That actually makes a lot of sense given the fact that i havent heard about massive steam data centers. I suppose they just rent their servers from data centers around the world.
Which actually is very suprising. I imagine at their scale making their own data centers would save them money.
Actually i just think they must subcontract a lot of their daily operation. I refuse to belive such low numbers are enough to even handle the complaints from stolen shipments and broken devices not to mention all the other complaints.
It is more than enough to actually develop the platform but surely not to handle day to day operations.
I remember reading that having a version keyword in your user alias would cause issues with steam, and it was actually because it was a blocked word on CloudFlare where they store/pull a bunch of steam data from
Well large corporations are at least 50% dead weight by volume, weighted overwhelmingly in management and at the executive level. So naturally it’s the ones doing all the ACTUAL work who get terminated whenever the line isn’t going up hard enough. Capitalism folks, it’s doomed us all and there’s no way we can fix it and those who could never will.
Of course there’s a fee.
Do they not realize how expensive it is to fileserve useless videogame data, provide versioning for that, updater systems, workshop storage, curation, promotion etc etc. . . without help?
Is there not a fee for your competing storefront? How would it fund its daily operations?
Right? Steam provides better service and functionality than any other PC storefront. It’s ridiculous that there’s so much whining about them charging for it. So what if it’s a higher percentage? It’s also a better service and a large audience. Whoever doesn’t like it is free to go elsewhere, unlike console games that can only be sold though the manufacturer’s store.
Valve is profitable because of the reputation they’ve built up over many years as being an incredibly consumer friendly storefront. Avoiding corporate bloat, and focusing their attention on the core aspects of their business consumers care about has allowed them to thrive where many others failed. Valve created and maintained a fantastic product. So yes.
These “B-B-BUT STEAMS MONOPOLY CROWD” really do think we have stockholm/boot licker syndrome as if a good 60%+ of steam users didnt know how to Pirate games if we truly didnt like the service
As for as storefronts go, which is what’s being talked about here, they are competing and winning. With a fraction of the employees other companies employ for storefront work. Origin (Rest Unpeacefully) and Uplay never stood a chance and epic has had plenty of time to market saturate. The company not being publicly traded doesn’t prevent competition, it prevents investor interests like quashing competition.
They’ve touted before that they may be the most profitable company per employee on earth. They make a few billion in profit per year with a payroll of a few hundred employees.
I don’t know, there’s plenty of anti-Valve rhetoric on Lemmy. Plenty of people try to spin it as Valve having a low employee count because they have a lot of contractors. One guy was making a point that Valve employee count is much lower because they buy in AMD GPUs for the Steam Deck… As if Valve should buy chip manufacturing plants and design and manufacture their own GPUs.
Even here somewhere below (or maybe up later) in this thread someone said
Also, a company can pretend to have 10 employees if it instead hires 1000 contractors to do the actual work.
Which is an argument, if you can prove Valve is buying in 10 times the amount of contractors as they have employees for positions that should go to full-time employees. But I very much doubt such information exists.
80 world-class engineers sounds like more than enough people. It’s not like Valve struggle to acquire talent and are thus forced to have teams and teams of juniors who are masters at building tech debt.
Valve will likely be hiring and retaining the kinds of engineers who love a good refactor and appreciate the time and space to do that rather than some product manager pressuring for the next shiny shit they wanted yesterday.
And Steam is their money printing machine that keeps them free to do whatever they want. It’s no surprise their team have stayed invested in continuing to build out the best gaming platform of all time.
80 talented, passionate, and healthily paid engineers > 800 junior, sleep deprived, and struggling to buy groceries “coders”.
Also explains why Steam is still a 32-bit binary and didn’t get ARM port on any platform.
I think the point is that with this kind of upkeep costs it’s hard to argue that Steam sales cut is fair, especially given near-monopoly in PC gaming space.
It’s actually pretty easy to argue it’s fair once you look at everything. Steam offers a shit ton of resources for that 30%, including hosting, distribution, patching, workshop, etc. And that’s not even getting into the fact that the dev can get all of that AND get steam keys that they can distribute themselves (meaning valve doesn’t get a cut of that) that still utilizes the same infra.
I wish I could find it, but I recently saw a video of Thor (@piratesoftware, does his own game dev and used to work for Blizzard) talking about this and going into even more detail than I can remember at the moment.
Ok, so then handle all of that yourself at cost. Which will lead to the death of your studio faster?
Seriously though, a $15 game selling just 100k copies is still $1m to you (before taxes) and has no upkeep. You do all that steam does yourself, you’re going to drown in operations costs and upkeep time.
I agree with you but at the same time I feel like I should point out that this is the China fallacy, where there’s a billion people in China and if you could just tap into even 0.3% of their market you would make bank.
While it’s technically true, the fallacy behind it overshadows the difficulty of acquiring that percentage of the market. The grand majority of games released never become cash positive, and over 50% of games on steam alone never make more than $4,000.
This is not an issue with distribution, it’s an issue with marketing and market fit, and accompanied by the base fact of that if you’re the kind of person who is good at making games, it would be a rarity for you to also be the kind of person that’s good at marketing the games you made.
Those are two entirely different wheelhouses that function best with two entirely different personality types, and that’s not covering all of the different disciplines that you need to make a game or run a game making company in the first place.
Use Steams competitors then if you don’t want to pay Steams cut. If you’re getting less overall from them, that tells you all you need to know about the validity of Steams fees
Competition isn’t possible? EGS is an active competitor that only takes 12% and they still can’t get fucking anywhere because their store fucking sucks. GoG exists and also takes 30%, their store/launcher are ok, but they don’t offer nearly as much for that 30%, but they make up for that with drm free games. There are other minor players out there, so competition is definitely possible, but not one of them offers a comparable product.
