So as a developer I could release my software on Steam directly (no publisher and associated costs) and have access to how many potential customers? Of course I could also release on my own website and host everything myself, or I could use the Epic Store, perhaps GOG.
How do you think Steam store restricts the industry? I can buy steam keys on alternative sites, is that possible in Epic or GOG?
Steam Keys are a free service we provide to developers as a convenient tool to help you sell your game on other stores and at retail, or provide for free for beta testers or press/influencers.
As a customer the steam store experience, mod workshop, Steam deck and OS, Steam VR app (I use with my Quest 2) all work really well for me. Reviews seem pretty uncensored (at least I’ve not read about Valve doing anything underhand)
I’m very happy to say that the Steam android app could be better!
As a final point, I would like to see a viable alternative to Steam as competition is generally good for consumers!
Steam did deal a big blow to self publishing and piracy as it provided a platform to sell games, manage patches, multiplayer, DLC, gaming community moderation, controller support etc. It really reduced a lot of burden on developers.
From your very first sentence you make my point. Steam is nothing but access to the customers who use it. That’s it. A digital distributor with a clunky website. It’s useful because it’s popular, NOT because it actually does anything special. If everyone stopped using Steam tomorrow, literally nothing of value would be lost. The same can’t be said for any innovative company on this planet.
Like Apple’s vr headset? Or did you forget the first 2 Valve VR (HTC hardware) sets and associated software?
What about the Steam Deck, of course hand held consoles are nothing new, but what makes it special is the combination of the rather excellent trackpads and controller mapping that debuted in the Steam controller and with an OS (that uses wine) to bypass Windows and all it’s bloat - It must be quite popular as we’re now seeing a number of imitators!
Imho Steam is, by far, the gold standard for digital distributors.
None of that is worth a 30% premium on games, which stymies creative development and industry growth.
Face it, Steam is a distribution center whose popularity entitles it to extract enormous rents that pose a significant burden on the industry. Greater decentralization will lead to growth. Always has.
I had a Steam controller for a long time. Worst piece of gaming hardware I’ve ever owned — but that’s not the point. Even if it were the best controller it wouldn’t justify a 30% tax on games.
Epic, GoG, Microsoft store, if Steam is so awful, then why don’t people use the competition?
There’s really no penalty to me as a consumer if I choose to buy on any platform, they all work on Windows, and to a lesser extent Steam OS. I’m not locked on hardware, there no subscription, the biggest challenge is keeping all 4 app stores updated to the latest version which costs me a little time and storage space…
Actually, dlc is a good example of being trapped in one ecosystem, but beyond that I can buy games from any publisher on any store without penalty.
Compare that to Apple and their restrictive app store, or other innovators that stop supporting hardware upgrades or disable servers removing key features (Unisoft…) Steam even goes further and provides users access to games that have been withdrawn from sale, compare that with Nintendo.
Please invest some into the Linux client. The dropdown click-through problem exists for years already, the source of the problem is known and would be easy to fix on your side.
Or develop an API coupled with your DRM, so the community could develop some good interfaces already.
My favourite factoid about that is that the minister of finance in Greece who was in charge during the Greek Debt Crisis was Yanis Varoufakis, the former economist-in-residence at Valve.
I stumbled across a bunch of economic videos featuring him in the past. Yanis and Steam in the same sentence was never something I was expecting to see lol
Afaik he still praises their anarchist corporate management structure. Haven’t really looked into it, but if true kind of an L from a guy i really like otherwise
Can you expand more on why it’s an L? I have a lot of time for Varoufakis, I don’t agree with him on everything but I find him a very reasonable person.
Because he doesn’t call out their traditional centralized ownership structure, which is more important and will always “win” when it conflicts with the anarchist parts. The owners still have final say over the workers.
That guy had it easy compared to the guy that had his eyeball replaced with a valve, and after everything he sacrificed they just stopped using his picture.
What does that mean? They take a cut of every game sold, they didn’t make that product. They make the platform the games other people made are sold on.
It’s a good platform nonetheless, but IDK how much of it is actually “earned” as opposed to just a big cut taken from someone.
I never said those things were free. I did say the platform is good, but their income is from the games sold on the platform that other people made.
I don’t know what metric would properly capture money/time spent on infrastructure and servers, but I don’t think it’s “money per head” if that money is from games sold and doesn’t strictly relate to how good their platform performs.
If games company’s could make more money by not releasing on Steam, they would. The fact that they accept the 30% cut means that Steam is in fact leading to more sales for those developers and thus earns its cut. No one HAS to sell their product on Steam, PC’s are a completely open marketplace
The only one that seems surprising is Apple. All the others don’t really make products that are sold. They make revenue via advertising on things they give away free. Valve not only used to make games they still sell, but made a store platform not a social media network.
Is 30% on average “huge” considering the platform and total number of averages monthly users? I know that number does move around a bit as well.
