I'm only going to do the mid video Patreon plug this once. I'm not going to start pushing it every video. Here is the link: www.patreon.com/ShreddedNerd I'm also trying out a new editor for this video, so let me know your thoughts.
Though I mainly listen to your videos in the background which luckily is quite enjoyable, I can appreciate your editors flow and style. It’s smooth, appropriate and humorous.
Valve is one of the most profitable companies on earth, yet somehow everyone seems to think of them as some kind of valiant, scrappy hacker Davids facing off against the corporate Goliaths of the world.
@@boyishdude1234 but as it stands they’re helping the industry. The industry is a lot better with them in. Without them Epic is the defacto computer game store which isn’t good. Plus they basically let anyone publish on their platform which is great too. Also releasing a console and supporting right to repair is good.
@@marcar9marcar972 This has nothing to do with what I said. And they're not really helping the industry when it's coming at the expense of customers and even the industry itself. DRMs in particular are something that need to go, and they don't really work anyway. Someone who is determined to crack a DRM-protected game will, regardless of how much time it takes. You're just decreasing performance and taking control away from the customer just to delay the inevitable, and that objectively isn't worth it. Property rights should always take precedence over distribution rights.
for tf2,it's hard to go wrong with the stock loadouts, so that's probably why and id really agree with the message, im not going to lie and say valve is not a favorite of mine, they really are (im probably the kind that would be inclined top let valve get away with alot, especially as a linux user), but even if you love what a company does to death, you have to be able to criticize it, otherwise you end up like nintendo guys, treated like slaves.
As a linux user I completely agree. I overlook their scummy decisions because they basically catapulted linux into being a viable gaming OS. Hopefully since Valve has no obligations to any stock holders they will not go the way of Nintendo.
you can still unlock the weapons via achievements and playing the game. Its similar to saying Apex legends technically pay2win because you have the possibility of paying to unlock the characters through bundles and stuff, while still being able to unlock them for free by simply playing the game. even then though, i still think its scummy to provide really obviously shitty choices to people, even if most consumers are smart enough to not buy the tf2 starter bundle for the weapons that are worth half a scrap each.
Just one thing I wanna point out. The 30% cut from devs was an industry standard for a long ass time and EGS were the first(I think) that reduced it to facilitate their engine's usage(unreal engine). Then microsoft is the only other big player in the industry that does this as well. Sony, valve, nintendo pretty much take 30% cut. While it sucks for smaller studios it's valve is certainly not the only one to do it
I once read that, in the context of publishers, the cuts make absolutely no difference for the actual developers, unless they are smaller self published studios. They likely get a set wage regardless of how well a game does, so Epic Games offering larger cuts was often seen just an attempt to lure in larger publishers for exclusives, with the developers themselves being largely unaffected.
@@jedwell9531 I honestly do not care about how much the bigger publishers make. But the 12% cut is literally a boon for indie studios and publishers. Besides this move has also put pressure of steam, microsoft and other store fronts to help indie studios however they can. Which resulted in steamfest which is incredible for any indie studio that gets the attention.
@@augustuslunasol10thapostle the issue with Epic / EGS right now is that it's good for the devs / publishers, not that good for the consumers due to the lackluster features Don't get me wrong i support the move to give smaller indie developers what they deserve, just not when it's at the detriment of the actual end user / consumer
Agree. Valve went out of their way to make Linux a viable option for gamers and game devs, by releasing Linux native versions of their own games and apps, and Proton. Wine ia notoriously difficult to install and set-up, Proton was a total game changer as don't require any technical background to install it and make it work.
@Eviscerate You are okay with monopolies as long as they support Linux? So if any massive oil company monopolised the market and raised oil prices due to lack of competition, you would be okay with it as long as they support Linux by making their employees use PCs with Ubuntu? Wow, you Linux fans are unbelievable.
the reason people praise valve is simple: they make good products and provide good services, people only start bringing attention to the companies contrvercies when they fail to make good products/services initiate_generic_comment_edit-C199: :finish edit
@@Narko_Marko Imagine you spend years designing this incredible device, you show it to Steve Jobs, and instead of praising your work, he just throws it in an aquarium and says "not small enough" because there were air bubbles.
@@mxzaiw2744 ok, and? they probably get paid for all the work that has gone into that device. Its their job to make it better. Better to have ur boss tell u its not good enough than to release it and company loses money as well as you.
Valve hasn't released major original IP in over 10 years now, it's fair to say they're not primarily a game developer at this point, the majority of their income is through publishing.
I'm not trying to defend Valve or anything, I just want some clarification due to curiosity. What about in regards to the development of technologies like the Steam Deck (which has become a very popular device) or managing the online store? Would those be beyond publishing? Forgive me, I am not well versed with certain kinds of business practices.
@@cadethumann8605 Valve is less orientated towards game production and more towards software and hardware like you said. Valve makes insane amounts of money from passive sources, such as the Steam store and micro transactions in their most popular titles such as Counter Strike, TF2 and Dota. Valve has no pressure to try to pump out titles because of that. Also, from what I know, Valve is run in a very laid back manner. Employees kind of just work on whatever project they feel passionate about at the time rather than being forced to and this has resulted in some of the best games and products to ever enter the market. The games they realsed a decade ago are still indusrty standards and put newer AAA releases to shame. So yeah, it is easy to look at the situation and see that Valve is not a big game maker right now sans Half Life: Alyx being their most recent title, which really just seemed like them going nuts with VR and once again pushing the industry forward.
@@der_shingen8548 I understand. TBH, I don't always keep up to date about the politics behind developing stuff. Regardless, would you say that Valve is more ethical with its business practices than other game companies like Nintendo and Sony (at least in some ways)? So far, I've seen less controversies surrounding than than the big three (though Microsoft is somewhat connected to Valve as they both involve computers). They even seem to try to be transparent as possible like sharing much info of the Steam Deck pre-release (including a arguably literal example where they did a tear down and discuss about what to do with broken parts). Though, if there's one thing I wish they'd take a cue from the Nintendo e-Shop, it would be the ability to use points received from purchases as discounts for other games (as opposed to profile or message board cosmetics). What's your take of their business ethics, good sir/miss?
No, it's not fair to say that. They don't stop being a game development studio just because they haven't released a new IP in a while. We just had HLAlyx a few years ago and CS2 is coming out eventually, with at least one or two more games in the pipeline per reporting by some passionate gamer.
I don't think you understand the scripted element of half life. What makes people enjoy it so much is how they work it into the world seamlessly like it's any other gameplay element.
@@limabarreto911 Not every game needs to be replayable. Half-Life isn't a perfect series but they represent some great experiences and innovations that stand out even today.
Its also the fact that what made it special is the fact that your being led. Games nowadays are linear for the sake of it, but half life was linear to demonstrate to the player that sense of being "controlled" by something greater
in TF2, you can get the game altering items just by playing, each hour or so you have a chance to get a random item. also, you can just ask people for them, theyre literally worthless since 2 weapons of the same kind can be made into 1 scrap, which is 1/3rd of a reclaimed metal, which is 1/3rd of a refined metal, which is worth less than 3 pennies. what i will say, though, is that your default backpack size is too small to hold one weapon of each kind.
The TF2 Crates section really took me out of the video. I literally bought each weapon I didn't have for a penny each! It was less than a dollar! Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you don't know about trading and therefore use the Mann Co. Store. Valve made a package for each class that guarantees each unique weapon! Obviously they don't give you the reskins, but that's likely because of contracts long past. Sure! Cosmetics (HATS!) used to give bonuses, but they quickly stopped that because it WAS gambling at that point!
@@Gamerbro302 you say that as if the random kiddies who just installed TF2 on their dad's work laptop can be reasonably expected to know this. valve deliberately exploits this by selling overpriced weapons on the mann co store and the like
Regarding the microtransaction system, you forget one aspect of it, it allowed valve to justify developing free content for their games, TF2, Dota 2 and CSGO all got tons of support post launch almost completely free, there were no map packs, everyone got access to more or less the same content
@@ShreddedNerd True but Valve come from a bit of a different age where they like to keep their classic games classic, they weren’t built for this mindset of constant updates to games as they wanted to make fun party deathmatch games. I’m not a big valve fanboy, Ive never even played a counter strike game and I literally just finished Half Life 1 for the first time and thought it aged like milk in a few places. But they easily could’ve added new classes to TF2 and stuff by now, went the R6S route, etc. but Valve wants their “classics” to stay mostly true to what they were. Yeah they add new content but nothing that vastly changes the core game, balancing etc. all the time. (I get it, saying Valve is better than Ubisoft is like saying a priest is better than the taliban, but still) They’re also very strict when it comes to console ports of their games which can be pretty admirable, but also pretty annoying. There’s very few Valve console ports that are god awful (minus the HL2 Xbox port!!!) Left 4 Dead 2’s DLCs were free on PC, and Valve TRIED to make them free on console but Microsoft insisted they be paid updates. The survival update for L4D1 was only free because Valve had lengthy convos with Microsoft convincing them that it should be free. Not only was Orange Box an incredible deal of 3 brand new games and 2 old ones for $60, Valve worked on Orange Box for the 360 in-house, but hated working on the PS3 so much that they hired another company to do that one for them. And they made damn sure that the Switch port of Portal 1+2 ran better than the console ports and as good as the PC version or else they wouldn’t have allowed it to release. Valve’s standards for their big releases and classics are so high that it’s honestly hurting them. They could easily port TF2 to console again this day in age, port Left 4 Dead, Portal, Half Life etc. to new consoles like they did the switch. But they won’t because 1. They are really strict to a fault, and don’t like their AAA titles looking bad, and 2. They have no incentive to now, they’re a money making machine, they don’t pretend to care about console players that much anymore because their mentality is “just get a PC dude” TF2 was one of the very first examples of a game going free to play, at the time everyone was ecstatic about it, I think it was at the same time the Meet The Pyro trailer released. This is around the time hats became a thing. However, this move from Valve inspired so many bad things not only for Valve but for the gaming industry, and Valve definitely used that model bigtime on CS:GO to the point where players have made their own economy buying stupid ass knives. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that around the time of TF2 and CSGO’s huge microtransactions, plus Steam, Valve practically went radio silent for 9 years. They found a money machine where they could basically do nothing and get rich forever. They’re scared of growing as a company because they don’t want to lose the core of what Valve is, but, where is all the money going? Yachts for every single employee? Half Life Alyx is neat enough, Source 2 is neat enough, but more so than Portal or Half Life, it is very much a tech demo game and it doesn’t make up for 9 years of basically nothing
2 major mistakes: 1: Assassin's Creed Liberation was not removed, only its miniscule online features were shut down. 2: Valve's 30% cut is the industry standard. Xbox, PlayStation, GOG, Google Play, and Apple all have the same cut. It's Epic's 12% cut that's the outlier.
The ENTIRE section about Team Fortress 2 is COMPLETELY wrong. While yes, originally, when the crates first released, crates WERE used to get weapons, as it still was really early into the game's lifespan. However, in current day, this is no longer the case. Modern crates (now called cases) include EXCLUSIVELY cosmetic items (hats and war paints). The most truth you can see is that you can get STRANGE versions of weapons, which are just weapons with kill counters. The entire argument is really invalid because no one actually opens crates for the weapons, as nowadays most players have all of(or atleast, most of) the weapons.
I had the same issue with that as well minus some stuff the video is decent. But that part with tf2 pains me the most because how far from truth it is. I forgot how you get unusal weapons, but still everything in game works mvm tours you get stuff to make kill counter stuff and you get australiums its part of the economy. Weapons you can buy a vintage for like 5 or 13 cents really
@@OnyxJaguar It is still weapon drops, however crafting still exists, so if you play for a while you should be able to get any weapon that you want (as long as it's not one of the rare expensive ones that are just reskins of other weapons).
Valve has earned its good reputation. 1. They release quality games and support them for a long time. Even though they have mostly stopped game development in a the last few years they have actually been releasing a handful of great vr games. 2. They offer a good service. The reason steam is the most popular game distribution online is because it's easy to use and their software dosent annoy you constantly like other game sellers. 3. They sell quality hardware. All of valves first party hardware is amazing. The steam deck, the index and the steam controller. All have been very innovative well prices and well supported.
The biggest reasons I use steam over any other storefront are: community, workshop and it doesn't destroy my computer, unlike the ""competition"" [epic games] So I basically agree with your first and second point, dunno about the third since I didnt really buy any of their products [Edit: I forgot to mention the amazing linux support valve gives to its own games and its platform!]
@@MILDMONSTER1234 no they did a couple of free vr games. All of which while either short or more mini game oriented they are fun and very well crafted. Alyx was really good it's probably only surpassed by boneworks.
@@daegnaxqelil2733 What do you mean by impose? You can literally not use it if you don't want, and it's just for the safety of your own account, why are you complaining?
you may laugh but i'm tired of every single game having a chat filter, feels really off putting to not be able to even curse (let alone insult someone lmao) am i the only one who thinks it's pretty weird how older games had no moderation and nobody gave a single one but now ITS SO TOXIC AND OMG MUH ANXIETY so every game has a chat that reminds me of something like club penguin lmao
Theres a reason why many gamers like myself love Valve and are extremly hesitant to cirique it. I am a Linux gamer and without Valve the amount of games wouldnt even be a fraction. Games usally arnnt made for Linux so tools like Proton are the reason Linux gaming is possible. On top of that many of Valves less sucsessful products are still amazing. The Steam Controller is my favorite controller and the Steam Link is ok for what its meant to do. Also Valves future hardware has created tons of speculation. Project Deckard could be the Index 2 many people have been waiting for.
@@blupandax7902 Linux gaming on Linux proper has been a thing for a long time however, until proton was created Linux gaming in the way people know it today didn't exist.
@@kittenzrulz2314 Android is Linux, there is no such thing as “Proper” Linux. Linux is nothing more than a kernel, the rest of the operating system is just extra meat on the bone. And besides, Proton is bad for Linux gaming because developers will no longer make any native versions of Linux games. What’s the point of spending money on native Linux coding when Valve has already done the hard work? Keep in mind Proton reduces the performance of games due to the CPU converting Windows system calls to a Linux system calls.
@@blupandax7902 Proton activity helps native Linux gaming. When proton was created more gamers began to use Linux. The influx of gamers from proton and the Steam Deck leads to greater market for Linux gamers. Because of this more developers are willing to make native Linux games.
@@kittenzrulz2314 Even if Linux gains wide acceptance, developers will not make native games for Linux, because they are only interested in saving money. If making games run natively on Linux takes time and money, they won’t bother doing it if Proton can do it for them. They won’t care about the performance decrease from Proton, they only look at the money and nothing else. Many game developers can’t even optimise for PC in general, let alone Linux specifically.
The difference is that they can turn in these items for real-life money. In Valve's case, their "in-game microtransactions" are more like simplified investments. And the only "game changing" items that cost a normal amount of money (like more than a dollar I'd say), are kill-counter/rarer versions of items that already cost less than 1 cent.
Valve has no issue about whatever offensive games get placed on steam because they are still privately held and as such are not compelled by the financial interests of their shareholders.
Tf2 unlockable weapons aren't only obtainable by random chance, they can be crafted, an also, people really don't open crates to get weapons because they're dirt cheap, people open crates to get shiny hats, that are in fact only cosmetic, and maybe a disadvantage, as you're glowing and people can see you from the other side of the map
@@Amber_Valentine I dont know every unusual effect, but I'm pretty sure none of them are that bright. Literally all they do ingame is make you easier to see. I wouldn't call that an advantage.
Also this video crosses with your "Dear Developers, Stop Listening to Pros" one. Because Valve essentially made eSports what it is right now with Dota 2 and The International.
TF2 got away with it because, they started doing crates before the current controversy. They basically helped popularise the idea of loot crates as monetization. However, they eventually changed the contents of the crates over the series to dropping cosmetics and skins. Nowadays, crates that drops only basic weapons (and the occasionnal hat/unusual) have been discontinued and are very rare on the market. Yes, it's gambling but it doesn't affect gameplay, so players don't really care. If anything, wearing a bright unusual hat only makes you more obvious to the ennemy heh.
The one mistake you made with the video imo is with TF2, weapons are not exclusively given to you by crates. Crates do give you weapons yes, but they are a version of the weapon that tracks kills and other feats you perform in game, or in terms of cases (introduced to tf2 in 2015 and are no different than CS:GO's cases) a specific weapon skin, or a skin that could count kills or have a particle effect on the barrel usually of stock weapons, this wasn't changed until jungle inferno where skin cases now give you a specific skin pattern you can turn into a small selection of guns. The regular weapons in the game you earn from drops, OR EARN FROM ACHIEVEMENTS, are the exact same ones as strange weapons except they just don't count kills, you can get these from the in game store, the starter bundles, or on community ran 3rd party websites for literally less than a penny due to how common they are. I'm not defending valve on this because their store prices are too expensive for something you can get for pocket change, but acting like crates that purely give cosmetic items and the occasional rare item such as an unusual (which again is a cosmetic item that is entirely optional to have and doesn't make you better or worse at the game) are something mandatory in order to play the game kindof seems like you're leaving out things to help your point.
yep came here to say this. sort of disengenious to say tf2 is pay to win, as you can buy 9 weapons for literally 3 pennies, and there are plenty of people who will give you weapons for free if you look hard enough. though in his defense theres no way to know about any of this if you just play tf2 itself and not engage in the community at all.
