"Don't get an abortion! Have that baby and dispose of it at your nearest "Leave your baby here for our coalition of friendly CEOs to take care of" location for a 25$ amazon gift card!"
That fully sounds like a program a literal vampire would implement with wild success. Parents selling their kids for money happened in the past, so not even that much of a stretch. It does sound like a potential cobra problem though.
I am a fan of Valve, but this is just way exaggerated. For example, encourages you to save money by having sales? Isn't that about manipulating you into buying more games than you would otherwise, because you perceive the value as being better?
Yeah, Valve are certainly one of the best options for buying games other than sometimes GoG or directly from the developer. But this level of simping for Valve is odd.
Right? The best method of saving money is not to spend it in the first place, no matter how good the deal is. I mean, good deals are nice and all if you really need a thing.
Where I am, games in Steam cost about five to ten bucks normally, and two or three bucks on sale. Ten bucks goes quite far here, and without sales many wouldn't buy games at all. Now, is it good value to buy games instead of not buying any?
They don't set the prices. Developers and Publishers of the game are the ones that do that.
PlayStation has been known to straight up limit and even DENY developers and publishers of indie games on their platform but its strange I never see hate for them very much. And they also have crazy sales on AAA games too.
Valve's "hands-off" approach extends far beyond CS:GO gambling. They have the same willful negligence toward moderating their own official group chats.
For weeks, the official Steam Deck group chat has been flooded with racist slurs and hate speech. I and many others reported the individuals responsible, yet weeks passed with zero action taken.
Frustrated, I opened a formal support ticket. I detailed the offenses, provided evidence, and explained why a basic filtering system or active moderation is necessary for their own official spaces. Valve's response? They closed my ticket without taking any action at all. They have confirmed, through inaction, that providing a non-toxic environment in their official communities is not a priority.
This experience has made me lose a significant amount of respect for Valve. I will now be actively purchasing my games elsewhere in protest.
Hmmm. Everyone takes Steam refunds for granted now. But until late 2015 they refused to do refunds for any kind of game purchase, even if the game was literally unplayable by buyers - until they were dragged through the courts by the ACCC and fined, with similar legal demands happening from the EU around the same time.
Dunno if I'd call that, "never abused their power to the disadvantage of customers".
And that's just what I found with a few minutes of research. I'm fairly confident if I search some more, I'll find much more of those cases.
So yes, while the stance back then was "all purchases are final", you were absolutely able to get your money back if the game was truly broken and unplayable. Don't get me wrong, the current rule is significantly better, but claiming that steam hasn't been on customers side back then is just straightup wrong.
And I have an anecdote that counters your anecdote. I've been refused a refund. It was at their discretion. Game crashing withing 10 minutes of playing every time isn't always enough to get them to deign to give you your money back...
So, yes, it IS true. Them occasionally making a PR friendly move and going against their own policy doesn't change that
Their policy was that if a game was activated on your account then you were not entitled to a refund. The fact that they pulled some games from the store due to significant complaints about those individual titles (or at publisher request), and subsequently decided to make an exception to refund that particular game for some people does not disprove that their standard policy was 'you are not entitled to a refund'.
Of course it doesn't disprove that, I never said it was, infact, I stated quite the opposite. However, the fact that they were handing out refunds in cases where games were just outright broken or a scam proves that they have been on the consumer side. Just look at what bethesda did with FO76, where they actually denied refunds for that game when it was obvious it was a shitshow.
Again, I'm not saying that it was a great move from steam to not have a refund window, but claiming they were "abusing their power" when "no refunds" is basically the default for american companies (where refunds are not legally mandated, but each merchant can set his own refund period) is just stupid.
If Valve would want to do that, they could have done so years ago. To the contrary, there are more stores where you can buy games online then ever before (Epic, Windows Store, GOG, Itch.io, Fanatical, Humble and so on, with steam keys and without), and i haven't heard of a single aqcuisition by Valve yet.
It seems from your response that you have at least some desire to educate... Why must that also come with derision?
It isn't that hard to convey a message without such a contemptuous tone, and I'd venture to guess it would be more likely to persuade. Someone has seen some good in a thing. You can disagree without scorn.
My apologies, this community is generally memey/jokey in tone, and I was going with that. /gen
I’m also firing off dumb comments at like 2 am where I am, lol. Please do not take my short soundbites (text bites?) seriously.
On a more serious note, one billion dollars is a legitimately unfathomable amount of wealth and, by extension, unilateral power. That’s a dangerous thing for any one person to hold, regardless of how kind their heart is since it means the use of that power is dependent on the whims of one person.
Corporations are also, by their nature, driven by a profit motive. A corporation can do non-evil, customer-friendly things but that can also change very quickly. It’s important to differentiate between beneficial behavior and altruism.
Also, I typically don’t expect people to read my unsolicited soapboxing rants under a green text meme lol.
Also also, I am quite appreciative of the benefits of Valve’s efforts. I just don’t assume they’re purely doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. Nor do I expect/demand them to.
I've lurked on Lemmy for over a year and this post, for whatever reason, compelled me to register an account to respond; I took your comment to be a tad critical. It seems I may've misread the room here - my apologies if so. I agree wholeheartedly with pretty much all you've said. Thanks for the response.
Your concerns are valid since text is hard to interpret due to lack of inflection, context, and other intonation indicators. I try to remember to use tone tags but don’t always.
Thank you for your thoughtful responses and engagement, though. Good faith discussion is an important thing on the web, and is a large part of why I like Lemmy over Reddit and other centralized social media sites. I appreciate you for that and adding to the constructiveness and positivity :) /gen
All that's between you and success is a consistent and reasonable performance, but seemingly everyone else in the world is too greedy to pull this off.
succeeding by not actively running their platform into the ground
As someone who began to use Steam from 2007, and play their games since 2000 - they not only made their platform better over years, they also now branching out lately. Their hardware is either the best in price/performance or outright innovative.
They are not "succeeding by not actively running their platform into the ground", they succeeding in actually providing a good service and getting better the more time passes. All that while all competition does is to attempt to expand their user base without actually providing a good service.
Just thought that if not Valve, we'd be stuck in the same shithole streaming services been lately.
STEAM- Give a reasonable good platform for gaming.
OTHERS- Kill themselves with shitty optimization and spam policies.
STEAM - Sit. Enjoy the sunny day. Drink a coffee. Improve a bit the navigator to help you find new games.
OTHERS - Keep their shitty platforms unoptimized and double down on AI Slops.
STEAM - Doing some yoga. Walk the dog. Add an AI disclaimer for the games.
(update) OTHERS - Complaining about Steam AI disclaimer on socials without fixing a single fuck on their platforms.
STEAM - Trying the new Turkish restaurant down the street. Read a book. Add a disclaimer to alert the user if there's a cheaper bundle for the same game they are buying in the cart.
BTW the way refunds work is that steam withholds the money for a month to pay refunds with it. The publisher has no say, they just get gross - 30% - VAT - refunds.
At a certain point, making some functionality only available to part of your audience is more costly than just allowing it for everyone. Also the PR would have been horrible.
Now, being sued into doing it at all somehow made everyone in this thread fawn over them...
This is such a controversial person to discuss. On one hand, loot boxes, the steam market for trading, and a lot of gambling and profiteering going on. At the same time, all of the OP comments are also true.
Out of all the billionaires, I dislike gaben the least. The net good he's done for gaming may not balance the scales entirely, but at least there's a discussion to be had whether what gaben has done is for the better, or for the worse. Which is more than I can say about most billionaires I know of.
Hot take: ...but it's just fucking gaming tho...
He's not fucking with manifesting some bullshit ideology throughout the world, he's not trying to leave his mark on history... And if he is, it's as a chill dude who gave us all a better alternative to piracy.
He kind of is, but in the way old-school millionaires did - he has purchased a MASSIVE yacht and turned it into an ocean-floor research laboratory, either donated it to a university, or just allows researchers to use it.
Gabe was already wealthy with Microsoft money when he founded Valve, so when his new private startup found success he didn't feel the pressure to go public, expand, dilute, and cash out. He made the judgement call that they already had enough talent internally to keep playing the hits while keeping all the profit for themselves, and he was right. I'm sure a little bit a business ideology reinforces Gabe's long-term outlook for Valve, but he's ultimately enabled by a happy intersection of pre-existing wealth, great timing, and careful hiring choices.
I mean, he is developing the brain chip with his Starfish Neuroscience company but its supposed to be minimally invasive and let's be real if its between his and Elon Musks (which is NOT minimally invasive and requires surgical implantation) I'm definitely going with his.
I wouldn't say at this point its all about gaming though. Valve is, but not necessarily Gabe. Which I don't mind but I could understand how some people wouldn't like it.
Fair. But its important to point out this won't be one that goes inside you it will be one that you put on the outside of your head that interacts with brain impulses, at least according to them.
If I was someone with limited mobility or some other sort of handicap I would do that before I got the one that goes inside my skull. But that's just me.
You know, I think those are inevitable ... any potentially evil technology shown in sci-fi will eventually be created irl; it's like some kind of rule (trust me). Given this, the future is a duality: it's either GabeN or a random billionaire. I want this potentially-abusive technology with devil that I know.
I know this novel strategy that Valve employs might be difficult to conceptualize for people whose thinking only extends as far as "company evil, success bad", so let me summarize it in a format that is easier to understand:
The EU definitely helped. I'll add that this was actually kicked off by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) in 2014.
They took Valve to court over their insistence that they can ignore Australian Consumer Law rights - in particular that if a product is 'not fit for purpose' then the buyer is entitled to a full refund, with respect to games. Valve offered no possibility of refund at the time. The case dragged on, but Valve eventually lost and was told to pay several million in fines, they appealed it to the High Court of Australia in 2016 - and lost also on appeal.
The judge was pissed at Valve, and wrote in their ruling:
“Valve’s culture of compliance was, and is, very poor”. Valve’s evidence was ‘disturbing’ to the Court because Valve ‘formed a view …that it was not subject to Australian law…and with the view that even if [legal] advice had been obtained that Valve was required to comply with the Australian law the advice might have been ignored”. He also noted that Valve had ‘contested liability on almost every imaginable point’.
Valve are generally a very positive force in gaming, but they're definitely not the saints that OP image text implies.
I have a pro-Valve bias because I do like them. But I still do want to make a fair argument and would like to be corrected if I fail to do so.
So, yes, Valve's refund policy in the past was bad, and yes, they were forced to change. But since then they have fixed their mistakes, and have arguably the most generous refund policy out there. Last time I bought digital content from Nintendo store I had to waive my refund rights.
