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Wow, it's very rare for companies to move in this direction. This is the polar opposite direction of what Apple's been doing.

nicce 3y ago
If you do it well, the polar opposite just boots your marketing and overall goodness.
rbjorklin 3y ago
Steam is not a publicly traded company. Their decisions don't necessarily have to improve profit margins.
- haunter 3y ago
  >Their decisions don't necessarily have to improve profit margins They can always rely on the gambling money. Takes 0 effort (all digital), unregulated, and it's enormously popular on Steam.
  - spiderice 3y ago
    You're trying to muddy the waters by calling it gambling. Gaming and digital loot boxes are different. Even if they share some similarities. Gambling is far, far more destructive than digital loot boxes in games. No need to conflate the two.
    - rowanG077 3y ago
      How is it not gambling? You put in something you need to buy with money to receive an item you can trade for money. Sounds awfully similar to me like you go to a casino, get some chips to wager and then later trade the remaining chips back for money. Regardless of whether the "official" law states it's gambling or not from a moral perspective they are pretty much identical.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
        > to receive an item you can later trade for money. A person could reasonably argue can be exchanged vs primarily intended as a stand in for cash is important. If the items are intended as actual items people value then that's more defensible than say chips that only exist to be cashed out. (And I'm not familiar enough to know whether that's the case here)
        rowanG077 3y ago
        I would maybe agree with you if the marketplace were not operated by Valve. But it is. This makes very clear that the one of the intended use cases of the skins is to be sold. Which is understandable, it's very likely Valves makes in the order of a billion dollars just from the marketplace.
    - haunter 3y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_gambling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_gambling Valve could shutdown the whole thing with one button but they don't. Do you know why because it's profit for them too. Every case and every key sold.
      - mrguyorama 3y ago
        Every TRANSACTION involving a CS:GO (CS2 now) skin gives valve a cut. An entire offshore gambling INDUSTRY exists around treating these skins as value bearing tokens you can deposit, gamble away, and cash out. They then take the enormous profit that unregulated gambling always generates, and pushes it towards degenerate gambler streamers who regularly have thousands of literal children watch their stream, where they often gamble with a rigged account made for them by the gambling companies so they can show artificial success to, once again, 12 year olds. They pay these streamers millions of dollars, up to and including one of the streamers moving to a different country with more lax gambling laws so they could continue to gamble on the companies dime (because they are a degenerate gambler) in order to hook children on gambling. The skins work exactly like crypto in this case, except the on-ramp is a game that millions of children play (I don't care "it's not aimed at kids", you don't need to be 18 to buy a steam gift card at the store for the skins, and the game itself is free, which is a huge lure for children without an allowance) and it is entirely unregulated. This entire system is being used to purposely trap gambling addicts at a very young age to milk them for as long as possible in the gambling industry, for every dime they are worth, and until they have used up all possible credit they can find just to keep pressing that addiction button. Twitch is in on it too.
    - matheusmoreira 3y ago
      > Gambling is far, far more destructive than digital loot boxes in games. Nope. They are exactly the same thing. Same effect on the brain.
      - spiderice 3y ago
        Please, say it with more conviction and continue providing no sources. That is what will convince me.
        matheusmoreira 3y ago
        Please, downplay the impact of serious diseases some more. I'm sure your "it's not gambling even though it's basically a rigged lottery" argument will convince everyone here. Even plain old video game addiction is already a recognized medical diagnosis by the WHO, to say nothing of literal gambling. https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/addictive-behaviours-gaming-disorder https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/add...
