Funny thing is I don’t support Valve or Tim Sweeney. While by American standards, Valve are angels, that is a very low standard. Sweeney is your stereotypical American corporate degenerate:
But honestly Valve is no better. Europe (and other countries/regions) should either force Valve to have to de facto white label their store for Europe (where they are a junior partner and hold minimal control) or kick them out. And I am not saying there can’t be collaboration on common goals; e.g. investing into Linux support and open platforms, but you can’t have Americans in charge of major platforms. That ship has sailed.
There are many massive issues with Valve:
They made a huge contribution to the rise of lootbox gambling schemes
They initially attempted a fraudulent scheme on local consumer laws on refunds
For most of Steam’s life their TOS had mandatory arbitration requirements which is a local corruption scheme that is not too different from Soviet kangaroo courts. In their defence they did add that “as far as your country’s laws permit”.
I will admit that the overall logic of the case doesn’t make sense.
Apologies, in retrospective that was wrong to say.
I should have said “entities based in the US jurisdiction (or that are influenced by American-style corruption)”.
You are correct that the nationality plays no role in this.
That being said, it is fact that all major US B2C tech platforms support corruption, engage in crime, engage in spyware activities and leverage shallow pompous PR copytext about alleged belief in free speech and “government official this or that”.
Just realize Americans are not a homogeneous group, of course Google/Meta/MS/Oracle are all shitbag companies with leaders who support Trump, as far as I’m aware Gabe does not and has not contributed to rightwing government.
I understand the frustration and mistrust, I live here. But it’s important to realize that is a small minority of people no matter how much of an outsize influence their power and corruption has over all of us.
Israel is bad, but not all Israelis or Jews are, not supporting Israeli companies that are govt backed/ran by "ex"IDF makes sense, but companies that don’t shouldn’t be lumped in just because of that.
I apologize for the broad generalisation (in my defence, the use of demonyms in such a context doesn’t always suggets complete generalisation). That was uncalled for.
I’ve lived for several years and travelled a lot around the US (both while living there and during subsequent visits). The impression I got is that corruption is not purely a far right thing and a far larger proportion of say the centre-right voting public enable it than would think. They might not be as openly committed to crime and corruption as say the far right, but much for the centre-right voting is simply too well off to risk rocking the boat and pursuing true anti-crime measures.
Let me give you an example of the latter. Meta has been found to knowling enable and support fraud to the tune of $16 B (10% plus of revenues) in 2024 alone. They even had a playbook to enable this scheme, so there likely entent to engage in crime.
This is a more pedestrian example, there also the enablement of Rohingya genocide (I don’t support capital punishment, but I would be willing to consider exceptions for egregious crimes against humanity, but let’s go with a more clear cut case.
Am I being unreasonable in stating that the vast majority of the centre-right voting public may vaguely believe Meta’s action to be criminal, but they fundamentally oppose any actions that might address such criminal activities. Things like immediate internment of all Meta executives and senior operational staff involved in this scheme, raids on their properties to uncover evidence, asset seizures for any entities involved in crime (so Zuckerburg would lose ownership stake in Meta if his engagement was proven during criminal proceedings)
The facts are pretty clear in this case, Meta didn’t even deny it, they decided to try PR their way out of it, hoping the issue would be forgotten.
There may be structural reasons for not pursuing such crimes, but that’s a weak excuse. Every country has problems (some far more challenging than American structural issues),
I stand by what I said, tech platforms (especially B2C, but not only) run by entities either based in the US or being subject to American influence cannot be trusted.
I will happily change my stance; it brings me no joy to see any country become a bastion of negative forces such as oligarchy and global promotion of crime and corruption. But there are limits to open mindedness and a desire to emphasis the positive elements of a given culture/nation.
At some point, there has to be real world changes and impact. I do not believe a hypothetical win by the centre-right in both legislative and executive office will change anything (FWIW, I actually lived in the US under Obama). I will also note that the issues with Valve were implementing during Obama’s terms.
I’m no Epic Games fan, but this is an overcorrection. Valve makes money hand over fist and they aren’t making those products simply out of passion. They’re doing it to make even more money. The company are pioneers in micro transactions and loot boxes. The other large game companies (and especially alternative storefronts) have just been so shit that gamers feel a weird attachment to this company.