They could have limited refunds to Australia but they didn't. This has to count for something, right? Valve is a for profit company in a capitalist system, and yes they have bad practices. But surely we can agree they are one of the better ones?
People saying that when Gabe dies so does Steam seem to be missing a piece of the puzzle.
From everything I've read and can tell they work using an ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Program). Meaning each employee working there today is becoming partial owners in Valve. If you think they will allow some new face to show up when Gabe dies and flip the table you are missing the piece where the owners of this company are extremely well compensated today and a core part of making Valve successful today.
Those shares are also generally for sale for a high enough price. Given the immense current value of the brand, when Gabe dies vultures of every variety will start circling. If they offer employees 2x their share price to sell, enough of them will do it to lose control to investors that just want to enshittify everything and milk it's brand for every last penny as they drive it into the ground.
My company is an ESOP and shares don't give us voting rights or any actual control, it's just a monetary incentive. The C-suite/board still control everything and unilaterally makes all the executive decisions.
Lol everyone always gets mad that dude has yachts.
Do you think that the CEOs of Microsoft and Sony don't have yachts?
So that's something they have in common. But consumer good will and overall happiness with the service isn't. Only one of the companies have that distinction and you know which one it is.
Also, maybe you're not aware just how insanely expensive and wasteful it is to own even one yacht, let alone a fleet of them. It's honestly hard for normies like us to even wrap our heads around.
I agree with you its wasteful and I personally would never own one but it sounds like the dude actually likes the whole sea scene and scuba dives and stuff like that a lot.
A quote from him about it: "This isn’t about buying a yacht company. It’s about plugging into a tribe of builders, dreamers, sailors, creatives and engineers—and seeing what kind of future they can shape when no one’s holding them back. This isn’t a transaction. It’s ignition."
So it really just sounds like he bought a company with a hobby he's interested in to make more money and be a part of the hands on experience with it. That's the same thing he did when he made Steam except he didn't buy it he made it.
I still think yachts are insane and some absolute let them eat cake tier of rich bullshit but I don't hate the guy for buying a company he seems interested in.
I'm not sucking his dick or anything but the dude got rich by being the least shit bag to the paying customers of his service. That's more than I can say about almost every single other CEO alive at this point. So fuck it, let him have the yachts I guess.
I was extremely impressed that Valve did an RMA replacement for one of my Index base stations even out of warranty. They explicitly did not have to do that. It’s been years but I’m still amazed
Yeah my white OLED Steam Deck broke (it was definitely my fault), and they sent me a replacement, no questions asked. Also white OLED, after you couldn't even buy them anymore.
Not explicitly, but 2011/83/EC does state that it applies to everything but "financial services, gambling, healthcare by regulated professionals, package travel, property transactions, social services, timeshare and most aspects of passenger transport" and reservers. And steam's refund policy is most likely a reaction to this. See https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32011L0083, which mentions the 14 days basically everywhere as a default withdrawal period.
"Sells hardware at a loss to hook you into the steam ecosystem and make more money by selling you software" FTFY
Don't get me wrong, as companies go I like valve, but to say they aren't making decisions based on making more money and just out of altruistic motives is madness. Businesses that aren't healthy and competitive die, even if they have rabid fans.
Never said it was locked. But being locked or unlocked doesn't change the motivation and is irrelevant to my point. The more people on the steam ecosystem, the better for them. It is far easier to use steam on the steam deck than any of the options you put forward. Even so, not preventing their use means people are more likely to buy the steam deck, which in turn means they are more likely to use steam as their primary store.
Epic, etc are not a default and at the beginning were not easy to get working.
Oh and you got it the wrong. Those things support the steam deck (usually via third party hacks), the steam deck doesn't support them, it you would be able to install them from the steam store with tight integration into the library by default. It just doesn't prevent them. That is a BIG difference. But yes, doing similar things on other hardware might not be possible or at least as easy. I'm grateful their are so many enthusiasts out there making such things possible.
I quite explicitly named lutris and heroic which are 3rd party apps. These apps are installable via Discover which is the app store running on the OS. I'd agree the wording could be seen as ambiguous.
Sony and Xbox do NOT support any other app stores on their devices - I think the use of support is clear and understandable in this statement.
Yes Discover is part of the Linux distro, not the valve added value. It is by virtue of their choice to base on an established Linux rather than anything. Again lutris and heroic both support steam deck not the other way around.
But none of this changes my original point. Valve wasn't you to use the steam store. The stream deck is a tool to get you to do that. You are free to bypass because they don't stop you, but they are willing to take a loss on hardware because they know it means more sales on the steam store. Or they wouldn't be here much longer.
You seem to think if I were to write an app for Windows and release it tomorrow that it means Microsoft support my app.
Depends on who gets the crown - or prices thereof - when Gabe passes. There are lots of cases where the beneficiary of an estate can't afford to keep the asset due to a lack of liquidity, and is forced to sell.
I'd say Zuckerberg's $77B disaster is not a forced mistake but a self-influcted wound. If anything, it's the Cambridge Analytica scandal that pushed him towards the rebrand they would have been better off without.
Also, that's not necessarily because they put the consumers' needs advice above anything else. Sony and Microsoft do this all the time simply for market share.
Not at a loss. We still don't know the prices of the new wave of hardware, but some Valve spokesperson has said that they wouldn't subsidize the price of the hardware with future game sales. They've also said, when the Steam Deck was launched, that affordability was a massive factor in the design, and that some of the decisions to make that happen were "painful".
As a fan of TF2, I'll quote another greentext: "does nothing, competition keeps shooting themself in the foot." It was about Overwatch vs TF2, but it's mostly similar.
Steam refused to issue refunds for a long, long time. In the end they started allowing refunds for everyone because governments started requiring it and it was easier to just allow them for everyone than having to do the legal footwork to have different policies based on geography.
Forgot about steam's forced DRM on purchases. Forgot about their inconsistent policing of content in games they sell. Forgot about steam not wanting accounts to be inherited when you pass away. Forgot about their 30% cut for small devs while bigger devs get a smaller cut. Forgot about a lot of things.
Don’t read this as a general defence of steam but I do want to correct a factual mistake: there is no forced DRM on steam.
Plenty of games are released on steam which do not rely on the steam client to be started and are in fact DRM-free. They can be backed up, and played on any machine without steam installed.
Some examples are Cyberpunk2077, the System Shock remake, Shadow tactics, and most of the devolver digital catalogue. The issue I personally have is that steam itself does not declare the difference anywhere in the store front, but at least it is always accurately catalogued on the lovely pcgamingwiki.
Usually accurately displayed on the PCGamingWiki, at least. I've tested games that it listed as having SteamDRM and discovered that they're actually DRM free. My experience is that new entries on Steam are likely to be listed as using SteamDRM. People usually just assume it's active when they're making the initial page.
Yeah I think that’s a more reasonable assumption. Presumably the new page template comes with the steam info pre-filled and has to be confirmed manually before someone then can correct the entry.
Still love that they even have this info nicely organized at all!
are you complaining that smaller devs get a bigger cut than larger devs? That's certainly an interesting gripe...
Smaller devs have to pay 30% of their revenues to steam.
If a game sells well enough, their revenue share increases and steam takes a smaller cut, 25 or even 20%.
This greatly benefits publishers of big games and unfairly punishes smaller developers.
I think that's a perfectly fair gripe.
There's not steam added drm, for games that the developer didn't add drm to you van just go to the games folder and launch the executable.
For a good chunk of games without drm they're even portable, ie you can copy the game's folder to a flashdrive and run it anywhere or give people working copies.
I understand what you're saying, but it's literally not. DRM is very specifically code added to games to prevent them from being copied and shared. Words mean things, ya know
No. It literally is. It is specifically Digital Rights Management. You are using the colloquial term, not the literal. Words do mean things.
You have no capacity to access these products via any other system than Steam. You have no means to redistribute, modify, etc. except for what Steam forwards to you. This is no different than Netflix. It is no different than Spotify.
Denuvo is also a DRM solution, that is leveraged to prevent tampering and reverse engineering. This is because Steam's DRM guarantees do not rise to the level desired by many publishers. These DRM solutions are more consumer hostile, sure, but it's ignorant to suggest Steam does not perform a portion of these duties as well.
Unless the game has DRM built in by the developer, you can just fucking launch the game standalone my yin
That's what I said in the earlier comment
Steam isn't preventing you from launching shit
It's not complicated
Sorry for being a snarky jerk, but it's literally what I said earlier, you can just go to the game folder and launch the executable. Steam doesn't prevent it, it's not stopping you from doing anything.
Seems I need to update my definition, polled some friends (I didn't vote) and this was the result
You can still launch games you've downloaded without steam preventing it unless the game has developer added code preventing it, but if people consider having to use the storefront to buy and download them drm, then it seems I should update my word usage
Unfortunately gaming might already be dead with these RAM prices and Micron giving up on the consumer space. Unless Valve wants to start buying chips wholesale and selling DIMM and SODIMM modules.
Talks about AI bubble burst been there a long time. I sure hope it will happen tomorrow, but I really wouldn't put my bets on that happening any time soon.
They are talking about bubble popping soon for 2 years except AI is older than that. For a bubble to burst - 2 years is not very long time. How is to have one talking point for 2 years is not a long time?
The AI investment craze wasn't going on the whole time even LLMs have been around. There will be people calling out doomsday financial scenarios every day for years that never happen.
Some have been proclaiming daily we're overdue for another recession ever since we hit the bottom of the 2008 one. Hasn't happened yet, 17 years later.
Never thought I’d see the day when Lemmy has nice things to say about a billionaire who owns multiple yachts!
There’s a story recently about how a huge percentage of people’s steam libraries are never played. People just spending money on steam sales and amassing huge backlogs of games they’ll never get to. Valve has mastered the art of using sales to create FOMO and drive unnecessary spending!
Imagine arguing that creating a service so much better than the competition available in that industry that it drives people to spend the most money on that platform is a bad thing.
It isn’t better though? GOG is a better service. DRM-free, web based downloads (galaxy is completely optional). They even invest development resources to get old games working better.
Steam is mostly the dominant platform due to first-mover advantage. They aren’t the best and most of the games on Steam aren’t even exclusives.
I like GOG and love DRM free games however another point is that many, many games are never even available on GOG to begin with. So what do you do then?
Would you rather buy them on Xbox, PlayStation, Epic or Steam?
Most people choose steam because it is the best out of all those options.
I agree having a DRM free game that you own forever is the best option but 7 times out of 10 a new game won't even be listed on GOG in the first place and if it is refer back to the link about how they often get abandoned with no updates or DLC and therefore less features than on other platforms.
Also, talking about getting old games to work better I would refer you to the Proton compatibility layer that Valve develops.
