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As a kid I always lamented that every studio seemed to sell out as soon as they had the chance. Valve is basically the only one that didn’t… clearly it’s paid o

As a kid I always lamented that every studio seemed to sell out as soon as they had the chance. Valve is basically the only one that didn’t… clearly it’s paid off very well for Gabe and the employees. Wish more people would resist the payday and keep what’s theirs.

immibis 11mo ago
Gabe is the Apple of PC gaming, taking a 30% tax on all transactions. It's not this particular kind of evil, but it is a different kind of evil.
- samiwami 11mo ago
  There is nothing forcing developers to release on steam, they can sell directly through a website. It’s not Valve’s fault no other competitor has gotten close to the quality of Steam. Epic Games could have made a dent, but they decided to try to bribe customers instead of making a functioning store.
  - SaltyBackendGuy 11mo ago
    This made me laugh. I tried Epic because I got a free game that I was interested in, but could only play it on the Epic Game store. After a week, I was no longer able to login no matter what I tried. So anecdotally, your statement tracks with my experience.
  - gruez 11mo ago
    >instead of making a functioning store. For all intents and purposes it's "functioning" for me. You can search for a game, hit buy, put in your credit card number, then download/play it. I've seen some spurious arguments about how it lacks a cart or reviews, but it's a stretch to claim the lack of them makes them non "functioning". I never bulk buy games, and for reviews I can go to steam or metacritic.
    - skotobaza 11mo ago
      In 2025 I expect an online store to have at least some cataloging option (like Steam's tags) and some user feedback (like Steam reviews or Steam community discussions). Yes, most of Steam's features are half-baked, and Valve doesn't really want to improve them (curators, user tags, guides etc.), but it's baffling that no other store gives at least the same amount of those features to you. Even though they could.
      - gruez 11mo ago
        >In 2025 I expect an online store to have at least some cataloging option (like Steam's tags) To be fair most online storefronts don't have that. Amazon/walmart at best have "categories", which epic also has. Even online content portals like spotify don't have tags, preferring something like "more like this". > but it's baffling that no other store gives at least the same amount of those features to you. Even though they could. The better question is why storefronts don't directly compete on price. We see with airlines that consumers are willing to put up with hellish conditions to save a few percent on airfare. Those features are definitely nice, it's just unclear how they can avoid the free-rider problem if there are competing storefronts.
        keyringlight 11mo ago
        > The better question is why storefronts don't directly compete on price. The way I see it, it depends how you see who is who's customer. Is the gamer the customer of the store, or are they the customer of the developer/publisher who put out the game, and in turn is the developer/publisher the customer of the store. The store cut is the price to buy their services, and they can shop around to find different offerings at different prices, just as gamers might be able to shop around and decide what (platform features) matters to them with the options available.
        skotobaza 11mo ago
        I think directly reducing the games' prices will not have the same effect as with traveling, since games are digital and non-mandatory goods, so less people will be swayed by reduced price; unless we are talking about 50% less, of course, which is why people use key reselling sites, because there it is noticeable (and people don't care about legality in that case). That said, Epic is indirectly competing "on price" by paying publishers and developers for their store exclusivity, for free giveaways and even for just using Unreal Engine. But it's the price for developers, not customers. Tim Sweeney said multiple times that he thought supporting developers was more important than customers, and that customers would follow developers. I don't know how whether it worked though.
- daedrdev 11mo ago
  Plenty of companies have tried to compete with gabe, they’re all just terrible at it
  - gruez 11mo ago
    No. First mover advantage is just that strong. How are the competitors to whatsapp or facebook doing? At best you have something like tiktok, which might be technically "social" media but is a totally different segment. You don't catch up with old high school buddies on tiktok, for instance.
    - chacham15 11mo ago
      - Facebook was not first. Before it was friendster and myspace. - Tiktok was not first. Before it was vine and youtube. - Google was not first. Before it was yahoo and altavista. Plenty of todays big companies were not the first in their area.
      - gruez 11mo ago
        All of the examples you gave, the challengers had some revolutionary idea/improvement on top. Tiktok had its recommendation algorithm and short videos. Google had pagerank. That's also the reason why whatsapp hasn't been supplanted. There's no room for innovation (or nobody bothered trying). The same is true for digital distribution. Every steam competitor is basically "steam but [publisher]" or in epic's case, "steam but with steam games".
        mjr00 11mo ago
