feddit.org

38 points

3 months ago

Steam? Really out of all these, the the one that treats it’s customers properly and gives them any and all tools needed to make a proper purchase decision with many big sales consistently. Great call

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Landless2029@lemmy.world

28 points

3 months ago

Funny the things you can do when you don’t have to worry about shareholders.

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-21 points

3 months ago

So because they’re treating you right it’s ok to put 70% of the market in the hands of a single person?

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3 points

3 months ago

Hot take: if they aren’t hurting me or others, money wise or not, I don’t care if they have majority market share. In this case it makes sense, they treat their customers right and don’t bully the market.

This simply isn’t the fight.

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-1 points

3 months ago

But they’re hurting you, their market dominance means they don’t have to compete for pricing, the reason Newell is a billionaire is because the games they sell are sold for more than they’re worth.

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3 points

3 months ago

You don’t get to decide for me who I think is or isn’t hurting me, I do.

With these takes, what I really want to know is: Who hurt you?

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0 points

3 months ago

Oh so you believe that margins high enough that the owner is a billionaire don’t hurt your wallet?

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2 points

3 months ago

You are so lost in the sauce. We’re talking about a company that hosts a video game sales platform, if I feel like they are fucking me, I can go elsewhere, there’s epic, gog, ubishit, ea, xbox, itch, I don’t have to go to steam. I choose to.

If they aren’t fucking me, let them make as much as they want. There are far, FAR bigger fish to fry.

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Hexarei@programming.dev

4 points

3 months ago

You know Valve doesn’t set the prices right? The developers do

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-1 points

3 months ago

The devs determine they need to sell X copies at Y$/copy, they then calculate what Valve’s cut will be and add it over Y$

Example: You think you’ll sell a million copy and want to make 10 millions to recoup your cost and make a profit so you need 10$ per. But the truth is that after everyone else gets their cut (publisher, distributor, taxes…) you’re left with about 50% of the sale price going to you, that means your need to sell the game for 20$ to end up with 10$/copy going to you. If everyone else had lower margins and you got 70% of the sale price ending up in your pocket you would need to sell your game for 14.30$ a copy to end up with 10$ going to you. Everyone else in this example are the people who aren’t part of the actual development cost, their margins are huge compared to the amount of work they accomplish, the proof of that is that they’re making billions in profit, profit is revenue - cost, their cost is basically nothing, hosting content and distributing it costs peanuts these days and prices are only going down, so their profit is actually increasing passively over time. Because the devs need to set the price at 20$ instead of 14.30$ you’re paying 5.70$ more for the same product and that 5.70$ is all going into the pockets of people that had nothing to do with actually creating the product you’re purchasing.

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TachyonTele@lemm.ee

4 points

3 months ago

How is that different than selling anything else anywhere? You’ve picked a strange hill to die on, and your reasoning doesn’t even fit.

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11 points

3 months ago

You say that like your only option is to buy games from steam.

There are many other online stores you can use. Sorry you don’t like the most popular/oldest/one that reflects the wishes of the consumer the most.

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TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world

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16 points

3 months ago

Just having a high market share isn’t the issue. It’s abusing that dominant market position that is.

Valve has been smart enough not to do that. Google, Amazon, Microsoft and the like haven’t. In fact, Valve’s competitors have been more anti-competitive than Valve.

ASML, who make EUV machines and other semiconductor tooling, is also in a dominant market position (way more dominant actually). Do you ever see calls to break them up? No. Because they haven’t been abusing their power. They know that if they put a toe out of line, they’ll be in trouble with regulators.

Google and the like have been able to act with impunity because the US protects them, to the detriment of their smaller companies and their citizens.

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Tiresia@slrpnk.net

1 point

3 months ago

ASML is basically a strategic asset. Breaking them up to have a more level playing field inherently threatens the West’s economic-political position. If ASML abused their position, it wouldn’t be the regulators so much as the CIA that showed up to tell them to reconsider.

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-10 points

3 months ago

Really? Because they’re part of the giants that determine game prices, pricing is based on everyone that takes a cut along the way, they take 30%, that’s calculated into what games need to sell for, 30% is enough to make them billions in profit, billions in profit is money that came out of our pockets to go in Newell’s pockets so he can own six yachts.

I swear if it was a public company people would be flipping out because their numbers would be public and the profit would be going to investors, but they’re private and they only have one investor the profit goes to do that’s perfectly fine I guess???

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patatahooligan@lemmy.world

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1 point

3 months ago

Antitrust is not about preventing big companies making money. It’s about preventing specific practices by monopolies to restrict the free market and to abuse their users. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a ton I find morally objectionable with companies as big as Valve and people as rich as Gabe. We might agree on those issues. But this particular Google thing is about something else. And Valve is indeed different to most tech companies in that regard.

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1 point

3 months ago

If you don’t consider that a company taking billions out of our pockets and putting it in the pockets of a single person abuse then I don’t know what to say.

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TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world

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9 points

3 months ago

30% is the industry standard.

Shit, doesn’t YouTube take like 60%? I think Twitch takes a big chunk too. Gog takes 30%. MS takes 30%. Sony takes 30%. Nintendo takes 30%. Apple takes 30%. GameStop, BestBuy, Amazon, and Walmart all take roughly 30% too.

It’s the industry standard.

And unlike the likes of the Play Store or App store, Valve provides a lot for that 30%.

free cloud sync
free online multiplayer (not a given, look at MS/Sony/Nintendo)
forums
game demos
game recording with some neat features
a VR system
in-home streaming
family game sharing
a review system
a mod distribution platform
dev tools
advertising
online services you can tie into your game
achievements
a cross-platform, userspace anti-cheat solution
notes
backwards compatibility tooling
OS compatibility layers
Linux development
driver development
vast controller support
performance overlays
steam input
the list goes on…

I’m not in love with everything Valve does (loot boxes, micro-transactions 🤢). But it’s undeniable that compared to other companies that take the same (or higher) cut, you get a lot back.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to live in the fantasy world where they only take a 1% cut, but that’s just what it is, a fantasy.

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-6 points

3 months ago

Ok so because it’s the industry standard it’s ok?

How about we focus on the fact that the industry standard makes owners and c-suite billionaires? Do you think people would start hating a company if they cut their share to 10% and prices came down instead of having that extra enrich the few?

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TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world

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5 points

3 months ago

Reread my comment. I’m not saying it’s ok because it’s the industry standard, I’m saying it’s tolerable because it’s the industry standard and yet despite their strong market position, they still consciously provide a good value.

And let’s not pretend that even if everyone switched to a 10% margin (assuming that would even be profitable), people wouldn’t then complain about 10% being too high. It’s like taxes - no matter what it’s set as, a significant amount of people will always say “that’s too high! I don’t want to pay that!”

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1 point

3 months ago

Deleted by creator

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sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works

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47 points

3 months ago

They’re not anti-competitive, that’s the difference. Devs can even sell Steam keys on their own website and take 100% of the profit if they so choose, and there’s absolutely no lock-in.

I’m not sure where the anti-trust is. Having a high marketshare by itself doesn’t mean you’re committing anti-trust, abusing that market position does.

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