@@dialga236 yes but there is the starter bundle in the mann co store that gives you most of if not all the weapons in the game and unlocks premium in order to earn more backpack space for duplicate weapons
Also, he compares with payday2. Payday2 has lots of DLC's that if you bought them on release added up to a lot of money. If you already have paid hundreds of dollars for a game (that by the way, it's still not polished in a lot of ways) you expect to have all the content, and not to add an extra layer of "money grinding" on your playerbase. TF2 never had DLC's, has been free most of it's history, and weapons are avaliable just by playing anyway. Valve it's not perfect but they have been solid with their way of working.
people get mad at cd projekt red, and i get that for their botched day 1 game versions, but they are genuinely the only major PC storefront selling you games you can just share with friends. Most of us don't even have enough gamer friends in person that would take a blu ray disc burn of a modern game, or we don't want to setup a giant server games catalog sharing our games. It is something we would do once in a blue moon. GOG i think knows this, so they keep DRM free gaming alive.
Yep, I did agree with Tim that Steam need competition. So I started to buy a lot of games using GOG instead. Steam need competition, but not Epic with their aggressive, monopolistic behavior.
5:44 It's kinda funny how getting good at the super realistic military game is similar to how real soldiers train - repetitive drills of repeatedly practicing certain exercises to near perfection. Not saying if CS:GO's good or bad, just something funny I noticed.
Your point about CSGO Lotto is a bit unfair to Valve. Although I absoutely despise the blatant gambling mechanics of CSGO cases, the CSGO Lotto guys advertised the site using cheated odds to maximize the wow factor during their streams and drive people to the site while failing to mention they owned the fucking thing... It's three or four steps beyond what Valve does with cases
I honestly think the gambling thing is a bit overblown. Before lootboxes in games there were Pokemon/YuGiOh cards or other toys which where in blind bags, (effectively lootboxes), which were not just available but mainly advertised towards children but I never see anyone saying there is a problem with these cards.
Problem is, its basically those, But with a single click of a button. Instantaneous. And not limited like physical objects are. It only stops, when u stop or run out of money.
@@guidedexplosiveprojectileg9943 selling the same game over and over and over and over and over and over, its fucking worse than skyrim and gta 5, had pokemon been owned by valve we would have seen one released in 2010 beeing updated with new pokemon and maybe maps with native mod support for free
It's quite strange that this topic needs a video made on. I would point out though that getting unlockable weapons (the ones that affect gameplay) in TF2 is not that hard and they removed the hats that were needed to complete sets that also alter you character's abilities after getting bad feedback from community. But there are still some ridiculous restrictions for Free-to-Play accounts like inability to trade at all, limited backpack size and since recently they can't use neither text not voice chat and even can't use default voice commands.
Most weapons are gained through and awful random drop system with duplicate so it's very possible to play the game for hours in end and never get a good weapons, and alot achievement weapons like medic are gained through absurdly specific achievements
@@literallyvergil1686 Yeah, maybe I just don't remember what my first hours of playing TF2 were (also I actually bought the game so don't have a true f2p experience). But I seriously don't remember not having some unlockable gun in inventory to be a huge issue for me. Maybe it feels this way now because the are like 2 times more of them than when I was actively playing.
I wasn't a huge half life fan or anything, I was going down on metacritic all time and saw half life 2 -96. I played half life 1 a long time ago before that and I thought to give hl2 a try, and I had a blast. Its genuinely enjoyable, and the talking is brief and has soul and character so it is justified instead of soulless mass effect Andromeda cutscenes. Don't get why gen z is trying to cancel classics like combat evolved and half life and metal gear solid 2 and 3 without understanding the crux of the acclaim. Good video though
Yeah I mean I'm a Gen Z but even with the classics that I don't like I feel it's important to respect them for what they did for the whole industry like for example I'm not really a big Super Metroid guy and myself prefers the Prime series but even then you must respect Super for what it did for the entire Metroidvania genre like without Super we wouldn't have games like Cave Story or Axium Verge or Hollow Knight and many many other indie metroidvanias and it's kinda stupid to see young kids around my age and such try to say that the classics were never good to begin with which is obsurd
There's a quote of this which is "if you dont understand the past ur doomed to repeat it" Which I feel is important because honestly for me it's important to respect the influential games that help inspire so many of your favorite modern games today
look, i try and keep an open mind, and i know valve has a lot of issues, as I'm a tf2 player myself and have seen a lot of how they've treated tf2 but this video is just so full of factual issues and bad faith arguments why does everyone love valves games despite their issues? because you have to look at the game for its time, mario 64, and golden eye 64 are perfect examples, both amazing game in many many ways, but compare it to to days 3d platformers and shooters and they both look quite dated, missing the innovations that have come since their release you give an example of the CSGO gambling, and all i can say is, what can valve really do to stop it? not valves fault you give an example of tf2 being pay to win, but forget to mention that you can get all of the items for under $2 you give an example of tf2 and csgo (and the steam inventory in general) basically being NFT's and you are on some level right, but the problem with NFT's isnt that they do nothing, its that they 1. they are almost exclusively used to scam people and 2. are killing the planet because of how blockchain technology works your DRM argument is again sadly incomplete, you talk about always online, but steam doesn't even need you to be online, you can play most of its games entirely offline after you've purchased them through steam (also you use assassins creed liberation as an example, a game that isnt a valve game, its a ubisoft game, meanwhile you look at even valves oldest games and youll see the odd update here and there to keep the games working properly as they slowly break over time due to things like changes in how software runs, and hackers trying new ways to break break the game) you talk about steam going down forever and that would be a terrible time indeed but ultimately t i like the convivence of being able to buy games without leaving my house, i like the convenience of being able to buy old games without tracking down a seller on eBay or amazon, valves monopoly is almost entirely down to simply being the better product for consumers, im not saying valve shouldnt reduce their 30% cut in some situations but people are choosing steam because steam has so many more features, customizing profiles, text and voip, streaming, inviting people to play games with you, showcasing achievements, and backpacks, reviewing games, and the list goes on, meanwhile you look at other options on the market like the battle.net launcher for actiblizzard and epic store for epic games and its got not even 1/10th of that stuff paid mods... paid mods, there is too too much to say about paid mods, ill just sum it up quickly, the problem with paid mods is almost entirely on how little the mod creators are getting out of the situation, mod creators work hard to make those mods, and they should be able to choose to have the paid mods be premium content if they so choose, so the problem is almost entirely on 2 factors 1. bethesda and how much theyre taking a cut for these mods and 2. valves stringent 30% which i already mentioned previously and that's the end of the video let me just say a few things, in conclusion you've ballooned maybe 2-4 semi valid criticisms into a 20 minute rant video that is mostly full of hot air, there are valid problems with valve, but you barely touch any of them, and gloss over probably the biggest of them at the end, no i dont think valve should let nazi games onto the store in order to preserve freedom of speech, and no i dont think that sites like "glassdoor" should be entirely ignored because they lack the broader picture
@@IndianaJonesTDH at the end of the video you see a few games that are related to hitler and nazis and it gets brushed off as just freedom of speech but i disagree i dont think the promotion of hitler in any capacity is a good thing
@@vidc4313 Uhh did you read the comment? half of this dude's arguments are blatantly invalid and just wrong. Which is ironic considering he's criticizing the video's arguments. Now i totally agree with the his "Hitler" point. Freedom of speech does have its limits.
This doesn't get Valve off the hook, but I think it _does_ make a bigger difference than most realize: Valve is not a publicly-traded corporation, it's a privately held business. This does actually mean that it's not going to be _inevitably_ dragged down into the same pits of self-cannibalizing Hell that public corporations all wind up in. Valve can operate however it pleases, and it could, if it so wanted, choose to operate while only ever breaking even because the business is only held accountable to itself and its customers. On the other hand, publicly traded corporations wind up getting sucked into this downward spiral because they are legally obligated to act in the best interests of not their employees, not their customers, but their _investors._ This has a corrupting influence that severely hampers any business that publicly traded from simply _maintaining_ a good thing because the stock market has shifted heavily from stocks that pay dividends (profit sharing) to stocks that don't and instead reinvest that money into the company to chase "growth." This is how you'll sometimes see these big corporations crumble despite the fact that they are turning a profit. It gets complicated, but the main issues here is that corporations aren't beholden to their customers, they're beholden to an often-disinterested third party who really only gives a shit if their stocks become more valuable. This is why companies with good reputations who make a steady profit will suddenly start doing shit like trying to slash costs to the detriment of product quality, eroding customer loyalty, trying to expand into markets that made _zero_ sense and put huge financial strain on them, buying up smaller companies that are not competitors and may only be loosely related to their own business (if at all) and then immediately shutting everything down and firing almost everyone and just selling everything off or sitting on the empty property and unused parents, and introducing shit like subscription plans and planned obsolescence and intentionally crippling repairability. Their _customers_ don't want any of this. Their _employees_ also don't want any of this (most people I know like working for companies where they can be proud of what they make). It's the _investors_ who cause these things. This doesn't mean that Valve can't make shitty, anti-consumer decisions (and they absolutely have). But it does mean that they don't have the same gravitational pull into the black hole of "investors' interests" that publicly traded corporations always wind up succumbing to. And, honestly, this makes some of the bad decisions that Valve has made _even worse,_ because they _probably_ aren't operating under the same kinds of pressures. So, this doesn't explain away the shit things they've done (denying refunds, DRM, all the stuff you mentioned, etc...) However it _does_ help explain the positive things they have done, or, at least, the negative and greedy shit they _haven't_ done (yet.) It also means that Valve _is_ actually in a position to be what we want it to be simply because they have the financial, legal, and organizational freedom to basically structure their business however they want. I don't think that the Steam Deck or their other hardware would be _anywhere near_ as open and relatively repairable as it is, and I don't think they ever would have garnered such a reputation for being so open to their fans having fun with their IPs as they have been. if they were a publicly traded corporation (Honestly, the fact that Bethesda has continued to be so chill and supportive to modders and open with their IPs as they have been is nothing short of a fucking miracle considering their corporate ownership, and which I think may be one of the few things we can actually attribute to Todd Howard personally) The one thing we do not really know a whole lot about is Valve's finances. Just because Valve is privately held _doesn't_ actually mean that they _can't_ have investors. It just means that shares in the company aren't traded in a public stock market. They very well may have private investors who could have sunk large amounts of money into the company and these investors may hold a lot of sway over them. Since they are not publicly traded, we can't know this. The best guesses out there, however, seem to be that Valve is mostly owned by Gaben and Mike Harrington, and possibly a few other smaller stakeholders (ex or current employees, early backers, etc...) Is this shit boring? Yeah. But when you start looking into things you start to realize that these regulatory and organizational differences and quirks between companies go a _long_ way toward making sense of their decisions.
Half Life is praised for all the things you mentioned because they did them right. I also don't really think of Half-life as being slow or a cover based shooter. You can still Bunny Hop and essentially just have the same movement as Quake, just toned down a bit. And when I think of a cover based shooter, I think of shooters with stuff like aiming down iron sights, stamina bars, aiming around corners, and having mechanics that makes your character lock to low walls and other cover in order to take shots over the top and around the side of the cover/ barrier. Half Life is only "cover-based" in the sense that the _AI_ will duck behind cover and that you can strategically sneak up on them with grenades and explosive charges and use things like the snarks and trip mines to lay traps. Even that, though, is older than Half Life (Duke 3D has both laser trip mines and the pipe bombs, which function as both grenades and remote explosive charges.) It _does_ have scripted events, yes, but in Half Life you remain in control of Gordon for 99% of them and they're treated more as obstacles and puzzles than like cheap cutscenes designed to glue together disjointed levels/ missions.
You also conveniently failed to mention that through items like stickers in CSGO, a part of the revenue goes to the esports orgs the sticker belongs to during a tournament (a Major for example). The community-made skins (Dreams & Nightmares case-it was a $1M competition) also benefit the community - the person who made the skin, who's not a Valve employee, gets paid for it! The workshop is the most convenient way to interact with mods or download extra content. I don't see Bethesda or Riot or Activision doing this sort of thing.
E-Sports teams make pennies off the tournaments specifically. This is an open-secret. It's why so many of them get wrapped up in Skin Gambling. If you want to make money, don't do comp.
I mean modders that make community-made mods for Bethesda games get paid by selling them on the Creations storefront, so yes, you do indeed see Bethesda doing similar things.
I find Nintendo fanboys to being the worst of all, simply because they defend literally EVERYTHING, Nintendo do. Also Sony fanboys in second place, because they constantly bitch about exclusivity this and prices that.
like nearly everything in life, it isn't a black and white issue. Valve has had an immense impact on gaming, mostly for the better, but sometimes for worse. No individual person has singular motivations for doing something, let alone a multi billion dollar corporation.
not to mention its very difficult to balance "we need to make money no matter what even if we have to break some moral boundries because we are a corporation and have to please stockholders" while also keeping quality control up
Really overstating Valve's importance there. They run an online storefront and occasionally make video games. Microsoft, intel, Nvidia, AMD, Sony, Nintendo, literally any major publisher has had a significantly larger impact on gaming than valve. Mostly for the better, but sometimes for the worse. Yet they don't have delusional fanboys like valve does. Sure every company has some contingency of blind loyalists but usually they are outcasts. Whereas with valve, if you don't exhibit blind loyalty, YOU ARE the outcast.
@@nerdstrangler4804they do, all multi billion dollar gaming companies have dick riders, valve isnt the only thing that has delusional fanboys, hell i might argue nintendo has more delusional fanboys.
@@nerdstrangler4804 1 year late but Valve literally made the biggest digital storefront on PC, if we didn't have Steam, all games would be on different independent launchers/ stores. They made a revolutionary engine that you can use in any of your games and sell and you would only have to pay royalties to Havok which is out of their control. And they have made some of the best games ever made, completely changing genres like Half-Life or creating new ones entirely like L4D. Saying 'they run an online storefront and occasionally make video games' is like saying a nuke has the power to destroy a microwave, it's true, but grossly understating the impact
It's nice to see some criticism of Valve for a change. They are on a pedestal to me, like many others. I feel lucky they became the monopoly in the digital games market before the big corpos of the time. But without their competitors really pressuring them to raise the bar, they need all the criticism we can dish out.
Ah yes the capitalist isn't stopping you from giving them money, so let the abuse continue! Valve is too big to fail, collective action can't stop them. That should be scary... bloody hell I think it's terrifying.
The only level-head video on this topic. Also: - They hide the offensive words by default, the button to undo that doesn't work, you have to enter the regular expression of ".*" to actually unhide offensive words. Average user can not know that. - They hide off-topic review bombs. The issue is, they consider drm and censorship as "off topic". See the skullgirls june censorship patch that valve hid the reviews for. Technically with the ongoing Capcom enigma controversy they may hide those reviews as well. - General forums (not game hubs) are filled to the brim with their damage control team that praises valve 24/7. I do not have the source for that, but take 1 look at any thread and you'll see the same pattern of user raising the problem, then Tito Shivan coming in (prob undercover community manager) slamming the idea, then 3-4 alt accounts repeating the same. All while being very hostile to the user, almost to the point like it's the same dumb as a brick valve worker. - Game hub moderation is atrocious as it's done by game companies themselves, they'll ban you for whatever and valve very rarely steps in (I think I've seen them revoking moderation rights from dev over the forum but only 1 time)
I think the worst thing is leaving one of their most popular games tf2 for dead with bots and they haven’t released a big update for 5 years also you can buy individual weapons you want from the SCM and other markets
I don't think this is relevant to this specific subject though, since hes talking about the company and not their games. But otherwise, I agree with you about the update thing. [even though he does have a weird side-tangent mid-video about their games]
which one is eaasier pay few cent for an item which you need a 5$ steam wallet so you can use the steammarket feature or wait 30minute hopin for that one item to drop
@@Luksed12 having to spend 2.8 hours just to get all the weapon is not OK, considering they fucking random good luck getting dead ringer when all the drop is cloak n dagger
@@Amber_Valentine holy shit, just say you don't like tf2 and no you're wrong. There is a third option. You can get them for literal cents on the marketplace and not have to spend 5 dollars on the in game market. Also what kills me is that any tf2 vet knows that 9 times outta 10 stock is better then any of the drop weapons.