Hey, we don’t talk about that here! Gaben is wholesome and even though he is a billionaire who owns a yacht company funded by lootboxes, he’s one of the good ones!
FYI: Games like Ready or not have started the early access outside of Steam.
So if you advertise your game properly, you can make it as well. Just need to work on your discoverability.
But Steam makes it way easier.
So either go with Steam, Epic, GOG, Itch.io or any other store.
No need to fixate on only steam
Hilarious. Didn’t Epic just introduce microtransactions for user-created content in Fortnite with intention of taking 63% fee on that? All the while, trying to turn the said Fortnite in Roblox-like major store for games?
Devs are also paying for the Steam recommendation algorithm. It’s not just a store that puts games on a shelf and just forgets about it. The store actively promotes games to the right audience. The algorithm is how small indie games from a team without an advertising budget can blow up into millions of dollars in revenue. No other digital games store has a recommendation algorithm that is as good (for the buyer and the seller) as Steam.
There are other platforms devs can release games. GOG, microsoft, epic store, or you can release physical CD copies to sell at retailers. Steam isn’t gate keeping anything.
TIL that Tim Fortnite does not consider Sony or Nintendo to be ‘major stores’.
TIL that the video game industry has never had nor currently has titles that are priced exclusively on certain platforms.
(Where ‘its only available for purchase on one platform’ is an effective price of infinity on other platforms)
Just… from the article:
“Steam’s rules do explicitly prohibit games from steering players to competing purchase methods, forcing everyone to pay 30% to Valve,” he [Sweeney] recently tweeted. “Apple and Google did the same until the court explicitly found this practice to be unlawful. Now they don’t!”
It’s not clear exactly what rule Sweeney’s referring to here, but Steam’s own guidelines state that “it’s OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.” Though Valve would also prefer that developers “don’t give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam key purchasers.”
It’s almost like this guy is malding, crashing out even, and has just… departed from the realm of even trying to make sense.
What is happening here is that Tim is losing his mind because Unreal Engine 5 only runs on GPUs (mostly from Nvidia) that cost as much as an entire PC did 2 or 3 years ago, and so many AAA studios that used UE 5 to make a pretty but hollow and buggy game are now collapsing or seeing a dramatic consumer pullback.
See how this is all connected, and these idiots did this to themselves?
Nvidia decides that Real Time Ray Tracing is the new paradigm for gaming graphics, and Unreal is the primary way people will experience this, by having all the lighting be done ‘auto-magically’ by UE 5, from the perspective of game devs.
Fastforward 5 or so years, half of everything computer hardware is too expensive now, hugely funded AAA games are routinely failing and causing financial disasters for publishers, Unreal Engine 5 is a hugely stigmatized joke because its not any kind of optimized for hardware people actually have, and outside of AAA games, is notorious for low quality UE asset store flips and actual scam games…
…this paradigm doesn’t work.
Compare that to Valve pretty close to singlehandedly developing its own VR hardware, and showcase AAA tier game for it… and well hey shucks, yeah, its too expensive for wide adoption, but that didn’t ruin their entire business’s financials.
They just actually properly accounted for the costs of trying that paradigm shift, and are today still iterating on and improving it, ala the upcoming SteamFrame and new software layer for translating ARM to x86 calls.
WTF is this comments section here? I don’t give a rat’s fuck (if that is a thing), about what Tim Sweeney thinks about Valve, or if Valve is a good company or not.
Charging 30% of revenue for a digital store is clearly nit justifiable and Valve makes insane amount of profits just by having a near monopoly on PC game sales. They don’t need that much and it’s still just digital feudalism regardless if who does it.
You guys are just stuck in the good guy/ bad guy mentality and honestly, it’s kind of embarrassing to get this defensive over a company.
