> Valve themselves eagerly trumpeted that they had paid more than $57 million to Steam Workshop creators over four years — an enormously impressive figure until you realize that it's only 25 percent of the sale price, which means Valve just made $171 million profit from ... setting up an online form where you can submit finished 3D models.
Yeah, come on, you guys! They barely did any of the work! They just set up a form! How dare they expect to be compensated for that? It's not like there's a huge infrastructure powering all of that, that not only required an initial investment of money, time and brainpower, but also requires ongoing maintenance!
The article does raise some good points, but the overall raise-the-pitchforks tone makes it seem less credible - especially when most of the complaints seem to be that Valve is running a profitable business while delivering value to customers. The author forgot what installing and playing games was like before Steam - better write down those CD keys somewhere safe, or never lose the cases - or the CDs themselves. (Or, god forbid, keep the manual around forever so you can refer to line 5 on page 17, and type in the third, seventh and eight word.)
And one of the reasons people hated EA was because EA abused its employees and developers, not because they had a shitty game client; if you want to compare someone to Uber/Lyft/AirBNB, they are a much closer candidate.
The centralization Valve represents is dangerous, but from my perspective they have been thus far mostly responsible with their near monopoly. I know it would be pretty easy for me at least to totally 'opt out' and move to buying direct from publishers but Steam is dang convenient. Increasing Valve hate smells like paranoia and bitterness at them not doing single player games these days.
Hey, I'm hosting a server with a shitty PHP app, but you can put your addons on it. I'm just asking for 75% of your income. Not profit, no, income. I'm running the infrastructure after all. Not to mention that this 25% figure is largely exaggerated, and it's closer to 7-8% in reality.
Steam is not all bad. But the last thing Valve needs is people defending them, because they have been doing fuck all work for the past years. Delegating everything to the community is not work. Steamworks API is still a joke. Greeenlight is a joke. 99% the cosmetics they are putting out are done by the community. CSGO skins? Done by the community. DotA2 skins? done by the community. Team Fortress 2 items? I can't even remember the last time the game was updated with some thing they made themselves. They outsourced an update to the community, ffs.
The last time Steam itself had a meaningful update was years ago. Still waiting on an actually good Big Picture mode.
I am not saying they do not deserve payment for their work. Just that the ratios are heavily skewed in their favour and as the only serious players in the market, this is bad for everyone but them. Until the day Origin, Uplay, Galaxy, etc. get better (spoiler: never), we are bound to their whims and whishes. You can be the most benevolent dictator of all time, you're still a dictator, and I'm still going to protest.
>better write down those CD keys somewhere safe, or never lose the cases - or the CDs themselves.
Joke's on you, I enjoy having cases. I actually miss having physical boxes and manuals and all the goodies that came with games.
> Hey, I'm hosting a server with a shitty PHP app, but you can put your addons on it. I'm just asking for 75% of your income. Not profit, no, income. I'm running the infrastructure after all. Not to mention that this 25% figure is largely exaggerated, and it's closer to 7-8% in reality.
Cool. Does your shitty PHP app tie into dozens of incredibly popular games, and hundreds more of moderately popular ones? Has it been tested for years, both by in-house QA and real-world friction?
> But the last thing Valve needs is people defending them
Sure, but on the flip side, if someone is going to attack them, they should make sure their arguments are valid, no? Like I said, this article is mostly someone mad that Valve is making money while not putting in as much effort as the author would like them to.
> Steamworks API is still a joke. Greeenlight is a joke. 99% the cosmetics they are putting out are done by the community.
I'll take your word for it - I have never really purchased cosmetics, aside from taking the random drops in TF2. I have heard bad things about Greenlight, but mostly from people upset that game devs don't deliver what they promise after taking your money (and that's as much on them as it is on Valve for empowering that sort of thing.)
And as far as offloading work onto the community... why is that bad again? It's all volunteer-driven. I'd wager that a lot of the people making these things were the type of people who would just use a modded server and load them that way, instead of having an officially sanctioned channel.
