We’ve tried nothing and we’re out of ideas.
What do you mean? They tried the most capitalist of solutions, buying themselves into the space free games and exclusivity! It’s a shame it takes a bit more than just being able to click “play” (and not even that in Linux) to have a shop front people want to use.
Yeah, and their unknowable secret sauce to win capitalism was to not overdo it and enshittify. Wild stuff. Who could tell that keeping your userbase happy is more productive in the long term than chasing “growth” at every turn?
Give it a generation or three, but yes.
Companies that “haven’t gone evil” yet are like dynasties that aren’t ruled by a mad king, yet.
It usually comes after the original founder leaves or dies.
Yeah it’ll be extremely interesting to see the post-Gabe Valve era
I’m terrified, honestly.
Steam has problems, Epic games could fix that. They choose to whine about it on social media instead.
They could, but they won’t.
The major way they broke capitalism was by not going public. Gabe has to answer to nobody, so the usual gang of corporate fucking idiots can’t force him to do short sighted shit to make a short term squeeze at the cost of long term viability.
This is the key. It’s the WHOLE thing. A runaway cap table destroys companies, always. Investors have different exit horizons and they are fundamentally incompatible with long term viability.
All you need to do to compete with a publicly owned company is capitalism is wait for their investors to get too greedy.
I’ve been screaming this exact sentiment into the void for a long time, so it’s nice to see someone else who understands.
The main reason companies are getting so shitty right now isn’t a blanket “capitalism bad”. Companies need to have a clear goal that they pursue with a coherent vision, and that is impossible when you auction away control of the driver’s seat to a comittee of random people with varying interests.
Fixing those problems wouldn’t get anyone to move over. It’s another launcher and store. Who the fuck wants that? Until GabeN dies, Valve is taken public, and things get straight up shitty on Steam, nobody’s going to start buying games on another platform.
Don’t be shitbags and at least try customer service.
These fuckers have tried everything except shipping a decent product.
BS. Steam offers games simply without the bull. They didn’t break capitalism, they just didn’t enshitten their platform.
Or maybe they broke capitalism in the sense that they are showing that the shit they teach MBAs isn’t the only or even the best path to profit and if enough people adopt (or return to) that way of doing business, they can dominate their markets and compete directly with the venture capital class that tries to compete with its financial weight more than whatever products or services it is currently peddling.
I mean, this part is so obvious to me right now. With all the complete shit products out there that have so many anti-features that I often just stop looking for things rather than get enticed by the good features, I think that competitors that come in with the intent of making good quality shit people want (where “good” can even just mean “doesn’t try to spy on you”) could similarly dominate their markets. And if people don’t chase empires to become billionaires, I think there’s a lot of room in all markets even when certain players come to dominate their local area (considering physical markets more than digital ones, since they scale very differently, though I do think that some thought could be put in to how to do this for digital markets, too… Maybe some drastic changes to IP laws).
When Gabe passes one day and the next owner is some business dimwit and makes steam really win capitalism, pretty sure we’ll jump to GoG. That’s my headcanon at least. Because that’s what always happens to private companies when the person who cares about the thing no longer leads the company.
No I don’t want to lose my library 😭
How?
I try to buy GoG over Steam, at any price, but the vast majority of the time the game I want is only on Steam, or Steam/1st party launcher.
They’ve got the whole market.
It’s a chicken and egg kind of problem. But ultimately, it’s where gamers go. Where we vote to put our dollars basically. If it’s GoG or some other platform that becomes open source or something that works to build a good product, that’s where publishers will eventually move to as well after the paying audience moves. But yeah, of course lots of big name studios will fight tooth and nail and won’t supply DRM free versions willingly.
Unless policy gets instituted to force them of course.
https://www.theverge.com/policy/1013521/video-game-ownership-bill-congress-power-to-the-players-act
The paying audience is not going to move though. I hate to say it, but gamers (in aggregate, not individually) have proven they will collectively buy stuff with horrible MTX and other anti-features. If Steam gets these, they will not budge until it is too late.
I don’t disagree. We’ll have to feel pain before anyone changes. That’s how conservative, reactionary thinking works. Until gas in the US went people didn’t give a shit about their neighbors and fascism. Personal harm/gain move people more than empathy or anecdotes unfortunately. Good ole capitalism reinforcing selfishness and narcissim.
Is GoG immune?
For a while, maybe? It’s very tempting to sell out, and most people succumb.
Not entirely, but they’re focused on delivering DRM free copies for your purchases. So if they were to pivot and revoke your library, that part is impossible if you’ve downloaded your DRM free installation files.
Do you keep an up to date copy of all your games installers?
I have some games on GoG. But when I wanted to install games, I got their launcher installer. You need to go through some dark path to find the true installer. At least it was the case a couple years back.