I’m honestly not sure whether it’s some huge astroturfing campaing or just people simply sucking off billionaires for no reason, but every time we see ANY criticism towards Valve or Gaben, most of the commenters flock in support of Valve. Underage gambling? Oh, who cares. Lootboxes? Well, that’s okay. Taking 30% cut for games? Uh, actually, that’s not a lot! Gaben owning a ton of yachts? Well, he’s a good guy, so it’s fine. And when Valve got forced by Australian court to create a refund policy, I saw a TON of comments saying it was actually wholesome valve who voluntarily decided to create it. But apparently they get a pass because they’re smart enough to invest in a backup solution (Linux) in case Microsoft fucks them over.
Having a 21 year old Steam account and having bought quite some games makes it hard to stay subjective about this for me. I don’t disagree with you but I see Valve as the best monopoly if I could choose. And I don’t see Epic performing the same services while tryharding tremendously to be the monoply themselves by giving away free games.
agreed, i feel like Valve is using their monopolization for good then bad, look at Valve’s competitors using their monopolization stance for bad.
and i feel like Valve has monopoly cause they do less mistakes then their competitors(compare Steam with like Epic Games and GOG)
am not defending valve here,am not saying Valve is a saint.
They aren’t a monopoly, they are simply better than all their competitors in every feature that matters. They aren’t anti-competitive, and Epic is free to try making a decent product instead of the pile of garbage they currently have.
What about game devs though? They are clearly hurt already by the insane fees.
Just think about it. When you buy a game for 10€ on steam, steam get’s a flat 3.33€ just for giving you a “buy game” button. The gamedeev get’s maybe half of what you payed (Taxes, engine fees etc.).
Don’t you think, that there is something kind of fucked up about that?
if that was all they got the money for, and the devs were indeed hurt to a significant degree by it, a competitor with a lower fee (say, epic, with their 8%) would have outgrown them years ago, since steam doesn’t do exclusivity deals.
That’s not how this stuff works. Gamers decide, what stores succeed, not game devs.
Also Valve has policies, that say that you can’t offer your game for cheaper elsewhere, which means, that gamers can never notice the difference between a 30% cut or an 8% cut.
okay, so all a storefront has to do is build a better system and take, say, 20%. that would pull in both sellers and buyers. why isn’t the other storefronts building competitors? epic has infinite money but all they seem to use it on is bribes. gog offers standalone installers and online community systems, but not both at the same time. itch is held together by duct tape and dreams.
That’s disingenuous. They do a lot more than that.
Discovery for one. Hosting the game so that downloads are fast and paying for the server and network infrastructure for that. Handling payment processing from all around the world.
That all has a cost. And any developer can just drop the installer on their own website and pay all of these things themselves.
I’ve now lost multiple entire weekends to trying to figure out how to just download assets from FAB, on linux.
Finally, they just made a direct option on the website to just download files, you know, like a normal download.
Prior to that, you basically had to install or compile and install UE5, to be able to download some asset.
… This doesn’t work well, because as you say, UE 5 is horrifically borked and improperly documented on linux, they can’t even figure out how to list all the dependencies you actually need, and thats on the linux versions they claim to support.
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Funny thing is I don’t support Valve or Tim Sweeney. While by American standards, Valve are angels, that is a very low standard. Sweeney is your stereotypical American corporate degenerate:
But honestly Valve is no better. Europe (and other countries/regions) should either force Valve to have to de facto white label their store for Europe (where they are a junior partner and hold minimal control) or kick them out. And I am not saying there can’t be collaboration on common goals; e.g. investing into Linux support and open platforms, but you can’t have Americans in charge of major platforms. That ship has sailed.
There are many massive issues with Valve:
I will admit that the overall logic of the case doesn’t make sense.
“You can’t have Americans in charge of major platforms.” Lmao what
Apologies, in retrospective that was wrong to say.
I should have said “entities based in the US jurisdiction (or that are influenced by American-style corruption)”.
You are correct that the nationality plays no role in this.
That being said, it is fact that all major US B2C tech platforms support corruption, engage in crime, engage in spyware activities and leverage shallow pompous PR copytext about alleged belief in free speech and “government official this or that”.
That ship has really sailed.
Just realize Americans are not a homogeneous group, of course Google/Meta/MS/Oracle are all shitbag companies with leaders who support Trump, as far as I’m aware Gabe does not and has not contributed to rightwing government.
I understand the frustration and mistrust, I live here. But it’s important to realize that is a small minority of people no matter how much of an outsize influence their power and corruption has over all of us.