The main and only real issue i see is the lack of actual ownership of games, not being able to buy used copies or sell yours. Other DRM restrictions suck but when they're enforced by publishers, it's not like Valve can do much about it other than simply giving up on a massive portion of the market but when it comes to games that allow it, we should absolutely be able to *own* them.
Yeah I mean sure Steam still uses DRM but at least DRM is mostly up to the developers to implement to their games and there do exist DRM free Steam games like Doom but I mean Doom's source code is literally open sourced so that doesn't come as a surprise
What are you talking about? You get items in TF2 just by playing the game from random drops, trading with people, or just buying from the store. Unless you're dumb enough to open old crates to get items, for multiple years loot boxes haven't featured items anymore, just cosmetics. Getting items is laughably easy, unless what you want is a reskin like awp, which functions identically to snipers stock sniper riffle. You're objectively incorrect.
It could've been a good critique of Valve if all of the things you listed weren't third party issues i.e the DRM that would've happened regardless of Valve, the comparison of skins to NFTs and TF2 P2W crate thing were just pure cringe with zero research or thoughts put into it
I agree with you on the comparing skins to nfts thing, but I strongly disagree that DRM is only a third-party issue, since you need steam to not only download, but also play your steam games. I guess circunventing that restriction is extremely trivial though, so If Valve does indeed disappear, that wont be as big of an issue.. Other than the multiplayer servers for older, non-supported or developed games being completely destroyed
Most of the skins in crates are now skins/items made by the community in the workshop voted to be added by other players and the person who made the item gets money from it getting added too, its not just valve that makes profit
@@stealthysaucepan2016 NFTs has been sold overpriced mixed with crypto stuff and you just get a link to a jpg you bought which in most cases is ai generated from few presets, they have no market that has existed for years compared to skins
I realize this is ancient history for some people, but I remember when Steam first came out, and it was a buggy mess that was difficult to get working (I learned about port forwarding settings in home routers for the sake of getting Steam to work so I could play CS, and that was far from the only issue). Lots of people were furious with Valve at the time for requiring such a mess of an application to play their games, when it was a standard to just be able to perform an offline install of most PC games from disc at the time. It took quite a few years for Steam to mature into the beloved storefront we know today, and it wasn't even entirely Valve's doing. I remember when there were widespread assertions that PC gaming was dying because consoles were so much more lucrative, most PC games were bad console ports, and true modern PC games like Crysis were few and far between. It wasn't Valve that revived PC gaming, it was the rise of the modern ecosystem with things like Twitch streaming, screen recording, TH-cam, eSports, modding, indie gaming, Discord, Kickstarter, free game engines like Unity and Unreal, asset stores with lots of free content, etc. Console ecosystems fell behind, and PC gaming exploded due to the dynamism of the greater PC gaming community. Valve just happened to be the primary beneficiary of the revival of PC gaming, to the point that now people attribute its revival to the popularity of Steam, when really it was the other way around. That's not to say they haven't done great things for PC gaming, but I agree, I think it's odd that people seem to paint them as the saviors of PC gaming when most of the things that saved it really had little to do with Valve.
drm ruined gaming for me, I couldn't even get good internet back when games started to force steam since Australia was backwards with internet, my heart sunk every time I found a physical game I was interested in a brick and morter store having the steam requirement, I feel they killed physical releases too soon.
VALVE sort of got a "contributed enough" pass, but in long run, Steam is dystopian ticking bomb, nothing less. You don`t own anything on Steam, you rent stuff. But ppl who go bananas when "rent" is promoted by Ubisoft or EA, are completely silent, when Valve is pushing the same approach, just in a less "in your face" way. Their workshop is another dangerous thing, which facilitates paywalls greatly. Valve is business, and they are not the worst business. But consumers have to remember, that nothing is eternal. Policies change, owners change, and when they do change, you want to have strong foundation to balance things out. Simping for Valve is not gonna create said balance. Their DRM and desire to tie everything to steam - is dangerous enough already. It is just that ppl give them pass, or say "well, it is not the worst DRM in the world, we have seen worse DRM" ....
@@watchman0062 when you use Steam you don`t own your account and games. It is owned by Valve, you are just subscribed to their service. When you "buy" a game on Steam, legally speaking, you are NOT buying it really (not even a copy), you are buying license to access files (subscribing with one time fee basically). This is why if you die, your kids can`t inherit and access your account (at least not legally). Because you don`t really own anything there. And even Steam ToS is literally called "Steam Subscriber Agreement", to underline the fact, that you are merely subscribed to a service and you are in no way an owner.
With valve, they came out years ago when asked about what would happen if they shut down, and said they’d make their games detached from the service so they could still be played. Whether this is still true or not is up in the air, and this likely has problems with third party games with other launchers as well. But I do believe they want to do right in that regard. Their shit stinks like anyone else though. There just may be less of it
Nobody out there seriously thinks Valve is the good guy. It's just literally everyone else is completely incompetent, more greedy than Valve, or both. Is it really that much to ask for a store apps that has a functional and sane friend list, and a shopping cart, in year 201x? When every single FREE web programming tutorial out there teach one how to make those 2?
There are plenty of people in this comment section that are pretty blatantly calling valve the good guys, and I certainly wouldn’t say they’re less greedy than other companies when they helped to pioneer the mainstreaming of some of the worst aspects of modern gaming.
@@Ekatkid Yet Valve also pioneered some of the best features of modern gaming. Embracing modding through the Steam Workshop. Item trading with the Steam Trading system. Heavily customisable profiles that go well beyond many social media platforms. I'm not sure what aspects of modern gaming they pioneered that are bad (besides DRM) as overall they have been really good both with their games and Steam.
@@artemisDev Valve, to my knowledge, hasn't touched NFT's. In terms of loot boxes, while they did introduce the concept of loot boxes, they limited them to cosmetic only and items do not affect gameplay. Microtransactions where spurred on long-before Valve carried the trend but even taking into account microtransactions, I have no issue with microtransactions for cosmetic content that does not affect gameplay (especially as the Valve games that do include microtransactions are all multiplayer). FIFA pioneered the idea of loot boxes far more than Valve has.
I think you sold the creativity of CS:GO gameplay short. There is a lot of rote learning, but half of the game is game sense, making good plays, getting your team to coordinate, and creatively setting up situations that benefit you/your team. People with better game sense and strats stomp on people with better aim all the time. The elimination format forces you to think harder about your decisions, because death has more meaning than if you quickly respawn.
Some counterarguments about some very wrong points brought out: - The DRM on Steam is entirely optional. There's an extensive list of games that don't use any kind of DRM on Steam. You can easily back them up if you want to. Valve created Steam as a better way to deploy its games and updates, not making you download it from Major Geeks or some other shady download website way back then. The backlash at the time was mainly because its servers couldn't handle the traffic during the Half-Life 2 launch as people were eager to play it; - Valve only gets the 30% cut if you buy the key through Steam. If you buy the Steam key from a Humble Bundle, Green Man Gaming, Fanatical, etc, Valve doesn't get a dime and still has to cover all the costs involved. If you look at the percentage of reviews made from keys bought outside Steam, they can be significant (over 30% on RE: Village, for instance). If you think the Steam store doesn't add any value to you, while you still have to offer it on Steam, you can sell it on your website and take all the money from the purchases made there; - Besides being by far the best launcher/storefront/platform on PC, Steam/Valve became a monopoly on PC gaming by virtue of not giving up on the platform. In the 2000's most companies pretty much gave up on PC gaming. Microsoft created the complete mess that was Games for Windows Live and EPIC very publicly declared that PC gaming was dead while they focused on the console space. A monopoly by itself is not illegal (otherwise you never would have new markets being formed), the problem is when the company uses monopolist tactics to obtain or maintain said monopoly and that's definitely not the case with Valve, but if Valve tried to use the same tactic of paying for exclusive games (like Epic is doing), they could be sued because they have a dominant market share on PC gaming; - I don't see any problem with the existence of paid mods. If you created something and wish to be paid for it, you're completely entitled to it. The problem was that some asshats tried to abuse the system to monetize stuff that they didn't make. The idea wasn't bad - the execution that could have been better; - About "Valve stopped making games - Now they just make money". Only people that have no grasp of game development say something like that. Creating games can take a long time and "The Final Hours of Half-Life Alyx" recently showed just how many different versions of that project were scrapped since the release of Episode 2. Money only removes the time urgency to release products. - Pretty much everything around TF2 was just wrong, but too many people already mentioned it here in the comments; - The loot boxes made the transition to free-2-play possible. It's cosmetic. If you don't like it you don't have to pay for it. I play Counter-Strike for years and have never paid a dollar for skins/whatnot. To not say that Valve is perfect, their biggest weakness is in the communication department, and that includes their refusal to say what games they're working on and the fact that they let so many misconceptions about them persist without setting the record straight. Now if I would talk about the countless positives that Valve brought to the PC gaming space, it would take 10 times the space of what I already have written, but I will just leave it at this: Steam transformed an inveterate pirate from a third world country like me into a legal and proud owner of over 2000 games thanks to, among other things, their superior service and regional pricing.
"- I don't see any problem with the existence of paid mods. If you created something and wish to be paid for it, you're completely entitled to it. The problem was that some asshats tried to abuse the system to monetize stuff that they didn't make. The idea wasn't bad - the execution that could have been better;" Exactly, paid mods in itself aren't the issue itself and are even mostly accepted in some communities. Assetto Corsas community would be pretty dead without companies like RSS, VRC or URD that produce high-quality mods and Content manager and CSP enabling modern features. The bad part was how Bethesda wanted to profit from mods despite profiting from the community already and how nobody checked the quality or the origin of mods. But for angry gamers it is just easier to go with the " paid mods bad, people should give me everything for free" mentality.
I agree with everything you've said here, but I also have your answer for you: Why do people forgive Valve but no one else? More or less, because Valve don't nickel and dime you. They're more or less generous. Almost every attempt at monetisation makes the "non-money" game worse (grind etc), but with Valve, the non-money game is still fun. Yes, Valve can remove all your games at any point. Ubisoft actually did this, but Valve haven't. You don't have to rebuy stuff with Steam, no PS5 upgrade tax etc. So, roughly, people feel safe that Valve isn't going to screw them, whereas other companies go very hard on squeezing their customers from the get-go. People don't leave because they feel safe, not because they're trapped.
@@Amber_Valentine I play TF2 from time to time, and have never engaged the money market. I'm honestly not even sure where I can buy stuff, but I assume you just buy hats?
@@Amber_Valentine I've been F2P for three years until I finally paid for something. You can absolutely play TF2 for completely free, there is no leveling system or anything unless you count the useless medal level at the menu, cosmetics don't affect the gameplay at all (at one point they did but Valve removed it after player outrage), all of the weapons are given by either random drops or achievements, and the backpack limitation is solved by the free stocking you get during Christmas which includes a backpack expander. There has been people that have been F2P for much longer than that and they play better than most people. In fact, the stock weapons are fantastic, I use stock reskins on my loadout just to give it a little flair but it's just the same weapons that Valve has already given to you.
@@Amber_Valentine didn't pay a dime except for the Orange Box. Still fun. Game is not p2w like the video pointed out. In fact it's straight up lies since paying money only gives you skins and cosmetics ability without affecting the main gameplay.
I've played counter strike for like 15 years and never felt like I needed to spend money to play the game or enjoy it. Skins always felt to me a bit like decorating your bedroom more than anything else. Yea you can decorate your bedroom to be a million dollars worth but you can also do that with different ways for much more cheap. Besides, you don't even need to decorate your bedroom to sleep in it.
It did have critism. From entitled pricks. Because that’s the only kind of people interested in criticizing it. The epic game store is open if you’re so desperate for muh competitors and muh monopoly
Correction at 18:25 you can actually publish a game and have a bitcoin miner included. Most of the cheap games such as the ones where you can farm achievements almost all of them have a miner in them.
I don’t know about the gambling stuff since I don’t partake, but I always liked the idea of free markets in games. Old school runescape had followed supply and demand and prices were adjusted accordingly. IDK but it was fun and I always wanted to see games try that model again. There were problems but it never bothered me. In fact, it taught me a lot as a kid on how to deal with scams. I don’t play cs go so idk how it works, but I feel as if this system that uses markets and free trade has potential.
@Arthur Brown You can totally buy the items directly. You can buy them off of the store itself or you can buy them from one of the community sites or you can buy them from the community marketplace.
@Arthur Brown As far as companies go, valve has been pretty beneficial to gaming as a whole on PC. For Christ's sake before steam, PC gaming was about to be declared by many devs dead due to the rampant piracy. Valve single-handedly curbed piracy, and they didn't even do it with a ton of DRM bullshit, the DRM exists more for the Devs convenience and so they can say they did try and prevent it. They did it based on the service itself and offering something pirates can't. That's not to say valve didn't do harm, The modern free to play model, microtransactions, and the loot box/RNG based loot crazes are all both thanks to them. But unlike most modern companies, they didn't take those concepts too far, almost all of it has either been obtainable in game by themselves or cosmetic and available in either their storefront or via community marketplaces. A good chunk of them being from the first two. Valve was nowhere near the 1st to use the licensing model for games. EA was doing it back when you bought discs. You were granted a license to the game and in some cases that was actually beneficial as it meant EA would replace the disc if it ever got damaged. Since your licensed, the game hadn't been revoked. Therefore you were entitled with a copy of the disc to play the game.
Valve hasn't done a single bad thing to me, only been good to me. Companies (usually) do not give a single flying fuck about us, why should we care about them?
Back in the days, valve was our video game savior. Now, the new valve just insulted us by saying there will be a major update to tf2. But replace it with holiday sized update.
I think the reason Valve is always seen as different is because of the few stances they do take that people like. For instance they work on a lot of genuinely positive Steam features like Remote play, Lots of controller support options, Steam os etc which distracts people from how predatory their practices are. The darkest part about this is everyone knows about CSGO gambling or the fact that all the games on steam technically have an end license agreement. Everyone just sees these bad signs as "A thing that will never effect me! I am not the idiot being scammed I got my TF2 items for 7$ therefore it is totally fine someone elses life gets ruined! I also know all the games I PERSONALLY PLAY will never be taken away from me when I care so who cares about the long term implications." Admittedly in some ways I am in that boat too, but I still greatly criticize Valve for these scams and schemes... that and the brain chip thing I am surprised you never mentioned that what the hell Valve.
The big thing valve has going for it is that it's a private company. There's a lot of corporate scummy BS that valve doesn't do because they aren't beholden to shareholders. They're a comparatively small company that found a money printer, and has used it to fuck around since then. Some stuff they do is good because they can afford it, some stuff is pretty shit, plenty of stuff is in the middle.
@@monty58 correction it is still beholden to share holders but those shareholders are basically strapped with the devs and the devs have a bomb but so do the shareholders so it’s a distribution of power but the shareholders still have more influence
@@augustuslunasol10thapostle don't forget the part where the biggest shareholder is a madman who wants to stick a computer in his brain because he can't type fast enough to code all the nutjob ideas he has, and keeps getting distracted by wierd ass niche hardware. And don't forget the money printer. That's a big part of it all.
Valve isn't as much a closed book as many others.are They also are pretty much gaming only, and leas partisan as a result in platforms It is in their benefit to better linux gaming and not be in the clutches of the microsofts and sonies of this world Their business model kind of is more consumer-friendly and plaform agnostic by necessity They're in the business of selling games, more than developing rhese days, certainly not a games divisiion of a bigger hardware brand They don't incentivize devs like epic does either, that can as a result cam hold higher quaility stamdards by really backing things with their own money Different approach They are more than welcome as a baseline for others to compete with Thats the way i see it
I see valve as passionate. Because the people hired there are passionate, such as the team hired to create Half Life Alyx. Valve does everything right… most of the time if we forget about artefact. I mean, most of their multiplayer games still relevant today are free aren’t really pay to win, or as prevalent as other games. However I do get the point that Valve isn’t really humble. But I would be lying that it isn’t my most loved one.
I'm actually in favour of the idea of paid mods, I'll gladly pay for high quality mods from genuinely lovely and talented modders. It's just the implementation was the worst possible outcome with mod theft, trash peddling and scams, the worst part being that the modder got none of the money until they hit at least $100 in sales and even then they only got a 25% cut despite putting in all of the legwork.
Personally, as a BIG fan of Valve's games (except Csgo, for pretty much the same reasons you stated you didn't like it), I'd just have to agree with you on most things. After they introduced items on their multiplayer games and started dominating the electronic purchasing of games, it was over. It makes a lot of sense that many key employees that worked on their most acclaimed titles (programming staff, artists, writers etc.) have since left the company.
