exactly, this is a non-apology. It’s just the social media manager who come back to work after the weekend and is trying to mitigate the situation.
There’s a chance that they will come out and say “ok we listened to the community, we don’t want the 20 cents per install anymore, we want 15 cents”
BTW if they really have a tech that can distinguish pirated installs with a 100% success rate are and not just lying “trust our numbers, they’re correct”, they should monetize that, developers are paying much more for Denuvo.
This just in: Shitty and unethical company known for shitty, unethical practices and absolutely bonkers PR statements like “AAAA games” unsurprisingly continues to be shitty and unethical company. There’s not more at 11 because that’s all there is to it.
I guess the news is that someone is finally setting up a campaign with an actionable plan to punish some of the shitty unethical practices. And every bit of news in that regard is more fuel for the fire to keep it from sizzling out.
Probably after all major studios pulled out. Turns out dumping tons of money on huge marketing shows that usually turn out a ton of drama probably isn’t the best spend of money. It’s much cheaper to run your own announcements under your own control. The better game show for fans would be PAX.
Not to mention there’s the benefit to companies of being better able to manage the production of the announcements and avoid the random pitfalls that can happen at live shows. They can make sure the games they are announcing look their best and they can control their message. All three major console companies have had their versions of E3 failures that have led to major embarrassments for them in the past. They would rather not have that happen to them again if they can help it.
But Steam doesn’t have a monopoly. There’s Epic and GOG and whatever Origin’s called now and probably others. They’re all free to exist, Valve doesn’t do anything to stifle competition, and even lets other companies sell games that start their launcher from Steam.
The only thing you have to lose by using a different system is that it’s probably not as good.
All they’ve done is produce a really fucking exemplary product and it’s become really popular because it’s honestly just good. The second it stops being good or Valve stop being awesome there’s plenty of alternative ways to buy games that I’m sure will be there to replace it.
And Valve is perhaps the best PC store since they have continually pushed PC gaming forward, for example:
Valve Index - still one of the best, if not the best, VR headset out there; it made VR a lot more interesting
Steam Controller - didn’t make as big of a spash as they wanted, but it was really innovative and lead to…
Steam Deck - yeah, they weren’t first, but it’s affordable and made a big enough splash to get big studios to care; now we have a lot more options as well for handheld PC gaming
Not to mention their Linux support, awesome customer support, free dev keys, and Steam Link app. What did other stores do?
GOG - DRM-free is great! But that’s about it.
EGS - free games and lower store fee are cool
Xbox Game Pass - pretty good for users, but it’s troubling long term, and it only works on Windows
everything else - can’t think of anything special here
So no, I don’t think Valve is bad in any way. Quite the opposite, they’re the best behaved games store on PC.
GOG Galaxy is actually amazing in what it accomplishes, GOG just don’t have the resources to make it frictionless.
Gamepass is probably the main competition for Steam at this point. Publishers have been busting to make games run on the cloud, it’s the ultimate DRM, the ultimate goal of the erosion of ownership.
There will be a time where there is a push towards partial-cloud gaming and then fully cloud gaming, and it will be hard for PC gaming to compete in the mainstream when you buy an Xbox dongle for $50 and game as soon as you plug it in. That’s the real threat to Valve.
GOG just don’t have the resources to make it frictionless
They had enough budget to make Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3, I think they can handle making a decent desktop client. They just don’t prioritize it.
But yeah, subscription and cloud gaming is where the industry wants to go, and I sincerely hope they don’t succeed.
Then they’re either not meeting the needs of potential customers or not finding new customers.
For me personally, I would buy more from them if they supported Linux with GOG Galaxy. I would but a lot more from them if GOG Galaxy had a good experience on Steam Deck. I can’t speak for anyone else, but that’s my price, and apparently it’s the most upvoted feature request for GOG Galaxy.
I didn’t have a Steam account until they made a Linux client (they released in 2012, I made my Steam account in 2013). I bought a few Linux native games here and there, and when they launched Proton in 2018, I bought a lot more games. Before that, I mostly bought games directly from indie devs (Minecraft, Factorio, etc), or tried my luck buying Windows games and running them through WINE (e.g. Starcraft 2).
That’s my price. If they want me as a customer, they need first class Linux support. That’s why Steam gets my money, and GOG could win my business by offering DRM-free games on top. But to me, a Linux desktop client is more important than DRM-free, so that’s why Steam gets my money.
