10 ms·

The thing with Steam is - at no point in history it felt like the company is just milking its users. Something that otherwise never happens nowadays. Every sing

• gcanyon 4y ago
  I just want to be able to play N++ without having to launch two apps to do so.
• ReptileMan 4y ago
  Being privately owned has its advantages
• afroboy 4y ago
  The answer is simple, the company is not public it's private. it doesn't seek infinite growth which is impossible thing to to.
  • honkdaddy 4y ago
    Yeah this is a key point when you consider Valve’s strategy. Gabe still owns >50%, and is a billionaire without a tonne of outside ventures, he can afford to play around a bit. I think this is why they’ve been able to experiment so much the last few years, to varying success.
    • bayofpigs 4y ago
  • shultays 4y ago
    Didn't it kinda reach the ceiling already when it comes to PC game market share? Hard to grow above that
• LtWorf 4y ago
  > The thing with Steam is - at no point in history it felt like the company is just milking its users. You mean like to "solve the cheaters problem" they made so that free users in tf2 can no longer use the chat, while it's still full of cheaters?
• mojzu 4y ago
  I agree, I've been a happy customer of theirs for ~20 years and always felt like I was getting a good deal, and many of the annoyances of the platform seem mostly imposed by publishers (origin/uplay logins, online/drm requirements etc.) Plus often the strategies competitors cook up actively put me off, I don't want the additional overhead of managing more accounts/payment options/social platforms I already have more then I want. And making me jump through those hoops to play an exclusive game will more often then not mean I just don't play the game
• ninjinxo 4y ago
  You mean the company that pioneered: Microtransactions, real money loot-boxes, gambling, NFT marketplace, battlepasses doesn't milk it's users? Dota used to have $35 "arcanas", a high quality skin for a single hero which were released intermittently - but that wasn't enough money, they're now placed $200+ deep in the yearly battlepass. If you played any of their games, you'd realise they're one of greediest in the business.
  • izietto 4y ago
    TBF I have been playing to Dota for seven years, and I've never spent 1 cent for it.
  • Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    Steam did not pioneer these things. They were a thing in MMO's since around 2000, then rose to ridiculous properties in the early 2010's with Facebook (farmville) and mobile (clash of clans) games. The current spat, I believe, started in 2016 with Overwatch, quickly followed by the series of "live service" games like Fortnite.
  • Terr_ 4y ago
    I think the key is that it feels like Steam-the-marketplace is merely making such tools available to individual developers/publishers of specific games. Then if a game is an exploitative grindfest, blame falls on the dev/publisher for choosing to implement whatever-it-is.
  • badpun 4y ago
    Are you speaking about the game which costed (at least) tens of millions to develop and everyone can play it for free, with no in-play disadvantage?
  • happymellon 4y ago
    Oh, hi Tim Sweeney.
  • philderbeast 4y ago
    the difference is that is not the steam market place, all of that helps people complete with there games, but not steam as a market place.
• sublinear 4y ago
  They don't have to milk the user when they do that to themselves. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't seem there are many PC-exclusive publishers around anymore for several decades now.
• yellow_lead 4y ago
  Of course they do - loot boxes in tf2 and other games enable underage gambling. I can't think of a worse way to monetize your users.
  • ReptileMan 4y ago
    Unlike Magic the Gathering in the 80s and 90s.
    • vultour 4y ago
      MtG is actually much worse because the lootboxes contain items that give you advantage in the game. AFAIK all Valve games only have cosmetic items.
• ClassyJacket 4y ago
  It's privately owned. The requirement for infinite growth so investors can get rich off other people's work is what kills everything publicly traded. It's what is killing Netflix and what will kill Game Pass. I love Steam and I hope it's never bought out. As much as I wish Valve made more games, I'd prefer this to them being publicly traded.
  • everdrive 4y ago
    If they got bought out I’d worry for the future of my game library.
• dmos62 4y ago
  By being a walled garden monopoly, you're inherently milking the users.
  • gchamonlive 4y ago
    It's not, though. I mean, I don't remember the last time something came exclusively through Steam by exclusivity agreements. That cannot be said for Epic Games though. Sure Epic had to come up with ways to increase their competitive advantage while having an inferior product with smaller catalog and worse ux, all problems inherent to a newer product trying to penetrate a consolidated market. Steam felt like it was just there, adding features and improvements in a slow but steady pace and really offering value to both players, by introducing sales and democratizing access to games (sure in the EU and US it might seem less important, but coming from Brazil I can't begin to tell how much of an impact digital outlets had to providing access to quality games on emergent markets), and to developers by single handely making piracy somewhat obsolete. Sure it had problems like high fees for small devs, a case can be said that this monopoly over time started hurting the small dev, or the massive flow of low quality games, but to call it a walled garden is a far cry from reality. We gamers got it good and we sometimes don't appreciate it. Just look at the state of streaming services to see what could have been.