15:15 the big difference here is that steam still allow you to sell steam keys outside of steam if you want to. so you can still sell keys on your website without steam getting a cut
"Whenever I see my friends play it, [CS:GO] they'll always log off angry." I remember hitting MGE, realizing this, and quitting. It's a shame because the gunplay is actually pretty satisfying once you're good with it, with autos it feels like a matter of trying to control a predictable bullet hose and with semi-autos it's always stupidly satisfying to nail difficult headshots. All the stuff stapled on top however, like ranking being a god awful grind where you can straight up get trapped in some brackets because you get bad luck with team mates that just got the game, casual being awful, hax, next to no emphasis on community servers/content officially, more or less requiring a team to queue with to get a decent rank, and so on, just totally kills the experience. I can still boot up 1.6 and CS:S and have a great time, but CS:GO doesn't have the same feel unless I go in not giving a shit about my rank. You're 100% on point about getting better though, it ends up being a matter of memorization and drilling specific nades into your head as opposed to getting better at dynamically reacting to a situation, that's why most people only play on a small selection of maps they know well, which is something I've never really liked as I've always had the most fun trying to estimate where I should be throwing things to get them in the right spot. Also, fuck skins, they add nothing to the game and make everything look like a cartoony mess, even more so with the new operator skins.
Valve stopped being a dev long time ago, they're just a store and a client now, I still like Gabe because of the steam sale that made my childhood awesome.
18:25 While they seemingly allow all the low-effort porn games... They have weird double standard against Japanese games, and it seems to affect ONLY Japanese games. Look at how Little Witch Nobeta (Taiwanese game) is up despite the obvious connotations... While non-porn Japanese VNs with adult characters have been rejected for having characters that are in school??? The creator of Seventh Lair shared about his experience how the game was completely blocked by Valve based on... The intro movie having 0.5 second of old public domain painting with barely registerable nudity.
You are right, the fact that it has taken them this long and still haven't released Ricochet 2 shows just how far Valve has sunk. They took their greatest property and just forgot about it. Imagine how much better the gaming landscape would be if it was inspired by Ricochet 2 instead of TF2 and CSGO.
everyone talks about how they cant count to three when with ricochet they can’t even count to two! really shows the degradation of valve as a company. for shame.
@@DangerNoodlez144 To be fair, I thought the same thing at first. But the amazing level of intricacies and innovative mechanics packed into such a small package should have made it the defining game of a decade. Ricochet is truly one of the games ever made.
well researched and insightful and articulate. I like that you don't sound like you're reading off a script, that's probably the hardest part about youtube.
A game being on steam used to mean something, because valve didn't really allow sub-par products on there, it was an assurance of some sort of quality control. Of course limiting the amount of titles available is bad for profits. Now there is way too much shit to sift through on steam, which is not just bad for the consumer, but also bad for the developers, steam used to be marketing in and of itself. Being on the "recently released" page of steam brought traffic and sales for days if not weeks. Now you are lucky to stay on there for 45 minutes under the avalanche of shovelware.
The Payday 2 Microtransaction Drama was not about adding them in. Before the announcement they invited popular Payday 2 Content Creators to ask them about them and many like them. Until they mentioned the Skins in Payday 2 can also improve the stats of the weapons. Every creator said no to the idea but these Stat Boosts came into the game nonetheless. As a player I don't know the whole picture, but they steadily removed parts of the whole fiasko after they terminated their contracted with 505 Games, sooo maybe OVERKILL/Starbreeze was not at fault here, but maybe it was former CEO (and a** Bo Andersson). We don't and probably won't ever know.
The TF2 point clearly shows that you either hadn't played enough of TF2 or don't know anything about the community. I have never seen anyone who would buy a crate to get a WEAPON. (By this I mean a different weapon not an unusual but that is just a cosmetic effect.) The stock loadout is in most cases the best one you can run and many other weapons are downgrades unless you play a very specific style. And even if you wanted to buy the weapons, you can get pretty much anything under 0,10E (And even that is overpricing). But again, why would you do that if the stock one is just fine and you get new weapons by playing anyway. Crates are nowadays just used for cosmetic items. Also the Epic Games Store comparison isn't good either becuase it's not even a proper competitor. It's lacking many features, generally slower at downloading and the only good thing about it are the free games. That's pretty much why anyone bothers to boot it up.
It's a simple case where the service they provide to gamers is unmatched to others who've attempted the same business practices. The community is more accepting of new ideas if they feel like they are involved with the process. The steam marketplace is a good example of letting gamers use their in game achievements to earn back some credit to get more games. Get trading cards, having meta games and collectibles. They speak to what people like and want. Companies like EA or Bethesda don't get away with it because what they are offering simply sucks. The game either launches in a horrible state or they offer paid DLC that is a complete joke to what modders did for free AND sometimes they might just try to shut down a project they don't like.
Fck Valve, and fck Steam! Forever. I was already developing doubts about valve after seeing some job posting from them for positions to help develop the worlds greatest unbreakable copy protection anti-piracy DRM system, but I was still looking forward to Half Life 2. Then when HL2 came out together with the initial Steam rollout, my concerns where proven to be well founded. I bought HL2 on DVD, but after installing it, I had to create a steam account and go online to 'decrypt' the installation. It took 10 minutes to install from the 2 DVDs, but then it took 24 hours to decrypt. So when it finally finished decrypting the next day, I played for a bit and was mildly disappointed with the game, which honestly wasn't surprising considering the hype and my unavoidably inflated expectations. Then I made the critical mistake of clicking on one of the game info PDF files the were added to the start menu with the installation. I absolutely did not click uninstall, but even if I had, uninstallers typical have an interface which presents an opportunity to cancel uninstallation (I don't think that installer even added an 'uninstall' shortcut to start anyway). Clicking that PDF file resulted in the game immediately and completely uninstalling itself. Well suffice it to say, I was not not going to accept not actually owning the game I had just bought, and instead having it be tied this infernal online DRM system with an unforeseeable service lifespan, which treated paying customers to a substantially worse experience than pirates. I went and downloaded a permanent solution, which was available through alternative channels the day after the game's release... and involved none of the absurd hoop jumping valve were requiring from their paying customers. I am sure that millions of piracy enthusiasts where born the day Half Life 2 was released and Steam came online. Until then, for people who could afford to buy games, piracy was not even remotely worth the hassle and risks involved. That all changed with the advent of Steam. I still don't pirate games, but before HL2, I used to spend a couple hundred bucks on games almost every month. After HL2, I became extremely wary of anti-consumer practices and invasive DRM schemes causing me to drastically reduce the number of games I bought down to a couple hundred bucks every six months or so. Many others, simply turned to piracy, stopped buying games entirely, and never looked back. I've never bought anything from Valve or through Steam since. If you're an indie dev, please make your games available outside of steam, or I, and many others like me, will never play them. I mostly buy games from GoG, Ebay, or directly from publishers/developers when they are available that way. Never from steam. Valve actually got *a lot* more backlash than most people realize. But most of those people who were really pissed aren't raging about it, but rather just quietly never interfacing with Steam period, so we don't generally have too much to say about it. Many turned to piracy too, which they generally keep quiet about for obvious reasons. Fck Valve and fck Steam - that sht is fuggin cancer. To think... I bought 4 copies of the original Half Life, just so I could have the extra CD keys to loan out to friends for playing various multiplayer HL1 mods, most of whom would eventually buy the game for themselves allowing me to bring others online with those spare keys. There was nothing wrong with the simple CD key copy protection scheme of Half Life 1. Sure lots of people pirated HL1, but they were mostly people who wouldn't or couldn't have bought the game anyway, and they mostly couldn't play online with cracked versions (which was a huge part of the HL1 modding scene, which in turn was a huge part of HL1's success). I mean I'm sure sometimes people where able to generate keys that worked online briefly, but I think they'd generally get blacklisted by Valve pretty quickly. It's not like Steam eliminated the pirates anyway, in fact, quite the opposite. It created vastly more pirates, by forcing players, who could *and would* have bought games, over to piracy, because it treated (and continues to treat) paying customers to a markedly worse experience than pirates. I'm happy to see more people waking up to the concerning anti-consumer trends which have begun to increasing plague ever more industries. It is starting to get pretty bad, and people are starting to realize, and maybe we can begin to starting turning this tide of fundamentally anti-social trends.
"I have a really good PR Team" -Gaben (Also on the paid mods, Mojang introduced resource packs for the Xbox and Bedrock but it never got backlash for something that was free for PC)
Thanks for addressing this as gambling. its a casino for kids basically. And I think there were much more interactivity in sin, blood, duke nukem. I am not really sure if half life 1 was popular at all. Its hl2 that became popular.
I've distanced myself from Valve and Steam. After being mistreated and abused by their moderators this week and dealing with the abysmal support over the years, I've come to the conclusion that Valve only cares about the money moreover the customers nowadays. They got so big they don't have to care anymore because they have the monopoly in the industry. Fans constantly praising them and flocking to Steam with the herd mentality just makes matters worse as it only enables Valve to get more and more careless. The community is also beyond toxic and I have no interest in that atmosphere. When it comes to Valve and Steam, people treat Steam the same as the console wars that are still going to this day. I'm sick of the whole scene. So, I've moved onto other platforms and stores. Valve no longer has my business.
in tf2 you can get a lot of items for free if you go to comunity server and the section "free items" and when you log into those servers and type the correct command in chat you will get all the achivement items for free you dont have to open useless crates
I see and respect your points. I think the reason Valve can and does get away with stuff that others are so heavily scrutinized for is because of the goodwill and good products and services they provide, as well as how less egregious it is comparatively. Still doesn't excuse a lot of things but it's not seen as awful as other companies doing the same thing because it isn't as awful as other companies doing the same thing. They do it just enough that they can get away with it while not sticking out because there are other publishers doing it far far worse, and we focus on the bigger of the two. It's almost like we "need" to focus on the larger hole in the ship than the smaller ones. And I think that's true, to an extent, but they still need addressing regardless. They've also been very pro community which adds more goodwill. Should they be held accountable for crap they do? Yes. Should you criticize? Absolutely. Can you do so while still loving them as a company? Of course. It's through that love that we should be critical and hold them to the standard they originally set for themselves because we want them to stay top dog. A lot of folks don't realize you can criticize without hating, which is dumb. My biggest problem is DRM, but I already have so much on Steam and I don't want to use GOG because of what Steam provides; Their launcher has so many things that I enjoy including a community I like being in that it's hard to move away. And I think that's the big crux of the issue, like I said earlier and like you said, they make really good products: games, services and the storefront/launcher. It's convenient and easy. And for all that I'll always be a strong fan, just not one to turn a blind eye.
I miss when Valve was more or less an apolitical company. It seems like their main concern nowadays is policing the forums against wrongthink and hosting pride themed sales.
I agree people need to stop giving companies a pass on shitty behavior regardless of the good things they've done in the past. It would be better for gaming as a whole.
Huge fan of how much they have brought pc gaming mainstream, i served in the military and handhelds were the only way possible i could play games so i’m a huge advocate. That being said, People fanboy for valve now but if they terminate your 2000+ game account as they get more and more differing and wild employees in that is your fault for all eggs in one basket. Ford made some of the biggest innovations in automotive technology, only to go from being the biggest help to a terrible monstrosity with a subpar product at best in todays day and age. Just something to think about when your product is even more endanger being not physical, you don’t own any of that digital marketplace!!!! Its all rights usage paid for only.
I agree with the video's general premise but you make mistakes. For Half Life 1: - it isnt too different to Unreal 1 which you show. Unreal 1 also had scripted sequences. Though Half Life 1 has a more interactable world and more scripted sequences, Unreal 1 does exceed it in many other ways like combat or arguably AI and level design. - Half Life 1 did on rails sequences differently to how modern games do them. You CAN move and you do HAVE the ability to do things differently in HL1. - Half Life 1 features VERY fast movement. It is NOTHING like the slower paced more modern shooters. It is an arcade FPS at heart. In some ways its FASTER than DOOM 2016 even. For Half Life 2 - The way it does cutscenes has issues but it is not worse than how most other games do it since you can do things while listening to the NPCs. I agree it deserves critique, but it is a better way to handle things. For DRM: - Valve DID NOT introduce DRM to PC Gaming. I can literally take out my Bulgarian 2002 game - Celtic Kings. It has a "Insert Disc to play" type of DRM. This is DRM. DRM has existed before Valve were a company. I agree with critiquing Steam having DRM (even if its weak). But that part is just false. For Steam: - The 30% cut for Valve is something to critique, but the REASON it won over is because its better than the 45-60% cut physical retailers got at the time. Selling a 50 USD PC game in 2001 meant that the dev/publisher got back only around 25 USD. With Steam that is now 35. A big increase. - GOG are still charging 30 percent. Steam NO LONGER charge just 30. Now it has tiers and some tiers pay less than 30%. I still dont like it, but it is no longer 30%. The rest I find fair or cant critique right now.
I'm only going to do the mid video Patreon plug this once. I'm not going to start pushing it every video. Here is the link: www.patreon.com/ShreddedNerd
I'm also trying out a new editor for this video, so let me know your thoughts.
New editor is great 🤝
Great new editor! (even though I never saw any old videos)
Though I mainly listen to your videos in the background which luckily is quite enjoyable, I can appreciate your editors flow and style. It’s smooth, appropriate and humorous.
By
they made another "sin": a stupid new version of styeam guard, where we must find a code to go to steam, with password. Greeeeaaaaaat
Valve is one of the most profitable companies on earth, yet somehow everyone seems to think of them as some kind of valiant, scrappy hacker Davids facing off against the corporate Goliaths of the world.
It's the same with Nintendo. These two companies are basically what happens when brand loyalty turns into outright cultism.
@@boyishdude1234 but as it stands they’re helping the industry. The industry is a lot better with them in. Without them Epic is the defacto computer game store which isn’t good. Plus they basically let anyone publish on their platform which is great too. Also releasing a console and supporting right to repair is good.
@@marcar9marcar972 This has nothing to do with what I said.
And they're not really helping the industry when it's coming at the expense of customers and even the industry itself. DRMs in particular are something that need to go, and they don't really work anyway. Someone who is determined to crack a DRM-protected game will, regardless of how much time it takes. You're just decreasing performance and taking control away from the customer just to delay the inevitable, and that objectively isn't worth it. Property rights should always take precedence over distribution rights.
@@boyishdude1234 well at least Nintendo still makes games. They suck though.
@@123abcdancewithme lol that’s sad. I hate Nintendo consoles, they are just gimmick machines that can barely run games. Even old games struggle.
for tf2,it's hard to go wrong with the stock loadouts, so that's probably why
and id really agree with the message, im not going to lie and say valve is not a favorite of mine, they really are (im probably the kind that would be inclined top let valve get away with alot, especially as a linux user), but even if you love what a company does to death, you have to be able to criticize it, otherwise you end up like nintendo guys, treated like slaves.
As a linux user I completely agree. I overlook their scummy decisions because they basically catapulted linux into being a viable gaming OS. Hopefully since Valve has no obligations to any stock holders they will not go the way of Nintendo.
@@perfishfan i think them getting as bad as someone like nintendo is really slim, but it's never zero and it can always get much worse.
you can unlock the weapons via achievements still right?
Poor nintendonites are pushed to emulation
you can still unlock the weapons via achievements and playing the game. Its similar to saying Apex legends technically pay2win because you have the possibility of paying to unlock the characters through bundles and stuff, while still being able to unlock them for free by simply playing the game.
even then though, i still think its scummy to provide really obviously shitty choices to people, even if most consumers are smart enough to not buy the tf2 starter bundle for the weapons that are worth half a scrap each.
Just one thing I wanna point out. The 30% cut from devs was an industry standard for a long ass time and EGS were the first(I think) that reduced it to facilitate their engine's usage(unreal engine). Then microsoft is the only other big player in the industry that does this as well. Sony, valve, nintendo pretty much take 30% cut. While it sucks for smaller studios it's valve is certainly not the only one to do it
I once read that, in the context of publishers, the cuts make absolutely no difference for the actual developers, unless they are smaller self published studios. They likely get a set wage regardless of how well a game does, so Epic Games offering larger cuts was often seen just an attempt to lure in larger publishers for exclusives, with the developers themselves being largely unaffected.
@@jedwell9531 I honestly do not care about how much the bigger publishers make. But the 12% cut is literally a boon for indie studios and publishers. Besides this move has also put pressure of steam, microsoft and other store fronts to help indie studios however they can. Which resulted in steamfest which is incredible for any indie studio that gets the attention.
@@devanandham6609 thats the thing we need epic no matter how much of a wet noodle to keep the thing we like great
Thank you somebody brought this up
@@augustuslunasol10thapostle the issue with Epic / EGS right now is that it's good for the devs / publishers, not that good for the consumers due to the lackluster features
Don't get me wrong i support the move to give smaller indie developers what they deserve, just not when it's at the detriment of the actual end user / consumer
I really appreciate Valve’s promotion of Linux gaming and their mod support.
but still no mod support for CSGO?
@@daegnaxqelil2733 there is mod support for csgo few years already
Agree. Valve went out of their way to make Linux a viable option for gamers and game devs, by releasing Linux native versions of their own games and apps, and Proton.
