Valve takes 30% on every game sold and you don’t even own the games. That’s sick capitalism in action, yet everybody kisses their ass.
Honestly, I pay for the service alone.
Pirating games is easy-ish enough so if Valve ever enshittifies I will be quickly learning how to remove Steam’s DRM and put all my games on a server and never purchase another video game in my lifetime.
They do provide a good service. There’s no subscription fee. They maintain delisted games so you can download games you bought years ago that are no longer available. Not to mention steam OS and other projects like the steam deck that put pressure on other gaming companies to do better.
This could go up in a cloud of smoke at any point and it likely will as soon as Gabe passes on and the in fighting begins. So this is a “good king” situation and the system itself will not be sustainable long term by any means.
Did you ever read their terms of use ? This company is not a work of charity. They collect all kind of datas about you. It is voracious capitalism.
I have read the Subscriber Agreement, most of it is standard legal boilerplate. I don’t see anything about collection of data. Steam is a vehicle for capitalism, no one has claimed otherwise.
Yeah. Really wish they were more like gog or itch
As far as capitalism goes they are not the shittiest of companies out there.
They have predatory tactics with lootboxes on their popular games though.
But most of their practices are not anticonsumer.
And they do not enforce drm and their own drm is a joke, so you can basically own most games if you want with very little effort. Just copy the files and have a generic steam crack around and you are golden for most cases.
I believe this is something to be aware of and if this is something you don’t want use GOG instead. But in reality as long as Steam exists you will be able to download and play your games. If Steam ceases to exists then you will not be able to download them, but there will be ways to still play them, if you previously downloaded them. It is not like “owning” movies on Amazon (or just recently on the Playstation Store), where you always need to stream the movies.
Because somehow their competition is even worse
And the share of Valve in the computer video game market is around 75% and even more than 80% in Europe. This company is clearly in a monopoly situation that prevents any competition. This situation is clearly undesirable.
There’s Xbox, but when that’s the alternative it is clear why Steam still dominates
The problem does not come from other plateforms but from the abuse of dominant position.
having a monopoly isn’t illegal but abusing it is
Honestly, I’ll probally care about this more when someone else tries to make a service remotely close to what steam provides. Hell epic is probally the closest we got and they don’t even have 20% of the Services that steam has. They charge 30% while giving a multitude of extra services the other companies charging similar rates don’t, seems fair to me.
did pcgamer learn it by reading a similar article awhile back?
I hope the employees are compensated well compared to the profit.
I’ll bet they all can afford a half-dozen yachts.
As a private company with no board and stockholders to appease, with a guy in charge who is at least a descent person, employees at valve are doing fantastic. Way higher than “industry standards”.
with a guy in charge who is at least a descent person
There is no decent billionaire
So insightful. Really contributes to the conversation.
You could sort of say that, just because he is a billionaire, but unlike virtually any others, his money has come from no oppression or cheap labor or dirty money, or slavery or anything else. He hasn’t drove up pricing, his employees are paid better than anywhere else, he doesn’t exploit a need, and he doesn’t use his money and position for political power.
So the only “not descent” thing he’s really done involving that money, is having that money. But with his company being a private company, he can also keep that money as a security nest egg in case the company somehow falls on bad times and keep paying his employees.
his money has come from no oppression or cheap labor or dirty money, or slavery or anything else.
It came from loot crates.
So don’t buy loot crates if you don’t want to.
Also, his money came from Half Life episodes 1 and 2, and creating what would be known as the “Steam” store and getting it downloaded on every PC with Half Life 2 on it. Loot boxes were side jobs that came way later.
I’d argue valve spearheading microtransactions was a bad thing, traceable to tf2 items and cases. People don’t give them enough flak for filling games with monetization.
They made a free game and offered hats. I don’t see anything predatory or wrong with charging for skins that don’t make a game “pay to win” in a game that is free. Really, I call it the least terrible monetization form.
Tbh it’s more the getting users to gamble by paying for cases that got the ball rolling. Objectively, the least terrible monetization form is buying a game outright and then earning your items through playing as they used to do before free to play became normalized. That’s why all these shitty games come out with battle passes even though game developers did just fine supporting their game for a few years without the constant money churn. Because it’s the norm, people now think it’s impossible to have a game with updates that is bought outright, yet deep rock galactic does it just fine without $60/yr worth in battle passes.
But an online only game like team fortress? It doesn’t jive well. You can’t keep the servers going and the security and the anti cheat updated on a game that you pay once for unless you want the support and the game to be worthless two or three years after it was first released.