I guess considering the ease of use for users and the fact that other platforms exist, they might be considered a monopoly only because nothing else of quality has shown up. It’s not like they’re buying out competitors and paying politicians to create laws and expectations to give them a competitive advantage. They’re literally just better than the other shit. Except arguably GoG which is solid in its own right, though not in the same ways as Steam.
When valve was establishing steam, 30% was justified. They had to invest in the product. They took a risk. They don’t have to now and they are profiteering.
And valve have admitted they’re making more profit than anyone else in the space. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be allowed a profit, I’m saying there’s an argument that they (and Apple via the Apple store) are taking too much from the work of others
And that argument is idiotic, as proven by the fact that even bribing people to their shitty Epig Store, Epic can’t compete with the value Steam provides.
Differently from Apple, Steam hasn’t put any barriers in place to stop competitors nor have they forced exclusivity on publishers for their platform.
Last time I checked, Epic Games has plenty of money to compete. Monopoly implies competition is actively being stopped. Valve hasn’t done much to stop competition other than making a good product that people use.
Steam let’s devs sell games anywhere and provide steam keys. There are many alternate stores you can buy games and get a steam key. I’m guessing that is one reason they have a big cut.
But also, I remember indie devs having to give up 60℅ of revenue to go on the larger indie game publishing sites.
Once again, they profit by accepting Steams cut, proving that Steam earns and deserves it. There Itch.io, GoG, Epic, or they can go Minecrafts route and sell their game on their own site. Steam does nothing to hamper competition. Steams cut is entirely optional, a dev doesnt HAVE to put their game up on Steams marketplace. Steam is earning that cut by being a marketplace that brings devs more sales
No, they don’t have to use the largest and most popular storefront at all. Good economic e sense right there.
People didn’t have to use Internet Explorer, but that was deemed a monopoly. The existence of alternatives doesn’t make them automatically economically viable
Yes, and their cut for letting you use the largest storefront out there that THEY BUILT AND GOT THERE, is 30%. If you are earning more money paying that 30% and being on their storefront than you would by rejecting that cut and listing somewhere else, than that is full proof that Steam is earning that cut.
Also, internet explorer came bundled with Windows and THATS why it was deemed a monopoly. You have to specifically choose to download Steam, it gets no starter advantage over the competition.
Steam is the most popular storefront because its the BEST storefront, there is no ulterior motivation putting it at the top, its just that all of its competition barring Itch and GoG are garbage. Steam is still better than the non garbage competition though and why it can get away with its incredibly minor option for built in DRM and its 30% cut. They use their cut to make an amazing storefront, and the developers who choose to pay that cut benefit from the customers that having the worlds best PC marketplace brings.
What makes it not a monopoly is that it isnt. It has competitors, it does nothing to block competition. It is not responsible for its competition not being as good as it is.
Brainless take. “I want all of the benefits of a huge storefront with free advertisement and countless features that attract customers, but I don’t wanna pay for it!”
Brainless take. Valve is making money hand over fist. Most game devs are not making money. Valve aren’t creating any of the games, valve aren’t taking any of the risk
Do you think the payment processing, storage, content distribution, content delivery, social & communal aspects are free? Think for a second before writing your nonargument.
Non public should be more efficient from the labor cost savings of not having to file all the sec documents quarterly and legal costs of following public company regulations.
Public companies focus on short term profit to keep share holders happy. Private companies can actually focus on long term profit, especially if it’s at the expense of some short term profit.
Or they can choose not to focus on profit at all. Probably most people with an ownership stake in Valve are fabulously rich now. Maybe they just want to focus on interesting R&D now.
Theoretically there’s a benefit to a publicly traded company that since a lot of your financials are visible to everyone and people get to “vote” by buying and selling shares, there’s a sense in which you can get feedback on how well you’re running the company that you don’t get when it’s private. But, as Reddit’s “wall street bets” and “superstonk” subreddits show, a lot of investors are morons.
This isn’t totally true. Private companies can still have shareholders that demand info. Their aren’t the same level of regulations, but it’s not nothing.
I’ve despised steam ever since they forced it on me to play HL2.
I hate the store page that pops up whenever I want to play a game.
I hate the friends list.
I miss when I would just install a game and it was just an icon on my desktop. Now they think they should own my gaming experience and they’re so powerful I can’t say no.
That last para is missing the fact that you’d have to go to a store and buy a CD and come back home and play vs downloading in a few minutes in today’s time plus get insane discounts. Not to mention easily conquer compatibility issues. Also use controllers very easily including dualshocks. You can still have desktop icons, you can ignore the friends list, and disable notifications/pop-ups.
You can download games using steamcmd (command line) and pick only games that are DRM free on Steam. Valve doesn’t force DRM (even it’s own one) so, if you see a game that require DRM (Steam or whatever) it’s solely because the publisher put the DRM into it.
