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My unpopular opinion: Valve is basically a parasite or a landlord. They've been so successful it's hard to imagine a world without them, and they say "you gotta

My unpopular opinion: Valve is basically a parasite or a landlord. They've been so successful it's hard to imagine a world without them, and they say "you gotta give the parasite its due" and we believe them and comply. It's been kept around because they treat their customers ok, but they absolutely exsanguinate their developers. And their engineering culture is... odd. They hire senior people and then let them all fuck sound aimlessly. Their APIs are terrible, their infrastructure is all over the place, they still have patch Tuesdays. But because they are the landlord that owns every house in town, what are you going to do, not pay rent? Gabe is out there cruising the world in a billion dollar yacht, eating thousand dollar meals. All that came off the backs of developers who actually make the games.

usea 5mo ago
> It's been kept around because they treat their customers ok, but they absolutely exsanguinate their developers. This is true, but "treat their customers ok" goes a long way. When everybody else severely abuses their customers, the one company that doesn't generates a lot of goodwill.
CursedSilicon 5mo ago
I'd question the idea that they treat developers poorly. Epic Games Store exists and Famously beats Steam (and others) over the head by charging only a 12% fee Hell, they even buy timed exclusive access to certain games And yet. Steam persists
- fc417fc802 5mo ago
  I lack an informed opinion on the matter but I have to wonder what you think the one thing has to do with the other? Developers have very little choice but to go where the customers are.
  - CursedSilicon 5mo ago
    Why aren't the customers going to Epic Game Store? It's the PC, after all. It's explicitly not a walled garden
    - fc417fc802 5mo ago
      Who knows? Presumably because Steam hasn't done anything to drive them off, they've generally been satisfied with the service, and the titles they want are available. At least that would be my guess based on my personal experience but I assume Valve has a much better grasp of their audience than I do.
    - zamadatix 5mo ago
      The Epic Game Store is just kind of mid. The app feels spammy, the game selection is less, and it doesn't really offer anything over the existing options beyond the monthly free game gimmick. If they want customers to head there it needs to be better, not just good enough.
    - Banditoz 5mo ago
      EGS has yet to reach the feaure parity of Steam from 15 years ago.
      - simoncion 5mo ago
        As a user of both EGS and Steam, the one thing that EGS doesn't have that Steam does is multi-threaded downloading. Steam can saturate any connection I've thrown at it, whereas EGS gets a few-hundred mbit/s and saturates a single CPU while doing it. Perhaps game devs get a whole bunch of "gee whiz" features from the Steam Platform that Epic Games doesn't provide, but I -personally- couldn't care less about those.
        fc417fc802 5mo ago
        You don't need multiple threads to saturate a gigabit connection. Even many embedded SoCs can do it. That said, Steam has a rather absurd CDN.
- brador 5mo ago
  The epic games launcher that famously takes 46 seconds to launch. It’s cost them 100s of millions and they refuse to fix it.
- jfim 5mo ago
  The Epic store is horrendously slow though. I bought a few games there but in practice the client is just so slow that I avoid it if I can.
- dontlaugh 5mo ago
  Having worked in the games industry for long time, everyone is constantly trying in vain to escape the 30% tax.
  - antonkochubey 5mo ago
    It’s fascinating how (mostly western liberal) game developers argue in favor of 99% taxes for general population “for maintaining infrastructure” and yet cannot fathom paying a fee for maintaining actual infrastructure that is necessary for their business to function.
    - dontlaugh 5mo ago
      I'm not familiar with whatever strawman you're invoking here. By "everyone" I mean game studio owners. They're desperate to not pay 30% to Valve / Sony / Apple / whatever. The vast majority of people that work at game studios don't really care about that, they see a shrinking fraction of the profits of their employers and worsening conditions.
  - simoncion 5mo ago
