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.
Don’t TF2 loot boxes contain weapons that alter the gameplay?
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.
Your argument rests on the claim that Valve’s implementation of these practices is indistinguishable from hated industry standards, but I disagree.
The “hated industry standards” are in many cases directly copied from the Valve implementations that predate them, so… yeah.
I mean, I haven’t played CS2 yet, and definitely haven’t played CS:GO in a while, but I may need you to point me at the timecode in this video where the superior free-range loot boxes are way better than in, say, Call of Duty, because I’m not sure I caught it the first time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJGY6RGPCnY
And again, I’m not against these on principle. I think unboxing videos are a bit weird and I don’t see the appeal of opening tons of boxes in one sitting in real life, either… but this is the exact same implementation being criticized elsewhere.
Uh, paid mods were around in the 90s. Probably earlier but that’s what I can testify to.
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.
I’ve never heard of patreon only mods, tell me more
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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To add to this comment, remember that the base cut is 30%, but it goes down to 25% and later to 20% as the game reaches certain thresholds of revenue. This isn’t meant to shake down the large corporations (indies benefit the least from this policy), but to make their system appealing enough to developers large enough to be able to try their luck somewhere else.
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.
No, yeah, Steam’s business model is very comparable to Youtube’s. That’s my exact point. I’ve made that specific comparison elsewhere here. I don’t know how long you’ve been around the “Fediverse”, but when you’re not actively defending a corporation you like way more than a human should like a corporation that’s not typically considered a defense around these parts.
But hey, yeah, that’s a good mental model for it.
Look, I’m aware of the work Steam and other gaming first parties do. Like, very aware. Way more aware than most. You’re Internetsplaining the crap out of this to me right now. And I’m telling you Steam has been actively cutting down the amount of those things they do based on their quasi-monopolistic positioning. Their entire business model and concept is to create a platform that runs itself (or is crowdsourced to its audience and creators as much as possible). That goes all the way down to content creation, discoverability, curation and more. Their idea is to do game-publishing-as-social-media.
I have very mixed feelings about that, but I don’t think it’s fundamentally invalid. They’ve staved off enshittification so far because they have SO much money and they’re a private company, so they aren’t mandated to drive endless growth out of that model.
The observation I’m making is that Steam hangs in the same space, ideology and business practices as Amazon or Youtube, but they absolutely don’t get the same crap for it as Amazon and Youtube. Which demonstrates a somewhat horrifying fact: It’s not the existence of the billionaires like Musk, the monopolistic behavior like Amazon or the black-box gig economy algorithm that pisses people off. It’s just the enshittifiation of the end product. If the incentive system in publicly traded companies wasn’t so terrible at doing its job people would just live in the shadow of Google and Amazon and Twitter for the rest of their lives and actively love it.
I mean, I guess in a way it’s comforting, in that it’s proof positive that the liberal assumptions about the market self-regulating optimally are absolutely wrong, but it’s still kinda disappointing to see the true power of branding.
They did the work for global credit card transactions, tax, distribution, forums, cloud saves, multi-player support, anti-cheat, achievements, controller support, friends lists, unlimited game keys, workshop for mod support, add drm, voice chat, and more. All that for a 30% cut.
Yes, we’ve established they are a first party like any other. For the record, if you manage to get Microsoft/Activision, Sony, Nintendo, EA or Ubisoft to publish your game they’ll also throw QA, marketing and localization into the mix.
The difference is you’ll sign a specific deal and have a publisher at that point. Valve will tell you what they want you to do, then poof out into the distance and give you a link or at best an API to access all of those things at no extra cost to themselves. Their entire business model is for others (both devs and users) to work for them within their systems. Which is fine. I’m also less hostile to the gig economy than many around here, but even I am not gonna actively cheerlead for it.
Doesn’t change that it’s a lot lol they’re also basically “the industry”
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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.
On the other hand they pay for all the liabilitys, server capacitys and everything regarding the store and let everyone put their games up i think its fair. Also steam is trusted by almost everyone to always be available and never loose your games. And it does advertising for the games as well.
They take nothing if you sell your game via keys on other sites like itch.io
The power of monopoly
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
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.
I’ve been playing TH 1+2 offline with no connection for the past year. What are you talking about?
It hasn’t even been out for a year… What’re you talking about?
It was released for PlayStation 4, Windows, and Xbox One on September 4, 2020.
