Michael: "Python is absolutely a foundational language to know" ... Well, yes BUT only if you have no OO background. Python is to OO programming as BASIC is/was procedural programming. Then you put the big-boy pants on and use a proper programming language!
Tim Sweeney is way more the bad guy than Valve. Valve's shop realy delivers real actual added value! I bought games twice just to have them on Steam and use Steam invite. Steam is made realy well! Tim Sweeneys Epic gamestore sucks! Same with EA App. I think it's ridiculous that a competitor of valve with it's own epicstore is angry that Valve prices it's service expensively...Aren't expensive competitor a chance? The best way to destroy Valve , would be to pitch them to go public...and work from quarter to quarter...
Regardless of steams, it's now better to use an interface. This is a monopoly. Saying to a developer that you can't sell for less is literally what big corporations do to squash competition. You enjoy paying 100$+ for a new game... that's bollocks, get the same game for less with a gog or humble or epic . It's obvious it's bollocks when some of these games go down to 25% with random specials. (the special prices are closer to what you would have to pay if we had competition) Competition is good for the consumer, I rarely directly buy from steam as they are rip offs.
The reason Valve staff can be so efficient is likely that theyre veterans who know what theyre doing. I work in software dev. We are inefficienct. Why? Layoffs and departures. People come in, look at codebase, have no idea what theyre even looking at, spend months trying to get to know it, get laid off, repeat. Meanwhile someone who knows the codebase can get things done in a few hours instead of a few days or weeks. I also love it when someone asks questions about how a thing works and the only guy who knew was laid off. Thats how you achieve negative efficiency.
yeah I had the same experience. When I finally understood the codebase and was able to add complex features with confidence, the project was put on hold due to budget constraints. This was my half-year long endeavor in software development and so I decided I would never return to this kind of job ever.
Valve is what Apple, Microsoft, and all other big tech sold themselves as decades ago when IT degrees were still a hot commodity. Imagine a PRIVATE company that doesnt bow to shareholders, your Big Boss is a Big Boss who isnt an evil F. It would be like a dream job these days, a company that doesn't f you and just wants you to work while paying you somewhat fairly as opposed to the revolving door nonsense we see everywhere.
Companies continue to underestimate the worth of their tech workers My father is one of the last people who understands legacy systems at his work, systems they can’t replace, yet the way they work his ass and treat him you wouldn’t think he’d be in possession of such integral info to the function of their sites, skill is one thing that a good employee must have but for any job where programming is needed it seems like seniority is also important as old tech needs understanding
This is very true. When i was a technical person, all of our stuff that I was in charge of ran smoothly. Then I left, they never replaced me thinking it wasn't needed. Last i heard from a friend who still works there, everything went on fire. They they spent millions to try and replace the systems because no one wanted to learn it. Then the replacement failed badly it doesnt even cover half what the old systems used to do 😂
It’s going to his son, who has expressed similar values as his dad. That’s not a guarantee nothing will change, but it’s hope that the legacy will continue.
So you telling me having few experienced people and pay them well is better than what the rest of the gaming industry does in letting go all the experienced staff and hiring new one instead of paying the people who know what they do more? Who would have known? Btw this is sarcastic it’s just disgusting to see how the gaming industry in most cases treats their employees
@@JimBimBum I assume you don't actually understand what I meant.. I meant EA being below steam, where it sounds like EA is countering the steam offer.. instead of steam offering... after a 'best we can do' statement. It boils down to Steam: 5 million EA: best we can do, unpaid internship
It's not that hard to understand. He's saying you should reverse the statements for more comedic effect Steam: We'll pay a million a year. EA: Best we can do is an unpaid internship and a sick break room.
I'm from an developing country, and up until a good chunk of the 00s legitimately buying computer games was virtually unheard of here because no one could afford it. Quite literally everyone just played pirated games. Most people would get their games for cheap from shady vendors who distributed pirated copies of games, and they basically had no guarantee they weren't installing malware in their computer. Valve pretty much put us on the map as a market with regional pricing, and I'll always be grateful.
Where am from its still the case because we don't have online international payment. so if we want to go legit we are forced to buy overpriced steam gift cards from people who have connections to buy them. so basically everyone pirates games. Piracy is always a problem of availability not people being thieves.
@@Blackwing2345635 Don't forget that in the late 90's and early 2000's it started getting harder and harder to even get PC games as most brick-and-mortar retailers started pulling them from shelves in lieu of console games. Valve almost single handedly saved PC gaming by pioneering digital distribution.
What causes me to laugh, is If Valve eased off their revenue cut to the lowest they could tolerate, then THAT would truly be monopolistic behavior as no one else could compete with how efficient they are.
Sites like GMG and Fanatical rely on competing with Steam on prices by giving buyers a discount taken out of their store cut. GMG, for example, takes a 30% cut from keys they sell while often giving buyers up to 15% off new games, which leaves them with a 15% profit and publishers keep 70% of the sale. If Valve lowered their commission rate, GMG would no longer be able to compete in price and buyers would lose all incentives from buying on there when Steam has a better refund policy. Publishers also would then lose any incentive of providing GMG with keys to sell.
its almost like their trying to punish steam for being good while rewarding lack luster crap like Ubisoft's store and EA's store. like yeah you can go to any other store but you wont make meaningful cash... like yeah because no one else has built a store as well as steam has. i hope in discover and in maybe 5 clicks i will find a game that grabs my interest. but hey lets punish steam for being pro consumer and putting effort into their products.
If you haven’t looked at Valves internal organization you should. It’s one of the few “flat” companies. There is no hierarchy. No bosses. Everyone just contributes to the projects where they can make the most impact. Who sets those projects? Well if you have an idea and can build a team (take resources from other projects) it gets worked on. This helps explain why Valve is so unpredictable but also runs incredibly lean. No bureaucratic bloat.
maybe VALVe as a game developer (though ever since HL:A they've said they're changing), not Steam. They're basically two sides of the coin, I wouldn't be surprised there are levels of responsibility, just not in the same way as the corporations we're used to
Is nobody going to acknowledge that steam is paying their average employees around a million dollars a year, with the lowest paid average team being Hardware at around 500k per employee?
Average isn't an important number. The pay could all be at the management level. I bet plenty of employees see these numbers and feel cheated. Imagine your boss makes 10 million a year and you make 50k. Probably not a fair assumption at steam, but it's possible.
@@Vonderboywhere are you getting this 50k number from and more importantly why would it matter? The person making 50k would be an outlier in the greater scheme of things.
@@youtubeisovertlyantisemiti3247 well to me it looked like the email said "if you price it on steam higher than another site we aren't doing business, so make the price the same"
@@MaxIronsThird Ok i will use your house as a storage unit for FREE. While paying another storage unit. I see you agree that it is fair so please give me your address so i can move merchandise
As a linux user I am very grateful for the money Valve put into proton. Without this situation, my gaming experience would most likely not be possible on linux and I would still be forced to keep a windows installation.
Wild considering once upon a time ID and Epic would do native binaries before they abandoned those thoughts , Remote Play and Proton don't really get enough love all things considered .
this is the only reason I play games at all, they are literally opening markets. and sure we are not many people, but still opening markets that can grow in the future is worth that 30% easy.
lol I love people like you, its like you want to use linux but gaming is more important so you use windows too? LOL gaming on linux was possible before proton, proton just made it easier for idiots who dont know how to use a compiler.
@trixer230 Do you have friends and family? How many of them are, by your own definition, idiots? There's more to life than computers. The idea that everyone should be proeficient in your particular field of expertise, and that anyone who isn't is an "idiot" is incredibly narrowminded.
@@majorgnu Not only that, what he is claiming is completely untrue. Proton IS the compatibility layer that TRANSLATES the calls to the gpu, like between vulcan and directX.
@@Web720 Normally a privately owned company owners, even if shared to an extent ie say more than one family owns it, get a share in the profits. Publicly Traded Companies however, rely on ever increasing stock values, because the stocks are bought/sold/traded to earn profits. So people invest when they're low and expect them to go up before they sell, so they can profit. This is why Privately owned companies that are not publicly traded are much better. As all that matters is that they're making a profit. Valve cna make less money one year and everyone would still be happy. Publicly traded all that matters is the value of the stocks going up? They don't' care what way that happens they must go up. If they make less money and stock values go down shareholders will get angry. This is also why publicly traded companies are also obsessed with buying out other companies as well. Increases the value of the company even though they're spending money. It's a lazy way of increasing stock value to make shareholders happy without producing actual products to sell.
@@Web720because those are the ones where you have a CEO who's looking to cash out as soon as it actually starts being profitable. They're basically DESIGNED to get pumped so the CEO can dump.
@@Web720 Public ownership is not a free market concept, so when you force them into something that's supposed to be a free market it messes a lot of things up.
And they earned it, Valve is so much better consumer wise compared to MS, Sony, Nintendo and Epic. Wake up execs, and be more pro-sumer if you want to compete.
Well they can’t be if they want to keep their job. If they don’t maximise shareholder value then they will get sued by their shareholders and lose. You can thank the dodge brothers for that.
@@christiandauz3742as a platform or a dev compagny ? Because as a dev they could increase their output of games given how much money they make from their steam platform. They should also fix their current games (tf2 comes to mind along with others). As a platform, i have only good things to say about them, but nowaday they are barely outputting any game they made themselves. I mean before half-life 3 there was a long time where they werent outputing any game at all. They are barely a dev compagny anymore, aside than the occassionnal valve game, they dont do much game dev nowadays, they became mainly publisher a long time ago. Not saying its bad. Im saying given the amount of money they make they could probably afford to make a few more games.
That doesn't matter if they kill off all competition. The only reason Apple is still around is because Microsoft gave them funding when they were going under to prevent themselves from being called a monopoly.
@@TheStephaneAdam They don't. People just see them as such. Since corporations always see the bigger person as a threat even if that bigger person just doesn't care.
@keeneahnungoldr Believe? This is very important to know/look into. If you're planning on a salary negotiation it pays to know the fundamentals of your company. It puts a ceiling on your expectations and can point you towards jobs with opportunities.
@RillianGrant Yes, believe. No one said that have to pay the same as a Steam, but that they need to pay their employees better. Something they actively avoid doing.
@keeneahnungoldr You're clueless if you think a packaging company is making the same amount of revenue vs COGS as Valve. Valve gets to have VERY LITTLE physical overhead. These server farms are nothing compared to actual manufacturing operations
Because they make bucket loads AND they have the least employed AAA studios. I'm glad they are putting that money to their employees and the company itself rather than just a few people.
Steam does not have a monopoly. There are at least a dozen other platforms for people to buy games digitally. It's just that most people prefer steam over the other options. Meanwhile no one is doing anything about the livenation/ticketmaster monopoly.
Discounting key resellers, there's producer/publisher co-platforms (EA, ubisoft, GOG, etc) but not more than a dozen.. because steam's just the most established and consumer conscious storefront..
If you have more then 50% of the market and you do any anti comptive practices, which is often fairly easy to prove, then your a monopoly. Steam owns closure to 80% of the market by the way.
The Justice Department filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation/Ticketmaster back in May. And the FTC put int a new rule to ban junk fees. So yeah people are going after the ticket monopoly.
I can install a game I bought 20 years ago on a completely different operating system and play it in about 5 minutes whenever I want. Thanks, Gaben. I hope Valve never goes public.
Big thing Tim Sweeny needs to know if he truly wants to compete with Steam is to offer cheaper prices than Steam in general and try to have your store/launcher be at least close to Steam in terms of quality. Why would I buy a game on the Epic Game store for the same price as it is on Steam and have to use a crappier launcher as well, and why do I personally care that studios/publishers get more money?
Also good Ol' Tim's platform is a publishing blackhole. Games that exist on it functionally have extremely limited discoverability. Devs and publishers use steam because it does 90% of a publisher's job and only takes a 30% cut. Most full publishing deals are for cuts SIGNIFICANTLY higher than that and often times with a 100% cut until loses are recouped. Steam does both storefront and publisher better than any of its competition in either field.
yea he pays for a huge exclusive deal only to be like YO GIMME 80 DOLLARS!!! only for steam to eventually get it and be all "hey everyone its $49.99 while on epic its somehow 90 dollars now" you know like what happened to kingdom hearts
In case anyone is interested, the average Valve employee salary in 2021 was as follows: Admin - $4.514.273 Games - $1.062.740 Hardware - $431.862 Steam - $967.678
I feel like working at Microsoft or gaming company (beside Nintendo) pay they employees like 15$ per hour or less plus they don't have joh probably will fire them after 1 or 2 months. Steam and Nintendo are probably the best place to work at
I'm a Linux user and, thanks to steam, now I can just buy a modern game, install it and run it, 9 times out of 10, with no hassle at all. If a game is not on steam, it might as well not exist for me.
less hassle then trying to get a hack working for a modern title to run in say debian. if the game runs in dosbox its even harder without gui ports for dosbox
But they dont want to do thatit woud take alotof time to build trust betwin you and the player on top of building a good store front so other companys just dont do it
Just a reminder, Valve is the only reason you're able to refund games in the PC Gaming space, before that it was perfectly normal to just be stuck with a purchase. Imagine how bad it would be now if valve hadn't set that up.
@@DKTronics70 Has 0 to do with it. They only care about money and they don't have the money or the interest/dedication to do it. Toxicity on forums is incidental.
I got steam when i bought half life 2. After that it took me years to buy another game on steam because i wanted to be sure there were not going to collapse suddenly and lose all my games. Now i have a fair amount of trust in them not to screw me over after having over 14 years of excellent service with almost everything i have seen has had the end users as the focus.
@@DoesNotInhale Well it's not wrong to be cautious and they might of gotten the game a long time ago and only commenting about it now. we dont know when they bought the game.
@@DoesNotInhale I got Steam with Half life 2 and didn't buy another game on it for nearly a decade after... it's not that hard to understand. Also, I can't wait to see the cataclysm that is to come when Gaben finally retires and some new, hotshot corpo douche takes over Valve, makes them publicly traded, and enforces a subscription fee for you to use your Steam library. The way the world has gone... It really feels like it's gonna happen...
@@planescaped Or else it won't, especially if they keep the same corporate philosophy and shares among a certain few....and most privately owned companies keep it this way but a catastrophist like you just wants to see disaster.
The 'funny' thing to me is.. Valve is less of a monopoly now than ever, perhaps; ie: EA store and GOG and such are all doing pretty well existing. Go back 10 years and it was pretty much a lock hold for Valve.
Not really, GoG is bleeding money, and EA store... well tbh idk anything about it. Even blizzard with their own Bnet launcher had to whore out OW2 onto steam in order to save its player numbers.
