They’re making their machine more and more efficient, storage and bandwidth just gets cheaper with time… Yet, they still need their 30% cut to make billions in profit.
If they make billions in profit and Gaben is a billionaire while 80% of the population of his country lives paycheck to paycheck then there’s a fucking issue. The same logic applies to all businesses.
Why are they not allowed to create a good service and profit?
Why are the competition unable to take marketshare with lower fees?
It feels as if you have this number, >billion, makes a company evil. Why?
I agree with you that no single person needs a billion, but having earned it doesn’t make them bad. They innovate and move everything forwards. I’d much rather see my money with Valve than with EA, Activision Blizzard or any of the other faceless giants out there.
Multimillionaires, billionaires, they’re all part of the problem.
They’re allowed to make a good product and profit, there’s no reason why we allow them to profit so fucking much, if they do it’s because we’re paying more for their product than they actually need to charge us, the fact that they consider it ok makes them bad people.
Stop defending the people profiting from you, you’re the cattle defending the butcher.
Right, but there’s nothing immoral about it either.
I live in a place where the rich pay their fair dues to the benefit of the less fortunate. That’s where I think you need to focus on getting, not slandering every successful company out of envy.
Thanks for the chat. You were nothing but respectful. Have a great weekend.
Yes there’s something immoral about it, it’s a choice they they consciously make to make us spend more than necessary on the products they have to sell so they can accumulate more wealth and we can accumulate less wealth.
The funniest thing is, there are billionaires out there that agree tax laws are messed up and think they should be paying more taxes. For them it’s just a stressful hassle to work out which charities should take their money.
I agree with you that there’s a problem, but I think you’re targeting the wrong villian here. I shop local whenever I can but there are a few things that are just… big. Video games are worldwide and getting them off the internet is nice. There’s no such thing as a local video game distributor. There’s local indie game development which I do support, but Steam is a product I like which does its job very well.
The problem here is scale, not necessarily who individuals are buying from. Take major league sports as an example. Salaries for indivudual players are in the millions because of the amount of eyeballs attached to wallets that are interested in watching those players. Less eyeballs, less money, and the players would probably be doing the same thing but not be making as much money. Same thing with music. It’s very hard for an artist to make a good living with music, but once they hit global awareness suddenly money will come rollin in from all over the place. This isn’t a problem with the people doing the jobs (although it could be said that major league sports should charge less, they are trying to maximize their profit) but is the result of the amount of people who are willing to pay.
The probelm you’re having is that a company is allowed to suck up so much money and keep it. That’s a problem for governments to handle. Individuals can choose who to give their money to, but sometimes there aren’t any other good choices.
It’s their choice to take a cut big enough that they’re making that kind of profit, no one is forcing them, it’s all greed, stop acting like they wouldn’t be able to lower it.
So he should get the address of every single person in the country and divide his money equally among every single person and have no money for himself? Maybe only keep the same amount for himself that each other person is getting? That’s ~342 million people. Give them $3 each and no more billionaire. Worth $10B? $30 for each person.
Elon Musk is the wealthiest person in the USA and is worth $251B. $750/person would help for rent for one month. You could take money away from babies and maybe get a full month, maybe two.
Jeff Bezos is next at $161B. That’s about $480/person.
Of course, this means that their money is gone. No golden goose. Do you think that they should subsidize every person in the country?
Or simply say "I guess 30% is more than we need, let’s cut that to 10% and see how that goes.
If billionaires didn’t exist we wouldn’t need to subsidize anyone, the majority of the world’s issues are related to the fact that a minority keeps a majority of wealth to themselves and just try to acquire more and more.
Perhaps 10%. Taxes at one point went up to 90%. Some companies do need more, especially small businesses. As for not needing to subsidize anyone, when the pandemic struck and the checks went out a lot of people paid bills (I managed to get rid of my student loan debt, with help) but many went on spending sprees and some of those still couldn’t pay rent. Wealth distribution isn’t as great as it sounds and I’m on SSDI.
“when the pandemic struck”… The pandemic that was caused by poor people hunting wild animals to sell their meat to make a living? Gosh darn, I wonder what we could have done to make it so these people wouldn’t have to resort to that to make a living… Oh well 🤷
The pandemic that was caused by poor people hunting wild animals to sell their meat to make a living? Gosh darn, I wonder what we could have done to make it so these people wouldn’t have to resort to that to make a living.