    It makes a lot of sense for businesses to seek to reduce their costs wherever they can. But, from what I've heard about brick and mortar distribution, you used to pay quite a bit more and get a lot less than what Steam gives you. From what I can tell, that 30% cut gets you -for the rest of forever- * distribution for both the current version of the game and some number of older versions you choose to make available [0] * a place in their searchable games index [1] * "cloud" storage for your players' savegames * basic forum and blog hosting for discussion of and news about your game From what I could tell as someone who used to buy games in retail stores, in a bricks and mortar distribution unless you were -like- the Starcraft/Diablo/Warcraft boxed set, you got like maybe a half year of time on the shelf. I've heard folks say that you had to pay a 50->80% cut for that. [0] Valve will even distribute games that don't work anymore. This is both good and bad, but Steam's no-hassles refund policy combined the existence of unofficial patches that make games work on current versions of Windows make me generally fine with charging for and distributing games that no longer work as-is. [1] ...at least until the wrong horde of pearl-clutching busybodies demand that credit card companies require your game be erased from the commercial world because it is art that discusses those busybodies' bugbear du jour
- kotaKat 5mo ago
  > Epic Games Store exists and Famously beats Steam (and others) over the head by charging only a 12% fee https://www.fortnite.com/news/fortnite-developers-will-soon-be-able-to-sell-in-game-items https://www.fortnite.com/news/fortnite-developers-will-soon-... Unless you're inside Fortnite, where Epic takes a 63% cut of any 'in game item' you sell, and you don't have a choice of storefront inside the game. Rules for me, but not for thee, so sayeth Timmy Tencent as he collects his next ten cents of revenue from a twelve year old.
astlouis44 5mo ago
Totally agreed. I'm building a Steam competitor, that's web-based (WebGPU/WASM) as well as cross-platform. Light on games atm, but the goal is to replicate over time virtually every feature Steam has to offer, as well as more. You can check out a preview of the portal here: https://gameselect-knvxf8av.manus.space/ https://gameselect-knvxf8av.manus.space/
- koolala 5mo ago
  What lets you host Monkeyball like that. Are you going to port Xonotic to WASM?
  - dminik 5mo ago
    Starting a sustainable steam competitor with piracy sure seems like a great idea!
    - sammularczyk 5mo ago
      The background music is ripped from the PS5 home menu too.
    - trumpdong 5mo ago
      It's how Spotify started. And CrunchyRoll. And slightly metaphorically Uber. And in a way Netflix. Turns out you can't scale if you never offer anything of value to customers and therefore never get customers.
  - D2OQZG8l5BI1S06 5mo ago
    He already did lol, just didn't update the main website. Doesn't work very well for me, but it's something. https://www.reddit.com/r/xonotic/comments/1tyqx5w/i_ported_xonotic_to_the_web_with_full_p2p/ https://www.reddit.com/r/xonotic/comments/1tyqx5w/i_ported_x...
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
faidit 5mo ago
Eh, Steam is kind of like the liberal democratic US empire. It may be evil in a lot of ways but it could actually be a LOT worse. We may actually historically be very lucky to have had a non-shittificationmaxxing games platform for a couple decades, just like we were lowkey lucky that the world was briefly ruled by a somewhat democratic country.. Enjoy both while they last, may not be around long.
- applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - faidit 5mo ago
    Steam is also a child gambling company that sells loot boxes to kids but it could be a lot worse. From the perspective of someone getting ripped off it doesn't matter whether it was Gaben who scammed you, but he and his empire could still be a lot worse overall. You're allowed to say what you just said in that post without getting taken away at night and your family never talking about you again. Or a drone taking you out while you sleep. Palantir logs all our comments and it would be trivially easy for them if there weren't still some lingering democratic handrails holding them back. You're also typing on a computer on HN, so you're a "beneficiary of the empire" regardless of where you live. As someone who apparently reads leftist theory you should know to look at the big picture on world-historical questions rather than getting emotional, like the people who say USSR was just as evil as WW2 Germany because it also killed gormillions of people. Democracy in the US is dying and may not last another generation. It was something that helped imperial workers and limited the power of the ruling elite, like unions. Unions, like democracy as a whole, are dying. Unions were also corrupt and complicit in imperialist war crimes during the Cold war. Unions in the West have always been connected to labor aristocracy and imperialism. That said, unions as a whole are still a good thing. We should still mourn the decline of labor unions and miss the days when they kept the elite in check and allowed so many working people to live a decent life. Steam is also likely to become an ordinary ripoff company one day soon. I will miss this historical aberration among pure ripoff services. Just like I will miss being able to vote and dissent without drones zapping me.
Scroll_Swe 5mo ago
Developers, like gamers, are the most oppressed people.