    • dmos62 4y ago
      It's not a monopoly, you're right. I misspoke. It's a walled garden, because you can't use their various services on their own or with third-party services. The games themselves are just rented to you, you can't run them without your Steam account.
      • LinXitoW 4y ago
        You absolutely can, the DRM part of Steam is optional choice by the developer. It can just be a Game Downloader. You can even sell codes in your own store, WITHOUT STEAM GETTING MONEY. That's incredibly generous. I don't understand why you would expect them to give away their features for free. That's like expecting a a restaurant letting you use their cutlery and tables with your own food. Finally, you have never and will never truly own a game. No, not even when they came as CDs. It was always just a limited license.
• Karrot_Kream 4y ago
  The question ultimately is: how do you create an ecosystem which fairly compensates and doesn't brutally overwork game staff? Relying purely on game sales is difficult. Games are expensive to produce and gamers, sans whales, are generally quite price sensitive. Gamers are also a famously tough crowd to please. Indie game economics work by saving costs on production, either by keeping art simple so many fewer artists are required or otherwise constraining the game space. Even then, the majority of indie games flop. I don't have an answer, but everywhere I've looked in the games industry, margins are razor thin.
  • OkayPhysicist 4y ago
    The main issue as I see it in the game dev space (can't speak to other parts of the gaming industry) is that faaaar too many people naively go into it because they like playing video games, got into programming because they were on the computer anyway, and then hop into the industry bright-eyed and bushy tailed. That's just a recipe for mistreatment. Whereas in web-dev, for example, no one is excited at the prospect of developing a new CRUD app for some megacorp, so we get paid handsomely for our skills. Unions may be controversial in the broader software development sphere, but they're obviously desperately needed in game dev. (P.S. Re: "margins are razor thin": A lot of this comes down to the gaming industry's version of Hollywood accounting. The big publishers like EA, Ubisoft, etc. are making a killing off of their mistreatment of their studios' staff)
    • Karrot_Kream 4y ago
      > (P.S. Re: "margins are razor thin": A lot of this comes down to the gaming industry's version of Hollywood accounting. The big publishers like EA, Ubisoft, etc. are making a killing off of their mistreatment of their studios' staff) Sorry, I meant "everywhere I look outside of the big publishers" instead of "everywhere I look." Of course, the big publishers make crazy money by milking old franchises and through large economies of scale. If that's the kind of games industry we want, then it looks like the working model is oligopoly.
  • mschuster91 4y ago
    > The question ultimately is: how do you create an ecosystem which fairly compensates and doesn't brutally overwork game staff? This is a problem that has to be solved by those actually able to do something, and that is the regulatory agencies for the US and EU, not multinational corporations or placing the responsibility on individual consumers. The multinational corporations have no interest in kneecapping their "competitive advantages", and consumers don't care or don't even know just how fucked up the entire entertainment industry is ("crunch time" isn't just an issue in games, but also in movies!). That's stuff like actually enforcing labor regulations (e.g. the Directive 93/104/EC that prescribes a maximum week work time of 48h)... and that linked together with stuff like passing "supply chain laws" (that hold corporations liable for labor rights violations by their suppliers) should put a stop on these practices. Unfortunately, labor regulations enforcement is pretty scarce in the EU as it is, and the US are pretty much a regulatory wild west, at least when seen from an European perspective.
• xbmcuser 4y ago
  Valve is a private corporation that is run to make profits for its owners. It is not run to jack up its stock price so it behaves differently from other corporations it runs more like a family run business not a corporation.
• sascha_sl 4y ago
  "Felt" is really the right word for this, because almost every bad practice in the industry was pioneered by Valve, particularly in TF2. They're just really good at inducing reciprocity. Large scale Microtransactions (TF2). Cosmetic Microtransactions in a Single Player / Coop game (Portal 2). Loot Boxes (TF2, though they really got bad with CS:GO). And worst of all, a planned economy that collects "sales tax" and enables children to gamble. Not even "simulated" gambling where all you get is a cosmetic locked to your account. Just straight up gambling. With cashing out if you happen to be lucky and know when to stop. Oh, and don't forget paid mods - a concept that has similarities to previous Steam Workshop games, but blew up right in their face when it involved a third party that people usually just joke about having their players fix all bugs for them after ship.