Once you’ve downloaded your drm-free game through steamcmd, you can basically zip the folder and store your game wherever you want… even on the cloud (your own personal space, if you share it publicly it’s piracy).
Also, you’re not even forced to use Steam: itch.io and GoG are preferable ways to buy games and improve your drm-free wallet-vote situation.
If I recall correctly from a People Make Games video (great YT channel btw) all Valve employees have access to how much money Steam makes, so they can apparently just login and look at them anytime they feel like it. The profits of Valve might be shown in a similar way to employees.
Profit/employees isn’t a measure of efficiency, completed projects/employees is and I’m willing to bet that a company without any real organization like Valve doesn’t complete as many projects/employees as companies like Apple or Microsoft.
Valve is basically a file hosting service. I will never understand the computer illiterate gamers who worship that website. Omg it lets me download my games many times! Amazing. Go sell something on the Steam Marketplace. Fucking idiot.
It’s not just files. It’s forums, chats, performance metrics, and game integration for gaming with your friends with a centralized account instead of 30 different friend group listing across 50 games.
The incredibly generic feature you just described isn’t worth a 30% markup on all games. But I can see you’re here to provide evidence for the computer illiteracy of gamers, who are apparently so impressed with file sharing that they will defend fucking Steam.
I don’t see why you consider that bad. Yes, it lets me download them many times. And automatically updates. And provides multiplayer. And friends and chat. And a bunch of other features too. This is what they call a “value add”.
Why do I consider it bad that some middlemen have parked themselves between gamers and developers to leech out all the profits while providing nothing in return?
Even ten times your imaginary ”value add” wouldn’t justify a 30% markup.
Is that still accurate? Their employees handbook was legendary a decade ago, but since then there have been rumours that this isn’t the case any longer, and that there were significant problems behind the scenes.
I mean with that money printing machine and good reputation among users it’s no doubt be cozy for devs to start stuff without having someone breath down their neck for costing too much money or too high of a risk.
I mean they have a finance team for sure, so I guess this is their job…
However Steam does a really good job to stay in its borders of where they can provide a good service and do not milk the cow until half live 09 where they just repeat the story of half live 1-3 in a poor way
Back in 2021, indie developer Wolfire filed an antitrust lawsuit against Valve that accused the gaming giant of anti-competitive business practices—including a long-standing habit of taking unfair cuts from game developers on its store. Valve’s 30% fees have come under criticism before—and they are notably high when compared to some other online platforms.
Ouch. I didn’t realize they took such a big cut. On the other hand, authors trying to publish to Amazon’s kindle get hit with commissions from 30%-65% before any other fees, so Steam seems downright reasonable for that particular comparison.
From where I’m sitting, though, I’ve plenty of complicated feelings. Steam might be the best option out there, but monopolies aren’t great for anybody—at the same time, business is business.
Steam’s absurd efficiency could be a product of merciless penny-pinching from indie devs, but it’s just as likely we’re watching a well-oiled machine continue to belch out cash in an expected fashion.
Is it really a monopoly with everyone from EA to GoG delivering games? I guess it is dominant enough to count. I have a hard time complaining when employees are getting good pay and I’ve continued to get good service from them. It might get scarey if/when Gabe steps down, but this all feels pretty fair for now.
I’ve been thinking about the 30% cut and I think to some extent Valve earn it. They’re not just hosting the download for your game and managing updates and payments. They’re also running your forum, running your multiplayer (if you take advantage of the Steam Datagram Relay), making mods easy to manage and share, making controller support easy to implement and making it easy to port to Linux and MacOS.
Apple and Google also take a 30% cut (+$100 USD/year and semi-recent Mac for Apple). In comparison I think Valve to a lot more to earn your 30% (even if I still think its a bit high considering how much money they make)
How should governments deal with a situation in which a monopoly exists and it’s bad for the economy, but it only exists because no competitors come close?
Perhaps the government should have the power to demand Steam be made open source in situations like this. Thereby giving competitors a chance to compete on an even paying field by copying the winning technology.
The unusual though possibly wrong thing that differentiates steam is they don’t appear to engage in all that much anti competitive behavior. Possibly some, but not really that much. Ultimately if it’s better for the consumer but worse for ‘the economy’ who’s really losing out? By what metric?
For now, at least. But the secret to valves success here doesn’t appear to be very closed source. A fairly flat internal structure, moderately functional store and community reputation building, mostly keeping promises and having which reputation that when they don’t they can weather the storm. Nothing there seems unachievable unless your design philosophy is so cut throat and monetized that you just build a bad product.
Just because monopolies can have a fanbase, doesn’t mean they don’t negatively impact society.
The cult behind Steam doesn’t understand the problem that will arrive once Gabe retires. The amount of power they gave this single entity will come to.bite them in the ass.