Wine ia notoriously difficult to install and set-up, Proton was a total game changer as don't require any technical background to install it and make it work.
@Eviscerate You are okay with monopolies as long as they support Linux? So if any massive oil company monopolised the market and raised oil prices due to lack of competition, you would be okay with it as long as they support Linux by making their employees use PCs with Ubuntu? Wow, you Linux fans are unbelievable.
Linux gaming has been popular for a long time. Android is a Linux based OS, and there are plenty of games for it.
the reason people praise valve is simple: they make good products and provide good services, people only start bringing attention to the companies contrvercies when they fail to make good products/services
initiate_generic_comment_edit-C199:
:finish edit
exactly
Another example is Apple especially under Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs would kinda just isolate and gaslight employees to push them to do better.
@@appropriate-channelname3049 what do you mean by isolate and gaslight employees?
@@Narko_Marko Imagine you spend years designing this incredible device, you show it to Steve Jobs, and instead of praising your work, he just throws it in an aquarium and says "not small enough" because there were air bubbles.
@@mxzaiw2744 ok, and?
they probably get paid for all the work that has gone into that device.
Its their job to make it better.
Better to have ur boss tell u its not good enough than to release it and company loses money as well as you.
Valve hasn't released major original IP in over 10 years now, it's fair to say they're not primarily a game developer at this point, the majority of their income is through publishing.
I'm not trying to defend Valve or anything, I just want some clarification due to curiosity. What about in regards to the development of technologies like the Steam Deck (which has become a very popular device) or managing the online store? Would those be beyond publishing?
Forgive me, I am not well versed with certain kinds of business practices.
@@cadethumann8605 Valve is less orientated towards game production and more towards software and hardware like you said. Valve makes insane amounts of money from passive sources, such as the Steam store and micro transactions in their most popular titles such as Counter Strike, TF2 and Dota. Valve has no pressure to try to pump out titles because of that. Also, from what I know, Valve is run in a very laid back manner. Employees kind of just work on whatever project they feel passionate about at the time rather than being forced to and this has resulted in some of the best games and products to ever enter the market. The games they realsed a decade ago are still indusrty standards and put newer AAA releases to shame.
So yeah, it is easy to look at the situation and see that Valve is not a big game maker right now sans Half Life: Alyx being their most recent title, which really just seemed like them going nuts with VR and once again pushing the industry forward.
@@der_shingen8548 I understand. TBH, I don't always keep up to date about the politics behind developing stuff.
Regardless, would you say that Valve is more ethical with its business practices than other game companies like Nintendo and Sony (at least in some ways)? So far, I've seen less controversies surrounding than than the big three (though Microsoft is somewhat connected to Valve as they both involve computers). They even seem to try to be transparent as possible like sharing much info of the Steam Deck pre-release (including a arguably literal example where they did a tear down and discuss about what to do with broken parts). Though, if there's one thing I wish they'd take a cue from the Nintendo e-Shop, it would be the ability to use points received from purchases as discounts for other games (as opposed to profile or message board cosmetics). What's your take of their business ethics, good sir/miss?
No, it's not fair to say that. They don't stop being a game development studio just because they haven't released a new IP in a while. We just had HLAlyx a few years ago and CS2 is coming out eventually, with at least one or two more games in the pipeline per reporting by some passionate gamer.
Or steam.
I don't think you understand the scripted element of half life. What makes people enjoy it so much is how they work it into the world seamlessly like it's any other gameplay element.
But it ruins replayability
@@limabarreto911 Not every game needs to be replayable. Half-Life isn't a perfect series but they represent some great experiences and innovations that stand out even today.
are you trying to say other game isnt seamless?
Its also the fact that what made it special is the fact that your being led. Games nowadays are linear for the sake of it, but half life was linear to demonstrate to the player that sense of being "controlled" by something greater
@@gjgaming2133 I agree there are too many games trying to do this without a good reason.
in TF2, you can get the game altering items just by playing, each hour or so you have a chance to get a random item.
also, you can just ask people for them, theyre literally worthless since 2 weapons of the same kind can be made into 1 scrap, which is 1/3rd of a reclaimed metal, which is 1/3rd of a refined metal, which is worth less than 3 pennies.
what i will say, though, is that your default backpack size is too small to hold one weapon of each kind.
@Big Chungus Plays Game that's what happens when you don't play games you talk about
The TF2 Crates section really took me out of the video.
I literally bought each weapon I didn't have for a penny each! It was less than a dollar!
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you don't know about trading and therefore use the Mann Co. Store. Valve made a package for each class that guarantees each unique weapon! Obviously they don't give you the reskins, but that's likely because of contracts long past.
Sure! Cosmetics (HATS!) used to give bonuses, but they quickly stopped that because it WAS gambling at that point!
Scrap.tf also exists
You can literally get all the guns in the game and still have some refined left for just 5 dollars by buying a key and going on scrap.tf
@@Gamerbro302 you say that as if the random kiddies who just installed TF2 on their dad's work laptop can be reasonably expected to know this. valve deliberately exploits this by selling overpriced weapons on the mann co store and the like
Regarding the microtransaction system, you forget one aspect of it, it allowed valve to justify developing free content for their games, TF2, Dota 2 and CSGO all got tons of support post launch almost completely free, there were no map packs, everyone got access to more or less the same content
But the story changes when they still make money off microtransactions on a game they aren't making any content for.
@@ShreddedNerd yes when it comes to TF2 is a bit slimy
Then again it got like 10 years of updates
@@ShreddedNerd True but Valve come from a bit of a different age where they like to keep their classic games classic, they weren’t built for this mindset of constant updates to games as they wanted to make fun party deathmatch games. I’m not a big valve fanboy, Ive never even played a counter strike game and I literally just finished Half Life 1 for the first time and thought it aged like milk in a few places.
But they easily could’ve added new classes to TF2 and stuff by now, went the R6S route, etc. but Valve wants their “classics” to stay mostly true to what they were. Yeah they add new content but nothing that vastly changes the core game, balancing etc. all the time.
(I get it, saying Valve is better than Ubisoft is like saying a priest is better than the taliban, but still)
They’re also very strict when it comes to console ports of their games which can be pretty admirable, but also pretty annoying. There’s very few Valve console ports that are god awful (minus the HL2 Xbox port!!!)
Left 4 Dead 2’s DLCs were free on PC, and Valve TRIED to make them free on console but Microsoft insisted they be paid updates. The survival update for L4D1 was only free because Valve had lengthy convos with Microsoft convincing them that it should be free.
Not only was Orange Box an incredible deal of 3 brand new games and 2 old ones for $60, Valve worked on Orange Box for the 360 in-house, but hated working on the PS3 so much that they hired another company to do that one for them.
And they made damn sure that the Switch port of Portal 1+2 ran better than the console ports and as good as the PC version or else they wouldn’t have allowed it to release.
Valve’s standards for their big releases and classics are so high that it’s honestly hurting them. They could easily port TF2 to console again this day in age, port Left 4 Dead, Portal, Half Life etc. to new consoles like they did the switch.
But they won’t because 1. They are really strict to a fault, and don’t like their AAA titles looking bad, and
2. They have no incentive to now, they’re a money making machine, they don’t pretend to care about console players that much anymore because their mentality is “just get a PC dude”
TF2 was one of the very first examples of a game going free to play, at the time everyone was ecstatic about it, I think it was at the same time the Meet The Pyro trailer released. This is around the time hats became a thing. However, this move from Valve inspired so many bad things not only for Valve but for the gaming industry, and Valve definitely used that model bigtime on CS:GO to the point where players have made their own economy buying stupid ass knives.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that around the time of TF2 and CSGO’s huge microtransactions, plus Steam, Valve practically went radio silent for 9 years. They found a money machine where they could basically do nothing and get rich forever.
They’re scared of growing as a company because they don’t want to lose the core of what Valve is, but, where is all the money going? Yachts for every single employee?
Half Life Alyx is neat enough, Source 2 is neat enough, but more so than Portal or Half Life, it is very much a tech demo game and it doesn’t make up for 9 years of basically nothing
@@ZacTheFirst Have you played TF2 because of you have you'd know why new classes is a horrible idea
@@timefortnt4637 He clearly doesn't play TF2 or understand it
2 major mistakes:
1: Assassin's Creed Liberation was not removed, only its miniscule online features were shut down.
2: Valve's 30% cut is the industry standard. Xbox, PlayStation, GOG, Google Play, and Apple all have the same cut. It's Epic's 12% cut that's the outlier.
And that's a good thing?
@@cobraregala4571no it’s just the industry standard
Epic games can't run itself if it was for its life. Increase the cut byt at least make it workable@@cobraregala4571
And Epic is the biggest pile of shit in the room
The ENTIRE section about Team Fortress 2 is COMPLETELY wrong.
While yes, originally, when the crates first released, crates WERE used to get weapons, as it still was really early into the game's lifespan. However, in current day, this is no longer the case.
Modern crates (now called cases) include EXCLUSIVELY cosmetic items (hats and war paints). The most truth you can see is that you can get STRANGE versions of weapons, which are just weapons with kill counters. The entire argument is really invalid because no one actually opens crates for the weapons, as nowadays most players have all of(or atleast, most of) the weapons.
I had the same issue with that as well minus some stuff the video is decent. But that part with tf2 pains me the most because how far from truth it is. I forgot how you get unusal weapons, but still everything in game works mvm tours you get stuff to make kill counter stuff and you get australiums its part of the economy. Weapons you can buy a vintage for like 5 or 13 cents really
Have you noticed that there are several videos coming out whose core messsge is just saying that Valve is bad while Riot is good? Weird huh?
@@blastermaster5039 In what way this this person say Riot is good???
I havent played Team Fortress 2 for years. Nice to know that they made this change, but the entire time I played it was all convoluted weapon drops
@@OnyxJaguar It is still weapon drops, however crafting still exists, so if you play for a while you should be able to get any weapon that you want (as long as it's not one of the rare expensive ones that are just reskins of other weapons).
You forgot Valve's biggest problem. They can't count to 3.
SteamOS 3: Am I a joke to you?
@@speed3414 yes.
@@speed3414 steamos isn't a game. So for that they can count to 3
@@speed3414 Why it's not SteamOS: Alyx?
@@prateekpanwar646 because it's not VR
I kind of feel like valve is a true neutral in terms of how good they're games can be and how much shit they pull
Definitely
Shill
Valve has earned its good reputation.
1. They release quality games and support them for a long time. Even though they have mostly stopped game development in a the last few years they have actually been releasing a handful of great vr games.
2. They offer a good service. The reason steam is the most popular game distribution online is because it's easy to use and their software dosent annoy you constantly like other game sellers.
3. They sell quality hardware. All of valves first party hardware is amazing. The steam deck, the index and the steam controller. All have been very innovative well prices and well supported.
The biggest reasons I use steam over any other storefront are:
community, workshop and it doesn't destroy my computer, unlike the ""competition"" [epic games]
So I basically agree with your first and second point, dunno about the third since I didnt really buy any of their products
[Edit: I forgot to mention the amazing linux support valve gives to its own games and its platform!]
Past few years is putting it lightly all they did was release one pretty decent VR game And all the sudden now everything is forgiven
@@MILDMONSTER1234 no they did a couple of free vr games. All of which while either short or more mini game oriented they are fun and very well crafted. Alyx was really good it's probably only surpassed by boneworks.
@@daegnaxqelil2733 What do you mean by impose? You can literally not use it if you don't want, and it's just for the safety of your own account, why are you complaining?
@@Aleks-e8g now if we want to go steam, we must type a code for steam guard in plus of our passwords, that's very annoying
valve lets me say the gamer word in all their games, they're the good guys.
Based
based
Holy Shit . MEGA BASED !
you may laugh but i'm tired of every single game having a chat filter, feels really off putting to not be able to even curse (let alone insult someone lmao) am i the only one who thinks it's pretty weird how older games had no moderation and nobody gave a single one but now ITS SO TOXIC AND OMG MUH ANXIETY so every game has a chat that reminds me of something like club penguin lmao
@@Frank-qn7de you sound like you have anxiety from writing this
Theres a reason why many gamers like myself love Valve and are extremly hesitant to cirique it. I am a Linux gamer and without Valve the amount of games wouldnt even be a fraction. Games usally arnnt made for Linux so tools like Proton are the reason Linux gaming is possible. On top of that many of Valves less sucsessful products are still amazing. The Steam Controller is my favorite controller and the Steam Link is ok for what its meant to do. Also Valves future hardware has created tons of speculation. Project Deckard could be the Index 2 many people have been waiting for.
Linux gaming has existed for a long time. Android is Linux-based, and there are plenty of games for it.
@@blupandax7902 Linux gaming on Linux proper has been a thing for a long time however, until proton was created Linux gaming in the way people know it today didn't exist.
@@kittenzrulz2314 Android is Linux, there is no such thing as “Proper” Linux. Linux is nothing more than a kernel, the rest of the operating system is just extra meat on the bone. And besides, Proton is bad for Linux gaming because developers will no longer make any native versions of Linux games. What’s the point of spending money on native Linux coding when Valve has already done the hard work? Keep in mind Proton reduces the performance of games due to the CPU converting Windows system calls to a Linux system calls.
@@blupandax7902 Proton activity helps native Linux gaming. When proton was created more gamers began to use Linux. The influx of gamers from proton and the Steam Deck leads to greater market for Linux gamers. Because of this more developers are willing to make native Linux games.
@@kittenzrulz2314 Even if Linux gains wide acceptance, developers will not make native games for Linux, because they are only interested in saving money. If making games run natively on Linux takes time and money, they won’t bother doing it if Proton can do it for them. They won’t care about the performance decrease from Proton, they only look at the money and nothing else. Many game developers can’t even optimise for PC in general, let alone Linux specifically.
The difference is that they can turn in these items for real-life money. In Valve's case, their "in-game microtransactions" are more like simplified investments. And the only "game changing" items that cost a normal amount of money (like more than a dollar I'd say), are kill-counter/rarer versions of items that already cost less than 1 cent.
So basically NFT's?
@@Guciom yeah I guess except it has better and more tangible value than an NFT, and maybe less volatile
Stop defending crappy practices
@@TheSMR1969 how is it a crappy practice
@@duzi. It's virtual data that has no real value as it requires Steams ecosystem to function.
Valve has no issue about whatever offensive games get placed on steam because they are still privately held and as such are not compelled by the financial interests of their shareholders.
Tf2 unlockable weapons aren't only obtainable by random chance, they can be crafted, an also, people really don't open crates to get weapons because they're dirt cheap, people open crates to get shiny hats, that are in fact only cosmetic, and maybe a disadvantage, as you're glowing and people can see you from the other side of the map
a glowing unusual that blinds enemy sniper eyes?
surely a disadvantages
@@Amber_Valentine the unusual is placed on the player head bruh, wdym
@@Amber_Valentine I dont know every unusual effect, but I'm pretty sure none of them are that bright.
Literally all they do ingame is make you easier to see. I wouldn't call that an advantage.
@@Amber_Valentine literal brainlet
Also this video crosses with your "Dear Developers, Stop Listening to Pros" one. Because Valve essentially made eSports what it is right now with Dota 2 and The International.
nobody care about dota 2 , we want HL3
Starcraft did it first but valve expanded a lot
@@bsherman8236 Yeah, esports was a thing long before Dota 2, Vlave just made it mainstream and profitable
@@daegnaxqelil2733 try beeing more subtle in your future trolling
@@Helperbot-2000 why
TF2 got away with it because, they started doing crates before the current controversy. They basically helped popularise the idea of loot crates as monetization. However, they eventually changed the contents of the crates over the series to dropping cosmetics and skins. Nowadays, crates that drops only basic weapons (and the occasionnal hat/unusual) have been discontinued and are very rare on the market.
Yes, it's gambling but it doesn't affect gameplay, so players don't really care. If anything, wearing a bright unusual hat only makes you more obvious to the ennemy heh.
The one mistake you made with the video imo is with TF2, weapons are not exclusively given to you by crates. Crates do give you weapons yes, but they are a version of the weapon that tracks kills and other feats you perform in game, or in terms of cases (introduced to tf2 in 2015 and are no different than CS:GO's cases) a specific weapon skin, or a skin that could count kills or have a particle effect on the barrel usually of stock weapons, this wasn't changed until jungle inferno where skin cases now give you a specific skin pattern you can turn into a small selection of guns.
The regular weapons in the game you earn from drops, OR EARN FROM ACHIEVEMENTS, are the exact same ones as strange weapons except they just don't count kills, you can get these from the in game store, the starter bundles, or on community ran 3rd party websites for literally less than a penny due to how common they are. I'm not defending valve on this because their store prices are too expensive for something you can get for pocket change, but acting like crates that purely give cosmetic items and the occasional rare item such as an unusual (which again is a cosmetic item that is entirely optional to have and doesn't make you better or worse at the game) are something mandatory in order to play the game kindof seems like you're leaving out things to help your point.
yep came here to say this. sort of disengenious to say tf2 is pay to win, as you can buy 9 weapons for literally 3 pennies, and there are plenty of people who will give you weapons for free if you look hard enough. though in his defense theres no way to know about any of this if you just play tf2 itself and not engage in the community at all.