@@WingTzu343 The EA store is decent at first glance last I looked, but the big thing in my opinion is that why would you want to use a storefront/game launcher of a single publisher that just has their own games? It's a waste of hard drive space if you aren't playing any of those games and it doesn't help that EA has a bad reputation as well. On GoG, no idea on why they are bleeding money. Maybe they are just ran inefficiently. Can't say for sure without looking at their numbers.
Steam provides: Marketing platform, Data Distribution, Regional pricing or restrictions, Community portal (Workshop is basically a big mod and map portal), Automated installation and efficient update handling, sales analytics, reviews, review statistics, in-game item monetization and trading (for any game that would implement it), compatibility tools on linux, library management, and probably a bunch of other things I didn't mention. Other stores have a fraction of that. Not a Monopoly, but a well built platform, unlike some others.
Ha! As someone who has done redactions work in legal cases, I imagine the redactions were not properly burned into the documents totally obliterating the text data.
Correct, apparently this all leaked because somebody figured out that the first version of the PDF just had black boxes drawn over stuff and they could just remove the boxes to see the stuff again, big whoops! 😂
@@suicidalbanananana A tale as old as time. I imagine they cheaped out and didn't have software with the capacity to obliterate text, and just thought they would be able to add black boxes over stuff, print it out and then scan it back in - then ended up forgetting to do so!
@@saladealer Stale meme is stale & not really true anymore. If you actually care, investigate a bit, based on leaks and reports from former employees etc, they do several game projects each year, but then axe them all as "not good enough", but that still means those ppl DO put in a lot of work 🤷♂
A bit of mental play: Supossed that somehow the case goes in Epic's favour (for some highly improbable reason), ok, Steam lowers the 30% to some arbitrary number. Now, since that cut is lower, and Epic has been a garbage store since it's conception, this means that even more devs and people will sell games on Steam due to the lower fee that Valve takes, practically the worst case scenario for Epic since Steam is already THE PC DIGITAL STORE, and lowering the fee would make Steam's abyssmal popularity even larger due to the added benefit of less fees. Are they actually stupid?
The issue is a game on steam cant be cheaper on other platforms making it impossible to compete on price, one of the most basic elements of competition between similar products. you literally did the "are they stupid" meme/joke but unironically. Also i like how you don't give a crap about the devs.
@@AL-lh2htYes it can absolutely be cheaper. It just can’t be cheaper if you’re selling Steam’s stuff, which is a necessary rule to maintain a business model.
@@AL-lh2ht You neglected to mention (or realize?) the key element here, which is that this (only) applies to STEAM KEYS. If you sell a STEAM KEY for your game on some other platform, they want you to charge the same price on that other platform, that is very fair considering you are pretty much screwing them out of their 30% cut of those sales *_while still using the Steam backend for those sales, including future updates, etc_* That 30% is not just free income, they have server/bandwidth costs, tons of custom api's to maintain, etc etc. This channel has a video explaining why he is fine with the 30% cut and you can find videos like that all over youtube, to be blunt (and not trying to be rude) people are just getting tricked by mostly Epic & a few devs with a grudge (or too much greed?) to believe that 30% is a bad deal, because that has been/is a bad deal with other companies, but in the case of Steam it's actually a great deal for what you get in return. 🤷♂ There is no publisher or other kind of third party anywhere that could give me what i can get from Steam for only 30% cut. ----- Working on a semi-serious game project for some time now, haven't released anything yet but Steam already saves me a LOT of time and effort & possibly even a little money too? even in this early stage? i'm MORE than happy to give them their 30% once i get to releasing something, it's a good deal imho, i don't have to really care about things like: - Controller support or VR devices support, i just use the steam api's, they will keep adding controllers and headsets etc - Realistic reverbing/reflecting/etc audio with smart/easy integration in materials etc, i don't wanna do that math, so just use steam audio, which is pretty much even above HL:Alyx quality (depending on how you set it up) & again very little effort to implement - I don't really have to put thought into how most of multiplayer logic actually works, just use another api, i only have to add some basic function calls and slap together some ui for it and it magically does multiplayer with matchmaking etc 😂 That's not even all of it but hopefully this gets the idea across, there's a lot more going on "behind the scenes" that most people don't even realize, all of this gets paid for by said 30% cut, on top of the store (and ads/suggestions), the bandwidth, the updates, the workshop, the discussions, screenshots, etc etc. For a big AAA title with a big publisher and their own platforms & backend & enough people to make everything themselves, sure, 30% is too much, but they don't actually pay that % anyway, they just make some deal, for the rest of us that can (and very often do) use all sorts of these 'launcher features' & helpful/great API's? 30% is a good deal. 🤷♂ If your game goes big the cut goes to 20%, if your game goes really big you get to negotiate a custom cut like the big boys. Sorry that it became a bit of a wall-o-text comment everybody, but just trying to make it clear why most small devs are fine with the 30% 😉👍
I bought the Orange box on PC and forgot about it. Years later (I think 7) I went back after I heard Shadowrun Returns was kick started and on a service called Steam. I logged in and the Orange box was still there waiting for me.
Is the lawsuit trying to say "steam should not have the right to negotiate with the developers for the price of a GAME ON THEIR STORE"? I must be missing something. Reading all the responses indicate this has to do with steam wanting to have the same price as anywhere else, that is NEGOTIATION. A negotiation is not a THREAT! And it has nothing to do with steam keays or not (to me that is 100% obvious why those keys should ONLY be allowed to be sold on steam) I completely get it, imagine this scenario. Company A: "Do you want to sell our cars?" Company B: "sure, but we want to be able to sell them at the same price as anywhere else you sell these cars" And then imagine this scenario: B: "Hey, we notice you are selling the same cars at Company C for 20% less money, it makes it nearly impossible for us to sell the cars, can we lower the price please?" A: Sues Company B for "monopoly"... This is insane right?
Steam does allow devs to sell their keys on other storefronts but they can't lower the price or let the competing storefront lower the price. If the competing storefront using a steam key wants to lower the price, the dev/publisher would have to tell them no, you can't do that because you are selling steam keys to our game.
The other store is taking a smaller cut though, that's why the game can be cheaper, it's entirely on Valve, if you want to match prices, just slash your own cut, but they're steam, so they strong arm the dev, aka being a monopoly. So, not so insane.
Another thing is if you sell a key for cheaper on another store. You must sell the game on sale on steam at some point for that price. So they are allowed too as long as they put it on sale at some point for that price.
Have Valve made any official statement that the price restriction only applies to keys minted on Steam? Have they updated the terms to be more specific? When I read the section, you had to infer from context that the restriction only applied to keys that were made by and would be redeemed on Steam. Reading clauses using plain language interpretation with contextual nuance is not really how contracts work.
Actually, we have steam keys we can sell on other markets without being impacted by the 30% like Humble Bundle or our own site, but we must always report it accordingly as we can only generate so many steam keys ourselves at a time to prevent fraud situations
Yes, because to not officially restrict it to Steam keys, the only price that Steam is legally allowed to dictate, would be illegal. So of course they are going to word that carefully. But is that what they actually do in practice? It appears not...
Green man gaming, humble bundle, and fanatical exist, I don't know how this is true, if these constantly undercut steam, FOR steam keys. Humble bundle is owned by IGN...
Wouldn't surprise me if they wanted to have it included in the deal written confirmation that they're getting the best deal available to anyone. Just like what Amazon demands from sellers. It seems insane but there are many things in law that are just plain ridiculous.
What I don't get, is HOW this is even considered when Amazon's KU is still allowed. Kindle is all but a monopoly in the e-book world, with upwards of 80-% of the market If you want to make any money on Kindle, you need either the backing of a large publisher, or you have to enter KU. If you enter a work in KU, they expressly disallow you to sell that work outside Kindle AT ALL.
So the take away is someone tech bro wants to take PC gaming away from us cause his scam market failed against Steam... We really need that time machine to save Harambe, this timeline is borderline unplayable.
@@Terrados1337 buddy that is billions not going to indies. making projects that instead of breaking even become failures, projects that break even butt don't produce a profit, projects that make profit but not enough for a sequel. who really says devs should get paid less for their work?
i look at it in a different way ... i see a hug (huge huge huge) sucking hole where all of the gaming industry goes down and nothing good as come out of that hole (nothing given back at all in the exchange). just a huge sucking hole. i think life was better 20 years ago (gaming wise)
like how long epic games storefront been around now trying to compete, in like last 5years they have added no features or did anything major to improve their store. all they do is pay for exclusivity deals thinking it will get them users. how about using all that money they spend on exclusives to actually improve the platform so people come in naturally..oh wait that requires skilled programmers which is big no easier to just say valve is big bad monopoly
@@Natrium9775 you think valve makes tens of billions because of its customers supplying content? i think it makes its money from taking a cut of sales from devs.
@@ginxxxxx just like any store does. If anything it's more worth it for devs, because being in steam is essentially putting your product on a billboard.
@@XShadowzVarcolac does amazon have only 70 employees? does amazon pay admins have a million a year? does amazon have margins times thousands vs costs? what you posted is not original, its the same scam 20 years ago. this was done to gamers because gamers, and programmers "have no choice but to have lower expectations - what you going to sell out of your truck to gamers, gamers only respect steam and the huge sucking sound"
Not really. Customer support are off shore based so there'sa lot of them and I never have a problem with valve customer support. They are responsive and very helpful
Gog, Origin, EGS and many more alternatives exist and they are hardly small mom and pop shops. This isn't a monopoly in the slightest and more akin to if General Motors complained that Ford was being mean.
It's not a matter of them being able to afford game development or not, it's a matter of if it's even worth making a sequel that goes beyond its predecessors That's why HL:A took such a long time to release, because the Valve mindset is to treat every game like a tech demo, and HL:A being a staple of what VR games can be is why it was made
Steam doesn't have a monopoly because a Monopoly actively squeezes competition out of the market, steam just offers a service that consumers and game devs prefer. It's the natural logical conclusion of a free and open market consumers will naturally drift to the Superior Service.
The only reason why Windows is popular nowadays is because Microsoft had an aggressive strategy back in the day where they would kill off anything that would even attempt to become popular. Their madness to overtake as many companies as possible and to turn them into shit is still in their blood, as it can be seen with all the gaming studios accusations over the years. Yet, Valve is the bad dog according to some people, who literally do nothing actively to turn them into a monopoly and instead only let the market decide
Windows destroyed all their competition, perfected the OS, and then began stripping away what made it good knowing the only alternatives are awful Macbooks and nerdy Linux.
Judge should request a Steam questionnaire asking Devs if they feel ripped off: Yes/No. Save a lot of time and money. Gabe has cool shit to do. Leave him alone to work.
@@dubc7565Distribution is what that 30% pays for. They get to host their game, lobbies, achievements, and all the other player/game data on Valve’s servers for 0 upfront cost. They can advertise all they want but the actual distribution costs them nearly jack squat.
That would be a very interesting questionnaire. I honestly think @dubc7565 hits the nail on the head, im convinced the majority would say "yes good deal". But it would be cool to know how much actual % feels that way.
@@AL-lh2htfree bandwidth, free servers, free keys, free advertising on the biggest gaming platform. The steam community. All these apply even to free games that valve cannot make a penny on. Yeah sounds like a good deal.
Steam keys are printed by the developers of the game and can be distributed to anyone they want including other market places, Devs do this for a multitude of reasons, increasing player counts and sales mainly. This legal battle will be thrown out without a shadow of a doubt since it's not valves responsibility for what others do with their intellectual property.
In my experience, Steam has done an excellent job of investing their profits back into the video games industry through efforts that push the market forward. For example, with their work on VR in the mid 2010s and more recently their efforts to make Linux into a viable platform for PC gaming. So, I don't mind that Steam is making money hand-over-fist. As long as they're putting that money into good causes that benefit all of us, the result seems well worth it.
Eh, VR was pushed forward more by things like Quest that were affordable for average consumer than their Index line. And they better announce Index 2 soon, old one is, well, old for today standards, but still costs an arm and a leg. Valve used to push video game scene forward in early 2000s, but since HF2 they kinda just remained marketplace thing with occasional title here and there.
@@nihili4196 "valve used to push..." Ahem.... (Deep breath in) Steam controller, drivers for PS4 PS5 Nintendo switch controllers, steam input and steam input API. Steam workshop, community page, guides, game beta and older version support, Stream to friend, Remote play together (you who owns a copy, and a friend that doesn't but allows streaming locally) voice call support, gamepadui and the attempted steamos hardwarebox, proton. Discovery queue, seeing friends wishlist, gifting and custom messages. Profile badges, message stickers game specific icons,Customizable profile pictures that allow user upload, steam vr, valve index. Steamdeck. Investment into kde plasma desktop (the desktop environment the steamdeck uses) Game backup and migration. Yeah. They fell off after HF2
Valve's steamvr definitely didn't do ANYTHING, not like it made a standard for every vr headset to communicate through so people don't have to program for each individual headset for each vr game.
@@alexamderhamiltom5238 A lot of the scrapped projects for Valve games do seem entirely underwhelming in retrospect. I really hope Deadlock ends up being one of them but it seems like they're going full steam ahead with it unfortunately.
The thing is valve is offering so much for devs. They provide all the infrastructure you could need for distributing your game, including world wide payment processing, they offer forums and modding too and all they ask for it is that you don't sell your game cheaper on other platforms. As a dev you can generate any number of steam keys and sell them yourself on your own website or gog or others for the same price as on steam without valve getting any cut at all.
Technically devs still have to develop the framework to allow modding to mesh with steam workshop, so that's down to devs and not a standard with steam. Most serious modders use Nexus over steam workshop also, though the rest of your point is bang on.
If they were so sure about the value of their product, they wouldn't force devs to keep the price the same. The problem is that by forcing the seller to have the same price everywhere , they won't allow the buyer to choose between their solution and their high margin, and a cheaper game on a crappier storefront.
i think one of the interesting games to look at in this is starsector, not sold on steam on its own old website instead, dont even necessarily need to pay for it but still in active development with the solo dev and has a big active community
Their request for the price to be the same isn't unreasonable. Ok that it's from the company who is basically the goliath of pc gaming but the idea per se isn't really unreasonable.
is it? hm so lets say a large food corporation tells farmers that they have to accept the corporations prices and that they arent allowed to sell to anyone else at a higher price... and that corporation can do so, because they are the only viable buyer... does that sound reasonable? just in case you are wondering why i picked that example - if you live in the US... thats why your food prices look that way does it look that bad with steam? no of course not... but its absolutely something that would be in their power to do at the moment its mostly affecting devs, rather than consumers... but thats something that can change over time depending on their intentions
@@SharienGamingkeep in mind steam deals primarily in intellectual property not physical property. And that it costs steam money to run their service and the number of services they provide, they offer bandwidth and servers for free and those are expensive. So it's perfectly reasonable that any product that is on steam cannot be allowed to undercut steam on other stores. And also the hell is your analogy, if you don't like the rules valve puts you under just don't put your game on steam, and you can do whatever you want. Other stores have similar rules, so it's less valve's rules and more industry standard.