GOG perhaps, but that doesn’t strive to deliver the conveniency, and ignores Linux players.
Epic? Lol.
Any other private company launcher? Well, just no.
Everyone will be gone one day, Gabe, Linus Torvalds… but that doesn’t mean other people don’t share their values and the original idea will be gone too.
But only the greedy capitalists have enough money to set up all that e-commerce infrastructure. Making Steam open source would lower the barrier to entering the market. Then small businesses could join the playing field, and those that keep their promises will succeed.
This would probably also require a federated standard for deploying game releases to multiple storefronts. Imagine if releasing your game on Steam is exactly the same amount of effort as releasing it on a dozen different competing storefronts.
If your proposal is some sort of grant program to make that infrastructure easier to come by then that could be neat. Nothing about steams actual technology is unique though.
A federated indie store could also be neat, though like other federated systems with money involved especially you’ll need to be extra careful about how it’s all set up to make sure the result is any good.
Steam doesn’t need to be unique in order for programming a Steam clone to still take a lot of humanhours. A government mandated opening of the source would eliminate most of those humanhours spent programming. A company could have only a handful of developers and sysadmins, and mainly employ customer service representatives, and that would be a business with the potential to compete with Steam.
The point is, steam competitors don’t do badly because they lack the man hours of steams Dev team. They do badly because of terrible company vision and incentives. Open sourcing a tech doesn’t solve a problem that doesn’t exist. I don’t even think open sourcing steam really does… Anything, for developers. Philosophically cool, practically useless, everything that steam is exists in piecewise form already. Turning steam into a federated service is not meaningfully faster because you make steam open source.
Gog is the closest and does fine. The technology is about on par with steam, the philosophy of the service better, and they are doing fine. Not overwhelming steam no, but fine.
The reason all the steam competitors have bad vision is that there’s not enough of them. If the barrier to entry were lower, there’d be more competitors and some might have good vision.
Steam isn’t a monopoly; they have competition. As far as I’m aware, they also don’t have a mechanism to lock people out of the market, so there’s probably no danger of them becoming a monopoly. I have no idea why people are going around saying they’re a monopoly when they demonstrably aren’t.
Revenue per head is no doubt a sexy metric, especially for private companies. If it was a public company then investors would call for the company to try and grow its overall profits by spending more on growth related initiatives… Perhaps by releasing half-life 3 for example, lol.
The great thing about keeping your company private is that you can get it just where you like and keep it there no matter what outside parties want. I could totally see Gaben is perfectly satisfied making bank at this level while also having a chill lifestyle.
Why is money per employer a better metric than customer satisfaction?
Should an owner be more proud of their yatch size or of being a role model for customers not other millionaires? What’s their passion really, money or what they do for a living?
We clearly know where valve wants to be. I’m just surprised it’s a company that stands out.
Probably because “headcount” is a common HR term for the number of employees, and when people are talking “per capita” it might be more about the number of users or customers. The meaning is the same though.
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I mean that’s great but still multiple orders of magnitude less than Apple in profits…
Fair point, however everyone (just about) has either an android or apple phone. Not everyone plays computer games.
Yes, and since Valve drives up the cost of video games while contributing nothing, they’re certainly doing their part to stymie the industry.
Nothing? That’s silly.
Unless you count… file hosting? Name anything else that could POSSIBLY justify a 30% markup on all games. Go ahead.
So as a developer I could release my software on Steam directly (no publisher and associated costs) and have access to how many potential customers? Of course I could also release on my own website and host everything myself, or I could use the Epic Store, perhaps GOG.
How do you think Steam store restricts the industry? I can buy steam keys on alternative sites, is that possible in Epic or GOG?
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
As a customer the steam store experience, mod workshop, Steam deck and OS, Steam VR app (I use with my Quest 2) all work really well for me. Reviews seem pretty uncensored (at least I’ve not read about Valve doing anything underhand)
I’m very happy to say that the Steam android app could be better!
As a final point, I would like to see a viable alternative to Steam as competition is generally good for consumers!
Steam did deal a big blow to self publishing and piracy as it provided a platform to sell games, manage patches, multiplayer, DLC, gaming community moderation, controller support etc. It really reduced a lot of burden on developers.
From your very first sentence you make my point. Steam is nothing but access to the customers who use it. That’s it. A digital distributor with a clunky website. It’s useful because it’s popular, NOT because it actually does anything special. If everyone stopped using Steam tomorrow, literally nothing of value would be lost. The same can’t be said for any innovative company on this planet.
Like Apple’s vr headset? Or did you forget the first 2 Valve VR (HTC hardware) sets and associated software?
What about the Steam Deck, of course hand held consoles are nothing new, but what makes it special is the combination of the rather excellent trackpads and controller mapping that debuted in the Steam controller and with an OS (that uses wine) to bypass Windows and all it’s bloat - It must be quite popular as we’re now seeing a number of imitators!