Proton is built on the open source project Wine and private products from CodeWeavers. Yes, Valve has contributed a tremendous amount to the project but they aren’t deserving of sole credit for it.
I own neither an Xbox nor a PlayStation (nor a Switch, for that matter).
There are LOADS of other options besides AAA games on the big platforms. There are countless vintage games, freeware, shareware, and abandonware that can all be played on the Internet Archive. There are countless indie developers out there to support, including some that have been in business for more than 30 years.
It really bothers me when gamers act like the big publishers are the only game in town (while also complaining about how bad AAA games are now). I mean if you like AAA games, fine, no argument there from me. But if you also like games for their stories and gameplay and don’t need AAA graphics to have a good time then there are thousands and thousands of options out there. I just think most people are unaware of them.
Yes Proton is Valves own compatibility layer though. They built it in collaboration with Codeweavers but Valve built it with Steam money. Codeweavers needed that money to make it into what it is today and Valve provided it.
And that's ok that you don't own any of those systems but you are acting like Steam is unreasonable when the rest of the industry does the same thing.
There is sales on PlayStation and Xbox all the time too but why aren't most of those games unplayed and more bought on Steam? Because the market decided that was the best platform to buy it on. Do you not think Xbox and PlayStation "create FOMO" by offering sales too or just Steam?
And sure if you want to play old games or Indie games lots of options exist Itch.io is a good one too in addition to GOG.
But that's not really what's being talked about is it? This was about which storefront is better for consumers and most gaming consumers are playing AAA titles and of the storefront options for those titles there exist Steam, Epic, Xbox, and PlayStation and on some games itch.io and GOG but like I said before out of all those options Steam is the best one for new games and even old games sometimes when the developers don't give their GOG versions love like they should.
GOG gets shafted on updates and DLC and also doesn't even usually have like 70% of new games as an option to buy on them at all. Yes, I too prefer to own games but like I mentioned that isn't always the best option on GOG because of reasons stated above.
Also my abandonware and some others have had Malware problems in the past although so has Steam but it gets caught on steam usually quicker.
I don’t think Steam is unreasonable, I just think they get way more goodwill from their customers than they probably deserve. It’s like with Apple or the Catholic Church. A lot of people love them but they do have ugly sides.
I think convincing people to buy games they never play is a scuzzy thing to do. Is it as scuzzy as gambling? No. But it’s not up there with something like a co-op bakery or coffee shop that sells products (and a cozy environment) at a reasonable price that people actually enjoy.
People have been saying “well they support indie game developers” and sure, yes indie game developers sell a lot of games during Steam sales. But there’s a problem there too: if loads of people are buying indie games but not playing them then that distorts the indie game market. It takes revenue away from less-well-known developers and gives it to popular/viral flash sale developers whose games people aren’t playing. That’s bad for anyone who wants to reward developers for making better games that we actually want to play but otherwise haven’t heard about.
I just think they get way more goodwill from their customers than they probably deserve.
That's fair. They do a few things I don't appreciate but overall I like them a lot better than any alternative other than GOG but I do hate that developers don't update stuff the way it deserves on there sometimes.
Its always good to be a little critical of any service.
But the thing about the sales is that the developers and publishers set the sale price, not Valve. Valve still takes the cut of course.
But the reason you are seeing that most people buy them and don't play them on there specifically is because it's just the most used service for gaming. They have a higher userbase than playstation and Xbox combined. And that really just ties in with them being the most customer friendly.
I'm not saying they arent without faults but they are better overall than any of the competition.
Also to add to this PlayStation has been known to limit and straight up restrict indie developers sales prices on their platform sometimes straight up not letting them do it at all. So that's another reason it all ties together to Valve not being a shit company. I'm sure that Xbox probably does the same thing but haven't researched it as I sold my Xbox when they did the gamepass price hike this last time.
In my opinion letting indie developers set their own sale prices is good for the industry. But not letting them certainly isn't.
Wait, why we should not argue?
Steam is not perfect so we yap.
Also not good enough considering it's just a game listing library and still taking 30% cut from devs imo.
I said imagine your argument being that because a service does sales all the time and consumer relations better than almost all the competition available in the industry that that's a bad thing because people spend money on said sales.
Its a bit of a shit argument.
"They have so many sales all the time that they force people into spending money they shouldn't spend! And that's bad!!"
Also, all those devs are free to use any other platform that doesn't take 30%.
Remind me again how much PlayStation and Xbox take? Oh yeah, 30% huh.
Btw, PlayStation and Xbox provide whole console system, Apple store and Google play are also 30% and they provide iOS and Android. It's not same as Valve.
Me saying "imagine arguing" is the same same as saying "your argument is stupid because" and that is not the same as saying not to argue.
I said imagine arguing the points they argued because they are silly. Lots of storefronts have sales shit epic even gives shit away for free every week and gives 20% back in points when you buy a game fron them but you don't hear anyone talking about how they "create FOMO" by not participating in their storefront.
Its a dumb argument. That is what "imagine arguing" means in that context. Hope that helps.
And yeah they make the console that you have to pay a fee to use internet on. Valve doesn't do that. If you stop paying their exorbitant fees to use the internet you pay for already to play their games online then you lose half the functionality of your game that you bought. (For multiplayer ones of course).
Valve also makes systems but yes it isn't quite the same as how PS and Xbox do it I understand what you are saying. However, everyone acts like Steam is greedy dickheads for charging the exact same rate other platforms charge without also charging you some dumb online play fee which is the real greedy fuckery. Despite them having more users than PlayStation and Xbox combined.
I think its funny that no one calls out the other companies greedy fuckery though. Just the one that is the nicest to their consumers (being steam)
You're still defending Steam’s 30% fee for no good reason besides cherry-picking failed competitors.
Also if you think “sale is good” and “Steam is customer friendly” (I think so too), why are you so mad when I talked about Steam’s 30% fee? I just said 30% is too high for just a game launcher. Fee acts like tariff, if Steam lowers fee little bit, game price will go down too. Which is super customer friendly. Don’t you like it?
Look, I don’t care how much you fangirling Steam, but it certainly doesn’t help Steam any better.
You mean all of them? PlayStation, Xbox, and GOG literally the only two that don't do this is Itch.io and Epic and Epic games store hasn't been profitable since it came out in 2018. And Itch is pretty much indie games only. Please name one other competitor that sells AAA titles that doesn't do that besides epic which again hasn't been profitable as a game store since 2018. They supplement it all with that fortnite money.
You want steam to be the only one that has AAA titles for sale that doesn't take the same percentage cut every single other one takes?
Not fangirling either I'm pointing out that your hate is completely unwarranted. You should hate the gaming industry as a whole if you hate the pricing model it has set up.
The reason people put their games on PlayStation, Xbox, GOG and Steam is because that's where all the players are. They could easily only sell it on Epic and not sell well if they wanted to do that. (The fee being so low on Epic is why they don't make money BTW give it a search online)
These developers could even set up their own payment processing system and sell it directly on their own website which would take about, oh look at that 20 - 30% of profits without any of the exposure PS, Xbox, GOG, and Steam gives you. I wonder why they don't do that if its such a bad deal for them? (Payment processing fees, bank fees, website hosting fees - add it all up you're not talking about some random checking account you're talking about an account moving millions of dollars through it)
You know Xbox and PlayStation could also stop charging you for the internet you already pay for and that would be super consumer friendly too. Also could not take 30% "Don't you like it?" GOG could do it too. What's stopping them?
Also no, I'm "mad" because you willfully misunderstood what I said earlier and said I was saying not to argue which is not what I said. But ok, let's argue about it, then. You dont seem to know what you are talking about because so far your argument is shit because every single other competitor does what you're crying about steam doing. Except the one losing money.
So your position is a store should never have sales? Besides, pretty sure games need to willingly participate to be on sale. e.g. factorio has never been on sale.
I don’t participate in steam sales anymore. I don’t buy anything on steam because I’ve already got way more games than I’ll ever be able to play. If there’s a new game that I really want to play I’ll try to get it from outside steam if I can, or at the very least make sure it’s DRM-free so I can play it without launching the steam client (I hate the steam client but that’s just my opinion and I won’t tell anyone else what to feel about it).
Do I think they should be banned from having sales? No. I also don’t think gambling should be made illegal even though I’ll continue trying to warn people away from gambling.
so you yourself is an example of how sales don't make you spend money...
personally i don't really buy random games because they are on sale. like, i go through the list of games shown on the steam sale page and most of the time i will find nothing interesting. what usually happens is i would wishlist games i want to play, then wait until steam sales and see if i get a discount.
Done about what? I stopped using steam. I buy games directly from developers or from GOG or humble bundle as well as just supporting open source games.
A sale that happens every few months or even weeks is the same as gambling? Sure i buy more id a game is on sale.. But not because of fomo but because i can save money?
Developers and publishers set the prices of sales like CD Projekt who makes Cyberpunk and has a 65% off sale right now.
So look at that, the company that owns GOG is one of the companies you're upset about making all those sales and "taking money" from people.
Wheres the hate man? Why not boycott?
Or is that only for Steam and not really about who sets the sales?
I mean if you're going to be outraged at least have some consistency about it.
Sounds like the only thing you're upset about that Valve controls is more people use it and the CEO has a yacht. Due to those sales that your beloved owners of GOG set.
It’s not sales specifically that I have an issue with, it’s a business model based on selling people tons of games they don’t play. Is GOG doing that too? Well I don’t like that either, but at least I can take my games with me when I leave GOG because they’re DRM free downloads from a web browser.
Yeah the owners of GOG (CD Projekt) aren't rich either?
Idk man the games you play are designed by groups of people (maybe except our Stardew Valleys and whatnot) and those people spend hours upon hours developing said games.
I'm pretty reluctant to be this flattening towards Gabe Newell and Valve.
Once Google was seen as one of the good companies. "Googling" became synonimous with searching on the internet. Most if not all competitors went bankrupt. When Google was accused of monopolistic behavior, its fans treated it as an attack on "perfection". Google Chrome was a fast browser requiring less memory than its competitors. People saw them owning YouTube as a good thing. The most common form of toxicity towards new users in the Linux community was only providing lmgtfy links to them (I did get the occasional custom WinXP ISO torrent link too). Even their motto was don't be evil.
And then came the YouTube content ID system. And then they were reluctant to throw off the far-right from their platform for breaking their ToS during Gamergate. Then they dropped the motto. Then they put ads into the Google search results. Then they let the far-right control their platform before the 2024 elections. And also they're pushing AI hard.
Will Gabe Newell stick to his ideas, or get an anyeurism and join the Trump oligarchs?