@@andrewgreeb916 sorry, but servers and bandwidth are comparatively cheap as hell... that excuse hasnt flown ever like... im willing to bet that a single employee costs them more than their server infrastructure and... dont put your game on steam? sure if you want to fail before you start thats an "option" ... its pretty common knowledge among devs that if you want any chance of success, you HAVE to be on steam - especially as an indie dev and my analogy is an ilustration of effectively the same behaviour by one of the nastier real world monopolies (well technically in that case a monopsony, since they control the supply side rather than the consumer side) and even without a full monopoly - pricefixing is what a cartel does... and a cartel is just a distributed monopoly... so telling a supplier that they are not allowed to negotiate better deals with someone else (or sell directly to customers without the extra fee to the middleman) is massively anti-competitive behaviour
@@SharienGaming So, let your house be used for free while people sell YOUR stuff for lesser than you were actually selling. And plus, none of those profits go to your pocket.
@@SharienGaming that's indeed the problematic part. As I said the idea alone isn't unreasonable. The problem is that it's coming from a Goliath. However we should put on the table that, for example, EA does offer different version of their games on Origin and Steam. As a NFS fan I noticed that the cheapest edition it's available only on Origin and steam is left with the deluxe. That's doesn't really solve the problem, but that's just another piece of the puzzle.
I always like to remember Gabe saying that he wants Valve to be more like Nintendo in that they produce both the software AND the hardware for their games. A major step towards that was the Steam Machines and the Steam Deck. Always nice to see that high of a risk taken and rewarded for the sake of growth
As long as steam remains privately traded it will continue to outperform all these publicly traded companies. Epic wasn't trying to be consumer friendly with the epic games store. They were trying to be developer/producer friendly so that steam would have no products to sell when all the games went to epic where on paper they would make more money. Effectively going around the consumer. If they achieved market capture they would have been able raise prices back up. Everyone loses but epic.
Big thing is that if Epic was more consumer friendly, and did something like mark down the price of AAA titles by $5, then people would've jumped all over the Epic Games store/launcher. If it was decent when it launched on top of that, then it would've easily have forced Steam to act.
@@urazz7739 But Epic is publicly traded, meaning it is all but impossible to prioritize long term goals over quarterly profit. Making the store usable would require a loss of profit, therefore will not happen. Being consumer friendly would also take years to materialize the benefits, so that's a no as well.
@@xraze6906 A simple response to quarterly profits is "get good". No seriously. Valve poured tons of money to get gaming on Linux on par with most windows only games. The only benefits of Linux gaming was making there own console ( Steam Deck ) and being consumer friendly towards a very small minority of there consumers. Those investments are just a drop in the bucket for them, and Valve is still developing new features for Steam ( I heard they were working on a game recording ability ).
@@xraze6906where did you get this information of Epic Games being publicly traded from? Because I have found absolutely nothing of them being a public company, only a private company. I haven’t even found a mention of a IPO from Epic Games either.
Sweeney's perspective shows what Epic gets wrong. If money was the primary issue then both developers and users would flood to Epic. Instead, Epic exclusivity is used as justification for poor sales because the EGS service quickly got a reputation for being a poor service to use.
There is no case here really. You can sell your game on Steam and on your own platform for different prices. Valve is not stopping you from doing that. What they don't like is you selling access to Valve's servers to download and manage a game for a different price, outside of your platform. A good example for that is Giants, who make Farming Simulator. They sell the game on Steam for a price, they sell it on their website for another price (and have deals rather often). A key from their website activates the download from their website but doesn't register on Steam.
Remember when people asked publisher to sell steam keys or put their game on steam for convenience ? I remember back in the days when gamers would put pressure this way on publishers.
Steam doesn't do exclusive deals. That's actually what Epic is doing. If exclusivity deals are what constitutes a monopoly, Epic is far more of one than Steam is. Dumb argument.
and some people actually do not work at valve, they just go fucling around at another company, like brain study ! valve became so rich they doesnt care anymore.
as an avid tf2 fan, the game just got it's update, sure its seasonal but its nice, Eric S. did say its a small update. cs2 is in dire need of more work, a lot more work.
Because they are already stretched as it is? From Steam, SteamOS, SteamVR, Index, Deckard, SteamDeck, CS2, DOTA 2, Source 2, Proton, and legacy support (eg Source 1).
$2,000,000,000 just from commission...I'm assuming that isn't including the marketplace at all either....crates/keys/etc commission...Gabe could buy EA and laughs at Elon.
@@joshallen128For graphics? It's AMD, Intel, and Nvidia at the high end. There's reasons to buy all three. Yes, there's a reason to buy an A750 or A770 over a 4090. AV1 encoding. Intel has the best video encoder on the market for people who produce video.
@@joshallen128 And a bunch of unrealized promises about AI. I look at it like this. The market leaders on actually knowing what the AI software can do are Google and Microsoft. They wrote, funded, and in some way own most of the research. Those two companies. They're the actual experts on the technology. Neither promises anywhere close to what Nvidia does. Nvidia is making money off selling hardware to run the software to do things neither Google or Microsoft thinks the technology can do or they'd be advertising that. Nvidia is getting rich off a market delusion. Same way Tesla did, go look at their financials half a decade later. Wall Street Darling, Main Street Bum.
@@joshallen128 'natural' is incorrect. Nvidia has long maintained market dominance via proprietary tech that does not work on other hardware, and 'sponsoring' (read: Bribing) developers to use that tech instead of the hardware agnostic alternatives. PhysX, Hairworks, Flex, DLSS, RTX, they've been doing it for a VERY long time. There's also been issues in the past with them doing things like pushing devs to use unnecessary and visually indistinguishable amounts of tesselation to abuse the fact that their hardware handles the type of compute needed for tesselation slightly better than AMDs, fudging benchmark numbers in the process.
If they were losing money, while disadvantaging competitors, that is a monopolistic practice. Lose money until your competitor goes bankrupt then raise prices.
Why is this guy trying to paint value the bad guy. Epic gives games out for free, and ppl still choose to buy it from steam. Probably, if other store fronts care more about the consumer, they would see growth too. Cry me a river.
Fantastic report @BellularNews! Thank-you for going out and looking at the what documentation has been revealed, and giving a concise, factual synopsis and analysis of the Valve situation. Honestly I didn't even realise that this was a 22 minute video! 😳 Keep up the great work, you're getting better at this all the time.
If they are talking ONLY Steam keys, Valve wouldn't have a problem. They are at risk being slapped as a monopoly as soon as they pull games over cheaper prices on OTHER platforms with NON Steam keys. For example, a third party reseller selling Steam keys can't be less than on Steam, understandable, but Epic/Ubi/EA store keys aren't related, so Valve doesn't have a legal leg to stand on.
Epic/ubi/ea does the same thing its to provent fraud . So no there is no case there at all . If EA sells there stuff for less on there launcher its up to them but if it is a game soled on steam it cant be soled cheaper then on steam it self .
Steam doesn't have to publish your game. If you are giving Steam a CLEARLY bad deal, they don't have to do business with you. Don't like it? Go to another game store. Make your own game store. Valve is definitely in the right to protect their business.
Thor of Pirate Software is wrong, though. He's been misinforming people. He said that price parity only pertained to Steam keys, which it apparently doesn't. He built his entire argument on that.
not only does it look like that Thors argument goes out the window with how those mails looked. But even if that was a nothing burger. There is no way to argue around Steam being a monopoly for the PC Gaming market. Every other Store is like Linux to Windows, which had and is still facing constant watchfull eyes from all regulators across the world. Which is why Microsoft does so little there and buckled rightaway when the European Union knocked to make their Programs like Edge completely removable from the System. It is an interesting case and we, the consumers, should use any transparancy we get from it and look at the people we voted for to maybe jump in and put a stop to any practice that would make it harder for us consumers to get cheaper prices while using Steam.
@@Sw4lley dude, you think the guvernment gonna interviene to give YOU the consumer cheaper prices while using Steam? LOOOOOL dude wake up, Tim Sweaty only has a 12% cut for his store and before opening he was like: "hur dur, Consumers gonna have cheaper prices" but LOOK AT IT, the prices are the same like everywhere, loool :))))) but you go you thinking guvernment with their ********** IT intelectuals in it will decide upon good laws to not screw you :)))))))
The responses all seem to go back to what is best for the consumer. They keep saying that if the game is being offered cheaper somewhere else that they would like to be able to offer the game at that same cheaper price to their (Steam's) consumer as well, why should Steam customers get the worse deal just because they are steam customers? So technically I can see why someone might say that stance is anti competitive, but the whole competition protection aspect is about protecting consumers, not really so much about protecting other customers. So if that is the case wouldn't this be a anti competitive practice that we would want since it benefits consumers? *I am not saying I agree that this is anti competitive or that it even happens or that that is the stance of Valve, especially since what I'm reading in this video seems to be someone's interpretation and summary of what was said, instead I'm pretending for argument sake that I take it at face value.
Something a lot of people are forgetting is that Epic has given away expensive games for free on there platform. I am sure publishers and developers agreed to this, but if we wanna talk about undercutting competition and price fixing, Epic should be public enemy #1.
The lawsuit: "How dare you treat your customers better, offer a better service that's nearly impossible to match and continue being universally loved while we can barely put our crap on the shelves??"
Steam doesn't have a monopoly, nor have they ever tried to exert one. They simply offer the best service for the most reasonable price. They offer an overwhelming number of tools for indy developers, a sweetheart deal for getting published if you don't have a publisher, they have sales constantly, and MOST of the issues people had with digital services haven't manifested in Steam, yet. They probably will eventually, though.
Nobody is talking about "monopoly"... This is about Steam using anti-competitive business practices to maintain a huge market share domination. 86% last time I heard. The guy in this video is literally talking about court-presented evidence that Steam has been enforcing price parity...
@@PropaneWP Okay, if you don't want the price parity, then you don't get Steam as a service, you are actively choosing THEIR platform to publish and distribute your game. So they dictate the rules of how you as a publisher or developer will engage with their service, if you don't want to abide by their rules then you don't get access to the service, a service which might I include has: The ability for you to put out patches on the fly with Steamworks, the ability to be marketed and discovered by millions of users, the ability to have forums, news, artwork, mods, administration tools, dedicated servers, reviews (oh this is a fucking big one that an incredible amount of shit storefronts miss out on), the list goes on. Which ties into our next little tidbit! It's not illegal for Valve to tell publishers that if they want to sell their game on Steam that they cannot give the users on Steam a worse deal than other platforms. That's not price fixing, that's just being fair to your own customers, reducing the price on other platforms just to screw over another one is just being an asshole. If you want Steam to lose this, you can enjoy your $20 price hike on all games while the rest of us with some actual intelligence pirate everything under the sun because no game will ever be worth $100+.
@@PropaneWP Half of the people in this comment section are talking exactly about "monopoly", it dominates the conversation. Nobody is being forced to be on Steam, they can go anywhere else that they want to, they want to be on Steam because they know it is more valuable for them to be there and they want Steam to provide them that benefit at no additional cost compared to other distributors. They literally want to have their cake and also eat it. Steam is apparently supposed to just be fine with doing all of the heavy lifting as far as discoverability, key-hosting, community goes while the publishers/devs drive downloads to other platforms where Steam doesn't benefit from their own hard work? Bull. You know what the saddest part is going to be? Let's say Steam actually loses this, pays a giant penalty and has to change policies. You know what's NOT going to happen? Price-parity revision. Steam is just going to adopt a standard platform-exclusivity for new releases, just like the big console brands do, just like Epic keeps trying to do. Want to release on Steam? Cool, but nowhere else. That is what's going to happen if they lose and, for what should be obvious reasons to everybody, that's bad for the industry.
@@Ichthyodactyl I have yet to see anyone talk about "monopoly" in this comment section, except those bringing it up to deny it. Nobody with common knowledge of the game industry would say "nobody's being forced to be on Steam". For the average developer, it's not an option to forfeit 86% of the PC game market. Don't be silly.
@@PropaneWP Yeah but how did Steam even get to the point where they have so much control over the PC game market? They got there by simply providing a solid service all-round. It's not perfect but out of all the options you have they are just the best. They don't even really do anything while the competition just keeps shooting themselves in the foot. Like Epic constantly getting exclusivity deals, which btw are really anti-competition practices, and people see that and are just like "yeah that's bs I'll just wait a year til it's on steam" and Epic's imgae kept deteriorating as a direct consequence of these exclusivity deals which nobody liked. Valve don't do anything and win because they provide a solid service. YOu can't argue with that and forcing a market to be shared relatively equally among a bunch of competitors is just a terrible idea.
There is a thing in Monopoly law that says you can't undercut your fellow distributors at a loss to eliminate the competition Basically stating 2 gas stations one can't undercut the other by law. However gaming is completely different than selling gas it's more like art
This. People keep trying to make this issue exclusively about discoverability, which IS a huge part of what Steam offers to be fair, but the entire platform has features nobody else is even trying to implement. User reviews, forums, curator groups, events, meta-collectibles with included marketplace, profile customization. Even Achievements are a thing that a lot of other platforms aren't even willing to implement. Steam is the GOAT for a reason, it is a premium platform and that's the entire reason that devs will continue to release on there, even if they don't like the cut, they know they are making more on Steam with the 30% cut than they would if they weren't on Steam at all.
I like steam, but most users don't give a dam about the shoehorned social media aspect. Having a friends list chat function is standard, having a forum for a game would be at the dev site if not hosted on steam (It's self moderated anyway and i feel steam does need more staff to he involved more in this...). And profile stuff? Maybe it's communities in the games i play, but almost everyone has profiles set to private... steam points buying useless anime trash to adorn my profile is such a dissapointment when i learned that's all it would buy... Not even like a customer reward scheme to have money off of games. They have me as a customer because they got there amongst the first that offered other devs games i had interest in too and i much prefer having one platform rather than logging into 20 forgetting passwords etc. They have relatively stable servers, i know when sales occur or I'd probably miss them with a host of random platforms (more a benefit to steam, not me). I've never once had a steam recommendation for a product i wanted, got 100 games and tried to s3t up detailed likes etc but it's always been me needing to dig and fighting being recommended the same trash. I love that they run lean and have a more flat hierarchy, however they clearly actually need more staff to have better oversight and tech support on a game by game basis. They need better consumer protection surrounding early access devs taking the piss and scams, they simply do not want to get more involved in that as it's more cost and risk... Understandable, but that's not going above and beyond for consumer protection. The trial is a joke, Epic are clowns and it is understandable steam wants to be able to sell their game as cheap on steam as it's offered elsewhere. That's not price fixing or a monopoly, it's literally the opposite... They wan5 to be able to compete if they are also expected to promote and support the game. That said, saying steam doea this for the good of the customer is straight up shill cope in the opposite direction. Steam does it for steam.
