> Valve themselves eagerly trumpeted that they had paid more than $57 million to Steam Workshop creators over four years — an enormously impressive figure until you realize that it's only 25 percent of the sale price, which means Valve just made $171 million profit from ... setting up an online form where you can submit finished 3D models.
Yeah, come on, you guys! They barely did any of the work! They just set up a form! How dare they expect to be compensated for that? It's not like there's a huge infrastructure powering all of that, that not only required an initial investment of money, time and brainpower, but also requires ongoing maintenance!
The article does raise some good points, but the overall raise-the-pitchforks tone makes it seem less credible - especially when most of the complaints seem to be that Valve is running a profitable business while delivering value to customers. The author forgot what installing and playing games was like before Steam - better write down those CD keys somewhere safe, or never lose the cases - or the CDs themselves. (Or, god forbid, keep the manual around forever so you can refer to line 5 on page 17, and type in the third, seventh and eight word.)
And one of the reasons people hated EA was because EA abused its employees and developers, not because they had a shitty game client; if you want to compare someone to Uber/Lyft/AirBNB, they are a much closer candidate.
The centralization Valve represents is dangerous, but from my perspective they have been thus far mostly responsible with their near monopoly. I know it would be pretty easy for me at least to totally 'opt out' and move to buying direct from publishers but Steam is dang convenient. Increasing Valve hate smells like paranoia and bitterness at them not doing single player games these days.
Hey, I'm hosting a server with a shitty PHP app, but you can put your addons on it. I'm just asking for 75% of your income. Not profit, no, income. I'm running the infrastructure after all. Not to mention that this 25% figure is largely exaggerated, and it's closer to 7-8% in reality.
Steam is not all bad. But the last thing Valve needs is people defending them, because they have been doing fuck all work for the past years. Delegating everything to the community is not work. Steamworks API is still a joke. Greeenlight is a joke. 99% the cosmetics they are putting out are done by the community. CSGO skins? Done by the community. DotA2 skins? done by the community. Team Fortress 2 items? I can't even remember the last time the game was updated with some thing they made themselves. They outsourced an update to the community, ffs.
The last time Steam itself had a meaningful update was years ago. Still waiting on an actually good Big Picture mode.
I am not saying they do not deserve payment for their work. Just that the ratios are heavily skewed in their favour and as the only serious players in the market, this is bad for everyone but them. Until the day Origin, Uplay, Galaxy, etc. get better (spoiler: never), we are bound to their whims and whishes. You can be the most benevolent dictator of all time, you're still a dictator, and I'm still going to protest.
>better write down those CD keys somewhere safe, or never lose the cases - or the CDs themselves.
Joke's on you, I enjoy having cases. I actually miss having physical boxes and manuals and all the goodies that came with games.
> Hey, I'm hosting a server with a shitty PHP app, but you can put your addons on it. I'm just asking for 75% of your income. Not profit, no, income. I'm running the infrastructure after all. Not to mention that this 25% figure is largely exaggerated, and it's closer to 7-8% in reality.
Cool. Does your shitty PHP app tie into dozens of incredibly popular games, and hundreds more of moderately popular ones? Has it been tested for years, both by in-house QA and real-world friction?
> But the last thing Valve needs is people defending them
Sure, but on the flip side, if someone is going to attack them, they should make sure their arguments are valid, no? Like I said, this article is mostly someone mad that Valve is making money while not putting in as much effort as the author would like them to.
> Steamworks API is still a joke. Greeenlight is a joke. 99% the cosmetics they are putting out are done by the community.
I'll take your word for it - I have never really purchased cosmetics, aside from taking the random drops in TF2. I have heard bad things about Greenlight, but mostly from people upset that game devs don't deliver what they promise after taking your money (and that's as much on them as it is on Valve for empowering that sort of thing.)
And as far as offloading work onto the community... why is that bad again? It's all volunteer-driven. I'd wager that a lot of the people making these things were the type of people who would just use a modded server and load them that way, instead of having an officially sanctioned channel.
> Just that the ratios are heavily skewed in their favour and as the only serious players in the market, this is bad for everyone but them.
That's true, but how is that Steam's fault or problem? You mentioned their competitors; let them compete! What is Steam expected to do about this? Lend them some employees?