The only way steam would lower their cut is if someone came along and made a game store that actually offered a significant portion of the services steam offered and was about as good but also had a lower cut of sales. But good luck finding someone who can do all of that and also takes less than 30%.
You don’t seem to understand what a monopoly is. Having some small competition that’s not ever going to threaten you because you can leverage your dominant position is also a case of a monopoly.
Epic poured billions of Fortnite money with little to show for it. How is anyone going to compete with a platform that most gamers have all of their games on? This is why they need to be broken up or brought to order via regulations. Companies are not your friends.
Success is not illegal. Valve isn’t buying up smaller competing storefronts, or paying off developers for exclusivity, or burying competition in legal fees and prepared 80-page lawsuits. The only thing holding back real competition is the competing platforms being dogshit.
I was excited for the EGS when it was announced. Then it turned out to be a garbage platform with the shady exclusivity deals that turned Steam into an ad platform for games that had been poached by Epic. Valve responded to it with the Steam Deck and Proton.
How is anyone going to compete with a platform that most gamers have all of their games on?
They could offer their games DRM-free, guarantee that their multiplayer games have LAN or provide servers and/or at least provide that information clearly to the consumer, write an open source drop-in replacement for Steam Input and Workshop, guarantee more uptime on their matchmaking/friends servers, retain old versions of games that they distribute, and allow for user-customized or open source clients to fit all sorts of UI preferences, off the top of my head.
Epic poured billions of Fortnite money with little to show for it.
Yes, Into fortnite, not EGS. The eggs spent all their money on timed exclusives instead of a better product, and that’s why they failed to make a steam competitor.
Blame the game not the player, it’s not like they are doing some next level weird shit like all the competition does. This rigged economic system allowed this situation.
After that well-informed take, listen to an actual indie developer talk about why the 30% is worth it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwoAmifo9r0 (it’s a separate but similar lawsuit by a “waaahmbulance-chaser” law firm in the UK)
Damn dude that link fuckin DESTROYS every braindead “b-b-but STEAMS MONOPOLY!!!” arguement I’ve seen uttered by idiots who want to bring late stage capitalism to the PC marketplace just so they can pretend they stood up to a company
Enjoy accelerating late stage capitalism while pretending you’re against it because you’re incapable of seeing things outside of black and white thinking
At this point, their cut is just about mathematically fair, given how little value customers get from buying games most other places and how much value they get from Steam. Then that money got funneled back into decoupling PC gaming from Microsoft and making probably the only mass produced handheld gaming system that’s open enough to let you opt out of their ecosystem. I’d be really curious as to how many games on Steam even have ARM builds, because I’ll bet it’s a very low number, and that would likely make the juice not worth the squeeze.
Their cut is mathematically fair but the inputs for this formula are mostly pain tolerance levels of consumers and producers. I meant fair for having a monopoly. Either you’re a utility or need to be broken up so that actual competition can take place.
Steam Deck and Proton killed Linux gaming because nobody bothers to do native ports. While I don’t agree with that approach it kinda works but it’s not that Valve does this because they like Linux. They’re scared of losing their monopoly in case Windows changes too much.
There are ARM native games on Mac (Disco Elysium for example) and Steam has no issues with them. Not having ARM client though means that you’re running a dynamically recompiling web browser through a translation layer resulting in terrible performance.
I disagree with your definition of “killed Linux gaming.” It killed native Linux development perhaps. But using Linux for gaming is more viable than ever thanks to Valve. They single handedly boosted Linux gaming, if anything.
And they also offer more than the competition. For a while there games on EGS were just telling people to get support on steam forums because epic had nothing for supporting games they sold. Steam has forums, screenshot storage, achievements, remote play, friends lists, a shopping cart (🙄) and is adding new features like clips. I’m not using steam because it’s a monopoly, I’m using it because it’s a better platform.
Killed Linux gaming? I hard disagree with that. Yes developers may not do Native ports as often anymore but I would much rather have the ability to play games that are not considered a native Port because the ocean is so much vaster. If anything proton in the steam deck put Linux on the map, prior to the deck AAA titles you would never see running on Linux you barely saw AA titles on it. However with the introduction of the steam deck in proton we now have companies moving closer to at least making sure their game is compatible with the deck which is one step closer to allowing it to be Linux compatible. It allows you to take your windows games and for the most part just be able to play it without having to have the studio spend as much for it as they would with a native port, because that’s the number one thing that holds them back from making a native Port the lack of market share. I would not have switched off of Windows if this was not the case because that was basically the only thing that was holding me on Windows still was the lack of decent gaming support
Let’s take Elden Ring for example, it plays beautifully I haven’t had a single problem playing it. They weren’t going to release a Linux branch but they made sure it was steamdeck compatible, which meant that it was proton compatible which then allows me to play this amazing game on my Debian 12, a game that otherwise would not have worked because none of the other translation layers function with it. I notice zero difference in performance it plays flawlessly, but I would not have been able to play this game otherwise. It might as well be a native Port because I’ve had zero issues with functionality.
The Factorio development blog has a piece on developing Linux-native. Basically there’s ONE GUY who works on the LInux-native version, and it’s a lot more challenging than people think – from managing and linking dependencies, to working around GNOME’s monumentally stupid decision to expect client-side decorations from all apps. It’s simply more worthwhile to ensure that a game works well on WIne/Proton.
Pain tolerance levels? The biggest pain points I have with Steam are that it’s not universally DRM-free (which is why I shop GOG first) and that their multiplayer servers go down for 15 minutes during maintenance windows once or twice per week. Native Linux ports were not going to become more common prior to Proton; they were on the fast track to becoming less common, especially given how many more games are now released every year, and Proton has the added benefit of adding Linux support to games where it was just never going to feasibly happen otherwise.
While I don’t agree with that approach it kinda works but it’s not that Valve does this because they like Linux. They’re scared of losing their monopoly in case Windows changes too much.
