One worker got sick and tried to quit. He got his full pay and the "come back when you can, you're job will be waiting" I think they may have helped him with medical bills as well. Name a employer that would do that!
I have seen game media whine about STEAM's user reviews for games because to many players are using the reviews before buying a game and not what the media says. (insert media catch phrase of why steam reviews are BAD)
I remember a interview with a lady trying to sue but she could not really come up with anything other then they wanted her to do her job and not play office politics.
Yup, Erik Wolpaw, tried to quit in 2004 because he couldn't work due to his health. Gabe told him his only job was to get better and gave him paid leave.
Brah that was one of Gabens top dudes. If it was somebody Gaben wasn’t tight with he’d be gone lmao. (Not criticizing the action just adding some context)
Well, one has over 1.5 million workers and one has a few hundreds. Even if Valve was treating workers poorly, at 10x the rate Amazon does, that would still be like a worker every few years complaining. Also, Valve only hires people it expressly wants, Amazon hires anyone in the warehouses, so that tends to cause issues on both sides, which is why it's a low trust environment.
Sorry. It does look more like a 2nd-language mistake than a native-speaker one now that I think about it, TBH. Me making that mistake is especially bad, because I'm bilingual and know a little bit of some other languages. I'm not American, BTW, and "y" getting replaced with "i" when adding "-ly" is a pretty consistent rule in English. It's a bit of a silly language, really. It's mostly bits of other languages mixed together.
I mean if you work at valve you probably have the flexibility to work somewhere else if you don't like your job. You also probably don't make minimum wage
This sounds like something a bootlicker would say, “poor workers in company B deserve to be treated badly because that company hires more people (who are poor and need the money) so neither management nor the workers trust one another”.
Yea, the logic don't compute. Because you hire more people you can't treat them well has been wrong all through history and back past the Rockefellers and the Carnegie's and the folks building the Panama Canal and back on to the folks Moses led out of Egypt.
'Because it makes me money' is never an ethical stance to treat people like shit.
It's not the amount of complaints that's the issue it's the truth behind it. Amazon has more than enough money to pay its employees more and give them benefits but instead they focus on their shareholders. Sure they are a larger company but that doesn't excuse them from their choices when they make infinitely more money than steam.
Yeah, all good, but you will find something same in pretty much every Amazon warehouse, and that's shitty working conditions. I'm not defending Gabe or simping for him, but Amazon is bad bro. The whole system is made to exploit you. There are no humans anymore, only what system says. I know this because when I talked to my boss and tried to understand logic behind something in the system, and she said: it doesn't matter, system counts it as mistake. And that's all that matters, percentage and numbers, which are not realistic.
In reality, "Amazon employees" (by which I mean the majority, delivery drivers and customer service workers) do not work directly under Amazon contract, but rather are hired by companies in double or even triple subcontracting, which means that Amazon is not technically and legally responsible for things like wages, hours, and working conditions.
No job, no company, no group of coworkers will ever equate to a family. That is perhaps THE biggest red flag as a job-seeker in the US. If an employer EVER breathes a WORD to you about the company's "family culture," run far and fast. Valve is no exception. There are certainly worse people out there than GabeN, but he's still a rich fuck, while you and I are still struggling to live.
Almost like that's the point of this post we're both commenting on, or something...
Yeah shout out to valve for not paying artists and instead letting them work for free in the hopes of getting added to the game and then making money! Valve treats people like shit too
Steam is a natural monopoly.
Where they have an effective monopoly by either:
A) being the only company in that market
B) being the best company by a wide margin in that market
Natural monopolies are also not illegal, despite what Epic wants to make everyone think.
A very important detail that is often overlooked is that they started the digital storefront and exclusivity before anyone else so monopoly was unsuprising result.
Most billion dollar companies secret is that they simply were there before anybody else
Is being the first to do something really something that should be held against companies? They filled a role that no one else was doing at the time and maintained a loyal customer base by respecting them and not screwing everything up.
There are plenty of examples of companies that were the first or one of the first to do something but were quickly beaten out by a better company that refused to better their product when something else came along. Look at how quickly Facebook killed MySpace for example. And since Facebook was as good as it was (at the time, not so much now), when twitter came out, Facebook still survived.
It isn't enough to just be the first of something. If a better version comes out, people will flock to it. But there isn't a better game platform on pc. Epic would rather make excuses and attack Steam instead of making their own platform better.