What the poor people were doing happened in another country and therefore there was nothing that we could have done to change their way of life. We can’t dictate to China how they treat their citizens.
You’ve got the proverbial “patience of a saint.” Shame about all’ the bootlickers around here, though. I’d thought/hoped better of Lemmy but still people’s brains turn off when they’ve chosen a team :(
Incredible how you look at the comment history of all these people and all of them have comments about not having enough money or being angry at rich people, but all critical thinking goes out the window when it’s for a hobby they like, suddenly whatever they’re told to spend is perfectly OK!
The Microsoft Store and how to redeem games is so mind-numbly stupid. GamePass wowed me with their library and the subscription service. But how they do everything, from DRMing their games in a absolute mindfuckery app folder, to locking it into your Microsoft account and ecosystem, was so frustrating. Modding? Eat a Microdick. Hell, save files don’t even transfer between Steam and Microsoft GamePass games because FUCK YOU PLAYERS.
I’m glad Steam was extremely proactive at moving off of Windows.
Well large corporations are at least 50% dead weight by volume, weighted overwhelmingly in management and at the executive level. So naturally it’s the ones doing all the ACTUAL work who get terminated whenever the line isn’t going up hard enough. Capitalism folks, it’s doomed us all and there’s no way we can fix it and those who could never will.
These “B-B-BUT STEAMS MONOPOLY CROWD” really do think we have stockholm/boot licker syndrome as if a good 60%+ of steam users didnt know how to Pirate games if we truly didnt like the service
This is the second time they’ve pointed out the size of valve. First total size, now steam specific. Is it some kinna dogwhistle to other companies that the size is a weakness to exploit? Cuz what layman cares about how many people work at a given company?
“Companies have too many employees!” cries the guy who will lose his job if all companies are run like Valve.
Them having few employees doesn’t prevent them from taking a 30% cut on all sales and making billions in profit and having a billionaire at their head, so are people expecting that if other companies were “trimming down some fat” it wouldn’t simply result in them making more profit because prices wouldn’t come down or something?
Also, a company can pretend to have 10 employees if it instead hires 1000 contractors to do the actual work.
There are no good billionaires, the reason they exist is because people like you and me are paying more for things than they’re truly worth, billionaires exist because of the surplus we pay.
the reason they exist is because people like you and me are paying more for things than they’re truly worth
There is no true worth, worth is defined by how much people are willing to spend on something, doesn’t matter how much something costs to produce and distribute
There’s a cost to producing things. All the overhead you’re being charged that ends up enriching investors and bosses that have so much money they wouldn’t be able to spend it if they tried? That’s money you could keep in your pocket.
Have you ever thought that maybe you evaluate that some things are worth a certain amount just because that’s what you’re used to seeing them sold for so in reality you just underestimate what your money is worth and how much you should be able to purchase with it? Because that’s exactly what’s happening, especially with digital goods, there’s no supply vs demand relationship here, there’s no rarity.
If bread sells for 5$ for long enough you’ll think you’re getting your money’s worth by getting it on sale for 4.50$ without realizing that it cost 2$ to make it, transport it and put it on the shelves and there’s still 2.50$ going to the grocery store owner. You were paying that bread 3$ a couple of years ago and at the time it cost 1.75$ to make, transport and store, but you’re ignoring all that because what’s important is that right now it’s 50¢ less than full price so you’re getting your money’s worth. Most of the surplus is going to a company that’s just making record profit year after year after year, but that record profit comes from somewhere. It went up 100% in a couple of years while the people who made, transported and put the bread on the shelves have seen their salary increase by 10% and you’ve seen what you spend on grocery increase by 66%, but hey, you’re getting your money’s worth and the price is fair because that’s what people accept to be paying, right?
I don’t know where this contractor bullshit is coming from; if anything that should be aimed at Microsoft.
TBF, Valve does hire contractors to help work on Proton and Steam OS. I have no idea what the terms and compensation are, I’m just pointing out that they do hire contractors
A lot of companies have been trying to sue them and are trying to tarnish their name in any way possible because their case is already shaky at best. The whole “monopoly” thing despite competition existing and Valve only being on top because they’re the best feature wise stuff.