It’s both. That fear of losing their market position is exactly how a functioning market is supposed to work. Competition is supposed to come in and outdo Valve. EA looked like they were interested for a little while back when they launched Origin, but they changed their minds. Epic says they’re interested now, but they only want sellers and not customers. It’s not a monopoly, legally, when they attained their market position by just being better than everyone else.
There are ARM native games on Mac (Disco Elysium for example) and Steam has no issues with them.
And I wonder how many more there are out there. Because if that number is low enough, it may just not be worth it to bother. I’d imagine it’s a nightmare to have to support Apple through all of their standards that they dictate at their business partners. Valve went through the trouble of making a Vulkan->Metal translation layer, since Apple refused to support open standards, and then Apple retired x64 on their machines shortly afterward.
The only reason you don’t see the price as a pain point is that you refuse to see that about 50% of that goes to companies that make billions in profit while people like you and me can’t afford rent.
Because the same games sell for more elsewhere (also, funnily enough, we’re seeing tons of info on Valve because they’re getting sued for including a non compete clause in their contract to prevent games from being sold for less elsewhere), that’s an issue for the market as a whole and doesn’t apply to video games only. You’re paying too much for your food, for your gas, for your housing, for your clothes, for every fucking thing!
Profit shares for distributors will need to be regulated and wealth tax will need to be applied.
Valve is not your landlord. They made a good place to buy video games. And come on, now; it’s 30% at most to Valve (which is less than brick and mortar before it) and then some more to the government.
Pain tolerance to prices, how good the support is, how snappy the app is etc. Within the space of game marketplaces they’re average and that’s because every one of them kind of sucks. If Epic was first to monopolize PC game marketplaces people would be defending them like they defend Valve now because they want all of their games in one place.
Linux gaming was stable before Proton. It was never big but mainstream titles were getting released. These days there’s nothing. Titles could be broken at any moment by a developer and nobody will have any responsibility to fix it. I very much doubt that a for profit company does anything because they “like” something like Linux. They’re there to make money, period.
I’m not saying Valve should port their games to ARM or update them, it’s up to them and they don’t seem to be interested in developing games all that much these days. My point wad that plenty of games run via Rosetta2 fine. Steam doesn’t run fine because essentially it’s a web browser and that’s where you can say that 80 developers might not be enough to support this money printing machine.
Pain tolerance to prices? We’re talking about the platform whose name is frequently coupled with the word “sale”. Given the complete lack of ideas out of Epic in the year 2024, I don’t have much confidence that they’d have risen to be a dominant market leader in the first place.
Linux gaming was stable before Proton. It was never big but mainstream titles were getting released.
Stable, but not many titles. Mainstream titles were getting released because Valve was either greasing the wheels or because those partners thought Steam Machines were going to be a bigger deal. When they weren’t a bigger deal, those mainstream titles dried up fast. The Witcher 3 and Street Fighter V both announced Linux ports and cancelled them when the writing was on the wall for Steam Machines. Both now work in Proton.
I very much doubt that a for profit company does anything because they “like” something like Linux. They’re there to make money, period.
I was told, to my face, by a Valve employee between the launch of Steam Machines and the release of Proton, that a lot of engineers at Valve “are enamored with Linux” before he gave me a look indicating that he couldn’t say more. But also, yes, the pursuit of making money leads to all sorts of wonderful new things, like simultaneously porting more than half of the history of PC gaming to a different operating system.
I’m not saying Valve should port their games to ARM or update them, it’s up to them and they don’t seem to be interested in developing games all that much these days. My point wad that plenty of games run via Rosetta2 fine. Steam doesn’t run fine because essentially it’s a web browser and that’s where you can say that 80 developers might not be enough to support this money printing machine.
But if there aren’t many games ported to ARM, and if the number of games running via Rosetta “fine” isn’t high enough, then the number of customers you’re benefiting by making a native ARM build of Steam is very low, and throwing more developers at the problem only makes that math worse. I think you should have a better Steam on Mac. I also know that Apple is actively hostile to gaming on Mac, so I get it if Valve isn’t super interested.
If Epic was first to monopolize PC game marketplaces people would be defending them like they defend Valve now because they want all of their games in one place.
No, people accept Steam because of the proven track record, values of their leadership, their hardware and the work they do with Linux.
They’re making their machine more and more efficient, storage and bandwidth just gets cheaper with time… Yet, they still need their 30% cut to make billions in profit.
If they make billions in profit and Gaben is a billionaire while 80% of the population of his country lives paycheck to paycheck then there’s a fucking issue. The same logic applies to all businesses.
Why are they not allowed to create a good service and profit?
Why are the competition unable to take marketshare with lower fees?
It feels as if you have this number, >billion, makes a company evil. Why?
I agree with you that no single person needs a billion, but having earned it doesn’t make them bad. They innovate and move everything forwards. I’d much rather see my money with Valve than with EA, Activision Blizzard or any of the other faceless giants out there.
Multimillionaires, billionaires, they’re all part of the problem.
They’re allowed to make a good product and profit, there’s no reason why we allow them to profit so fucking much, if they do it’s because we’re paying more for their product than they actually need to charge us, the fact that they consider it ok makes them bad people.
Stop defending the people profiting from you, you’re the cattle defending the butcher.
I agree with you that there’s a problem, but I think you’re targeting the wrong villian here. I shop local whenever I can but there are a few things that are just… big. Video games are worldwide and getting them off the internet is nice. There’s no such thing as a local video game distributor. There’s local indie game development which I do support, but Steam is a product I like which does its job very well.