Imho Steam is, by far, the gold standard for digital distributors.
None of that is worth a 30% premium on games, which stymies creative development and industry growth.
Face it, Steam is a distribution center whose popularity entitles it to extract enormous rents that pose a significant burden on the industry. Greater decentralization will lead to growth. Always has.
I had a Steam controller for a long time. Worst piece of gaming hardware I’ve ever owned — but that’s not the point. Even if it were the best controller it wouldn’t justify a 30% tax on games.
Epic, GoG, Microsoft store, if Steam is so awful, then why don’t people use the competition?
There’s really no penalty to me as a consumer if I choose to buy on any platform, they all work on Windows, and to a lesser extent Steam OS. I’m not locked on hardware, there no subscription, the biggest challenge is keeping all 4 app stores updated to the latest version which costs me a little time and storage space…
Actually, dlc is a good example of being trapped in one ecosystem, but beyond that I can buy games from any publisher on any store without penalty.
Compare that to Apple and their restrictive app store, or other innovators that stop supporting hardware upgrades or disable servers removing key features (Unisoft…) Steam even goes further and provides users access to games that have been withdrawn from sale, compare that with Nintendo.
Please invest some into the Linux client. The dropdown click-through problem exists for years already, the source of the problem is known and would be easy to fix on your side.
Or develop an API coupled with your DRM, so the community could develop some good interfaces already.
An open steam DRM API would be the end of Windows as an OS for gaming
Lol. No.
Have you tried Windows?
I would rather give up on steam than switch to windows thank you very much
“So we’re getting pay rises, right?” Annakin.gif “Right?”
You should dive down the rabbit hole. Valve does not have a workplace like anything you’ve seen before, and the pay is just as fucked.
EDIT: Down the rabbit hole we go
Like… In a good way?
I’ve added a video link to my original comment. should clarify a bit.
Some people aren’t in situations where they can watch videos unfortunately (I am scrolling at work)
My favourite factoid about that is that the minister of finance in Greece who was in charge during the Greek Debt Crisis was Yanis Varoufakis, the former economist-in-residence at Valve.
Woah woah woah, really?
I stumbled across a bunch of economic videos featuring him in the past. Yanis and Steam in the same sentence was never something I was expecting to see lol
Yeah, I’m really curious about what he did there and how it influenced both him and Steam.
Afaik he still praises their anarchist corporate management structure. Haven’t really looked into it, but if true kind of an L from a guy i really like otherwise
Why don’t you like that? It seems to work for Valve.
Can you expand more on why it’s an L? I have a lot of time for Varoufakis, I don’t agree with him on everything but I find him a very reasonable person.
Because he doesn’t call out their traditional centralized ownership structure, which is more important and will always “win” when it conflicts with the anarchist parts. The owners still have final say over the workers.
How much did they compensate that bald man who they installed a valve in the back of his head for the loading screen photo?
That guy had it easy compared to the guy that had his eyeball replaced with a valve, and after everything he sacrificed they just stopped using his picture.
Actually earned profit too
What does that mean? They take a cut of every game sold, they didn’t make that product. They make the platform the games other people made are sold on.
It’s a good platform nonetheless, but IDK how much of it is actually “earned” as opposed to just a big cut taken from someone.
It’s well known that server infrastructure and software development is free
I never said those things were free. I did say the platform is good, but their income is from the games sold on the platform that other people made.
I don’t know what metric would properly capture money/time spent on infrastructure and servers, but I don’t think it’s “money per head” if that money is from games sold and doesn’t strictly relate to how good their platform performs.
If games company’s could make more money by not releasing on Steam, they would. The fact that they accept the 30% cut means that Steam is in fact leading to more sales for those developers and thus earns its cut. No one HAS to sell their product on Steam, PC’s are a completely open marketplace
The only one that seems surprising is Apple. All the others don’t really make products that are sold. They make revenue via advertising on things they give away free. Valve not only used to make games they still sell, but made a store platform not a social media network.
It’s because Valve is a private corporation, Gabe Newell has managed it well, they don’t hire idiots, and they pay their employees well.
I think it is more because of heavy encouraging of being proactive.
It’s because they have a near monopoly and take a huge cut of developer’s revenue
Is 30% on average “huge” considering the platform and total number of averages monthly users? I know that number does move around a bit as well.
I guess considering the ease of use for users and the fact that other platforms exist, they might be considered a monopoly only because nothing else of quality has shown up. It’s not like they’re buying out competitors and paying politicians to create laws and expectations to give them a competitive advantage. They’re literally just better than the other shit. Except arguably GoG which is solid in its own right, though not in the same ways as Steam.
Being a monopoly or near monopoly doesn’t mean that they’re automatically underhanded
They don’t. No other platform will provide all of the benefits Steam provides for only 30% OR LESS of every sale.