@@dialga236 yes but there is the starter bundle in the mann co store that gives you most of if not all the weapons in the game and unlocks premium in order to earn more backpack space for duplicate weapons
Also, he compares with payday2. Payday2 has lots of DLC's that if you bought them on release added up to a lot of money. If you already have paid hundreds of dollars for a game (that by the way, it's still not polished in a lot of ways) you expect to have all the content, and not to add an extra layer of "money grinding" on your playerbase.
TF2 never had DLC's, has been free most of it's history, and weapons are avaliable just by playing anyway.
Valve it's not perfect but they have been solid with their way of working.
Achievement weapons in TF2 are strong and helps people
@@nicmagtaan1132 lmao no. Skill and random crits
people get mad at cd projekt red, and i get that for their botched day 1 game versions, but they are genuinely the only major PC storefront selling you games you can just share with friends. Most of us don't even have enough gamer friends in person that would take a blu ray disc burn of a modern game, or we don't want to setup a giant server games catalog sharing our games. It is something we would do once in a blue moon. GOG i think knows this, so they keep DRM free gaming alive.
Yep, I did agree with Tim that Steam need competition. So I started to buy a lot of games using GOG instead. Steam need competition, but not Epic with their aggressive, monopolistic behavior.
5:44 It's kinda funny how getting good at the super realistic military game is similar to how real soldiers train - repetitive drills of repeatedly practicing certain exercises to near perfection.
Not saying if CS:GO's good or bad, just something funny I noticed.
My fav Valve moment is when they created the battlepass. Truly an epic moment
"muh good man gabeyyyy!!!!!!!!!! steam bes!!1!!!!"
Your point about CSGO Lotto is a bit unfair to Valve. Although I absoutely despise the blatant gambling mechanics of CSGO cases, the CSGO Lotto guys advertised the site using cheated odds to maximize the wow factor during their streams and drive people to the site while failing to mention they owned the fucking thing... It's three or four steps beyond what Valve does with cases
Agreed
I honestly think the gambling thing is a bit overblown. Before lootboxes in games there were Pokemon/YuGiOh cards or other toys which where in blind bags, (effectively lootboxes), which were not just available but mainly advertised towards children but I never see anyone saying there is a problem with these cards.
There is a problem with these cards
Hmmm, intresting, at least the Pokemon games didnt have microtransactions
Problem is, its basically those,
But with a single click of a button.
Instantaneous. And not limited like physical objects are. It only stops, when u stop or run out of money.
@@guidedexplosiveprojectileg9943 selling the same game over and over and over and over and over and over, its fucking worse than skyrim and gta 5, had pokemon been owned by valve we would have seen one released in 2010 beeing updated with new pokemon and maybe maps with native mod support for free
It's quite strange that this topic needs a video made on. I would point out though that getting unlockable weapons (the ones that affect gameplay) in TF2 is not that hard and they removed the hats that were needed to complete sets that also alter you character's abilities after getting bad feedback from community. But there are still some ridiculous restrictions for Free-to-Play accounts like inability to trade at all, limited backpack size and since recently they can't use neither text not voice chat and even can't use default voice commands.
Most weapons are gained through and awful random drop system with duplicate so it's very possible to play the game for hours in end and never get a good weapons, and alot achievement weapons like medic are gained through absurdly specific achievements
@@literallyvergil1686 Yeah, maybe I just don't remember what my first hours of playing TF2 were (also I actually bought the game so don't have a true f2p experience). But I seriously don't remember not having some unlockable gun in inventory to be a huge issue for me. Maybe it feels this way now because the are like 2 times more of them than when I was actively playing.
@@literallyvergil1686 glad stock is so good (except medic primary still fun)
I wasn't a huge half life fan or anything, I was going down on metacritic all time and saw half life 2 -96. I played half life 1 a long time ago before that and I thought to give hl2 a try, and I had a blast. Its genuinely enjoyable, and the talking is brief and has soul and character so it is justified instead of soulless mass effect Andromeda cutscenes. Don't get why gen z is trying to cancel classics like combat evolved and half life and metal gear solid 2 and 3 without understanding the crux of the acclaim. Good video though
Yeah I mean I'm a Gen Z but even with the classics that I don't like I feel it's important to respect them for what they did for the whole industry like for example I'm not really a big Super Metroid guy and myself prefers the Prime series but even then you must respect Super for what it did for the entire Metroidvania genre like without Super we wouldn't have games like Cave Story or Axium Verge or Hollow Knight and many many other indie metroidvanias and it's kinda stupid to see young kids around my age and such try to say that the classics were never good to begin with which is obsurd
There's a quote of this which is
"if you dont understand the past ur doomed to repeat it"
Which I feel is important because honestly for me it's important to respect the influential games that help inspire so many of your favorite modern games today
look, i try and keep an open mind, and i know valve has a lot of issues, as I'm a tf2 player myself and have seen a lot of how they've treated tf2 but this video is just so full of factual issues and bad faith arguments
why does everyone love valves games despite their issues?
because you have to look at the game for its time, mario 64, and golden eye 64 are perfect examples, both amazing game in many many ways, but compare it to to days 3d platformers and shooters and they both look quite dated, missing the innovations that have come since their release
you give an example of the CSGO gambling, and all i can say is, what can valve really do to stop it? not valves fault
you give an example of tf2 being pay to win, but forget to mention that you can get all of the items for under $2
you give an example of tf2 and csgo (and the steam inventory in general) basically being NFT's and you are on some level right, but the problem with NFT's isnt that they do nothing, its that they 1. they are almost exclusively used to scam people and 2. are killing the planet because of how blockchain technology works
your DRM argument is again sadly incomplete, you talk about always online, but steam doesn't even need you to be online, you can play most of its games entirely offline after you've purchased them through steam (also you use assassins creed liberation as an example, a game that isnt a valve game, its a ubisoft game, meanwhile you look at even valves oldest games and youll see the odd update here and there to keep the games working properly as they slowly break over time due to things like changes in how software runs, and hackers trying new ways to break break the game)
you talk about steam going down forever and that would be a terrible time indeed but ultimately t i like the convivence of being able to buy games without leaving my house, i like the convenience of being able to buy old games without tracking down a seller on eBay or amazon,
valves monopoly is almost entirely down to simply being the better product for consumers, im not saying valve shouldnt reduce their 30% cut in some situations but people are choosing steam because steam has so many more features, customizing profiles, text and voip, streaming, inviting people to play games with you, showcasing achievements, and backpacks, reviewing games, and the list goes on, meanwhile you look at other options on the market like the battle.net launcher for actiblizzard and epic store for epic games and its got not even 1/10th of that stuff
paid mods... paid mods, there is too too much to say about paid mods, ill just sum it up quickly, the problem with paid mods is almost entirely on how little the mod creators are getting out of the situation, mod creators work hard to make those mods, and they should be able to choose to have the paid mods be premium content if they so choose, so the problem is almost entirely on 2 factors 1. bethesda and how much theyre taking a cut for these mods and 2. valves stringent 30% which i already mentioned previously
and that's the end of the video
let me just say a few things, in conclusion
you've ballooned maybe 2-4 semi valid criticisms into a 20 minute rant video that is mostly full of hot air,
there are valid problems with valve, but you barely touch any of them, and gloss over probably the biggest of them at the end, no i dont think valve should let nazi games onto the store in order to preserve freedom of speech, and no i dont think that sites like "glassdoor" should be entirely ignored because they lack the broader picture
I think the point he's trying to make is people worship valve when they shouldnt
Theres of course more to tf2 but nazi games that seem vage and idk what your talking about there
@@IndianaJonesTDH at the end of the video you see a few games that are related to hitler and nazis and it gets brushed off as just freedom of speech but i disagree i dont think the promotion of hitler in any capacity is a good thing
@@gandalfurisotherworldly7909 when the point youre trying to make has a lot of false information youre doing more harm than good
@@vidc4313 Uhh did you read the comment? half of this dude's arguments are blatantly invalid and just wrong. Which is ironic considering he's criticizing the video's arguments. Now i totally agree with the his "Hitler" point. Freedom of speech does have its limits.
This doesn't get Valve off the hook, but I think it _does_ make a bigger difference than most realize: Valve is not a publicly-traded corporation, it's a privately held business. This does actually mean that it's not going to be _inevitably_ dragged down into the same pits of self-cannibalizing Hell that public corporations all wind up in. Valve can operate however it pleases, and it could, if it so wanted, choose to operate while only ever breaking even because the business is only held accountable to itself and its customers. On the other hand, publicly traded corporations wind up getting sucked into this downward spiral because they are legally obligated to act in the best interests of not their employees, not their customers, but their _investors._ This has a corrupting influence that severely hampers any business that publicly traded from simply _maintaining_ a good thing because the stock market has shifted heavily from stocks that pay dividends (profit sharing) to stocks that don't and instead reinvest that money into the company to chase "growth." This is how you'll sometimes see these big corporations crumble despite the fact that they are turning a profit. It gets complicated, but the main issues here is that corporations aren't beholden to their customers, they're beholden to an often-disinterested third party who really only gives a shit if their stocks become more valuable. This is why companies with good reputations who make a steady profit will suddenly start doing shit like trying to slash costs to the detriment of product quality, eroding customer loyalty, trying to expand into markets that made _zero_ sense and put huge financial strain on them, buying up smaller companies that are not competitors and may only be loosely related to their own business (if at all) and then immediately shutting everything down and firing almost everyone and just selling everything off or sitting on the empty property and unused parents, and introducing shit like subscription plans and planned obsolescence and intentionally crippling repairability. Their _customers_ don't want any of this. Their _employees_ also don't want any of this (most people I know like working for companies where they can be proud of what they make). It's the _investors_ who cause these things.
This doesn't mean that Valve can't make shitty, anti-consumer decisions (and they absolutely have). But it does mean that they don't have the same gravitational pull into the black hole of "investors' interests" that publicly traded corporations always wind up succumbing to. And, honestly, this makes some of the bad decisions that Valve has made _even worse,_ because they _probably_ aren't operating under the same kinds of pressures. So, this doesn't explain away the shit things they've done (denying refunds, DRM, all the stuff you mentioned, etc...) However it _does_ help explain the positive things they have done, or, at least, the negative and greedy shit they _haven't_ done (yet.) It also means that Valve _is_ actually in a position to be what we want it to be simply because they have the financial, legal, and organizational freedom to basically structure their business however they want. I don't think that the Steam Deck or their other hardware would be _anywhere near_ as open and relatively repairable as it is, and I don't think they ever would have garnered such a reputation for being so open to their fans having fun with their IPs as they have been. if they were a publicly traded corporation (Honestly, the fact that Bethesda has continued to be so chill and supportive to modders and open with their IPs as they have been is nothing short of a fucking miracle considering their corporate ownership, and which I think may be one of the few things we can actually attribute to Todd Howard personally)
The one thing we do not really know a whole lot about is Valve's finances. Just because Valve is privately held _doesn't_ actually mean that they _can't_ have investors. It just means that shares in the company aren't traded in a public stock market. They very well may have private investors who could have sunk large amounts of money into the company and these investors may hold a lot of sway over them. Since they are not publicly traded, we can't know this. The best guesses out there, however, seem to be that Valve is mostly owned by Gaben and Mike Harrington, and possibly a few other smaller stakeholders (ex or current employees, early backers, etc...)
Is this shit boring? Yeah. But when you start looking into things you start to realize that these regulatory and organizational differences and quirks between companies go a _long_ way toward making sense of their decisions.
Half Life is praised for all the things you mentioned because they did them right. I also don't really think of Half-life as being slow or a cover based shooter. You can still Bunny Hop and essentially just have the same movement as Quake, just toned down a bit. And when I think of a cover based shooter, I think of shooters with stuff like aiming down iron sights, stamina bars, aiming around corners, and having mechanics that makes your character lock to low walls and other cover in order to take shots over the top and around the side of the cover/ barrier. Half Life is only "cover-based" in the sense that the _AI_ will duck behind cover and that you can strategically sneak up on them with grenades and explosive charges and use things like the snarks and trip mines to lay traps. Even that, though, is older than Half Life (Duke 3D has both laser trip mines and the pipe bombs, which function as both grenades and remote explosive charges.)
It _does_ have scripted events, yes, but in Half Life you remain in control of Gordon for 99% of them and they're treated more as obstacles and puzzles than like cheap cutscenes designed to glue together disjointed levels/ missions.
You also conveniently failed to mention that through items like stickers in CSGO, a part of the revenue goes to the esports orgs the sticker belongs to during a tournament (a Major for example). The community-made skins (Dreams & Nightmares case-it was a $1M competition) also benefit the community - the person who made the skin, who's not a Valve employee, gets paid for it! The workshop is the most convenient way to interact with mods or download extra content. I don't see Bethesda or Riot or Activision doing this sort of thing.
E-Sports teams make pennies off the tournaments specifically. This is an open-secret. It's why so many of them get wrapped up in Skin Gambling. If you want to make money, don't do comp.
I mean modders that make community-made mods for Bethesda games get paid by selling them on the Creations storefront, so yes, you do indeed see Bethesda doing similar things.
Valve fanboys are the worst fanboys in all of gaming because: 1. They are the biggest zealots & 2. Most people are scared to call them out.
I find Nintendo fanboys to being the worst of all, simply because they defend literally EVERYTHING, Nintendo do. Also Sony fanboys in second place, because they constantly bitch about exclusivity this and prices that.
if valve fanboys are the worst your in for a treat with Nintendo and playstation fanboys
@@dirge7459nintendo fanboys are 10 year olds or 30 year old soymen
like nearly everything in life, it isn't a black and white issue. Valve has had an immense impact on gaming, mostly for the better, but sometimes for worse. No individual person has singular motivations for doing something, let alone a multi billion dollar corporation.
not to mention its very difficult to balance "we need to make money no matter what even if we have to break some moral boundries because we are a corporation and have to please stockholders" while also keeping quality control up
I mean a billion dollar corporation is as close you can get to something with a singular motivation
Really overstating Valve's importance there. They run an online storefront and occasionally make video games. Microsoft, intel, Nvidia, AMD, Sony, Nintendo, literally any major publisher has had a significantly larger impact on gaming than valve. Mostly for the better, but sometimes for the worse.
Yet they don't have delusional fanboys like valve does. Sure every company has some contingency of blind loyalists but usually they are outcasts. Whereas with valve, if you don't exhibit blind loyalty, YOU ARE the outcast.
@@nerdstrangler4804they do, all multi billion dollar gaming companies have dick riders, valve isnt the only thing that has delusional fanboys, hell i might argue nintendo has more delusional fanboys.
@@nerdstrangler4804 1 year late but Valve literally made the biggest digital storefront on PC, if we didn't have Steam, all games would be on different independent launchers/ stores. They made a revolutionary engine that you can use in any of your games and sell and you would only have to pay royalties to Havok which is out of their control. And they have made some of the best games ever made, completely changing genres like Half-Life or creating new ones entirely like L4D. Saying 'they run an online storefront and occasionally make video games' is like saying a nuke has the power to destroy a microwave, it's true, but grossly understating the impact
It's nice to see some criticism of Valve for a change. They are on a pedestal to me, like many others. I feel lucky they became the monopoly in the digital games market before the big corpos of the time. But without their competitors really pressuring them to raise the bar, they need all the criticism we can dish out.
You feel lucky not owning any games? Wow they really have tricked all the dumb people
@@johndodo2062 Gaben is lord, you must repent
It's not good criticism though
I feel like Valve not filtering games based on twitter opinions alone is enough to let them get away with what they're pulling
Ah yes the capitalist isn't stopping you from giving them money, so let the abuse continue!
Valve is too big to fail, collective action can't stop them. That should be scary... bloody hell I think it's terrifying.
The only level-head video on this topic.
Also:
- They hide the offensive words by default, the button to undo that doesn't work, you have to enter the regular expression of ".*" to actually unhide offensive words. Average user can not know that.
- They hide off-topic review bombs. The issue is, they consider drm and censorship as "off topic". See the skullgirls june censorship patch that valve hid the reviews for. Technically with the ongoing Capcom enigma controversy they may hide those reviews as well.
- General forums (not game hubs) are filled to the brim with their damage control team that praises valve 24/7. I do not have the source for that, but take 1 look at any thread and you'll see the same pattern of user raising the problem, then Tito Shivan coming in (prob undercover community manager) slamming the idea, then 3-4 alt accounts repeating the same. All while being very hostile to the user, almost to the point like it's the same dumb as a brick valve worker.