  • stonemetal12 4y ago
    Yeah, I even think the mass harvesting of data(steam hardware survey, usage stats) is fun and interesting.
  • somenameforme 4y ago
    Your timeline could use some work. Oblivion's 'horse armor' DLC was in 2006, and the first DLC came about a decade prior. The earliest I could find was the "Cuss Pack" for Redneck Rampage from 1997. Also, you cannot withdraw money from your Steam account.
    • sascha_sl 4y ago
      Very nit-picky. I didn't say DLC itself was bad, but the scale at which TF2 and Portal 2 had these elements was rather unprecedented (having bundles going into the hundreds of dollars). Also, sure, you can't withdraw from a Steam account. But that doesn't mean it's not monetary value. It's easy enough to find someone who wants a game and you buy them a gift and they give you the money instead. And paying for CSGO items outside the ecosystem is tolerated enough that people still do it.
• zppln 4y ago
  Meh, I don't know. The whole reason Steam even exist is because Valve decided to lock CS 1.6 and later HL2 behind it. It's a long time ago now, but the way I remember things people hated Steam for years before the general perception started to change 15 or so years ago. Edit: I'm also pretty sure they patched in-game ads into CS 1.6 at some point, but can't remember for sure. Anyone else recall that?
  • bayofpigs 4y ago
  • tech2 4y ago
    The reason people hated Steam at the time of CS 1.6 is because those people who owned CS on WON would need to repurchase CS on Steam. Since all new players were on Steam it meant that the existing playerbase were excluded (there was no WON/Steam cross-play).
  • faeriechangling 4y ago
    Ah yes I remember steam being called a "steaming pile of shit" and an animated gif of the steam logo using used to drive a piston into a man's rear end being passed around. I recall the friends service was constantly broken. I had a copy of CS 1.5 on USB for local LAN usage. At release internet speeds were honestly too slow and the software was filled with bugs.
  • Shorel 4y ago
    Not really. The reason Steam exists and is as strong as it is, is because every other game developer abandoned PC gaming and went to the consoles, for an entire decade. Including Microsoft. People not only hated Steam, they hated PC gaming.
    • P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
      No, the other poster is right. You had to use Steam to get HL2. This got them on enough PCs that they could build the dominance they have today. There are obviously other reasons for their success, but the other poster is spot on both about what they did, and how many people felt about it at the time.
• a3w 4y ago
  > at no point in history it felt like the company is just milking its users. Still, the EULA states that steam is a subscription, for currently 0 (USD|EUR) per month. So at any time they might increase that fee.
  • a3w 4y ago
    Thanks for the downvotes. Read the EULA. Then think about the rule of the messenger vs. the content of the message.
• RunSet 4y ago
  > The thing with Steam is - at no point in history it felt like the company is just milking its users. As someone who purchased Half-Life in a physical box in a retail store before Steam so much as existed and was happy downloading update patches and using a server browser until Steam forced me to create a Steam account and become a Steam user to continue playing Half-Life online, this is true. I feel more exploited than milked.
• raxxorraxor 4y ago
  Steam milks developers instead of users, so that does indeed tend to generate value for the customer. The situation isn't ideal, but Valve is certainly the least bad option for computer games. Alternative platforms were mostly implemented by larger studios. The incentive was probably to cut out the middle man of course. Ironic if you look at the state of the IT industry. Also, Steam has a long term strategy in the interest of customers and I believe gaming in general. Supporting other platforms as Windows for example. They are smart enough to look beyond the horizon and can make predictions for possible developments in the market. I highly appreciate that as a customer.
  • jabbany 4y ago
    Does it really "milk" developers though... The "customers" of Steam are the developers not the people buying games. They make money not by selling games (well okay, Valve does sell first party games via Steam too) but by selling the ability to sell games to developers. App stores like Steam, for all their problems, provide real tangible value to developers. It simplifies distribution of files and updates (no need to set up your own CDN/P2P network and write server/client code to handle game updates), provides integration of payment (no need to negotiate your own deals with payment processors), and in Steam's case also provides extra gaming specific value-adds like cloud saves and DRM that would also be costly to build/integrate in-house. If you think about all this, the cut they take could be justified for the right customer. The difference between Steam and something like the Apple App Store is that Steam does not have have monopoly power over PC game/software distribution. As a developer you get to decide whether Steam's cut justifies their value to you individually. If you don't like Steam or it doesn't make sense for you, you don't need to use it. And many indie developers do exactly this -- they sell at conventions, release physical media, offer direct downloads/sales from their own site, use competing platforms like itch.io, Patreon, Dlsite etc. Steam is good because the platform they are on is competitive and thus to succeed you have to justify your value.