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
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).
predatory, mafia or middle-age money lender style.
Your words have lots of sentiments, but present no facts. I know that Wolfire and Sweeney are independently throwing a tantrum, and we all hate taxes, but I don’t see public exposés showing game developers who went hungry because they couldn’t afford the 70-30 split.
I have read your link but they didn’t say the EGS is at loss specifically because of the 12% cut nor that the Fortnite money is subsidizing the lower cut.
It could be that the EGS is at loss because creating a new store and client from scratch costs money ?
To be honest here, we don’t have the numbers to say exactly how much margin Valve is making.
But my guess is the following: if EGS estimated that with a 12% cut they could be profitable if they had enough customers, it makes me think that the cut of valve is way overinflated in regards to their costs.
And yes Fortnite is awfully predatory. But the topic is Valve and Steam there 🙂
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
Not to mention his insane Porsche collection, yeah he’s just another billionaire
Valve ruined my favourite game (dota) by flooding the game with ridiculous cosmetics that even change particle effects with no way to disable any of this
Frankly I don’t even know if this clause can be enforced in Europa. I wanted to point out that we shouldn’t rely on the customer protection laws of each country to address that: this clause shouldn’t exist in the first place.
But to be frank, it most likely doesn’t come from Valve and rather from the games company themselves.
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:
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:
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).
Your words have lots of sentiments, but present no facts. I know that Wolfire and Sweeney are independently throwing a tantrum, and we all hate taxes, but I don’t see public exposés showing game developers who went hungry because they couldn’t afford the 70-30 split.
I’ll also remind you that the EGS (12%) is barely profitable, and operated for years at a loss, only sustained by Fortnite (which used dark patterns to extract money from kids, in case you want to see something actually predatory).
I have read your link but they didn’t say the EGS is at loss specifically because of the 12% cut nor that the Fortnite money is subsidizing the lower cut.
It could be that the EGS is at loss because creating a new store and client from scratch costs money ?
To be honest here, we don’t have the numbers to say exactly how much margin Valve is making. But my guess is the following: if EGS estimated that with a 12% cut they could be profitable if they had enough customers, it makes me think that the cut of valve is way overinflated in regards to their costs.
And yes Fortnite is awfully predatory. But the topic is Valve and Steam there 🙂
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
I didn’t knew about he claiming to be a libertarian. Rothbard must be turning over in his grave.
Not to mention his insane Porsche collection, yeah he’s just another billionaire
Valve ruined my favourite game (dota) by flooding the game with ridiculous cosmetics that even change particle effects with no way to disable any of this
There’s nothing wrong with having money or expensive hobbies. It’s not like he’s collecting Senators or buying himself a seat in the Oval Office
This is unenforceable under US Law
Well I am European 😂
don’t you guys have better consumer protections?
Maybe, maybe not.
Frankly I don’t even know if this clause can be enforced in Europa. I wanted to point out that we shouldn’t rely on the customer protection laws of each country to address that: this clause shouldn’t exist in the first place.
But to be frank, it most likely doesn’t come from Valve and rather from the games company themselves.