usea 5mo ago

> It's been kept around because they treat their customers ok, but they absolutely exsanguinate their developers. This is true, but "treat their customers ok" goes a long way. When everybody else severely abuses their customers, the one company that doesn't generates a lot of goodwill.

CursedSilicon 5mo ago

I'd question the idea that they treat developers poorly. Epic Games Store exists and Famously beats Steam (and others) over the head by charging only a 12% fee Hell, they even buy timed exclusive access to certain games And yet. Steam persists

fc417fc802 5mo ago
I lack an informed opinion on the matter but I have to wonder what you think the one thing has to do with the other? Developers have very little choice but to go where the customers are.
- CursedSilicon 5mo ago
  Why aren't the customers going to Epic Game Store? It's the PC, after all. It's explicitly not a walled garden
  - fc417fc802 5mo ago
    Who knows? Presumably because Steam hasn't done anything to drive them off, they've generally been satisfied with the service, and the titles they want are available. At least that would be my guess based on my personal experience but I assume Valve has a much better grasp of their audience than I do.
  - zamadatix 5mo ago
    The Epic Game Store is just kind of mid. The app feels spammy, the game selection is less, and it doesn't really offer anything over the existing options beyond the monthly free game gimmick. If they want customers to head there it needs to be better, not just good enough.
  - Banditoz 5mo ago
    EGS has yet to reach the feaure parity of Steam from 15 years ago.
    - simoncion 5mo ago
      As a user of both EGS and Steam, the one thing that EGS doesn't have that Steam does is multi-threaded downloading. Steam can saturate any connection I've thrown at it, whereas EGS gets a few-hundred mbit/s and saturates a single CPU while doing it. Perhaps game devs get a whole bunch of "gee whiz" features from the Steam Platform that Epic Games doesn't provide, but I -personally- couldn't care less about those.
      - fc417fc802 5mo ago
        You don't need multiple threads to saturate a gigabit connection. Even many embedded SoCs can do it. That said, Steam has a rather absurd CDN.
brador 5mo ago
The epic games launcher that famously takes 46 seconds to launch. It’s cost them 100s of millions and they refuse to fix it.
jfim 5mo ago
The Epic store is horrendously slow though. I bought a few games there but in practice the client is just so slow that I avoid it if I can.
dontlaugh 5mo ago
Having worked in the games industry for long time, everyone is constantly trying in vain to escape the 30% tax.
- antonkochubey 5mo ago
  It’s fascinating how (mostly western liberal) game developers argue in favor of 99% taxes for general population “for maintaining infrastructure” and yet cannot fathom paying a fee for maintaining actual infrastructure that is necessary for their business to function.
  - dontlaugh 5mo ago
    I'm not familiar with whatever strawman you're invoking here. By "everyone" I mean game studio owners. They're desperate to not pay 30% to Valve / Sony / Apple / whatever. The vast majority of people that work at game studios don't really care about that, they see a shrinking fraction of the profits of their employers and worsening conditions.
- simoncion 5mo ago
  It makes a lot of sense for businesses to seek to reduce their costs wherever they can. But, from what I've heard about brick and mortar distribution, you used to pay quite a bit more and get a lot less than what Steam gives you. From what I can tell, that 30% cut gets you -for the rest of forever- * distribution for both the current version of the game and some number of older versions you choose to make available [0] * a place in their searchable games index [1] * "cloud" storage for your players' savegames * basic forum and blog hosting for discussion of and news about your game From what I could tell as someone who used to buy games in retail stores, in a bricks and mortar distribution unless you were -like- the Starcraft/Diablo/Warcraft boxed set, you got like maybe a half year of time on the shelf. I've heard folks say that you had to pay a 50->80% cut for that. [0] Valve will even distribute games that don't work anymore. This is both good and bad, but Steam's no-hassles refund policy combined the existence of unofficial patches that make games work on current versions of Windows make me generally fine with charging for and distributing games that no longer work as-is. [1] ...at least until the wrong horde of pearl-clutching busybodies demand that credit card companies require your game be erased from the commercial world because it is art that discusses those busybodies' bugbear du jour
kotaKat 5mo ago
> Epic Games Store exists and Famously beats Steam (and others) over the head by charging only a 12% fee https://www.fortnite.com/news/fortnite-developers-will-soon-be-able-to-sell-in-game-items https://www.fortnite.com/news/fortnite-developers-will-soon-... Unless you're inside Fortnite, where Epic takes a 63% cut of any 'in game item' you sell, and you don't have a choice of storefront inside the game. Rules for me, but not for thee, so sayeth Timmy Tencent as he collects his next ten cents of revenue from a twelve year old.