- kube-system 3y ago
  Also, they have a much more narrow target market with different interests and priorities. "PC gamer" correlates with "hardware tinkerer" much more strongly than "telephone user" does.
- brookst 3y ago
  Publicly traded companies also don’t have to increase profit margins. They generally do, but so do privately traded companies.
  - Hemospectrum 3y ago
    Increasing profit margins is a reliable way to increase stock prices, which is (at this stage of capitalism) the most powerful force directing the allocation of capital. It's a self-reinforcing feedback loop with far-reaching power throughout the economy.
    - brookst 3y ago
      Allocation of capital matters for startups. Most large companies aren’t issuing new stock, so profit margins only affect secondary markets for their stock.
Steltek 3y ago
It'll be a very dark day for us all when Valve turns evil. Steam Deck has been a modder's dream since it came out. Just having "desktop mode" be a standard option has been amazing.
- xbmcuser 3y ago
  It's privately owned so does not have the shareholder pressure to keep increasing share holder value.
  - wholesomepotato 3y ago
    The do increase shareholder value, just in exactly short-term. The problem with publicly traded companies is not as much wanting to increase the value, but how short is the time horizon, when most owners don't have any understanding of the bussiness other than just handful of numbers every quarter.
- haunter 3y ago
  >Valve turns evil Some people and legislators are arguing that unregulated digital gambling is very very evil
  - hovering_nox 3y ago
    If you mean gambling in Counter Strike, at least it's not explicitly aimed at children.
    - andy_ppp 3y ago
      Children don’t play Counter Strike?
      - askiiart 3y ago
        Whether or not children play CS:GO/CS:2 is irrelevant. It is a game where 50% of the time you play as terrorists shooting law enforcement, it's very obviously not aimed at kids. The only way for kids to gamble in CS at all is to either steal a credit card, which is obviously not Valve's fault, or for them to have a Steam gift card. If anything is to be done about the children, I think Valve should just 1) require a users to have a credit card on file in order to buy lootboxes, and 2) require re-entering the full credit card details if the user makes several purchases in a short period of time, in order to stop kids who, for example, memorized the CVV of a card already on file in Steam. Keep in mind that uploading a government ID would have issues, seeing as in the US a driver's license is not universal, not to mention IDs all across the globe. Maybe there's an alternative form of ID that would work that I just can't think of, but anyways, I'm against needing to upload a government ID to access anything unless it's specifically for governmental purposes.
jjjjmoney 3y ago
I don't think Apple is the pinnacle of repairability by any means, but they have been making slow improvements in this area (like replaceable back glass in the new model phones, the entire mainboard doesn't need to be replaced for common repairs as often now, etc).
- jokethrowaway 3y ago
  I don't know on which planet you live but every new generation is worse than the previous one. My last macbook needed to have a battery replaced during Apple Care (after only 2 years) and they just gave me a new body (no dents, same specs, same keyboard layout, transplanted the ssd - or transferred the data, not sure) and plugged it to the old screen. If they don't bother swapping a battery...
  - wtallis 3y ago
    Citing something that's been the same way for all Apple laptops for at least a decade doesn't really support your assertion that it gets worse with every generation. Your repair was probably done by moving your laptop's motherboard into a new lower case (with a corresponding new battery glued in).
    - bluescrn 3y ago
      Is there any real justification for glueing batteries in beyond obstructing replacement? It's not as if there's any space for them to slide around, they're a fairly tight fit in a compact device, and there's got to be plenty of other options to keep them in place if there is a little bit of looseness to deal with. (I guess they'll use safety as an excuse, to reduce the risk of the damage to cells. But it's not the real reason, is it?)
      - giantrobot 3y ago