30% is a huge cut. Epic takes 12%
When valve was establishing steam, 30% was justified. They had to invest in the product. They took a risk. They don’t have to now and they are profiteering.
Epic has admitted they’re taking a loss at 12%. Also, Epic’s store is shit, complete barebones, barely works as a way to buy games.
And valve have admitted they’re making more profit than anyone else in the space. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be allowed a profit, I’m saying there’s an argument that they (and Apple via the Apple store) are taking too much from the work of others
And that argument is idiotic, as proven by the fact that even bribing people to their shitty Epig Store, Epic can’t compete with the value Steam provides.
Differently from Apple, Steam hasn’t put any barriers in place to stop competitors nor have they forced exclusivity on publishers for their platform.
Irrelevant. Being good and popular doesn’t make them not a monopoly
Last time I checked, Epic Games has plenty of money to compete. Monopoly implies competition is actively being stopped. Valve hasn’t done much to stop competition other than making a good product that people use.
No it doesn’t. Anticompetittive behaviour is a seperate issue. One often imployed by monopolists, but seperate nonetheless.
Epic Games also takes 5% of all games that use the Unreal engine, unless you use the Epic store.
A whacking great cut of somebody else’s money will do that.
If people dont like the cut they can use another shop front or make their own. PC gaming isnt locked down to any specific store front
That’s not the reality for game devs
Steam let’s devs sell games anywhere and provide steam keys. There are many alternate stores you can buy games and get a steam key. I’m guessing that is one reason they have a big cut.
But also, I remember indie devs having to give up 60℅ of revenue to go on the larger indie game publishing sites.
Once again, they profit by accepting Steams cut, proving that Steam earns and deserves it. There Itch.io, GoG, Epic, or they can go Minecrafts route and sell their game on their own site. Steam does nothing to hamper competition. Steams cut is entirely optional, a dev doesnt HAVE to put their game up on Steams marketplace. Steam is earning that cut by being a marketplace that brings devs more sales
No, they don’t have to use the largest and most popular storefront at all. Good economic e sense right there. People didn’t have to use Internet Explorer, but that was deemed a monopoly. The existence of alternatives doesn’t make them automatically economically viable
Yes, and their cut for letting you use the largest storefront out there that THEY BUILT AND GOT THERE, is 30%. If you are earning more money paying that 30% and being on their storefront than you would by rejecting that cut and listing somewhere else, than that is full proof that Steam is earning that cut.
Also, internet explorer came bundled with Windows and THATS why it was deemed a monopoly. You have to specifically choose to download Steam, it gets no starter advantage over the competition.
Steam is the most popular storefront because its the BEST storefront, there is no ulterior motivation putting it at the top, its just that all of its competition barring Itch and GoG are garbage. Steam is still better than the non garbage competition though and why it can get away with its incredibly minor option for built in DRM and its 30% cut. They use their cut to make an amazing storefront, and the developers who choose to pay that cut benefit from the customers that having the worlds best PC marketplace brings.
That stream is good doesn’t make it not a monopoly
What makes it not a monopoly is that it isnt. It has competitors, it does nothing to block competition. It is not responsible for its competition not being as good as it is.
Brainless take. “I want all of the benefits of a huge storefront with free advertisement and countless features that attract customers, but I don’t wanna pay for it!”
Brainless take. Valve is making money hand over fist. Most game devs are not making money. Valve aren’t creating any of the games, valve aren’t taking any of the risk
Do you think the payment processing, storage, content distribution, content delivery, social & communal aspects are free? Think for a second before writing your nonargument.
Strawman.
It is not.
You’re arguing against obtuseness. I think it’s a close cousin of willful ignorance.
Point me to one service that provides as many benefits as Steam without taking a larger total cut than 30%. I’ll wait.
And that for being a non-public company.
Non public should be more efficient from the labor cost savings of not having to file all the sec documents quarterly and legal costs of following public company regulations.
Not to mention that an obsession with increasing share price is massively distracting and self-defeating.
Public companies focus on short term profit to keep share holders happy. Private companies can actually focus on long term profit, especially if it’s at the expense of some short term profit.
Or they can choose not to focus on profit at all. Probably most people with an ownership stake in Valve are fabulously rich now. Maybe they just want to focus on interesting R&D now.
Theoretically there’s a benefit to a publicly traded company that since a lot of your financials are visible to everyone and people get to “vote” by buying and selling shares, there’s a sense in which you can get feedback on how well you’re running the company that you don’t get when it’s private. But, as Reddit’s “wall street bets” and “superstonk” subreddits show, a lot of investors are morons.
This isn’t totally true. Private companies can still have shareholders that demand info. Their aren’t the same level of regulations, but it’s not nothing.
I’ve despised steam ever since they forced it on me to play HL2.
I hate the store page that pops up whenever I want to play a game.