Your idea is great for single player games and noncompetitive team games like borderlands online play, and i own tons of games like that and its 90% of what i play. Not for games like team fortress, LoL, and Fortnite. For the latter games, it would mean support and servers would shut down while lots of people would still want to play them.
I played LoL quite a bunch over decade ago. Thousand+ hours over three years, probably. I spent a total of about $40. Had Hundreds of hours in on team fortress and never spent a dime.
Exactly. The main problems are two-fold:
- chance-based item acquisition - if I can buy the thing I want, that’s fine, but if it’s all chance based, it promotes gambling
- market to resell items - now there’s a cash incentive to gamble
I don’t have a problem with paid cosmetics, I have a problem with promoting gambling.
That said, I think Valve has done more good than bad, so I like them. I don’t like everything they do though.
Honestly, the actual spearheading of microtransactions were physical collectible card game companies with games like MTG.
As of 2021, Valve employees made roughly $430K-4.5M, depending on role. Not bad, considering the average salary in WA is around $58k.
Source:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/13/24197477/valve-employs-few-hundred-people-payroll-redacted
Interesting. Looks like the hardware people are the lowest paid department.
Which maybe makes sense. They’ve started to see some success there, but not the way Steam or TF2 has.
Is Gabe taking a duck face selfie in the thumbnail?
Yeah it’s from a video where he was back seating on some voice actors doing announcement and he’s doing odd things background for comedic effect.
Might have something to do with getting underage kids hooked on gambling.
When asked about the possibility of bringing back beloved but dormant PlayStation IPs, Hulst didn’t shy away from the topic.
“Our extensive IP portfolio is an important asset for PlayStation, and as part of our efforts to strengthen our portfolio, we continually explore opportunities to leverage our legacy IP as well as develop new franchises,” Hulst shared.
Basically a non-answer.
Kinda exposes the lie about entrepreneurship being about job creation. Not all high tides raise all ships.
“It’s making more money per employee than Apple”
And how much are the game devs whos game are on steam making? If Valve ceo has enough money to buy a billion dollar worth fleet of mega yachts the share is simply off, Valve is making billions nobody else is.
Considering their only major competitor has enough money to keep trying to lure players to their significantly worse store system with free games for years now instead of going the route of actually providing a decent product I think Valve making money off their good product strategy is a good thing.
The entry ticket means billions… They lock the game market.
Exactly. Steam’s main competitors:
- EGS - literally bribes users with free games and pays for exclusivity agreements
- Microsoft - bought Activision Blizzard, Mojang and others to try to corner the game dev market, probably hoping people would use the Microsoft and Xbox stores
- PlayStation - owns the biggest console and has tons of exclusives
- GOG - major game studio (Witcher, Cyberpunk) and distribution platform that caters to DRM-free crowd
Except EGS, all of them sell their games on Steam, and Steam completely dominates PC gaming. They don’t have any exclusives other than the handful of Valve-developed games, they don’t bribe players with free games (and their sales are rarely the best), and the only hardware they make is open to direct competition if competitors bother to make a client for it (and users can play non-Steam games through Steam as well).
The only “bad” thing Steam does is charge a 30% fee, but they also let devs sidestep that through selling free Steam keys on other stores (or directly). Valve isn’t the villain here, and they’re arguable the least bad in their industry, except maybe GOG, but their DRM-free stance has less weight due to Steam’s good policies and superior customer support.
Is that just clever wording or are the employees actually seeing bigger checks?
It’s being phrased as an ROI per employee “asset”, not as compensation per actual employee.
Gabe is pocketing most of this.
For once, it looks like the answer is that they do see some big checks. From an article someone posted further down the thread:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/13/24197477/valve-employs-few-hundred-people-payroll-redacted
Lowest paid department is hardware, with an average of about $430k/employee.
Now, that is an average, and it’s hard to tell from here if a few highly paid employees in each department are throwing that number off.
It’s not ‘clever wording’, it says what it is - dividing profit by the number of employees results in a higher number for valve.
The heading isn’t comparing employee paychecks,it’s about overall company performance.
It’s funny that these publications only learned that this year when Valve has had a publicly available company directory on their website with names, pictures and email addresses since forever.
They didn’t just learn about it there have been articles about it for years and years they just post the same old article from a few years ago and act like it’s new
Their super high revenue/profit per employee has been reported on periodically for years. I remember hearing this fact literally ten years ago.