@@evulclown I regularly use steam social integrations to join my friends. Profiles being set to private is more likely the result of your social choices and the games you play.
Imma be honest, without Steam I would have definitely pirated 90% of the games I already owned on Steam It's too convenient and user friendly to not use And with those kinds of sale, it's basically free games
I have personally bought so many small indie games because Valve reaches out to me and says "Hey, we notice you play these games a ton, and this dev is making something similar and it's on sale. Want it at a discount?" I refuse to buy games on other launchers, even if they are cheaper :-P
Lets apply a little bit of critical thinking everyone. Valve is not a publicly traded shithole like Epic Games is or EA, they're private. If you wish to sell your game on our platform, our users must not be getting a worse deal than others, otherwise, we will not sell your game. It is a simple, Valve wants what is best for their consumers, which is... You guessed it! Fair prices on their platform, and what's that? Oh, oh my. Valve can tell you that they won't sell your game on their platform because you want to screw over their customers by forcing them to another platform? That's crazy, almost like Valve is actually looking out for you in some regards because you're one of their paying customers, while publicly traded companies aren't your friend, private companies certainly can be.
Private companies are rarely your friend either, but certainly higher than the 0% for public. Valve, at least as long as Gabe is here, appears to remain on the customer's side.
Ikea is a private company and never went public. Back when it started to pop off, other companies, often public companies were pissed at Ikea and tried so many tactics to ruin Ikea as a business. Why? Because their model were superior, they had the best customer service and they stole customers in droves, and only the owner Kamprad had a say in the company. No shareholders who only want a quick buck. It would seem that private companies are in the long run much better than public ones, for the customers that is.
Nice presentation. Cheers. Also, thank you so much for having quiet music in the background with very quiet intro and more importantly outro. Much appreciated.
If a game is sold on a store shelf, what % of the retail price goes to the store, shipping, packaging, and production of the physical item? I would think at least 30%
Pirate software has said that steam only takes 30% of sales on steam and that developers could sell steam keys on other sites, as long as it isn't cheaper than the current steam price and steam gets nothing. In fact they foot the bill for bandwidth among others things. The truth is steam and has engendered an entire generation of gamers with an unprecedented amount of consumer goodwill. Valve is the greatest company ever made in the history of mankind, period.
When you said "we're not all playing on our steam controllers", I was legit just playing euro truck simulator 2 on steam using a steam controller, did the side eye a bit lol
Everyone is so afraid of criticizing Valve that even after revealing that they make twice as much profit than other major corporations you can still immediately launch into a 5-minute lecture about how they are providing an amazing service and people like Tim Sweeney clearly aren't thinking about how much it really costs them to run. Wild.
Tim will never be taken seriously. he speaks against anti-competitive practices after causing the Epic-Exclusive chaos that we had years ago. even now I have not been able to play Alan Wake 2 because of his bullshit and may as well be foced to pirate the game soon unless we get a steam-release anouncement soon.
Honestly, this is a flex by Valve. They just exposed that they pay all their employees at least half a mil a year. And yet they're always winning, keeping up so many servers, have amazing customer service, and more. They just exposed that every single corporation cheaps out, even the best ones that still are worth even giving something every so often.
Steam is a funny thing. They are much better for consumers than other companies and deserve success but the amount of money they’re making for their labour really suggests they’ve got an exploitative position in the market. Which is unfortunately common for transaction brokers in large markets.
@@Gr8humanilation9TV idk, a 30% cut doesnt seem greedy at all, thats the rate for google, epic games, ea, ubisoft, apple app store. I dont see how this is nickel and diming them. at all
@@Gr8humanilation9TV 30% in exchange for developing games technology and more importantly, putting the game on a store that over a hundred million people use is worth it.
@@chrisrutschman7261 Well yeah, they do exactly the same thing, nickel-and-diming developers, well except epic games because they don't take 30% cut. Sure steam is great service but in my opinion, "pricing" should be based on expenses and revenue.
They dont exploit anybody they just work more efficient thats all . How tf do you punish anybody for beeing more efficent thats brain dead . Labour also means nothing hours worked means nothing if you get more work done at the same amount of hours with less amount of peopl then you shoud make more money thats not exploitative thats just better managment . Its as if i woud punish you for doing more work in less time by paying you the same amount of money then the guy that does less stupid way of thinking
As a steam developer you can sell steam keys on your own website or another site at the same price as steam but you won't be required to give 30% to steam, you keep all of it
I don't need "amazing service" with every game I buy. For example, when I buy games on GOG, my experience is not that much different from buying on Steam. If there was a platform with less "amazing service" that could sell their games for cheaper - I would use it. However, if Steam is interfering and demanding price parity, that's not going to happen.
As to reply to your comment, after replying to your comment. Then the developers don't have to sell on Steam, that's a pretty simple idea, but to get something like that past the likes of someone like you, seems to be pretty hard.
Let's not pretend game publishers would magically lower the price just because it's not on Steam. They had those prices long before they went through Steam, they aren't going to lower them now!
Just for.. clarity, If you go to epic games and buy borderlands 3 base.. It's the same price as borderlands 3 base on steam.. Why aren't the developers or the storefront selling it for less? They get a bigger cut right? Why isn't it less than steam? It doesn't affect steam, steams rules apply parity to steam keys from a developer.. Like releasing a game on steam, requesting say 500 keys, then selling them on G2A.. kinguin.. for lower prices than steam.. but more than you would gain, while steam foots the bill(Data usage/storage costs) on your game?
@ThatWhichObserves steam already would pay those costs anyway. Also i got bl3 free on epic AND i regularly see it on sale for cheaper than steam sales
@@Jan12700 Of course the most heinous problems with monopolies, are allowed for companies that "work with" (were started with seed funding by) the intelligence apparatus. Amazon is destroying the fabric of our country by homogenizing everything and obliterating competition.
That lawsuit is taking the exact direction I predicted that it would. that "even though the % cut and price parity only technically apply to steam keys, that that clause is being used to pressure/force devs into keeping price parity regardless of if they use steam keys or not". I feel the number of people that had to have it explained to them that the price parity only applies to steam keys is proof enough to show the lack of understanding, how this could have gotten out of hand & how it needs a deeper look (aka the trial). I appreciate valve as much as the next person, but companies are not your friends.
Yeah, it doesn't matter what any company does, whether they're anti-consumer, pro-consumer, public or private... the end goal of every single company is to earn a profit. It all comes down to that moolah.
I fail to understand how everyone misinterpreting Valve's clear statements are Valve's fault... If we can't get out of an agreement by claiming to not understand, why should corporations get to?
OH NOOO, a COMPANY IS MAKING MONEY, AND PASSED THAT on to the customer instead of hiking the price of games through the roof!!!!!!!!!!! Maybe they should make everything 100 dollars, charge a battle pass fee to access basic content, and nickel you into submission. "how they compare to massive", bro... They are massive. Your wording makes it sound like you think Steam was some low-budget tiny platform that no one used. Steam is the freaking staple in how an e-shop should be. Everyone else needs to take notes. Nintendo, Microsoft, EA, COG, and Epic, all have trash clients and honestly, it's shameful.
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Michael: "Python is absolutely a foundational language to know" ... Well, yes BUT only if you have no OO background.
Python is to OO programming as BASIC is/was procedural programming.
Then you put the big-boy pants on and use a proper programming language!
15:30 I wonder: are there numbers as to how many people inside Valve work for & how much money is spend by Valve for HR & legal work?
ngl "seventy NINE motherfuckers!" caught me so off guard I laughed weird and fucked my throat up somehow
Tim Sweeney is way more the bad guy than Valve.
Valve's shop realy delivers real actual added value!
I bought games twice just to have them on Steam and use Steam invite.
Steam is made realy well!
Tim Sweeneys Epic gamestore sucks! Same with EA App.
I think it's ridiculous that a competitor of valve with it's own epicstore is angry that Valve prices it's service expensively...Aren't expensive competitor a chance?
The best way to destroy Valve , would be to pitch them to go public...and work from quarter to quarter...
Regardless of steams, it's now better to use an interface. This is a monopoly. Saying to a developer that you can't sell for less is literally what big corporations do to squash competition.
You enjoy paying 100$+ for a new game... that's bollocks, get the same game for less with a gog or humble or epic .
It's obvious it's bollocks when some of these games go down to 25% with random specials. (the special prices are closer to what you would have to pay if we had competition)
Competition is good for the consumer,
I rarely directly buy from steam as they are rip offs.
The reason Valve staff can be so efficient is likely that theyre veterans who know what theyre doing. I work in software dev. We are inefficienct. Why? Layoffs and departures. People come in, look at codebase, have no idea what theyre even looking at, spend months trying to get to know it, get laid off, repeat. Meanwhile someone who knows the codebase can get things done in a few hours instead of a few days or weeks. I also love it when someone asks questions about how a thing works and the only guy who knew was laid off. Thats how you achieve negative efficiency.
yeah I had the same experience. When I finally understood the codebase and was able to add complex features with confidence, the project was put on hold due to budget constraints. This was my half-year long endeavor in software development and so I decided I would never return to this kind of job ever.
Valve is what Apple, Microsoft, and all other big tech sold themselves as decades ago when IT degrees were still a hot commodity. Imagine a PRIVATE company that doesnt bow to shareholders, your Big Boss is a Big Boss who isnt an evil F. It would be like a dream job these days, a company that doesn't f you and just wants you to work while paying you somewhat fairly as opposed to the revolving door nonsense we see everywhere.
Companies continue to underestimate the worth of their tech workers
My father is one of the last people who understands legacy systems at his work, systems they can’t replace, yet the way they work his ass and treat him you wouldn’t think he’d be in possession of such integral info to the function of their sites, skill is one thing that a good employee must have but for any job where programming is needed it seems like seniority is also important as old tech needs understanding
It's not just tech. It's almost every industry. VC firms ruined all trades
This is very true. When i was a technical person, all of our stuff that I was in charge of ran smoothly. Then I left, they never replaced me thinking it wasn't needed. Last i heard from a friend who still works there, everything went on fire. They they spent millions to try and replace the systems because no one wanted to learn it. Then the replacement failed badly it doesnt even cover half what the old systems used to do 😂
The real problem with steam is that as soon as Gabe is gone it will go to shit
This.
one can only hope but someone with this style of leadership wont promote some rat to lead his legacy
also, its not realy one man company anymore
It’s going to his son, who has expressed similar values as his dad. That’s not a guarantee nothing will change, but it’s hope that the legacy will continue.
No what has he done? He hasn't done anything genius(You win gaben fans hes great)
that is sad but true
What the Staff cost shows is that even the "lower paid" people get about $500k/year. That's pretty damn good.
Becouse they only have good peopl to begin with so they get payed what they are worth .
Yea, steam seems to hire experienced senior staff mostly
I wonder what role that is
@@rundown132 Hardware engineer is Steam's lowest paid role
So you telling me having few experienced people and pay them well is better than what the rest of the gaming industry does in letting go all the experienced staff and hiring new one instead of paying the people who know what they do more? Who would have known? Btw this is sarcastic it’s just disgusting to see how the gaming industry in most cases treats their employees
EA : best we can do is an unpaid internship and a sick break room.
Steam : How about a million a year?
Almost need to reverse them, might be more poetic
@@ThatWhichObservesit wouldn't be poetic or accurate.
@@JimBimBum I assume you don't actually understand what I meant.. I meant EA being below steam, where it sounds like EA is countering the steam offer.. instead of steam offering... after a 'best we can do' statement.
It boils down to
Steam: 5 million
EA: best we can do, unpaid internship
@@ThatWhichObservescome again ?
It's not that hard to understand. He's saying you should reverse the statements for more comedic effect
Steam: We'll pay a million a year.
EA: Best we can do is an unpaid internship and a sick break room.
I'm from an developing country, and up until a good chunk of the 00s legitimately buying computer games was virtually unheard of here because no one could afford it. Quite literally everyone just played pirated games. Most people would get their games for cheap from shady vendors who distributed pirated copies of games, and they basically had no guarantee they weren't installing malware in their computer. Valve pretty much put us on the map as a market with regional pricing, and I'll always be grateful.
Yep, where others blamed consumers, Gabe saw not a lack, but complete absence of any service and brought it.
Great post, thanks!
@@Blackwing2345635”the best way to counter piracy is to make the service more appealing.” - gabe.
Where am from its still the case because we don't have online international payment. so if we want to go legit we are forced to buy overpriced steam gift cards from people who have connections to buy them. so basically everyone pirates games. Piracy is always a problem of availability not people being thieves.
@@Blackwing2345635 Don't forget that in the late 90's and early 2000's it started getting harder and harder to even get PC games as most brick-and-mortar retailers started pulling them from shelves in lieu of console games. Valve almost single handedly saved PC gaming by pioneering digital distribution.
What causes me to laugh, is If Valve eased off their revenue cut to the lowest they could tolerate, then THAT would truly be monopolistic behavior as no one else could compete with how efficient they are.
Sites like GMG and Fanatical rely on competing with Steam on prices by giving buyers a discount taken out of their store cut. GMG, for example, takes a 30% cut from keys they sell while often giving buyers up to 15% off new games, which leaves them with a 15% profit and publishers keep 70% of the sale. If Valve lowered their commission rate, GMG would no longer be able to compete in price and buyers would lose all incentives from buying on there when Steam has a better refund policy. Publishers also would then lose any incentive of providing GMG with keys to sell.
@@Moskeetoso in any case, Steam wins basically
No, this is how Valve would create a monopoly. But there is no need, they already control the market.
@@WayTooAwesome That sounds exactly like winning.
its almost like their trying to punish steam for being good while rewarding lack luster crap like Ubisoft's store and EA's store. like yeah you can go to any other store but you wont make meaningful cash... like yeah because no one else has built a store as well as steam has. i hope in discover and in maybe 5 clicks i will find a game that grabs my interest. but hey lets punish steam for being pro consumer and putting effort into their products.