        That's what the person who started this comment chain said, though. Every Steam competitor has been "does the same thing as Steam, but worse" so why would anyone switch over?
        deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
- duxup 11mo ago
  PCs are plenty accessible to developers without Steam.
- zer00eyz 11mo ago
  Uhhh.... 11 percent. That is the charge back rate in gaming. The "overall" stat for all transactions is something like 3 percent. Card processing isnt free. There are fees, and supporting card processing still has more humans in the loop than one needs. Never mind all the technology that comes with running the dam platform. Is 30 percent a lot. It sure is. Valve isnt a charity, this is how they chose to make money. Meanwhile, AWS has a 30+ percent margin and I dont see CTO's lining up to run hardware...
  - gruez 11mo ago
    >11 percent. That is the charge back rate in gaming. The "overall" stat for all transactions is something like 3 percent. 1. source? 2. How does that justify a 30% rate, when presumably it's clawed back from developers? >Card processing isnt free. There are fees, and supporting card processing still has more humans in the loop than one needs. Never mind all the technology that comes with running the dam platform. Again, nowhere near 30% though >Meanwhile, AWS has a 30+ percent margin and I dont see CTO's lining up to run hardware... 30% margins on renting hardware is totally different than a 30% tax on transactions, and it's disingenuous to imply they're comparable. At the very least amazon needs to spend the other 70% on running servers and investing in datacenters, whereas valve doesn't. It's studios that are actually doing the development. Valve just is charging 30% on top of that. To take an extreme example, compare the 2-3% fees charged by visa vs the ~15% gross margins that car companies make. Even though that's 5x higher, I doubt many are outraged about car companies' profiteering.
    - dartharva 11mo ago
      Valve also hosts and maintains the game files for consumers to download, and the bandwidth/hardware needed to serve hundreds of GBs for each game to millions of customers across the globe is not trivial.
      - cwillu 11mo ago
        And the minefield of user cloud storage; I'm amazed that they've managed to avoid basically any abuses of the service.
- acedTrex 11mo ago
  This is in no way true because there is no requirement to use steam for PC releases. Apple is a firm technical gatekeeper to their ecosystem. Steam is not at all analogous to that for PCs.
  - threetonesun 11mo ago
    Steam isn't even analogous to that on their own Steam Deck, where they absolutely could have been.
  - immibis 11mo ago
    No requirement to use an apple phone either
- al_borland 11mo ago
  Are you of the opinion that these marketplaces shouldn’t exist, that they should take a smaller percentage, that they should be entirely ad-supported, or something else? How can user have an optional one-stop-shop that is sustainable for the long-term while not being “evil”.
- robhlt 11mo ago
  Valve allows developers to generate activation keys for their games and sell them on other platforms, where Valve gets a 0% cut. This is how you're able to buy games from places like the Humble Store and activate them on Steam. Their agreement does technically require that you don't sell at a lower price on other platforms, but as far as I know it's never been enforced.
  - kevinh 11mo ago
    There's a lawsuit ongoing about Valve threatening developers with delisting if they sell non-Steam copies of games (that's NOT Steam keys, but, say, a version on the Epic store) on other stores.
    - mjr00 11mo ago
      Can you provide a source for this? This is the first I've heard of anything like this and searching only gives results about the game delisting due to payment processor problems from a few months ago. edit: after some additional search tweaking this is most likely in reference to Wolfire v. Valve, which is now a class-action suit.[0] The argument seems to be that Valve is engaging in anticompetitive behavior by disallowing developers from reselling Steam keys for their games for lower prices on other platforms, not selling the games themselves on other platforms. So this may or may not be what the parent post was referencing. [0] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/wolfire-and-dark-catts-antitrust-lawsuit-against-valve-granted-class-action-status https://www.gamesindustry.biz/wolfire-and-dark-catts-antitru...
- axus 11mo ago
  Can a Steam Deck install games without using Steam? If so, big advantage over Google Play and the App Store.
  - daedrdev 11mo ago
    Yes, which is why nobody attacks them from that angle.
  - jamie_ca 11mo ago
    It's more fiddly in that you need to swap to desktop mode to do the installs, but you can get it set up so that your "external" games from Epic or Itch or emulators or whatever show up in the standard Steam UI.
  - chrisnight 11mo ago
    Yes, I have plenty of games from, e.g. the Epic Game Store on my steam deck, even in the steam home page, seamlessly. Gamescope is even fully open-source, so you could remove the steam deck UI, and still run any game with the same performance benefits of not running it inside KDE. Of course also, you could flash a new OS on the device itself if you wanted to entirely remove Valve’s presence.
  - Phelinofist 11mo ago
    Sure, it is a Linux box after all
  - whatevaa 11mo ago
    Steam Deck desktop mode is full blown KDE desktop. The only nuance is that system updates are managed by A/B partition scheme, so root is readonly. Can be made writeable but it's an overlay, so changes get lost on system update and need to be reapplied.
