Valve is an online store first and foremost. Apples and oranges. The rest are playing catchup, as they’ve seen gabe get rich and fat, and they want in on that.
they’ve seen gabe get rich and fat
Hey, that’s not true! Gabe’s lost a lot of weight in recent times.
I think that is one reason why Valve has remained dominant in this space for over 20 years.
I suspect wolfire is a useful idiot with a larger company funding this lawsuit. Whether or not the antitrust case has legs, this will cost valve money which is a win for whoever they may be.
Just conjectue o course. I know though that if steam were destroyed tomorrow only terrible more expensive garbage would come in its place.
So go go gaben
I like Wolfire. Their head (David Rosen) had a really good procedural animation talk at GDC about a decade ago, their games are pretty good, and they started up Humble before it spun off on its own.
Before tarnishing their reputation, I’d suggest reading up on the actual complaints put forth in the lawsuit. I’ve done so extensively, I think they have very solid grounds to go after Valve (Valve’s behaviour is comparable to Amazon’s in terms of anticompetitive practices).
The entire complaint seems to be centered around the idea that you can’t sell the game for different price off platform. That’s demonstrably untrue. You can sell the game for a different price of platform as long as they’re not using steam keys. Which is hardly an unreasonable onus, It’s not hard to generate your own keys.
The other complaint seems to be about the 30% but again you can just distribute yourself. Of course then you have to fund all your own server architecture, that’s what the 30% pays for.
Don’t need that many employees to run a store, programmers/IT and marketing and you’re good to go. Employees wouldn’t count contractors either so they probably have a lot more “employees” than that.
Not only that, Valve has done a TON of work to outsource as much of the process of running Steam off to the users and developers. Self-publishing, a minimum of manual moderation, automated greenlight processes, automated ratings, database tags, controller configs…
Their entire business model is to make money with as little effort as possible. I’ve been saying for ages that people vastly underestimate how ruthlessly profitable their business is. We didn’t have the numbers, but we roughly knew this is what was going on.
Gabe owns six yachts, people should always keep that in mind when praising him, he’s not the friend of the average Joe, he just realized there’s profit to be made by not pissing people off, but he’s still making enough profit from us to be a billionaire while the majority of people live paycheck to paycheck.
he just realized there’s profit to be made by not pissing people off
I’m okay with this. Same deal with Costco’s founders and CEOs. It’d be nice if billionaires didn’t exist, but they do, and most of them made their profits while pissing everyone off.
I’ll praise the ones that at least try to do some “good” for people. Even if their “good” is “Let’s make obscene amounts of money by charging affordable prices and being the ‘good guy’ in the industry”.
Holy shit Gabe Newell is a billionaire (it’s just at the second paragraph). This does change my view of him and steam. So uncool.
people should always keep that in mind when praising him
Why?? Good for him, stop being so envious. It’s thanks to Valve I started to buy games instead of pirate them anyway. Good prices and good practices.
A billionaire from a game industry is not the same as a billionaire from a real state company or a bank. Games are not a basic need.
Could use a few to develop a new linux distribution for entirely new markets and use cases, design and manufacture innovative cutting edge consumer hardware, and count to three.
I’m surprised they didn’t really try to make Steam OS a real distro for regular PCs, but at the same time there’s no real money to be made…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution https://distrowatch.com/search.php?status=All
There are almost one thousand distros. What’s one more?
Well that explains why they don’t make many games.
I heard half life alyx was pretty good. I also heard rumors that they’re making a TF2 successor. Also, didn’t a new counter-strike just come out?
Still, you have a point. Artifact was a disgusting trend-chasing cashgrab. They still haven’t commented on Half life 3, which is despicable behavior imo.
Don’t let any TF2 fan hear you call Deadlock its successor. It appears to be Overwatch gameplay mixed with Moba style map layouts.
But yeah HL:A was indeed amazing.
Alyx is great. Probably the closest thing to Half Life 3 we’re going to get. But even that’s four years old now.
