this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2024
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Valve is a Titan doing incredible work for the open source community and making money while doing so.
Successful open source software business model at work. Way to go.
I don't think FOSS represents a lot of how they make money, the money making is probably all closed source, so I don't think it's a good example. It's more like a for-profit company also doing so good quality charity work on the side. It's mostly good for their image and a way to tell Windows that they could go without them if they don't collaborate.
I fully enjoy what they have been doing as a Linux only patient gamer for the past years, but I am realistic.
In reality, it's likely a self-preservation move. Microsoft made what appeared to be a monopolistic move to control the entire Windows ecosystem when they added their own app store and the locked down S edition of Windows. If Valve both hadn't invested in Linux and Microsoft hadn't halted going down that path, they would have been screwed.
I’d doubt that. Everyone hated S mode: Corporate hated it, power users hated it, newbies…probably ignored it. Even if MS continued down it, it’d just be like Digg v4.
Personally, I think the profit incentive is a way to improve SteamOS further for free.
I’m not sure that Microsoft ever did halt going down that path. My wife recently bought a PC that came locked down by default and required some fiddling to allow running unsigned apps. This was Windows 10, not sure about 11.
I think it could be more that broad compatibility with everything is their main selling point, and by doing so they were undermining their own ecosystem.
However, this is mere speculation on my part.
"Likely", man I am pretty sure Gaben openly talked about this, they haven't liked where windows was headed for a long time
I think Steam does have enough influence to be able to pull a sizable chunk of users away from windows.
That’s a tough nut to crack. Even as a video game platform, they don’t write most of the software that they sell today. They would need to find some way to convince developers to write software for something that’s not the platform nearly all users are running.
Their main product is a proprietary software launcher that for decades has pushed videogames and the whole industry into a closed environment making them billions. It's good that they are now supporting linux and collaborating in open source projects but let's not forget who they are.
Let's also not forget how absolutely groundbreaking Steam was for digital distribution.
I really have a hard time accepting that they "pushed" the industry rather than that they offered a platform with features that were worlds beyond what was available at the time for game developers and publishers. No one was bribed. There were no shady backroom deals. No assassinations of competitors (in fact the opposite, doing experiments with cross platform purchases with the PS3 and with GOG). There was no embrace extend extinguish, as there was nothing already existing like it to embrace or extinguish.
Also saying that they are now supporting linux and open source is ignoring a long history of their work with linux. This isn't something new for them. What's new is yet another large step forward in their investment, not their involvement.
Look, like you, I am concerned about their level of control over digital distribution game sales for the PC market. But from a practical standpoint I find them incredibly hard to have any large amount of negative feelings about them due to their track record, and the fact that they are not a publicly traded company so they are not beholden to the normal shareholder drive for profit at any cost. I'd love to hear more reasons to be concerned if any exist rather than "proprietary" and "too big".
On top of that, Steam DRM is pretty notably easy to bypass, with what appears to be relatively little effort from Valve to eliminate the methods. They aren't doing the normal rat race back and forth between crackers and the DRM devs that you would expect.
Anyway, again I'll say: I'd love to hear more reasons to be concerned beyond "proprietary" and "too big".
I think a good comparison is Bell Labs and AT&T. A lot of good work was done by Bell Labs but it was mostly enabled by AT&Ts monopoly.
I'd like to see a Sankey graph of where Valve's money goes before I praise them that much for helping out a Linux distribution a bit.
Lots of major companies like Microsoft and IBM also contribute to Linux, it doesn't make them saints nor even necessarily compare to what they get for using the volunteer dev work inside Linux.
Gabe Newell is a billionaire, Steam is a defacto monopoly that objectively charges more than they have to, and literally everyone who works at Valve is in the 1%. Let's not fall over ourselves dick-riding them.
Oh come on. Mr negativity over here. FFS Valve has been a godsend compared to the likes of EA or Blizzard. I bet you complain when you get ice cream that it's too cold
Valve has ripped off every single game purchase to the tune of billions and billions of dollars (taking an objective 15% more than they need to from the total cost of every single game), for the past 20 years.