The problem here is scale, not necessarily who individuals are buying from. Take major league sports as an example. Salaries for indivudual players are in the millions because of the amount of eyeballs attached to wallets that are interested in watching those players. Less eyeballs, less money, and the players would probably be doing the same thing but not be making as much money. Same thing with music. It’s very hard for an artist to make a good living with music, but once they hit global awareness suddenly money will come rollin in from all over the place. This isn’t a problem with the people doing the jobs (although it could be said that major league sports should charge less, they are trying to maximize their profit) but is the result of the amount of people who are willing to pay.
The probelm you’re having is that a company is allowed to suck up so much money and keep it. That’s a problem for governments to handle. Individuals can choose who to give their money to, but sometimes there aren’t any other good choices.
It’s their choice to take a cut big enough that they’re making that kind of profit, no one is forcing them, it’s all greed, stop acting like they wouldn’t be able to lower it.
The funniest thing is, there are billionaires out there that agree tax laws are messed up and think they should be paying more taxes. For them it’s just a stressful hassle to work out which charities should take their money.
Right, but there’s nothing immoral about it either.
I live in a place where the rich pay their fair dues to the benefit of the less fortunate. That’s where I think you need to focus on getting, not slandering every successful company out of envy.
Thanks for the chat. You were nothing but respectful. Have a great weekend.
So he should get the address of every single person in the country and divide his money equally among every single person and have no money for himself? Maybe only keep the same amount for himself that each other person is getting? That’s ~342 million people. Give them $3 each and no more billionaire. Worth $10B? $30 for each person.
Elon Musk is the wealthiest person in the USA and is worth $251B. $750/person would help for rent for one month. You could take money away from babies and maybe get a full month, maybe two.
Jeff Bezos is next at $161B. That’s about $480/person.
Of course, this means that their money is gone. No golden goose. Do you think that they should subsidize every person in the country?
Or simply say "I guess 30% is more than we need, let’s cut that to 10% and see how that goes.
If billionaires didn’t exist we wouldn’t need to subsidize anyone, the majority of the world’s issues are related to the fact that a minority keeps a majority of wealth to themselves and just try to acquire more and more.
You’ve got the proverbial “patience of a saint.” Shame about all’ the bootlickers around here, though. I’d thought/hoped better of Lemmy but still people’s brains turn off when they’ve chosen a team :(
Incredible how you look at the comment history of all these people and all of them have comments about not having enough money or being angry at rich people, but all critical thinking goes out the window when it’s for a hobby they like, suddenly whatever they’re told to spend is perfectly OK!
Perhaps 10%. Taxes at one point went up to 90%. Some companies do need more, especially small businesses. As for not needing to subsidize anyone, when the pandemic struck and the checks went out a lot of people paid bills (I managed to get rid of my student loan debt, with help) but many went on spending sprees and some of those still couldn’t pay rent. Wealth distribution isn’t as great as it sounds and I’m on SSDI.
“when the pandemic struck”… The pandemic that was caused by poor people hunting wild animals to sell their meat to make a living? Gosh darn, I wonder what we could have done to make it so these people wouldn’t have to resort to that to make a living… Oh well 🤷
The report says that Valve has ~350 employees total, and of those employees only 80 actually work on Steam as a storefront. The rest are working on their games and hardware.
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All i read is “Damn, they’re a super capable team.”
Who probably tear ass around the office in camaros.
Bitchin’ Camaros!
80 people who are doing a bang-up job, i might add.
That actually makes a lot of sense given the fact that i havent heard about massive steam data centers. I suppose they just rent their servers from data centers around the world. Which actually is very suprising. I imagine at their scale making their own data centers would save them money.
Actually i just think they must subcontract a lot of their daily operation. I refuse to belive such low numbers are enough to even handle the complaints from stolen shipments and broken devices not to mention all the other complaints. It is more than enough to actually develop the platform but surely not to handle day to day operations.
I remember reading that having a version keyword in your user alias would cause issues with steam, and it was actually because it was a blocked word on CloudFlare where they store/pull a bunch of steam data from
That’s an insanely efficient machine.
Pretty amazing that years of effort from massive competitors like Epic and Microsoft haven’t managed to crack this. I wonder what they’re doing wrong?
(Ok I lied. I know exactly what they’re doing wrong and there’s zero chance of them changing.)
Well large corporations are at least 50% dead weight by volume, weighted overwhelmingly in management and at the executive level. So naturally it’s the ones doing all the ACTUAL work who get terminated whenever the line isn’t going up hard enough. Capitalism folks, it’s doomed us all and there’s no way we can fix it and those who could never will.
Of course there’s a fee. Do they not realize how expensive it is to fileserve useless videogame data, provide versioning for that, updater systems, workshop storage, curation, promotion etc etc. . . without help?
Is there not a fee for your competing storefront? How would it fund its daily operations?
The workshop alone is already a godsend (from Lord Gaben).
There are decade old games with hundreds of thousands of mods, who’s paying for all the hosting?
Has anyone tried Epic Store? It has nothing but the most barebone features to purchase a game, literally just a glorified launcher.
Right? Steam provides better service and functionality than any other PC storefront. It’s ridiculous that there’s so much whining about them charging for it. So what if it’s a higher percentage? It’s also a better service and a large audience. Whoever doesn’t like it is free to go elsewhere, unlike console games that can only be sold though the manufacturer’s store.
If any digital game store deserved to be sue, it’s Nintendo hand down. That’s the real monopoly store with a “fuck you because we can” attitude.
That’s how you maximize profit, isn’t it?
Valve is profitable because of the reputation they’ve built up over many years as being an incredibly consumer friendly storefront. Avoiding corporate bloat, and focusing their attention on the core aspects of their business consumers care about has allowed them to thrive where many others failed. Valve created and maintained a fantastic product. So yes.