        The case isn't so tight the batteries can't move. LiPoly batteries expand and contract when they heat and cool. The case needs enough space for that to happen without putting pressure on the battery. When the battery is at its most contracted state it can move if it's not fixed to the case by some means. Movement of the battery puts stress on the connectors and can lead to a short (or worse). Gluing the battery in the case is a safe way of fixing it in place inside the case. Screw tabs would give the opportunity during assembly of puncturing the battery casing with a tool or screw. They could also work themselves loose with the thermal expansion cycles. But people like the thought-terminating "Apple bad" narratives.
darklycan51 3y ago
It'd be nice if it was a real console and not a glorified Nintendo games piracy device. It's very easy to be user friendly when your business model is relying on piracy, they even showed an emulator in a now deleted trailer
- asddubs 3y ago
  I'd rather have companies putting out emulator-friendly devices than re-charging for the same game every time a new hardware generation rolls around. The steam deck is just a computer at the end of the day, people are going to run emulators on it.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    sure, but most other console makers actually sell at a loss and rely on selling and re-selling software to make profit. And users who buy consoles don't want to mess around with emulators anyway. Valve didn't sell hardware for half its lifetime, and the hardware it sold were on small margins. Steam Deck is a success selling a few million, the vita was a bomb selling 10m (very conservative estimate. you'll see 15m when googling). Economies of scale
    - asddubs 3y ago
      Did you accidentally respond to the wrong comment?
      - johnnyanmac 3y ago
        I don't believe so. I was just explaining that a console needs to justify every generational bump. And if remasters are valuable enough, they'll do it.
        asddubs 3y ago
        Oh, I see what you mean now. I had trouble figuring out the relevance to my comment before.
yarg 3y ago
Valve's a software distribution company, not a hardware company. The steam deck exists primarily to expand their targetable market. It's of no benefit to them if people's devices fail - they just stop buying games (unlike Apple, where the devices are intended to slow down or stop working altogether).
- jonhohle 3y ago
  > unlike Apple… I liked the direction you were going, but I don’t think you made the right comparison. iPhones, for example, are used 30-60% longer (4-10 years) than a Samsung phone (3-6 years). Apple provides software updates for all of their devices for 6+ years. I’ve had very few devices containing lithium ion batteries that didn’t require a new battery. I have devices from the early 2000s from Sony, HP, Dell, Nikon, and countless others whose batteries have failed.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    Samsung has some very aggressive upgrade programs, so that might explain it. Used to even have an entire yearly upgrade program you could pay for.
- Pr0ject217 3y ago
  Valve may not be a hardware company on the scale of Apple, but they do design/prototype/create/repair hardware products. Also, they do a lot more than just distribute software [0]. [0] https://uspto.report/company/Valve-Corp/patents https://uspto.report/company/Valve-Corp/patents
  - yarg 3y ago
    Yes, of course they do - and all in service of steam.
    - BEEdwards 3y ago
      I'm confused, you're lobbing this as if it's a gotcha or insult. No matter what you think of them as a company Steam is a license to print money, of course basically everything they do is in service of it...
opyate 3y ago
Check out Fairphone. Maybe not as feature packed as the latest Pixel or iPhone, but definitely a step in the right direction. Even Marques Brownlee [0] said he's going to rate gadgets' green/sustainability creds from now on, after reviewing the Fairphone. 0. https://www.youtube.com/user/marquesbrownlee https://www.youtube.com/user/marquesbrownlee
pjmlp 3y ago
Apple is going back to how home computers used to be, before Compaq got lucky with the IBM PC cloning. They were consumer electronics devices, most of the expansion possibilities were via external devices connected on an expansion port of some sort, and that was about it. Naturally this model offers better margins than selling PC components on thin razor margins, which is why even the PC world is going into that direction, leaving custom PCs for hardcore gammers and servers, where OEMs can also enjoy higher margins.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

