12 ms·

You mean the company that pioneered: Microtransactions, real money loot-boxes, gambling, NFT marketplace, battlepasses doesn't milk it's users? Dota used to

• 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.
• TulliusCicero 4y ago
  Correct. They certainly offer a lot of ways to send them money, but it doesn't feel like they're pushing particularly hard. All that Dota stuff is cosmetics, is it not? No gameplay boosts? Plus, they were talking about Steam the platform, not individual games Valve has developed.
  • ninjinxo 4y ago
    No, dota has a paid subscription ($5 p/m) which gates gameplay features, many of which would be really useful for newer players - ingame coaching, item suggestions, hero pick suggestions, death summary, live gameplay tips, avoid player list, ranked mmr double downs that can be used after drafting phase, exclusive modes, and live spectating (free users have to use discord streaming or spectate with 2 minutes delay).
    • TulliusCicero 4y ago
      I meant more like gameplay power boosts, but that's fair, those things are sorta gameplay. But in any case, while you could argue that that's kinda pushy, that's Valve the game dev, not Valve the platform owner. I don't play Dota so that stuff doesn't affect me at all.
    • joshxyz 4y ago
      As a dota player who played dota 1 and dota 2, i dont have to spend a single penny to enjoy dota 2. And i get to play it for free on linux. Good lord, im grateful for that.
    • raspberry1337 4y ago
      Stop using the bad game of dota as an argument. It doesn't say a whole lot about how valve uses steam.
    • josefx 4y ago
      > many of which would be really useful for newer players Some of it is outright bad if you blindly rely on it because it goes by global statistics. How was that old story about the air force trying to create a perfect seat for the "average" pilot again? They measured everyone and averaged the results and then they couldn't find a single pilot that fit. The static list of suggested items is interesting, but the "dynamic" suggestions for the next item to build are something I mostly ignore.
• __alexs 4y ago
  Valve we're just so far ahead of the META that by the time people realised what was happening they were already hooked.
• unionpivo 4y ago
  I have hundreds of hours in most games they developed, and i never ever felt like purchasing any of the microtransactions, or that their gameplay was optimized in a way that you would be compelled to spend money. There is a huge difference between cosmetics only and gameplay affecting microtransactions. With current prices they are not micro anymore anyway.
• Gigachad 4y ago
  Long time steam user and have never felt compelled to buy any of that. I get an absolutely massive amount of value out of Steam and I'm yet to see another store that even runs on Linux, let alone actually boosting the whole ecosystem with Proton and other efforts. I bought a new racing wheel a while ago and it wasn't quite working on linux, after doing some searching I found that a Valve employee was working on a patch to the kernel to fix this racing wheel just to make gaming on linux better.
  • troyvit 4y ago
    This Linux thing can't be over-stated. I'm a dad with 2 teenage daughters and yet aside from school devices and their phones they never touch anything but Linux. Steam is a huge reason why that's possible.
  • Zhyl 4y ago
    FWIW itch.io also runs on Linux and have developed their own 'Proton-alike' which automatically sets up Wine prefixes for Windows games. They're standing on the shoulders of Giants, but I also don't see (m)any of the other stores doing likewise.
    • ekianjo 4y ago
      itch.io may be great and all but its missing good commercial titles. It feels like any kind of subpar game ends up there.
      • Zhyl 4y ago
        It's an indie store, the natural successor to the flash game websites of yore. Getting games from there sight unseen is like picking up some games from the bargain bin - a lot of rubbish but the occasional gem. It doesn't need 'good commercial titles', it needs to be seen as the preferred option for supporting Indies over steam (i.e. if you are presented with the choice, go for itch. If you're already on steam then steam has earned its money).
        • 4y ago
• mrtksn 4y ago
  "Milking" doesn't simply mean charging for services, it means collecting money in unfair or abusive way. I'm not sure that Steam pioneered them but microtransactions are great, they enabled high quality games be free or at least cheap to access for casual players and the few who really dive deep into the content pay accordingly. Loot boxes and other stuff are things that people want and enjoy. Can be unhealthy for some people but let's not pretend that there are large number of people living on the streets because Steam milked them away like an illegal casino. Their ways are not designed to make you sell your car to buy a skin.
• izacus 4y ago
  They also pioneered 2 hour no question return policy, Linux support and a store that was mostly global in a world where everyone else treated us non-americans like crap. When Nintendo sold me a game thats unplayably busted on the Switch they just shrugged and told me to suck it up. Steam didn't. They also pioneered a store that plays less of a moral police than any others. (Despite all that, I usually prefer GoG these days because I despise DRM and Steams login limit.)
  • stonemetal12 4y ago
    >They also pioneered 2 hour no question return policy, I don't consider that a positive. Big Box stores usually have 15 days for returns.