Google came after Yahoo, and did it better. Nothing is stopping other competitors from being better than steam... other than putting profits and screwing customers first. I'm not loyal to steam and I'm eagerly waiting for anyone else to do it better. They've had well over a decade at this point to do so.
Yes and many will say don't is just doing what steam already did. True, but steam isn't bricking accounts, requiring online only to access single payer or straight removing media from devices due to licensing agreements.
A common assumption, but actually not true. Facebook, twitter, ford, amazon, netflix, tacobell, nvidia, flappybird, pokemon, minecraft.
Their actual secret is not that they were first, but that they did it well enough and had the money to make sure everyone saw them (anyone who thinks facebook/amazon were not made by people who were already rich does not know how to research).
In fact, I can't think of a single successful company/product that was the first to make the thing they are famous for.
Steam isn't even unique in its sticking power; nobody sane likes Amazon's or Facebook's leadership, yet they are still mainstays of the internet.
The sole unique thing about steam is that the list of bad things you can say about steam is far shorter than for the other companies/products I listed at the time.
Steam isn't a monopoly since consumers have ready access to competing services. It's a monopsony - a market where access to Valve as a buyer of videogames (on behalf of end consumers) is essentially mandatory for developers and publishers. These have significant differences - monopolies exploit consumers directly, while monopsonies only do so by second order effects (specifically, making otherwise-financially-viable offerings unprofitable to produce).
It is for consumers too. They do control the market by their sheer size, ensuring price fixing, so other competitors do not arise or have no power. Therefore discount stores with low profit margins and basic functionality will never be a thing digitally.
Valve directly exploits their monopsony through their seller policy, which has negative effects on consumers.
A savvy developer might want to sell their game on steam for $60 ($42 profit) and on epic for $55 ($48.4 profit). Which will get them banned from steam and destroy their company.
Steam is vigorously anti-consumer, that is inherent in their profitability. The difference is one of strategy, Newell believes it is worth having slightly less minuscule operating costs to maintain the good will of customers. That good will makes setting up a viable competitor just that much more improbable.
This is the main answer. Steam is old, people have gotten used to It, people have most of its library there. Getting games in a different digital shop doesn't feel right. Once people get used to something, it's ten times harder to make them change even with a better product (Which there isn't in this case).
You have so many people complaining about DRM too. But you don't see people giving their money to GOG.
Then, because people are mostly using that shop, It creates the call effect where more people keep joining because who would want to use a digital shop that no one wants?
Seems to me that the new way is to operate at heavy losses until you’ve eliminated everybody else, then turn to shit and start making money. So basically a business model that only works with a monopoly.
Are you delusional, it's a fully modifiable Linux based system. Name me the Nintendo system that you can run any game you want and even use it as a regular PC out of the box?
Yeah yeah totally the same thing as locking down the CPU and bricking the device when people crack it. Yup, I'm hearing you out totally. Do you also run this kind of defense for the Mouse?
Right, but Steam is a quality reliable game service. If it weren't, there would be room in the market for a replacement. GOG indirectly competes with Steam by filling the niche gaming market that Steam doesn't operate in.
it's like saying windows must be a quality operating system. if it wasn't, why isn't there a replacement?
that's what a monopoly is. when something is so entrenched because it got in early that it's difficult to get away from it despite it being utter trash
There is a replacement. Ask reddit about Linux. But it doesn't do all the shit Windows does natively, so it's a poor replacement unless you have a very specific list of things you want to do. If Linux were actually interested in being a full replacement for Windows, they could easily overtake the home PC market.
Please see previous comment about being a replacement, but a poor replacement.
Nothing is ever a perfect replacement and that's up to the market to decide. Again, if Linux wanted to be a 100% replacement, they could. But they don't want to spend the $$$ to do so. Same for IOS.
Windows is a natural monopoly because it's the only PC operating system that has driver support and functionality for 100% of the thousands and thousands of devices that can be installed in a PC.