You’re right but missing an important factor
i thought it was a big team
These “B-B-BUT STEAMS MONOPOLY CROWD” really do think we have stockholm/boot licker syndrome as if a good 60%+ of steam users didnt know how to Pirate games if we truly didnt like the service
Who the fuck cares what’s with this constant desire to try and shit on steam
Because they tried competing and it didn’t work because they kept offering an inferior product, so they’re trying to weasel Steam out of the market
As for as storefronts go, which is what’s being talked about here, they are competing and winning. With a fraction of the employees other companies employ for storefront work. Origin (Rest Unpeacefully) and Uplay never stood a chance and epic has had plenty of time to market saturate. The company not being publicly traded doesn’t prevent competition, it prevents investor interests like quashing competition.
They meant the other companies tried competing and failed so they’re pushing these anti-valve lawsuits and articles.
I definitely didn’t interpret this as shitting on Steam. In fact, the opposite.
How is this even shitting on them? It’s impressive af
The way the headline is phrased suggests a disapproving tone.
Explain.
How so? It’s about as neutral as can be.
Anything not directly biased towards my interests are against my interests.
;p
Just more seems to be a lot of posts on this topic and they are filled with anti steam crap
Shit on? This is some baller ass shit – What is the rev per employee a billion dollars!!!
They’ve touted before that they may be the most profitable company per employee on earth. They make a few billion in profit per year with a payroll of a few hundred employees.
Must be – I can’t think of anyone else that could come close unless you count Berkshire Hathaway or something
I don’t know, there’s plenty of anti-Valve rhetoric on Lemmy. Plenty of people try to spin it as Valve having a low employee count because they have a lot of contractors. One guy was making a point that Valve employee count is much lower because they buy in AMD GPUs for the Steam Deck… As if Valve should buy chip manufacturing plants and design and manufacture their own GPUs.
Even here somewhere below (or maybe up later) in this thread someone said
Which is an argument, if you can prove Valve is buying in 10 times the amount of contractors as they have employees for positions that should go to full-time employees. But I very much doubt such information exists.
I mean that’s awesome.
Ultimately they’re only responsible for the steam client and the servers.
Reliable, low maitenance, with good infastructure. 80 sounds like a solid number when not including game devs and support staff.
80 world-class engineers sounds like more than enough people. It’s not like Valve struggle to acquire talent and are thus forced to have teams and teams of juniors who are masters at building tech debt.
Valve will likely be hiring and retaining the kinds of engineers who love a good refactor and appreciate the time and space to do that rather than some product manager pressuring for the next shiny shit they wanted yesterday.
And Steam is their money printing machine that keeps them free to do whatever they want. It’s no surprise their team have stayed invested in continuing to build out the best gaming platform of all time.
80 talented, passionate, and healthily paid engineers > 800 junior, sleep deprived, and struggling to buy groceries “coders”.
For serious. I wish they hired remote.
Or they hire contractors without any job security
That’s USA. They don’t belive in job security.
What good is job security when we get an automatic pay cut every year? We get raises by switching jobs!
This likely management 101 in action
Amazing what happens if you treat people right and let them do their job
Instead we got too much management constantly causing churn
“I have 8 different bosses. That means when I make a mistake, I have 8 different people coming by to tell me about it.”
From a comment below, Valve as a whole supposedly has around 350, of which around 80 work on Steam.
Love to refactor, the more I watch the Mesa graphics drivers and the employees valve hired that work on it the more I believe it
Also explains why Steam is still a 32-bit binary and didn’t get ARM port on any platform.
I think the point is that with this kind of upkeep costs it’s hard to argue that Steam sales cut is fair, especially given near-monopoly in PC gaming space.
It’s actually pretty easy to argue it’s fair once you look at everything. Steam offers a shit ton of resources for that 30%, including hosting, distribution, patching, workshop, etc. And that’s not even getting into the fact that the dev can get all of that AND get steam keys that they can distribute themselves (meaning valve doesn’t get a cut of that) that still utilizes the same infra.
I wish I could find it, but I recently saw a video of Thor (@piratesoftware, does his own game dev and used to work for Blizzard) talking about this and going into even more detail than I can remember at the moment.
As an Indie dev, a 30% cut of profit could be the death of my one man studio (if I ever get around to actually starting it)
Ok, so then handle all of that yourself at cost. Which will lead to the death of your studio faster?
Seriously though, a $15 game selling just 100k copies is still $1m to you (before taxes) and has no upkeep. You do all that steam does yourself, you’re going to drown in operations costs and upkeep time.
I agree with you but at the same time I feel like I should point out that this is the China fallacy, where there’s a billion people in China and if you could just tap into even 0.3% of their market you would make bank.
While it’s technically true, the fallacy behind it overshadows the difficulty of acquiring that percentage of the market. The grand majority of games released never become cash positive, and over 50% of games on steam alone never make more than $4,000.
https://vginsights.com/insights/article/infographic-indie-game-revenues-on-steam
This is not an issue with distribution, it’s an issue with marketing and market fit, and accompanied by the base fact of that if you’re the kind of person who is good at making games, it would be a rarity for you to also be the kind of person that’s good at marketing the games you made.
Those are two entirely different wheelhouses that function best with two entirely different personality types, and that’s not covering all of the different disciplines that you need to make a game or run a game making company in the first place.
Use Steams competitors then if you don’t want to pay Steams cut. If you’re getting less overall from them, that tells you all you need to know about the validity of Steams fees
I think you missed my point. I am in favor of steam and valve by far, my quibble is with the idea that anyone can sell 100,000 copies of a $15 game.
For every Stardew Valley there are thousands of other games no one has ever heard of and that almost no one bought.
By all means though, make great games. I’ll be buying them on steam.
The cut would be less if competition was possible. I will bet my arm, first child and souls on this.
And you’d lose all of that.
