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Valve rocks
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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Then again, Valve gets 30% to 20% of the benefits from all sales from their platform. It's easier to be generous when everyone has to pay you to make cash.
This.
Valve doesn't release games, it releases ads for Steam.
Which is fine. It's great. Makes for great, cheap products and long-term strategies that aren't trying to shake all the money off of you.
But that's the end goal, still.
As a friendly reminder, Valve also universalized DRM, invented multiple new types of microtransactions and actually kinda invented NFTs for a little bit.
Invented the loot box y'all love so much. Tried to invent paid mods. Valve is still a Corpo and corpos gonna corpos
Honestly I'll defend TF2 loot boxes til I die. There are valid complaints as far as casual gamers go but as someone who played the game for thousands of hours the cosmetic system added a lot of longevity to the game. It was a fun ecosystem to engage with and compared to modern games where you spend $15-20 on a single cosmetic item it was an absolute bargain. If you got tired of an item you could trade it for something else too.
Idk maybe I just got indoctrinated but I have so many positive memories of that game and interacting with the cosmetic system. These days every game you play is shoving their store front in your face. Every cosmetic is $20 and if you don't buy it now it's lost forever. Don't want to spend money? Ok here's an "event" where you need to play the game 2 hours a day for a week to unlock some meh items and if you don't then fuck you those items are gone forever.
Sorry I'm ranting.
Agreed. It sounds weird saying, but I feel that Valve did these things right or at least fixed them quickly thereafter. I've never felt any sense of pay-to-win or being left out playing TF2. Quite the opposite. I'd get the new items quick enough, and if there was anything in there articular I'd want then there was a robust market willing to make it happen for cheaper than I thought. And "cheaper" referring to in-game items.
I actually agree that loot boxes aren't intrinsically bad.
I mean, I was buying Magic the Gathering cards before anybody got mad at making blind purchases. The entire field is called Gacha because it's modelled on analogue equivalents people don't mind at all.
But that's not what the community will tell you. Loot boxes are THE problem, if you ask this in a different context. Fundamentally predatory.
Unless you bring it up in this, and only this context. When Valve does it it's fine. Never mind that they had and actual gambling problem around their retradeable cosmetic loot box drops. Or that their implementation is indistinguishable from others. Or that they have a pattern of innovating in the monetization space not just with loot boxes but with battlepasses, cosmetics and other stuff people claim to not like when other people do it.
The shocker isn't the actual business practices, it's the realization that you can get so good at PR that you can't just get away with it, but have the exact same people that are out there asking for the government to intervene to stop those actively defend you against the mere suggestion that your business model is your actual business model.
Look, I was out there during the big loot box controversies that there were babies going out with thtat bathwater. I like me some Hearthstone and CCGs and other games that do those things. I like a bunch of free to play things. Got a TON of crap every time I even dared to float that online. UNLESS it comes up in a conversation about Valve. Then I get crap flung in the opposite direction.
I'm not saying you shouldn't like them, I'm saying that brief "maybe I'm indoctrinated" moment of realization should make you take a minute and reassess your relationships with brands and corporations. We are all subject to PR influence.
Playing a touch of devils advocate here but, how are patreon only mods any different than what valve was trying to do? It seems if mod makers wanna get paid for their work they should be able to monetize it in via any avenue that fits their fans abilities.
Uh, paid mods were around in the 90s. Probably earlier but that's what I can testify to.
Maybe it's a good idea to pay modders for their work?
DOTA 2, Counter-Strike 2, TF 2 are all maintained and get updates or total overhauls.
What’s their opinion on NFTs now?
That was slightly facetious. I just spent the entirety of the NFT bubble reminding people that tradeable tokens attached to JPGs is something that Valve invented to do with their dumb trading cards when they introduced those and we all saw in real time that all of them trend to zero value immediately.
I kept asking cryptobros to explain why their new tokenized JPGs were gonna behave any differently and it turns out there really wasn't a particularly good answer to that one.
For the record, those get updated and get total overhauls because they are driven by cosmetics MTX and/or battlepasses, both of which Valve straight-up invented in their modern form.
So I guess yeah, they either make cutting edge innovations in monetization design for games-as-service things or they put out ads for Steam. I think the larger point holds.