Israel is bad, but not all Israelis or Jews are, not supporting Israeli companies that are govt backed/ran by "ex"IDF makes sense, but companies that don’t shouldn’t be lumped in just because of that.
I apologize for the broad generalisation (in my defence, the use of demonyms in such a context doesn’t always suggets complete generalisation). That was uncalled for.
I’ve lived for several years and travelled a lot around the US (both while living there and during subsequent visits). The impression I got is that corruption is not purely a far right thing and a far larger proportion of say the centre-right voting public enable it than would think. They might not be as openly committed to crime and corruption as say the far right, but much for the centre-right voting is simply too well off to risk rocking the boat and pursuing true anti-crime measures.
Let me give you an example of the latter. Meta has been found to knowling enable and support fraud to the tune of $16 B (10% plus of revenues) in 2024 alone. They even had a playbook to enable this scheme, so there likely entent to engage in crime.
This is a more pedestrian example, there also the enablement of Rohingya genocide (I don’t support capital punishment, but I would be willing to consider exceptions for egregious crimes against humanity, but let’s go with a more clear cut case.
Am I being unreasonable in stating that the vast majority of the centre-right voting public may vaguely believe Meta’s action to be criminal, but they fundamentally oppose any actions that might address such criminal activities. Things like immediate internment of all Meta executives and senior operational staff involved in this scheme, raids on their properties to uncover evidence, asset seizures for any entities involved in crime (so Zuckerburg would lose ownership stake in Meta if his engagement was proven during criminal proceedings)
The facts are pretty clear in this case, Meta didn’t even deny it, they decided to try PR their way out of it, hoping the issue would be forgotten.
There may be structural reasons for not pursuing such crimes, but that’s a weak excuse. Every country has problems (some far more challenging than American structural issues),
I stand by what I said, tech platforms (especially B2C, but not only) run by entities either based in the US or being subject to American influence cannot be trusted.
I will happily change my stance; it brings me no joy to see any country become a bastion of negative forces such as oligarchy and global promotion of crime and corruption. But there are limits to open mindedness and a desire to emphasis the positive elements of a given culture/nation.
At some point, there has to be real world changes and impact. I do not believe a hypothetical win by the centre-right in both legislative and executive office will change anything (FWIW, I actually lived in the US under Obama). I will also note that the issues with Valve were implementing during Obama’s terms.
Losers are gonna rage.
Valve please cut epic loose.
I miss old Epic games from 20 years ago. This greedy prick is an aggressive blight on PC gaming. Maybe he’ll die soon.
Right, because managing, securing, updating, and operating steam is all black magic that costs valve nothing.
Listen, they need that revenue for their R&D for the steam deck 2 and steam machines and shit. Fuck off ya hoser, eh?
I’m no Epic Games fan, but this is an overcorrection. Valve makes money hand over fist and they aren’t making those products simply out of passion. They’re doing it to make even more money. The company are pioneers in micro transactions and loot boxes. The other large game companies (and especially alternative storefronts) have just been so shit that gamers feel a weird attachment to this company.
And also for Gabe’s fleet of billionaire yachts
Hey, we don’t talk about that here! Gaben is wholesome and even though he is a billionaire who owns a yacht company funded by lootboxes, he’s one of the good ones!
How about you fuck off defending the mafioso vig that Apple, Google, and Valve have extorted from game developers for years, you monopoly bootlicker?
FYI: Games like Ready or not have started the early access outside of Steam.
So if you advertise your game properly, you can make it as well. Just need to work on your discoverability.
But Steam makes it way easier.
So either go with Steam, Epic, GOG, Itch.io or any other store.
No need to fixate on only steam
Nobody is forced to use any of those platforms.
You’re the one licking the boot of developers who just want to profit off of your stupidity.
Aw, those poor hardworking app stores with their razor-thin ::checks notes:: 78% profit margins
You’re a useful idiot.
Says the wanker defending billionaires’ profit margins
I’m not defending anyone.
I’m calling stupidity out for what it is.
