“If you have the patience to sit by the river and wait, eventually, the corpses of your enemies will float by.” Sun Tzu
It’s called making a product/service for their customers instead of for the shareholders bank balance.
The “do nothing and win” strategy.
His plan isn’t based off trying to squeeze blood from stones, it’s to sell some video games. Not a very capitalist mindset, but there you have it.
Valve takes 30% from every sale on Steam, which is quite landlord-like. Although there are much worse practices in the market.
Oh no, a sales platform that takes a cut of revenue.
Valve isn’t a charity, and they provide very good services for what developers pay.
Devs don’t need to host download servers, they don’t need to staff customer service reps, they don’t have to set up banking infrastructure or worry at all about handling payments from hundreds of different banks across hundreds of countries.
It’s not like valve takes 30% and sits on it. They put that money to use.
I am not against it.
you gotta take into account the insanely good service both devs and players get in exchange for those 30% here is a list
EGS finally has a shopping cart now, so it’s basically equal now, right?
now it just needs to stop sucking
You know sometimes I actually straight up FORGET that Steam is run by the same company that created Half-Life?
They:
- identified a gradient of human wants
(Video games exist; I want them on my computer) - Created a vector for that want to be satisfied
(Digital distribution that conveys the games I want to my computer) - Stayed the FUCK OUT OF THE WAY
When you do something well, people don’t notice you’ve done anything at all.
I think the key was that Steam wasn’t created to make money, but to solve problems they themselves had, like “How do we get new versions of Counter Strike out to all these players?”
Then as Valve wasn’t the only company having these problems, the solution could easily be sold to others.
If the other companies really wanted to crack Steam’s near-monopoly, the solution would be to tackle the problems associated with not having all your games on Steam. Work together on a open-source launcher supporting all stores, similar to GOG Galaxy. First make something useful that tackles an unsolved problem, then you can make money off it when it becomes successful.
Instead they go in just trying to make a buck, and end up just being worse versions of Steam.
That ended up being a bit of a rant, but I’m frustrated at their shortsighted market strategies :p
Oh indeed! And that’s why I love GOG! I actually try to check GOG first just in case I can buy a game I want there before I go through with buying it on steam. I would actually gladly pay MORE for the GOG version because it removes bullshit like DRM!
I used to do the same, but I lost a lot of confidence in GOG after they retroactively restricted their cloud saves to 200 MB.
My hundred-hour Witcher 3 save is exactly the kind of thing I want backed up, but that’s no longer possible. And the very low limit they set, and the urgency with which they started deleting the very data they were expected to keep safe, reeks of a desperation to save money that makes me hesitant to invest more in their ecosystem.
I really want them to succeed though, and I think they have the right idea with Galaxy. Even Epic giving me games for free doesn’t make me actually use their client or store.
But somehow the obvious idea of forming a consortium to develop open standards and implementations for game clients, doesn’t seem like something that will ever happen.
- identified a gradient of human wants
I have a mixed feeling about Gabe and Valve.
While I am insanely grateful for proton (even if it was strategically important for them, they didn’t do it out of kindness of heart), some other stuff disturb me:
- Valve being so lenient on CS2 skin gambling, hurting the young people
- A steam account being un-inheritable, making you defacto a tenant of your games
- The 30% percent cut, stealing money from devs
- Gabe spending his money on multiple mega yachts, like every asshole billionaire, instead of making the world a better place
- Gabe claiming to be a libertarian, like Elon and other pieces of shit
- The 30% percent cut, stealing money from devs
Sigh. Here we go again. I’ll just copy one of my older comments about that attitude.
Steam is not a parasitic middle man, it is a collection of services that would have to be provisioned and operated by the developer otherwise. The 30% cut pays for:
- A massive infrastructure to store and deliver the game and its updates, worldwide, and at an acceptable bandwidth that Valve operates
- A storefront that enables monetizing the game
- The audience and discoverability that would not exist otherwise
- The Steam API, achievements, cloud saves
- The client itself, content management, validation, and Linux compatibility tools
- Network and operational security
- Also keep in mind that Steam and its services are operated by experts. A game developer would have to hire the experts or get training.