If you haven’t looked at Valves internal organization you should. It’s one of the few “flat” companies. There is no hierarchy. No bosses. Everyone just contributes to the projects where they can make the most impact. Who sets those projects? Well if you have an idea and can build a team (take resources from other projects) it gets worked on. This helps explain why Valve is so unpredictable but also runs incredibly lean. No bureaucratic bloat.
apparently from what i've heard, they're trying not to be as flat; as it can cause its own issues
No shareholders does wonders for business.
That's why their games are barely maintained and everything they released in the last decade have been flops lmao
maybe VALVe as a game developer (though ever since HL:A they've said they're changing), not Steam. They're basically two sides of the coin, I wouldn't be surprised there are levels of responsibility, just not in the same way as the corporations we're used to
@@valmiro4164 everything multiplayer* you mean
Is nobody going to acknowledge that steam is paying their average employees around a million dollars a year, with the lowest paid average team being Hardware at around 500k per employee?
We know how much Epic is paying their people?
@@Solkard They are paying them? I joke, but I doubt it's in the 6 figures, gota pay the CEO's yearly bonus after all!
Undeserved. Their customer service gives copy paste responses and are generally unhelpful.
Average isn't an important number. The pay could all be at the management level. I bet plenty of employees see these numbers and feel cheated. Imagine your boss makes 10 million a year and you make 50k. Probably not a fair assumption at steam, but it's possible.
@@Vonderboywhere are you getting this 50k number from and more importantly why would it matter? The person making 50k would be an outlier in the greater scheme of things.
Just remember:
Valve does NOT set the prices. They just take 30% of the price the Developer/Publisher sets.
@@MaxIronsThird What the emails say is "you give us the same price as other places or we aren't doing business".
@@youtubeisovertlyantisemiti3247 well to me it looked like the email said "if you price it on steam higher than another site we aren't doing business, so make the price the same"
@@youtubeisovertlyantisemiti3247 Microsoft and Sony does the exact same thing
@@MaxIronsThirdNo they don't
@@MaxIronsThird Ok i will use your house as a storage unit for FREE. While paying another storage unit. I see you agree that it is fair so please give me your address so i can move merchandise
As a linux user I am very grateful for the money Valve put into proton.
Without this situation, my gaming experience would most likely not be possible on linux and I would still be forced to keep a windows installation.
Wild considering once upon a time ID and Epic would do native binaries before they abandoned those thoughts , Remote Play and Proton don't really get enough love all things considered .
this is the only reason I play games at all, they are literally opening markets.
and sure we are not many people, but still opening markets that can grow in the future is worth that 30% easy.
lol I love people like you, its like you want to use linux but gaming is more important so you use windows too?
LOL gaming on linux was possible before proton, proton just made it easier for idiots who dont know how to use a compiler.
@trixer230
Do you have friends and family?
How many of them are, by your own definition, idiots?
There's more to life than computers.
The idea that everyone should be proeficient in your particular field of expertise, and that anyone who isn't is an "idiot" is incredibly narrowminded.
@@majorgnu Not only that, what he is claiming is completely untrue.
Proton IS the compatibility layer that TRANSLATES the calls to the gpu, like between vulcan and directX.
Private Ownership in a nutshell. Best companies often end up being private business. Instead of those large Publicly Traded Corporations.
Funny how all the big tech megacorps are publicly-traded and shit.
@@Web720 Normally a privately owned company owners, even if shared to an extent ie say more than one family owns it, get a share in the profits.
Publicly Traded Companies however, rely on ever increasing stock values, because the stocks are bought/sold/traded to earn profits. So people invest when they're low and expect them to go up before they sell, so they can profit.
This is why Privately owned companies that are not publicly traded are much better. As all that matters is that they're making a profit. Valve cna make less money one year and everyone would still be happy.
Publicly traded all that matters is the value of the stocks going up? They don't' care what way that happens they must go up. If they make less money and stock values go down shareholders will get angry.
This is also why publicly traded companies are also obsessed with buying out other companies as well. Increases the value of the company even though they're spending money. It's a lazy way of increasing stock value to make shareholders happy without producing actual products to sell.
@@Web720 Big =/= Good
@@Web720because those are the ones where you have a CEO who's looking to cash out as soon as it actually starts being profitable. They're basically DESIGNED to get pumped so the CEO can dump.
@@Web720 Public ownership is not a free market concept, so when you force them into something that's supposed to be a free market it messes a lot of things up.
And they earned it, Valve is so much better consumer wise compared to MS, Sony, Nintendo and Epic. Wake up execs, and be more pro-sumer if you want to compete.
the problem is going public. when you let investors have any say in your company you doom said company to inevitable faliure
Well they can’t be if they want to keep their job. If they don’t maximise shareholder value then they will get sued by their shareholders and lose.
You can thank the dodge brothers for that.
Aside from Half Life 3 what other negatives does Valve have?
@@christiandauz3742as a platform or a dev compagny ? Because as a dev they could increase their output of games given how much money they make from their steam platform. They should also fix their current games (tf2 comes to mind along with others). As a platform, i have only good things to say about them, but nowaday they are barely outputting any game they made themselves. I mean before half-life 3 there was a long time where they werent outputing any game at all. They are barely a dev compagny anymore, aside than the occassionnal valve game, they dont do much game dev nowadays, they became mainly publisher a long time ago. Not saying its bad. Im saying given the amount of money they make they could probably afford to make a few more games.
@@CBonduMiel
Both
Steam doesn't really have a monopoly, they're just the best service, so people use it.
It's not like Valve's really leveraging their market dominance either.
That doesn't matter if they kill off all competition. The only reason Apple is still around is because Microsoft gave them funding when they were going under to prevent themselves from being called a monopoly.
REAL!
That's literally been the argument since Sweeny started the whole paid exclusivity thing.
@@TheStephaneAdam They don't. People just see them as such. Since corporations always see the bigger person as a threat even if that bigger person just doesn't care.
Damn Valve cant be the only US company that actually pays its staff well, Can it?
Well? You've got very high standards. The vast majority of companies don't make enough to justify a fraction of these salaries.
@keeneahnungoldr Believe? This is very important to know/look into. If you're planning on a salary negotiation it pays to know the fundamentals of your company. It puts a ceiling on your expectations and can point you towards jobs with opportunities.
@RillianGrant Yes, believe. No one said that have to pay the same as a Steam, but that they need to pay their employees better. Something they actively avoid doing.
@keeneahnungoldr You're clueless if you think a packaging company is making the same amount of revenue vs COGS as Valve. Valve gets to have VERY LITTLE physical overhead. These server farms are nothing compared to actual manufacturing operations
Because they make bucket loads AND they have the least employed AAA studios. I'm glad they are putting that money to their employees and the company itself rather than just a few people.
Steam does not have a monopoly. There are at least a dozen other platforms for people to buy games digitally. It's just that most people prefer steam over the other options. Meanwhile no one is doing anything about the livenation/ticketmaster monopoly.
That's because Valve/Steam are not paying off politicians and judges behind the scenes.
Discounting key resellers, there's producer/publisher co-platforms (EA, ubisoft, GOG, etc) but not more than a dozen.. because steam's just the most established and consumer conscious storefront..
If you have more then 50% of the market and you do any anti comptive practices, which is often fairly easy to prove, then your a monopoly.
Steam owns closure to 80% of the market by the way.
The Justice Department filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation/Ticketmaster back in May. And the FTC put int a new rule to ban junk fees.
So yeah people are going after the ticket monopoly.
@musclestruts5032 ha! There have been laws in place against junk fees for decades and businesses still get away with charging them.
I can install a game I bought 20 years ago on a completely different operating system and play it in about 5 minutes whenever I want. Thanks, Gaben. I hope Valve never goes public.
@@Jan12700 *if they were to go public*
Pretty sure Gaben personally would rather let Valve die than it to go public
@@marcely1199 based gabe
Big thing Tim Sweeny needs to know if he truly wants to compete with Steam is to offer cheaper prices than Steam in general and try to have your store/launcher be at least close to Steam in terms of quality. Why would I buy a game on the Epic Game store for the same price as it is on Steam and have to use a crappier launcher as well, and why do I personally care that studios/publishers get more money?
Steam tos doesn't let you have lower prices on other platforms.
Tim Sweeny doesnt want that he wants to be the monopoly with 0 work put in . Epic is the most unuser friendly store ever .
Also good Ol' Tim's platform is a publishing blackhole. Games that exist on it functionally have extremely limited discoverability. Devs and publishers use steam because it does 90% of a publisher's job and only takes a 30% cut. Most full publishing deals are for cuts SIGNIFICANTLY higher than that and often times with a 100% cut until loses are recouped. Steam does both storefront and publisher better than any of its competition in either field.
yea he pays for a huge exclusive deal only to be like YO GIMME 80 DOLLARS!!! only for steam to eventually get it and be all "hey everyone its $49.99 while on epic its somehow 90 dollars now" you know like what happened to kingdom hearts
@@jeromeace1282 It sure does, you just can't use their platform to do it.
In case anyone is interested, the average Valve employee salary in 2021 was as follows:
Admin - $4.514.273
Games - $1.062.740
Hardware - $431.862
Steam - $967.678
Honestly seems reasonable for how low their employee count is and their profit levels. Something to be envious of being apart of for sure.
I feel like working at Microsoft or gaming company (beside Nintendo) pay they employees like 15$ per hour or less plus they don't have joh probably will fire them after 1 or 2 months. Steam and Nintendo are probably the best place to work at
@@alexjackyperson101 It's actually ~30 bucks for entry level, from what I can tell
This is what we call a family.
all that and then they make Deadlock...
I'm a Linux user and, thanks to steam, now I can just buy a modern game, install it and run it, 9 times out of 10, with no hassle at all. If a game is not on steam, it might as well not exist for me.
less hassle then trying to get a hack working for a modern title to run in say debian. if the game runs in dosbox its even harder without gui ports for dosbox
Have you ever tried not using Steam? I'm a Linux user and I buy games on GOG all the time. They run just fine with Wine.
@@PropaneWP I did sometimes with mixed results. Often times, they were more hassle than I cared for the game.
@@PropaneWP i wish you could extract the game as if the exe was a big 7z file
Wrong, you can rent a game. You own nothing that is "purchased" on Steam
If the other game service platforms got their shit together and got up on Steams level, maybe they would have some more success.
But that's expensive and you must think of the share holders.
But they dont want to do thatit woud take alotof time to build trust betwin you and the player on top of building a good store front so other companys just dont do it
Most of the other platforms look at Steam Forums, and Reviews, and see the utter toxicity that resides in them, and think - We don't want any of that.
Just a reminder, Valve is the only reason you're able to refund games in the PC Gaming space, before that it was perfectly normal to just be stuck with a purchase. Imagine how bad it would be now if valve hadn't set that up.
@@DKTronics70 Has 0 to do with it. They only care about money and they don't have the money or the interest/dedication to do it. Toxicity on forums is incidental.
I got steam when i bought half life 2. After that it took me years to buy another game on steam because i wanted to be sure there were not going to collapse suddenly and lose all my games. Now i have a fair amount of trust in them not to screw me over after having over 14 years of excellent service with almost everything i have seen has had the end users as the focus.
Steam has been around for 21 years. Are you ok?
@@DoesNotInhale Need to brush up on your reading comprehension, they've been using Steam for 14 years.
@@DoesNotInhale Well it's not wrong to be cautious and they might of gotten the game a long time ago and only commenting about it now. we dont know when they bought the game.
@@DoesNotInhale I got Steam with Half life 2 and didn't buy another game on it for nearly a decade after... it's not that hard to understand.
Also, I can't wait to see the cataclysm that is to come when Gaben finally retires and some new, hotshot corpo douche takes over Valve, makes them publicly traded, and enforces a subscription fee for you to use your Steam library.
The way the world has gone... It really feels like it's gonna happen...
@@planescaped Or else it won't, especially if they keep the same corporate philosophy and shares among a certain few....and most privately owned companies keep it this way but a catastrophist like you just wants to see disaster.
The 'funny' thing to me is.. Valve is less of a monopoly now than ever, perhaps; ie: EA store and GOG and such are all doing pretty well existing. Go back 10 years and it was pretty much a lock hold for Valve.
Not really, GoG is bleeding money, and EA store... well tbh idk anything about it. Even blizzard with their own Bnet launcher had to whore out OW2 onto steam in order to save its player numbers.
@@WingTzu343GOG is bleeding money due to a combination of lack of marketing and sounding too good to be true, EA isn't viable because it's EA.
@@WingTzu343 why is GOG bleeding money?
@@WingTzu343 The EA store is decent at first glance last I looked, but the big thing in my opinion is that why would you want to use a storefront/game launcher of a single publisher that just has their own games? It's a waste of hard drive space if you aren't playing any of those games and it doesn't help that EA has a bad reputation as well. On GoG, no idea on why they are bleeding money. Maybe they are just ran inefficiently. Can't say for sure without looking at their numbers.
@@admiralkaede yeah im new to hearing about that too.
Steam provides: Marketing platform, Data Distribution, Regional pricing or restrictions, Community portal (Workshop is basically a big mod and map portal), Automated installation and efficient update handling, sales analytics, reviews, review statistics, in-game item monetization and trading (for any game that would implement it), compatibility tools on linux, library management, and probably a bunch of other things I didn't mention.
Other stores have a fraction of that. Not a Monopoly, but a well built platform, unlike some others.
Ha! As someone who has done redactions work in legal cases, I imagine the redactions were not properly burned into the documents totally obliterating the text data.
Correct, apparently this all leaked because somebody figured out that the first version of the PDF just had black boxes drawn over stuff and they could just remove the boxes to see the stuff again, big whoops! 😂
@@suicidalbanananana Very old loophole.
@@suicidalbanananana A tale as old as time. I imagine they cheaped out and didn't have software with the capacity to obliterate text, and just thought they would be able to add black boxes over stuff, print it out and then scan it back in - then ended up forgetting to do so!
@@brodriguez11000 I've seen government redacted documents done in the same manner. The incompetence is hilariously terrifying.
If steam was a monopoly, I wouldn't have to have six different goddamn launchers on my computer 😂
Bars
Facts!
The “games staff” are paid 1 million+ a year, holy shit
well makes sense given they make billions a year and only have a few hundred total employees
and they dont make any games
@@saladealer Stale meme is stale & not really true anymore.