So, you are afraid to have an opinion in case future events make it invalid?
How do you support literally anything with this mindset?
Elon Musk might be haunted by the three spirits of not being racist this christmas and give away all his possessions. Nonetheless, I'm happy to call him wanker today, because it's an accurate representation of reality at present.
nahhh, lootboxes existed before CS:GO or TF2. and neither was supposed to be for kids in the first place! card games like MTG were one of the first mass created to use those mechanics
you know what was supposed to be for kids, had (& still has) lootboxes galore and other predatory monetisation tactics? Wizard101 (2008)
i don't see many people complaining about MtG or Wizard101, but folks love to point out how Gaben did a bad thing by taking something that was already a concept (that people liked) and making it digital, whereby he accidentally created something he could never uncreate
I have to disagree. Loot boxes definitely existed before CS:GO and TF2, but Valve has still been really predatory about it, dodging regulation and refusing to seriously address the issues in CS for years now. The recent update they did that cut down the CS market was a step in the right direction but far too late imo.
still doesn't change the fact that that's not a game for kids, and the adults for whom that game was made can make as many bad decisions with their money as they can afford
i'm not in favour of gambling for children don't get me wrong, in fact i was once a victim of it (thanks to wizard101, a game advertised as and marketed for children), but Valve just did not enage in that. if a child is playing a game that's clearly marked "M" or "PEGI 18" then it's the parents' responsibility to figure out if its something appropriate for their child
both tf2 and cs aren't games for kids. if the kids' parents let them play those games and spend real money on them, that's the parents' fault for letting their kids do that.
Yeah, I've played it using my Oculus Quest 1, too. It is the most game-like VR game, as opposed to most VR games that are more mini-games. But I've definitely spent more time in those mini-games than Alyx.
Totally untrue that they will replace faulty hardware. Was one of the first people to buy the Index. After a year the headset just stopped displaying any video.
Tried everything to fix. Even reached out asking for hardware documentation so I could fix it myself. They don't provide the documentation and they refused to fix or replace the headset.
Basically stole $1500 from me.
Everyone is excited to buy the new VR headset they are making but I'm steering clear.
You must have gotten a bad rep or something. I had a very similar situation, first with a lighthouse and then the headset itself. They replaced both free of charge, only asked that I send the broken ones back both times. Even sent me free shipping labels.
Got a source for that? Best I can find are "implications", like Gaben saying the deck's pricing is "very aggresive" and that the parts used sum up to roughly 1k dollars
Eh, its true that no-one does sales like Valve. Even while the sales aren't as good as they used to be, Steam pretty much forced the market to move on what a "good" discount was. Calling it a nice move to save you money is a joke but they really did bring prices down in the whole market.
the games with lootboxes that valve owns are not for kids, and their parents should be the ones that make sure they don't get addicted to gambling by not buying loot boxes for their kids.
Valve does literally the bare minimum to avoid getting sued. They've probably spent millions of dollars on the salaries for lawyers and psychologists to come up with a new gambling system that bypasses the laws since lootboxes are being regulated all over.
and valve is supposed to parent kids, not their actual parents? valve can be good or evil, it doesn't change the fact that parents should take better care of their kids
Lol give me a break... Look, Gabe is a billionaire and yes that puts him on "piece of shit" scale. But it seems you really had to dig deep to think of things here. Seasonal FOMO instigator? Really?
monopolistic? what even is a monopoly anyway? afaik there are a bunch of alternatives for steam.
loot box pushing. yeah, they do that unfortunately. though parents should really take better care of their children, so that they don't get addicted to gambling.
what is a Seasonal FOMO instigator?
steam sells whstever people pay to put in the store. if the game is broken you can review it badly and ask for a refund.
what is an assets flip exploiter?
and even if they pushed against the current refund policy, they do have one of the best refund policies for customers afaik.
And these two came out of nowhere and have no backbone to support either of these.
Other points are also debateable:
Defending the monopolistic.
By definition Valve is not monopoly. Even if we stretch the meaning, Valve would still barely fall under the definition. They are not the ones who decides what games to be sold and at what price. They do have competition and they are not continuously destroying it.
Loot box pushing
They adapted lootboxes? Yes! Do they insist on lootboxes? No. These are purely cosmetic and bring no advantage whatsoever. (Except TF2 but you still can get all weps by playing the game and not spending a cent. Also game is half-dead anyway) Many games adopted lootboxes, and some, like Star Wars Battlefront 2, had them as a pay-2-win option.
Gambling economy boosting
Not Valve was the one to create csgolobby and other external gambling sites. They did slightly restrict gamingling by locking items as non-tradeable for a week from the time of purchase. That is not enough to kill it, but it does restrict gambling for a bit.
Seasonal FOMO instigator
What exacltly fomo is with Steam? You'd say - sales. Dunno how anyone uses them but I go to check sales - if I see something I like and am willing to pay for, I buy it. I see It Takes Two for 9.99? I get! I see Need For Speed The Run for 9.99 - I pass. I don't have to buy anything I wouldn't play on a Steam sale even if it costs fraction of the full price.
Fomo is when League of Legends runs winter/championship skins in store claiming that is one-time offer and that skins never are coming back to be sold so people buy them to look unique in game. This is fomo. And it becomes even more of a clown fiesta when these skins come to store a year later. Maybe even with the same one-time-offer claim.
Guys I know he is not perfect but it's understandable that people like him in a world where the average CEO drinks the blood of newborns daily.
Huh, so that’s why they’re all so prolife. Need to keep the source of fresh babies going…
"Don't get an abortion! Have that baby and dispose of it at your nearest "Leave your baby here for our coalition of friendly CEOs to take care of" location for a 25$ amazon gift card!"
That fully sounds like a program a literal vampire would implement with wild success. Parents selling their kids for money happened in the past, so not even that much of a stretch. It does sound like a potential cobra problem though.
Would watch a full length film of this
very literal cobra problem as well
I am a fan of Valve, but this is just way exaggerated. For example, encourages you to save money by having sales? Isn't that about manipulating you into buying more games than you would otherwise, because you perceive the value as being better?
I fall for it every time and I couldn't be more proud
Yeah, Valve are certainly one of the best options for buying games other than sometimes GoG or directly from the developer. But this level of simping for Valve is odd.
Right? The best method of saving money is not to spend it in the first place, no matter how good the deal is. I mean, good deals are nice and all if you really need a thing.
Where I am, games in Steam cost about five to ten bucks normally, and two or three bucks on sale. Ten bucks goes quite far here, and without sales many wouldn't buy games at all. Now, is it good value to buy games instead of not buying any?
They don't set the prices. Developers and Publishers of the game are the ones that do that.
PlayStation has been known to straight up limit and even DENY developers and publishers of indie games on their platform but its strange I never see hate for them very much. And they also have crazy sales on AAA games too.
Mmmm billionaire boot must be delicious
Steam is not a bad company but it is still a company that holds a lot of power, don’t forget that.
Yeah. I am a fan of valve but their complicity in cs:go skin gambling uhhh... gets worse and worse the more closely you look at it.
Its fair to appreciate the good they have done for linux and largely very consumer friendly business practices AND, companies are not your friends.
Valve's "hands-off" approach extends far beyond CS:GO gambling. They have the same willful negligence toward moderating their own official group chats.
For weeks, the official Steam Deck group chat has been flooded with racist slurs and hate speech. I and many others reported the individuals responsible, yet weeks passed with zero action taken.
Frustrated, I opened a formal support ticket. I detailed the offenses, provided evidence, and explained why a basic filtering system or active moderation is necessary for their own official spaces. Valve's response? They closed my ticket without taking any action at all. They have confirmed, through inaction, that providing a non-toxic environment in their official communities is not a priority.
This experience has made me lose a significant amount of respect for Valve. I will now be actively purchasing my games elsewhere in protest.
Steam has had this power for ages tho and never abused it to the disadvantage of customers.
Supporting companies that don't shit on consumers is equally important as boycotting companies that do.
Hmmm. Everyone takes Steam refunds for granted now. But until late 2015 they refused to do refunds for any kind of game purchase, even if the game was literally unplayable by buyers - until they were dragged through the courts by the ACCC and fined, with similar legal demands happening from the EU around the same time.
Dunno if I'd call that, "never abused their power to the disadvantage of customers".
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/australia-fines-valve-over-steam-refunds
That is not true. I know this because I had one case where I did get a refund for a game called "War Z" - I also found an article that explains that the game was pulled by valve and they have indeed offered refunds: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/how-not-to-launch-a-video-game-starring-i-the-war-z-i-
On the same site, I also found this article talking about a ubisoft game that was pulled: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/report-ubisoft-offering-refunds-on-i-from-dust-i-through-steam
Now, it's debateable if this was a valve or a ubisoft decision - however, knowing ubisoft, I'd say they were pressured by valve to give in lmao.
I've also found this article on polygon that talks about another Early Access Title that was pulled by valve and refunded to buyers because it was shit: https://www.polygon.com/2014/5/6/5686826/earth-year-2066-refund-steam-early-access/
And that's just what I found with a few minutes of research. I'm fairly confident if I search some more, I'll find much more of those cases.
So yes, while the stance back then was "all purchases are final", you were absolutely able to get your money back if the game was truly broken and unplayable. Don't get me wrong, the current rule is significantly better, but claiming that steam hasn't been on customers side back then is just straightup wrong.
And I have an anecdote that counters your anecdote. I've been refused a refund. It was at their discretion. Game crashing withing 10 minutes of playing every time isn't always enough to get them to deign to give you your money back...
So, yes, it IS true. Them occasionally making a PR friendly move and going against their own policy doesn't change that
Their policy was that if a game was activated on your account then you were not entitled to a refund. The fact that they pulled some games from the store due to significant complaints about those individual titles (or at publisher request), and subsequently decided to make an exception to refund that particular game for some people does not disprove that their standard policy was 'you are not entitled to a refund'.
Of course it doesn't disprove that, I never said it was, infact, I stated quite the opposite. However, the fact that they were handing out refunds in cases where games were just outright broken or a scam proves that they have been on the consumer side. Just look at what bethesda did with FO76, where they actually denied refunds for that game when it was obvious it was a shitshow.
Again, I'm not saying that it was a great move from steam to not have a refund window, but claiming they were "abusing their power" when "no refunds" is basically the default for american companies (where refunds are not legally mandated, but each merchant can set his own refund period) is just stupid.
And if they get rid of most of the competition then they can treat us like garbage and we'd have nowhere to go.
If Valve would want to do that, they could have done so years ago. To the contrary, there are more stores where you can buy games online then ever before (Epic, Windows Store, GOG, Itch.io, Fanatical, Humble and so on, with steam keys and without), and i haven't heard of a single aqcuisition by Valve yet.
