6 ms·
It's the other way around. Valve is the company where we spend a lot of money and they deserve it. The rest is companies that trick people into giving them mo
by artyom 5mo ago
It's the other way around.
Valve is the company where we spend a lot of money and they deserve it.
The rest is companies that trick people into giving them money (battlepass! lootboxes!) and they don't deserve it.
People often forget that consumers as a whole are the ones holding the power, and the sad part is that rewarding a company with a good product with your money stopped being the business model and it's now the exception.
- xingped 5mo agoI don't disagree with most of your statement, but Valve has and continues to make lots of money from loot boxes in both CS and TF2. Just want to point out that they do do stuff like that too.
- stevehawk 5mo agopeople are still buying tf2 loot boxes?
- xingped 5mo agoThe lootboxes drop as a normal course of gameplay, you buy keys to open them. People still play TF2 so presumably some still open boxes. It's also the base unit of trading for high value items.
- alifeinbinary 5mo agoI agree that turning CS into a casino wasn’t a tasteful choice on Valve’s part but as someone who has played CS at least once a week for decades I can understand that they needed to find a way to cover server costs somehow. I paid $15 dollars for CS:GO and have clocked 4,500 hours in the game. I don’t gamble but I’d rather those who choose to fund the server costs than Valve charge a monthly subscription to everyone. Skin sales alone would have accomplished this without having to have loot boxes and keys and that’s where I think Valve went overboard with it. Also, for a game that provides so much revenue I expect better anti-cheat and more VAC bans, which are rare.
- account42 5mo agoThey didn't need to cover server costs for CS 1.6. I wonder why that is? Hint: CS 1.6 wasn't designed from the ground up as a microtransaction vehicle so could have servers run by the community unlike CS:GO where centrally run servers are needed to make microtransactions work, not the other way around.
- bitfilped 5mo agoA company choosing to take a loss on a service is not the same as not needing to pay for it, it was getting paid for.
- cwel 5mo ago..and Dota2..
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- blindspot4 5mo agoAmericans would rather mention TF2, a game with less than 10 thousand concurrent players and probably making a modicum of money, than ever pretend that game exists or has influenced other games.
- GranPC 5mo agoWhat does that have to do with Americans specifically?
- DaSHacka 5mo agoTF2 has over 30,000 active players right now though.. https://steamdb.info/app/440/charts/ https://steamdb.info/app/440/charts/
- transcriptase 5mo ago25,000 are bots farming drops
- maleldil 5mo agoRegardless of how many concurrent players it has now, TF2 was massively influential to other FPS games, and it's still held with high regard by the community. It was also one of the first major games to introduce loot boxes.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- xingped 5mo agoAh yeah, I forgot about Dota2, sorry. It's just a genre I don't pay any attention to, but you're right.
- firen777 5mo agoI feel like a lot of things Valve does, with the exception of loot boxes, are the bare minimum of what a good (not great) companies should do. So of course every single company look at Valve and decide they should do the complete opposite of everything Valve does except loot boxes.
- artyom 5mo agoAnd I forgot to mention in-game currency. I didn't say Valve is perfect. But they're definitely worth the money I spend there. Great service, proper support, regional pricing, and the list goes on. Everything works today. The work they've put on Proton/Linux gaming easily wins my support. Did they screw up sometimes? Sure. And I'm from the days when Steam didn't exist. I remember the NoSTEAM game versions in shady sites, including Half-Life 2. Steam was hated with a passion back then. They won by ultimately providing great value and service.
- ninjaoxygen 5mo agoTotally agree with you there, as much as I love to hate non-transferability, revokable licenses, permanent VAC bans on accounts that got hacked, I still find Steam the most convenient path to "owning" games in one place. The Linux work done for Steam Deck is fantastic and I do credit their efforts with inspiring others to work on similar projects that extend and complement what Valve achieved. Much of the hard effort did go into Windows games on Linux before Valve looked at it; everything the WINE project, Codeweavers did, gaming via Lutris since 2009, however Valve have definitely been a force multiplier. Trust is earned and I think Valve are doing pretty well on that front, especially when you look at the differences to other PC stores, Ubisoft, EA, and to some extent Epic. GOG and Itch are very different beasts. To some extent I miss the time where Steam was totally curated, you had to make an impact to get your game on the platform, back before it was a free-for-all of shovelware and low-effort slop. Occasional controversies aside, at least on Steam the tools / marketing funnel are there to keep the popular games at the forefront of the store whilst also being fairly open to allow devs to publish without being the chosen one. Is there a danger of doing to games what Spotify has done to music? Maybe, but I reckon the super deep-discount sales have calmed somewhat and are happening later in game's long-tail part of the lifecycle or used as promo for sequels. There are plenty of publishers that choose to mainly avoid going that route, often the traditional established publishers with console outlets they don't want to cannibalise, for example Sony and Konami.
- artyom 5mo ago> Is there a danger of doing to games what Spotify has done to music? I think such business model ultimately doesn't scale well for games (several million-dollars production budgets sharing minuscule pieces of a ~$20 all-you-can-eat subscription pie). Microsoft always knew this, they didn't try to win the market, they tried to subvert the business model, probably expecting the industry as a whole moving towards it -- which didn't happen at all, at least not yet. Simple math would prove this. There's no way acquiring half the good studios in the world and make them release flop after flop was a break-even operation. It's several orders of magnitude behind.