I hate the friends list.
I miss when I would just install a game and it was just an icon on my desktop. Now they think they should own my gaming experience and they’re so powerful I can’t say no.
That last para is missing the fact that you’d have to go to a store and buy a CD and come back home and play vs downloading in a few minutes in today’s time plus get insane discounts. Not to mention easily conquer compatibility issues. Also use controllers very easily including dualshocks. You can still have desktop icons, you can ignore the friends list, and disable notifications/pop-ups.
You can download games using steamcmd (command line) and pick only games that are DRM free on Steam. Valve doesn’t force DRM (even it’s own one) so, if you see a game that require DRM (Steam or whatever) it’s solely because the publisher put the DRM into it.
Once you’ve downloaded your drm-free game through steamcmd, you can basically zip the folder and store your game wherever you want… even on the cloud (your own personal space, if you share it publicly it’s piracy).
Also, you’re not even forced to use Steam: itch.io and GoG are preferable ways to buy games and improve your drm-free wallet-vote situation.
I just want to comment that your comment covered all my bases so well I didn’t need to respond to OP myself
Ok boomer
that’s not what that means
We researched ourselves and found out that we are the best
I’d trust a group of employees doing this out of curiosity over, say, HR doing it.
Absolutely! I would do it too if I had access to the numbers.
I imagine each employee crunched their own numbers using their own salaries and compared notes.
If I recall correctly from a People Make Games video (great YT channel btw) all Valve employees have access to how much money Steam makes, so they can apparently just login and look at them anytime they feel like it. The profits of Valve might be shown in a similar way to employees.
thats the worst nightmare of most bosses
Profit/employees isn’t a measure of efficiency, completed projects/employees is and I’m willing to bet that a company without any real organization like Valve doesn’t complete as many projects/employees as companies like Apple or Microsoft.
Valve is basically a file hosting service. I will never understand the computer illiterate gamers who worship that website. Omg it lets me download my games many times! Amazing. Go sell something on the Steam Marketplace. Fucking idiot.
It’s not just files. It’s forums, chats, performance metrics, and game integration for gaming with your friends with a centralized account instead of 30 different friend group listing across 50 games.
Nobody but children uses those “features.” Honestly wtf are you even talking about? Steam messenger, that broken piece of shit?
Yeah most file hosts put hundreds of millions into making sure all your files can be used on platforms they weren’t designed for /s
I love when people are proud of having no fucking clue what they’re talking about
The incredibly generic feature you just described isn’t worth a 30% markup on all games. But I can see you’re here to provide evidence for the computer illiteracy of gamers, who are apparently so impressed with file sharing that they will defend fucking Steam.
I don’t see why you consider that bad. Yes, it lets me download them many times. And automatically updates. And provides multiplayer. And friends and chat. And a bunch of other features too. This is what they call a “value add”.
Why do I consider it bad that some middlemen have parked themselves between gamers and developers to leech out all the profits while providing nothing in return?
Even ten times your imaginary ”value add” wouldn’t justify a 30% markup.
I mean I both agree but also I think “it’s just x” comments in tech always ignore the complexity of scale, availability, and integrity.
I wonder how many of them realize that in a couple of clicks someone can decide they don’t have access to their games anymore…
When your employees are so efficient they start using their spare time to audit each other’s efficiency on an industry-wide metric.
I have heard that its not too hard to start your own project when working at valve.
Maybe it will turn into their next game, or a new steam feature or it will get canned.
Is that still accurate? Their employees handbook was legendary a decade ago, but since then there have been rumours that this isn’t the case any longer, and that there were significant problems behind the scenes.
I think you can still work on whatever you want as long as GabeN wants it too.
I think that goes for most company structures
I mean with that money printing machine and good reputation among users it’s no doubt be cozy for devs to start stuff without having someone breath down their neck for costing too much money or too high of a risk.
I mean they have a finance team for sure, so I guess this is their job… However Steam does a really good job to stay in its borders of where they can provide a good service and do not milk the cow until half live 09 where they just repeat the story of half live 1-3 in a poor way
Ouch. I didn’t realize they took such a big cut. On the other hand, authors trying to publish to Amazon’s kindle get hit with commissions from 30%-65% before any other fees, so Steam seems downright reasonable for that particular comparison.
Is it really a monopoly with everyone from EA to GoG delivering games? I guess it is dominant enough to count. I have a hard time complaining when employees are getting good pay and I’ve continued to get good service from them. It might get scarey if/when Gabe steps down, but this all feels pretty fair for now.
I’ve been thinking about the 30% cut and I think to some extent Valve earn it. They’re not just hosting the download for your game and managing updates and payments. They’re also running your forum, running your multiplayer (if you take advantage of the Steam Datagram Relay), making mods easy to manage and share, making controller support easy to implement and making it easy to port to Linux and MacOS.