    - efreak 11mo ago
      It's not an overlay, it just gets mounted separately from root - there's an overlay for /etc and possibly a few other directories, this is to allow user changes to configuration to be kept after upgrades Changes get wiped because (as you mentioned) it's an a/b partition; when you switch partitions you lose the changes. You can actually enable an overlay for root changes, but this causes other issues - you get to choose if you want to track packages you've installed, or packages that are in the base system. It's either in the overlay and you keep your changes but not the base system changes, or it's in the base system and you lose track of changes made in your overlay. - updates to the base system of packages that have been uninstalled in the overlay can cause inconsistencies like orphaned files (the new system update includes extra files from this package that haven't been removed by your uninstall. Hopefully some other package doesn't take this as a sign that an optional dependency library is fully installed, the linked subdependencies might be missing) - updates to the base system can be overridden in specific files that were modified in your overlay, causing packages to become non-functional - imagine rebuilding a library 4.5 to add a feature (or updating to v 4.7), then the base system updates that library to 4.8. All other software now expects version 4.8, but instead your overlay is providing 4.5. better hope it's only a minor patch update and not an update providing a feature, or worse, a major breaking update.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- preisschild 11mo ago
  That is bullshit, you are not even locked to using Steam on the Steam Deck. 30% is completely fair for the amount of infrastructure Steam provides to your game. Definitely not comparable to Apple, which is forcing all iPhone users to use their own app store.
daedrdev 11mo ago
Its definitely the ones that sell. There are plenty of small studios run by founders, but often once they sell they start burning consumer trust and goodwill as if those things don't exist and have an actual cost
- Loughla 11mo ago
  Once you have an IP that's massive and you know people will buy regardless of if you're a trash monster or not, there's zero incentive to do the right thing. Until people stop buying games from these places nothing will change.
monospacegames 11mo ago
Financially Valve exists in an incomparably different space compared to companies like Take Two that actually have to make games to make money.
- bak3y 11mo ago
  And they were able to get there because they made good games.
  - jeffwask 11mo ago
    I would rephrase this as they got there because they treat their customers with respect, they take feedback to improve their platform, they don't pack their launcher / store front with ads and trickery, and you can trust that your games will be there and not go away. Yes, they are loot box whores but so is everyone else. Steam is a community, social media, and a store. The community is what they built and that community is extremely loyal. That community is also what developers are paying for. In Gaben, we trust. I have 20 years of experience saying Gabe won't fuck me over to increase EBIDA by .5%. Are they perfect? No, but they are lightyears better than most of their competitors except GOG in terms of putting consumers first.
    - caconym_ 11mo ago
      This is what I always say about Valve. They are not morally unimpeachable, but at the end of the day I've been a regular customer for over 20 years and they've never fucked me over. I don't think I can say the same about any other software company.
      - mrguyorama 11mo ago
        And most importantly, the moment they show any indication of doing otherwise, I will happily drop them. I keep giving Valve my money because they keep giving me good value for that money and a trustworthy environment to spend that money in. I have no loyalty. I also buy games from Humble Bundle and GOG. I'm not excited about the prospect of losing my 4000 games but the literal only options available for consumers right now are "Pay money and get a game that we can take away at any time, fuck you over, do all sorts of bad things, and we demonstrably hate you", or "Pay money to get a game and a refund period and a bunch of features and maybe when Gabe dies we will do that other thing" There is no alternative. GOG is run by the same people who released CyberPunk2077 as a bug ridden mess to please upper management, so they even have evidence of already straddling that line right now.
worldfoodgood 11mo ago
Valve makes a significant amount of their money from the gambling they've attached to their games, and profits immensely from the culture of farming loot boxes to gamble on for skins and such. They also take an absurd cut of developer income and saddle devs with costs that they don't always want. (Selling on Steam? Valve takes 30% and forces you to moderate the forums on your listing page that you cannot opt out of.) They also have an internal culture that's been fairly regularly criticized as being pretty uncomfortable for women and minorities. Valve has done some cool stuff, but let's not lionize them too much. They are probably better than an average company, for sure, but it's important to remember that they are also sketchy in some very gross ways as well.
- abtinf 11mo ago
  > but it's important to remember that ... as well Hello LLM.
