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Tim Sweeney emailed Gabe Newell calling Valve 'you assholes' over Steam policies, to which Valve's COO replied internally 'you mad bro?' (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/steam@lemmy.ml
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[+] -17 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Why should valve, or sony, or Apple, or Google get 30% of the revenue of entire industries for having a download and payment service.

It's extortionate and undeserved. When I play a game I absolutely love, one third of the money for that game didn't go to the people who made it, it went to valves endless bucket of money. It's not right and we should not be defending these extremely high cuts.

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  • [–] 21 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    Valve runs a profitable Launcher that allows them to try expanding into ventures like the Steam Deck and pushing Linux gaming adoption even if it ends in failures. That extra cash is what allows for businesses to expand beyond only one field.

    Otherwise a company is just stuck being just a reseller, and I think gaming space currently is better for Steam Deck and how it's pushed more people to try Linux. And even before the Steam Deck work on Proton helped. Having profits makes it easier to absorb failures and put resources towards stuff like Linux that is niche and may never gain a significant enough adoption.

    Like epic even with fortnite can't financially justify supporting Linux anticheat for fortnite, so I guess that's what happens if a company is not taking in enough profits. And Epic store is only being kept afloat because of fortnite, and is losing money.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago*

    Also, it's worth pointing out that Gabe seems like a decent guy, and Tim Sweeney is a fucking prick. So I think that's a pretty big difference right there too. Valve has earned respect, Epic has not.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago*

    Not just the Steam Deck. It or the Index (or IMO even better the Link and the Controller) are certainly more noticable things they did, but big wins to me are stuff like the integrated modding in Steam, or the ease of user reviews.

    And for a newer feature that has become somewhat standard across stores but only because Valve startedi t and they had to keep up, refunding without any questions asked.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    When you buy something at the store, did you know that in most cases the company selling probably saw less than half of what you paid? What if they don't have it in stock?

    steam provides a ton of benefits at scale that would have probably eaten up more than 30% of the price for the game company, with the ability to instantly scale with no limitation if it picks up in popularity.

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  • [+] -16 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    If I buy a single player game, more than likely, valve is making entirely profit on that 30%. The cost of the download is below a penny to valve. Yet they still get s third of that companies revenue.

    Charge them for the services if you want. They aren't doing thst, they are taking 30% of an industries revenue for doing nearly nothing.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    And Valve has other bills to pay, servers to run, employees to pay. Software to develop, did you think all of these great features Steam has were free to develop? Incidentally, remember when Valve released their in house animation software for free when people asked to buy it?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    You pay for the game once, whether you download it once or a million times. Valve gets the 30% once, because if you don't pay again, 30% of 0 is still 0. At least that's how percentages worked back in the day, who knows how it works now 🤣🤣

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Valve is at least helping out to grow a community ofbgamers that want to have nothing to do with Crapple, Google, Microshit, etc. Look at the cost of a Steam Deck. Now to see if you can buy or assemble a computer with similar specs. Why do you think Asus and Ayaneo have similar devices that are way more expensive? Valve sells the decks at a loss (which they make up for by that 30% on sapes, sure). How would they be able to pull something like that off if they weren't swimming in money? Is 30% disproportionately hefty? Hell yes! But developers and gamers alike get much more out of that cut Valve gets, just Proton development alone is good enough. Can you say the same about Crapple, for example? Valve is a corporation, for profit, like every other corp out there, but at least they do bring innovation (not to be confused with the bullshit that Google and all Tue other crooks want to call that when all they are doing is knocking down walls between them and your money) and value across the board.

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