The Valve Index is the least popular VR option and doesn’t rank near the top of VR headsets. Still being beat out by entry level Oculus.
The Steam controller was poorly made flop and has been discontinued. The vast majority of reviews put the controller well below the Xbox controller, which was already PC compatible.
Steam Deck is very expensive and has a very poor battery life. Making the handheld cable tethered. It also went against its open promise by including locked down proprietary software.
Steams customer support ranks the third worst of all top level game stores. Just above Ubisoft and Blizzard.
You mention their Linux support yet the majority of games are yet to be supported and plenty of game will never be supported due to their nature or inclusion of anti-cheat. The only thing Valve has done was release the Steam Client to Linux.
Steam popularized gambling for children and continue to be one of 2 PC companies that continue to do so.
Valve’s goal isn’t to sell a lot of headsets, but to show what’s possible with high quality VR and encourage more VR games and headsets. Valve’s ultimate goal here is to sell more VR games.
Oculus wants to sell a lot of headsets so they can push some kind of SM interaction and profit from having lots of ads. The priority there is adoption, not quality or compatibility.
Steam Controller was poorly made
No, it was well made, it just wasn’t popular. And again, it wasn’t their goal to sell a ton of them.
The goal was to design a flexible controller to build out their controller API and give an option for a decent desktop mouse replacement for a PC “console” format (i.e. Steam Machine). I think they succeeded at that, but the market wasn’t interested, probably because Steam Machines didn’t go anywhere. It was never intended to replace existing controllers, but to complement them.
Steam Deck is very expensive
It’s $400, which is really competitive. Direct competitors like the AYANEO cost ~$1k twice as much, or even more. The Switch cost $300 at launch (OLED is $350, even today) and wasn’t even competitive with current console hardware at launch, while the Steam Deck is competitive with both price and hardware.
And it’s not cable tethered. I get a few hours of battery life as long as I’m not playing the most heavy games. Most of what I play are older AAA games and newer indie titles, and I get 3-5 hours of battery life, which is longer than my play sessions anyway. If I switch to a modern AAA titles, it’s like 1-2 hours, which is still enough for most play sessions.
Their goal, again, isn’t to sell a ton and corner the PC handheld market, it’s to make PC handhelds popular so there’s more demand, thus more competition, and thus more game sales. They also want to show what’s possible with a Linux-based PC, so there’s a credible alternative to Microsoft (and most games seem to be playable, check out ProtonDB for a larger picture than just Steam’s official stamp; look at Proton DB medals, 77% are Gold or Platinum, which usually refers to “playable” and “verified” accordingly).
Steam’s customer support
You claim it’s worse, but you don’t give examples of services that are better. Here are some examples of worse customer service:
Nintendo estore - no returns
PlayStation store - no returns if you have started to download it, unless it’s faulty (e.g. Cyberpunk 2077), and even then you have 14 days
Xbox - within 14 days and don’t have “a significant amount of playtime”
And Steam’s policy is 14 days and <2 hours playtime (so the same or better than above), yet there are countless examples of refunds being issued being both the time and playtime limit, provided you don’t abuse it.
I’m not going to go through other examples because I believe I’ve proven my point, so now it’s your turn: give specific examples of other stores having better customer service than Steam.
No, they’re just one example, and perhaps the most clearly documented one, and IMO the most important one (i.e. the one that most users will need to use).
If you want to discuss another metric, then please do so.
The only thing Valve has done was release the Steam Client to Linux.
*countless improvements Valve engineers have made to the the Mesa OpenGL and Vulkan drivers as well as to the kernel graphics driver components. Not just to the AMD graphics drivers for benefiting the Steam Deck’s hardware but also to Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan and then other common infrastructure. But in this area of the Linux graphics driver support, Valve’s contributions and those of their partners have been incredibly beneficial to the Linux desktop ecosystem even outside gaming. *
I guess that depends on your priorities. It has a competitive resolution and frame rate, is a bit heavy, has fantastic controllers, and has Linux compatibility. It’s also expensive and is best to pair with high end hardware.
So if you’re looking for Linux support (like me), it’s pretty much your only option, unless you’re willing to buy used or accept a lot of compromises. If you’re looking for cheap, lightweight, or compatible with lower end hardware, it’s not going to score well.
