[elephanlemon]

As a kid I always lamented that every studio seemed to sell out as soon as they had the chance. Valve is basically the only one that didn’t… clearly it’s paid off very well for Gabe and the employees. Wish more people would resist the payday and keep what’s theirs.

[jsheard]

> Valve is basically the only one that didn’t

They kind of did, with their sudden pivot from primarily making singleplayer games to almost exclusively making F2P GaaS titles the instant they got a taste of lootbox money. Half-Life 3 and Portal 3 will never happen because Valve makes 100x as much money with 1/100th of the effort by peddling Counter Strike skins.

[PetitPrince]

HL3 kinda happened though, but it was called Half-Life Alyx. And while it wasn't a conventional FPS like HL1 and 2, there's absolutely no trace of GaaS in it.

[saintfire]

Allegedly HL3 is in active development.

No official announcement yet.

[pphysch]

HL3 is under active development though. If that's a success I'm sure they'd try a Portal 3 as well.

[manjalyc]

What does the G in GaaS mean?

[wlesieutre]

Didn't Valve just deliberately tank the Counter Strike cosmetics market?

[monospacegames]

Financially Valve exists in an incomparably different space compared to companies like Take Two that actually have to make games to make money.

[bak3y]

And they were able to get there because they made good games.

[John23832]

> Valve is basically the only one that didn’t…

Lol Valve is taking a cut of a ridiculous amount of video game sales while releasing no games.

I like some of their work on the linux support side, but they have sold out as much as Apple has if anything.

[haunter]

>Wish more people would resist the payday and keep what’s theirs.

Ah yeah unregulated illegal underage gambling, the great resistance. Gabe could shutdown the whole thing with 1 click, all the sites are using the Steam API, but they don't and you know why.

Valve did a lot of things good but they are also the original source of a lot of bad things from lootboxes to skin gambling to the FOMO battle pass cancer of modern gaming.

[daedrdev]

Its definitely the ones that sell. There are plenty of small studios run by founders, but often once they sell they start burning consumer trust and goodwill as if those things don't exist and have an actual cost

[Loughla]

Once you have an IP that's massive and you know people will buy regardless of if you're a trash monster or not, there's zero incentive to do the right thing.

Until people stop buying games from these places nothing will change.

[jayd16]

I wouldn't call this selling out, exactly. If the issue is endless crunch, its more a matter of having enough money to support it endlessly and an aging workforce that knows their worth and can push back.

The issue is trying to force (or likely, continue) bad practices when they're clearly not working and then lacking the leadership to realize that a retaliatory layoff is only going to make things worse.

[Aunche]

Smaller studios can maintain a small team of highly passionate people that will happily work 60+ hours a week or achieve similar productivity. As a studio grows, this becomes harder to maintain. You're pressured to either become a slave driver or dilute your product and make more money through derivative content or micro transactions. For example, I heard that EA is actually a relatively chill company. What sometimes works at keeping employees and customers both happy is fostering a cult-like environment, but that can easily lead to exploitation.

[shadowgovt]

Valve never sold out because they became the "out" other companies sell out to. They successfully built a revenue-capturing money-printer in the form of the Steam store and service and now they don't have to make games at all to keep their bottom line strong. Not to imply they shouldn't have; get that gold ring and all.

(But I may also argue the point they never sold out in terms of being a game studio as opposed to a publisher.... "So when's Half Life 3 releasing?")

[worldfoodgood]

Valve makes a significant amount of their money from the gambling they've attached to their games, and profits immensely from the culture of farming loot boxes to gamble on for skins and such.

They also take an absurd cut of developer income and saddle devs with costs that they don't always want. (Selling on Steam? Valve takes 30% and forces you to moderate the forums on your listing page that you cannot opt out of.)

They also have an internal culture that's been fairly regularly criticized as being pretty uncomfortable for women and minorities.

Valve has done some cool stuff, but let's not lionize them too much. They are probably better than an average company, for sure, but it's important to remember that they are also sketchy in some very gross ways as well.

[xhrpost]

If you were a dev selling a game years ago when physical distribution was the only method, you'd likely end up with a lot less than 70% after both the publisher and retailer take their cut.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/blogs/company-town-blog/sto...

[umvi]

I'm happier to pay Valve's 30% than Apple's. With Valve you could always switch to Itch or something if you didn't want to pay, but with Apple you have no alternative. Valve gives you access to a huge player base and lots of useful marketing tools and such.

[vkou]

Valve charges 30% for access to their marketplace, and allows you to sell Steam keys for your game at whatever price you want through your own sales channels, without paying Valve a cent.

I'm not sure how any of that is sketchy or gross. As far as marketplaces and platforms go, this is quite reasonable, and there are many successful games which are either not on Steam, or are cross-listed on multiple platforms, or are cross-listed on both Steam and the developer's own distribution channel.

I'll give you lootboxes, they are pretty shitty.

[kotaKat]

> They also take an absurd cut of developer income and saddle devs with costs that they don't always want.

Fun fact: Nintendo's revenue split on WiiWare was 60/40, and required minimum downloads to even get your revenue out of Big N.

[xinayder]

> They also have an internal culture that's been fairly regularly criticized as being pretty uncomfortable for women and minorities.

Source?