What competition lol
At least they are not beholden to parasitic shareholders that demand quarterly grow at all costs.
It seems from your response that you have at least some desire to educate... Why must that also come with derision?
It isn't that hard to convey a message without such a contemptuous tone, and I'd venture to guess it would be more likely to persuade. Someone has seen some good in a thing. You can disagree without scorn.
My apologies, this community is generally memey/jokey in tone, and I was going with that. /gen
I’m also firing off dumb comments at like 2 am where I am, lol. Please do not take my short soundbites (text bites?) seriously.
On a more serious note, one billion dollars is a legitimately unfathomable amount of wealth and, by extension, unilateral power. That’s a dangerous thing for any one person to hold, regardless of how kind their heart is since it means the use of that power is dependent on the whims of one person.
Corporations are also, by their nature, driven by a profit motive. A corporation can do non-evil, customer-friendly things but that can also change very quickly. It’s important to differentiate between beneficial behavior and altruism.
Also, I typically don’t expect people to read my unsolicited soapboxing rants under a green text meme lol.
Also also, I am quite appreciative of the benefits of Valve’s efforts. I just don’t assume they’re purely doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. Nor do I expect/demand them to.
I've lurked on Lemmy for over a year and this post, for whatever reason, compelled me to register an account to respond; I took your comment to be a tad critical. It seems I may've misread the room here - my apologies if so. I agree wholeheartedly with pretty much all you've said. Thanks for the response.
Your concerns are valid since text is hard to interpret due to lack of inflection, context, and other intonation indicators. I try to remember to use tone tags but don’t always.
Thank you for your thoughtful responses and engagement, though. Good faith discussion is an important thing on the web, and is a large part of why I like Lemmy over Reddit and other centralized social media sites. I appreciate you for that and adding to the constructiveness and positivity :) /gen
Yes, it's better to have companies that have no power and do nothing.
Exactly, and Steam is not a bad company... yet.
Gaben and steam are not perfect, but are monumentally better than what we would be stuck with on sony-soft
They're succeeding by not actively running their platform into the ground, which is somehow inspiring and disappointing at the same time
That's because they're a privately owned company. They can decide when to prioritize long term profits over short term profits.
Most of their competition are publicity traded companies that have no such luxury. They have to make next quarter's number higher no matter what.
The very core of pretty much every enshittification you can put a finger on
All that's between you and success is a consistent and reasonable performance, but seemingly everyone else in the world is too greedy to pull this off.
That's because they're a privately owned company. They can decide when to prioritize long term profits over short term profits.
Most of their competition are publicity traded companies that have no such luxury. They have to make next quarter's number higher no matter what.
As someone who began to use Steam from 2007, and play their games since 2000 - they not only made their platform better over years, they also now branching out lately. Their hardware is either the best in price/performance or outright innovative.
They are not "succeeding by not actively running their platform into the ground", they succeeding in actually providing a good service and getting better the more time passes. All that while all competition does is to attempt to expand their user base without actually providing a good service.
Just thought that if not Valve, we'd be stuck in the same shithole streaming services been lately.
Nintendo too. look, I love their creative, but holy hell have they become exceptionally money grabby.
Nintendo has used up all there goodwill, for me personally. Sucks.
agree, it's depressing that such a part of my childhood is basically... moneygrubbing
STEAM- Give a reasonable good platform for gaming.
OTHERS- Kill themselves with shitty optimization and spam policies.
STEAM - Sit. Enjoy the sunny day. Drink a coffee. Improve a bit the navigator to help you find new games.
OTHERS - Keep their shitty platforms unoptimized and double down on AI Slops.
STEAM - Doing some yoga. Walk the dog. Add an AI disclaimer for the games.
(update) OTHERS - Complaining about Steam AI disclaimer on socials without fixing a single fuck on their platforms.
STEAM - Trying the new Turkish restaurant down the street. Read a book. Add a disclaimer to alert the user if there's a cheaper bundle for the same game they are buying in the cart.
BTW the way refunds work is that steam withholds the money for a month to pay refunds with it. The publisher has no say, they just get gross - 30% - VAT - refunds.
Also giving refunds is required by law in some countries, it's not like valve invented it out of the goodness of their heart.
Australia sued them into their current refund policy
They did not need to extend that to countries like the US.
At a certain point, making some functionality only available to part of your audience is more costly than just allowing it for everyone. Also the PR would have been horrible.
Now, being sued into doing it at all somehow made everyone in this thread fawn over them...
Is this supposed to be a negative?
"You immediately got weirdly defensive", and the dude asked a single question.
"Your cute little indie game", bro why do you talk like a Disney bully?
How was I being "weirdly defensive"?
This is such a controversial person to discuss. On one hand, loot boxes, the steam market for trading, and a lot of gambling and profiteering going on. At the same time, all of the OP comments are also true.
Out of all the billionaires, I dislike gaben the least. The net good he's done for gaming may not balance the scales entirely, but at least there's a discussion to be had whether what gaben has done is for the better, or for the worse. Which is more than I can say about most billionaires I know of.
Hot take: ...but it's just fucking gaming tho... He's not fucking with manifesting some bullshit ideology throughout the world, he's not trying to leave his mark on history... And if he is, it's as a chill dude who gave us all a better alternative to piracy.
He kind of is, but in the way old-school millionaires did - he has purchased a MASSIVE yacht and turned it into an ocean-floor research laboratory, either donated it to a university, or just allows researchers to use it.
Gabe was already wealthy with Microsoft money when he founded Valve, so when his new private startup found success he didn't feel the pressure to go public, expand, dilute, and cash out. He made the judgement call that they already had enough talent internally to keep playing the hits while keeping all the profit for themselves, and he was right. I'm sure a little bit a business ideology reinforces Gabe's long-term outlook for Valve, but he's ultimately enabled by a happy intersection of pre-existing wealth, great timing, and careful hiring choices.
I mean, he is developing the brain chip with his Starfish Neuroscience company but its supposed to be minimally invasive and let's be real if its between his and Elon Musks (which is NOT minimally invasive and requires surgical implantation) I'm definitely going with his.
I wouldn't say at this point its all about gaming though. Valve is, but not necessarily Gabe. Which I don't mind but I could understand how some people wouldn't like it.
Hard pass
Fair. But its important to point out this won't be one that goes inside you it will be one that you put on the outside of your head that interacts with brain impulses, at least according to them.
If I was someone with limited mobility or some other sort of handicap I would do that before I got the one that goes inside my skull. But that's just me.
Can I put it on my dick instead?
You can put almost anything on your dick, its the secret the elite don't want you to know about!
You know, I think those are inevitable ... any potentially evil technology shown in sci-fi will eventually be created irl; it's like some kind of rule (trust me). Given this, the future is a duality: it's either GabeN or a random billionaire. I want this potentially-abusive technology with devil that I know.
I remember back around 2010 period, maybe a bit after that, Valve and reddit were both hiring economists. We can see exactly why, now.
I know this novel strategy that Valve employs might be difficult to conceptualize for people whose thinking only extends as far as "company evil, success bad", so let me summarize it in a format that is easier to understand:
I receive: half-decent product
You receive: my money
end of story
The sad thing is that them having a half decent product is something special in this world
How would you like to see it improved?
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html
The world? Don't get me started.
Steam? It's alright, I guess. I just wish "sell decent product, get money" would be the norm, not this ensure try fixation circus we have
They only began giving refunds when the European Union mandated it, back then only Origin (EA) gave refunds. Some times the EU is useful.
The EU definitely helped. I'll add that this was actually kicked off by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) in 2014. They took Valve to court over their insistence that they can ignore Australian Consumer Law rights - in particular that if a product is 'not fit for purpose' then the buyer is entitled to a full refund, with respect to games. Valve offered no possibility of refund at the time. The case dragged on, but Valve eventually lost and was told to pay several million in fines, they appealed it to the High Court of Australia in 2016 - and lost also on appeal.
The judge was pissed at Valve, and wrote in their ruling:
Valve are generally a very positive force in gaming, but they're definitely not the saints that OP image text implies.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/australia-fines-valve-over-steam-refunds
https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/valve-to-pay-3-million-in-penalties-for-misrepresenting-gamers-consumer-guarantee-rights
I have a pro-Valve bias because I do like them. But I still do want to make a fair argument and would like to be corrected if I fail to do so.
So, yes, Valve's refund policy in the past was bad, and yes, they were forced to change. But since then they have fixed their mistakes, and have arguably the most generous refund policy out there. Last time I bought digital content from Nintendo store I had to waive my refund rights.
They could have limited refunds to Australia but they didn't. This has to count for something, right? Valve is a for profit company in a capitalist system, and yes they have bad practices. But surely we can agree they are one of the better ones?
Thanks for the info and sources!
Thanks mate for adding the extra information, I had forgotten about the Australian ruling.
People saying that when Gabe dies so does Steam seem to be missing a piece of the puzzle.
From everything I've read and can tell they work using an ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Program). Meaning each employee working there today is becoming partial owners in Valve. If you think they will allow some new face to show up when Gabe dies and flip the table you are missing the piece where the owners of this company are extremely well compensated today and a core part of making Valve successful today.
A ton of companies have ESOP, but that doesn't stop enshitification because the employees generally don't own enough shares to exert control.
Those shares are also generally for sale for a high enough price. Given the immense current value of the brand, when Gabe dies vultures of every variety will start circling. If they offer employees 2x their share price to sell, enough of them will do it to lose control to investors that just want to enshittify everything and milk it's brand for every last penny as they drive it into the ground.
My company is an ESOP and shares don't give us voting rights or any actual control, it's just a monetary incentive. The C-suite/board still control everything and unilaterally makes all the executive decisions.
Believing that sales exist to save people money is the funniest shit i have ever seen.
Step 1. Make a good product
Step 2. Corner the market
Step 3. Build up good will
Step 4. ...?
Step 5. Keep building up good will
Step 4 is "buy the company that builds the yachts you like"
Which is not great, but is a lot better than actively destroying the fabric of the society, like all other billionaires are doing.
Lol everyone always gets mad that dude has yachts.
Do you think that the CEOs of Microsoft and Sony don't have yachts?
So that's something they have in common. But consumer good will and overall happiness with the service isn't. Only one of the companies have that distinction and you know which one it is.
The dude bought the yacht company.
He doesn't just "have yachts".
Also, maybe you're not aware just how insanely expensive and wasteful it is to own even one yacht, let alone a fleet of them. It's honestly hard for normies like us to even wrap our heads around.
