The fact that they don’t pull this shit is the reason they have the distribution market cornered.
We have to remember that gamers are not Valve’s primary customers. Game devs are. The market you’re referring to is the market of distributors available to game devs – NOT the market of storefronts available to gamers. In the PC space, the market of distributors is cornered by Valve and it allows them to take a big chunk of each sale from the game devs.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Steam and I think Valve has done some great things for gaming on PC and for gamers in general. That doesn’t change the fact that they are another cost a game dev must pay in order for them to create their goods, in an economic sense. Valve’s got the shelf space and devs don’t have much choice but to rent it out.
I think you are forgetting the other reason Valve cornered the market;
“One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue… The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”
Gabe Newell, CEO Valve - Speaking at the Washington Technology Industry Association’s (WTIA) Tech NW Conference.
Yeah, no I definitely agree they’re good to gamers. I also love how they have a flat structure, and I think Gabe seems like a smart guy. He’s given some interesting talks about economics. They’ve made a great platform for gamers, but it doesn’t quite change that their business model is based on taking a cut of the profit of work done by others. In most other scenarios, it’s easy for us to recognize when companies do this – amazon, Walmart, etc, but in Valves case they have such a great reputation among gamers and a fanbase of their own, I think the escape a good amount of warranted scrutiny (game dev side, not gamer side)
Valve’s fee is more than earned however. Steam as a storefront is highly trusted by users, it has a rock solid reputation that is hard to come by. As a distributor they take a one time fee for each copy sold, then they manage all of the costs from users downloading and downloading again for as long as the platform exists from that one time fee. Meanwhile if a developer were to do that themselves then they pay each time a user wants to download that game.
Sure the developers lose a bit more money than if they sold on another platform. But the higher up front cost to access the larger platform is a very worthwhile trade as can be seen by developers continually coming back.
Maybe. I’m not a game dev, so Im not sure I can say for sure. But it still remains that there isn’t much of a choice for game devs and Valve holds most of the cards. That level of centralization of power isn’t good, earned or otherwise. It’s evident that at least some devs aren’t happy how much of a cut Valve is taking.
Meanwhile if a developer were to do that themselves then they pay each time a user wants to download that game.
I’m not sure this is exactly right. They’d have to buy and maintain their own servers, or rent them from a cloud provider, but it wouldnt necessarily be a charge for every download. But maybe I’m being pedantic – you’re right that it costs some amount of money to store data and keep computers up.
I think probably from a game dev perspective, the issue here is Valve takes far more of a cut than whatever value they add to the experience itself. If you’re a team that just spent years of work on a game, the one-third cut Valve takes is just not proportional considering the amount of dev work, and is therefore considered extractive. Does that make sense?
I’m trying not to cast too much moral judgement here because we live in a capitalist system and corporations are going to seek profit in whatever way possible, and we are all indoctrinated into it, but from a perspective critical to that system, Valve are not good.
From a gamer perspective theyre a fucking godsend lmaooo
As a cloud engineer - renting any distribution servers from a cloud provider will result in a dev paying for every download. You pay based on the bandwidth you consume in the cloud (I.e., you pay per Gb delivered) as opposed to your pipeline like you do when you run your own private servers. You also pay storage costs per month. You’d have to maintain that “forever” as well, because people would want to uninstall, then re-install later.
I get your argument, and I’m not discounting it, but I do suspect that for smaller devs the price they’re paying to Valve is well earned on Valve’s side (and the fact that so many devs choose to use it would seem to bear this out). We should also consider that steam is essentially built-in DRM to games.
For larger customers, they likely have this infrastructure and get annoyed at the costs. They still go to Steam though because it increases their reach as a type of marketing strategy, so they still likely find the cut worth while. If Steam was more hostile to users, then people would actively look for alternatives (I.e., the Gogs of the world), and the publishers would have to target more storefronts.
So yes, Steam’s primary customers are publishers, but I’m not sure they’re really getting the raw end of the deal here :)
The fact that they don’t pull this shit is the reason they have the distribution market cornered.