- Bombthecat 11mo ago
  How much money do they make through counter strike loot boxes and selling games etc?
- umvi 11mo ago
  I'm happier to pay Valve's 30% than Apple's. With Valve you could always switch to Itch or something if you didn't want to pay, but with Apple you have no alternative. Valve gives you access to a huge player base and lots of useful marketing tools and such.
  - worldfoodgood 11mo ago
    Ok! Happier is a fine place to be. They are both still too high. Not everything has to be binary -- I can think Valve is offering some utility and also think that Valve is charging too much for that utility. The fact that Gabe has a billion dollars worth of yachts probably suggests that maybe, just maaaaaybe, that 30% could be lower and Steam could still provide you the same level of marketing support and player base.
John23832 11mo ago
> Valve is basically the only one that didn’t… Lol Valve is taking a cut of a ridiculous amount of video game sales while releasing no games. I like some of their work on the linux support side, but they have sold out as much as Apple has if anything.
jsheard 11mo ago
> Valve is basically the only one that didn’t They kind of did, with their sudden pivot from primarily making singleplayer games to almost exclusively making F2P GaaS titles the instant they got a taste of lootbox money. Half-Life 3 and Portal 3 will never happen because Valve makes 100x as much money with 1/100th of the effort by peddling Counter Strike skins.
- pphysch 11mo ago
  HL3 is under active development though. If that's a success I'm sure they'd try a Portal 3 as well.
- saintfire 11mo ago
  Allegedly HL3 is in active development. No official announcement yet.
- PetitPrince 11mo ago
  HL3 kinda happened though, but it was called Half-Life Alyx. And while it wasn't a conventional FPS like HL1 and 2, there's absolutely no trace of GaaS in it.
  - jsheard 11mo ago
    Alyx is a bit of an edge case because they needed a VR showcase, and it's unlikely that a PC VR game (even a Valve one) could have sustained a healthy multiplayer population. Regardless of the reasons why it happened, it's the one and only singleplayer title they've released in the last 14 years, which neatly aligns with them discovering the joy of lootboxes 15 years ago.
    - Something1234 11mo ago
      What about Aperture Labs Desk Job as a demo for the deck? Full self contained single player story.
      - mathgeek 11mo ago
shadowgovt 11mo ago
Valve never sold out because they became the "out" other companies sell out to. They successfully built a revenue-capturing money-printer in the form of the Steam store and service and now they don't have to make games at all to keep their bottom line strong. Not to imply they shouldn't have; get that gold ring and all. (But I may also argue the point they never sold out in terms of being a game studio as opposed to a publisher.... "So when's Half Life 3 releasing?")
jayd16 11mo ago
I wouldn't call this selling out, exactly. If the issue is endless crunch, its more a matter of having enough money to support it endlessly and an aging workforce that knows their worth and can push back. The issue is trying to force (or likely, continue) bad practices when they're clearly not working and then lacking the leadership to realize that a retaliatory layoff is only going to make things worse.
haunter 11mo ago
>Wish more people would resist the payday and keep what’s theirs. Ah yeah unregulated illegal underage gambling, the great resistance. Gabe could shutdown the whole thing with 1 click, all the sites are using the Steam API, but they don't and you know why. Valve did a lot of things good but they are also the original source of a lot of bad things from lootboxes to skin gambling to the FOMO battle pass cancer of modern gaming.
Aunche 11mo ago
Smaller studios can maintain a small team of highly passionate people that will happily work 60+ hours a week or achieve similar productivity. As a studio grows, this becomes harder to maintain. You're pressured to either become a slave driver or dilute your product and make more money through derivative content or micro transactions. For example, I heard that EA is actually a relatively chill company. What sometimes works at keeping employees and customers both happy is fostering a cult-like environment, but that can easily lead to exploitation.
guywithahat 11mo ago
But union "busting" isn't selling out, if anything it's keeping to their true cause. Companies don't function well with adversarial units within them, and companies don't start out with unions. Case and point: Valve doesn't have a union.
- NoraCodes 11mo ago
  The phrase is "case in point", and unionized companies often do quite well.
- ab5tract 11mo ago
  It’s a privately owned company. This leads to an entirely different relationship between employees and the top layer of management. You have to be very misguided to believe that the c suite in most companies is not engaged in n adversarial relationship with its employees, whether those employees are unionized or not.
- array_key_first 11mo ago
  > Companies don't function well with adversarial units within them This isn't a given, this is just an opinion, and one you didn't bother trying to argue for. Many systems do function much better with adversarial units in them. Governments have the adversarial units of checks and balances. Companies have the adversarial forces of the market. A news paper has the adversarial units of editors to their writers.
righthand 11mo ago
They definitely get a free pass from people. Valve is plenty evil.

