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[BADMAN]

Well if people make enough of a stink about this then we should get a response from Gabe himself. At least Valve is pretty consistent on responding to the community. Hopefully they won't talk down to us like they have occasionally in the past.

 

[dhonk]

Well if people make enough of a stink about this then we should get a response from Gabe himself. At least Valve is pretty consistent on responding to the community. Hopefully they won't talk down to us like they have occasionally in the past.

I'm not so hopeful enough people will care. It doesnt affect a large enough amount of people. I sent an email to Gabe anyway but meh.

 

[BlazingDarkness]

Valve stinks, imo.
Their complete hands off approach with stuff like Greenlight, lack of interest in fan favourite franchises, and their radio silence with their use base shows a lack of respect, and even a contempt for, their own audience.

I uninstalled Steam a couple of years back (real life commitments) and have no inclination to go back anytime soon.

 

[King Gilga]

Well this is real scummy, but valve being real scummy is no surprise.

 

[Nzyme32]

Flat structure, self-directing, we love the community pixie-dusting utopia ring any bells for you?

And that has no bearing on their supposed "self-proclamation" quote you made. There is no such quote. If there is, i want to see it and​ laugh at how unbelievable it would be.

Valve stinks, imo.
Their complete hands off approach with stuff like Greenlight, lack of interest in fan favourite franchises, and their radio silence with their use base shows a lack of respect, and even a contempt for, their own audience.

I uninstalled Steam a couple of years back (real life commitments) and have no inclination to go back anytime soon.

Greenlight wasn't hands off - if anything steam direct is very much more hands off, though the copyright side of things is pretty hands on lately. Valve amusingly ended a long period of relative silence recently to which there is no more info that in years on what is happening, new games etc. "Fan favourite" franchise whine is ridiculous to me. HL is the only one where it really applies and even then, the company is so much more focused on Steam, the PC ecosystem and tech as it has grown to be something of a leader for the PC gaming side, forming a function of where their games will go.

The more important and legit things to get annoyed about is stuff like this, where fundamental principles that set a good ecosystem for a game are contradicted and regress.

 

[collige]

I always thought the original 25% cut was a ripoff, this is just a slap in the face.

 

[BADMAN]

I'm not so hopeful enough people will care. It doesnt affect a large enough amount of people. I sent an email to Gabe anyway but meh.

It's #1 on Dota's subreddit and Valve uses that subreddit as a metric for how much people give a shit. Also people are eventually going to care when the quality (or quantity) of items drop. Hopefully the former will do the job

 

[Arkage]

What?

And also there is the challenge of how you hold an economy together. Give a much larger percentage profit to such cosmetics and they will make more than the staff working on the game per content being created (which some already do), who would be better served actually just being another workshop artist. This has been discussed at length a ton.

A Valve employee gets job security, a great work environment, benefits, job structure, etc. If they decided to quit to become "just another workshop artist" there is literally no guarantee they would strike it big. And if they did, good for them, but there's absolutely no reason to think it would get to the point where Valve is no longer able to hire good artists because they'd rather workshop hats. It's a ridiculous hypothesis, one that obviously stems from grasping at straws to justify the absurd money they're raking in, to justify transparent greed. You're literally trying to say that it's in Valves best interest to pay workshop artists shit, in case their own employees get any strange ideas. What a gem of capitalistic logic.

 

[ScientificPizza]

Bruh. That's insane.

 

[balladofwindfishes]

Good lord I'd love to talk about Invasion someday. What a disaster, mostly caused by 3 big egos.

It's why Valve doesn't do big community updates anymore. Instead they just pick a theme and plan a future update around it, as we're seeing with the Jungle update. Too much drama.

Also in TF2, the rate for chests has been 7% as of at least 2013.

 

[dhonk]

It's why Valve doesn't do big community updates anymore. Instead they just pick a theme and plan a future update around it, as we're seeing with the Jungle update. Too much drama.

Also in TF2, the rate for chests has been 7% as of at least 2013.

Depends on the crate but yes. Essentially.

 

[balladofwindfishes]

Depends on the crate but yes. Essentially.

I wish I had data going further back, but my 2012 item was in a limited crate, so I don't have key sales data for that anymore.

Any of the items sold in the store is still 25%. But they don't do that anymore for TF2, so I guess everyone is stuck at 7% in TF2 now, at least for new items.

 

[poppedcollar69]

The actual item market trade market is dead because of short-sighted economy decisions.

Let us dispel with the fiction that valve don't know what they are doing. They know exactly what they're doing

 

[Zia]

Seriously depressing.

Valve is EA.

 

[Parsnip]

Really odd.

 

[Sibylus]

And that has no bearing on their supposed "self-proclamation" quote you made. There is no such quote. If there is, i want to see it and​ laugh at how unbelievable it would be.

