It’s not an unreasonable cut, the reason they’re successful is they provide such a good service that any time someone thinks “well I don’t wanna pay that 30% cut, I’ll just do it myself” they fail. That 30% is for all the million features that benefit both devs and players which nobody wants to build an alternative for.
It’s not an unreasonable cut, the reason they’re successful is they provide such a good service that any time someone thinks “well I don’t wanna pay that 30% cut, I’ll just do it myself” they fail. That 30% is for all the million features that benefit both devs and players which nobody wants to build an alternative for.
I mean it is unreasonable in that this sort of thing should be publicly owned and operated infrastructure, rather than a digital walled garden for the master who owns it to make obscene profits from
part of what you describe is people “not wanting to build” an alternative, but part of it is also that 1) building an alternative means dealing with breaking into what is effectively a monopoly, and you can see how successful that’s been for Origin/Epic/whatever, who seem to be slowly gaining steam but that’s only after years of literally giving away free $60 games just to get people to download their launcher and 2) having alternatives ultimately degrades the quality for everyone because instead of having one integrated service you now have all these competitors with all their varying (or missing) features and just the general hassle of having to keep up with what’s on any of them
There’s a very important detail that is missing here, namely that Steam has a clause where you cannot list your game elsewhere for less than you list it on Steam. Many indie games are published to Itch.io and Steam, but Valve forces them to list both at the same price, meaning thay since most gamers use Steam they will automatically choose the version that invisibly only gives the devs 70% of the revenue. Sure Valve does have lots of nice features, but those features could be duplicated over time by one of Valve’s competitors. The problem is that to get a competing platform off of the ground, you need to entice people with lower prices since you can’t compete on features. Valve uses its monopoly status to make this impossible.
Epic Game Store has pretty much succeeded with their weekly free (often quite good!) games. I’ve even bought a few things from them. Unfortunately they fucked up royally and EGS is an unusable slow piece of shit. Really an indictment of modern software engineering practices but they need to ether than entire thing and rewrite it from scratch. Steam is much more performant. Still, EGS shows that it is possible to break in as long as you have a boatload of cash to burn. However, Valve has started to run up the score by making their own their hardware; using EGS on steam deck is a pain.
My understanding is that you cannot sell steam keys to your game at lower than steam prices (since they can’t/don’t take their cut from directly selling those keys). If you had a direct download from your website or from itch you’d be fine to sell that cheaper.
It’s been a little while since I’ve read in detail about this so I’m open to being wrong about it.
Come on, I’m sure you understand that just because they provide a real service does not mean we can’t be critical of rent-extracting bullshit, and the failure of other attempts does not simply happen in a vacuum of perfect meritocracy but instead in the smothering shadow of a pre-existing monopoly.
I was doubtful of people complaining about g*mer communists becoming capitalist apologists when it’s their preferred monopolistic extraction operation, but people really do forget everything they know better than sometimes.
How is that not unreasonable? Your justification is literally just supply and demand.
The exact same justification an employer uses to exploit workers, your argument is “if game devs want better pay, why don’t they go set up their OWN company???”. Actual upbeared justification of technofeudalism.
Massively overcharging on commission, with anti-competitive practices, is kind of the definition of unreasonable in my books. Absolute HONKTONS of people - I’m amazed you emphasise ‘nobody’ in that sentence - want to build alternatives for it, but struggle because Steam has users locked in and deliberately have made it massively inconvenient to ever leave.
These would be interesting challenges in a world where capitalism still exists in half of countries, and socialism exists in a variety of progressed stages, but,
I imagine the company is nationalised by the country it’s headquartered/mostly managed in. Nationals/Allied socialist states get free/subsidised service (ie commissions and purchases), everyone else pays as usual. Efficiency savings for the socialist nations is a net benefit anyway, with the bonus that capitalist states subsidise it, job done.
I hated steam when it first rolled out because I knew it was going to become a monopoly once they ironed out the kinks. Not only was I right it paved the way for a bunch of garbage imitators. Anyway as always the answer is socialism.