But on the whole, outside of pricing, it does a good job in almost every category. If money is no object, the Index is one of the best.
The position makes a monopoly so I would say they are but they remain the good guys because they don’t engage in anti-competitive practices, you can have a monopoly wven if you don’t abuse it.
Monopolies aren’t based on the mere existence of competition. It’s based on power and market share. Eg, Chrome has a monopoly. Firefox, Safari, and a few niche browsers exist. But Chrome is the utter vast majority of the market and has pretty much all the power on dictating web standards as a result.
Microsoft had competitors when they got sued for their IE + Windows monopoly. But they had an utterly massive amount of the market share and used that to push their own browser.
So Redfall was set up to fail, and you make those people fall on the sword, and then Hi-Fi Rush is a game people clearly want more of and could have stood to cost more than $30, and you let those people go too instead of hitting the ground running on a sequel? What is wrong with you, Microsoft?
The way they see it, their best interests don’t involve those of the game studio. Buying a studio does two things. It gives them a new business to latch onto and suck all the money out of quickly, and it eliminates competition in the gaming industry. Killing the studio still meets both of those goals. And then they just move onto the next one.
I mean, yeah, if you’re expecting intelligent long term decisions, those expectations are still too high.
Remember: This is the group of people STILL actively trying to cover up anthropogenic climate change. Something that not only threatens their long term profitability, but literally threatens the planet with extinction.
Going by MS‘s track record the last couple decades, it‘s all business as usual. It‘s expected from them to eventually close everything down they incorporate into their ecosystem. Sometimes after draining it or letting it rot away, and sometimes sooner than later.
Steam is a legitimate value add for sellers and buyers/users, that justifies its 30% cut. Other than free games, Epic has a seemingly easy-to-integrate online networking system, that’s about it. Steam has a modding platform, broadcasting, remote “parsec”-like controller emulator, Linux support, content sharing, forums and a developer news feed. That’s quite a lot.
What makes me stick with them is that they don’t preclude Steam and other gaming users from using alternatives but simply compete with their own well-made system… plenty of games have their own cross-platform mod-launchers that aren’t workshop for example. Steamworks DRM isn’t required and Steam networking services for multiplayer aren’t mandatory either.
That said, itch and GoG are great alternatives where they have games available. I’d just like GoG to provide better Linux support.
Gog has support problems on some windows games too. Also they mark games run via dosbox as windows, which is annoying when you specifically want to find an older windows game that also had a dos release. Even with those issues, gog is still my goto because at least my games won’t be full of denuvo securom etc. and nobody else seems to remotely care about the really old harder to find games. I’d be scouring ebay for old discs if not for gog.
Epic only has a lower cut because they’re leveraging their undoubtedly massive Chinese investments to gain market share. You can rest assured they would charge 30% if they could.
I don’t like that Steam or Apple or Google charge 30%. I think it’s absurd. But also Valve is basically a saint compared to every modern corporation so I don’t think twice about it.
While 30% is high it seems developers consider it acceptable since number of games Steam releases is not reducing. Any one of those developers can decide not to publish on steam and go that way, but in the end I think Valve’s service offers so much exposure that it’s worth considering.
Getting 100% of 1000 sales is not the same amount of money as getting 70% of 30000 sales, especially when it’s a digital distribution where copying bytes costs nothing. Steam also offers bunch of other services as well, things like networking, cloud saves, streaming and similar all of which cost money to maintain.
While 30% is high it seems developers consider it acceptable since number of games Steam releases is not reducing.
Yeah that’s not how that works. Acceptable or not, if you want to sell your games, they have to be on Steam because that’s where people are buying them.
That’s the whole point. If people prefer to buy it on Steam, then that’s it. Forcing people to move away to other store due to exclusive deals and similar means only making people with money more annoyed and more inconvenienced.
Your “point” is shit. Backing people into a corner and then claiming that your choice is “acceptable” because they didn’t go somewhere else is bullshit.
No they don’t lol. GOG doesn’t even have a client, you have to use Lutris or Heroic Launcher that support it.
Itch has a half implemented Linux client that they gave up years ago and is straight up unusable/broken. The client is worse then a web wrapper and nas no support for Wine, so if the game doesn’t have native Linux support, it just won’t run through the client. It will download exe’s that won’t actually run and silently fail, and doesn’t have any wine support.