[Bombthecat]

How much money do they make through counter strike loot boxes and selling games etc?

[throw10920]

The only thing absurd is this comment.

> They also take an absurd cut of developer income

30%-20% is by no means "absurd", given the incredible value that Steam provides to developers: content delivery, payment processing, cloud saves, ratings, game tags, social integration, wishlisting and sale notification, search indexing, game discovery, a bunch of incredibly useful APIs including networking and input, Linux compatibility, and many, many other things.

In fact, 30% of revenue is well under what it would cost me to implement all of the features that I want from Steam as a developer, unless I somehow won the jackpot and ended up selling millions of copies (in which case I would end up only paying 20% of revenue anyway).

> and saddle devs with costs that they don't always want. (Selling on Steam? Valve takes 30%

Which you already mentioned, while somehow conveniently omitting the fact that the cut decreases to 20% if your revenue is high enough.

> and forces you to moderate the forums on your listing page that you cannot opt out of

This is the single possibly objectionable thing here.

> They also have an internal culture that's been fairly regularly criticized as being pretty uncomfortable for women and minorities.

~~Allegations~~ mean nothing. Are there successful lawsuits?

> Valve has done some cool stuff, but let's not lionize them too much.

Valve is incomparably better than every other major game distribution platform, which is the comparison that we're making. You are very intentionally making manipulative and dishonest points to try to paint Valve as worst than it is. Which makes sense, because you're a throwaway account.

[eckmLJE]

I appreciate what you've posted here. Valve fanboyism is widespread (I'm guilty of it too) and while they are shoulders above the alternatives, it's a good reminder that no one's perfect and I'll be sure to take a closer look at the company in the future.

[Forgeties79]

10% if it’s a Linux copy ;)

[sugarpimpdorsey]

> They also have an internal culture that's been fairly regularly criticized as being pretty uncomfortable for women and minorities.

If they don't like the culture, then they should work elsewhere.

I hear Google is hiring.

Nothing worse than joining a company you contributed zero to building from the ground up, then unilaterally deciding the culture needs to change according to your whims, right now.

You might feel uncomfortable working in a black barber shop. Or a cat cafe with pet allergies. You've contributed nothing to their business, they shouldn't have to change for you.

[abtinf]

> but it's important to remember that ... as well

Hello LLM.

[righthand]

They definitely get a free pass from people. Valve is plenty evil.

[immibis]

Gabe is the Apple of PC gaming, taking a 30% tax on all transactions. It's not this particular kind of evil, but it is a different kind of evil.

[samiwami]

There is nothing forcing developers to release on steam, they can sell directly through a website. It’s not Valve’s fault no other competitor has gotten close to the quality of Steam. Epic Games could have made a dent, but they decided to try to bribe customers instead of making a functioning store.

[robhlt]

Valve allows developers to generate activation keys for their games and sell them on other platforms, where Valve gets a 0% cut. This is how you're able to buy games from places like the Humble Store and activate them on Steam. Their agreement does technically require that you don't sell at a lower price on other platforms, but as far as I know it's never been enforced.

[acedTrex]

This is in no way true because there is no requirement to use steam for PC releases.

Apple is a firm technical gatekeeper to their ecosystem. Steam is not at all analogous to that for PCs.

[duxup]

PCs are plenty accessible to developers without Steam.

[axus]

Can a Steam Deck install games without using Steam? If so, big advantage over Google Play and the App Store.

[al_borland]

Are you of the opinion that these marketplaces shouldn’t exist, that they should take a smaller percentage, that they should be entirely ad-supported, or something else?

How can user have an optional one-stop-shop that is sustainable for the long-term while not being “evil”.

[zer00eyz]

Uhhh....

11 percent. That is the charge back rate in gaming. The "overall" stat for all transactions is something like 3 percent.

Card processing isnt free. There are fees, and supporting card processing still has more humans in the loop than one needs. Never mind all the technology that comes with running the dam platform.

Is 30 percent a lot. It sure is. Valve isnt a charity, this is how they chose to make money.

Meanwhile, AWS has a 30+ percent margin and I dont see CTO's lining up to run hardware...

[daedrdev]

Plenty of companies have tried to compete with gabe, they’re all just terrible at it

[preisschild]

That is bullshit, you are not even locked to using Steam on the Steam Deck. 30% is completely fair for the amount of infrastructure Steam provides to your game.

Definitely not comparable to Apple, which is forcing all iPhone users to use their own app store.

[guywithahat]

But union "busting" isn't selling out, if anything it's keeping to their true cause. Companies don't function well with adversarial units within them, and companies don't start out with unions.

Case and point: Valve doesn't have a union.

[ab5tract]

It’s a privately owned company. This leads to an entirely different relationship between employees and the top layer of management.

You have to be very misguided to believe that the c suite in most companies is not engaged in n adversarial relationship with its employees, whether those employees are unionized or not.

[array_key_first]

> Companies don't function well with adversarial units within them

This isn't a given, this is just an opinion, and one you didn't bother trying to argue for.

Many systems do function much better with adversarial units in them. Governments have the adversarial units of checks and balances. Companies have the adversarial forces of the market. A news paper has the adversarial units of editors to their writers.

[NoraCodes]

The phrase is "case in point", and unionized companies often do quite well.