If the revenue from the cut exceeds the operational costs: it’s called profitability, not theft. The world doesn’t run on good vibes.
Yeah you’re of course right, they are not a charity and shouldn’t have to provide their service for free.
I expressed myself too quickly (the rage!). What I meant is the this cut of 30% is fucking predatory, mafia or middle-age money lender style. You get one third of the rewards of my efforts just for delivering my product? And don’t talk about promotion because this store is now stuffed with too many games for visibility.
You can argue “but this is it the standard rate of the industry”. Well it is predatory everywhere else and I hate Google and Apple as much for it.
A cut of 10% would be more humane. Or whatever to reach a “normal” profitability. But now the discussion becomes complex because we don’t have the concrete numbers.
What is sure, is that it is possible without pain to take way less than 30%. This is something EGS got right, even if I dislike them for many other things (Epic and Tim Sweeney).
You get one third of the rewards of my efforts just for delivering my product
you have not read the comment you responded to.
and forgot or ignored that it often is not the dev who gets most of the money at all but publishers like ea and ubisoft. why should customers act in defense of those companies who actively try and make gaming worse for everyone?
an indie dev paying 30% is expensive but steam is really a premium platform for distributing games. it would be nice if it were cheaper but I don‘t really understand the outrage here
Honestly, the secret is not being a publicly traded company. All the others have to make the shareholders happy while steam just does steam. If the line doesn’t have to constantly go up you can pretty much do whatever you want as long as you’re still making profit. And if what you’re doing is already working you don’t need to add gimmicks or advertisements to milk it as much as you can just to appease the shareholders.
Being a private company has allowed Valve to take some really big swings. Steam Deck is paying off handsomely, but it came after the relative failure of the Steam Controller, Steam Link and Steam Machines. With their software business stable, they can allow themselves to take big risks on the hardware side, learn what does and doesn’t work, then try again. At a publically traded company, CEO Gabe Newell probably gets forced out long before they get to the Steam Deck.
Man Intel are so dumb for firing Pat. And they did it while seeing positive reviews for their second gen GPUs!
That’s just what happens to CEOs of publicly traded companies when they have a bad year. And Intel had a really bad year in 2024. I’m certainly hoping that their GPUs become serious competition for AMD and Nvidia, because consumers win when there’s robust competition. I don’t think Pat’s ousting had anything to do with GPUs though. The vast majority of Intel’s revenue comes from CPU sales and the news there was mostly bad in 2024. The Arrow Lake launch was mostly a flop, there were all sorts of revelations about overvolting and corrosion issues in Raptor Lake (13th and 14th gen Intel Core) CPUs, broadly speaking Intel is getting spanked by AMD in the enthusiast market and AMD has also just recently taken the lead in datacenter CPU sales. Intel maintains a strong lead in corporate desktop and laptop sales, but the overall trend for their CPU business is quite negative.
One of Intel’s historical strength was their vertical integration, they designed and manufactured the CPUs. However Intel lost the tech lead to TSMC quite a while ago. One of Pat’s big early announcements was “IDM 2.0” (“Integrated Device Manufacturing 2.0”), which was supposed to address those problems and beef up Intel’s ability to keep pace with TSMC. It suffered a lot of delays, and Intel had to outsource all Arrow Lake manufacturing to TSMC in an effort to keep pace with AMD. I’d argue that’s the main reason Pat got turfed. He took a big swing to get Intel’s integrated design and manufacturing strategy back on track, and for the most part did not succeed.
k
Does nothing? DOES NOTHING?! He spent the last few years ripping Microsoft a new a@@hole, rendering their operating system meaningless for gamers! …but nice meme
