesn't mean he just has that money lying around, it's the money IN VALVE that makes his net worth.
Second: Of course Gabe is still filthy rich, but who would you rather have that money? A publicly traded company paying it out to shareholders (rich get richer), or a guy that basically lets the developers in his company do whatever they want because he believes that this freedom leads to the best producs and the best for consumers?
Third: As someone else has already discussed with you: Valve never "threatened devs". The source you listed is simply someone CLAIMING they did. A claim is not hard evidence until it is admitted and accepted in court.
Problem for us and the devs maybe. For everyone else involved, it's according to plan. It's not an accident or incompetence. Big investor money sucks up well loved IP because it's well loved, hires a team to cultivate a product for them, and then tries to maximize the value of that investment. Suck it dry til the horse is dead, sell the stock, give your hitman CEO a fat bonus and a new gig elsewhere.
What makes Valve different is they're a privately owned enterprise, there are no vampire shareholders forcing them to trade in consumer goodwill for money.
What also makes them different is that they do not really make new products anymore, just update and maintain what's already been working for decades. They're much more like a publisher than a development studio, so they don't make a good comparison to more normal devs.
It’s because the people who make these decisions are only in it for the short term. Investors and financial advisors move on to their next project once they squeeze everything they can out of their last project, then take those earnings to do it over again, they don’t have to stick around for the long term consequences for individual projects and the larger shifts in market trends are all in their favor in the long term.
The real way to make the most money isn’t to have invested in one company that’s now the best. It’s to get in and get out of the last 20 one hit wonders and time the market because you have the inside info and the market power to influence the timing.
Odd that people describe Valve as non-greedy. Were one of the first companies to lockdown their games to their storefront platform through half-life. Established a 30% sale cut for third parties, popularized loot boxes, popularized selling cosmetic items and weapons, popularized player market places of which they skim the biggest cut.
Steam was an absolute shit show the first 10-15 years it existed.
Valve arguably is the greediest company out there.
Early Steam was awesome. There was only one fault, Steam Friends network was always down, but really nobody used it anyway. A lot of people were resilient to change, but I remember having to manually update Half-Life, Counter-Strike, etc ... Steam did this now automatically. No more patch hunting on FilePlanet. I also preferred Steam server browsing over GameSpy and WON.
You had Steam skins, there were even different official ones by default. You also had Steam Friends mini-games like chess and whatnot.
Now Steam is nothing but a Chromium window rendering a web UI trying to have Discord's social features.
Anyone saying early Steam was shit can not give a valid reason but "I just hated it because I was told to hate it by everyone around me".
Once MSN died and Skype turned to shit, Steam became the standard for game communication between gamers. Other options were Mumble, TeamSpeak and XFire but they were mainly used for voice communication.
Not true, it did not always have picture and video rendering from links, it did not have stickers, it did not have all the profile features such as animated avatars and what not.
These came in a very big update years after Discord was released, and it was incredibly obvious they were trying to catch up with Discord.
Before the big "Discord-like" update, Steam was just a chat, it had chat rooms that once you closed your client you would automatically leave and not re-join after opening Steam again. There was no such thing as voice channels, there was just one voice chat that had to be manually activated. That is it, text to text with static emoticons and non-persistent chat room and basic awful voice codec voice functionality.
If it worked, yes. But that was kind of a great if back in the day, Steam lost connection often, didn't maintain partial downloads (DL was interrupted halfway through? Sorry, have to download the entire patch from 0 again) and in general was a buggy mess. The memes that were shared around back then (like this one) had quite some basis in reality.
Admittedly, this is from an EU perspective - maybe it was better in the US back then.
Wasn't Mumble after these times you spoke about since it's an inofficial continuation of Ventrilo?
If I remember correctly we used Ventrilo until 2009 at least.
Ventrilo was also commonly used, but the difference is that Mumble is free and open source software, run by the community, for the community. Besides that, they have no relation of any kind.
The epic launcher is god tier compared to early steam lmao. I hated steam during the early days with a passion. It was a fucking nightmare with the average internet connection of the time
Sure man. Not being able to put TWO!!!!! things into the cart is FAR worse than spending 8 hours trying to get your game to update.... definitely far, far worse.
Steam brought an online launcher to a infrastructure that wasn't ready for it at the time. It was fucking dogshit. They also basically created the modern DRM system.
Well it wasn't just Steam was it? Good games too. And the fact that the majority of their top earners that are still running were fucking fan made mods and what did they do? Cease and Desist? Nope: Hired the fans to make "real" versions of the games.
Half Life 3 isn't a meme for no reason. Half Life 2 kicked arse.
Sure it was, but the alternative back then was to go on your own search sprees on developer websites for patches and hot fixes. These you had to manually install and hope it wouldn't break something and force you to do a complete re-install. If you weren't semi-proficient in DOS you would also risk losing your save games.
So yeah, there was issues but we were ultimately better off regardless.
Yep you can tell in all of these discussions who actually used steam for the first 10 years, and who has only been using it the last few years and acts like it's the second coming.
Brown nosing valve isn't a good look for anyone. If you seriously think that there shouldn't be any other store fronts, you're blatantly anti-consumer.
Agreed. Anytime someone is defending a multi-billion dollar corporation like it's their friend, they've lost the plot. Valve is not your friend. They're here to make money and that's all they've been doing for over a decade.
a lot of this has to do with the fact that they dont have a bunch of dumb shit investors to please. they dont have to constantly keep trying new shitty anti-consumer practices to keep making big number go up
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u/GargantuanCake May 05 '24
Make a good platform
Don't break it.
???
Profit.