nicce 3y ago

If you do it well, the polar opposite just boots your marketing and overall goodness.

rbjorklin 3y ago

Steam is not a publicly traded company. Their decisions don't necessarily have to improve profit margins.

haunter 3y ago
>Their decisions don't necessarily have to improve profit margins They can always rely on the gambling money. Takes 0 effort (all digital), unregulated, and it's enormously popular on Steam.
- spiderice 3y ago
  You're trying to muddy the waters by calling it gambling. Gaming and digital loot boxes are different. Even if they share some similarities. Gambling is far, far more destructive than digital loot boxes in games. No need to conflate the two.
  - rowanG077 3y ago
    How is it not gambling? You put in something you need to buy with money to receive an item you can trade for money. Sounds awfully similar to me like you go to a casino, get some chips to wager and then later trade the remaining chips back for money. Regardless of whether the "official" law states it's gambling or not from a moral perspective they are pretty much identical.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      > to receive an item you can later trade for money. A person could reasonably argue can be exchanged vs primarily intended as a stand in for cash is important. If the items are intended as actual items people value then that's more defensible than say chips that only exist to be cashed out. (And I'm not familiar enough to know whether that's the case here)
      - rowanG077 3y ago
        I would maybe agree with you if the marketplace were not operated by Valve. But it is. This makes very clear that the one of the intended use cases of the skins is to be sold. Which is understandable, it's very likely Valves makes in the order of a billion dollars just from the marketplace.
  - haunter 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_gambling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_gambling Valve could shutdown the whole thing with one button but they don't. Do you know why because it's profit for them too. Every case and every key sold.
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      Every TRANSACTION involving a CS:GO (CS2 now) skin gives valve a cut. An entire offshore gambling INDUSTRY exists around treating these skins as value bearing tokens you can deposit, gamble away, and cash out. They then take the enormous profit that unregulated gambling always generates, and pushes it towards degenerate gambler streamers who regularly have thousands of literal children watch their stream, where they often gamble with a rigged account made for them by the gambling companies so they can show artificial success to, once again, 12 year olds. They pay these streamers millions of dollars, up to and including one of the streamers moving to a different country with more lax gambling laws so they could continue to gamble on the companies dime (because they are a degenerate gambler) in order to hook children on gambling. The skins work exactly like crypto in this case, except the on-ramp is a game that millions of children play (I don't care "it's not aimed at kids", you don't need to be 18 to buy a steam gift card at the store for the skins, and the game itself is free, which is a huge lure for children without an allowance) and it is entirely unregulated. This entire system is being used to purposely trap gambling addicts at a very young age to milk them for as long as possible in the gambling industry, for every dime they are worth, and until they have used up all possible credit they can find just to keep pressing that addiction button. Twitch is in on it too.
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    > Gambling is far, far more destructive than digital loot boxes in games. Nope. They are exactly the same thing. Same effect on the brain.
    - spiderice 3y ago
      Please, say it with more conviction and continue providing no sources. That is what will convince me.
      - matheusmoreira 3y ago
        Please, downplay the impact of serious diseases some more. I'm sure your "it's not gambling even though it's basically a rigged lottery" argument will convince everyone here. Even plain old video game addiction is already a recognized medical diagnosis by the WHO, to say nothing of literal gambling. https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/addictive-behaviours-gaming-disorder https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/add...
kube-system 3y ago
Also, they have a much more narrow target market with different interests and priorities. "PC gamer" correlates with "hardware tinkerer" much more strongly than "telephone user" does.
brookst 3y ago
Publicly traded companies also don’t have to increase profit margins. They generally do, but so do privately traded companies.
- Hemospectrum 3y ago
  Increasing profit margins is a reliable way to increase stock prices, which is (at this stage of capitalism) the most powerful force directing the allocation of capital. It's a self-reinforcing feedback loop with far-reaching power throughout the economy.
  - brookst 3y ago
    Allocation of capital matters for startups. Most large companies aren’t issuing new stock, so profit margins only affect secondary markets for their stock.

Steltek 3y ago

It'll be a very dark day for us all when Valve turns evil. Steam Deck has been a modder's dream since it came out. Just having "desktop mode" be a standard option has been amazing.

xbmcuser 3y ago
It's privately owned so does not have the shareholder pressure to keep increasing share holder value.
- wholesomepotato 3y ago
  The do increase shareholder value, just in exactly short-term. The problem with publicly traded companies is not as much wanting to increase the value, but how short is the time horizon, when most owners don't have any understanding of the bussiness other than just handful of numbers every quarter.
haunter 3y ago
>Valve turns evil Some people and legislators are arguing that unregulated digital gambling is very very evil
- hovering_nox 3y ago
  If you mean gambling in Counter Strike, at least it's not explicitly aimed at children.
  - andy_ppp 3y ago
    Children don’t play Counter Strike?
    - askiiart 3y ago
      Whether or not children play CS:GO/CS:2 is irrelevant. It is a game where 50% of the time you play as terrorists shooting law enforcement, it's very obviously not aimed at kids. The only way for kids to gamble in CS at all is to either steal a credit card, which is obviously not Valve's fault, or for them to have a Steam gift card. If anything is to be done about the children, I think Valve should just 1) require a users to have a credit card on file in order to buy lootboxes, and 2) require re-entering the full credit card details if the user makes several purchases in a short period of time, in order to stop kids who, for example, memorized the CVV of a card already on file in Steam. Keep in mind that uploading a government ID would have issues, seeing as in the US a driver's license is not universal, not to mention IDs all across the globe. Maybe there's an alternative form of ID that would work that I just can't think of, but anyways, I'm against needing to upload a government ID to access anything unless it's specifically for governmental purposes.

jjjjmoney 3y ago

I don't think Apple is the pinnacle of repairability by any means, but they have been making slow improvements in this area (like replaceable back glass in the new model phones, the entire mainboard doesn't need to be replaced for common repairs as often now, etc).