> Joke's on you, I enjoy having cases. I actually miss having physical boxes and manuals and all the goodies that came with games.
Sure, and I'm not saying it's wrong to like having physical memorabilia - but the key difference is that if you lose the physical memorabilia, you're fucked, and can't play that game anymore.
> Cool. Does your shitty PHP app tie into dozens of incredibly popular games, and hundreds more of moderately popular ones? Has it been tested for years, both by in-house QA and real-world friction?
And those are just the nasty development parts. Building a CDN like steam is hard and expensive. Many geo-distributed servers, peering arrangements up to hundreds of gbits with many different local ISPs, hardware management. Some globally replicated shop database, search systems. And then operational infrastructure on top of all of that just to able to control and maintain that mess of boxes. Even if at every point in time, something is borked in a network that large.
Politics aside. It's easy to assume steam being simple, because the steam application doesn't do much. But building a system like steam is actually a lot harder than it looks.
Very much all alive! Left in a box since I moved recently, but SNES, N64, PS1, PS2, GameCube, PC games all in rather good state. And yes, some of them are crooked, or faded. But I'm not looking at an art collection there, am I?
Oooh, a hat! Who wrote the game it shows up in, runs the servers that do the matchmaking, and distributes the hat to the customers? Right, you did all the work. I'll remember that next time I play my favorite pikzen game distributed by the pikzen network and run on pikzen servers.
For reference, once cosmetics were introduced (and it was already getting old by the time), TF2 ran a good... two years? without matchmaking servers, only with a master server to list all the public servers. While it's not something you're running on a $5 DigitalOcean instance, it's not exactly super expensive either (especially considering they were down regularly). All the servers were hosted by the community. Microtransactions are the only reason the game got matchmaking.
But I don't know, call me a bleeding heart idealist, but if I'm asking people to come build things for me, I'm not asking for a 75% claim on it because the terrain belongs to me. People didn't ask Valve to make content for them. Valve asked them to.
Actually if I recall correctly, modders were largely making skins and other things for free and distributing them to other players. Then Valve developed a section of their online store and distribution network to allow those mods to be sold for at least some money. Now the split may not be what you consider entirely fair, but 8%, 25%, 75%, or 100% of zero is all the same.
A game without mods is a game. A mod without a game is just digital art. It's their engine, their game rules, their store, their distribution network, and their audience that they've reached with their marketing. Maybe they deserve a bit smaller share than they ask, but who are you going to sell these items to without a game engine, game rules, a store, a distribution network, and an audience to sell them to?
If you gave 30% to an app store, and 20% for marketing, and 25% for someone to vet your items don't break the game, what would that cut be overall? 75%.
No marketing is being done for items aside from announcing them in patch notes.
>25% for someone to vet your items don't break the game
That is not something Valve does, considering the amount of items that clip through models after release. Notwithstanding the fact that items they select are either from modelers that they're already in contact with, or items that were voted up by the community and therefore, tried.
This is exactly where the Polygon article is right. Steam is in a situation of almost monopoly on the market, and you have absolutely zero chances of ever being able to negotiate those rates.
Even the mafia takes less as a protection fee, and they do more work than Valve when it comes to their customers.
> No marketing is being done for items aside from announcing them in patch notes.
None perhaps for the individual add-on items, but there's been marketing to get people involved in the games for which the extra content is made. The audience is there initially because of the game, not initially because of the extra content.
> That is not something Valve does, considering the amount of items that clip through models after release.
That's a shame. I would expect that for the amount they keep they'd do some quality control.
If you want more control and a bigger share, make assets for a non-Valve game. Find an engine, some programmers, a musician, a level designer, and a couple of testers. Publish your own game. Of course, then you'd be splitting the game development share across all of those team members. So depending on the size of the team, 5% to 50% of the game team's share from your 70% from the sale of the game through the store would be that alternative, unless you're prepared to do it as a solo project. That, though, is for the sale price of the whole game rather than a single downloadable item. Then you can do the same with DLC packs. Indie games do tend to sell at lower prices than AAA titles, though.
and let you download said app as many times as you want...
i don't know how many times i've deleted games just to redownload them some time later. i could even continue with the same playthrough because steam kept backups of my save files on their servers.
Standard Oil was running a profitable business while delivering value to customers. So was the International Fruit Company. So is Aramco today, etc. That's no justification for anything.