I agree with you its wasteful and I personally would never own one but it sounds like the dude actually likes the whole sea scene and scuba dives and stuff like that a lot.
A quote from him about it: "This isn’t about buying a yacht company. It’s about plugging into a tribe of builders, dreamers, sailors, creatives and engineers—and seeing what kind of future they can shape when no one’s holding them back. This isn’t a transaction. It’s ignition."
So it really just sounds like he bought a company with a hobby he's interested in to make more money and be a part of the hands on experience with it. That's the same thing he did when he made Steam except he didn't buy it he made it.
I still think yachts are insane and some absolute let them eat cake tier of rich bullshit but I don't hate the guy for buying a company he seems interested in.
I'm not sucking his dick or anything but the dude got rich by being the least shit bag to the paying customers of his service. That's more than I can say about almost every single other CEO alive at this point. So fuck it, let him have the yachts I guess.
The latest yacht is a research vessel - not a "party-cocaine-hookers" vessel. News articles accurately avoid mentioning that.
There are tons of things to hate on billionaiers. To be fucking fair, Gabe is the most benign out of the bunch.
I was extremely impressed that Valve did an RMA replacement for one of my Index base stations even out of warranty. They explicitly did not have to do that. It’s been years but I’m still amazed
Yeah my white OLED Steam Deck broke (it was definitely my fault), and they sent me a replacement, no questions asked. Also white OLED, after you couldn't even buy them anymore.
When he dies gaming lives on within us.
I think this is factually wrong, Steam only introduced refunds because they were forced to for the European market
I believe it was Australia
No, the EU doesn't force refunds for software
Not explicitly, but 2011/83/EC does state that it applies to everything but "financial services, gambling, healthcare by regulated professionals, package travel, property transactions, social services, timeshare and most aspects of passenger transport" and reservers. And steam's refund policy is most likely a reaction to this. See https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32011L0083, which mentions the 14 days basically everywhere as a default withdrawal period.
The current version, at article 16, also includes software:
Didn't spot that, thanks
"Sells hardware at a loss to hook you into the steam ecosystem and make more money by selling you software" FTFY
Don't get me wrong, as companies go I like valve, but to say they aren't making decisions based on making more money and just out of altruistic motives is madness. Businesses that aren't healthy and competitive die, even if they have rabid fans.
Steam deck supports Xbox live streaming, gog, epic via lutris and heroic. It's about as far from a locked down ecosystem as one could possibly get.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/xbox-cloud-gaming-in-microsoft-edge-with-steam-deck-43dd011b-0ce8-4810-8302-965be6d53296
Never said it was locked. But being locked or unlocked doesn't change the motivation and is irrelevant to my point. The more people on the steam ecosystem, the better for them. It is far easier to use steam on the steam deck than any of the options you put forward. Even so, not preventing their use means people are more likely to buy the steam deck, which in turn means they are more likely to use steam as their primary store.
Epic, etc are not a default and at the beginning were not easy to get working.
Oh and you got it the wrong. Those things support the steam deck (usually via third party hacks), the steam deck doesn't support them, it you would be able to install them from the steam store with tight integration into the library by default. It just doesn't prevent them. That is a BIG difference. But yes, doing similar things on other hardware might not be possible or at least as easy. I'm grateful their are so many enthusiasts out there making such things possible.
I quite explicitly named lutris and heroic which are 3rd party apps. These apps are installable via Discover which is the app store running on the OS. I'd agree the wording could be seen as ambiguous.
Sony and Xbox do NOT support any other app stores on their devices - I think the use of support is clear and understandable in this statement.
Yes Discover is part of the Linux distro, not the valve added value. It is by virtue of their choice to base on an established Linux rather than anything. Again lutris and heroic both support steam deck not the other way around.
But none of this changes my original point. Valve wasn't you to use the steam store. The stream deck is a tool to get you to do that. You are free to bypass because they don't stop you, but they are willing to take a loss on hardware because they know it means more sales on the steam store. Or they wouldn't be here much longer.
You seem to think if I were to write an app for Windows and release it tomorrow that it means Microsoft support my app.
I did not say that at all.
The road outside my house supports cars, lorries, bicycles and foot traffic. If I breakdown on that road the local govt. will not come and fix my car.
I understand now. You are using the general definition of support so we are taking about different things.
Lets pray valve never goes public
Why would they?
The fuck do they need investors for?
Depends on who gets the crown - or prices thereof - when Gabe passes. There are lots of cases where the beneficiary of an estate can't afford to keep the asset due to a lack of liquidity, and is forced to sell.
2 words though "Kiddie gambling".
Sure Steam is one of the less evil companies out there, but they're far from innocent.
I'd say Zuckerberg's $77B disaster is not a forced mistake but a self-influcted wound. If anything, it's the Cambridge Analytica scandal that pushed him towards the rebrand they would have been better off without.
They sell their hardware at a loss?
Also, that's not necessarily because they put the consumers' needs
adviceabove anything else. Sony and Microsoft do this all the time simply for market share.Edit: didn't check autocorrect before posting
Not at a loss. We still don't know the prices of the new wave of hardware, but some Valve spokesperson has said that they wouldn't subsidize the price of the hardware with future game sales. They've also said, when the Steam Deck was launched, that affordability was a massive factor in the design, and that some of the decisions to make that happen were "painful".
Awesome, thanks for that info.
I suspect translation later for ARM will be industry shaking
As a fan of TF2, I'll quote another greentext: "does nothing, competition keeps shooting themself in the foot." It was about Overwatch vs TF2, but it's mostly similar.
TF2 completely abandoned their whole design philosophy to cater to the gambling crowd...
They made multiple design documentary videos on their whole "recognizable unique sillouette" class design. Then they created loot boxes...
All of the Valve employees are making bank. I don't think they'll be changing their core values any time soon even if he dies.
Steam refused to issue refunds for a long, long time. In the end they started allowing refunds for everyone because governments started requiring it and it was easier to just allow them for everyone than having to do the legal footwork to have different policies based on geography.
I think they've even been forced to pay fines because they refused to give refunds in countries where it's a legal right.
The power vacuum this man will leave behind sucks.
Forgot about steam's forced DRM on purchases. Forgot about their inconsistent policing of content in games they sell. Forgot about steam not wanting accounts to be inherited when you pass away. Forgot about their 30% cut for small devs while bigger devs get a smaller cut. Forgot about a lot of things.
Don’t read this as a general defence of steam but I do want to correct a factual mistake: there is no forced DRM on steam.
Plenty of games are released on steam which do not rely on the steam client to be started and are in fact DRM-free. They can be backed up, and played on any machine without steam installed.
Some examples are Cyberpunk2077, the System Shock remake, Shadow tactics, and most of the devolver digital catalogue. The issue I personally have is that steam itself does not declare the difference anywhere in the store front, but at least it is always accurately catalogued on the lovely pcgamingwiki.
Yeah, would be nice if they added a DRM disclaimer like they did with AI
Usually accurately displayed on the PCGamingWiki, at least. I've tested games that it listed as having SteamDRM and discovered that they're actually DRM free. My experience is that new entries on Steam are likely to be listed as using SteamDRM. People usually just assume it's active when they're making the initial page.
Yeah I think that’s a more reasonable assumption. Presumably the new page template comes with the steam info pre-filled and has to be confirmed manually before someone then can correct the entry.
Still love that they even have this info nicely organized at all!
It's easy to forget when you see the competition.
Not a thing.
Also, are you complaining that smaller devs get a bigger cut than larger devs? That's certainly an interesting gripe...
Smaller devs have to pay 30% of their revenues to steam. If a game sells well enough, their revenue share increases and steam takes a smaller cut, 25 or even 20%. This greatly benefits publishers of big games and unfairly punishes smaller developers. I think that's a perfectly fair gripe.
There's not steam added drm, for games that the developer didn't add drm to you van just go to the games folder and launch the executable.
For a good chunk of games without drm they're even portable, ie you can copy the game's folder to a flashdrive and run it anywhere or give people working copies.
My guy, Steam is DRM
I understand what you're saying, but it's literally not. DRM is very specifically code added to games to prevent them from being copied and shared. Words mean things, ya know
No. It literally is. It is specifically Digital Rights Management. You are using the colloquial term, not the literal. Words do mean things.
You have no capacity to access these products via any other system than Steam. You have no means to redistribute, modify, etc. except for what Steam forwards to you. This is no different than Netflix. It is no different than Spotify.
Denuvo is also a DRM solution, that is leveraged to prevent tampering and reverse engineering. This is because Steam's DRM guarantees do not rise to the level desired by many publishers. These DRM solutions are more consumer hostile, sure, but it's ignorant to suggest Steam does not perform a portion of these duties as well.
You have to log into steam to be able to launch any game you own on steam. As opposed to launching the game standalone.
This is the gateway you have to cross to access what you paid for.
That's the management of digital rights, right there. It's not complicated.
Unless the game has DRM built in by the developer, you can just fucking launch the game standalone my yin
That's what I said in the earlier comment
Steam isn't preventing you from launching shit
It's not complicated
Sorry for being a snarky jerk, but it's literally what I said earlier, you can just go to the game folder and launch the executable. Steam doesn't prevent it, it's not stopping you from doing anything.
Seems I need to update my definition, polled some friends (I didn't vote) and this was the result
You can still launch games you've downloaded without steam preventing it unless the game has developer added code preventing it, but if people consider having to use the storefront to buy and download them drm, then it seems I should update my word usage
Unfortunately gaming might already be dead with these RAM prices and Micron giving up on the consumer space. Unless Valve wants to start buying chips wholesale and selling DIMM and SODIMM modules.
Eh, ram prices will drop again when the ai bubble bursts
Talks about AI bubble burst been there a long time. I sure hope it will happen tomorrow, but I really wouldn't put my bets on that happening any time soon.
A long time? It's only been in full swing for like ~2 years now. That is not a long time for financial bubbles.
They are talking about bubble popping soon for 2 years except AI is older than that. For a bubble to burst - 2 years is not very long time. How is to have one talking point for 2 years is not a long time?
The AI investment craze wasn't going on the whole time even LLMs have been around. There will be people calling out doomsday financial scenarios every day for years that never happen.
Some have been proclaiming daily we're overdue for another recession ever since we hit the bottom of the 2008 one. Hasn't happened yet, 17 years later.
Never thought I’d see the day when Lemmy has nice things to say about a billionaire who owns multiple yachts!
There’s a story recently about how a huge percentage of people’s steam libraries are never played. People just spending money on steam sales and amassing huge backlogs of games they’ll never get to. Valve has mastered the art of using sales to create FOMO and drive unnecessary spending!