immibis 11mo ago

Gabe is the Apple of PC gaming, taking a 30% tax on all transactions. It's not this particular kind of evil, but it is a different kind of evil.

samiwami 11mo ago
There is nothing forcing developers to release on steam, they can sell directly through a website. It’s not Valve’s fault no other competitor has gotten close to the quality of Steam. Epic Games could have made a dent, but they decided to try to bribe customers instead of making a functioning store.
- SaltyBackendGuy 11mo ago
  This made me laugh. I tried Epic because I got a free game that I was interested in, but could only play it on the Epic Game store. After a week, I was no longer able to login no matter what I tried. So anecdotally, your statement tracks with my experience.
- gruez 11mo ago
  >instead of making a functioning store. For all intents and purposes it's "functioning" for me. You can search for a game, hit buy, put in your credit card number, then download/play it. I've seen some spurious arguments about how it lacks a cart or reviews, but it's a stretch to claim the lack of them makes them non "functioning". I never bulk buy games, and for reviews I can go to steam or metacritic.
  - skotobaza 11mo ago
    In 2025 I expect an online store to have at least some cataloging option (like Steam's tags) and some user feedback (like Steam reviews or Steam community discussions). Yes, most of Steam's features are half-baked, and Valve doesn't really want to improve them (curators, user tags, guides etc.), but it's baffling that no other store gives at least the same amount of those features to you. Even though they could.
    - gruez 11mo ago
      >In 2025 I expect an online store to have at least some cataloging option (like Steam's tags) To be fair most online storefronts don't have that. Amazon/walmart at best have "categories", which epic also has. Even online content portals like spotify don't have tags, preferring something like "more like this". > but it's baffling that no other store gives at least the same amount of those features to you. Even though they could. The better question is why storefronts don't directly compete on price. We see with airlines that consumers are willing to put up with hellish conditions to save a few percent on airfare. Those features are definitely nice, it's just unclear how they can avoid the free-rider problem if there are competing storefronts.
      - keyringlight 11mo ago
        > The better question is why storefronts don't directly compete on price. The way I see it, it depends how you see who is who's customer. Is the gamer the customer of the store, or are they the customer of the developer/publisher who put out the game, and in turn is the developer/publisher the customer of the store. The store cut is the price to buy their services, and they can shop around to find different offerings at different prices, just as gamers might be able to shop around and decide what (platform features) matters to them with the options available.
      - skotobaza 11mo ago
        I think directly reducing the games' prices will not have the same effect as with traveling, since games are digital and non-mandatory goods, so less people will be swayed by reduced price; unless we are talking about 50% less, of course, which is why people use key reselling sites, because there it is noticeable (and people don't care about legality in that case). That said, Epic is indirectly competing "on price" by paying publishers and developers for their store exclusivity, for free giveaways and even for just using Unreal Engine. But it's the price for developers, not customers. Tim Sweeney said multiple times that he thought supporting developers was more important than customers, and that customers would follow developers. I don't know how whether it worked though.
daedrdev 11mo ago
Plenty of companies have tried to compete with gabe, they’re all just terrible at it
- gruez 11mo ago
  No. First mover advantage is just that strong. How are the competitors to whatsapp or facebook doing? At best you have something like tiktok, which might be technically "social" media but is a totally different segment. You don't catch up with old high school buddies on tiktok, for instance.
  - chacham15 11mo ago
    - Facebook was not first. Before it was friendster and myspace. - Tiktok was not first. Before it was vine and youtube. - Google was not first. Before it was yahoo and altavista. Plenty of todays big companies were not the first in their area.
    - gruez 11mo ago
      All of the examples you gave, the challengers had some revolutionary idea/improvement on top. Tiktok had its recommendation algorithm and short videos. Google had pagerank. That's also the reason why whatsapp hasn't been supplanted. There's no room for innovation (or nobody bothered trying). The same is true for digital distribution. Every steam competitor is basically "steam but [publisher]" or in epic's case, "steam but with steam games".
      - mjr00 11mo ago
        That's what the person who started this comment chain said, though. Every Steam competitor has been "does the same thing as Steam, but worse" so why would anyone switch over?
        deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
duxup 11mo ago
PCs are plenty accessible to developers without Steam.
zer00eyz 11mo ago
Uhhh.... 11 percent. That is the charge back rate in gaming. The "overall" stat for all transactions is something like 3 percent. Card processing isnt free. There are fees, and supporting card processing still has more humans in the loop than one needs. Never mind all the technology that comes with running the dam platform. Is 30 percent a lot. It sure is. Valve isnt a charity, this is how they chose to make money. Meanwhile, AWS has a 30+ percent margin and I dont see CTO's lining up to run hardware...
- gruez 11mo ago