Comparing Steam to CD distribution is not fair, compare it to GoG. They also have a client, but you can always download DRM-free installation executable and just use it without hassle. You are even allowed to install games that are not Officially Supported™ on your system.
I always first check GoG and itch.io for any game I'm interested in. Maybe it's my taste in indie games, but quite a few authors actually want to have DRM-free release, while Steam will probably never support it.
If you consider being required to login into Steam once to download the game and run it the first time in Steam to be DRM, then yes I suppose Steam will always have DRM. That's not much in the way of DRM though.
Not to go full KiA but "gaming journalism" has been little more than a soapbox for interest groups (be it the corporations that make games or people with political agendas) basically since its inception. Not that it's a good thing, but I don't really think there is ANY mainstream news source for gaming that is truly independent and impartial.
Individual YouTube Let's Play and Twitch streamers kind of can offer individual opinions or commentary on a game, that aren't really entrenched in the game journalism industry or vacuum/echo chamber. Which is more or less, is this fun, and how best to play this game, which is what we used to go to gaming magazines for.
But yeah, any official branch of "journalism" that directly courts advertisers and hires desperate writers fresh out of liberal arts schools who have few job prospects that their communications or journalism degrees are marketable (and may not even be that in to video games when they start) come packaged with the political opinions and agendas shaped by said institutions/departments that really have zilch to do with gaming consumerism or considerations when making a game beyond is this fun and will it sell, but they feel they have to make a difference somehow and use it as their soap box or some grander form of social commentary when most people just want to play Zelda and the creators probably had none of the intentions they project onto it.
One of the problems even in independent games journalism is that developers will maintain relationships with "reviewers" who are incentivized to only leave positive reviews, as not doing so will end their relationship with that developer and thus the supply of free / early released games. As a result, even small time streamers or youtube personalities are in on the fix.
There was also a huge stink about Origin doing some spyware like things when it first release, including I believe sending EA a list of all the files on your HD.
In the case of Steam, it solved a problem. In the case of Origin, the problem was solved and it introduced more problems.
Taking 93% of the sale price seems like a very steep tax to me. No one is saying they shouldn't get a cut, but to take almost all of feels very unfair.
The reason people hate EA was not for how they treat their employees. Maybe treating your employees like shit and releasing terrible, fraudulently advertised products are correlated, but most people who hate EA do not have any way of interacting with "how they treat their employees".
Valve isn't my friend, no corporation is. They are largely benevolent despite some missteps. I can forgive that, mistakes are made. Steam has been a great boon to my hobby and I would dearly miss it if it were gone.
I wouldn't call any major corporation benevolent or malevolent, they're effectively amoral entities. They're your "friend" so long as they stand to profit from you.
I don't agree with this.
NGOs are primarily meant to do (morally) good things to the society where we live (usually help helpless people), where corporations pursue profit, which is usually not a bad thing unless they break the law (with a misleading behavior with the customers, antitrust, tax evading, and I'd like to say also lobbying).
Anyway, Steam users are also paying to consume the game, even if they don't own it. And I really doubt the 2% of their users read even the first paragraph of the EULA contract (where they do specify the above, yep I read it.)
My main beef with steam is that the client is a piece of crap. With the big bucks they have they should have a much better UX/UI and overall engineering.
They enjoy a massive network effect plus the key handling helped increasing the switch costs, but they should go down. Platforms like itch.io are much better, and GOG.com at least keeps improving.
Graded on a curve, the Steam client is excellent. Origin and Blizzard's desktop client are both incredibly bad. It's like you're using a GPU manufacturer's overclocking GUI from 2007.
I'm hoping GoG keeps up it's thing. Having standalone, downloadable installers for games makes me a lot more comfortable than a service which could potentially disappear or change it's terms.
Things like music licenses expiring and having that retroactively applied worry me [1]. Steam strikes me as a bit of a monopoly at this stage, and a 30% cut off all sales seems like money for jam - I'd be a bit less bitter if they offered excellent customer support or I felt they were doing something interesting with all the revenue.
The UX/UI on the steam client truly is awful, unintuitive, and the update processes are really ugly (plus, two different updaters actually run, with completely different UIs).
Also, it doesn't even have highdpi support, so it's already small fonts become illegibily small.