    • agentdrtran 4y ago
      having a 15 day return period for games that can be beaten five times in that period doesn't make sense
    • jabroni_salad 4y ago
      to be clear that is 2 hours of playtime, not realtime. You can refund something you bought months ago but never played. A lot of big box stores don't want to do 1:1 refunds if the seal has been broken.
  • Traubenfuchs 4y ago
    > They also pioneered a store that plays less of a moral police than any others. They banned loli. https://kotaku.com/steam-is-banning-sex-games-with-young-looking-character-1830949017 https://kotaku.com/steam-is-banning-sex-games-with-young-loo...
    • Dracophoenix 4y ago
      And a whole host of other games: Hatred, Active Shooter, Rape Day, Super Seducer 3. In many cases, Valve retroactively edited its content policies to justify banning such games.
• Longwelwind 4y ago
  You're talking about Valve, while OP is talking about Steam. As someone who only uses Steam (and used to play TF2 before all the hat things, but not DotA), I still see Steam in a good way. And I actually discovered that Valve indeed created all the things you mentioned (except NFT markeplace, which I believe is an exaggeration). I believe that it's good that EGS is trying to compete with Steam, but on the other hand, I'm scared that EGS's tactics will force Steam to use the same tactics and make it less user-friendly.
  • lagmos 4y ago
    Fair comment, but steam is, or at least used to be, worse in this regard than valve. They gamified sales. Flash sales, loot boxes for buying stuff, trading said loot on steam marketplace, etc. I e, they pushed gambling and gacha stuff to children. I've always felt they had come up with a perverse incentive s structure with these sales.
• chii 4y ago
  > you'd realise they're one of greediest in the business. it's not greedy if the users are buying it willingly. The game is not pay to win - you can skip all of it, and just enjoy the game on its own. Not many free to play games can be said to have this.
  • stavros 4y ago
    Agreed, as long as the items are only cosmetic, I don't care how much they cost. They're entirely optional, unlike the "optional" pay-to-win items that cost you thousands of hours of grinding if you don't pay.
• roenxi 4y ago
  It is 2022, we have the internet and long histories of everything everyone has said and done. A 5 point list of things you don't like isn't really an argument in the modern era. You really should put the effort in to link that into an actual complaint. Anyone or any company that has done anything of note has got a few points about them that aren't pure and perfect. Valve pioneered a lot of those things before anyone even realised that they were profitable. The way they stumbled into the gambling market looked, from where I sat, like an accidental evolution of a company that was experimental and evidence based. Particularly on DOTA - unless something really changed since the last time I looked you can play the whole game for free and the winner is determined purely by skill. Valve is being entirely reasonable in how they make money - giving people who are huge fans of the game a way to spend money on it.
• nindalf 4y ago
  I played Dota for years without ever feeling the need to spend on cosmetics. Valve prides themselves on a free-to-play, pay-to-look-fancy-in-game model. I didn’t care about the looks, so I played the game for free. Other games have a free-to-play but pay-to-win model. League of Legends requires you to pay if you want to play with the newer, more powerful characters. Hearthstone is free to play but adds newer, more powerful cards every season. Building a competitive deck of cards could cost $150-200 per season. That’s not to say I like this lootbox bullshit. It preys on people who have a weakness for gambling. If I were wired differently I could have spent thousands on them. I think they should be regulated out of existence.
  • spicypineapple 4y ago
    You can, over time, unlock the new characters in League of Legends without having to pay real money though, right?
    • acid__ 4y ago
      It’s true, but new characters are very “expensive”, even in the free currency. I have an embarrassing number of hours in league (4 digits) and do not have all the characters unlocked. Compare to Dota where I had every character unlocked at hour zero.
• xfer 4y ago
  It's literally a free game, with no strings attached. The only downside is the game gets heavier on resources with these items when you play with players with these items. Valve is certainly doing(has done) better than the market ethically, you need to look into their competition to see the state.
• 0-_-0 4y ago
  Nothing you list is mandatory, you're free to ignore it. I didn't even know about them. So no, I don't consider that "milking".
• LinXitoW 4y ago
  You mean the company that pioneered the single most fair microtransactions in existence? I've played many F2P games, and not a single one has ever been as fair as Dota 2. Short of giving away everything for free, there is no way they could've monetized more fairly.
  • Ekaros 4y ago
    Also the fact that it is one of the few where you can sell your lootbox results... Albeit for store credit with 15% tax. But still, that alone puts it beyond others.
• b4je7d7wb 4y ago
  Battlepasses where a cut is added to the price pools of events. I agree they are pioneers. Why is everyone else just pocketing their battlepass earnings still 5 years later and offering tiny price pools? Blizzard once crowdfunded a prize pool and ran away with the money. If valve is milking users, then everyone else is butchering them.