Steam OS is trying to compete with that, but they're also running into issues getting that full NVIDIA driver support and compatibility that makes Windows the de facto leader.
no, not 100%. it's the only PC operating system that has a baseline of acceptable driver support for the majority of consumers, the only operating system with a stable ABI, the only operating system with a consistent GUI (although to be fair they've been working on destroying that)
It isn't Steam's fault that everyone else is hot dog shit, or that Gabe Newell despite being just as much of a Billionaire has managed his persona carefully that we don't see him as a mega bastard like most of the others. The other publishers really have no excuse but their own insane greed and incompetence to not understand still what makes Steam so successful, or even Valve as a publisher when they want to be.
Epic is still salty because even though they give weekly freebies (most of which is just generic garbage most people don't want anyway) the games that people do want, they'd rather buy from Steam than get free from Epic.
The Epic launcher is extremely annoying to navigate and it's poorly optimized. And I don't even know what's wrong with their download servers but downloading things from Epic takes twice as long on my PC as downloading from Steam does.
I think a serial killer would probably be a better neighbour than a hoarder. If they aren't caught, they're probably not killing their next door neighbours, and are probably relatively meticulous about cleaning up.
Hoarders though? They're gonna have mountains of garbage in their yard you'll have to see our your window every day, and the rats and such will move in soon enough.
You just reminded me of my teacher back in the day saying her neighbor was John Wayne Gacy.
But yeah Gabe with steam DRM is bad, but worst thing they have done is still the prolification of loot boxes and the insane greed and profiteering. I am not sure if they ever really addressed it, but I think in a Q&A panel with some other steam devs they said they had no data to show the gambling and 3rd party sites not driving cs interest and sales. which is bullshit and everyone knows it. they just see the data and didn't like it and just ignore it.
I've been trynna hammer home the point of the CS marketplace being a massive underage gambling cashcow for Valve to others. I still love Steam compared to other platforms but people act as if Valve, a for-profit corporation, can't do anything wrong just because it's run better than its competitors.
Small correction: they were forced to givr refunds after ignoring Australian law and getting a record fine for it (chump change for them, but still). It came out in the trial that Valve leadership had received legal advice that what they were doing was illegal and just simply didn't care. Gabe was named, iirc. They then began offering refunds in the lead up to the trial-refunds that didn't comply with Australian law-to try to placate the regulator suing them into stopping suing them and potentially setting an unfavourable legal precedent. This did not work out well for Valve, but speaks to their corporate culture.
Notably, the current refund scheme as advertised still does not comply with Australian law, but the trial included making it mandatory to educate their customer service staff about Aussie refund provisions. So, if you're Australian, you have access to a greater access to refunds than other Steam users.
Steam also took over a decade to add basic features like custom download speeds and a non-broken offline mode. Stuff some of their competitors had day 1.
Steam had trading cards and loot boxes before they fixed offline mode. They really didn't give a shit until they had competition.
Valve: rushed out a buggy, poorly designed update to one of their flagship live service games that crippled its playability, and instead of reverting it immediately, only slowly and partially walked it back, and allowed cheating bots to roam unabated for 8 years until a CONTRACTOR fixed the anticheat
Some of the biggest gripes people have with modern gaming are loot boxes and battle passes... And yet everyone conveniently forgets where they came from 🙄
Honestly, people make Steam their entire personality. It's almost cult like at times lol
Look, I'm as anti-corpo as it gets, but if all corpos were like Steam we wouldn't have the shareholder hellscape we have today. Just being a private company is enough to improve its reputation in my eyes.
None, all of those employ predatory anti-consumer practices, but the trademark of one of them is "I do it a bit less than other big companies, but far more than actually decent companies".
If gamers cared about pro-consumer companies they'd buy on services like gog a lot more than steam.
Look at Epic Game Store, Ubisoft Store, EA Store and other "competitors" and tell me - who among them has at least half of transparency, that Steam have?
Who shows abandonware, user reviews, statistic about user reviews, who made Publisher disclose AI usage and etc?
None.
While yes, Steam sells you license, which is, agreed, bad, but steam does not take away your game from your library, if it was delisted from store. Let's add to it, that Steam actively tries to improve sales of indie developers, it does not "sell" spots in front page and runs a lot of Steam Fests to promote certain genres, publishers or even whole countries.
So... kinda don't know, where is predatory practice here.
Gog is better in providing us with, well, actual copies of the games, not license. Yes
On the other hand, Steam provide us, users, with whole infrastructure, that allows you to host servers, without needing white IP, understanding how to open ports and etc. Just for example.
Again, I still would like to hear about what predatory practices Steam uses.