Exactly. It’s hard to argue that Steam has a monopoly when the other launchers exist and suck. Steam, despite its flaws, is still the best storefront we have. Gabe is the person who taught us that piracy is largely a service problem, not a price problem. People will pay when the paid option is quality.
But Infinite growth!! How do you affirm the ability for a new CEO to make tough decisions without going on insane hiring sprees to show growth, and then firing those same people to cut corners and also show growth!? The economy needs blood!
Oh wait, they’re not publically traded? I thought only corner shops were allowed to stay off the market.
That’s just a name we give to “a share of a well-known, profitable, and established company with a history of success”. I.e. “companies that experience constant and consistent growth”. That’s literally what OP is criticizing. They do the same things. Microsoft is a blue chip. You think they don’t have layoffs to appease shareholders? Google? Apple?
As for as storefronts go, which is what’s being talked about here, they are competing and winning. With a fraction of the employees other companies employ for storefront work. Origin (Rest Unpeacefully) and Uplay never stood a chance and epic has had plenty of time to market saturate. The company not being publicly traded doesn’t prevent competition, it prevents investor interests like quashing competition.
They’ve touted before that they may be the most profitable company per employee on earth. They make a few billion in profit per year with a payroll of a few hundred employees.
I don’t know, there’s plenty of anti-Valve rhetoric on Lemmy. Plenty of people try to spin it as Valve having a low employee count because they have a lot of contractors. One guy was making a point that Valve employee count is much lower because they buy in AMD GPUs for the Steam Deck… As if Valve should buy chip manufacturing plants and design and manufacture their own GPUs.
Even here somewhere below (or maybe up later) in this thread someone said
Also, a company can pretend to have 10 employees if it instead hires 1000 contractors to do the actual work.
Which is an argument, if you can prove Valve is buying in 10 times the amount of contractors as they have employees for positions that should go to full-time employees. But I very much doubt such information exists.
The report says that Valve has ~350 employees total, and of those employees only 80 actually work on Steam as a storefront. The rest are working on their games and hardware.
In the string of images uploaded online, we get a look at file repositories, a rough map of the proposed Moon location, and shots of some early conceptual images and set pieces. As the story goes, CDPR originally intended for the Moon to be a featured location in the base game but recognised that it was too ambitious a goal, so they cut the content and instead decided to use it for an expansion – which ultimately never surfaced.
Cyberpunk 2077’s development has officially ended, so there’s no chance this will ever see the light of day.
The title suggests that there are files for an actual expansion, half-finished and unpublished.
Because that's exactly what this is. Click through to the source linked in the article, which is a 4chan thread. It's quite a bit more than just concept art, there are actual world map files that were extracted. The files, themselves, aren't made available, but the OP of the thread posted several screenshots of these assets rendered in-engine with a dev build of the game. There appears to have been quite a significant amount of development that was put into this unused area of the game.
Those are still what I would consider “sketches”. Just not the two-dimensional kind.
There are a couple more detailed assets, but tubes and boxes laying out locations, interiors and buildings is something you do when still exploring ideas and don’t want to lock anything down.
The written material suggests the writers got the furthest into it. But this is very much planning, not production.
It also says that they might have planned a second expansion featuring it. Doesn’t really say when the content was made, just that it would have been DLC.
Yeah, they really went in hard with Suicide Squad, to be perfectly frank, the only good thing to come out of suicide squad was the Peacemaker show on HBO.
Yeah I mean that’s kinda how I feel about it too. Why kill the momentum of a show that popular like that? Makes no sense. And yeah, I’m in the same boat. I won’t even give a shit by the time it comes out.
As much as I hate to say it, Ubisoft has a really solid game on their hands. Some issue with netcode and I think the XIM/Cronus use is going to rise pretty quickly, but other games have dealt with it before. I’ve enjoyed the few hours I put in so far and will be playing it tonight with the boys. I’d like to see a classic TDM but hotshot works for now. Also a really cool take on the Kill Confirmed gametype
Warzone, COD’s battle royale mode, is free to play and seems to have surpassed normal COD multiplayer in popularity. Talking to randos while playing normal COD multiplayer, a lot of people say they’re just playing it because it’s a quick way to level up their guns for use in Warzone
It’s understood that a ‘unique player’ means that the player has downloaded the game and opened it for the first time. The internal goal was to hit 5 million unique players within the game’s first month – a goal that has quickly been surpassed
insider-gaming.com
Aktywne