• nxpnsv 4y ago
  I never once felt I had to use any of those though...
• googl-free 4y ago
  Their tournament organizing is piss poor for how much the battlepasses bring in
• yzlnew 4y ago
  Can't agree more on the DOTA2 part. Valve doesn't invest much on the community, tournaments and even the game itself. Now the game is already dead in NA, CN coming next. Let alone the derivatives, like Artifact and AutoChess (DOTA Underloads)
• substation13 4y ago
  But all this stuff is strictly optional - the skins do not affect your win-rate. (There were some edge cases e.g. CSGO agents but they are working to bring it down to a tiny difference)
• solardev 4y ago
  > Microtransactions, real money loot-boxes, gambling, NFT marketplace, battlepasses I feel like I'm out of the loop here. Didn't those come more from mobile gaming and Asian free to play MMOs or Battle Royales? Didn't Valve make the "traditional" buy-once games like Half-Life, Portal, HL-derivatives like Team Fortress/CS? As for milking its users, Steam (the platform) is an incredible value (for purchases, refunds, reseller ecosystem, etc.) and an awesome utility (community mods, auto updates, reviews, cloud sync, streaming, Proton, multiplayer APIs, etc.). I think the one fair gripe about them is that they take a pretty large cut from developers and force them to use the Steam payment processing, which takes another big cut. But for end users (players) it's a wonderful platform, especially compared to its peers like GOG Galaxy, the EA/Ubi/Microsoft clients, the Epic Game Stores... none of those come close in usability. Individual titles within the platform might choose to use lootboxes and other crappy monetization schemes, but that's on them, not Steam. There are thousands of games that have better monetization models, and Steam helped revive the dormant indie PC gaming industry and then blew it up a thousandfold... almost none of those games have predatory pricing models. As for cosmetic skins, what's wrong with that? Who cares how much they charge for those if it doesn't provide a gameplay advantage of any sort, just blinky particles? Compared to any ACTUAL predatory P2W game, I'd so much rather support games that only sell cosmetics. It seems so unfair to reduce all that Valve has done for the PC gaming to "lootboxes and high priced skins". Without Steam PC gaming would probably have died by now, and with it the most amazing renaissance in indie titles since the shareware days.
  • ED_Radish 4y ago
    Valve pioneered most of that stuff, just that they sorta let go of the accelerator at some point and let other companies who were initially following their lead surpass them in exploitativeness so theyre not too associated with it nowadays. Although I suppose its dubious whether real world money gambling (valve) is more or less exploitative than the gambling directly implemented into game design that the rest of the industry took up.
    • solardev 4y ago
      Isn't there a pretty big difference between gambling for cosmetics and gambling for gameplay advantage? The former is like buying clothes... sure, you can spend as much money as you want on them, but it doesn't really affect anyone else. Whereas P2W gambling totally screws up game balance for all the other players because it monetizes the power curve.
• gruturo 4y ago
  Real money in exchange for non-cosmetic items (weapons, characters, skills, more attempts per day on boss X or dungeon Y) is awful and must die, I do not condone it. It should be outright outlawed. Real money in exchange for convenience (storage space in PoE) or purely cosmetic items (non-combat pets, hats, angel wings, whatever) ? Fine.
• JeremyNT 4y ago
  Yeah, Steam is not looking out for users. It locks everything behind DRM too. The "good for users" alternative to Steam is GOG, but it's basically an also-ran in the market. I have a love/hate relationship with Steam. I love that it "just works" on Linux, but I hate the DRM and lock-in. When I mostly used a PC I'd always favor GOG or some other distribution method, although I did have lots of Steam games as well. Now that I own a Steam Deck - and playing non-steam games is a bit of a pain in the rear (but at least possible) - I find myself buying into the platform even more (which, no doubt, was the entire purpose of the Steam Deck).
  • enragedcacti 4y ago
    I agree with what you're saying but just to note, the DRM is optional although most devs take them up on it. Kerbal Space Program is one example of a game where iirc you can just copy the folder out and run it on any machine.
    • JeremyNT 4y ago
      Good point. It facilitates DRM, but it doesn't mandate it. I feel like this exemplifies Steam. It's not unambiguously anti-consumer, and it does provide some real value, so many of us are willing to accept the tradeoffs involved.
  • faeriechangling 4y ago
    Even with DRM, historical context is important. Steams DRM usually had better terms (family sharing etc) than the competition and it was also more lightweight. It was DRM which really did not get in most gamers way compared to say the abominations that Ubisoft shipped. They're not GoG but they're far from the worst and I always felt like Valve cared a lot more about these sort of things then they had to given their market dominance.