> 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.
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.