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great, cool opinion, do you have an actual comment on the content of the article?
Read their comment and try again please
great, cool opinion, do you have an actual comment on the content of the article?
Clickbait has become such an empty criticism. "Not gonna read, it's clickbait!" How the hell would you know unless you read it.
Bull
Microsoft once send me an happy birthday email
I am your friend.
That's still not good. Valve does not have incentives to ever improve.
Amazon should invest in some new UI designers for this imaginary Amazon PC client then because the design of their other apps are usually boring as hell. All you can say in the positive is that they are functional and that's about it.
At least Steam has a 'look'.
They are exploiting their workshop creators and take pretty much as little responsibility as they can all around, so yes
You read a bunch from the same source until you learn not to click on the articles anymore because the reputation of the site precedes the article, it's not hard.
Finally someone other than me had the fucking balls to say it!
You read a bunch from the same source until you learn not to click on the articles anymore because the reputation of the site precedes the article, it's not hard.
To depend on Steam is not a good thing.
Says the Nintendo apologist. Pot, kettle, etc.
Once I got 20 microsoft points. I couldnt buy shit because they were 20 points. That was worse than never having received anything.Well, I got a Happy Birthday Coupon from Nintendo once, take that, XboT!
That's right, I was able to purchase 2-3 year old games for $28 instead of $40! Awwww yiisssss.
I don't mind boring as long as it's functional. I have a feeling they will start going in that direction if it's worth it. They will probably incorporate it into Twitch perhaps. Look up a game, buy it, play games with streamers, or join a game with someone on your twitch friends list.
Valve does not have a heart or intentions. The people who work at Valve probably have a wide range of attitudes from idealistic to mercenary. But why does any of this matter at all?
Read the article, it outlines cases of Valve engaging in shitty business practices
I am also a GOG apologist. Keep up. I lost steam for 6 months due to a driver error. Couldn't access my games. That happened years ago and in that time I only used steam once to try civ 6.
It's not like I see billboards for Steam saying "Become a workshop creator and earn $500 a week" or some shit. So that's a very tenuous criticism at best.
Because I often see people using this argument as the reason why Valve is so "open" and definitely not just another crappy attempt at forced ecosystem lock-in.
I have infinitely more trust in Valve/Steam than I do in Polygon.
Steam workshop creators aren't Valve employees. Most companies don't even promote mods, let alone pay the creators.
I remember PC gaming pre-steam. You went to a box store and had your choice of WoW, Starcraft 1 box set, Sims expansions, and a Battlefield. That was the entirety of PC gaming.
Says the Nintendo apologist. Pot, kettle, etc.
The videogame industry depends on a lot of things. Singling out Steam as a crux is reductive.
We emailed Valve for a comment on this issue before publishing the story, and have yet to hear back. After all, if you don't say anything, you can't tell a lie to the internet, right?
We also didn't want anything else once we were comfortable with Steam, which is a big problem for anyone who doesn't want to give Valve a third of every sale.
...
”Developers have sometimes complained about Valve's hegemony in digital distribution and wished for seriously competitive alternatives," Geek.com wrote. ”It appears that EA is taking this possibility very seriously with Origin, but it won't exactly be to gamers' benefit if in three years' time all gaming PCs are running stores from Valve, EA, Blizzard, and Ubisoft at all times just so that players can access their purchases."
Valve had all your information and was tracking your data, but it would be wrong for other companies to do so. Valve takes 30 percent of each sale on Steam, but anyone who wants to keep their own revenue is seen as ”greedy."
...
We all eventually discovered that our close, personal and entirely fictional relationship with Valve did not entitle us to any kind of refund on our purchases.
But it took the better part of a decade for enough people to start noticing that Steam's refund policy wasn't so much a ”policy" as the words ”eat shit and die" printed in huge size 72 font and to start raising hell about it. We were used to buying our PC games in stores, and we had recourse if they didn't work. We could go talk to someone. Steam never provided that luxury, and it still doesn't.
The occasional no-refund horror story was dismissed as the exception, not the rule. It didn't cause near enough to damage the Good Guy Valve golden brand, and an incredible 11 years passed before enough people were possessed of enough indignant fury to actually complain to the authorities.
...
Even when Valve finally did get around to launching a refund program (a full two years after the supposedly evil EA did it!), many people quite accurately and angrily observed that the default refund option was in Steam credit, which means Valve wins either way.
Dota 2 continues to grow not least of all because the prize money for the International tournaments is literally donated by us, the players, who purchase interactive Compendiums and Battle Passes to raise prize money for the competitors (from which Valve takes 75 percent).