Also a few month ago they putted an announce to hire someone to lead the Galaxy launcher. They explicitly asked for someone that would push the use of AI in their team.
I fear the moment they gain enough traction, the game won’t be as easy to install DRM free. Their launcher will be the DRM, just like steam.
So yeah, they provide an escape hatch for now, but sadly other than that it looks to me they are more like Epic than Valve. I have not much trust for them.
(Maybe Humble Bundle stopping to provide DRM free download of the game + the steam key eaeliy on made me very skeptical of this?)
You need to go through some dark path to find the true installer. At least it was the case a couple years back.
No? Literally just go to your games page on the website, click the game, and “Download Offline Backup Game Installers” is right where it’s been for as long as I can remember.
When you know you have DRM free installers on this store, and you “just” want to download them. Where do you click?
The big blue button or the little
line that look like it is a title? It is exactly like the cookies popup that show front and center the “accept all” button, but hide in text at the top somewhere the “Continue without accepting cookies” link.For me to not call that a dark pattern you need to have the same visual language for both download:
- Both a big blue button ✅
- Both a link ✅
- One is a big blue button, the other is hidden behind some sort of title that don’t look clickable? ❌
I mean, I feel like they put the client download front and center because the vast majority of people don’t actually want to manually download their game installers. The option is still very much there for those who do and collapsible sections like that are very common in interface design, though I am not sure why yours even looks like that when mine doesn’t. Either way, that is not something I’d call a dark pattern. You still get the DRM free game installed either way, so I find what you’re complaining about to be such a non-issue.
Edit: Actually, upon further inspection, Hollow Knight is collapsed for me by default but none of my other games are. Who knows why, I still think it’s a non-issue though and not as nefarious as you are implying.
Gabe doesn’t even work at valve anymore. He passed the torch long ago. Please don’t keep repeating this.
Really who runs it?
A collective of knives and boats.
Wikipedia still shows him as the majority owner and president. Could you perhaps go update it with the updated information and sources if you know better?
They “broke it”?
I mean sure nobody likes capitalism here but have they actually tried making a better product?
To be fair, he’s kinda right about it. You can’t JUST make a better product and hope gamers will move to your platform. Everyone’s got dozens if not hundreds of games on Steam and nobody wants to sit in two gardens.
To get people to move over, Steam would actively have to turn shit too. There’s nothing you can do to make a platform so much better than Steam currently is that it would entice people to move over. Perhaps if it sucked your dick while you’re playing?
That’s a separate point from Epic itself being shit.
That should be easy for them because they’re really good at sucking
Valve “made a better product than we ever could” former Epic dev says “I don’t think we can ever build something that isn’t slop”
It’s just as much that epic shit the bed when they first introduced their launcher/store by very clearly taking the “shitty capitalism” path that tries to compete by killing off competition with exclusivity deals and later throwing money at players with free games. Not to mention not even trying to compete on some of the things that gives steam more value to many users.
It was clear they were trying to do to video games what uber and abnb tried to do to taxis and hotels and use venture capital money to undercut the existing market with the intent of being able to set whatever price later when their competition died off but were even less successful than the other two corps, who still managed to become big players in their market even if they didn’t kill off the competition.
For me personally, not only am I uninterested in epic’s store, but I don’t wasn’t to see them succeed. Even if they started doing the good things, I wouldn’t trust that they’d keep it up if they managed to get to steam’s market position. They showed their cards too soon with trying to open up with exclusives.
itch and gog are both great storefronts and I continue to buy games from both of those. At this point the only person who can defeat Steam is Steam itself. You might laugh but I’ve seen a change in leadership absolutely destroy companies before. Let us all pray that Gaben lives forever. The next person might run Steam into the ground to make himself richer, just like all our American CEO’s.
I’m liking itch’s new launcher too
Steam… “broke” capitalism?
I think they mean “won.”
To quote the article: “Competition in this space is not only uninteresting to most Steam users, it’s actively denigrated!” He then says.
And then: “As long as Valve is independent and not a publicly traded company,” it looks impossible for Steam to be overthrown as the de-facto PC gaming marketplace.
(Sorry I don’t know how to do quotes)
This entire article tongue in cheek shows the thinking behind these ceos and how out of touch they are. The vibes I get from just scrolling here and listening, plus listening to the market in general, people are moving away from the evil, and ai whomever is least evil, wins the attention.
This guy compeletely ignores the inbetween the lines of his own words, Steam isn’t publicly traded, so doesn’t put shareholders above the actual product and it’s users. The ai isn’t used in the same ways, it’s pretty obvious to anyone who isn’t actively hallucinating , everyone hates ai.