astlouis44 5mo ago

Totally agreed. I'm building a Steam competitor, that's web-based (WebGPU/WASM) as well as cross-platform. Light on games atm, but the goal is to replicate over time virtually every feature Steam has to offer, as well as more. You can check out a preview of the portal here: https://gameselect-knvxf8av.manus.space/ https://gameselect-knvxf8av.manus.space/

koolala 5mo ago
What lets you host Monkeyball like that. Are you going to port Xonotic to WASM?
- dminik 5mo ago
  Starting a sustainable steam competitor with piracy sure seems like a great idea!
  - sammularczyk 5mo ago
    The background music is ripped from the PS5 home menu too.
  - trumpdong 5mo ago
    It's how Spotify started. And CrunchyRoll. And slightly metaphorically Uber. And in a way Netflix. Turns out you can't scale if you never offer anything of value to customers and therefore never get customers.
- D2OQZG8l5BI1S06 5mo ago
  He already did lol, just didn't update the main website. Doesn't work very well for me, but it's something. https://www.reddit.com/r/xonotic/comments/1tyqx5w/i_ported_xonotic_to_the_web_with_full_p2p/ https://www.reddit.com/r/xonotic/comments/1tyqx5w/i_ported_x...
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]

faidit 5mo ago

Eh, Steam is kind of like the liberal democratic US empire. It may be evil in a lot of ways but it could actually be a LOT worse. We may actually historically be very lucky to have had a non-shittificationmaxxing games platform for a couple decades, just like we were lowkey lucky that the world was briefly ruled by a somewhat democratic country.. Enjoy both while they last, may not be around long.

applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
[flagged]
- faidit 5mo ago
  Steam is also a child gambling company that sells loot boxes to kids but it could be a lot worse. From the perspective of someone getting ripped off it doesn't matter whether it was Gaben who scammed you, but he and his empire could still be a lot worse overall. You're allowed to say what you just said in that post without getting taken away at night and your family never talking about you again. Or a drone taking you out while you sleep. Palantir logs all our comments and it would be trivially easy for them if there weren't still some lingering democratic handrails holding them back. You're also typing on a computer on HN, so you're a "beneficiary of the empire" regardless of where you live. As someone who apparently reads leftist theory you should know to look at the big picture on world-historical questions rather than getting emotional, like the people who say USSR was just as evil as WW2 Germany because it also killed gormillions of people. Democracy in the US is dying and may not last another generation. It was something that helped imperial workers and limited the power of the ruling elite, like unions. Unions, like democracy as a whole, are dying. Unions were also corrupt and complicit in imperialist war crimes during the Cold war. Unions in the West have always been connected to labor aristocracy and imperialism. That said, unions as a whole are still a good thing. We should still mourn the decline of labor unions and miss the days when they kept the elite in check and allowed so many working people to live a decent life. Steam is also likely to become an ordinary ripoff company one day soon. I will miss this historical aberration among pure ripoff services. Just like I will miss being able to vote and dissent without drones zapping me.

Scroll_Swe 5mo ago

Developers, like gamers, are the most oppressed people.