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 love Valve for a lot of things but I’ll never forget that they spearheaded some of the most predatory microtransactions in the industry (loot boxes and battle passes) and were happy to help Bethesda try to sell mods until players raised a huge stink.
Here’s the thing - Theoretically we shouldn’t give a shit about his political leanings and we don’t have to, because he and his company deliver a good service. I can privately think he’s another asshole libertarian tech bro whose only guiding principle is “everyone should be able to do what I want, but only some people should have the money to do those things”, but it doesn’t change anything about Steam or Half-Life 3.
Because the libertarian view of the world DOES have an impact on Steam: they have so much inertia to fight against hate speech and extreme right, they do nothing against gambling, and so on. All under the pretense “free speech” which is so convenient.
IMO this is the view of the modern libertarian: all the money, none of the accountability.
Yes you can workaround it. But this is still a society right they forbid you.
And who can say that in 2100 they won’t implement a cleanup job that lock all accounts that are over 100 years old ? 🤪
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
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 love Valve for a lot of things but I’ll never forget that they spearheaded some of the most predatory microtransactions in the industry (loot boxes and battle passes) and were happy to help Bethesda try to sell mods until players raised a huge stink.
I didn’t knew about he claiming to be a libertarian. Rothbard must be turning over in his grave.
Here’s the thing - Theoretically we shouldn’t give a shit about his political leanings and we don’t have to, because he and his company deliver a good service. I can privately think he’s another asshole libertarian tech bro whose only guiding principle is “everyone should be able to do what I want, but only some people should have the money to do those things”, but it doesn’t change anything about Steam or Half-Life 3.
But this is a problem right ?
Because the libertarian view of the world DOES have an impact on Steam: they have so much inertia to fight against hate speech and extreme right, they do nothing against gambling, and so on. All under the pretense “free speech” which is so convenient.
IMO this is the view of the modern libertarian: all the money, none of the accountability.
Can’t you just give your kids your steam password ? How would they notice ?
Yes you can workaround it. But this is still a society right they forbid you. And who can say that in 2100 they won’t implement a cleanup job that lock all accounts that are over 100 years old ? 🤪
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