But let's thank them for that! Thanks Valve for making every single working class gamer poorer. We all love the fact that every single Valve employee is a multimillionaire, at the expense of literally every single game player and developer. What kind generosity! /S
How is it at the expense of the game player? Even if they paid less, the publisher and developers aren't going to pass the savings on to the consumer. That's wishful thinking in the same vain as hoping Starbucks would make their drinks cheaper because their rent went down.
If anything, one can argue that the 30% fee shelled out by the publisher pays for the various nice-to-haves that players get on Steam, like: a functional review system, free cloud save syncing, the workshop, game discussion forum, friends system, family sharing, game streaming, Steam input (which is a godsend for accessibility), etc.
You don't seem to have idea of how much a billion is and how much money is valve making. Enjoy your icecream while it's cold because you can't afford too much of it.
Being cautious of a corporation is never a bad thing, but remember: Valve isn't a public company. They don't have the same incentives and fiduciary duties that led to the enshittification of most other companies and services.
Ultimately, yes, everything they do is entirely for their own benefit. But, they're also free to focus on their long-term growth and returns. As long as the leadership doesn't get changed to a bunch of shit-for-brains golden parachute MBAs, they're going to want to keep their customers happy. It's good for them, and it's not terrible for us. Everybody wins.
I would prefer they were a nonprofit, but I'm not going to complain when the mainstream alternatives to Steam are mostly comprised of shitty sales-focused storefronts created by companies beholden to their investors.
I'll tell you a secret: you don't need a proprietary launcher to run software
I'll tell you something you missed:
Steam's DRM is notoriously easy to bypass, allowing that. They also don't force DRM on their platform, it's entirely developer/publisher opt-in (and they are also free to add additional DRM on top if they wish), and many many releases on Steam run fine directly from the executable without the launcher running.
Edit: For the record, I pirate before I buy, buy on DRM free platforms (GOG mainly) where possible, and use a third party launcher to unify my collection across multiple storefronts and many many loose executables into one spot.
No, they don't. Literally every single gamer across the world pays 15% more on every single game purchase, for literally no reason except to make the 1% at Valve even richer.
And they don't have to hire MBAs because gamers dick ride them like Gabe isnt a self serving billionaire and keep forking over an extra 15% and then thanking them for the opportunity to do so.
Do you seriously believe that if a developer pays 15% less in platform fees to Valve, that savings will be passed on to us? Epic Games tried that. Guess what: games still cost us the same there as every other platform.
It literally either goes back to the consumer or back to the game developer.
Or, more likely, the publisher. But, that's beside the point.
As it has been demonstrated when Epic tried the "developers pay less fees here" approach, the average Joe Gamer doesn't benefit in any way whatsoever. Your premise of the savings being passed down doesn't exactly pan out.
To be fair, Epic Store was marred by exclusives and having way less features back then. Even now, their (Electron) launcher boots up way slower than (CEF) Steam, and their sales are way worse.
Yes they have. The steam friends network and the fact that you can't transfer your purchases, friends data, or community data to other platforms is an inherent form of lock in. Just because you're used to it because Facebook also does it, doesn't mean it's not.
Lock-in != Monopoly.
This is ridiculously unrealistic in a capitalist society.
It costs the platform money whenever a user downloads a game, and a user who didn't buy from their store isn't a user that they make money from. No other platform would voluntarily accept a recurring cost like that unless they profit from user data.
Also, it's not like they stop publishers from doing that themselves. Ubisoft and EA use the cd-key generated by steam to associate the game with your U-Play and Origin accounts.
Not being able to transfer purchases seems like an other-platforms problem. Steam has authenticated API for users' game libraries.
Most of those companies actually contribute to the kernel or to foundational software used on servers, but few contribute to the userspace for desktop consumers on the level that Valve does.
So?
People more readily appreciate things that obviously directly affect them.