I don’t understand your point. It’s bad that they give out free games and constantly update them because they make money on cosmetics? That’s somehow worse or as bad as companies that make the same game every year, charge an arm and a leg for it and then have micro transactions on top of it? Or they’re bad because they innovate and then other companies take their ideas and make them shittier? What’s your point, exactly?
No, they don't make them shittier. My point is that they're in it for the money, the money just flows in different ways. Their battlepasses weren't any better or worse than anybody else's, and neither are their cosmetics.
They just get a pass because their brand is rock solid and they run very quiet and very cheap with a very long term view enabled by being a private company. That's not good or bad, it's a corporation out to make corporation things and doing them very well.
Their cosmetics are miles better because you can resell them on a market that they maintain. You really don’t know what you’re talking about.
No dog, you just really like the thing they’re talking about and it’s coloring your reaction. The points they’re making are actually very reasonable, but your responses read like they’re just criticizing Valve as a matter of opinion rather than practice.
To be clear, it's not even criticism. I don't mind Valve making money or being great at PR and branding or using MTX. I am way more chill with those things than the average gamer.
If there's anything here that rubs me the wrong way is objectively identical practices being assessed in entirely opposite ways by the community based on who is doing them. And it doesn't even bother me because I think the practices are bad or because I don't recognize that Valve absolutely worked on positioning that exact way.
Mostly it just gives me a bit of anxiety to realize that you can get away with that and somehow nobody else seems able to do it.
Honestly, if I had to guess why I'd say it's down to Valve being a private company. They genuinely can just never tell anybody what they're doing or what their plans and make long term investments. But man, the outcome is kinda scary.
That is a hilarious statement for reasons I won't get into here.
But also, it's a concerning statement because... yeah, no, that makes them arguably more predatory. I mean, they didn't have to attempt to dismantle an entire grey market of gambling built around their weird NFT-ish resell mechanics because it's such a fair environment.
So no, I don't love NFTs and I certainly don't think Valve inventing the entire concept around trading cards and in-game cosmetics way back when was a step in the right direction. That whole ecosystem was always a mess and it only got better because they started siloing the really bad chunks and the rest of it just quietly died down.
Image tokening was around before valve trading cards and the cards don't use blockchain verification (they never did). We've been embedding symbols as vectors for DECADES. It started as payment card technology.
That 20-30% tax also gives developers access to Valve's massive infrastructure (content delivery ain't easy or cheap) and Steam's audience, and that's something that can't be replicated with exclusivity deals.
Oh, and they KNOW that, too. Valve's entire business model is making other people work for them. Their third party relations talks are less keynotes and more thinly veiled, very pleasant shakedowns.
Not corpos, though. Corpos have deals with all platforms, they're not concerned about positioning on Steam. Valve will go to them, and if they don't their marketing budget will carry them.
No, it's the indies who end up bending over backwards to fit Valve's marching orders. It was contentious for a while, during the awkward period when Steam was figuring out how to crowdsource store placement. Now that they've successfully done so they invest very little and get to tell indies what to spend their budgets on, which they do often and explicitly.
If I had to compare the relationship, it's closest to Youtube and content creators. Have you noticed how every Youtube video now has a little intro with highlights from later on? Like that.
You get nothing from those compared to Steam, though. The only third party that can compete, and that's declined a bit, is Nintendo. And Nintendo is a bit of an additive thing, anyway. It's where you go when you can afford it or got big enough on Steam to get some attention.
I'm not gonna say it's impossible to survive around the edges of Steam, but man, if you're an indie dev and Valve says jump you are up in the air before you even ask how high.
I have to say, it's crazy how many things get more palatable in these conversation when you point out that Valve does them. Microtransactions, cosmetics, NFTs, content creation guidelines... it's a lot easier to get people to admit the upsides when it's those guys.
Which is fair. The thing is I'm not even against most of those practices in principle, and I agree that Valve are good at making them smooth and friendly. The big exceptions are the absolute mess they made of crowdsourcing store curation and the ungodly mess of the CSGO skin grey market. And they have more than enough brand clout to get those swept under the rug. Coca Cola wishes they had the brand loyalty Valve gets.
But indie devs don't work for Valve.
I guess technically video creators don't work for Youtube, although that one is murkier. Steam is a storefront.