If you actually care, investigate a bit, based on leaks and reports from former employees etc, they do several game projects each year, but then axe them all as "not good enough", but that still means those ppl DO put in a lot of work 🤷♂
@@suicidalbanananana too long, didn't read
@@suicidalbanananana meds
A bit of mental play:
Supossed that somehow the case goes in Epic's favour (for some highly improbable reason), ok, Steam lowers the 30% to some arbitrary number. Now, since that cut is lower, and Epic has been a garbage store since it's conception, this means that even more devs and people will sell games on Steam due to the lower fee that Valve takes, practically the worst case scenario for Epic since Steam is already THE PC DIGITAL STORE, and lowering the fee would make Steam's abyssmal popularity even larger due to the added benefit of less fees.
Are they actually stupid?
given how shallow Sweeney's analysis on Steam revenues seem to be, maybe yes
@@avgchoobafan This isn't Epic suing them though. It's Wolfire, a small indie developer.
The issue is a game on steam cant be cheaper on other platforms making it impossible to compete on price, one of the most basic elements of competition between similar products.
you literally did the "are they stupid" meme/joke but unironically.
Also i like how you don't give a crap about the devs.
@@AL-lh2htYes it can absolutely be cheaper. It just can’t be cheaper if you’re selling Steam’s stuff, which is a necessary rule to maintain a business model.
@@AL-lh2ht You neglected to mention (or realize?) the key element here, which is that this (only) applies to STEAM KEYS.
If you sell a STEAM KEY for your game on some other platform, they want you to charge the same price on that other platform, that is very fair considering you are pretty much screwing them out of their 30% cut of those sales *_while still using the Steam backend for those sales, including future updates, etc_* That 30% is not just free income, they have server/bandwidth costs, tons of custom api's to maintain, etc etc.
This channel has a video explaining why he is fine with the 30% cut and you can find videos like that all over youtube, to be blunt (and not trying to be rude) people are just getting tricked by mostly Epic & a few devs with a grudge (or too much greed?) to believe that 30% is a bad deal, because that has been/is a bad deal with other companies, but in the case of Steam it's actually a great deal for what you get in return. 🤷♂ There is no publisher or other kind of third party anywhere that could give me what i can get from Steam for only 30% cut.
-----
Working on a semi-serious game project for some time now, haven't released anything yet but Steam already saves me a LOT of time and effort & possibly even a little money too? even in this early stage? i'm MORE than happy to give them their 30% once i get to releasing something, it's a good deal imho, i don't have to really care about things like:
- Controller support or VR devices support, i just use the steam api's, they will keep adding controllers and headsets etc
- Realistic reverbing/reflecting/etc audio with smart/easy integration in materials etc, i don't wanna do that math, so just use steam audio, which is pretty much even above HL:Alyx quality (depending on how you set it up) & again very little effort to implement
- I don't really have to put thought into how most of multiplayer logic actually works, just use another api, i only have to add some basic function calls and slap together some ui for it and it magically does multiplayer with matchmaking etc 😂
That's not even all of it but hopefully this gets the idea across, there's a lot more going on "behind the scenes" that most people don't even realize, all of this gets paid for by said 30% cut, on top of the store (and ads/suggestions), the bandwidth, the updates, the workshop, the discussions, screenshots, etc etc. For a big AAA title with a big publisher and their own platforms & backend & enough people to make everything themselves, sure, 30% is too much, but they don't actually pay that % anyway, they just make some deal, for the rest of us that can (and very often do) use all sorts of these 'launcher features' & helpful/great API's? 30% is a good deal. 🤷♂ If your game goes big the cut goes to 20%, if your game goes really big you get to negotiate a custom cut like the big boys.
Sorry that it became a bit of a wall-o-text comment everybody, but just trying to make it clear why most small devs are fine with the 30% 😉👍
I bought the Orange box on PC and forgot about it. Years later (I think 7) I went back after I heard Shadowrun Returns was kick started and on a service called Steam. I logged in and the Orange box was still there waiting for me.
Is the lawsuit trying to say "steam should not have the right to negotiate with the developers for the price of a GAME ON THEIR STORE"?
I must be missing something.
Reading all the responses indicate this has to do with steam wanting to have the same price as anywhere else, that is NEGOTIATION.
A negotiation is not a THREAT!
And it has nothing to do with steam keays or not (to me that is 100% obvious why those keys should ONLY be allowed to be sold on steam)
I completely get it, imagine this scenario.
Company A: "Do you want to sell our cars?"
Company B: "sure, but we want to be able to sell them at the same price as anywhere else you sell these cars"
And then imagine this scenario:
B: "Hey, we notice you are selling the same cars at Company C for 20% less money, it makes it nearly impossible for us to sell the cars, can we lower the price please?"
A: Sues Company B for "monopoly"...
This is insane right?
Steam does allow devs to sell their keys on other storefronts but they can't lower the price or let the competing storefront lower the price. If the competing storefront using a steam key wants to lower the price, the dev/publisher would have to tell them no, you can't do that because you are selling steam keys to our game.
The other store is taking a smaller cut though, that's why the game can be cheaper, it's entirely on Valve, if you want to match prices, just slash your own cut, but they're steam, so they strong arm the dev, aka being a monopoly.
So, not so insane.
@@urazz7739 And if you sell the keys on other store fronts, they don't take the 30% cut!
Another thing is if you sell a key for cheaper on another store. You must sell the game on sale on steam at some point for that price. So they are allowed too as long as they put it on sale at some point for that price.
@@MaxIronsThird "It's entirely on valve"
Then why are the games on Steam the same price as they are on Ubisoft/EA storefronts, who are the publishers?
Have Valve made any official statement that the price restriction only applies to keys minted on Steam?
Have they updated the terms to be more specific?
When I read the section, you had to infer from context that the restriction only applied to keys that were made by and would be redeemed on Steam.
Reading clauses using plain language interpretation with contextual nuance is not really how contracts work.
Actually, we have steam keys we can sell on other markets without being impacted by the 30% like Humble Bundle or our own site, but we must always report it accordingly as we can only generate so many steam keys ourselves at a time to prevent fraud situations
Yes, because to not officially restrict it to Steam keys, the only price that Steam is legally allowed to dictate, would be illegal. So of course they are going to word that carefully. But is that what they actually do in practice? It appears not...
Green man gaming, humble bundle, and fanatical exist, I don't know how this is true, if these constantly undercut steam, FOR steam keys. Humble bundle is owned by IGN...
Wouldn't surprise me if they wanted to have it included in the deal written confirmation that they're getting the best deal available to anyone. Just like what Amazon demands from sellers. It seems insane but there are many things in law that are just plain ridiculous.
@@fransmith3255 It is not, in fact, illegal to refuse business when you're given a worse deal than your competitors.
Ah, yes. The ol' "If you can't compete, sue your competition" gambit.
ya this whole lawsuit is just this and calling valve a monopoly just because everyone else is garbage
What I don't get, is HOW this is even considered when Amazon's KU is still allowed.
Kindle is all but a monopoly in the e-book world, with upwards of 80-% of the market If you want to make any money on Kindle, you need either the backing of a large publisher, or you have to enter KU.
If you enter a work in KU, they expressly disallow you to sell that work outside Kindle AT ALL.
So the take away is someone tech bro wants to take PC gaming away from us cause his scam market failed against Steam... We really need that time machine to save Harambe, this timeline is borderline unplayable.
Steam is depressing the entire PC game market with their 30% cut, so it’s the other way around my friend.
@@thomasfsan I'd like some sauce for whatever you're cooking.
@@Terrados1337 buddy that is billions not going to indies. making projects that instead of breaking even become failures, projects that break even butt don't produce a profit, projects that make profit but not enough for a sequel.
who really says devs should get paid less for their work?
"listen Buddy" at least make sure your middleschool maths checks out before talking down to people.
@@Terrados1337 Steam sits on 70-80% of the PC game market. Their 30% cut comes before taxes and everything else. Very little comes back to devs.
Funny how it's always "Steam is a monopoly" and not "everyone else fucking sucks by comparison"
i look at it in a different way ... i see a hug (huge huge huge) sucking hole where all of the gaming industry goes down and nothing good as come out of that hole (nothing given back at all in the exchange). just a huge sucking hole. i think life was better 20 years ago (gaming wise)
like how long epic games storefront been around now trying to compete, in like last 5years they have added no features or did anything major to improve their store. all they do is pay for exclusivity deals thinking it will get them users. how about using all that money they spend on exclusives to actually improve the platform so people come in naturally..oh wait that requires skilled programmers which is big no easier to just say valve is big bad monopoly
@@Natrium9775 you think valve makes tens of billions because of its customers supplying content? i think it makes its money from taking a cut of sales from devs.
@@ginxxxxx just like any store does. If anything it's more worth it for devs, because being in steam is essentially putting your product on a billboard.
@@XShadowzVarcolac does amazon have only 70 employees? does amazon pay admins have a million a year? does amazon have margins times thousands vs costs?
what you posted is not original, its the same scam 20 years ago.
this was done to gamers because gamers, and programmers "have no choice but to have lower expectations - what you going to sell out of your truck to gamers, gamers only respect steam and the huge sucking sound"
I'm just waiting for my $70 settlement check to come in the mail so I can buy a new game on Steam XD
You buy new games? In this day and age?
Why?
@@planescaped Steam sales, duh. Why else would someone buy a game?
@@planescaped cdkeys
@@planescaped there are hundreds of games that come out each year of varying quality, you're rtrded
man is been forever since i bought a fresh triple A game
79 Steam employees: This does explain why it's basically impossible to get customer support from Valve.
the one major problem of not scaling up! rest of the store is the better for it tho.
Can you imagine how trash it would be if they outsourced the work though?
they subcontract support
Weird, I've never had any issues with getting support from Valve.
It's been surprisingly fast and efficient, actually. Maybe it's regional?
Not really. Customer support are off shore based so there'sa lot of them and I never have a problem with valve customer support. They are responsive and very helpful
Gog, Origin, EGS and many more alternatives exist and they are hardly small mom and pop shops. This isn't a monopoly in the slightest and more akin to if General Motors complained that Ford was being mean.
Tim Sweeney is only angry that he isn't the middle man that gets 30%.
They could probably afford to make Half Life 3, Portal 3, Left 3 Dead AND Team Fortress 3.
It's going to be Artifact 2 though, sorry.
ricochet 2 look it up a frisbee golf like game from 2000 that hasnt had a sequel yet
Don't worry, there won't be an Artifact 3.
There are so many franchises they could start and make two of!
@@PaulGuy You're right. Hope they are working on them right now though.
It's not a matter of them being able to afford game development or not, it's a matter of if it's even worth making a sequel that goes beyond its predecessors
That's why HL:A took such a long time to release, because the Valve mindset is to treat every game like a tech demo, and HL:A being a staple of what VR games can be is why it was made
Steam doesn't have a monopoly because a Monopoly actively squeezes competition out of the market, steam just offers a service that consumers and game devs prefer.
It's the natural logical conclusion of a free and open market consumers will naturally drift to the Superior Service.
The only reason why Windows is popular nowadays is because Microsoft had an aggressive strategy back in the day where they would kill off anything that would even attempt to become popular. Their madness to overtake as many companies as possible and to turn them into shit is still in their blood, as it can be seen with all the gaming studios accusations over the years. Yet, Valve is the bad dog according to some people, who literally do nothing actively to turn them into a monopoly and instead only let the market decide
Windows destroyed all their competition, perfected the OS, and then began stripping away what made it good knowing the only alternatives are awful Macbooks and nerdy Linux.
@@scrittleLinux is on the rise with how much support it has gotten and many branches of Linux are basically Windows these days
accusing a company of monopolizing, specially when proven otherwise, has got to be the best compliment of the efficiency and influence they have
Judge should request a Steam questionnaire asking Devs if they feel ripped off: Yes/No.
Save a lot of time and money. Gabe has cool shit to do. Leave him alone to work.
"are you happy 1/3 of your revenue pre tax get taken by steam"?
They would say yes. You should see how much media companies spend on just advertisements, let alone the actual distribution of a game.
@@dubc7565Distribution is what that 30% pays for. They get to host their game, lobbies, achievements, and all the other player/game data on Valve’s servers for 0 upfront cost. They can advertise all they want but the actual distribution costs them nearly jack squat.
That would be a very interesting questionnaire.
I honestly think @dubc7565 hits the nail on the head, im convinced the majority would say "yes good deal". But it would be cool to know how much actual % feels that way.
@@AL-lh2htfree bandwidth, free servers, free keys, free advertising on the biggest gaming platform. The steam community.
All these apply even to free games that valve cannot make a penny on.
Yeah sounds like a good deal.
Steam keys are printed by the developers of the game and can be distributed to anyone they want including other market places, Devs do this for a multitude of reasons, increasing player counts and sales mainly. This legal battle will be thrown out without a shadow of a doubt since it's not valves responsibility for what others do with their intellectual property.
It's also not valve/steam's responsibility to foot the bill for those practices.
if this lawsuits wins no more cd keys for steam
@@illusionlb This isn't true. It isn't Steam that decides what games have CD keys, it is the devs.
@@MrBear10mm steam decides to accept CD keys from 3rd party sellers...
@@illusionlb The CD keys that they themself provide.
In my experience, Steam has done an excellent job of investing their profits back into the video games industry through efforts that push the market forward. For example, with their work on VR in the mid 2010s and more recently their efforts to make Linux into a viable platform for PC gaming.
So, I don't mind that Steam is making money hand-over-fist. As long as they're putting that money into good causes that benefit all of us, the result seems well worth it.
Well said.
Eh, VR was pushed forward more by things like Quest that were affordable for average consumer than their Index line.
And they better announce Index 2 soon, old one is, well, old for today standards, but still costs an arm and a leg.
Valve used to push video game scene forward in early 2000s, but since HF2 they kinda just remained marketplace thing with occasional title here and there.
@@nihili4196 "valve used to push..."
Ahem.... (Deep breath in)
Steam controller, drivers for PS4 PS5 Nintendo switch controllers, steam input and steam input API. Steam workshop, community page, guides, game beta and older version support, Stream to friend, Remote play together (you who owns a copy, and a friend that doesn't but allows streaming locally) voice call support, gamepadui and the attempted steamos hardwarebox, proton. Discovery queue, seeing friends wishlist, gifting and custom messages. Profile badges, message stickers game specific icons,Customizable profile pictures that allow user upload, steam vr, valve index. Steamdeck. Investment into kde plasma desktop (the desktop environment the steamdeck uses)
Game backup and migration.
Yeah. They fell off after HF2
Valve's steamvr definitely didn't do ANYTHING, not like it made a standard for every vr headset to communicate through so people don't have to program for each individual headset for each vr game.
@@nihili4196 Valve worked on the original Vive too, not just the index.