Competition isn’t possible? EGS is an active competitor that only takes 12% and they still can’t get fucking anywhere because their store fucking sucks. GoG exists and also takes 30%, their store/launcher are ok, but they don’t offer nearly as much for that 30%, but they make up for that with drm free games. There are other minor players out there, so competition is definitely possible, but not one of them offers a comparable product.
The only way steam would lower their cut is if someone came along and made a game store that actually offered a significant portion of the services steam offered and was about as good but also had a lower cut of sales. But good luck finding someone who can do all of that and also takes less than 30%.
You don’t seem to understand what a monopoly is. Having some small competition that’s not ever going to threaten you because you can leverage your dominant position is also a case of a monopoly.
Epic poured billions of Fortnite money with little to show for it. How is anyone going to compete with a platform that most gamers have all of their games on? This is why they need to be broken up or brought to order via regulations. Companies are not your friends.
Success is not illegal. Valve isn’t buying up smaller competing storefronts, or paying off developers for exclusivity, or burying competition in legal fees and prepared 80-page lawsuits. The only thing holding back real competition is the competing platforms being dogshit.
I was excited for the EGS when it was announced. Then it turned out to be a garbage platform with the shady exclusivity deals that turned Steam into an ad platform for games that had been poached by Epic. Valve responded to it with the Steam Deck and Proton.
Leveraging dominant position to keep your monopoly is illegal even in the US.
They could offer their games DRM-free, guarantee that their multiplayer games have LAN or provide servers and/or at least provide that information clearly to the consumer, write an open source drop-in replacement for Steam Input and Workshop, guarantee more uptime on their matchmaking/friends servers, retain old versions of games that they distribute, and allow for user-customized or open source clients to fit all sorts of UI preferences, off the top of my head.
Those things are up to developers / publishers, not the marketplace.
Yes, Into fortnite, not EGS. The eggs spent all their money on timed exclusives instead of a better product, and that’s why they failed to make a steam competitor.
Those free games weren’t actually free, Epic paid for them, you know.
You dont seem to understand what a monopoly is either since steam isnt one
They make billions in profit, fuck off with it being fair.
Waah it’s not faaaair!
Fair isn’t a thing.
Making money isn’t evil.
Making billions always happens at the expense of people like you and me.
Show us on the doll where the Valve hurt you
It’s not a Valve issue, it’s a capitalism issue and you’re a victim of it just like I am.
Blame the game not the player, it’s not like they are doing some next level weird shit like all the competition does. This rigged economic system allowed this situation.
After that well-informed take, listen to an actual indie developer talk about why the 30% is worth it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwoAmifo9r0 (it’s a separate but similar lawsuit by a “waaahmbulance-chaser” law firm in the UK)
Damn dude that link fuckin DESTROYS every braindead “b-b-but STEAMS MONOPOLY!!!” arguement I’ve seen uttered by idiots who want to bring late stage capitalism to the PC marketplace just so they can pretend they stood up to a company
Yes, developers are also victims of this monopoly. It’s obviously better (“worth it”) to pay 30% for visibility on the biggest marketplace.
They also maintain file hosting for saves, game versions and a lot of useful apis for games https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features
Yes, it’s a nice cage.
Enjoy accelerating late stage capitalism while pretending you’re against it because you’re incapable of seeing things outside of black and white thinking
I’m accelerating late stage capitalism by being critical of monopolies? What???
At this point, their cut is just about mathematically fair, given how little value customers get from buying games most other places and how much value they get from Steam. Then that money got funneled back into decoupling PC gaming from Microsoft and making probably the only mass produced handheld gaming system that’s open enough to let you opt out of their ecosystem. I’d be really curious as to how many games on Steam even have ARM builds, because I’ll bet it’s a very low number, and that would likely make the juice not worth the squeeze.
Their cut is mathematically fair but the inputs for this formula are mostly pain tolerance levels of consumers and producers. I meant fair for having a monopoly. Either you’re a utility or need to be broken up so that actual competition can take place.
Steam Deck and Proton killed Linux gaming because nobody bothers to do native ports. While I don’t agree with that approach it kinda works but it’s not that Valve does this because they like Linux. They’re scared of losing their monopoly in case Windows changes too much.
There are ARM native games on Mac (Disco Elysium for example) and Steam has no issues with them. Not having ARM client though means that you’re running a dynamically recompiling web browser through a translation layer resulting in terrible performance.
I disagree with your definition of “killed Linux gaming.” It killed native Linux development perhaps. But using Linux for gaming is more viable than ever thanks to Valve. They single handedly boosted Linux gaming, if anything.
And they also offer more than the competition. For a while there games on EGS were just telling people to get support on steam forums because epic had nothing for supporting games they sold. Steam has forums, screenshot storage, achievements, remote play, friends lists, a shopping cart (🙄) and is adding new features like clips. I’m not using steam because it’s a monopoly, I’m using it because it’s a better platform.
Killed Linux gaming? I hard disagree with that. Yes developers may not do Native ports as often anymore but I would much rather have the ability to play games that are not considered a native Port because the ocean is so much vaster. If anything proton in the steam deck put Linux on the map, prior to the deck AAA titles you would never see running on Linux you barely saw AA titles on it. However with the introduction of the steam deck in proton we now have companies moving closer to at least making sure their game is compatible with the deck which is one step closer to allowing it to be Linux compatible. It allows you to take your windows games and for the most part just be able to play it without having to have the studio spend as much for it as they would with a native port, because that’s the number one thing that holds them back from making a native Port the lack of market share. I would not have switched off of Windows if this was not the case because that was basically the only thing that was holding me on Windows still was the lack of decent gaming support
Let’s take Elden Ring for example, it plays beautifully I haven’t had a single problem playing it. They weren’t going to release a Linux branch but they made sure it was steamdeck compatible, which meant that it was proton compatible which then allows me to play this amazing game on my Debian 12, a game that otherwise would not have worked because none of the other translation layers function with it. I notice zero difference in performance it plays flawlessly, but I would not have been able to play this game otherwise. It might as well be a native Port because I’ve had zero issues with functionality.