> Just that the ratios are heavily skewed in their favour and as the only serious players in the market, this is bad for everyone but them.
That's true, but how is that Steam's fault or problem? You mentioned their competitors; let them compete! What is Steam expected to do about this? Lend them some employees?
> Joke's on you, I enjoy having cases. I actually miss having physical boxes and manuals and all the goodies that came with games.
Sure, and I'm not saying it's wrong to like having physical memorabilia - but the key difference is that if you lose the physical memorabilia, you're fucked, and can't play that game anymore.
> Cool. Does your shitty PHP app tie into dozens of incredibly popular games, and hundreds more of moderately popular ones? Has it been tested for years, both by in-house QA and real-world friction?
And those are just the nasty development parts. Building a CDN like steam is hard and expensive. Many geo-distributed servers, peering arrangements up to hundreds of gbits with many different local ISPs, hardware management. Some globally replicated shop database, search systems. And then operational infrastructure on top of all of that just to able to control and maintain that mess of boxes. Even if at every point in time, something is borked in a network that large.
Politics aside. It's easy to assume steam being simple, because the steam application doesn't do much. But building a system like steam is actually a lot harder than it looks.
Very much all alive! Left in a box since I moved recently, but SNES, N64, PS1, PS2, GameCube, PC games all in rather good state. And yes, some of them are crooked, or faded. But I'm not looking at an art collection there, am I?
Oooh, a hat! Who wrote the game it shows up in, runs the servers that do the matchmaking, and distributes the hat to the customers? Right, you did all the work. I'll remember that next time I play my favorite pikzen game distributed by the pikzen network and run on pikzen servers.
For reference, once cosmetics were introduced (and it was already getting old by the time), TF2 ran a good... two years? without matchmaking servers, only with a master server to list all the public servers. While it's not something you're running on a $5 DigitalOcean instance, it's not exactly super expensive either (especially considering they were down regularly). All the servers were hosted by the community. Microtransactions are the only reason the game got matchmaking.
But I don't know, call me a bleeding heart idealist, but if I'm asking people to come build things for me, I'm not asking for a 75% claim on it because the terrain belongs to me. People didn't ask Valve to make content for them. Valve asked them to.
Actually if I recall correctly, modders were largely making skins and other things for free and distributing them to other players. Then Valve developed a section of their online store and distribution network to allow those mods to be sold for at least some money. Now the split may not be what you consider entirely fair, but 8%, 25%, 75%, or 100% of zero is all the same.
A game without mods is a game. A mod without a game is just digital art. It's their engine, their game rules, their store, their distribution network, and their audience that they've reached with their marketing. Maybe they deserve a bit smaller share than they ask, but who are you going to sell these items to without a game engine, game rules, a store, a distribution network, and an audience to sell them to?
If you gave 30% to an app store, and 20% for marketing, and 25% for someone to vet your items don't break the game, what would that cut be overall? 75%.
No marketing is being done for items aside from announcing them in patch notes.
>25% for someone to vet your items don't break the game
That is not something Valve does, considering the amount of items that clip through models after release. Notwithstanding the fact that items they select are either from modelers that they're already in contact with, or items that were voted up by the community and therefore, tried.
This is exactly where the Polygon article is right. Steam is in a situation of almost monopoly on the market, and you have absolutely zero chances of ever being able to negotiate those rates.
Even the mafia takes less as a protection fee, and they do more work than Valve when it comes to their customers.
> No marketing is being done for items aside from announcing them in patch notes.
None perhaps for the individual add-on items, but there's been marketing to get people involved in the games for which the extra content is made. The audience is there initially because of the game, not initially because of the extra content.
> That is not something Valve does, considering the amount of items that clip through models after release.
That's a shame. I would expect that for the amount they keep they'd do some quality control.