Lol just make it so people actually own games they buy and can move their library boom problem solved but i guess thats not on the table for Tim
Hilarious. Didn’t Epic just introduce microtransactions for user-created content in Fortnite with intention of taking 63% fee on that? All the while, trying to turn the said Fortnite in Roblox-like major store for games?
Steam is different from the Google or Apple stores, because they aren’t the gatekeeper of a platform.
But yeah maybe 30% is a bit high for games that don’t use any of the steam features, just the payment processing, review section and download servers.
Devs are also paying for the Steam recommendation algorithm. It’s not just a store that puts games on a shelf and just forgets about it. The store actively promotes games to the right audience. The algorithm is how small indie games from a team without an advertising budget can blow up into millions of dollars in revenue. No other digital games store has a recommendation algorithm that is as good (for the buyer and the seller) as Steam.
Yeah people consistently forget this, and will say things like ‘Valve isn’t even doing any marketing for me!’
No, they are.
Its just that its on their platform.
Via their categorization and recommendation snd review systems.
As opposed to… other pay to win ad platforms that shove ads in peoples faces depending on how much money you throw at them.
Also, while this is more of a minor point, Valve’s cut drops to 25% for games sales past $10 million, 20% for game sales past $50 million.
Been that way for 7 or 8 years.
There are other platforms devs can release games. GOG, microsoft, epic store, or you can release physical CD copies to sell at retailers. Steam isn’t gate keeping anything.
TIL that Tim Fortnite does not consider Sony or Nintendo to be ‘major stores’.
TIL that the video game industry has never had nor currently has titles that are priced exclusively on certain platforms.
(Where ‘its only available for purchase on one platform’ is an effective price of infinity on other platforms)
Just… from the article:
It’s almost like this guy is malding, crashing out even, and has just… departed from the realm of even trying to make sense.
What is happening here is that Tim is losing his mind because Unreal Engine 5 only runs on GPUs (mostly from Nvidia) that cost as much as an entire PC did 2 or 3 years ago, and so many AAA studios that used UE 5 to make a pretty but hollow and buggy game are now collapsing or seeing a dramatic consumer pullback.
See how this is all connected, and these idiots did this to themselves?
Nvidia decides that Real Time Ray Tracing is the new paradigm for gaming graphics, and Unreal is the primary way people will experience this, by having all the lighting be done ‘auto-magically’ by UE 5, from the perspective of game devs.
Fastforward 5 or so years, half of everything computer hardware is too expensive now, hugely funded AAA games are routinely failing and causing financial disasters for publishers, Unreal Engine 5 is a hugely stigmatized joke because its not any kind of optimized for hardware people actually have, and outside of AAA games, is notorious for low quality UE asset store flips and actual scam games…
…this paradigm doesn’t work.
Compare that to Valve pretty close to singlehandedly developing its own VR hardware, and showcase AAA tier game for it… and well hey shucks, yeah, its too expensive for wide adoption, but that didn’t ruin their entire business’s financials.
They just actually properly accounted for the costs of trying that paradigm shift, and are today still iterating on and improving it, ala the upcoming SteamFrame and new software layer for translating ARM to x86 calls.
Says who, the guy who is all-in on AI and is probably a TESCREAL-believing dipshit?
More like, steam is the only major store.
WTF is this comments section here? I don’t give a rat’s fuck (if that is a thing), about what Tim Sweeney thinks about Valve, or if Valve is a good company or not.
Charging 30% of revenue for a digital store is clearly nit justifiable and Valve makes insane amount of profits just by having a near monopoly on PC game sales. They don’t need that much and it’s still just digital feudalism regardless if who does it.
You guys are just stuck in the good guy/ bad guy mentality and honestly, it’s kind of embarrassing to get this defensive over a company.
I’m honestly not sure whether it’s some huge astroturfing campaing or just people simply sucking off billionaires for no reason, but every time we see ANY criticism towards Valve or Gaben, most of the commenters flock in support of Valve. Underage gambling? Oh, who cares. Lootboxes? Well, that’s okay. Taking 30% cut for games? Uh, actually, that’s not a lot! Gaben owning a ton of yachts? Well, he’s a good guy, so it’s fine. And when Valve got forced by Australian court to create a refund policy, I saw a TON of comments saying it was actually wholesome valve who voluntarily decided to create it. But apparently they get a pass because they’re smart enough to invest in a backup solution (Linux) in case Microsoft fucks them over.