The Factorio development blog has a piece on developing Linux-native. Basically there’s ONE GUY who works on the LInux-native version, and it’s a lot more challenging than people think – from managing and linking dependencies, to working around GNOME’s monumentally stupid decision to expect client-side decorations from all apps. It’s simply more worthwhile to ensure that a game works well on WIne/Proton.
Pain tolerance levels? The biggest pain points I have with Steam are that it’s not universally DRM-free (which is why I shop GOG first) and that their multiplayer servers go down for 15 minutes during maintenance windows once or twice per week. Native Linux ports were not going to become more common prior to Proton; they were on the fast track to becoming less common, especially given how many more games are now released every year, and Proton has the added benefit of adding Linux support to games where it was just never going to feasibly happen otherwise.
It’s both. That fear of losing their market position is exactly how a functioning market is supposed to work. Competition is supposed to come in and outdo Valve. EA looked like they were interested for a little while back when they launched Origin, but they changed their minds. Epic says they’re interested now, but they only want sellers and not customers. It’s not a monopoly, legally, when they attained their market position by just being better than everyone else.
And I wonder how many more there are out there. Because if that number is low enough, it may just not be worth it to bother. I’d imagine it’s a nightmare to have to support Apple through all of their standards that they dictate at their business partners. Valve went through the trouble of making a Vulkan->Metal translation layer, since Apple refused to support open standards, and then Apple retired x64 on their machines shortly afterward.
The only reason you don’t see the price as a pain point is that you refuse to see that about 50% of that goes to companies that make billions in profit while people like you and me can’t afford rent.
If this was true, games would cost 18% less on EGS because they only take 12%. Shockingly enough, they cost the same.
Because the same games sell for more elsewhere (also, funnily enough, we’re seeing tons of info on Valve because they’re getting sued for including a non compete clause in their contract to prevent games from being sold for less elsewhere), that’s an issue for the market as a whole and doesn’t apply to video games only. You’re paying too much for your food, for your gas, for your housing, for your clothes, for every fucking thing!
Profit shares for distributors will need to be regulated and wealth tax will need to be applied.
Valve is not your landlord. They made a good place to buy video games. And come on, now; it’s 30% at most to Valve (which is less than brick and mortar before it) and then some more to the government.
30% for Valve, another 10 to 20% for the publisher…
Guess where the billionaires work?
Pain tolerance to prices, how good the support is, how snappy the app is etc. Within the space of game marketplaces they’re average and that’s because every one of them kind of sucks. If Epic was first to monopolize PC game marketplaces people would be defending them like they defend Valve now because they want all of their games in one place.
Linux gaming was stable before Proton. It was never big but mainstream titles were getting released. These days there’s nothing. Titles could be broken at any moment by a developer and nobody will have any responsibility to fix it. I very much doubt that a for profit company does anything because they “like” something like Linux. They’re there to make money, period.
I’m not saying Valve should port their games to ARM or update them, it’s up to them and they don’t seem to be interested in developing games all that much these days. My point wad that plenty of games run via Rosetta2 fine. Steam doesn’t run fine because essentially it’s a web browser and that’s where you can say that 80 developers might not be enough to support this money printing machine.
Pain tolerance to prices? We’re talking about the platform whose name is frequently coupled with the word “sale”. Given the complete lack of ideas out of Epic in the year 2024, I don’t have much confidence that they’d have risen to be a dominant market leader in the first place.
Stable, but not many titles. Mainstream titles were getting released because Valve was either greasing the wheels or because those partners thought Steam Machines were going to be a bigger deal. When they weren’t a bigger deal, those mainstream titles dried up fast. The Witcher 3 and Street Fighter V both announced Linux ports and cancelled them when the writing was on the wall for Steam Machines. Both now work in Proton.
I was told, to my face, by a Valve employee between the launch of Steam Machines and the release of Proton, that a lot of engineers at Valve “are enamored with Linux” before he gave me a look indicating that he couldn’t say more. But also, yes, the pursuit of making money leads to all sorts of wonderful new things, like simultaneously porting more than half of the history of PC gaming to a different operating system.
But if there aren’t many games ported to ARM, and if the number of games running via Rosetta “fine” isn’t high enough, then the number of customers you’re benefiting by making a native ARM build of Steam is very low, and throwing more developers at the problem only makes that math worse. I think you should have a better Steam on Mac. I also know that Apple is actively hostile to gaming on Mac, so I get it if Valve isn’t super interested.
No, people accept Steam because of the proven track record, values of their leadership, their hardware and the work they do with Linux.
Please.
EGS would have all this in that hypothetical scenario, why wouldn’t it?
Found
Machkovetch’sRosen’s Lemmy account;)
I’ve been reading Ars Technica for over 20 years now but that’s because I like their points, not because I write for them xd
Haha naw the joke was supposed to be name of the guy who’s suing them but i ruined it by getting David Rosens name like … Completely wrong.
I don’t know how that happened besides not having my coffee and death stick yet
Yeah, I gathered as much while trying to figure out who that is :)
They’re making their machine more and more efficient, storage and bandwidth just gets cheaper with time… Yet, they still need their 30% cut to make billions in profit.
Wealth redistribution when?
If it’s that easy then make your own competetor and charge less. It’s not like steam has exclusively deals with anyone.
That’s not the point at all.
If they make billions in profit and Gaben is a billionaire while 80% of the population of his country lives paycheck to paycheck then there’s a fucking issue. The same logic applies to all businesses.
Then what is the point?
Why are they not allowed to create a good service and profit?
Why are the competition unable to take marketshare with lower fees?
It feels as if you have this number, >billion, makes a company evil. Why?