Imagine arguing that creating a service so much better than the competition available in that industry that it drives people to spend the most money on that platform is a bad thing.
It isn’t better though? GOG is a better service. DRM-free, web based downloads (galaxy is completely optional). They even invest development resources to get old games working better.
Steam is mostly the dominant platform due to first-mover advantage. They aren’t the best and most of the games on Steam aren’t even exclusives.
Here's a blog post on GOG talking about how many developers abandon their games on there so they don't get updates or DLC like they do on other platforms https://www.gog.com/forum/general/how_do_games_recieving_updates_work_on_gog
I like GOG and love DRM free games however another point is that many, many games are never even available on GOG to begin with. So what do you do then?
Would you rather buy them on Xbox, PlayStation, Epic or Steam?
Most people choose steam because it is the best out of all those options.
I agree having a DRM free game that you own forever is the best option but 7 times out of 10 a new game won't even be listed on GOG in the first place and if it is refer back to the link about how they often get abandoned with no updates or DLC and therefore less features than on other platforms.
Also, talking about getting old games to work better I would refer you to the Proton compatibility layer that Valve develops.
Proton is built on the open source project Wine and private products from CodeWeavers. Yes, Valve has contributed a tremendous amount to the project but they aren’t deserving of sole credit for it.
I own neither an Xbox nor a PlayStation (nor a Switch, for that matter).
There are LOADS of other options besides AAA games on the big platforms. There are countless vintage games, freeware, shareware, and abandonware that can all be played on the Internet Archive. There are countless indie developers out there to support, including some that have been in business for more than 30 years.
It really bothers me when gamers act like the big publishers are the only game in town (while also complaining about how bad AAA games are now). I mean if you like AAA games, fine, no argument there from me. But if you also like games for their stories and gameplay and don’t need AAA graphics to have a good time then there are thousands and thousands of options out there. I just think most people are unaware of them.
Yes Proton is Valves own compatibility layer though. They built it in collaboration with Codeweavers but Valve built it with Steam money. Codeweavers needed that money to make it into what it is today and Valve provided it.
And that's ok that you don't own any of those systems but you are acting like Steam is unreasonable when the rest of the industry does the same thing.
There is sales on PlayStation and Xbox all the time too but why aren't most of those games unplayed and more bought on Steam? Because the market decided that was the best platform to buy it on. Do you not think Xbox and PlayStation "create FOMO" by offering sales too or just Steam?
And sure if you want to play old games or Indie games lots of options exist Itch.io is a good one too in addition to GOG.
But that's not really what's being talked about is it? This was about which storefront is better for consumers and most gaming consumers are playing AAA titles and of the storefront options for those titles there exist Steam, Epic, Xbox, and PlayStation and on some games itch.io and GOG but like I said before out of all those options Steam is the best one for new games and even old games sometimes when the developers don't give their GOG versions love like they should.
GOG gets shafted on updates and DLC and also doesn't even usually have like 70% of new games as an option to buy on them at all. Yes, I too prefer to own games but like I mentioned that isn't always the best option on GOG because of reasons stated above.
Also my abandonware and some others have had Malware problems in the past although so has Steam but it gets caught on steam usually quicker.
I don’t think Steam is unreasonable, I just think they get way more goodwill from their customers than they probably deserve. It’s like with Apple or the Catholic Church. A lot of people love them but they do have ugly sides.
I think convincing people to buy games they never play is a scuzzy thing to do. Is it as scuzzy as gambling? No. But it’s not up there with something like a co-op bakery or coffee shop that sells products (and a cozy environment) at a reasonable price that people actually enjoy.
People have been saying “well they support indie game developers” and sure, yes indie game developers sell a lot of games during Steam sales. But there’s a problem there too: if loads of people are buying indie games but not playing them then that distorts the indie game market. It takes revenue away from less-well-known developers and gives it to popular/viral flash sale developers whose games people aren’t playing. That’s bad for anyone who wants to reward developers for making better games that we actually want to play but otherwise haven’t heard about.
That's fair. They do a few things I don't appreciate but overall I like them a lot better than any alternative other than GOG but I do hate that developers don't update stuff the way it deserves on there sometimes.
Its always good to be a little critical of any service.
But the thing about the sales is that the developers and publishers set the sale price, not Valve. Valve still takes the cut of course.
But the reason you are seeing that most people buy them and don't play them on there specifically is because it's just the most used service for gaming. They have a higher userbase than playstation and Xbox combined. And that really just ties in with them being the most customer friendly.
I'm not saying they arent without faults but they are better overall than any of the competition.
Also to add to this PlayStation has been known to limit and straight up restrict indie developers sales prices on their platform sometimes straight up not letting them do it at all. So that's another reason it all ties together to Valve not being a shit company. I'm sure that Xbox probably does the same thing but haven't researched it as I sold my Xbox when they did the gamepass price hike this last time.
In my opinion letting indie developers set their own sale prices is good for the industry. But not letting them certainly isn't.
https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/7/224446432324091426/
Many games on Steam don't have any DRM enabled and will boot without it. You just need to check
Wait, why we should not argue? Steam is not perfect so we yap. Also not good enough considering it's just a game listing library and still taking 30% cut from devs imo.
Never said not to argue.
I said imagine your argument being that because a service does sales all the time and consumer relations better than almost all the competition available in the industry that that's a bad thing because people spend money on said sales.
Its a bit of a shit argument.
"They have so many sales all the time that they force people into spending money they shouldn't spend! And that's bad!!"
Also, all those devs are free to use any other platform that doesn't take 30%.
Remind me again how much PlayStation and Xbox take? Oh yeah, 30% huh.
"Never said not to argue." Ok.
Btw, PlayStation and Xbox provide whole console system, Apple store and Google play are also 30% and they provide iOS and Android. It's not same as Valve.
Me saying "imagine arguing" is the same same as saying "your argument is stupid because" and that is not the same as saying not to argue.
I said imagine arguing the points they argued because they are silly. Lots of storefronts have sales shit epic even gives shit away for free every week and gives 20% back in points when you buy a game fron them but you don't hear anyone talking about how they "create FOMO" by not participating in their storefront.
Its a dumb argument. That is what "imagine arguing" means in that context. Hope that helps.
And yeah they make the console that you have to pay a fee to use internet on. Valve doesn't do that. If you stop paying their exorbitant fees to use the internet you pay for already to play their games online then you lose half the functionality of your game that you bought. (For multiplayer ones of course).
Valve also makes systems but yes it isn't quite the same as how PS and Xbox do it I understand what you are saying. However, everyone acts like Steam is greedy dickheads for charging the exact same rate other platforms charge without also charging you some dumb online play fee which is the real greedy fuckery. Despite them having more users than PlayStation and Xbox combined.
I think its funny that no one calls out the other companies greedy fuckery though. Just the one that is the nicest to their consumers (being steam)
LIKE GOG THAT ALSO TAKES 30%
Where's your hate for GOG though? I don't see it.
I never said GOG is good either, chill.
You're still defending Steam’s 30% fee for no good reason besides cherry-picking failed competitors.
Also if you think “sale is good” and “Steam is customer friendly” (I think so too), why are you so mad when I talked about Steam’s 30% fee? I just said 30% is too high for just a game launcher. Fee acts like tariff, if Steam lowers fee little bit, game price will go down too. Which is super customer friendly. Don’t you like it?
Look, I don’t care how much you fangirling Steam, but it certainly doesn’t help Steam any better.
You mean all of them? PlayStation, Xbox, and GOG literally the only two that don't do this is Itch.io and Epic and Epic games store hasn't been profitable since it came out in 2018. And Itch is pretty much indie games only. Please name one other competitor that sells AAA titles that doesn't do that besides epic which again hasn't been profitable as a game store since 2018. They supplement it all with that fortnite money.
You want steam to be the only one that has AAA titles for sale that doesn't take the same percentage cut every single other one takes?
Not fangirling either I'm pointing out that your hate is completely unwarranted. You should hate the gaming industry as a whole if you hate the pricing model it has set up.
The reason people put their games on PlayStation, Xbox, GOG and Steam is because that's where all the players are. They could easily only sell it on Epic and not sell well if they wanted to do that. (The fee being so low on Epic is why they don't make money BTW give it a search online)
These developers could even set up their own payment processing system and sell it directly on their own website which would take about, oh look at that 20 - 30% of profits without any of the exposure PS, Xbox, GOG, and Steam gives you. I wonder why they don't do that if its such a bad deal for them? (Payment processing fees, bank fees, website hosting fees - add it all up you're not talking about some random checking account you're talking about an account moving millions of dollars through it)
You know Xbox and PlayStation could also stop charging you for the internet you already pay for and that would be super consumer friendly too. Also could not take 30% "Don't you like it?" GOG could do it too. What's stopping them?
Also no, I'm "mad" because you willfully misunderstood what I said earlier and said I was saying not to argue which is not what I said. But ok, let's argue about it, then. You dont seem to know what you are talking about because so far your argument is shit because every single other competitor does what you're crying about steam doing. Except the one losing money.
So your position is a store should never have sales? Besides, pretty sure games need to willingly participate to be on sale. e.g. factorio has never been on sale.
I didn’t give my position.
I don’t participate in steam sales anymore. I don’t buy anything on steam because I’ve already got way more games than I’ll ever be able to play. If there’s a new game that I really want to play I’ll try to get it from outside steam if I can, or at the very least make sure it’s DRM-free so I can play it without launching the steam client (I hate the steam client but that’s just my opinion and I won’t tell anyone else what to feel about it).
Do I think they should be banned from having sales? No. I also don’t think gambling should be made illegal even though I’ll continue trying to warn people away from gambling.
so you yourself is an example of how sales don't make you spend money...
personally i don't really buy random games because they are on sale. like, i go through the list of games shown on the steam sale page and most of the time i will find nothing interesting. what usually happens is i would wishlist games i want to play, then wait until steam sales and see if i get a discount.
I’m not a compulsive gambler either, but I have friends who are. Am I not allowed to be opposed to gambling?
What exactly should be done about that?
Done about what? I stopped using steam. I buy games directly from developers or from GOG or humble bundle as well as just supporting open source games.
Nothing I can do about GabeN’s yachts though!
About people buying more games then they need. you are acting like that is gabe's fault.
Its even crazier when that dude realizes that Steam doesn't even set the prices, the game developers and publishers do.
I feel like people don't understand this a lot
I mean you can blame gamblers for losing all their money to Las Vegas too but that’s not a common opinion on Lemmy!
How are those the same?
A sale that happens every few months or even weeks is the same as gambling? Sure i buy more id a game is on sale.. But not because of fomo but because i can save money?