Absolutely agree, the load time is often very slow and completely unnecessary, just have a thin client in the background checking for updates, and if you want to look at your "Steam Inventory" whatever the fuck that is there should be a separate thing for that.
Steam definitely takes the Google approach - throw out a minimum viable product, automate as much as possible, and provide little-to-no support.
That also means the experience is similar. When it works, it works well and you don't have to think about it. When it doesn't work, be prepared to lose hours-to-days of your life to a system that seems to be as kafkaesque as possible.
This is not in touch with reality. The steam client has like 10 years, its bloated, slow and unsatisfactory. If you could do steam ratings on the steam client, they would get clobbered.
I find the Steam client does it's job of launching games particularly well. It even makes it pretty straightforward to buy them, and keeps them up to date in the background.
I have noticed that they don't screw with the UI every 2 months (Spotify et al.) and stick with what works. That seems to be a negative these days though.
Okay, but the article touched on more points than just the consumer side. Do you see any issues with Steam from the perspective of content creators? Not necessarily with the platform itself, but in its cut of profits?
This is outrage clickbait, pure and simple. The comparison of Steam Workshop to "an online form where you can submit finished 3D models" is so dishonest it crosses over into willful deception.
This is the same Polygon (a video game site) that put out an article complaining about how unfairly they were treated when they released a video showing that they don't even understand the basics of video games. The whole site is problematic.
Their lack of refund policy kicked me off the platform in 2010. I bought Civ V, then discovered that Mac port was a piece of crap. It didn't matter how fast your computer was, or how new your video card was, it rendered like stop-motion animation once you had more than a few units.
It probably took 10-15 emails, being bounced between steam, the publisher, and the port developer to finally get steam credit "as a courtesy".
This is a lot easier now. If you have played the game for less than 2 hours and purchased it within 14 days Steam will refund you pretty much no questions asked.
This is such a screed. I love PC games and was a very successful PC game developer in the nineties. Piracy was killing the business, don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
Steam is extremely successful but it is not a monopoly. All the smart developers I know use Steam but also maintain alternate points of distribution for all kinds of business reasons. If you don't like Steam, don't use it. There are many alternatives.
While I'm emphatically not a fan of the Platform as a way of extracting rent, Steam is one of the more acceptable cases, since it isn't preinstallled and integrated with (or gasp given exclusive access by) the OS.
Ironically I think the ideal is an OS with open infrastructure for 'stores' and all the good features they bring. (Ease of discovery, auto updates, etc.)
I don't have links right now but Valve has published some numbers that seem to suggest the opposite- that their low price sales sell so many more copies of games that they bring in more revenue than when the game is at full price.
Also you can see how effective the model is for indie games. Take Stardew Valley for instance. A hugely successful indie game that's made the author a ton of money. And it still sells for less than Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons.
Isn't this the parents point? There super low sales drive prices down because they work. Personally I see this as 'the market' working in a helpful way for consumers and don't see the problem with low price expectations. Not like the rate people are making games to sell is low.
The thing to keep in mind is that this is the Wal-Mart model: drive prices as low as possible (and maybe sell in bulk). It squeezes/kills the little suppliers (such as indie developers), drives down the notional market value of goods, but feels like a good deal for consumers.
At least in current society there isn't anything overtly wrong with "the Wal-Mart model" as it stands, but recognizing a Wal-Mart model is the first steps towards trying to figure out if it is long term healthy for the community. (Which brings us back to the article at hand, questioning the long term health of the community in the face of a Wal-Mart like Steam.)
Indie developers complain about Steam because they are the most vulnerable to its problems. They don't have the pricing power to avoid the race to the bottom of sales. But without Steam and the distribution it provides a lot of them wouldn't have a business model.
So on one hand: Isn't it great that there is this easy way for almost anyone to distribute their game; and on the other: isn't it terrible that so many people are distributing their game and driving down the price?
The story and so much of the discussion about it seem to exclude the boring possibility: Valve is not run by benevolent entertainment angel-saints, but neither is it run by mustache-twirling villains. The things they do have both upsides and downsides.
I'm surprised by the concerns over refunds. In my experience, brick-and-mortar stores that sold computer games were generally not too friendly about refunds. GameStop's website says downloadable PC purchases are not eligible for refunds at all.