  >11 percent. That is the charge back rate in gaming. The "overall" stat for all transactions is something like 3 percent. 1. source? 2. How does that justify a 30% rate, when presumably it's clawed back from developers? >Card processing isnt free. There are fees, and supporting card processing still has more humans in the loop than one needs. Never mind all the technology that comes with running the dam platform. Again, nowhere near 30% though >Meanwhile, AWS has a 30+ percent margin and I dont see CTO's lining up to run hardware... 30% margins on renting hardware is totally different than a 30% tax on transactions, and it's disingenuous to imply they're comparable. At the very least amazon needs to spend the other 70% on running servers and investing in datacenters, whereas valve doesn't. It's studios that are actually doing the development. Valve just is charging 30% on top of that. To take an extreme example, compare the 2-3% fees charged by visa vs the ~15% gross margins that car companies make. Even though that's 5x higher, I doubt many are outraged about car companies' profiteering.
  - dartharva 11mo ago
    Valve also hosts and maintains the game files for consumers to download, and the bandwidth/hardware needed to serve hundreds of GBs for each game to millions of customers across the globe is not trivial.
    - cwillu 11mo ago
      And the minefield of user cloud storage; I'm amazed that they've managed to avoid basically any abuses of the service.
acedTrex 11mo ago
This is in no way true because there is no requirement to use steam for PC releases. Apple is a firm technical gatekeeper to their ecosystem. Steam is not at all analogous to that for PCs.
- threetonesun 11mo ago
  Steam isn't even analogous to that on their own Steam Deck, where they absolutely could have been.
- immibis 11mo ago
  No requirement to use an apple phone either
al_borland 11mo ago
Are you of the opinion that these marketplaces shouldn’t exist, that they should take a smaller percentage, that they should be entirely ad-supported, or something else? How can user have an optional one-stop-shop that is sustainable for the long-term while not being “evil”.
robhlt 11mo ago
Valve allows developers to generate activation keys for their games and sell them on other platforms, where Valve gets a 0% cut. This is how you're able to buy games from places like the Humble Store and activate them on Steam. Their agreement does technically require that you don't sell at a lower price on other platforms, but as far as I know it's never been enforced.
- kevinh 11mo ago
  There's a lawsuit ongoing about Valve threatening developers with delisting if they sell non-Steam copies of games (that's NOT Steam keys, but, say, a version on the Epic store) on other stores.
  - mjr00 11mo ago
    Can you provide a source for this? This is the first I've heard of anything like this and searching only gives results about the game delisting due to payment processor problems from a few months ago. edit: after some additional search tweaking this is most likely in reference to Wolfire v. Valve, which is now a class-action suit.[0] The argument seems to be that Valve is engaging in anticompetitive behavior by disallowing developers from reselling Steam keys for their games for lower prices on other platforms, not selling the games themselves on other platforms. So this may or may not be what the parent post was referencing. [0] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/wolfire-and-dark-catts-antitrust-lawsuit-against-valve-granted-class-action-status https://www.gamesindustry.biz/wolfire-and-dark-catts-antitru...
axus 11mo ago
Can a Steam Deck install games without using Steam? If so, big advantage over Google Play and the App Store.
- daedrdev 11mo ago
  Yes, which is why nobody attacks them from that angle.
- jamie_ca 11mo ago
  It's more fiddly in that you need to swap to desktop mode to do the installs, but you can get it set up so that your "external" games from Epic or Itch or emulators or whatever show up in the standard Steam UI.
- chrisnight 11mo ago
  Yes, I have plenty of games from, e.g. the Epic Game Store on my steam deck, even in the steam home page, seamlessly. Gamescope is even fully open-source, so you could remove the steam deck UI, and still run any game with the same performance benefits of not running it inside KDE. Of course also, you could flash a new OS on the device itself if you wanted to entirely remove Valve’s presence.
- Phelinofist 11mo ago
  Sure, it is a Linux box after all
- whatevaa 11mo ago
  Steam Deck desktop mode is full blown KDE desktop. The only nuance is that system updates are managed by A/B partition scheme, so root is readonly. Can be made writeable but it's an overlay, so changes get lost on system update and need to be reapplied.
  - efreak 11mo ago
    It's not an overlay, it just gets mounted separately from root - there's an overlay for /etc and possibly a few other directories, this is to allow user changes to configuration to be kept after upgrades Changes get wiped because (as you mentioned) it's an a/b partition; when you switch partitions you lose the changes. You can actually enable an overlay for root changes, but this causes other issues - you get to choose if you want to track packages you've installed, or packages that are in the base system. It's either in the overlay and you keep your changes but not the base system changes, or it's in the base system and you lose track of changes made in your overlay. - updates to the base system of packages that have been uninstalled in the overlay can cause inconsistencies like orphaned files (the new system update includes extra files from this package that haven't been removed by your uninstall. Hopefully some other package doesn't take this as a sign that an optional dependency library is fully installed, the linked subdependencies might be missing) - updates to the base system can be overridden in specific files that were modified in your overlay, causing packages to become non-functional - imagine rebuilding a library 4.5 to add a feature (or updating to v 4.7), then the base system updates that library to 4.8. All other software now expects version 4.8, but instead your overlay is providing 4.5. better hope it's only a minor patch update and not an update providing a feature, or worse, a major breaking update.
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preisschild 11mo ago
That is bullshit, you are not even locked to using Steam on the Steam Deck. 30% is completely fair for the amount of infrastructure Steam provides to your game. Definitely not comparable to Apple, which is forcing all iPhone users to use their own app store.