So there are at least 181 people working at Valve who can't count to 3. :P
more like 181 people who making "not good enough games"
@@alexamderhamiltom5238 cope, valve has probably one of the best game libraries.
@@alexamderhamiltom5238 A lot of the scrapped projects for Valve games do seem entirely underwhelming in retrospect. I really hope Deadlock ends up being one of them but it seems like they're going full steam ahead with it unfortunately.
The thing is valve is offering so much for devs. They provide all the infrastructure you could need for distributing your game, including world wide payment processing, they offer forums and modding too and all they ask for it is that you don't sell your game cheaper on other platforms. As a dev you can generate any number of steam keys and sell them yourself on your own website or gog or others for the same price as on steam without valve getting any cut at all.
Technically devs still have to develop the framework to allow modding to mesh with steam workshop, so that's down to devs and not a standard with steam. Most serious modders use Nexus over steam workshop also, though the rest of your point is bang on.
If they were so sure about the value of their product, they wouldn't force devs to keep the price the same.
The problem is that by forcing the seller to have the same price everywhere , they won't allow the buyer to choose between their solution and their high margin, and a cheaper game on a crappier storefront.
i think one of the interesting games to look at in this is starsector, not sold on steam on its own old website instead, dont even necessarily need to pay for it but still in active development with the solo dev and has a big active community
Their request for the price to be the same isn't unreasonable. Ok that it's from the company who is basically the goliath of pc gaming but the idea per se isn't really unreasonable.
is it? hm so lets say a large food corporation tells farmers that they have to accept the corporations prices and that they arent allowed to sell to anyone else at a higher price... and that corporation can do so, because they are the only viable buyer... does that sound reasonable?
just in case you are wondering why i picked that example - if you live in the US... thats why your food prices look that way
does it look that bad with steam? no of course not... but its absolutely something that would be in their power to do
at the moment its mostly affecting devs, rather than consumers... but thats something that can change over time depending on their intentions
@@SharienGamingkeep in mind steam deals primarily in intellectual property not physical property.
And that it costs steam money to run their service and the number of services they provide, they offer bandwidth and servers for free and those are expensive. So it's perfectly reasonable that any product that is on steam cannot be allowed to undercut steam on other stores.
And also the hell is your analogy, if you don't like the rules valve puts you under just don't put your game on steam, and you can do whatever you want. Other stores have similar rules, so it's less valve's rules and more industry standard.
@@andrewgreeb916 sorry, but servers and bandwidth are comparatively cheap as hell... that excuse hasnt flown ever
like... im willing to bet that a single employee costs them more than their server infrastructure
and... dont put your game on steam? sure if you want to fail before you start thats an "option" ... its pretty common knowledge among devs that if you want any chance of success, you HAVE to be on steam - especially as an indie dev
and my analogy is an ilustration of effectively the same behaviour by one of the nastier real world monopolies (well technically in that case a monopsony, since they control the supply side rather than the consumer side)
and even without a full monopoly - pricefixing is what a cartel does... and a cartel is just a distributed monopoly... so telling a supplier that they are not allowed to negotiate better deals with someone else (or sell directly to customers without the extra fee to the middleman) is massively anti-competitive behaviour
@@SharienGaming So, let your house be used for free while people sell YOUR stuff for lesser than you were actually selling. And plus, none of those profits go to your pocket.
@@SharienGaming that's indeed the problematic part. As I said the idea alone isn't unreasonable. The problem is that it's coming from a Goliath. However we should put on the table that, for example, EA does offer different version of their games on Origin and Steam. As a NFS fan I noticed that the cheapest edition it's available only on Origin and steam is left with the deluxe.
That's doesn't really solve the problem, but that's just another piece of the puzzle.
I always like to remember Gabe saying that he wants Valve to be more like Nintendo in that they produce both the software AND the hardware for their games. A major step towards that was the Steam Machines and the Steam Deck. Always nice to see that high of a risk taken and rewarded for the sake of growth
Maybe if they hired one more dev they could finally release HL3
As long as steam remains privately traded it will continue to outperform all these publicly traded companies. Epic wasn't trying to be consumer friendly with the epic games store. They were trying to be developer/producer friendly so that steam would have no products to sell when all the games went to epic where on paper they would make more money. Effectively going around the consumer. If they achieved market capture they would have been able raise prices back up. Everyone loses but epic.
Big thing is that if Epic was more consumer friendly, and did something like mark down the price of AAA titles by $5, then people would've jumped all over the Epic Games store/launcher. If it was decent when it launched on top of that, then it would've easily have forced Steam to act.
@@urazz7739 they wanted to bake the cake, have the cake, and eat it too
@@urazz7739 But Epic is publicly traded, meaning it is all but impossible to prioritize long term goals over quarterly profit. Making the store usable would require a loss of profit, therefore will not happen. Being consumer friendly would also take years to materialize the benefits, so that's a no as well.
@@xraze6906 A simple response to quarterly profits is "get good". No seriously. Valve poured tons of money to get gaming on Linux on par with most windows only games. The only benefits of Linux gaming was making there own console ( Steam Deck ) and being consumer friendly towards a very small minority of there consumers. Those investments are just a drop in the bucket for them, and Valve is still developing new features for Steam ( I heard they were working on a game recording ability ).
@@xraze6906where did you get this information of Epic Games being publicly traded from? Because I have found absolutely nothing of them being a public company, only a private company. I haven’t even found a mention of a IPO from Epic Games either.
Sweeney's perspective shows what Epic gets wrong. If money was the primary issue then both developers and users would flood to Epic. Instead, Epic exclusivity is used as justification for poor sales because the EGS service quickly got a reputation for being a poor service to use.
There is no case here really. You can sell your game on Steam and on your own platform for different prices. Valve is not stopping you from doing that. What they don't like is you selling access to Valve's servers to download and manage a game for a different price, outside of your platform. A good example for that is Giants, who make Farming Simulator. They sell the game on Steam for a price, they sell it on their website for another price (and have deals rather often). A key from their website activates the download from their website but doesn't register on Steam.
Its amazing to see how efficient Steam is when it comes to employees.
Remember when people asked publisher to sell steam keys or put their game on steam for convenience ?
I remember back in the days when gamers would put pressure this way on publishers.
I strongly believe that if you think Valve is monopolizing, you need a huge re-evaluation of the term monopoly.
I don't really see how steam's business model is any less of a monopoly than nintendo, sony and x-box doing platform exclusive deals.
It’s about pricing not about exclusivity.
@@SpottedHares For who? The developers or the consumers?
PS is a Sony product, Xbox is a MS product, Switch is a nintendo product, 99% of steam users play games on PC, not a Valve product.
@@urazz7739 for the publisher
Steam doesn't do exclusive deals. That's actually what Epic is doing. If exclusivity deals are what constitutes a monopoly, Epic is far more of one than Steam is. Dumb argument.
Valve and Steam are the best thing that happened to gaming imho! I just hope they will keep their paragon status once lord gaben moves on.
I remember when stores stopped carrying PC games. Steam saved PC gaming single handedly.
Wait, they have less than 400 people on the HQ, less than 100 people working on games AND NOBODY IS STILL UPDATING TF2?
and some people actually do not work at valve, they just go fucling around at another company, like brain study ! valve became so rich they doesnt care anymore.
as an avid tf2 fan, the game just got it's update, sure its seasonal but its nice, Eric S. did say its a small update. cs2 is in dire need of more work, a lot more work.
Because they are already stretched as it is? From Steam, SteamOS, SteamVR, Index, Deckard, SteamDeck, CS2, DOTA 2, Source 2, Proton, and legacy support (eg Source 1).
you know, even their most updated game DOTA, is still pretty underwhelming at times compared to other games with the same popularity
$2,000,000,000 just from commission...I'm assuming that isn't including the marketplace at all either....crates/keys/etc commission...Gabe could buy EA and laughs at Elon.
Isn't EPIC now wholly-owned by TenCent?
only 40%
@Infernal_Elf is that the most though? Cause it may be that TenCent has the majority on voting if there isnt someone else that has 41%
This is still peanuts compared to nVidia operating margins. Even just for consumer gpus.
who else can make graphics chips esp high end ones? AMD? AMD/Nvidia is like Intel/AMD can you 3d print a CPU?
@@joshallen128For graphics? It's AMD, Intel, and Nvidia at the high end. There's reasons to buy all three. Yes, there's a reason to buy an A750 or A770 over a 4090. AV1 encoding. Intel has the best video encoder on the market for people who produce video.
@@halycon404 very limited competition natural monopolies that's why Nvidia enjoys high stock. Very few can compete with them
@@joshallen128 And a bunch of unrealized promises about AI. I look at it like this. The market leaders on actually knowing what the AI software can do are Google and Microsoft. They wrote, funded, and in some way own most of the research. Those two companies. They're the actual experts on the technology. Neither promises anywhere close to what Nvidia does. Nvidia is making money off selling hardware to run the software to do things neither Google or Microsoft thinks the technology can do or they'd be advertising that.
Nvidia is getting rich off a market delusion. Same way Tesla did, go look at their financials half a decade later. Wall Street Darling, Main Street Bum.
@@joshallen128 'natural' is incorrect.
Nvidia has long maintained market dominance via proprietary tech that does not work on other hardware, and 'sponsoring' (read: Bribing) developers to use that tech instead of the hardware agnostic alternatives.
PhysX, Hairworks, Flex, DLSS, RTX, they've been doing it for a VERY long time. There's also been issues in the past with them doing things like pushing devs to use unnecessary and visually indistinguishable amounts of tesselation to abuse the fact that their hardware handles the type of compute needed for tesselation slightly better than AMDs, fudging benchmark numbers in the process.
If they were losing money, while disadvantaging competitors, that is a monopolistic practice. Lose money until your competitor goes bankrupt then raise prices.
Valve just seems like what happens to a company when it dosent lay off half the workforce every year.
I just never want valve to become a public corporation. Every fucking game company that ever went bad went public.
Why is this guy trying to paint value the bad guy. Epic gives games out for free, and ppl still choose to buy it from steam. Probably, if other store fronts care more about the consumer, they would see growth too. Cry me a river.
He has a huge hard on for EGS, has for years. HE was a huge pusher for more to join the Epic Exclusive movement.
@@spacepiratekobold5112 yh he could keep pushing but ain't no one joining that BS 💯
@@spacepiratekobold5112 hes a game dev so it makes sense EGS is pro dev while steam is pro consumer as a consumer ill stick with steam
Ironically, he's selling his game on Steam. He should know how things functions by now. But nah, "STEAM BAD, VALVE BAD! EPIC GOOD CAUSE EXLCUSIVES!"
@@Xport9 facts 😂💯
I can imagine Tim Epic looking at these numbers and acting like that Obadiah scene from Iron Man.
HAHA XD
WHEEZE
"VALVE BUILT A STOREFRONT THAT MADE THEM BILLIONS OF DOLLARS, IN A GARAGE, WITH ONLY A BOX OF SCRAP"
Epic is trying far harder to obtain monopoly than steam is.
Yeah. Their business practices are quite disgusting. All while offering the worst client on the market.
Fantastic report @BellularNews! Thank-you for going out and looking at the what documentation has been revealed, and giving a concise, factual synopsis and analysis of the Valve situation. Honestly I didn't even realise that this was a 22 minute video! 😳 Keep up the great work, you're getting better at this all the time.
Don't forget how much infrastructure you gain access to through steam.
If they are talking ONLY Steam keys, Valve wouldn't have a problem. They are at risk being slapped as a monopoly as soon as they pull games over cheaper prices on OTHER platforms with NON Steam keys. For example, a third party reseller selling Steam keys can't be less than on Steam, understandable, but Epic/Ubi/EA store keys aren't related, so Valve doesn't have a legal leg to stand on.
Epic/ubi/ea does the same thing its to provent fraud . So no there is no case there at all . If EA sells there stuff for less on there launcher its up to them but if it is a game soled on steam it cant be soled cheaper then on steam it self .
@@xythiera7255 No, they don't. Reread what OP was saying. You're just in every comment defending Valve using at-best unproven statements.
Steam doesn't have to publish your game. If you are giving Steam a CLEARLY bad deal, they don't have to do business with you. Don't like it? Go to another game store. Make your own game store. Valve is definitely in the right to protect their business.
@@xythiera7255 You're leaving out some very specific context there, Bub.
@@WingTzu343 wait... how do you know they're in every comment?
"pirate software" is a game dev who covers this and explains why it's in an insane case and valve is more than fair
Thor of Pirate Software is wrong, though. He's been misinforming people. He said that price parity only pertained to Steam keys, which it apparently doesn't. He built his entire argument on that.
not only does it look like that Thors argument goes out the window with how those mails looked. But even if that was a nothing burger. There is no way to argue around Steam being a monopoly for the PC Gaming market. Every other Store is like Linux to Windows, which had and is still facing constant watchfull eyes from all regulators across the world. Which is why Microsoft does so little there and buckled rightaway when the European Union knocked to make their Programs like Edge completely removable from the System.
It is an interesting case and we, the consumers, should use any transparancy we get from it and look at the people we voted for to maybe jump in and put a stop to any practice that would make it harder for us consumers to get cheaper prices while using Steam.
@@PropaneWP "How dare steam ask for a fair deal"
@@Sw4lley I don't mind steam being a monopoly and I'm pretty sure that majority of gamers does too. It's just that haters will say otherwise.
@@Sw4lley dude, you think the guvernment gonna interviene to give YOU the consumer cheaper prices while using Steam? LOOOOOL dude wake up, Tim Sweaty only has a 12% cut for his store and before opening he was like: "hur dur, Consumers gonna have cheaper prices" but LOOK AT IT, the prices are the same like everywhere, loool :))))) but you go you thinking guvernment with their ********** IT intelectuals in it will decide upon good laws to not screw you :)))))))
The responses all seem to go back to what is best for the consumer. They keep saying that if the game is being offered cheaper somewhere else that they would like to be able to offer the game at that same cheaper price to their (Steam's) consumer as well, why should Steam customers get the worse deal just because they are steam customers? So technically I can see why someone might say that stance is anti competitive, but the whole competition protection aspect is about protecting consumers, not really so much about protecting other customers. So if that is the case wouldn't this be a anti competitive practice that we would want since it benefits consumers?
*I am not saying I agree that this is anti competitive or that it even happens or that that is the stance of Valve, especially since what I'm reading in this video seems to be someone's interpretation and summary of what was said, instead I'm pretending for argument sake that I take it at face value.
Something a lot of people are forgetting is that Epic has given away expensive games for free on there platform. I am sure publishers and developers agreed to this, but if we wanna talk about undercutting competition and price fixing, Epic should be public enemy #1.