I agree with you that no single person needs a billion, but having earned it doesn’t make them bad. They innovate and move everything forwards. I’d much rather see my money with Valve than with EA, Activision Blizzard or any of the other faceless giants out there.
Multimillionaires, billionaires, they’re all part of the problem.
They’re allowed to make a good product and profit, there’s no reason why we allow them to profit so fucking much, if they do it’s because we’re paying more for their product than they actually need to charge us, the fact that they consider it ok makes them bad people.
Stop defending the people profiting from you, you’re the cattle defending the butcher.
I agree with you that there’s a problem, but I think you’re targeting the wrong villian here. I shop local whenever I can but there are a few things that are just… big. Video games are worldwide and getting them off the internet is nice. There’s no such thing as a local video game distributor. There’s local indie game development which I do support, but Steam is a product I like which does its job very well.
The problem here is scale, not necessarily who individuals are buying from. Take major league sports as an example. Salaries for indivudual players are in the millions because of the amount of eyeballs attached to wallets that are interested in watching those players. Less eyeballs, less money, and the players would probably be doing the same thing but not be making as much money. Same thing with music. It’s very hard for an artist to make a good living with music, but once they hit global awareness suddenly money will come rollin in from all over the place. This isn’t a problem with the people doing the jobs (although it could be said that major league sports should charge less, they are trying to maximize their profit) but is the result of the amount of people who are willing to pay.
The probelm you’re having is that a company is allowed to suck up so much money and keep it. That’s a problem for governments to handle. Individuals can choose who to give their money to, but sometimes there aren’t any other good choices.
It’s their choice to take a cut big enough that they’re making that kind of profit, no one is forcing them, it’s all greed, stop acting like they wouldn’t be able to lower it.
A million dollars isn’t what it used to be. There are older working class multi-millionaires who have saved that much from entirely their own labor.
Sure, then «attack» the politicians allowing this to happen.
Up corporate tax and income tax for the wealthy.
Don’t attack the companies that play by the rules.
The funniest thing is, there are billionaires out there that agree tax laws are messed up and think they should be paying more taxes. For them it’s just a stressful hassle to work out which charities should take their money.
I don’t believe them for a second. When you have that much money you could just hire people to vet charities for you.
All of them deserve to be attacked, there’s nothing moral about being a multimillionaire while people are starving.
Right, but there’s nothing immoral about it either.
I live in a place where the rich pay their fair dues to the benefit of the less fortunate. That’s where I think you need to focus on getting, not slandering every successful company out of envy.
Thanks for the chat. You were nothing but respectful. Have a great weekend.
So what laws are you proposing to fix this? Or do you just think whining that they exist will cause them to give away their money?
Wealth taxation up to 100%
Limited share for distributors/publishers
Implement that and just watch as everyone but the super wealthy becomes richer all of the sudden.
So he should get the address of every single person in the country and divide his money equally among every single person and have no money for himself? Maybe only keep the same amount for himself that each other person is getting? That’s ~342 million people. Give them $3 each and no more billionaire. Worth $10B? $30 for each person.
Elon Musk is the wealthiest person in the USA and is worth $251B. $750/person would help for rent for one month. You could take money away from babies and maybe get a full month, maybe two.
Jeff Bezos is next at $161B. That’s about $480/person.
Of course, this means that their money is gone. No golden goose. Do you think that they should subsidize every person in the country?
Or simply say "I guess 30% is more than we need, let’s cut that to 10% and see how that goes.
If billionaires didn’t exist we wouldn’t need to subsidize anyone, the majority of the world’s issues are related to the fact that a minority keeps a majority of wealth to themselves and just try to acquire more and more.
You’ve got the proverbial “patience of a saint.” Shame about all’ the bootlickers around here, though. I’d thought/hoped better of Lemmy but still people’s brains turn off when they’ve chosen a team :(
Incredible how you look at the comment history of all these people and all of them have comments about not having enough money or being angry at rich people, but all critical thinking goes out the window when it’s for a hobby they like, suddenly whatever they’re told to spend is perfectly OK!
Perhaps 10%. Taxes at one point went up to 90%. Some companies do need more, especially small businesses. As for not needing to subsidize anyone, when the pandemic struck and the checks went out a lot of people paid bills (I managed to get rid of my student loan debt, with help) but many went on spending sprees and some of those still couldn’t pay rent. Wealth distribution isn’t as great as it sounds and I’m on SSDI.
“when the pandemic struck”… The pandemic that was caused by poor people hunting wild animals to sell their meat to make a living? Gosh darn, I wonder what we could have done to make it so these people wouldn’t have to resort to that to make a living… Oh well 🤷
Nothing. That happened in another country. Also, hunting wild animals to sell the meat has been a thing for millennia.
These numbers keep getting smaller with every headline. Tomorrow it says that Steam runs off of Gabens private NAS.
Because other articles cite about 350 (heh, inb4 three-fiddy) for the whole of Valve. This is just Steam.
Gaben isn’t actually one person. Gaben is a conglomerate.
Is it like Negan from The Walking Dead? They’re all Gaben.
Gaben is a state of mind
It’s the level beyond zen.
Budda statue is based on Gaben confirmed!
Budda is just a Garry’s Mod asset flip.
Wasn’t there just a report from a few days ago that it was closer to 300?
That’s total employees at Valve. This is a subset of those that work on Steam.
It’s very impressive. Although it explains why the remote streaming and controller stuff is so GD buggy.
Theres probably like 3 guys total working on them. Maybe not even full-time.
The report says that Valve has ~350 employees total, and of those employees only 80 actually work on Steam as a storefront. The rest are working on their games and hardware.
So they have people working on their games? HL-3 confirmed!
They have other games in the works. I’m in the alpha or beta now? Of their overwatch like called deadlock.