Having a 21 year old Steam account and having bought quite some games makes it hard to stay subjective about this for me. I don’t disagree with you but I see Valve as the best monopoly if I could choose. And I don’t see Epic performing the same services while tryharding tremendously to be the monoply themselves by giving away free games.
agreed, i feel like Valve is using their monopolization for good then bad, look at Valve’s competitors using their monopolization stance for bad.
and i feel like Valve has monopoly cause they do less mistakes then their competitors(compare Steam with like Epic Games and GOG)
am not defending valve here,am not saying Valve is a saint.
They aren’t a monopoly, they are simply better than all their competitors in every feature that matters. They aren’t anti-competitive, and Epic is free to try making a decent product instead of the pile of garbage they currently have.
ok i get the full picture now
as long as they avoid enshittification that hurts the consumer they may continue to get away with it.
I think it’s worth discussing though.
What about game devs though? They are clearly hurt already by the insane fees.
Just think about it. When you buy a game for 10€ on steam, steam get’s a flat 3.33€ just for giving you a “buy game” button. The gamedeev get’s maybe half of what you payed (Taxes, engine fees etc.).
Don’t you think, that there is something kind of fucked up about that?
it’s not really hurting the devs. if anything it hurts consumers, but even that’s a stretch considering the service both sides are getting.
holy hell can’t you see the difference between EGS and steam? one works reliably. the other is all over the place. to me that’s worth 30%
if that was all they got the money for, and the devs were indeed hurt to a significant degree by it, a competitor with a lower fee (say, epic, with their 8%) would have outgrown them years ago, since steam doesn’t do exclusivity deals.
That’s not how this stuff works. Gamers decide, what stores succeed, not game devs.
Also Valve has policies, that say that you can’t offer your game for cheaper elsewhere, which means, that gamers can never notice the difference between a 30% cut or an 8% cut.
okay, so all a storefront has to do is build a better system and take, say, 20%. that would pull in both sellers and buyers. why isn’t the other storefronts building competitors? epic has infinite money but all they seem to use it on is bribes. gog offers standalone installers and online community systems, but not both at the same time. itch is held together by duct tape and dreams.
That’s disingenuous. They do a lot more than that.
Discovery for one. Hosting the game so that downloads are fast and paying for the server and network infrastructure for that. Handling payment processing from all around the world.
That all has a cost. And any developer can just drop the installer on their own website and pay all of these things themselves.
if it’s not justifiable, then the game devs can go elsewere.
That’s not how the network effect works. If Deva go elsewhere, nobody buys their game. Most people will never even know of the games outside of steam.
you could try answering, but conceding works just as well
it’s an asynchronous medium. the answer could come tomorrow, or next week. not answering within an hour is not “conceding”.
well i am waiting
and why would gamers not buy their game elsewhere?
That’s a funny way of asking people to uninstall Epic’s game launcher & boycott their games.
You don’t need to even have the launcher installed to claim the free EGS games. I usually claim them to support the developers.
Yeah being against Valve is just evil. I love giving money to Gaben. It gives me the sense of pride and accomplishment. I would never hurt him.
one day he will take me with him onto a yacht voyage
Joke’s on you. EGS doesn’t support gaming on Linux and the Linux version of UnrealEngine is royally FUBAR so there is no reason to download it.
I’ve now lost multiple entire weekends to trying to figure out how to just download assets from FAB, on linux.
Finally, they just made a direct option on the website to just download files, you know, like a normal download.
Prior to that, you basically had to install or compile and install UE5, to be able to download some asset.
… This doesn’t work well, because as you say, UE 5 is horrifically borked and improperly documented on linux, they can’t even figure out how to list all the dependencies you actually need, and thats on the linux versions they claim to support.
The price cut is the only thing Tim cares about.
Oh this is the same guy who said it was censorship when people said that maybe Grok shouldn’t create pictures of children in bikinis?
Yes.
He’s a slimeball.
Well I suppose at least it’s subject matter related, unlike when he usually opens his mouth.