822
Dusk: Unpopular opinion: I'd rather pay Valve 30% and put up with their de facto monopoly than help Epic work towards their own (very obviously desired) monopoly (twitter.com)
submitted 1 year ago by nanoUFO@sh.itjust.works to c/games@sh.itjust.works
479 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

So you didn't actually read my comment, cool.

[-] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

Then developers can release games off steam, and some do.

'There's other services.'

But steam has many features people want and use that would add development costs if every dev had to make similar tools in house.

' It takes a whole fucking lot of hypothetical work, which you imagine developers would have to do, to amount to the slice Steam takes right off the top.'

Lie better.

[-] Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago

Do you think it's simple for a developer to create a friends list network, host/moderate community forums, host/moderate a mod website integrated into the game, achievements syncing, ability to share the game with friends, and integrate VR functionality for the above, on their own dime?

These are recurring ongoing costs for server and continued developmental changes, you are severely underestimating the time and money cost to create/host/maintain all those services?

[-] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

You are asserting without evidence that Valve needs to take all that money. As if they would go broke if they only took a quarter of all the revenue on most PC games.

Valve makes ten billion dollars on Steam, every single year. Their margins are not slim. And being an established de-facto monopoly, people go there because that's where the products are, and products are there because that's where the people go. They could slash costs to nothing, do the bare minimum work going forward, and still rake in the money on sheer momentum, for years and years and years.

The only feature that really matters here is adoption. And that's not a feature you can design. Even Valve didn't rope people in with a convincing sales pitch. They forced Steam onto everyone who wanted to play Half-Life 2. If you didn't want to put up with an always-online DRM service aimed to take over PC gaming - you didn't get to play the most anticipated game of the year. Whatever benefits you ascribe to the service, whatever functionality you argue developers would otherwise budget for, the core was always 'accept this or pound sand.'

this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
822 points (100.0% liked)

Games

16845 readers
735 users here now

Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)

Posts.

  1. News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
  2. Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
  3. No humor/memes etc..
  4. No affiliate links
  5. No advertising.
  6. No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
  7. No self promotion.
  8. No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
  9. No politics.

Comments.

  1. No personal attacks.
  2. Obey instance rules.
  3. No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc..)
  4. Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.

My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.

Other communities:

Beehaw.org gaming

Lemmy.ml gaming

lemmy.ca pcgaming

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
nanoUFO@sh.itjust.works