Think of Amazon, actually. That's probably a better comparison. Amazon workers work for Amazon. Their relationship with Amazon has to do with labour conditions and so on.
But if you're a seller, or a small store that tries to sell online your relationship with Amazon is not a labour relationship but it's still extremely asymmetrical. You have no power in that dynamic.
I mean, you're absolutely right, that's modern late-stage capitalism. The astounding thing is how well Valve manages to position itself outside that. Just look at all the pushback that pointing that out gets you in this and other threads. Poeple HATE the idea that Valve exists in that space. "Good guy Valve" is deeply ingrained and it demands that you think about them in a different way than Amazon and Youtube.
Exactly, they're offering useful services for monetary compensation. How dare they?
Not services, they are offerning their status. That's different.
You don't go to Valve and get services any more than you do from Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft. Valve isn't looking for content, though. They have all the content. The entire firehose.
To be clear, I'm not saying Valve is worse. But it's at best about the same, and arguably harder to work with on anything but getting out of your way to let you publish. The one thing I begrudge them is taking the social media model of making others work for you for free into game publishing, which I do think is a bit iffy. Maybe I'm just old fashioned there.
You are fundamentally misunderstanding what services they offer.
For starters, the infrastructure. Publishing a game, or any online content, is a massive undertaking. You need a robust solution for both storage and delivery. It needs to be scalable with the number of downloads, able to handle the bandwidth of parallel downloads, and resilient to hardware failure. You need a CDN to overcome geographic obstacles. You need a solution to orchestrate the distribution of software updates. In current year, most of these issues are solved by various platforms and the process is extremely streamlined. You upload a video to Youtube and soon enough a person in Timbuktu can watch it in full HD. Steam's infrastructure does the same thing for games. Storage, distribution, updates, and lots of smaller online services that make up a robust gaming platform.
Steam is a fairly competent storefront. I'm not a game developer, I can't speak for the full experience, but at the very least, Steam implements discoverability, payment processing, and license management. All things that a fully independent developer would have to implement or pay to have someone else do it.
Finally, you can't just equate Steam's large audience with their status. Community features, the almighty algorithm, discoverability (again) and recommendations are all features that would not exist without Steam.
If you can't see how all of those are valuable services to game developers, you're beyond reason.
30% is the industry standard.
Doesn't change that it's a lot lol they're also basically "the industry"
I think you're missing the principle. They could still charge for it, they simply won't. Think of it this way, if it was EA in that situation would they give it away for free? Somehow I doubt it because EA does things for profit. This is a potential avenue for profit and which means not asking money for it would go against the goal of EA.
Is it though? The only reason other platforms take 15% is to try to break through valve's market. Once they make it (like Epic) you better trust they're going to take as much as they can.
Plus, it's apparently not easy to be generous, Apple and Google make far more money, where are they being generous? Gaben is a gem
(Google and apple also take 30% of transactions on their store). You get much more for you 30% to valve than 30 or 15% anywhere else.
Well it's easier even to want more money, cooperations giving something away for free that could have earned them money is not that common.
It is when it gets people on your platform, and more likely to spend money on other things on the platform. It's called a loss leader.
Yeah, this is cool and all, but it's like Epic posting a game for free, which they do every week or so. People still complain about Epic being greedy or whatever though. I like the products Valve makes, but this isn't particularly amazing, just fairly nice to have.
Epic paid people for exclusivity in an attempt to force the customer to use its shitty platform. The free games are just bribes to try to get us to use it. And it's still not working very well for them.
Nobody would have complained (well ok, some would have, but few) if they just tried to make a better store than steam and get people to use it that way.
They could still do the free games as a bribe, to get people to check out the store, but the store would actually need to not be garbage. The exclusivity payments really rankled people though.
i love it when the epic games store flashbangs my eyeballs when i claim the free shit they give out. what an amazing marketing strategy
fr even though it's a very petty thing to complain about it just shows how little care they put into their platform
The power of monopoly
They take nothing if you sell your game via keys on other sites like itch.io
Yeah, but it's still more profitable for indie game studios to put their game on steam, since they have a larger market to sell to, also valve doesn't just take the money and goes, they spend it to make really good products that aren't profitable and wouldn't be possible else like the steam deck and proton