If you want more control and a bigger share, make assets for a non-Valve game. Find an engine, some programmers, a musician, a level designer, and a couple of testers. Publish your own game. Of course, then you'd be splitting the game development share across all of those team members. So depending on the size of the team, 5% to 50% of the game team's share from your 70% from the sale of the game through the store would be that alternative, unless you're prepared to do it as a solo project. That, though, is for the sale price of the whole game rather than a single downloadable item. Then you can do the same with DLC packs. Indie games do tend to sell at lower prices than AAA titles, though.
and let you download said app as many times as you want...
i don't know how many times i've deleted games just to redownload them some time later. i could even continue with the same playthrough because steam kept backups of my save files on their servers.
Standard Oil was running a profitable business while delivering value to customers. So was the International Fruit Company. So is Aramco today, etc. That's no justification for anything.
Comparing Steam to CD distribution is not fair, compare it to GoG. They also have a client, but you can always download DRM-free installation executable and just use it without hassle. You are even allowed to install games that are not Officially Supported™ on your system.
I always first check GoG and itch.io for any game I'm interested in. Maybe it's my taste in indie games, but quite a few authors actually want to have DRM-free release, while Steam will probably never support it.
If you consider being required to login into Steam once to download the game and run it the first time in Steam to be DRM, then yes I suppose Steam will always have DRM. That's not much in the way of DRM though.
Not to go full KiA but "gaming journalism" has been little more than a soapbox for interest groups (be it the corporations that make games or people with political agendas) basically since its inception. Not that it's a good thing, but I don't really think there is ANY mainstream news source for gaming that is truly independent and impartial.
Individual YouTube Let's Play and Twitch streamers kind of can offer individual opinions or commentary on a game, that aren't really entrenched in the game journalism industry or vacuum/echo chamber. Which is more or less, is this fun, and how best to play this game, which is what we used to go to gaming magazines for.
But yeah, any official branch of "journalism" that directly courts advertisers and hires desperate writers fresh out of liberal arts schools who have few job prospects that their communications or journalism degrees are marketable (and may not even be that in to video games when they start) come packaged with the political opinions and agendas shaped by said institutions/departments that really have zilch to do with gaming consumerism or considerations when making a game beyond is this fun and will it sell, but they feel they have to make a difference somehow and use it as their soap box or some grander form of social commentary when most people just want to play Zelda and the creators probably had none of the intentions they project onto it.
One of the problems even in independent games journalism is that developers will maintain relationships with "reviewers" who are incentivized to only leave positive reviews, as not doing so will end their relationship with that developer and thus the supply of free / early released games. As a result, even small time streamers or youtube personalities are in on the fix.
There was also a huge stink about Origin doing some spyware like things when it first release, including I believe sending EA a list of all the files on your HD.
In the case of Steam, it solved a problem. In the case of Origin, the problem was solved and it introduced more problems.
Taking 93% of the sale price seems like a very steep tax to me. No one is saying they shouldn't get a cut, but to take almost all of feels very unfair.
The reason people hate EA was not for how they treat their employees. Maybe treating your employees like shit and releasing terrible, fraudulently advertised products are correlated, but most people who hate EA do not have any way of interacting with "how they treat their employees".
Yeah, come on, you guys! They barely did any of the work! They just set up a form! How dare they expect to be compensated for that? It's not like there's a huge infrastructure powering all of that, that not only required an initial investment of money, time and brainpower, but also requires ongoing maintenance!
The article does raise some good points, but the overall raise-the-pitchforks tone makes it seem less credible - especially when most of the complaints seem to be that Valve is running a profitable business while delivering value to customers. The author forgot what installing and playing games was like before Steam - better write down those CD keys somewhere safe, or never lose the cases - or the CDs themselves. (Or, god forbid, keep the manual around forever so you can refer to line 5 on page 17, and type in the third, seventh and eight word.)
And one of the reasons people hated EA was because EA abused its employees and developers, not because they had a shitty game client; if you want to compare someone to Uber/Lyft/AirBNB, they are a much closer candidate.