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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

by pikzen 9y ago

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.

strathmeyer 9y ago
> Joke's on you, I enjoy having cases Maybe ask yourself what happened to all of yours?
- fb03 9y ago
  probably faded, ripped, crooked, cracked, lost, and any combination of those ;-)
  - pikzen 9y ago
    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?
pavel_lishin 9y ago
> 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.
- tetha 9y ago
  > 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.
cestith 9y ago
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.
- y4mi 9y ago
  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.
- pikzen 9y ago
  Coming Soon™ in your stores. >runs the servers that do the matchmaking 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.
  - cestith 9y ago
    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%.

by pikzen 9y ago

strathmeyer 9y ago

> Joke's on you, I enjoy having cases Maybe ask yourself what happened to all of yours?

fb03 9y ago
probably faded, ripped, crooked, cracked, lost, and any combination of those ;-)
- pikzen 9y ago
  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?

pavel_lishin 9y ago

> 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.

tetha 9y ago
> 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.

cestith 9y ago

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.

y4mi 9y ago
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.
pikzen 9y ago
Coming Soon™ in your stores. >runs the servers that do the matchmaking 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.
- cestith 9y ago
  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%.