So we're going for anally-retentive literal readings today. Valve employee handbook. Virtually every (favorable) interview they give on their structure. It was basically an article of faith among fans/the industry that it was true for a long time (and not a deceptively rosy bit of garnish).

 

[frontovik]

Surprising seeing this move from Valve.

 

[-COOLIO-]

They technically aren't, that's correct.

That doesn't make what they are doing any less fucked up on a moral level.

i fail to see how it's immoral to be honest.

if valve is offering too little for peoples work then people will stop making things for the workshop. at worst, it's a bad decision.

if you want to talk about immoral, then let's talk about the minimum wage.

 

[shira]

CSGO is where the money is at

RIP Dota2 dead game

 

[Neptonic]

How else are they going to fund the development of Half Life 3

 

[Yukinari]

Dota 2 and TF2 have the least successful economies right now which is why nobody is giving a shit probably.

I talk to some item creators on steam and they definitely deserve to be paid more for their work. Especially when Valve doesnt even bother to do their own events these days.

 

[balladofwindfishes]

Check out this funny joke from the First Blood patch notes

Many items have been removed from the store. These can now be sold and bought on the Steam Community Market! Workshop contributors will receive a share of each resale of their items. The items that have been removed are not immortal: they may return to the store in future sales or events, or they may appear in the drop list from time to time

I'm going to assume this never actually happened?

 

[bounchfx]

Check out this funny joke from the First Blood patch notes



I'm going to assume this never actually happened?

It certainly didn't. I don't remember it ever saying that. Wow.
Unless, of course, it's only those particular delisted items. Which I suppose makes more sense.

 

[balladofwindfishes]

It certainly didn't. I don't remember it ever saying that. Wow.
Unless, of course, it's only those particular delisted items. Which I suppose makes more sense.

Could be. I don't really recall what items were delisted. One of your items must have been in there? You have a million of them.

 

[CountAntonius]

Going by my data, I've made them roughly 500,000-600,000 dollars.

The big DOTA makers? Easily millions. Like seriously.

That's...wow.

 

[Cartman86]

Valve' entire thing is about crafting a place where shit like this shouldn't happen. There messaging has never been "you live in our world deal with it". Which is why arguments that point that out are tone deaf.

 

[GoldandBlue]

Remember a few months ago when Valve said modders deserved money for their work? Guess they never meant very much money.

It's pretty disgusting what happened to the workshop and as always Valve going quite. If they even do respond to this, I imagine the typical "We plan to communicate more in the future" response followed by another indecent where they don't respond for months.

 

[spindoctor]

So we're going for anally-retentive literal readings today. Valve employee handbook. Virtually every (favorable) interview they give on their structure. It was basically an article of faith among fans/the industry that it was true for a long time (and not a deceptively rosy bit of garnish).

So, basically, you were lying?

 

[Sibylus]

So, basically, you were lying?

If expecting readers to read between the lines (subtext) is deceit now, shite. Pack up civilization, we had a good run.

Spoiler

The above is hyperbole, if it wasn't already obvious.

 

[Abounder]

Holy shit that's a terrible deal that's only getting worse, like a goddamn Darth Vader meme

Valve are pieces of shit here

 

[archangelmorph]

Going by my data, I've made them roughly 500,000-600,000 dollars.

The big DOTA makers? Easily millions. Like seriously.

How much have you made from your work in total?

Also can you quantify the man-hours you put in here?

---

What I'm driving at is:

- Valve effectively own the IP here and so are under no obligation to pay huge sums of money to modders
- Valve [as a business] need to be really careful here. They actually hire internal talented, experienced artists, and if they create a skewed economy out of this scheme, they risk losing top class talent, who would be able to make more money full-time by quitting and creating mods for sale in these games

So they kinda have a vested interest in rebalancing the revenue model such that they don't brain drain and shoot themselves in the foot.

 

[Branduil]

I'm more and more convinced that any developer that shifts focus from actually making games to games-as-a-service(i.e. selling tons and tons of cosmetics) will inevitably become a piece of shit.

 

[zombieshavebrains]

Thoroughly explained here.

Why people should care:


Overall this is disgusting and it should not only be important to DotA 2 fans but potentially all F2P modelled Valve games. It completely breaks when creators aren't actually rewarded sufficiently.

Doing business is disgusting now.

 

[zombieshavebrains]

Yea - as good as Dota is in terms of gameplay and gameplay-related features, Valve's been doing a poorer and poorer job handling its other aspects.

