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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Doesn't change that it's a lot lol they're also basically "the industry"
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.
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.
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.
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
They take nothing if you sell your game via keys on other sites like itch.io
If only Valve could learn to count to three they'd be the perfect game studio.
Tony Hawk, anyone? Remaster old game, then make it require a server ping to guarantee it won't work in the future when they decide to stop supporting it.
Well, not every company is shitting money like Valve.
They can afford to do this because of their technical monopoly.
I mean sure, but this is a great showcase of Source Engine 2 which is a product they will be selling
Just few weeks ago everyone complaining about CS2
Since CS2 came out a ton of new people have started playing and a bunch of old school players came back. I am one of them and easily spent $60 on buying skins. Valve understands how to get people to love their games and spend money on something that is free.
Dead space remake was great, wasnt it?
It was. And so was RE4.
But on the other hand, they're already remastering The Last of Us 2 for some reason.
and at least they didn't remove the old one, even though that old one is $25 and gets put on sale less and less.
Best remake was AoE2 imo, the price is completely justified.
I know the documentary and the fact that game is free for now, but I am completelly out of the loop of what changed.
Did Valve upgraded graphics? Added new maps? I mean - for single player of original game? Someone please advise :)
they added a short bonus campaing for single player that was formaly on a demo disc that got lost to times. they added 4 new multiplayer maps they fixed graphic bugs and added widescreen support they dramatically improved controler support
so nothing game changing but nice nontheless
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