jokethrowaway 3y ago
I don't know on which planet you live but every new generation is worse than the previous one. My last macbook needed to have a battery replaced during Apple Care (after only 2 years) and they just gave me a new body (no dents, same specs, same keyboard layout, transplanted the ssd - or transferred the data, not sure) and plugged it to the old screen. If they don't bother swapping a battery...
- wtallis 3y ago
  Citing something that's been the same way for all Apple laptops for at least a decade doesn't really support your assertion that it gets worse with every generation. Your repair was probably done by moving your laptop's motherboard into a new lower case (with a corresponding new battery glued in).
  - bluescrn 3y ago
    Is there any real justification for glueing batteries in beyond obstructing replacement? It's not as if there's any space for them to slide around, they're a fairly tight fit in a compact device, and there's got to be plenty of other options to keep them in place if there is a little bit of looseness to deal with. (I guess they'll use safety as an excuse, to reduce the risk of the damage to cells. But it's not the real reason, is it?)
    - giantrobot 3y ago
      The case isn't so tight the batteries can't move. LiPoly batteries expand and contract when they heat and cool. The case needs enough space for that to happen without putting pressure on the battery. When the battery is at its most contracted state it can move if it's not fixed to the case by some means. Movement of the battery puts stress on the connectors and can lead to a short (or worse). Gluing the battery in the case is a safe way of fixing it in place inside the case. Screw tabs would give the opportunity during assembly of puncturing the battery casing with a tool or screw. They could also work themselves loose with the thermal expansion cycles. But people like the thought-terminating "Apple bad" narratives.

darklycan51 3y ago

It'd be nice if it was a real console and not a glorified Nintendo games piracy device. It's very easy to be user friendly when your business model is relying on piracy, they even showed an emulator in a now deleted trailer

asddubs 3y ago
I'd rather have companies putting out emulator-friendly devices than re-charging for the same game every time a new hardware generation rolls around. The steam deck is just a computer at the end of the day, people are going to run emulators on it.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  sure, but most other console makers actually sell at a loss and rely on selling and re-selling software to make profit. And users who buy consoles don't want to mess around with emulators anyway. Valve didn't sell hardware for half its lifetime, and the hardware it sold were on small margins. Steam Deck is a success selling a few million, the vita was a bomb selling 10m (very conservative estimate. you'll see 15m when googling). Economies of scale
  - asddubs 3y ago
    Did you accidentally respond to the wrong comment?
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      I don't believe so. I was just explaining that a console needs to justify every generational bump. And if remasters are valuable enough, they'll do it.
      - asddubs 3y ago
        Oh, I see what you mean now. I had trouble figuring out the relevance to my comment before.

yarg 3y ago

Valve's a software distribution company, not a hardware company. The steam deck exists primarily to expand their targetable market. It's of no benefit to them if people's devices fail - they just stop buying games (unlike Apple, where the devices are intended to slow down or stop working altogether).

jonhohle 3y ago
> unlike Apple… I liked the direction you were going, but I don’t think you made the right comparison. iPhones, for example, are used 30-60% longer (4-10 years) than a Samsung phone (3-6 years). Apple provides software updates for all of their devices for 6+ years. I’ve had very few devices containing lithium ion batteries that didn’t require a new battery. I have devices from the early 2000s from Sony, HP, Dell, Nikon, and countless others whose batteries have failed.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  Samsung has some very aggressive upgrade programs, so that might explain it. Used to even have an entire yearly upgrade program you could pay for.
Pr0ject217 3y ago
Valve may not be a hardware company on the scale of Apple, but they do design/prototype/create/repair hardware products. Also, they do a lot more than just distribute software [0]. [0] https://uspto.report/company/Valve-Corp/patents https://uspto.report/company/Valve-Corp/patents
- yarg 3y ago
  Yes, of course they do - and all in service of steam.
  - BEEdwards 3y ago
    I'm confused, you're lobbing this as if it's a gotcha or insult. No matter what you think of them as a company Steam is a license to print money, of course basically everything they do is in service of it...

opyate 3y ago

Check out Fairphone. Maybe not as feature packed as the latest Pixel or iPhone, but definitely a step in the right direction. Even Marques Brownlee [0] said he's going to rate gadgets' green/sustainability creds from now on, after reviewing the Fairphone. 0. https://www.youtube.com/user/marquesbrownlee https://www.youtube.com/user/marquesbrownlee

pjmlp 3y ago

Apple is going back to how home computers used to be, before Compaq got lucky with the IBM PC cloning. They were consumer electronics devices, most of the expansion possibilities were via external devices connected on an expansion port of some sort, and that was about it. Naturally this model offers better margins than selling PC components on thin razor margins, which is why even the PC world is going into that direction, leaving custom PCs for hardcore gammers and servers, where OEMs can also enjoy higher margins.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]