No, it’s not the same as gambling, but it does exploit weaknesses in human psychology to get people to buy things they don’t need.
If you’re buying a game that you’ll never play just because it’s on sale, you’re not saving money.
You would be happy to know that Steam doesn't set the sales prices, the developers and publishers of games do that.
So whether you buy their game on GOG or Steam, you are directly supporting the people that set those sales.
Best not to buy any games that go on sales to keep true to your values!
Developers and publishers set the prices of sales like CD Projekt who makes Cyberpunk and has a 65% off sale right now.
So look at that, the company that owns GOG is one of the companies you're upset about making all those sales and "taking money" from people.
Wheres the hate man? Why not boycott?
Or is that only for Steam and not really about who sets the sales?
I mean if you're going to be outraged at least have some consistency about it.
Sounds like the only thing you're upset about that Valve controls is more people use it and the CEO has a yacht. Due to those sales that your beloved owners of GOG set.
ALSO GOG ALSO TAKES A 30% CUT
It’s not sales specifically that I have an issue with, it’s a business model based on selling people tons of games they don’t play. Is GOG doing that too? Well I don’t like that either, but at least I can take my games with me when I leave GOG because they’re DRM free downloads from a web browser.
Yeah the owners of GOG (CD Projekt) aren't rich either?
Idk man the games you play are designed by groups of people (maybe except our Stardew Valleys and whatnot) and those people spend hours upon hours developing said games.
You know that takes money to make happen right?
dude owns the yacht manufacturer. lots of people can own yachts. he owns the shipyard that makes the yachts.
When he dies gaming is indie.
he's like the willy wonka of video games
oh and this is my 200th comment here on this lemmy instance. seriously!
I'm pretty reluctant to be this flattening towards Gabe Newell and Valve.
Once Google was seen as one of the good companies. "Googling" became synonimous with searching on the internet. Most if not all competitors went bankrupt. When Google was accused of monopolistic behavior, its fans treated it as an attack on "perfection". Google Chrome was a fast browser requiring less memory than its competitors. People saw them owning YouTube as a good thing. The most common form of toxicity towards new users in the Linux community was only providing lmgtfy links to them (I did get the occasional custom WinXP ISO torrent link too). Even their motto was don't be evil.
And then came the YouTube content ID system. And then they were reluctant to throw off the far-right from their platform for breaking their ToS during Gamergate. Then they dropped the motto. Then they put ads into the Google search results. Then they let the far-right control their platform before the 2024 elections. And also they're pushing AI hard.
Will Gabe Newell stick to his ideas, or get an anyeurism and join the Trump oligarchs?
It is fair to compare Google to Valve only in a category of "once been good". Other than that, 2 different companies with 2 different mottos.
How do you write all this and fail to mention that search doesn't even fucking work anymore?
I'm not arguing with you. But internet searching aDOEA NOT WORK ANYMROE.
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
Not perfect, but better than Google.
No it is t.
DuckDuckGo is a horrible search engine.
Google is a horrible search engine.
Bing is horrible.
They all fucking suck.
So, you are afraid to have an opinion in case future events make it invalid?
How do you support literally anything with this mindset?
Elon Musk might be haunted by the three spirits of not being racist this christmas and give away all his possessions. Nonetheless, I'm happy to call him wanker today, because it's an accurate representation of reality at present.
Thing is Valve is a private company with a flat structure and shared ownership that encourages moving between departments.
Basically, it's just a club of people doing whatever they want and they happen to all love videogames.
It seems like everyone has already forgotten how he introduced gambling to kids.
nahhh, lootboxes existed before CS:GO or TF2. and neither was supposed to be for kids in the first place! card games like MTG were one of the first mass created to use those mechanics
you know what was supposed to be for kids, had (& still has) lootboxes galore and other predatory monetisation tactics? Wizard101 (2008)
i don't see many people complaining about MtG or Wizard101, but folks love to point out how Gaben did a bad thing by taking something that was already a concept (that people liked) and making it digital, whereby he accidentally created something he could never uncreate
I have to disagree. Loot boxes definitely existed before CS:GO and TF2, but Valve has still been really predatory about it, dodging regulation and refusing to seriously address the issues in CS for years now. The recent update they did that cut down the CS market was a step in the right direction but far too late imo.
still doesn't change the fact that that's not a game for kids, and the adults for whom that game was made can make as many bad decisions with their money as they can afford
i'm not in favour of gambling for children don't get me wrong, in fact i was once a victim of it (thanks to wizard101, a game advertised as and marketed for children), but Valve just did not enage in that. if a child is playing a game that's clearly marked "M" or "PEGI 18" then it's the parents' responsibility to figure out if its something appropriate for their child
both tf2 and cs aren't games for kids. if the kids' parents let them play those games and spend real money on them, that's the parents' fault for letting their kids do that.
In addition to everything said, I'm pretty sure it was Oculus and John Carmack who did most of the work on getting VR to where it is.
Half-Life: Alyx is still the best FPS VR game I've played. Great story, environment, production values, variety, everything.
https://www.metacritic.com/game/half-life-alyx/
Yeah, I've played it using my Oculus Quest 1, too. It is the most game-like VR game, as opposed to most VR games that are more mini-games. But I've definitely spent more time in those mini-games than Alyx.
GabeN is one of those guys who'll likely die a hero. Whoever comes after him has a chance of selling out and enshittifying everything he built though.
I'm sus on GabeN
Love live Lord Gaben!
Totally untrue that they will replace faulty hardware. Was one of the first people to buy the Index. After a year the headset just stopped displaying any video.
Tried everything to fix. Even reached out asking for hardware documentation so I could fix it myself. They don't provide the documentation and they refused to fix or replace the headset.
Basically stole $1500 from me.
Everyone is excited to buy the new VR headset they are making but I'm steering clear.
You must have gotten a bad rep or something. I had a very similar situation, first with a lighthouse and then the headset itself. They replaced both free of charge, only asked that I send the broken ones back both times. Even sent me free shipping labels.
I think I did. Went back and forth on a support request about 20 replies deep and just gave up on any hope they would help me.
Honestly surprised me given everyone else's experiences I read about back then.
It is what is I guess. Glad everyone else seems to have been treated well though
I was not given a refund when MH World launched on PC in a broken, framelocked, constantly disconnecting state.
I tried and I was not granted one.
Ok GabeN junior
Also, steam deck and steam machines aren't sold at a loss
The steam deck was sold at a loss
The steam machine doesn't have a price yet
Got a source for that? Best I can find are "implications", like Gaben saying the deck's pricing is "very aggresive" and that the parts used sum up to roughly 1k dollars
You really need to learn how to learn about shit without people having to spoon feed you like a baby.
https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/gabe-newell-says-steam-decks-aggressive-pricing-painful-but-critical-2995253
I mention "best I can find are implications", I ask for a source and you paste the article bit that literally states "the implication "
Are you saying you want to harm these steam decks?!
"gaymers"
intentional or not?
Intentional and gaymer
Encouraging customers to spend less money by having sales is certainly one interpretation
How does it taste? The cock of a Gabe?
"No one does sales"
Sure. Don't even need to get past the first line. I send my regards to OP.
Eh, its true that no-one does sales like Valve. Even while the sales aren't as good as they used to be, Steam pretty much forced the market to move on what a "good" discount was. Calling it a nice move to save you money is a joke but they really did bring prices down in the whole market.
Valve is king of kiddie gambling. They are rich so why they money grubbing. Pathetic company.
the games with lootboxes that valve owns are not for kids, and their parents should be the ones that make sure they don't get addicted to gambling by not buying loot boxes for their kids.
Valve does literally the bare minimum to avoid getting sued. They've probably spent millions of dollars on the salaries for lawyers and psychologists to come up with a new gambling system that bypasses the laws since lootboxes are being regulated all over.
Pull your head out of the sand.
and valve is supposed to parent kids, not their actual parents? valve can be good or evil, it doesn't change the fact that parents should take better care of their kids
What brainwashed G*mer sheep
Defending the monopolistic.
Loot box pushing
Gambling economy boosting
Seasonal FOMO instigator
Broken game seller
Asset flips exploiter
Refund pusher backer (he pushed hard against it from the start until the EU told them to fuck off with that shit)
Yeah, I was never a fan of Tim Sweeney
Lol give me a break... Look, Gabe is a billionaire and yes that puts him on "piece of shit" scale. But it seems you really had to dig deep to think of things here. Seasonal FOMO instigator? Really?
Trying to bring up the seasonal item drops in games like TF2, while still keeping the rhythm of the rest of the comment is quite hard.
If you have a better way of putting it I'm all ears.
How about just leave it out entirely
G*mers hate it in other games. Why should I give Valve a free pass.
I knew you'd be here. And with bad takes as usual.
For as long as G*mers are mindless monopoly defending sheep. I'll never rest.
Fuck G*mers
monopolistic? what even is a monopoly anyway? afaik there are a bunch of alternatives for steam.
loot box pushing. yeah, they do that unfortunately. though parents should really take better care of their children, so that they don't get addicted to gambling.
what is a Seasonal FOMO instigator?
steam sells whstever people pay to put in the store. if the game is broken you can review it badly and ask for a refund.
what is an assets flip exploiter?
and even if they pushed against the current refund policy, they do have one of the best refund policies for customers afaik.
And these two came out of nowhere and have no backbone to support either of these.
Other points are also debateable:
By definition Valve is not monopoly. Even if we stretch the meaning, Valve would still barely fall under the definition. They are not the ones who decides what games to be sold and at what price. They do have competition and they are not continuously destroying it.
They adapted lootboxes? Yes! Do they insist on lootboxes? No. These are purely cosmetic and bring no advantage whatsoever. (Except TF2 but you still can get all weps by playing the game and not spending a cent. Also game is half-dead anyway) Many games adopted lootboxes, and some, like Star Wars Battlefront 2, had them as a pay-2-win option.
Not Valve was the one to create csgolobby and other external gambling sites. They did slightly restrict gamingling by locking items as non-tradeable for a week from the time of purchase. That is not enough to kill it, but it does restrict gambling for a bit.
What exacltly fomo is with Steam? You'd say - sales. Dunno how anyone uses them but I go to check sales - if I see something I like and am willing to pay for, I buy it. I see It Takes Two for 9.99? I get! I see Need For Speed The Run for 9.99 - I pass. I don't have to buy anything I wouldn't play on a Steam sale even if it costs fraction of the full price.
Fomo is when League of Legends runs winter/championship skins in store claiming that is one-time offer and that skins never are coming back to be sold so people buy them to look unique in game. This is fomo. And it becomes even more of a clown fiesta when these skins come to store a year later. Maybe even with the same one-time-offer claim.