They don’t have a client but both allow you to just download the game and run it from a .sh that installs it in the local folder. That’s enough for me but I agree it may not be for everyone.
Lol, Epic cut Linux support when it bought Rocket League.
But you are right, no one even tries. Everyone wants to have Valve’s income, but no one wants to do the legwork of innovation that Valve does. If someone would compete with Valve where they don’t already have a massive foothold, there might be some better results. For example, Linux. If any of these funding-gorged companies were to put serious money into competing with Valve in the Linux space, it’d be a real competition. Then you could leverage your stake in that to compete in different sectors. But the Linux market is small, and averse to paying for things (userwise) so not much to gain. But Valve understands that if gaming parity with Windows happens, then it will have a compounding effect. It would unshackle the PC market from Microsoft. It would make spending funding on a gaming device that DOESN’T have to have Windows involved a much more appealing prospect. Hell, the phone gaming market. No need for these re-skinned Skinner boxes when you can have the actual PC version on your phone. Whole new market, right there.
The companies that innovate tend to lead. And those who follow the coin and not the music, do not.
Steam’s de-facto monopoly is so strong, Epic can’t break it. Epic made four billion dollars per year on one game. Epic licenses the engine for like half of all noteworthy games. Epic has the only platform not seizing one-third of all revenue from developers, and that platform throws free shit at customers in constant desperation. And they still can’t move the needle.
Monopoly doesn’t mean there’s zero competition. It means the competition does not matter.
PC gamers have alternatives to Steam the way that Android users have alternatives to Google Play. Yes, there are dozens. And that’s how many users each one has.
If it’s even possible it would take years or decades of work building up good will. It’s kinda Valve’s game to lose right now. They just need to not make any enormous mistakes and they win by default. Fortunately for Valve, they seem to be one of the few companies in game dev that isn’t managed exclusively by misanthropes and buffoons.
Would it though? Being a competitor to Valve, not sucking, and not pulling shady anti-consumer shit would result in immediate good will for a decently large (though disproportionately loud) section of the market. Hell, EGS failed at the 2nd and 3rd thjngs in that list and they still got a loyal fanbase
Epic can't make a dent because their product is dogshit.
Customers don't care that Valve takes a well earned cut (that only applies buying directly from Steam); they care that their games are on a platform that's actually fucking useful. If Epic didn't insult gamers shipping that piece of trash and had put work into actually providing a product that could possibly be considered acceptable, they might have been able to make a dent.
You're not going to take market share with shitty gimmicks if your actual product is a crime against humanity no one wants.
For starters, they put so little developments money into EGS that they went two years without a shopping cart, a feature that effectively every other online store has and could be custom coded properly in a day
And every one of them comes back because paying Steam 30% is by far the most profitable way to do business. They absolutely deserve every single penny of it.
30% commission on an all margin product is not even sort of unusual or unfair.
The fact that using their services and paying them their cut is more profitable than not doing so absolutely, in and of itself, proves beyond discussion that their cut is fair.
Yes, sales should cost money. Moving units is a fucking massive value add. Valve deserves every penny they take and more. They're the best thing that ever happened to PC gaming and nothing else is remotely close.
Continued use only proves this is a way to make money. Probably the best available way. But to suggest that, so long as people are doing it, there cannot possibly be problems, is obvious crap.
Especially when you add “and more.” Oh: so this isn’t the exact right amount, as decreed by mighty god himself? We can talk about the middleman’s cut, so long as the rent goes up?
If your complaint is the money they take in exchange for sales, it's literally impossible for anything but the fact that paying them nets you significantly more money to be meaningful.
Valve built PC as a platform. If they never existed, you wouldn't get 10% of the PC sales. That absolutely means they're entitled to their share. Platform development is a massive value add, and useless jackasses trivializing their contribution by pretending that the massive development project of building a platform isn't every bit as important as single products on the platform can fuck right off.
Valve could take a lot less and it wouldn’t kill them. Or PC gaming. Wouldn’t be whatever frothing insult you pretend it is, either. It’s just… less money. They’d still make a shitload of money. Just… less.
The number can be smaller and the sky wouldn’t fall.
The number right now is obscenely high. It’s the most they think they can get away with. And they can only get away with it because of their de-facto monopoly, which should end.