We have to remember that gamers are not Valve’s primary customers. Game devs are. The market you’re referring to is the market of distributors available to game devs – NOT the market of storefronts available to gamers. In the PC space, the market of distributors is cornered by Valve and it allows them to take a big chunk of each sale from the game devs.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Steam and I think Valve has done some great things for gaming on PC and for gamers in general. That doesn’t change the fact that they are another cost a game dev must pay in order for them to create their goods, in an economic sense. Valve’s got the shelf space and devs don’t have much choice but to rent it out.
I think you are forgetting the other reason Valve cornered the market;
“One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue… The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”
Gabe Newell, CEO Valve - Speaking at the Washington Technology Industry Association’s (WTIA) Tech NW Conference.
Yeah, no I definitely agree they’re good to gamers. I also love how they have a flat structure, and I think Gabe seems like a smart guy. He’s given some interesting talks about economics. They’ve made a great platform for gamers, but it doesn’t quite change that their business model is based on taking a cut of the profit of work done by others. In most other scenarios, it’s easy for us to recognize when companies do this – amazon, Walmart, etc, but in Valves case they have such a great reputation among gamers and a fanbase of their own, I think the escape a good amount of warranted scrutiny (game dev side, not gamer side)
“Is based on taking a cut of the product of work done by others.”
That seems like a fair trade off for game developers in turn getting to use the platform who’s work was done by… Valve.
I understand why people make this argument but it’s really undercutting the value that Valve provides developers who utilize steam for distribution.
Valve’s fee is more than earned however. Steam as a storefront is highly trusted by users, it has a rock solid reputation that is hard to come by. As a distributor they take a one time fee for each copy sold, then they manage all of the costs from users downloading and downloading again for as long as the platform exists from that one time fee. Meanwhile if a developer were to do that themselves then they pay each time a user wants to download that game.
Sure the developers lose a bit more money than if they sold on another platform. But the higher up front cost to access the larger platform is a very worthwhile trade as can be seen by developers continually coming back.
Maybe. I’m not a game dev, so Im not sure I can say for sure. But it still remains that there isn’t much of a choice for game devs and Valve holds most of the cards. That level of centralization of power isn’t good, earned or otherwise. It’s evident that at least some devs aren’t happy how much of a cut Valve is taking.
I’m not sure this is exactly right. They’d have to buy and maintain their own servers, or rent them from a cloud provider, but it wouldnt necessarily be a charge for every download. But maybe I’m being pedantic – you’re right that it costs some amount of money to store data and keep computers up.
I think probably from a game dev perspective, the issue here is Valve takes far more of a cut than whatever value they add to the experience itself. If you’re a team that just spent years of work on a game, the one-third cut Valve takes is just not proportional considering the amount of dev work, and is therefore considered extractive. Does that make sense?
I’m trying not to cast too much moral judgement here because we live in a capitalist system and corporations are going to seek profit in whatever way possible, and we are all indoctrinated into it, but from a perspective critical to that system, Valve are not good.
From a gamer perspective theyre a fucking godsend lmaooo
As a cloud engineer - renting any distribution servers from a cloud provider will result in a dev paying for every download. You pay based on the bandwidth you consume in the cloud (I.e., you pay per Gb delivered) as opposed to your pipeline like you do when you run your own private servers. You also pay storage costs per month. You’d have to maintain that “forever” as well, because people would want to uninstall, then re-install later.
I get your argument, and I’m not discounting it, but I do suspect that for smaller devs the price they’re paying to Valve is well earned on Valve’s side (and the fact that so many devs choose to use it would seem to bear this out). We should also consider that steam is essentially built-in DRM to games.
For larger customers, they likely have this infrastructure and get annoyed at the costs. They still go to Steam though because it increases their reach as a type of marketing strategy, so they still likely find the cut worth while. If Steam was more hostile to users, then people would actively look for alternatives (I.e., the Gogs of the world), and the publishers would have to target more storefronts.
So yes, Steam’s primary customers are publishers, but I’m not sure they’re really getting the raw end of the deal here :)