The lawsuit: "How dare you treat your customers better, offer a better service that's nearly impossible to match and continue being universally loved while we can barely put our crap on the shelves??"
Wow! Having only around 80 people managing all of Steam is pretty impressive! 😲
Steam doesn't have a monopoly, nor have they ever tried to exert one. They simply offer the best service for the most reasonable price. They offer an overwhelming number of tools for indy developers, a sweetheart deal for getting published if you don't have a publisher, they have sales constantly, and MOST of the issues people had with digital services haven't manifested in Steam, yet. They probably will eventually, though.
Nobody is talking about "monopoly"... This is about Steam using anti-competitive business practices to maintain a huge market share domination. 86% last time I heard. The guy in this video is literally talking about court-presented evidence that Steam has been enforcing price parity...
@@PropaneWP Okay, if you don't want the price parity, then you don't get Steam as a service, you are actively choosing THEIR platform to publish and distribute your game. So they dictate the rules of how you as a publisher or developer will engage with their service, if you don't want to abide by their rules then you don't get access to the service, a service which might I include has:
The ability for you to put out patches on the fly with Steamworks, the ability to be marketed and discovered by millions of users, the ability to have forums, news, artwork, mods, administration tools, dedicated servers, reviews (oh this is a fucking big one that an incredible amount of shit storefronts miss out on), the list goes on.
Which ties into our next little tidbit! It's not illegal for Valve to tell publishers that if they want to sell their game on Steam that they cannot give the users on Steam a worse deal than other platforms. That's not price fixing, that's just being fair to your own customers, reducing the price on other platforms just to screw over another one is just being an asshole.
If you want Steam to lose this, you can enjoy your $20 price hike on all games while the rest of us with some actual intelligence pirate everything under the sun because no game will ever be worth $100+.
@@PropaneWP Half of the people in this comment section are talking exactly about "monopoly", it dominates the conversation. Nobody is being forced to be on Steam, they can go anywhere else that they want to, they want to be on Steam because they know it is more valuable for them to be there and they want Steam to provide them that benefit at no additional cost compared to other distributors. They literally want to have their cake and also eat it. Steam is apparently supposed to just be fine with doing all of the heavy lifting as far as discoverability, key-hosting, community goes while the publishers/devs drive downloads to other platforms where Steam doesn't benefit from their own hard work? Bull.
You know what the saddest part is going to be? Let's say Steam actually loses this, pays a giant penalty and has to change policies. You know what's NOT going to happen? Price-parity revision. Steam is just going to adopt a standard platform-exclusivity for new releases, just like the big console brands do, just like Epic keeps trying to do. Want to release on Steam? Cool, but nowhere else. That is what's going to happen if they lose and, for what should be obvious reasons to everybody, that's bad for the industry.
@@Ichthyodactyl I have yet to see anyone talk about "monopoly" in this comment section, except those bringing it up to deny it.
Nobody with common knowledge of the game industry would say "nobody's being forced to be on Steam". For the average developer, it's not an option to forfeit 86% of the PC game market. Don't be silly.
@@PropaneWP Yeah but how did Steam even get to the point where they have so much control over the PC game market?
They got there by simply providing a solid service all-round.
It's not perfect but out of all the options you have they are just the best.
They don't even really do anything while the competition just keeps shooting themselves in the foot.
Like Epic constantly getting exclusivity deals, which btw are really anti-competition practices, and people see that and are just like "yeah that's bs I'll just wait a year til it's on steam" and Epic's imgae kept deteriorating as a direct consequence of these exclusivity deals which nobody liked.
Valve don't do anything and win because they provide a solid service. YOu can't argue with that and forcing a market to be shared relatively equally among a bunch of competitors is just a terrible idea.
There is a thing in Monopoly law that says you can't undercut your fellow distributors at a loss to eliminate the competition
Basically stating 2 gas stations one can't undercut the other by law. However gaming is completely different than selling gas it's more like art
Maybe game development, but at the end your still selling a product
@@SpottedHares the thing here is that you're not selling the game at a loss, only huge companies are able to do that by strong-arming into a market.
So, Epic's exclusivity deals are actually illegal? Good to know.
@@youtubeisovertlyantisemiti3247not explicitly illegal, but more monopolistic than steam.
Steam is also a powerful social network it its own right, it offers LOADS of game integration for most games.
This. People keep trying to make this issue exclusively about discoverability, which IS a huge part of what Steam offers to be fair, but the entire platform has features nobody else is even trying to implement. User reviews, forums, curator groups, events, meta-collectibles with included marketplace, profile customization. Even Achievements are a thing that a lot of other platforms aren't even willing to implement. Steam is the GOAT for a reason, it is a premium platform and that's the entire reason that devs will continue to release on there, even if they don't like the cut, they know they are making more on Steam with the 30% cut than they would if they weren't on Steam at all.
I like steam, but most users don't give a dam about the shoehorned social media aspect. Having a friends list chat function is standard, having a forum for a game would be at the dev site if not hosted on steam (It's self moderated anyway and i feel steam does need more staff to he involved more in this...). And profile stuff? Maybe it's communities in the games i play, but almost everyone has profiles set to private... steam points buying useless anime trash to adorn my profile is such a dissapointment when i learned that's all it would buy... Not even like a customer reward scheme to have money off of games.
They have me as a customer because they got there amongst the first that offered other devs games i had interest in too and i much prefer having one platform rather than logging into 20 forgetting passwords etc. They have relatively stable servers, i know when sales occur or I'd probably miss them with a host of random platforms (more a benefit to steam, not me). I've never once had a steam recommendation for a product i wanted, got 100 games and tried to s3t up detailed likes etc but it's always been me needing to dig and fighting being recommended the same trash.
I love that they run lean and have a more flat hierarchy, however they clearly actually need more staff to have better oversight and tech support on a game by game basis. They need better consumer protection surrounding early access devs taking the piss and scams, they simply do not want to get more involved in that as it's more cost and risk... Understandable, but that's not going above and beyond for consumer protection.
The trial is a joke, Epic are clowns and it is understandable steam wants to be able to sell their game as cheap on steam as it's offered elsewhere. That's not price fixing or a monopoly, it's literally the opposite... They wan5 to be able to compete if they are also expected to promote and support the game. That said, saying steam doea this for the good of the customer is straight up shill cope in the opposite direction. Steam does it for steam.
@@Ichthyodactyl All that social media crap just makes their client a bloated mess. If they made a light client i'm one of the first ones to use it.
@@evulclown I regularly use steam social integrations to join my friends. Profiles being set to private is more likely the result of your social choices and the games you play.
@@nulian The workshop is "social media crap" that is made by the community.
the hardware people are getting screwed. average wage per department is -
Admin - $4,514,273
Games - $1,062,740
Hardware - $431,862
Steam - $967,678
I would not complain about that wage at all personally
Imma be honest, without Steam
I would have definitely pirated 90% of the games I already owned on Steam
It's too convenient and user friendly to not use
And with those kinds of sale, it's basically free games
I have personally bought so many small indie games because Valve reaches out to me and says "Hey, we notice you play these games a ton, and this dev is making something similar and it's on sale. Want it at a discount?" I refuse to buy games on other launchers, even if they are cheaper :-P
Wow, i don't see any bots in the comments yet. 😮
Beautiful isn’t it
Is exactly what a bot would say.
@@minirlz beep boop
It's because Bellular isn't popular enough to warrant the attention of botters.
Lets apply a little bit of critical thinking everyone. Valve is not a publicly traded shithole like Epic Games is or EA, they're private.
If you wish to sell your game on our platform, our users must not be getting a worse deal than others, otherwise, we will not sell your game. It is a simple, Valve wants what is best for their consumers, which is... You guessed it! Fair prices on their platform, and what's that?
Oh, oh my. Valve can tell you that they won't sell your game on their platform because you want to screw over their customers by forcing them to another platform? That's crazy, almost like Valve is actually looking out for you in some regards because you're one of their paying customers, while publicly traded companies aren't your friend, private companies certainly can be.
Amen
Private companies are rarely your friend either, but certainly higher than the 0% for public. Valve, at least as long as Gabe is here, appears to remain on the customer's side.
Ikea is a private company and never went public. Back when it started to pop off, other companies, often public companies were pissed at Ikea and tried so many tactics to ruin Ikea as a business. Why? Because their model were superior, they had the best customer service and they stole customers in droves, and only the owner Kamprad had a say in the company. No shareholders who only want a quick buck. It would seem that private companies are in the long run much better than public ones, for the customers that is.
Nice presentation. Cheers. Also, thank you so much for having quiet music in the background with very quiet intro and more importantly outro. Much appreciated.
3:11 Did you leave out Valve's numbers? It makes it impossible to understand the point you're making when you try to skip that detail.
WTF is wrong with lawyers these days? This is the third time this has happened lately. Someone buy them some decent permanent markers.
If a game is sold on a store shelf, what % of the retail price goes to the store, shipping, packaging, and production of the physical item?
I would think at least 30%
So, from some research (google/reddit) it sounds like the standard is between 25% to 50% with Gamestop at around 40% back in 2018.
Pirate software has said that steam only takes 30% of sales on steam and that developers could sell steam keys on other sites, as long as it isn't cheaper than the current steam price and steam gets nothing. In fact they foot the bill for bandwidth among others things. The truth is steam and has engendered an entire generation of gamers with an unprecedented amount of consumer goodwill. Valve is the greatest company ever made in the history of mankind, period.
When you said "we're not all playing on our steam controllers", I was legit just playing euro truck simulator 2 on steam using a steam controller, did the side eye a bit lol
Everyone is so afraid of criticizing Valve that even after revealing that they make twice as much profit than other major corporations you can still immediately launch into a 5-minute lecture about how they are providing an amazing service and people like Tim Sweeney clearly aren't thinking about how much it really costs them to run. Wild.
Tim will never be taken seriously. he speaks against anti-competitive practices after causing the Epic-Exclusive chaos that we had years ago. even now I have not been able to play Alan Wake 2 because of his bullshit and may as well be foced to pirate the game soon unless we get a steam-release anouncement soon.
Honestly, this is a flex by Valve. They just exposed that they pay all their employees at least half a mil a year.
And yet they're always winning, keeping up so many servers, have amazing customer service, and more.
They just exposed that every single corporation cheaps out, even the best ones that still are worth even giving something every so often.
Steam is a funny thing. They are much better for consumers than other companies and deserve success but the amount of money they’re making for their labour really suggests they’ve got an exploitative position in the market. Which is unfortunately common for transaction brokers in large markets.
Yeah, they really like to nickel-and-dime developers. This just proves it.
@@Gr8humanilation9TV idk, a 30% cut doesnt seem greedy at all, thats the rate for google, epic games, ea, ubisoft, apple app store. I dont see how this is nickel and diming them. at all
@@Gr8humanilation9TV 30% in exchange for developing games technology and more importantly, putting the game on a store that over a hundred million people use is worth it.
@@chrisrutschman7261 Well yeah, they do exactly the same thing, nickel-and-diming developers, well except epic games because they don't take 30% cut. Sure steam is great service but in my opinion, "pricing" should be based on expenses and revenue.
They dont exploit anybody they just work more efficient thats all . How tf do you punish anybody for beeing more efficent thats brain dead . Labour also means nothing hours worked means nothing if you get more work done at the same amount of hours with less amount of peopl then you shoud make more money thats not exploitative thats just better managment . Its as if i woud punish you for doing more work in less time by paying you the same amount of money then the guy that does less stupid way of thinking
Frankly, the only people who try to complain about Steam being a monopoly are the exact same companies who'd happily try to monopolize the PC market.
As a steam developer you can sell steam keys on your own website or another site at the same price as steam but you won't be required to give 30% to steam, you keep all of it
I don't need "amazing service" with every game I buy. For example, when I buy games on GOG, my experience is not that much different from buying on Steam. If there was a platform with less "amazing service" that could sell their games for cheaper - I would use it. However, if Steam is interfering and demanding price parity, that's not going to happen.
As to reply to your comment, after replying to your comment.
Then the developers don't have to sell on Steam, that's a pretty simple idea, but to get something like that past the likes of someone like you, seems to be pretty hard.
So are games cheaper off Steam?
Oh yeah, they're not.
Let's not pretend game publishers would magically lower the price just because it's not on Steam. They had those prices long before they went through Steam, they aren't going to lower them now!
Just for.. clarity, If you go to epic games and buy borderlands 3 base.. It's the same price as borderlands 3 base on steam.. Why aren't the developers or the storefront selling it for less? They get a bigger cut right? Why isn't it less than steam? It doesn't affect steam, steams rules apply parity to steam keys from a developer.. Like releasing a game on steam, requesting say 500 keys, then selling them on G2A.. kinguin.. for lower prices than steam.. but more than you would gain, while steam foots the bill(Data usage/storage costs) on your game?
@ThatWhichObserves steam already would pay those costs anyway. Also i got bl3 free on epic AND i regularly see it on sale for cheaper than steam sales
This is EXACTLY what Amazon does. Amazon is horrible to it's sellers.
@@Jan12700 Of course the most heinous problems with monopolies, are allowed for companies that "work with" (were started with seed funding by) the intelligence apparatus. Amazon is destroying the fabric of our country by homogenizing everything and obliterating competition.
That lawsuit is taking the exact direction I predicted that it would. that "even though the % cut and price parity only technically apply to steam keys, that that clause is being used to pressure/force devs into keeping price parity regardless of if they use steam keys or not". I feel the number of people that had to have it explained to them that the price parity only applies to steam keys is proof enough to show the lack of understanding, how this could have gotten out of hand & how it needs a deeper look (aka the trial).
I appreciate valve as much as the next person, but companies are not your friends.
Yeah, it doesn't matter what any company does, whether they're anti-consumer, pro-consumer, public or private... the end goal of every single company is to earn a profit. It all comes down to that moolah.
I fail to understand how everyone misinterpreting Valve's clear statements are Valve's fault... If we can't get out of an agreement by claiming to not understand, why should corporations get to?
OH NOOO, a COMPANY IS MAKING MONEY, AND PASSED THAT on to the customer instead of hiking the price of games through the roof!!!!!!!!!!! Maybe they should make everything 100 dollars, charge a battle pass fee to access basic content, and nickel you into submission.
"how they compare to massive", bro... They are massive. Your wording makes it sound like you think Steam was some low-budget tiny platform that no one used. Steam is the freaking staple in how an e-shop should be. Everyone else needs to take notes. Nintendo, Microsoft, EA, COG, and Epic, all have trash clients and honestly, it's shameful.