When you decide to support Dota 2, Good Guy Valve takes your money, puts 25 percent into the prize pool for the players and keeps the rest for himself, and even then the prize pool was nearly $20 million in 2016. I'm sure you can do the math
Nintendo (or any other gaming company) to Valve is no comparison at all. Valve has wrapped its tendrils around PC gaming and will never be ejected. Ever. There is no hardware reset, no OS upgrade, no real or artificial launch that can shake things up. 30 years from now people will not only still be locked into Steam but will be more dependent on it as their libraries grow over time. This is the reason Valve doesnt give a high priority to Steam its because they won totally and dont need to give it any attention for it to accrue influence.
Not really
Because I often see people using this argument as the reason why Valve is so "open" and definitely not just another crappy attempt at forced ecosystem lock-in.
It's an interesting article.
I don't really think there's much meat here, mostly grist.
The individual arguments are the following:
- Valve has a monopoly
- Some people like Steam and not Origin and they're hypocrites
- Valve let people make money off selling content, but don't pay them enough
- Valve wasn't proactive enough in establishing an EU/AU-compliant digital refunds policy
- Some ex-employees of Valve didn't like the culture.
- Reddit memes are bad
If the point here is "Some People ThinK Valve Is Based And Lord GFaben Dot Meme Dot Bmp!!!", then, like, why would any right-minded adult spend time trying to refute idiot teenagers on the internet.
But if the point here is that this is an indictment of Valve generally, I don't see it. In order:
- Steam has a lower share of PC gaming than ever before. With Twitch, Itch, Gog, Humble, Origin, Uplay, Epic Games Launcher, Windows 10 App Store, Amazon, Battle.net, the Mac App Store, Beth.net, and others there are more clients than ever before. WePlay is about to be an 800 pound gorilla. More games are being sold DRM-free than ever before. Many of the most popular games on the internet are not on Steam. And Valve allows people to sell Steam games on any store with Valve taking a 0% cut, so also Steam the Client and Steam the Store are not connected at all. Moreover, with Greenlight and now Direct, Steam is using what clout it does have less than ever before to constrain winners and losers on their own platform.
- When Steam came out, I didn't want Steam because it was an annoying inconvenience. Then it killed FilePlanet, made patching easy, and then later it solved the 10 foot UI problem for PC, so it is convenient. By comparison, Origin is worse. It's not intrinsically against the rules for people to want their 30%, but they need to earn it. Valve earned it for me. EA didn't. Ubisoft didn't. GOG did. Humble did. Microsoft didn't. This isn't because I'm a hypocrite, it's because I'd generally prefer fewer better clients.
- It sounds to me like Valve is making an error reducing the payout for DOTA2 cosmetic makers. But in general, there's a difference between starting with a status quo where everyone makes money and clawing it back, versus starting with a status quo where no one makes money and giving them a little bit. The alternative to paying community content makers is not paying community content makers. That's bad. Moving to a world where they do get paid, even if it's only the top earners and even if they aren't paid enough, is an improvement. Let's keep improving it by improving what they get paid, allowing paid mods, and reducing gatekeeping.
- I agree with the AU court decisions and support giving consumers additional rights for refunds. Also, no one had a systematic digital refund policy. This was a case where tech got ahead of law. I am glad law is constraining tech. But let's not pretend Bad Actor Valve departed from the tradition of digital refunds to screw people. And their current refund policy is more automated and generous than most other actors.
- if the point here is to point out that Valve's flat hierarchy has strengths and weaknesses, and one weakness is cliquishness and dysfunctionality when it comes to major projects, sure. I think the presentation of digging up all the ex-employees that say bad things and none of the people who feel it is functional makes it difficult to say whether these experiences are the rule or the exception. It also isn't a consumer-facing issue; the bizarre thing is that reddit people care about Valve's corporate structure to begin with.
- Reddit memes are bad.
I think the lack of a through line or coherence to the structure of the essay means that it mostly seems like a stream of consciousness, and the fact that all of these arguments have been made before mostly makes it seem like someone muckracking rather than an original contribution.
But, finally, a lot of this kinda seems Lady MacBeth-y. Like, venting grievances is of course always allowed and fine, but then what? In the end you can basically choose to buy from Steam or not. If you don't, then you give up Steam's value adds. If that bothers you, then Valve has justified their 30%. If it doesn't bother you, life goes on. If you do buy from Steam then it's a tacit consent that, despite your issues, Steam's the best option. Doesn't mean we can't demand better, but it does mean that maybe some of the apocalyptic language is a bit much.
The one line I would want people to take from this post is that Steam never than a monopoly and has less control than ever, so I particularly object to the idea that Bad Guy Valve is Ruining It For The Rest of Us.
Steam is much more open than any client bar a DRM free GOG copy. How is that not true?
Doesn't mean they won't try to attract you to their ecosystem nevertheless, and they leverage the openness of their feature for that.
The one line I would want people to take from this post is that Steam never than a monopoly and has less control than ever, so I particularly object to the idea that Bad Guy Valve is Ruining It For The Rest of Us.
I'm surprised GOG isn't more popular than it is
Sell your game on itch?