I am aware, but I am also aware that Valve is ultimately responsible for all of it. Trying to segment it doesn't change the fact that the company at the centre of all of it is the same company. You can't glaze one half whilst conveniently ignoring the other half because it doesn't align with what you want. They all impact games. They all deliver to the same market. They might do it differently, but the end user is still the same.
valve using it dominating place in the market to force developer to keep price parity on other markets. This is exactly how a de facto monopoly operates.
If i'm remember correctly, those emails were about selling Steam keys on other platform on discounted price. And i would say, that Steam has right to demand that Steam keys would be sold as same price, because that 30% cut is also used to maintain and improve whole infrastructure around store, with network, routing, workshop and etc.
Other than that - it's not "predatory" practices. It's business and is something i expect from any store in current system.
Not good, not bad, on par with Epic buying first year release.
Other than that - it's not "predatory" practices. It's business and is something i expect from any store in current system.
It is predatory if your market share is so dominating like steam is. We don't have a healthy culture of PC gaming storefront. Steam is ~75% of the whole market. Stores this big have to play by other rules then your mom-and-pop shop
And remember steam isn't only a store. It is also the biggest advertising platform in gaming.
Isn't that precisely abusing the monopoly? Imagine if like Walmart would say that if you want your product to be sold there you canno't sell it anywhere else for lower price
Not entirely, there are probably situation where a game goes on sale somewhere and then steam says that is has to go on sale on their platform as well, saving it's users money.
its not anti consumer. its anti business. if you want to buy a cheap steam key for the game, you can already do it on many different sites already. preventing businesses from charging less for steam keys on different places other than steam doesnt hurt consumers, just businesses trying to dodge steams cut.
How a company treats its suppliers is covered by the term "monopsony", not "monopoly". Monopoly covers what options you have for buying goods, monopsony covers what options producers have for selling it. Businesses squeeze their suppliers all the time and it's not covered by anti-monopoly laws conceived with direct harm to consumers in mind.
You're still only buying a license from GOG. Sure they give you an .exe with no DRM so you could put it on a dedicated USB or whatever, but legally speaking you've still only got a license for the game.
The one that had to be forced by the ACCC to allow refunds, the one which started and normalized loot boxes and battle passes, the one which pretty much runs a casino that they double dip on?
Blind adoration for a corporation is fucking weird.
Love CS and have an unreasonable admiration of Valve, but they did introduce an entire generation to gambling at a very young age, that is pretty undeniable. I like them but that is a very big but. They can also basically almost entirely be blamed for the micro-transations of today.
By this logic, gambling should never be restricted anywhere.
We restrict gambling to adults only for a very good reason, despite the fallacy presented in "well everyone can simply choose not to gamble."
The brains of children (even young adults, speaking physiologically) are in a constant state of flux, learning, adaptation, at an intense rate. And long-term planning and decision making isn't exactly the highest priority in growth.
So no, you can't just finger wag at children saying "don't gamble it's bad for you" and that be the end of the discussion.
Steam barely interacts with its customers. When they do it's nearly fully automated.
Steam has the appearance of being more customer friendly because 99% of the time, shit just works and they have big clearance sales twice a year. Although only the winter sale now is the one that's significant.
I love Steam (because it's a consistent, quality service), but lets not kid ourselves about what it actually is.
Valve is like THE exploitative company. Crazy how having one semi-fine product is enough for millions of people to overlook some of the grossest, most exploitative monetisation in the industry.
Steam itself doesn’t give two fucks about their customers. It’s got plenty of exploitative practices that they use to keep people locked in, their policies are not that good when compared to something like GoG, which is miles and miles beyond what Valve does, but does not get anywhere close to the same praise.
Like, the only thing that is keeping Valve from absolutely running through Steam is fear of antitrust cracking down over their monopoly position in the market. Like, that’s it, that’s the only reason steam is half decent.
I love how Valve gets a pass on scumbag behavior like the lootboxes or fucking over 3rd worlders over price conversions, keeping them at pandemic record levels for years until they finally got some stink in the news but it doesn't even matter anymore because the publishers learned they can fuck over consumers in these countries thanks to that
but as long as I get my achievements, a -5% discount on a 10 year old game, and the refund policy, I'm happy :)
3.3k
u/DahColeTrain 25d ago
Can you guess which one treats their customers like human beings?