daedrdev 11mo ago

Its definitely the ones that sell. There are plenty of small studios run by founders, but often once they sell they start burning consumer trust and goodwill as if those things don't exist and have an actual cost

Loughla 11mo ago
Once you have an IP that's massive and you know people will buy regardless of if you're a trash monster or not, there's zero incentive to do the right thing. Until people stop buying games from these places nothing will change.

monospacegames 11mo ago

Financially Valve exists in an incomparably different space compared to companies like Take Two that actually have to make games to make money.

bak3y 11mo ago
And they were able to get there because they made good games.
- jeffwask 11mo ago
  I would rephrase this as they got there because they treat their customers with respect, they take feedback to improve their platform, they don't pack their launcher / store front with ads and trickery, and you can trust that your games will be there and not go away. Yes, they are loot box whores but so is everyone else. Steam is a community, social media, and a store. The community is what they built and that community is extremely loyal. That community is also what developers are paying for. In Gaben, we trust. I have 20 years of experience saying Gabe won't fuck me over to increase EBIDA by .5%. Are they perfect? No, but they are lightyears better than most of their competitors except GOG in terms of putting consumers first.
  - caconym_ 11mo ago
    This is what I always say about Valve. They are not morally unimpeachable, but at the end of the day I've been a regular customer for over 20 years and they've never fucked me over. I don't think I can say the same about any other software company.
    - mrguyorama 11mo ago
      And most importantly, the moment they show any indication of doing otherwise, I will happily drop them. I keep giving Valve my money because they keep giving me good value for that money and a trustworthy environment to spend that money in. I have no loyalty. I also buy games from Humble Bundle and GOG. I'm not excited about the prospect of losing my 4000 games but the literal only options available for consumers right now are "Pay money and get a game that we can take away at any time, fuck you over, do all sorts of bad things, and we demonstrably hate you", or "Pay money to get a game and a refund period and a bunch of features and maybe when Gabe dies we will do that other thing" There is no alternative. GOG is run by the same people who released CyberPunk2077 as a bug ridden mess to please upper management, so they even have evidence of already straddling that line right now.

worldfoodgood 11mo ago

Valve makes a significant amount of their money from the gambling they've attached to their games, and profits immensely from the culture of farming loot boxes to gamble on for skins and such. They also take an absurd cut of developer income and saddle devs with costs that they don't always want. (Selling on Steam? Valve takes 30% and forces you to moderate the forums on your listing page that you cannot opt out of.) They also have an internal culture that's been fairly regularly criticized as being pretty uncomfortable for women and minorities. Valve has done some cool stuff, but let's not lionize them too much. They are probably better than an average company, for sure, but it's important to remember that they are also sketchy in some very gross ways as well.

abtinf 11mo ago
> but it's important to remember that ... as well Hello LLM.
Bombthecat 11mo ago
How much money do they make through counter strike loot boxes and selling games etc?
umvi 11mo ago
I'm happier to pay Valve's 30% than Apple's. With Valve you could always switch to Itch or something if you didn't want to pay, but with Apple you have no alternative. Valve gives you access to a huge player base and lots of useful marketing tools and such.
- worldfoodgood 11mo ago
  Ok! Happier is a fine place to be. They are both still too high. Not everything has to be binary -- I can think Valve is offering some utility and also think that Valve is charging too much for that utility. The fact that Gabe has a billion dollars worth of yachts probably suggests that maybe, just maaaaaybe, that 30% could be lower and Steam could still provide you the same level of marketing support and player base.