Also key activations cost the dev zero on Steam. And the dev can generate keys for free to sell elsewhere. details here: partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
Weird because I provided actual services and functionality that steam provides in exchange for that cut, and your response was that me mentioning devs do have other options isn’t “understanding criticism”
Your response to criticism of Steam was ‘there’s other services.’
That does absolutely nothing to deflect from criticism of Steam.
Praising their various features comes a little closer, but still doesn’t justify taking an entire third of every game’s revenue. 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.
What Valve offers that makes companies put up with that is their de-facto monopoly presence. They can sell many copies through Steam - or they won’t sell many copies.
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.’
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?
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.’
For now… 🖕🏽 They worded that so weasely, they’re just waiting for the storm to pass and for Legal to come up with some compelling reason why they’re totally “obligated” to make it happen, “hands tied” “so sorry” and all that.
Fuck Sony. They made this SOP way back when, and there’s no way they let this stop them forever. It’s all about profit, not what “we” want.
Yes. This is exactly how capitalism is supposed to work. The corporation bows to the wants and needs of the consumer, or they risk being replaced.
And this is an even greater example, consumers telling a mega-corp to get fucked and getting results.
But don’t let me get in the way of you kids and your anti-capitalism bent, typed on a machine made possible by capitalism. If I could send every fucking one of you back to the 70s and let you get an eye full of communism, I’d deport every one of you to the USSR.
Why should they go anywhere else? They are right. Making an echochamber by literally gatekeeping people with different political views than you isn’t productive either.
Their comment is incredibly ignorant. They’ve been fed a steady stream of propaganda from a fire hydrant of fox News, that’s why they should go somewhere else. Down vote all you want.
We removed it way before the pricing change was announced because the views were so low, not because we didn’t want people to see it.
(emphasis theirs)
I don’t believe that in the slightest. While yes, they did do that quite a while before the change took place, it was hosted there as an easy way to track changes to the ToS. I bet it was more of a “Any changes we make will stand out a lot more”, not realizing that any big change they make was going to stand out regardless (this whole thing being an example).
I mean come on, they could’ve at least tried with a better lie. I would’ve gone “Eh, maybe” if they’d said something like “Our legal team suggested that we keep it hosted in a central location, on our website”. But really, “not enough people looked at it”?? What a joke.
To be honest, in the face of how dumb that lie would be and how I have come to view stats-based decision-making (where companies favour decisions they can point to some KPI for because it makes them seem scientifically grounded over ones made “just” with human reasoning), I’ll invoke Hanlon’s Razor and say:
I absolutely think it’s possible some middle-manager looked at the view stats and decided they’d look better if they cut some chaff, never mind just what that chaff may be. Protests - if issued ar all - went unheard or unheeded, and the change went through because the numbers told them to make it.
It’s awful optics, in any case, but I’m willing to concede it may be dumb coincidence paired with dumb decisions, probably made by someone wholly uninvolved with the pricing change decision, rather than actual dumb malice.
(Doesn’t excuse the rest of their bullshit, of course)
I definitely wouldn’t completely discount that as a possibility for sure, but Unity sure is bad at damage control (as are most companies that make dumb decisions like this) - even if this is true, it would’ve been better to just not mention it, as it could only ever just douse fuel onto the already out-of-control PR fire that has erupted due to all of this.
No dispute on that front, it’s a dumb move to excuse a dumb move with a dumb excuse at a dumb time where nobody will believe that it was genuinely just dumb instead of malicious. And who knows, I might be totally wrong too.
My giving them this much credit is really just out of (possibly misplaced) idealistic desire to find alternate explanations before jumping right to accusations of malice. I’m not even entirety sure I believe it myself, to be honest.
Literally no one but legal should have the authority to remove a contract from the website, and allowing any other human being to do so is gross negligence at absolute best.
It should have sent a cascade of giant red flags the second it was touched.
Oh it definitely would be grossly negligent, but the amount of technical systems I’ve seen that somebody should have a stake in but wasn’t actually involved with… well, if Legal’s purview ends at writing up those terms, Compliance made sure they’re up in an appropriate place and nobody thought to put “make sure they are automatically involved of any change affecting this” on the checklist, all the boxes have been ticked and they won’t notice until the fallout starts hitting.
In an ideal world, any change to the master branch of that repo or to the repo itself should require the approval of a technically versed member of Legal/Compliance (or one of each, if they’re separate teams). In reality, that approval process may well exist only on paper, with no technical safeguards to enforce it.
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