- It’s been out since 2020.
- It does Not require an online connection to play.
That’s what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about the only platform that matters: Steam
You are an absolute moron
Hey let’s keep it chill.
Yes. Let’s let people flat out lie about something.
That’s ok, right?
Well that was unnecessary
You making up complete nonsense is unnecessary
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.
Gotta cash in on season 2 of the TV show
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.
They can do that because you pay them when you buy other game remasters.
yes but so do other huge game companies on cosmetics, in game items, other spin offs. I agree it’s not as easy but right now even doing this is unusual for most companies.
Doesn’t Valve make most of it’s money off the virtual economies of tf2 and counter strike?
No they make most of their money taking cuts from games sold on steam, afaik. CS2 probably makes lots too but I really hope TF2 doesn’t. (I’m still salty they left TF2 to rot)
Very few game companies actually make a lot of money from cosmetics and ingame items. Most don’t.
It’s also stupid to think companies should do things for free. That’s not the world we live in. It’s an exception
I just did a minimal amount of googling and this is absolutely not true. Micro transactions have outpaced full game sales by almost 3:1. The entire model of free to play games relies on microtransactions. The biggest games in the world right now are f2p games or paid games with f2p models. I dunno where you’re getting your info from, ancedotally, I’m sure, and maybe you just don’t play games like that… But the rest of the casual game player population absolutely does.
They might mean that the majority of games NOT weighted by popularity don’t have microtransactions. Think about all the indie games that only get like 10,000 downloads and are just small, pleasant games. Of course, most games have microtransactions if you weight them by popularity.
Very few game companies actually make a lot of money from cosmetics and ingame items. Most don’t.
The companies doing these full price remasters 100% are the ones making millions from cosmetics.
Cosmetics and in-game items (microtransactions) are how games make money hand-over-fist.
What world do you live in?
some very few games make money
Ok, you’ve made the claim that MOST games DON’T make any money off of cosmetics and microtransactions.
Name 5.
5 games that sell skins or other in-game items that actually lose money, or break even.
That first point is not true at all. There are entire games built around the paid cosmetics. League of Legends and everyone who follows that model for example. There are more than a few, but you’re right on the second point. I mean it’s not nice to call people stupid, but I suppose that’s not what we’re discussing.
My first point is that there are very few companies that actually make money from this, not that there are no companies. Riot games is one that does make money.
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Then why did Microsoft charge 60 dollars for the Halo remasters?
What game?
Adding a couple of maps to a 25 year old game isn’t a remaster. Anyone here play Black Mesa? Now THAT’s how you do a remaster.
That’s a remake, not a remaster.
Yes, I suppose you are correct.
Well, not every company is shitting money like Valve.
They can afford to do this because of their technical monopoly.
Blizzard, Bethesda, Epic, EA and many others have more money than Valve. So what’s their excuse for not giving free games? Hell EA earned on micro-transactions for FIFA more than GDP of some countries.
Activision Blizzard annual net income for 2022 was $1.513B
In fiscal year 2022, EA posted GAAP net revenue of approximately $7 billion
Epic Games revenue is $5.76 billion according to figures reported in 2021
Valve generated around USD13 billion in total revenue in 2022
Also,
So what’s their excuse for not giving free games?
Did you really ask this after including Epic?
But these comparisons are ridiculous anyway. Neither of these companies are your friends, and trying to understand their behavior in terms of anything other than profit-seeking is only going to lead to you feeling betrayed. Gamers’ obsession with defending Steam is so ridiculous that no one ever disputes the idea that Apple and Google are being abusive with their store policies, but calling out Steam for doing the exact same always brings dozens of people out of the woods who think it’s a controversial claim.
You’re aware that Revenue and Net Revenue is not the same right?
I’d say other corpos change the game more than this re-release
I mean sure, but this is a great showcase of Source Engine 2 which is a product they will be selling
And yet there are companies like Bethesda that have re-released games dozens of times for full price.
I mean don’t get me wrong, I am all for Valve’s overall values compared to EA, Sony, Microsoft, Bethesda, etc. glad they’re staying private.
Best remake was AoE2 imo, the price is completely justified.
Wow, I have been away and I did NOT anticipate such a interest in this topic by you guys!
If only Valve could learn to count to three they’d be the perfect game studio.
they already did! the steamdeck was released with steam os 3.0 (in the meantime they reached 3.5)