- Spacemolte 5mo agoThey also didn't/don't put a stop to the gambling sites, scams and non-scams, done with those lootboxes. We have an epidemic of addiction to gambling in youth, where the arrow points at lootboxes as the gateway drug..
- mschuster91 5mo agoValve is far from the first, only, or worst actors in this field. Skin lootboxes are not much more than a flex. If there is one to blame for the gambling epidemic, look at EA and FIFA.
- account42 5mo agoValve is not literally the first but they played a big part in normalizing both lootboxes and micro transactions. Don't rewrite history just because you are a fan. Not to mention their role in you not owning your games.
- embedding-shape 5mo ago> Not to mention their role in you not owning your games. I do use Steam to "purchase" games, and it irks me that they're still allowed to show "Buy" when in reality you're essentially leasing/renting the game, can't believe it's legal for them (and others) to trick people like this still.
- mschuster91 5mo agoA Steam purchase I have more confidence in than a physical game copy to survive. I trust Steam to honor its agreement with me more than I trust in myself and my feline overlords to keep a game CD alive. In a previous timeline, this has led to me going on ebay to find CDs of a long lost game (EarthSiege 2), which I promptly uploaded to the Internet Archive as the one distributed by the current license-holder at the time had an older, unstable version with bugs and, more importantly, no audio and my own original copy got damaged to hell and beyond... [1] https://archive.org/details/sierra-earth-siege-2 https://archive.org/details/sierra-earth-siege-2
- akimbostrawman 5mo agoCS lootboxes are the least shitty ones in the entire industry. There is 0% pay to win, if anything the skins are a disadvantage because they usually stand out.
- xingped 5mo agoI didn't say that lootboxes were pay to win and most lootboxes in games are not. That doesn't mean it's not still profiting from and enabling gambling and addiction.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- nextlevelwizard 5mo agoMaybe hot take in this age, but loot boxes for cosmetics aren't a problem when you can get cosmetics by just playing.
- xingped 5mo agoAlmost every game that has lootboxes, even only for cosmetics, is super stingy with cosmetics you can earn in-game through normal gameplay.
- nextlevelwizard 5mo agoAnd I see no problem with that. I have never bought a single skin for Counter Strike nor Team Fortress 2 and I have bunch. Well, I used to, but then CS2 came out and all of a sudden my skins and unopened boxes were valued at hundreds of euros and I sold them on steam.
- xingped 5mo agoIf you think enabling childhood gambling addictions and unregulated gambling systems aren't a problem then I don't know what else to say to you. Lootboxes are gambling, plain and simple.
- nextlevelwizard 5mo agoLet’s put age limit on gaming then. Gamblers will always find a way to gamble. I like getting cosmetics for free even if they are randomized. I don’t think I have ever bought keys to loot boxes, I just don’t see the point.
- jakkos 5mo agoThere's a lot of evidence showing that gambling as a child leads to gambling problems as an adult, and loot boxes are just gambling aimed to a large degree at children. Valve games are even worse for this because Steam trading allows 3rd party sites to sell cosmetics directly for cash, and some of these cosmetics are worth tens of thousands of dollars. It's just children gambling money but with a thin veneer of video game over the top.
- andrepd 5mo ago> The rest is companies that trick people into giving them money (battlepass! lootboxes!) and they don't deserve it. It's really funny to read this given that Valve largely invented loot boxes!
- caminante 5mo agoAnd they've done legendary doublespeak while looking the other way!
- unrealhoang 5mo agoMaybe not lootboxes but most certainly battlepass.
- Pay08 5mo agoAlthough not in its modern iteration.
- dvt 5mo agoI'd like to have an honest conversation about this, but imo Valve is no better than the iOS app store: it aggressively rent seeks and has essentially destroyed the shareware model (which was the best way to discover software in the 80s-90s). It has also willingly been complicit in underage gambling via loot boxes for more than a decade now. I think Gabe Newell is a visionary for building Steam in 2003, way before Jobs had the same idea, but absolutely everyone and their mother hated Steam back then. I remember the memes on IRC and various forums (and I've been on Steam for a very[1] long time, the first or second day it came out I think). Two decades later, props to them and their useful acolytes for gaslighting the entire gaming community. No idea how Gaben is regarded as some sort of Christlike figure these days, but here we are. Maybe it's just a "lesser of two evils" thing, as companies/platforms like EA and Ubisoft are the absolute scum of the earth. [1] https://steamcommunity.com/id/dvxirl/ https://steamcommunity.com/id/dvxirl/
- account42 5mo agoValve uses battlepasses and lootboxes (i.e. gambling for minors) as much as the worst in the industry. They are far from a good corporation. Gabe is just better at PR than the competition and gamers are irrationally tribal and will defend whatever they consider to be part of while ignoring all the bad parts.
- ricardobayes 5mo agoYes, true. Same thing with most software companies - they forget 100% of their value logs off at 5pm. If you're a software CEO reading this, your company value doesn't come from your customers, clients or contracts. It's the people doing the work.
- limagnolia 5mo agoGOG is pretty good too. I just wish they had better native Linux support.
- toilet 5mo agoVALVe are the original lootbox hawkers