They want an equal share of the market, and instead of listening this article (not bagging the article) highlights how much he instead sucks on sour grapes, and blames the gamers for being rusted on fans, rather than examining where they might have gone wrong, acknowledging and listening. The fact he’s unable to listen is going to actively keep users from Epic.
People just want to feel like they aren’t seen as cows to milk, in ever decreasingly comfortable and trapped ways. They want to feel listened to and be able to use the product. They don’t want to be force fed pigs pigswill and told to like it. There almost seems to be a fetish level hate towards the customers / consumers from these elitist idiot ceos etc. On a base level anyone could tell you that’s not a good business model.
The market is so fed up with all the things said out loud that previously weren’t. The whole “we own you” spiel from the top companies and ceos around the world. Gamers would more likely pack in the internet and retro game or build their own infrastructure (like has been done here) and ignore them all.
This guys egomaniacal take is just absolutely going to sink the entirely ship.
There’s an argument that steam take too high a cut from developers, but if that keeps it stable as is for a very long time, instead of tipping the scale and leading to a publicly traded company, so be it.
You can do the greater than symbol for quotes at the start to do quotes.
“>” Like this
Like this
Anticompete laws are a thing, but I don’t know if they’re applicable at this point to anything valve does.
Epic could also just try to not be utterly shite. I personally won’t touch it as long as sweeny is involved and they are deep-throating AI.
Like I enjoy a lot of what Valve does but people who simp to the extreme levels we see on Lemmy are honestly wild to me.
Two points to be contended with:
- Valve are getting 20-30% of every sale. Other marketplaces - notably Google and Apple - are rightfully despised for this level of rent seeking
- Valve popularized the concept of the loot box in Western games, making money off of children gambling
I think there’s something to be said between mobile app stores and what Valve offers through Steam though.
There’s an argument to be made that yes, developers are functionally giving up an entry fee to Steam’s userbase, but Steam also does run a very compelling platform. If it was just a storefront, I’d agree about rent seeking. But you get a pretty elaborate set of features that are legitimately what sets Steam apart from other stores:
- Steam community forums
- News feeds to make publishing patch notes easier
- Steam workshop for easy integration of community content
- A robust social network, with integration into the game for an easy means of inviting, hosting and joining games to meet parity with Consoles
- Steam’s whole CDN/versioning depot
- a swath of marketing tools, Proton for multi-platform compatibility, etc.
For both its users and the sellers, Steam is a consistently improving platform. I think they’ve made some less great decisions over the years, or fail to enforce their own guidelines, but largely they continue to innovate and make it clear there’s an interest in making it as complete and accessible am experience as possible.
To your second point, agreed. I despise the loot boxes and I think Valve is pulling some horseshit there. There’s also no forgetting they had virtually no customer support for longer than they’ve had it. Refunds weren’t even an option until 2015, and only came about as the result of multiple consumer rights suits. To their credit, they’ve made a point of doing that as well as they can too, but I still think there’s room for improvement.
Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Google and Apple all take 30% to the point that it is accepted as the standard market rate. Epic points at Valve following the same standard and says they are greedy and now everyone parrots the Valve is bad claim. I’m sorry but I never bought this argument Maybe we should claim it’s a problem with the industry as a whole instead of pointing to just one company following what others have been charging.
It’s an equally large problem on each platform, yet for some reason Valve gets vigorously defended any time they receive criticism.
Probably because, out of all those entities doing the same shit, Valve is the only one who bothers to give even so much as a passing thought towards treating their customers right too. The rest of them just view us as walking wallets who are unfairly keeping their money away from them.
Valve absolutely fucks up too, but when you’re surrounded by psychos, it’s easy to see the guy who’s merely kind of a dick as the good guy.
So I can guarantee you that there’s a lot of good things coming out from for example Google - massive amounts of contributions to open source for example.
We don’t forget the bad things Google do, however, nor do we defend them, because we understand what they are.
Understand what Valve is as well.
Google is a terrible example. They are assisting in the destruction of the Internet for their own gain, never mind the while AI data centers destroying the environment thing.
Valve is the least shitty option in a sea of garbage. If you find an oasis in the desert, do you complain that the water isn’t cold? Someone could do better, yes; but they haven’t.
Google and Apple both take 30% on everything, but that recently changed it to 15% for a developer’s first 1million dollars, and for subscriptions.
Valve are getting 20-30% of every sale. Other marketplaces - notably Google and Apple - are rightfully despised for this level of rent seeking
The contention is that you’re using Epic’s dishonest framing of this argument. Retail fees are not rent seeking, and the only “despising” of Google and Apple came from Epic themselves because they did not want to get any less than all of their MTX money from Fortnite on mobile.
The 30% cut is the standard retail fee. It’s the standard for all storefronts except for two: EGS and Microsoft.
People are tired of being milked and anti consumer practices.
Steam is the only company doing what we expected.