Apple and Google also take a 30% cut (+$100 USD/year and semi-recent Mac for Apple). In comparison I think Valve to a lot more to earn your 30% (even if I still think its a bit high considering how much money they make)
Steam is a monopoly because it’s the best.
How should governments deal with a situation in which a monopoly exists and it’s bad for the economy, but it only exists because no competitors come close?
Perhaps the government should have the power to demand Steam be made open source in situations like this. Thereby giving competitors a chance to compete on an even paying field by copying the winning technology.
The unusual though possibly wrong thing that differentiates steam is they don’t appear to engage in all that much anti competitive behavior. Possibly some, but not really that much. Ultimately if it’s better for the consumer but worse for ‘the economy’ who’s really losing out? By what metric?
For now, at least. But the secret to valves success here doesn’t appear to be very closed source. A fairly flat internal structure, moderately functional store and community reputation building, mostly keeping promises and having which reputation that when they don’t they can weather the storm. Nothing there seems unachievable unless your design philosophy is so cut throat and monetized that you just build a bad product.
Monopoly’s themselves are not necessarily bad. Its when they use the monopoly to spread into other areas where it becomes the problem.
Just because monopolies can have a fanbase, doesn’t mean they don’t negatively impact society.
The cult behind Steam doesn’t understand the problem that will arrive once Gabe retires. The amount of power they gave this single entity will come to.bite them in the ass.
It’s not like there are any better options.
GOG perhaps, but that doesn’t strive to deliver the conveniency, and ignores Linux players.
Epic? Lol.
Any other private company launcher? Well, just no.
Everyone will be gone one day, Gabe, Linus Torvalds… but that doesn’t mean other people don’t share their values and the original idea will be gone too.
But only the greedy capitalists have enough money to set up all that e-commerce infrastructure. Making Steam open source would lower the barrier to entering the market. Then small businesses could join the playing field, and those that keep their promises will succeed.
This would probably also require a federated standard for deploying game releases to multiple storefronts. Imagine if releasing your game on Steam is exactly the same amount of effort as releasing it on a dozen different competing storefronts.
If your proposal is some sort of grant program to make that infrastructure easier to come by then that could be neat. Nothing about steams actual technology is unique though.
A federated indie store could also be neat, though like other federated systems with money involved especially you’ll need to be extra careful about how it’s all set up to make sure the result is any good.
Steam doesn’t need to be unique in order for programming a Steam clone to still take a lot of humanhours. A government mandated opening of the source would eliminate most of those humanhours spent programming. A company could have only a handful of developers and sysadmins, and mainly employ customer service representatives, and that would be a business with the potential to compete with Steam.
The point is, steam competitors don’t do badly because they lack the man hours of steams Dev team. They do badly because of terrible company vision and incentives. Open sourcing a tech doesn’t solve a problem that doesn’t exist. I don’t even think open sourcing steam really does… Anything, for developers. Philosophically cool, practically useless, everything that steam is exists in piecewise form already. Turning steam into a federated service is not meaningfully faster because you make steam open source.
Gog is the closest and does fine. The technology is about on par with steam, the philosophy of the service better, and they are doing fine. Not overwhelming steam no, but fine.
The reason all the steam competitors have bad vision is that there’s not enough of them. If the barrier to entry were lower, there’d be more competitors and some might have good vision.
Steam isn’t a monopoly; they have competition. As far as I’m aware, they also don’t have a mechanism to lock people out of the market, so there’s probably no danger of them becoming a monopoly. I have no idea why people are going around saying they’re a monopoly when they demonstrably aren’t.
Revenue per head is no doubt a sexy metric, especially for private companies. If it was a public company then investors would call for the company to try and grow its overall profits by spending more on growth related initiatives… Perhaps by releasing half-life 3 for example, lol.
The great thing about keeping your company private is that you can get it just where you like and keep it there no matter what outside parties want. I could totally see Gaben is perfectly satisfied making bank at this level while also having a chill lifestyle.
The article is talking about net income per head, not revenue.
Why is money per employer a better metric than customer satisfaction?
Should an owner be more proud of their yatch size or of being a role model for customers not other millionaires? What’s their passion really, money or what they do for a living?
We clearly know where valve wants to be. I’m just surprised it’s a company that stands out.
Fuck shareholders.
They said it’s a sexy metric, as in big numbers are cool. They never said it’s a particularly useful or “better” metric.
It’s not a better metric. It’s a metric among others.
If the company were public the shareholders would say “great, now give the employees less and give us the difference”
Tried to? Revenue per head and profit per head are very easy metrics. Not sure I would count that as efficient though.
Totally meta comment, but why is everyone here saying “per head” instead of “per capita”?
Probably because “headcount” is a common HR term for the number of employees, and when people are talking “per capita” it might be more about the number of users or customers. The meaning is the same though.
Business speak vs country speak.