Programmable bots? Believe they've been pretty much abandoned.
Tutorial? Same story.
Guides? I believe they take awhile after patches to get updated/fixed.
Website? Doesn't have talents, the biggest gameplay addition to Dota since... Idk. Since I've been playing, and that's 2010/11.
Custom games? Lol.
Cosmetics? Most of them are Valve-made (it seems like, though I could be wrong) and only come from Compendium's nowadays. Furthermore, the ones in the compendiums all have excessive particles and break the original rules that Valve gave community artists to follow (color schemes, silhouettes, etc.). The ones that aren't made by Valve but are released are pretty awful - see the DAC Compendium (Whoa, another compendium?) and its boring sets.

Other examples of cosmetics that get the shoe-in over more deserving ones are the shitty holiday ones. Valve spends time trying to get Chinese money by doing New Year's events, but the original events that showed alternative game modes and the possibilities of custom games like Diretide/Frostivus are omitted, ignored, or barely acknowledged with a hat on Roshan, a mob that is less worth taking than ever.

Finally, Valve's economy has been in the shitter. Any items you get from games can't be sold, you can RARELY buy an item directly from Valve's store unless it's an arcana. They took away level up gifts/items. Again, pretty much all new items flow from Compendiums. Can't remember the last time we got wards from a non-Compendium chest.

I don't play as much as I used to, so please correct me if I'm wrong on any of these points, but Valve barely seems to put any effort into the non-gameplay side of the game anymore.

Fuck this revenue cut, it's completely shitty and seems to be reflective of Valve's feelings on the game lately.

This is a post I can get behind. They handled Dota better then anyone else could have. But have not followed through on what they said they were going to do and never reached their full potential.

 

[Haly]

Doing business is disgusting now.

Bad/exploitative business is disgusting yes.

 

[Dopus]

Valve is not obligated to allow you to make money with or on their platform. Same thing for YouTube.

Well, YouTube as a platform is mostly community driven and content creators are for the most part full-time. If they decided to go against this then the community would simply find an alternative relatively quickly. Other platforms would pop up to seize the opportunity using a similar model.

In addition, YouTube doesn't have a backlog of videos that have yet to be published, nor do they have ownership rights. It would be an awful business decision and it's not really comparable to this situation. Yeah, they're not obligated to, but if they decided to keep 100% of revenue, it would be financial suicide.

 

[mitch1971]

Never rated Valve, never will. This just adds more logs to the fire.

Maybe Gabe's worth has dropped below 4 billion. As you know 4 billion isn't much these days.

 

[water_wendi]

i felt this thread all the way from the OT.

 

[Kowalo]

It should be noted that Valve still advertises the tf2 workshop as a 25% cut on the about section of the workshop which going by the discussion here is pretty misleading.

 

[balladofwindfishes]

It should be noted that Valve still advertises the tf2 workshop as a 25% cut on the about section of the workshop which going by the discussion here is pretty misleading.

Items sold through the in game store, in TF2, still give 25%

Except they haven't added new items to the store in years, everything is crate exclusive these days.

 

[Bluth54]

Items sold through the in game store, in TF2, still give 25%

Except they haven't added new items to the store in years, everything is crate exclusive these days.

Well with the exception of taunts. I'm not sure how well taunts sell though.

 

[defiant04]

No disrespect to the folks who work hard on this knda thing, but you're always taking a risk when you're using someone else's platform to make money

Do you have business experience? because many business folks think the same lol.

 

[Aselith]

This is bullshit. Without the modders making these items, that game would be hosed. Item boxes are what kept it going in a lot of ways and especially the Battlestars that funded their majors and drove interest in the game.

 

[Mohasus]

Valve is not obligated to allow you to make money with or on their platform. Same thing for YouTube.

Why stop at skins though?

They should also reduce the percentage publishers receive from selling games on steam, after all they aren't obligated to make money for third parties.

 

[Gxgear]

I guess that's what happens when a company goes from a game developer to a platform managing corporation.

 

[Trickster]

Wow, that's fucking disgusting behaviour by Valve

 

[FieryBalrog]

Oh, it's Valve. The "gods of pc gaming", aka experts in innovating new ways to leech money off of other people's work.

 

[Nzyme32]

So we're going for anally-retentive literal readings today. Valve employee handbook. Virtually every (favorable) interview they give on their structure. It was basically an article of faith among fans/the industry that it was true for a long time (and not a deceptively rosy bit of garnish).

None of that is suggestive of a "self-described dream studio". They even call out the fact many will hate that structure or not function well in it - hardly the actions of a company that is a "self-described dream studio" - since it isn't

It should be noted that Valve still advertises the tf2 workshop as a 25% cut on the about section of the workshop which going by the discussion here is pretty misleading.

Which it is. The problem here is with Battle Passes etc too and how the Dota workshop ecosystem, events, items etc work together. Having said that, Valve typically are sloth like in updating the site for such info, so it would be no surprise if this is also wrong.

 

[Vincent Grayson]

Seriously depressing.

Valve is EA.

At least EA puts out new games still.

 

[Psyrgery ES]

At least EA puts out new games still.

Oh snap!