John23832 11mo ago

> Valve is basically the only one that didn’t… Lol Valve is taking a cut of a ridiculous amount of video game sales while releasing no games. I like some of their work on the linux support side, but they have sold out as much as Apple has if anything.

jsheard 11mo ago

> Valve is basically the only one that didn’t They kind of did, with their sudden pivot from primarily making singleplayer games to almost exclusively making F2P GaaS titles the instant they got a taste of lootbox money. Half-Life 3 and Portal 3 will never happen because Valve makes 100x as much money with 1/100th of the effort by peddling Counter Strike skins.

pphysch 11mo ago
HL3 is under active development though. If that's a success I'm sure they'd try a Portal 3 as well.
saintfire 11mo ago
Allegedly HL3 is in active development. No official announcement yet.
PetitPrince 11mo ago
HL3 kinda happened though, but it was called Half-Life Alyx. And while it wasn't a conventional FPS like HL1 and 2, there's absolutely no trace of GaaS in it.
- jsheard 11mo ago
  Alyx is a bit of an edge case because they needed a VR showcase, and it's unlikely that a PC VR game (even a Valve one) could have sustained a healthy multiplayer population. Regardless of the reasons why it happened, it's the one and only singleplayer title they've released in the last 14 years, which neatly aligns with them discovering the joy of lootboxes 15 years ago.
  - Something1234 11mo ago
    What about Aperture Labs Desk Job as a demo for the deck? Full self contained single player story.
    - mathgeek 11mo ago

shadowgovt 11mo ago

Valve never sold out because they became the "out" other companies sell out to. They successfully built a revenue-capturing money-printer in the form of the Steam store and service and now they don't have to make games at all to keep their bottom line strong. Not to imply they shouldn't have; get that gold ring and all. (But I may also argue the point they never sold out in terms of being a game studio as opposed to a publisher.... "So when's Half Life 3 releasing?")

jayd16 11mo ago

I wouldn't call this selling out, exactly. If the issue is endless crunch, its more a matter of having enough money to support it endlessly and an aging workforce that knows their worth and can push back. The issue is trying to force (or likely, continue) bad practices when they're clearly not working and then lacking the leadership to realize that a retaliatory layoff is only going to make things worse.

haunter 11mo ago

>Wish more people would resist the payday and keep what’s theirs. Ah yeah unregulated illegal underage gambling, the great resistance. Gabe could shutdown the whole thing with 1 click, all the sites are using the Steam API, but they don't and you know why. Valve did a lot of things good but they are also the original source of a lot of bad things from lootboxes to skin gambling to the FOMO battle pass cancer of modern gaming.

Aunche 11mo ago

Smaller studios can maintain a small team of highly passionate people that will happily work 60+ hours a week or achieve similar productivity. As a studio grows, this becomes harder to maintain. You're pressured to either become a slave driver or dilute your product and make more money through derivative content or micro transactions. For example, I heard that EA is actually a relatively chill company. What sometimes works at keeping employees and customers both happy is fostering a cult-like environment, but that can easily lead to exploitation.

guywithahat 11mo ago

But union "busting" isn't selling out, if anything it's keeping to their true cause. Companies don't function well with adversarial units within them, and companies don't start out with unions. Case and point: Valve doesn't have a union.

NoraCodes 11mo ago
The phrase is "case in point", and unionized companies often do quite well.
ab5tract 11mo ago
It’s a privately owned company. This leads to an entirely different relationship between employees and the top layer of management. You have to be very misguided to believe that the c suite in most companies is not engaged in n adversarial relationship with its employees, whether those employees are unionized or not.
array_key_first 11mo ago
> Companies don't function well with adversarial units within them This isn't a given, this is just an opinion, and one you didn't bother trying to argue for. Many systems do function much better with adversarial units in them. Governments have the adversarial units of checks and balances. Companies have the adversarial forces of the market. A news paper has the adversarial units of editors to their writers.

righthand 11mo ago

They definitely get a free pass from people. Valve is plenty evil.