- Game hub moderation is atrocious as it's done by game companies themselves, they'll ban you for whatever and valve very rarely steps in (I think I've seen them revoking moderation rights from dev over the forum but only 1 time)
I've been talking about how valve items are pretty much just nfts for years, good to hear I'm not the only one who though of this.
I think the worst thing is leaving one of their most popular games tf2 for dead with bots and they haven’t released a big update for 5 years also you can buy individual weapons you want from the SCM and other markets
I don't think this is relevant to this specific subject though, since hes talking about the company and not their games. But otherwise, I agree with you about the update thing.
[even though he does have a weird side-tangent mid-video about their games]
all of tf2s weapons that alter gameplay are easily unlocked as you play the game
which one is eaasier
pay few cent for an item
which you need a 5$ steam wallet so you can use the steammarket feature
or
wait 30minute hopin for that one item to drop
@@Amber_Valentine you forgot the 3rd option
@@Amber_Valentine idk I have 2.8k hours on tf2 and I unlocked all the weapons just by random weapon drops
@@Luksed12 having to spend 2.8 hours just to get all the weapon is not OK, considering they fucking random
good luck getting dead ringer when all the drop is cloak n dagger
@@Amber_Valentine holy shit, just say you don't like tf2 and no you're wrong. There is a third option. You can get them for literal cents on the marketplace and not have to spend 5 dollars on the in game market. Also what kills me is that any tf2 vet knows that 9 times outta 10 stock is better then any of the drop weapons.
The main and only real issue i see is the lack of actual ownership of games, not being able to buy used copies or sell yours. Other DRM restrictions suck but when they're enforced by publishers, it's not like Valve can do much about it other than simply giving up on a massive portion of the market but when it comes to games that allow it, we should absolutely be able to *own* them.
Yeah I mean sure Steam still uses DRM but at least DRM is mostly up to the developers to implement to their games and there do exist DRM free Steam games like Doom but I mean Doom's source code is literally open sourced so that doesn't come as a surprise
Good people do not rent games digitally and call it a "purchase". So, yeah, they are the bad guys.
What are you talking about? You get items in TF2 just by playing the game from random drops, trading with people, or just buying from the store. Unless you're dumb enough to open old crates to get items, for multiple years loot boxes haven't featured items anymore, just cosmetics. Getting items is laughably easy, unless what you want is a reskin like awp, which functions identically to snipers stock sniper riffle. You're objectively incorrect.
positively soyjacking at the prospect of more frequent shredded nerd youtube movies in the future
"money steers work"
there's nothing wrong with this statement, nobody on reddit would run valve for free lol
Redditors are just generally dumb lol. That's why most of them are liberal.
It could've been a good critique of Valve if all of the things you listed weren't third party issues i.e the DRM that would've happened regardless of Valve, the comparison of skins to NFTs and TF2 P2W crate thing were just pure cringe with zero research or thoughts put into it
I agree with you on the comparing skins to nfts thing, but I strongly disagree that DRM is only a third-party issue, since you need steam to not only download, but also play your steam games. I guess circunventing that restriction is extremely trivial though, so If Valve does indeed disappear, that wont be as big of an issue.. Other than the multiplayer servers for older, non-supported or developed games being completely destroyed
Most of the skins in crates are now skins/items made by the community in the workshop voted to be added by other players and the person who made the item gets money from it getting added too, its not just valve that makes profit
But the skins are just centralised NFT's tho
@@stealthysaucepan2016 NFTs has been sold overpriced mixed with crypto stuff and you just get a link to a jpg you bought which in most cases is ai generated from few presets, they have no market that has existed for years compared to skins
@@stealthysaucepan2016 No... Just no, please refrain from topics you do not understand
I realize this is ancient history for some people, but I remember when Steam first came out, and it was a buggy mess that was difficult to get working (I learned about port forwarding settings in home routers for the sake of getting Steam to work so I could play CS, and that was far from the only issue). Lots of people were furious with Valve at the time for requiring such a mess of an application to play their games, when it was a standard to just be able to perform an offline install of most PC games from disc at the time. It took quite a few years for Steam to mature into the beloved storefront we know today, and it wasn't even entirely Valve's doing. I remember when there were widespread assertions that PC gaming was dying because consoles were so much more lucrative, most PC games were bad console ports, and true modern PC games like Crysis were few and far between. It wasn't Valve that revived PC gaming, it was the rise of the modern ecosystem with things like Twitch streaming, screen recording, TH-cam, eSports, modding, indie gaming, Discord, Kickstarter, free game engines like Unity and Unreal, asset stores with lots of free content, etc. Console ecosystems fell behind, and PC gaming exploded due to the dynamism of the greater PC gaming community. Valve just happened to be the primary beneficiary of the revival of PC gaming, to the point that now people attribute its revival to the popularity of Steam, when really it was the other way around. That's not to say they haven't done great things for PC gaming, but I agree, I think it's odd that people seem to paint them as the saviors of PC gaming when most of the things that saved it really had little to do with Valve.
Mandatory acknowledgement of Infinite Space (conclusion) being played in the background around 17:45
drm ruined gaming for me, I couldn't even get good internet back when games started to force steam since Australia was backwards with internet, my heart sunk every time I found a physical game I was interested in a brick and morter store having the steam requirement, I feel they killed physical releases too soon.
VALVE sort of got a "contributed enough" pass, but in long run, Steam is dystopian ticking bomb, nothing less. You don`t own anything on Steam, you rent stuff. But ppl who go bananas when "rent" is promoted by Ubisoft or EA, are completely silent, when Valve is pushing the same approach, just in a less "in your face" way.
Their workshop is another dangerous thing, which facilitates paywalls greatly.
Valve is business, and they are not the worst business.
But consumers have to remember, that nothing is eternal. Policies change, owners change, and when they do change, you want to have strong foundation to balance things out.
Simping for Valve is not gonna create said balance.
Their DRM and desire to tie everything to steam - is dangerous enough already. It is just that ppl give them pass, or say "well, it is not the worst DRM in the world, we have seen worse DRM" ....
How are you renting any of the games on steam that you bought?
@@watchman0062 when you use Steam you don`t own your account and games.
It is owned by Valve, you are just subscribed to their service.
When you "buy" a game on Steam, legally speaking, you are NOT buying it really (not even a copy), you are buying license to access files (subscribing with one time fee basically).
This is why if you die, your kids can`t inherit and access your account (at least not legally). Because you don`t really own anything there.
And even Steam ToS is literally called "Steam Subscriber Agreement", to underline the fact, that you are merely subscribed to a service and you are in no way an owner.
this aged well
im glad to know ape escape is not forgotten
With valve, they came out years ago when asked about what would happen if they shut down, and said they’d make their games detached from the service so they could still be played.
Whether this is still true or not is up in the air, and this likely has problems with third party games with other launchers as well. But I do believe they want to do right in that regard.
Their shit stinks like anyone else though. There just may be less of it
Nobody out there seriously thinks Valve is the good guy. It's just literally everyone else is completely incompetent, more greedy than Valve, or both. Is it really that much to ask for a store apps that has a functional and sane friend list, and a shopping cart, in year 201x? When every single FREE web programming tutorial out there teach one how to make those 2?
The problem isn't making the store front. The hard part is actually convincing devs to put their games on it...
There are plenty of people in this comment section that are pretty blatantly calling valve the good guys, and I certainly wouldn’t say they’re less greedy than other companies when they helped to pioneer the mainstreaming of some of the worst aspects of modern gaming.
@@Ekatkid Yet Valve also pioneered some of the best features of modern gaming. Embracing modding through the Steam Workshop. Item trading with the Steam Trading system. Heavily customisable profiles that go well beyond many social media platforms.
I'm not sure what aspects of modern gaming they pioneered that are bad (besides DRM) as overall they have been really good both with their games and Steam.
@@MeAMoose micro-transactions, loot boxes and nfts
@@artemisDev Valve, to my knowledge, hasn't touched NFT's. In terms of loot boxes, while they did introduce the concept of loot boxes, they limited them to cosmetic only and items do not affect gameplay. Microtransactions where spurred on long-before Valve carried the trend but even taking into account microtransactions, I have no issue with microtransactions for cosmetic content that does not affect gameplay (especially as the Valve games that do include microtransactions are all multiplayer).
FIFA pioneered the idea of loot boxes far more than Valve has.
I think you sold the creativity of CS:GO gameplay short. There is a lot of rote learning, but half of the game is game sense, making good plays, getting your team to coordinate, and creatively setting up situations that benefit you/your team. People with better game sense and strats stomp on people with better aim all the time. The elimination format forces you to think harder about your decisions, because death has more meaning than if you quickly respawn.
Some counterarguments about some very wrong points brought out:
- The DRM on Steam is entirely optional. There's an extensive list of games that don't use any kind of DRM on Steam. You can easily back them up if you want to. Valve created Steam as a better way to deploy its games and updates, not making you download it from Major Geeks or some other shady download website way back then. The backlash at the time was mainly because its servers couldn't handle the traffic during the Half-Life 2 launch as people were eager to play it;
- Valve only gets the 30% cut if you buy the key through Steam. If you buy the Steam key from a Humble Bundle, Green Man Gaming, Fanatical, etc, Valve doesn't get a dime and still has to cover all the costs involved. If you look at the percentage of reviews made from keys bought outside Steam, they can be significant (over 30% on RE: Village, for instance). If you think the Steam store doesn't add any value to you, while you still have to offer it on Steam, you can sell it on your website and take all the money from the purchases made there;
- Besides being by far the best launcher/storefront/platform on PC, Steam/Valve became a monopoly on PC gaming by virtue of not giving up on the platform. In the 2000's most companies pretty much gave up on PC gaming. Microsoft created the complete mess that was Games for Windows Live and EPIC very publicly declared that PC gaming was dead while they focused on the console space. A monopoly by itself is not illegal (otherwise you never would have new markets being formed), the problem is when the company uses monopolist tactics to obtain or maintain said monopoly and that's definitely not the case with Valve, but if Valve tried to use the same tactic of paying for exclusive games (like Epic is doing), they could be sued because they have a dominant market share on PC gaming;
- I don't see any problem with the existence of paid mods. If you created something and wish to be paid for it, you're completely entitled to it. The problem was that some asshats tried to abuse the system to monetize stuff that they didn't make. The idea wasn't bad - the execution that could have been better;
- About "Valve stopped making games - Now they just make money". Only people that have no grasp of game development say something like that. Creating games can take a long time and "The Final Hours of Half-Life Alyx" recently showed just how many different versions of that project were scrapped since the release of Episode 2. Money only removes the time urgency to release products.
- Pretty much everything around TF2 was just wrong, but too many people already mentioned it here in the comments;
- The loot boxes made the transition to free-2-play possible. It's cosmetic. If you don't like it you don't have to pay for it. I play Counter-Strike for years and have never paid a dollar for skins/whatnot.
To not say that Valve is perfect, their biggest weakness is in the communication department, and that includes their refusal to say what games they're working on and the fact that they let so many misconceptions about them persist without setting the record straight.
Now if I would talk about the countless positives that Valve brought to the PC gaming space, it would take 10 times the space of what I already have written, but I will just leave it at this: Steam transformed an inveterate pirate from a third world country like me into a legal and proud owner of over 2000 games thanks to, among other things, their superior service and regional pricing.
this is what im SAYIN'
"- I don't see any problem with the existence of paid mods. If you created something and wish to be paid for it, you're completely entitled to it. The problem was that some asshats tried to abuse the system to monetize stuff that they didn't make. The idea wasn't bad - the execution that could have been better;"
Exactly, paid mods in itself aren't the issue itself and are even mostly accepted in some communities. Assetto Corsas community would be pretty dead without companies like RSS, VRC or URD that produce high-quality mods and Content manager and CSP enabling modern features. The bad part was how Bethesda wanted to profit from mods despite profiting from the community already and how nobody checked the quality or the origin of mods.
But for angry gamers it is just easier to go with the " paid mods bad, people should give me everything for free" mentality.
I agree with everything you've said here, but I also have your answer for you: Why do people forgive Valve but no one else? More or less, because Valve don't nickel and dime you. They're more or less generous. Almost every attempt at monetisation makes the "non-money" game worse (grind etc), but with Valve, the non-money game is still fun. Yes, Valve can remove all your games at any point. Ubisoft actually did this, but Valve haven't. You don't have to rebuy stuff with Steam, no PS5 upgrade tax etc. So, roughly, people feel safe that Valve isn't going to screw them, whereas other companies go very hard on squeezing their customers from the get-go.
People don't leave because they feel safe, not because they're trapped.
go play tf2 and see how fun it is wihtout spending no money
@@Amber_Valentine I play TF2 from time to time, and have never engaged the money market. I'm honestly not even sure where I can buy stuff, but I assume you just buy hats?
@@Amber_Valentine I've been F2P for three years until I finally paid for something. You can absolutely play TF2 for completely free, there is no leveling system or anything unless you count the useless medal level at the menu, cosmetics don't affect the gameplay at all (at one point they did but Valve removed it after player outrage), all of the weapons are given by either random drops or achievements, and the backpack limitation is solved by the free stocking you get during Christmas which includes a backpack expander. There has been people that have been F2P for much longer than that and they play better than most people. In fact, the stock weapons are fantastic, I use stock reskins on my loadout just to give it a little flair but it's just the same weapons that Valve has already given to you.
@@Amber_Valentine didn't pay a dime except for the Orange Box. Still fun. Game is not p2w like the video pointed out. In fact it's straight up lies since paying money only gives you skins and cosmetics ability without affecting the main gameplay.
I've played counter strike for like 15 years and never felt like I needed to spend money to play the game or enjoy it. Skins always felt to me a bit like decorating your bedroom more than anything else. Yea you can decorate your bedroom to be a million dollars worth but you can also do that with different ways for much more cheap. Besides, you don't even need to decorate your bedroom to sleep in it.
People have known this for like 10 years now
Valve having basically 0 criticism for years did not help things.
It did have critism. From entitled pricks. Because that’s the only kind of people interested in criticizing it. The epic game store is open if you’re so desperate for muh competitors and muh monopoly
Correction at 18:25 you can actually publish a game and have a bitcoin miner included. Most of the cheap games such as the ones where you can farm achievements almost all of them have a miner in them.
Valve is the only company i know, that has received zero criticism for using a fucking dead person as a random asset in a game.
I don’t know about the gambling stuff since I don’t partake, but I always liked the idea of free markets in games. Old school runescape had followed supply and demand and prices were adjusted accordingly. IDK but it was fun and I always wanted to see games try that model again. There were problems but it never bothered me. In fact, it taught me a lot as a kid on how to deal with scams.
I don’t play cs go so idk how it works, but I feel as if this system that uses markets and free trade has potential.
@Arthur Brown You can totally buy the items directly. You can buy them off of the store itself or you can buy them from one of the community sites or you can buy them from the community marketplace.
@Arthur Brown As far as companies go, valve has been pretty beneficial to gaming as a whole on PC. For Christ's sake before steam, PC gaming was about to be declared by many devs dead due to the rampant piracy. Valve single-handedly curbed piracy, and they didn't even do it with a ton of DRM bullshit, the DRM exists more for the Devs convenience and so they can say they did try and prevent it. They did it based on the service itself and offering something pirates can't.
That's not to say valve didn't do harm, The modern free to play model, microtransactions, and the loot box/RNG based loot crazes are all both thanks to them. But unlike most modern companies, they didn't take those concepts too far, almost all of it has either been obtainable in game by themselves or cosmetic and available in either their storefront or via community marketplaces. A good chunk of them being from the first two.
Valve was nowhere near the 1st to use the licensing model for games. EA was doing it back when you bought discs. You were granted a license to the game and in some cases that was actually beneficial as it meant EA would replace the disc if it ever got damaged. Since your licensed, the game hadn't been revoked. Therefore you were entitled with a copy of the disc to play the game.
Free to play meant free to play, Not free to play, but you have a severe competitive handicap therefore you can't have any fun.
@@donovan6320 I agree with this.
@@donovan6320 what severe competitive disadvantage are you talking about?
As this video proves, VALVe aren't AS evil as other companies, but they're FAR from saints.
Valve hasn't done a single bad thing to me, only been good to me. Companies (usually) do not give a single flying fuck about us, why should we care about them?
Back in the days, valve was our video game savior.
Now, the new valve just insulted us by saying there will be a major update to tf2. But replace it with holiday sized update.
I think the reason Valve is always seen as different is because of the few stances they do take that people like.
For instance they work on a lot of genuinely positive Steam features like Remote play, Lots of controller support options, Steam os etc which distracts people from how predatory their practices are. The darkest part about this is everyone knows about CSGO gambling or the fact that all the games on steam technically have an end license agreement. Everyone just sees these bad signs as "A thing that will never effect me! I am not the idiot being scammed I got my TF2 items for 7$ therefore it is totally fine someone elses life gets ruined! I also know all the games I PERSONALLY PLAY will never be taken away from me when I care so who cares about the long term implications." Admittedly in some ways I am in that boat too, but I still greatly criticize Valve for these scams and schemes... that and the brain chip thing I am surprised you never mentioned that what the hell Valve.