I was going to say that Steam's monopoly status is overstated, since there are a few (much smaller) competitors. But in fact it looks like the games I bought on Impulse years ago have vanished; GameStop bought Impulse, rebranded it, and later shut it down. As far as I can tell, my licenses have disappeared into the ether. Motivating just about any former customers to avoid GameStop in future, I would think. Boggling.
Steam got me back into gaming after a long period not having free time to fuck with activations, custom installs etc. If I get a new box, I just log-in and my shit gets installed. I don't have enough time to game and they're getting a cut for the service they provide, is this unacceptable?
It's acceptable, it's fine, the issue at hand is that we've reached the point that Steam is the Wal-Mart of PC videogames and a lot of people act like they still think Steam is some sort of Mom & Pop shop. It doesn't hurt to examine our Wal-Marts and want them to do better (even if many of us will still shop at them).
If any entity isn't healthy for the gaming community it's Polygon. This and other click bait articles they release regularly try to stir up controversy where there isn't any.
>The whole article seems like the author just woke up from a 15-year coma and is having trouble coming to terms with modern commerce.
Seems more like a Games Journalism article written by someone who isn't "a gamer". Which is par for the course nowadays.
I'd be hard pressed to find any PC gamer who doesn't think Steam improved upon the way things used to be done. I do know one person who is an exception but their issue isn't the gaming side of things but the fact they liked to collect boxes for the box art. Fewer games being released as a box = fewer box arts for their collection.
We could play the "no true Scotsman" game for a while, but I've yet to meet a games journalist that is less of "a gamer" than I am.
The article admits Steam improved the way things had been done before. It simply asks us to question our relationship with Steam today, if it's continuing to do real good. It wonders why so many people are still adamant Steam is a Mom & Pop shop when it's the PC gaming Wal-Mart today.
>We could play the "no true Scotsman" game for a while, but I've yet to meet a games journalist that is less of "a gamer" than I am.
I predicted this would be a response (or, similarly, "gatekeeping").
"Gamers" in the literal sense? Sure. But most people mean "gamer" as in "gaming enthusiast". There's a certain level of skill or knowledge expected of anyone calling themselves an "enthusiast". If you lack both of those things you'll find it hard for anyone to take you seriously. Just like an "artist" who is both untalented and ignorant (eg. no knowledge of common terminology, history, or popular figures) wouldn't be taken seriously as an "artist", regardless of how much time they spend on it.
Polygon infamously released 30 minutes of gameplay footage of Doom that was mocked for the player being so bad it's like they've no experience with an FPS game [0]. Polygon in general has a long track record of being ignorant of entire facets of gaming culture, to an extent that many enthusiasts say "Bullshit. You don't know what you're talking about." Their reputation for being ignorant and clickbaity wasn't earned because they're good at what they do, quite the contrary.
"Enthusiast" has no implied meaning, that I am aware of, with regards to skill or encyclopedic knowledge of/within a culture. Enthusiasm is not a profession and plenty of people are enthusiastic of things without high skill or deep knowledge, and there are so many different facets of gaming that I distrust anyone that thinks they can define a canon of skills, experiences, or knowledge that makes "a gamer". Primarily RPG gamers might have no FPS skills. FPS players might lack the deep lore and cultural touchstones of RPG culture. Neither is more nor less "a gamer", which is exactly why this is a "no true Scotsman" argument. That's just two genres of games within the hobby; we could go all night diving through the variety and depth of gaming.
Gaming is a giant spirograph of a venn diagram of interests, skills, knowledge, cultural touchstones, etc. You may be comfortable picking some very specific section of that Venn diagram for what criteria you think counts as "a gamer", but I hesitate to. I'd rather celebrate how wide and interesting the hobby can be than lock myself in an ivory tower or boy's club treehouse.
You're right that enthusiast doesn't have any dictionary definition with the implication I mentioned. So for lack of a dictionary term, allow me an analogy that also explains why it isn't a "no true scotsman" argument.
Compare game genres to musical instruments. Guitarist == FPS gamer and Pianist == RPG gamer
Both guitarists and pianists are musicians, just like RPG players and FPS players are gamers. Feel free to expand this analogy into as many genres and musical instruments as you like.