It’s not an unreasonable cut, the reason they’re successful is they provide such a good service that any time someone thinks “well I don’t wanna pay that 30% cut, I’ll just do it myself” they fail. That 30% is for all the million features that benefit both devs and players which nobody wants to build an alternative for.
I mean it is unreasonable in that this sort of thing should be publicly owned and operated infrastructure, rather than a digital walled garden for the master who owns it to make obscene profits from
part of what you describe is people “not wanting to build” an alternative, but part of it is also that 1) building an alternative means dealing with breaking into what is effectively a monopoly, and you can see how successful that’s been for Origin/Epic/whatever, who seem to be slowly gaining steam but that’s only after years of literally giving away free $60 games just to get people to download their launcher and 2) having alternatives ultimately degrades the quality for everyone because instead of having one integrated service you now have all these competitors with all their varying (or missing) features and just the general hassle of having to keep up with what’s on any of them
I have seen so many extremely successful games that aren’t on steam though. Starsector immediately springs to mind. Minecraft was never on steam too.
I think genuinely good games do well without steam. I would not attribute success of a game to steam.
There’s a very important detail that is missing here, namely that Steam has a clause where you cannot list your game elsewhere for less than you list it on Steam. Many indie games are published to Itch.io and Steam, but Valve forces them to list both at the same price, meaning thay since most gamers use Steam they will automatically choose the version that invisibly only gives the devs 70% of the revenue. Sure Valve does have lots of nice features, but those features could be duplicated over time by one of Valve’s competitors. The problem is that to get a competing platform off of the ground, you need to entice people with lower prices since you can’t compete on features. Valve uses its monopoly status to make this impossible.
Epic Game Store has pretty much succeeded with their weekly free (often quite good!) games. I’ve even bought a few things from them. Unfortunately they fucked up royally and EGS is an unusable slow piece of shit. Really an indictment of modern software engineering practices but they need to ether than entire thing and rewrite it from scratch. Steam is much more performant. Still, EGS shows that it is possible to break in as long as you have a boatload of cash to burn. However, Valve has started to run up the score by making their own their hardware; using EGS on steam deck is a pain.
My understanding is that you cannot sell steam keys to your game at lower than steam prices (since they can’t/don’t take their cut from directly selling those keys). If you had a direct download from your website or from itch you’d be fine to sell that cheaper.
It’s been a little while since I’ve read in detail about this so I’m open to being wrong about it.
Come on, I’m sure you understand that just because they provide a real service does not mean we can’t be critical of rent-extracting bullshit, and the failure of other attempts does not simply happen in a vacuum of perfect meritocracy but instead in the smothering shadow of a pre-existing monopoly.
I was doubtful of people complaining about g*mer communists becoming capitalist apologists when it’s their preferred monopolistic extraction operation, but people really do forget everything they know better than sometimes.
How is that not unreasonable? Your justification is literally just supply and demand.
The exact same justification an employer uses to exploit workers, your argument is “if game devs want better pay, why don’t they go set up their OWN company???”. Actual upbeared justification of technofeudalism.
Massively overcharging on commission, with anti-competitive practices, is kind of the definition of unreasonable in my books. Absolute HONKTONS of people - I’m amazed you emphasise ‘nobody’ in that sentence - want to build alternatives for it, but struggle because Steam has users locked in and deliberately have made it massively inconvenient to ever leave.
All the more reason to nationalize Valve and make it better for players and devs.
What does nationalizing an internationally-used online service mean? Genuine question
well first we build a really big guillotine
It becomes sole ownership of the DPRK, I assumed
These would be interesting challenges in a world where capitalism still exists in half of countries, and socialism exists in a variety of progressed stages, but,
I imagine the company is nationalised by the country it’s headquartered/mostly managed in. Nationals/Allied socialist states get free/subsidised service (ie commissions and purchases), everyone else pays as usual. Efficiency savings for the socialist nations is a net benefit anyway, with the bonus that capitalist states subsidise it, job done.
I hated steam when it first rolled out because I knew it was going to become a monopoly once they ironed out the kinks. Not only was I right it paved the way for a bunch of garbage imitators. Anyway as always the answer is socialism.