The big thing valve has going for it is that it's a private company.
There's a lot of corporate scummy BS that valve doesn't do because they aren't beholden to shareholders.
They're a comparatively small company that found a money printer, and has used it to fuck around since then. Some stuff they do is good because they can afford it, some stuff is pretty shit, plenty of stuff is in the middle.
@@monty58 correction it is still beholden to share holders but those shareholders are basically strapped with the devs and the devs have a bomb but so do the shareholders so it’s a distribution of power but the shareholders still have more influence
@@augustuslunasol10thapostle don't forget the part where the biggest shareholder is a madman who wants to stick a computer in his brain because he can't type fast enough to code all the nutjob ideas he has, and keeps getting distracted by wierd ass niche hardware.
And don't forget the money printer. That's a big part of it all.
Valve isn't as much a closed book as many others.are
They also are pretty much gaming only, and leas partisan as a result in platforms
It is in their benefit to better linux gaming and not be in the clutches of the microsofts and sonies of this world
Their business model kind of is more consumer-friendly and plaform agnostic by necessity
They're in the business of selling games, more than developing rhese days, certainly not a games divisiion of a bigger hardware brand
They don't incentivize devs like epic does either, that can as a result cam hold higher quaility stamdards by really backing things with their own money
Different approach
They are more than welcome as a baseline for others to compete with
Thats the way i see it
They did make Artifact pay 2 win at launch and then it died with in a month.
I see valve as passionate. Because the people hired there are passionate, such as the team hired to create Half Life Alyx. Valve does everything right… most of the time if we forget about artefact. I mean, most of their multiplayer games still relevant today are free aren’t really pay to win, or as prevalent as other games.
However I do get the point that Valve isn’t really humble. But I would be lying that it isn’t my most loved one.
I'm still pissed off that I had to download the Orange Box even when I have the disk in a box.
the whole mod debate would have never happened if they just added a donate button on the mod page and take a 5% cut.
I'm actually in favour of the idea of paid mods, I'll gladly pay for high quality mods from genuinely lovely and talented modders. It's just the implementation was the worst possible outcome with mod theft, trash peddling and scams, the worst part being that the modder got none of the money until they hit at least $100 in sales and even then they only got a 25% cut despite putting in all of the legwork.
@@InfernalMonsoon wait what?
i would expect valve to get maybe 15% and the game 10% and both be happy with that.
and the modder getting 75%
Personally, as a BIG fan of Valve's games (except Csgo, for pretty much the same reasons you stated you didn't like it), I'd just have to agree with you on most things. After they introduced items on their multiplayer games and started dominating the electronic purchasing of games, it was over.
It makes a lot of sense that many key employees that worked on their most acclaimed titles (programming staff, artists, writers etc.) have since left the company.
Valve is now issuing DMCA strikes on content creators lmao
This is why Portal 64 got removed due for DMCA on valve, because they are defending or loveing nintendo...
15:15 the big difference here is that steam still allow you to sell steam keys outside of steam if you want to. so you can still sell keys on your website without steam getting a cut
"Whenever I see my friends play it, [CS:GO] they'll always log off angry."
I remember hitting MGE, realizing this, and quitting.
It's a shame because the gunplay is actually pretty satisfying once you're good with it, with autos it feels like a matter of trying to control a predictable bullet hose and with semi-autos it's always stupidly satisfying to nail difficult headshots.
All the stuff stapled on top however, like ranking being a god awful grind where you can straight up get trapped in some brackets because you get bad luck with team mates that just got the game, casual being awful, hax, next to no emphasis on community servers/content officially, more or less requiring a team to queue with to get a decent rank, and so on, just totally kills the experience.
I can still boot up 1.6 and CS:S and have a great time, but CS:GO doesn't have the same feel unless I go in not giving a shit about my rank.
You're 100% on point about getting better though, it ends up being a matter of memorization and drilling specific nades into your head as opposed to getting better at dynamically reacting to a situation, that's why most people only play on a small selection of maps they know well, which is something I've never really liked as I've always had the most fun trying to estimate where I should be throwing things to get them in the right spot.
Also, fuck skins, they add nothing to the game and make everything look like a cartoony mess, even more so with the new operator skins.
Valve stopped being a dev long time ago, they're just a store and a client now,
I still like Gabe because of the steam sale that made my childhood awesome.
18:25
While they seemingly allow all the low-effort porn games... They have weird double standard against Japanese games, and it seems to affect ONLY Japanese games.
Look at how Little Witch Nobeta (Taiwanese game) is up despite the obvious connotations... While non-porn Japanese VNs with adult characters have been rejected for having characters that are in school???
The creator of Seventh Lair shared about his experience how the game was completely blocked by Valve based on... The intro movie having 0.5 second of old public domain painting with barely registerable nudity.
Finally, someone said it. They aren't the good guys.... Not even close.
You are right, the fact that it has taken them this long and still haven't released Ricochet 2 shows just how far Valve has sunk. They took their greatest property and just forgot about it. Imagine how much better the gaming landscape would be if it was inspired by Ricochet 2 instead of TF2 and CSGO.
everyone talks about how they cant count to three when with ricochet they can’t even count to two! really shows the degradation of valve as a company. for shame.
Dude Ricochet is shit lol
@@DangerNoodlez144 To be fair, I thought the same thing at first. But the amazing level of intricacies and innovative mechanics packed into such a small package should have made it the defining game of a decade. Ricochet is truly one of the games ever made.
well researched and insightful and articulate. I like that you don't sound like you're reading off a script, that's probably the hardest part about youtube.
Valve is starting to prove “you either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain” ~ The Dark Knight
The current state of tf2 is depressing :(
A game being on steam used to mean something, because valve didn't really allow sub-par products on there, it was an assurance of some sort of quality control. Of course limiting the amount of titles available is bad for profits. Now there is way too much shit to sift through on steam, which is not just bad for the consumer, but also bad for the developers, steam used to be marketing in and of itself. Being on the "recently released" page of steam brought traffic and sales for days if not weeks. Now you are lucky to stay on there for 45 minutes under the avalanche of shovelware.
I think GOG is the new savior because of there stance of DRM.
Considering they bent the knee to China to remove a game with an ant-xi reference
lol nice try
@@thecaptain6520 Valve did the same for said game.
@@thatguynobodywants3716 And it makes GoG no better either?.
The Payday 2 Microtransaction Drama was not about adding them in. Before the announcement they invited popular Payday 2 Content Creators to ask them about them and many like them. Until they mentioned the Skins in Payday 2 can also improve the stats of the weapons. Every creator said no to the idea but these Stat Boosts came into the game nonetheless.
As a player I don't know the whole picture, but they steadily removed parts of the whole fiasko after they terminated their contracted with 505 Games, sooo maybe OVERKILL/Starbreeze was not at fault here, but maybe it was former CEO (and a** Bo Andersson). We don't and probably won't ever know.
My guy thinks you have to pay to get unlock items in TF2. Also the crates aren’t necessary even if you do want to buy a weapon.
*cough cough cough
Hats
@@Amber_Valentine they don’t effect gameplay, which was the point he brought up.
Man shreddednerd really decided to just burn every bridge possible today
The TF2 point clearly shows that you either hadn't played enough of TF2 or don't know anything about the community. I have never seen anyone who would buy a crate to get a WEAPON. (By this I mean a different weapon not an unusual but that is just a cosmetic effect.) The stock loadout is in most cases the best one you can run and many other weapons are downgrades unless you play a very specific style. And even if you wanted to buy the weapons, you can get pretty much anything under 0,10E (And even that is overpricing). But again, why would you do that if the stock one is just fine and you get new weapons by playing anyway. Crates are nowadays just used for cosmetic items.
Also the Epic Games Store comparison isn't good either becuase it's not even a proper competitor. It's lacking many features, generally slower at downloading and the only good thing about it are the free games. That's pretty much why anyone bothers to boot it up.
It's a simple case where the service they provide to gamers is unmatched to others who've attempted the same business practices. The community is more accepting of new ideas if they feel like they are involved with the process. The steam marketplace is a good example of letting gamers use their in game achievements to earn back some credit to get more games. Get trading cards, having meta games and collectibles. They speak to what people like and want.
Companies like EA or Bethesda don't get away with it because what they are offering simply sucks. The game either launches in a horrible state or they offer paid DLC that is a complete joke to what modders did for free AND sometimes they might just try to shut down a project they don't like.
Fck Valve, and fck Steam! Forever.
I was already developing doubts about valve after seeing some job posting from them for positions to help develop the worlds greatest unbreakable copy protection anti-piracy DRM system, but I was still looking forward to Half Life 2. Then when HL2 came out together with the initial Steam rollout, my concerns where proven to be well founded.
I bought HL2 on DVD, but after installing it, I had to create a steam account and go online to 'decrypt' the installation. It took 10 minutes to install from the 2 DVDs, but then it took 24 hours to decrypt.
So when it finally finished decrypting the next day, I played for a bit and was mildly disappointed with the game, which honestly wasn't surprising considering the hype and my unavoidably inflated expectations.
Then I made the critical mistake of clicking on one of the game info PDF files the were added to the start menu with the installation. I absolutely did not click uninstall, but even if I had, uninstallers typical have an interface which presents an opportunity to cancel uninstallation (I don't think that installer even added an 'uninstall' shortcut to start anyway). Clicking that PDF file resulted in the game immediately and completely uninstalling itself.
Well suffice it to say, I was not not going to accept not actually owning the game I had just bought, and instead having it be tied this infernal online DRM system with an unforeseeable service lifespan, which treated paying customers to a substantially worse experience than pirates. I went and downloaded a permanent solution, which was available through alternative channels the day after the game's release... and involved none of the absurd hoop jumping valve were requiring from their paying customers.
I am sure that millions of piracy enthusiasts where born the day Half Life 2 was released and Steam came online. Until then, for people who could afford to buy games, piracy was not even remotely worth the hassle and risks involved. That all changed with the advent of Steam. I still don't pirate games, but before HL2, I used to spend a couple hundred bucks on games almost every month. After HL2, I became extremely wary of anti-consumer practices and invasive DRM schemes causing me to drastically reduce the number of games I bought down to a couple hundred bucks every six months or so. Many others, simply turned to piracy, stopped buying games entirely, and never looked back.
I've never bought anything from Valve or through Steam since. If you're an indie dev, please make your games available outside of steam, or I, and many others like me, will never play them. I mostly buy games from GoG, Ebay, or directly from publishers/developers when they are available that way. Never from steam.
Valve actually got *a lot* more backlash than most people realize. But most of those people who were really pissed aren't raging about it, but rather just quietly never interfacing with Steam period, so we don't generally have too much to say about it. Many turned to piracy too, which they generally keep quiet about for obvious reasons. Fck Valve and fck Steam - that sht is fuggin cancer.
To think... I bought 4 copies of the original Half Life, just so I could have the extra CD keys to loan out to friends for playing various multiplayer HL1 mods, most of whom would eventually buy the game for themselves allowing me to bring others online with those spare keys.
There was nothing wrong with the simple CD key copy protection scheme of Half Life 1. Sure lots of people pirated HL1, but they were mostly people who wouldn't or couldn't have bought the game anyway, and they mostly couldn't play online with cracked versions (which was a huge part of the HL1 modding scene, which in turn was a huge part of HL1's success). I mean I'm sure sometimes people where able to generate keys that worked online briefly, but I think they'd generally get blacklisted by Valve pretty quickly.
It's not like Steam eliminated the pirates anyway, in fact, quite the opposite. It created vastly more pirates, by forcing players, who could *and would* have bought games, over to piracy, because it treated (and continues to treat) paying customers to a markedly worse experience than pirates.
I'm happy to see more people waking up to the concerning anti-consumer trends which have begun to increasing plague ever more industries. It is starting to get pretty bad, and people are starting to realize, and maybe we can begin to starting turning this tide of fundamentally anti-social trends.
"I have a really good PR Team"
-Gaben
(Also on the paid mods, Mojang introduced resource packs for the Xbox and Bedrock but it never got backlash for something that was free for PC)
Probably because there were more rich kids playing Minecraft than Skyrim
Thanks for addressing this as gambling. its a casino for kids basically. And I think there were much more interactivity in sin, blood, duke nukem. I am not really sure if half life 1 was popular at all. Its hl2 that became popular.
I've distanced myself from Valve and Steam. After being mistreated and abused by their moderators this week and dealing with the abysmal support over the years, I've come to the conclusion that Valve only cares about the money moreover the customers nowadays. They got so big they don't have to care anymore because they have the monopoly in the industry. Fans constantly praising them and flocking to Steam with the herd mentality just makes matters worse as it only enables Valve to get more and more careless. The community is also beyond toxic and I have no interest in that atmosphere. When it comes to Valve and Steam, people treat Steam the same as the console wars that are still going to this day. I'm sick of the whole scene. So, I've moved onto other platforms and stores. Valve no longer has my business.
in tf2 you can get a lot of items for free if you go to comunity server and the section "free items" and when you log into those servers and type the correct command in chat you will get all the achivement items for free
you dont have to open useless crates
The only gopd thing comming from valve right now in my opinion is the push they make for Linux gaming as a whole. It's incredible.
I see and respect your points. I think the reason Valve can and does get away with stuff that others are so heavily scrutinized for is because of the goodwill and good products and services they provide, as well as how less egregious it is comparatively. Still doesn't excuse a lot of things but it's not seen as awful as other companies doing the same thing because it isn't as awful as other companies doing the same thing. They do it just enough that they can get away with it while not sticking out because there are other publishers doing it far far worse, and we focus on the bigger of the two. It's almost like we "need" to focus on the larger hole in the ship than the smaller ones. And I think that's true, to an extent, but they still need addressing regardless. They've also been very pro community which adds more goodwill. Should they be held accountable for crap they do? Yes. Should you criticize? Absolutely. Can you do so while still loving them as a company? Of course. It's through that love that we should be critical and hold them to the standard they originally set for themselves because we want them to stay top dog. A lot of folks don't realize you can criticize without hating, which is dumb. My biggest problem is DRM, but I already have so much on Steam and I don't want to use GOG because of what Steam provides; Their launcher has so many things that I enjoy including a community I like being in that it's hard to move away. And I think that's the big crux of the issue, like I said earlier and like you said, they make really good products: games, services and the storefront/launcher. It's convenient and easy. And for all that I'll always be a strong fan, just not one to turn a blind eye.
Valve aren't good. They are just better than the rest.
I miss when Valve was more or less an apolitical company. It seems like their main concern nowadays is policing the forums against wrongthink and hosting pride themed sales.
I agree people need to stop giving companies a pass on shitty behavior regardless of the good things they've done in the past. It would be better for gaming as a whole.
Huge fan of how much they have brought pc gaming mainstream, i served in the military and handhelds were the only way possible i could play games so i’m a huge advocate.
That being said, People fanboy for valve now but if they terminate your 2000+ game account as they get more and more differing and wild employees in that is your fault for all eggs in one basket.
Ford made some of the biggest innovations in automotive technology, only to go from being the biggest help to a terrible monstrosity with a subpar product at best in todays day and age. Just something to think about when your product is even more endanger being not physical, you don’t own any of that digital marketplace!!!! Its all rights usage paid for only.
I agree with the video's general premise but you make mistakes.
For Half Life 1:
- it isnt too different to Unreal 1 which you show. Unreal 1 also had scripted sequences. Though Half Life 1 has a more interactable world and more scripted sequences, Unreal 1 does exceed it in many other ways like combat or arguably AI and level design.
- Half Life 1 did on rails sequences differently to how modern games do them. You CAN move and you do HAVE the ability to do things differently in HL1.
- Half Life 1 features VERY fast movement. It is NOTHING like the slower paced more modern shooters. It is an arcade FPS at heart. In some ways its FASTER than DOOM 2016 even.
For Half Life 2
- The way it does cutscenes has issues but it is not worse than how most other games do it since you can do things while listening to the NPCs. I agree it deserves critique, but it is a better way to handle things.
For DRM:
- Valve DID NOT introduce DRM to PC Gaming. I can literally take out my Bulgarian 2002 game - Celtic Kings. It has a "Insert Disc to play" type of DRM. This is DRM. DRM has existed before Valve were a company. I agree with critiquing Steam having DRM (even if its weak). But that part is just false.
For Steam:
- The 30% cut for Valve is something to critique, but the REASON it won over is because its better than the 45-60% cut physical retailers got at the time. Selling a 50 USD PC game in 2001 meant that the dev/publisher got back only around 25 USD. With Steam that is now 35. A big increase.
- GOG are still charging 30 percent. Steam NO LONGER charge just 30. Now it has tiers and some tiers pay less than 30%. I still dont like it, but it is no longer 30%.
The rest I find fair or cant critique right now.