Now take someone who isn't able to play the correct notes, cannot read sheet music/tablature/any form of music notation, has no knowledge of music theory, hasn't heard of The Beatles (or whatever cultural/genre relevant artist would be the equivalent to The Beatles), but still practices for hours every day on their 8-note plastic recorder they got in 4th grade [0]. They call themselves a musician, after all they spend so much time with their hobby!
Nobody but that person and maybe their mother - being nice - would call them a musician. Is there a hard, defined line for when they'll "become a musician"? No. There is a grey line of necessary skill/knowledge that one needs to have for others to consider them a musician. Every amateur hobby has that grey line that needs to be crossed before you'll be taken seriously.
ps. The dictionary definition of "musician" only mentions "plays an instrument" and doesn't indicate any level of skill. This is the difference between "dictionary definition" and "actual usage of a word". By the dictionary's definition our untalented individual is a musician, even if nobody else would consider them one.
That analogy doesn't work for me either. History is littered with amazingly beloved musicians that played entirely by ear, with little to no literacy in the larger world of music, that basically reinvented everything they knew of music from first principles with never studying the previous culture or proper music literacy or music theory.
I think the dictionary definition is accurate/adequate enough and you may have an implicit "good" or maybe "professional" somewhere in your usage of musician, that I don't. One is a value judgment (history is also littered with "terrible" musicians that were still musicians, or contributed to the craft) and the other an economic judgment, neither of which I see as necessary to describing who is or is not a musician.
We'll have to agree to disagree here, because I don't find dictionary definitions all that useful for communication and most people don't operate under strict dictionary definitions.
By definition a pilot doesn't need to successfully fly - only operate the controls. So a drone pilot could crash every drone and still be a "pilot" by definition. Nobody would recognize them as a drone pilot because there is an implied "successfully" that isn't found in the definition.
Yes - there is an implicit "at least to some level of success" in my definition. "Professionals" meet that criteria by being good enough to be paid for what they do. Amateurs come at many different levels but I don't call myself a photographer just because I've taken a few (hundred) photos. This is where we disagree - because you would consider me a photographer for having taken any photos.
Here's where your analogy particularly breaks down: "a gamer" is neither a professional nor an amateur mark. Fandom does not, and perhaps cannot, have any sort of success bar. There is a notion of a "professional gamer" in the eSports world, and it's possible to extrapolate thereby to a notion of an "amateur gamer" that competes in eSports. But that belies a confusion between "[sports] gamer" and "[fandom/enthusiast] gamer". Within the context of fandom/enthusiasm, what would "professional" mean? "Amateur"?
Fandom/enthusiasm don't really have success bars. It's something you are either enthusiastic about or you aren't. You can be a fan of something and never be successful at it, however you define success. A baseball fan doesn't have to be good at actually playing baseball nor devoted to a deep knowledge of the sport to be a fan of their favorite team.
Isn't that exactly how commerce has worked throughout the times? You're not being robbed, you're the one who is purchasing the games. If you lose your wallet during this activity, maybe you should not engage in it at all?
Yeah, I don't see how anyone who's followed gaming news for more than 5 minutes can think that "the average PC gamer" is defined by concern for labor abuses.
Yes, but there is still a very surprisingly vocal set of PC gamers that always seem to refer to Valve as if Steam were the local Mom & Pop shop down the street and not the Wal-Mart of videogames that it has become. (It's fine that Steam is the Wal-Mart of PC Gaming, but let's treat it that way.)
I've never understood the drive toward some notion of commercial-free purity the gaming world seems to embody. Is it due to the heavy teenage boy presence that underlies so many other unsavory aspects?
Yeah, come on, you guys! They barely did any of the work! They just set up a form! How dare they expect to be compensated for that? It's not like there's a huge infrastructure powering all of that, that not only required an initial investment of money, time and brainpower, but also requires ongoing maintenance!
The article does raise some good points, but the overall raise-the-pitchforks tone makes it seem less credible - especially when most of the complaints seem to be that Valve is running a profitable business while delivering value to customers. The author forgot what installing and playing games was like before Steam - better write down those CD keys somewhere safe, or never lose the cases - or the CDs themselves. (Or, god forbid, keep the manual around forever so you can refer to line 5 on page 17, and type in the third, seventh and eight word.)
And one of the reasons people hated EA was because EA abused its employees and developers, not because they had a shitty game client; if you want to compare someone to Uber/Lyft/AirBNB, they are a much closer candidate.