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Comment by globalreset | Hacker News Reader

The thing with Steam is - at no point in history it felt like the company is just milking its users. Something that otherwise never happens nowadays. Every single bigger company is just trying to maximize the profit by being borderline abusive, but not Valve, despite their vast dominance. For this very reason they have my loyalty and no exclusives, promotions, pricing plans etc. are going to make me switch.

Not to mention that as Linux user, they might be the single biggest force that made it so that I have more games on Linux than I have time to actually play.

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You mean the company that pioneered:

Microtransactions, real money loot-boxes, gambling, NFT marketplace, battlepasses

doesn't milk it's users?

Dota used to have $35 "arcanas", a high quality skin for a single hero which were released intermittently - but that wasn't enough money, they're now placed $200+ deep in the yearly battlepass. If you played any of their games, you'd realise they're one of greediest in the business.

Correct.

They certainly offer a lot of ways to send them money, but it doesn't feel like they're pushing particularly hard. All that Dota stuff is cosmetics, is it not? No gameplay boosts?

Plus, they were talking about Steam the platform, not individual games Valve has developed.

No, dota has a paid subscription ($5 p/m) which gates gameplay features, many of which would be really useful for newer players - ingame coaching, item suggestions, hero pick suggestions, death summary, live gameplay tips, avoid player list, ranked mmr double downs that can be used after drafting phase, exclusive modes, and live spectating (free users have to use discord streaming or spectate with 2 minutes delay).

I meant more like gameplay power boosts, but that's fair, those things are sorta gameplay.

But in any case, while you could argue that that's kinda pushy, that's Valve the game dev, not Valve the platform owner. I don't play Dota so that stuff doesn't affect me at all.

Stop using the bad game of dota as an argument. It doesn't say a whole lot about how valve uses steam.

As a dota player who played dota 1 and dota 2, i dont have to spend a single penny to enjoy dota 2. And i get to play it for free on linux. Good lord, im grateful for that.

> many of which would be really useful for newer players

Some of it is outright bad if you blindly rely on it because it goes by global statistics. How was that old story about the air force trying to create a perfect seat for the "average" pilot again? They measured everyone and averaged the results and then they couldn't find a single pilot that fit. The static list of suggested items is interesting, but the "dynamic" suggestions for the next item to build are something I mostly ignore.

You're talking about features that were all developed extra (aka they weren't gated), all of them using some kind of AI.

And none of which are even close to necessary.

The problem with selling convenience in F2P games is that the developers themselves created the issue they are selling the solution to. For example, having little inventory space. This isn't something that requires development resources to fix, so it's very clearly just there as a problem you can pay to solve. None of this applies to Dotas stuff.

Dota plus item and skill suggestions are way worse than the build guides. The only worthwhile feature is the avoid list

the difference is that is not the steam market place, all of that helps people complete with there games, but not steam as a market place.

Valve we're just so far ahead of the META that by the time people realised what was happening they were already hooked.

I have hundreds of hours in most games they developed, and i never ever felt like purchasing any of the microtransactions, or that their gameplay was optimized in a way that you would be compelled to spend money.

There is a huge difference between cosmetics only and gameplay affecting microtransactions.

With current prices they are not micro anymore anyway.

Long time steam user and have never felt compelled to buy any of that. I get an absolutely massive amount of value out of Steam and I'm yet to see another store that even runs on Linux, let alone actually boosting the whole ecosystem with Proton and other efforts.

I bought a new racing wheel a while ago and it wasn't quite working on linux, after doing some searching I found that a Valve employee was working on a patch to the kernel to fix this racing wheel just to make gaming on linux better.

FWIW itch.io also runs on Linux and have developed their own 'Proton-alike' which automatically sets up Wine prefixes for Windows games.

They're standing on the shoulders of Giants, but I also don't see (m)any of the other stores doing likewise.

itch.io may be great and all but its missing good commercial titles. It feels like any kind of subpar game ends up there.

It's an indie store, the natural successor to the flash game websites of yore. Getting games from there sight unseen is like picking up some games from the bargain bin - a lot of rubbish but the occasional gem.

It doesn't need 'good commercial titles', it needs to be seen as the preferred option for supporting Indies over steam (i.e. if you are presented with the choice, go for itch. If you're already on steam then steam has earned its money).

Do you think there's room in peoples' lives for Steam _and_ itch.io or do they overlap too much?

Most of the high end of itch is on steam, so you could life a happy and fulfilled life without hearing about itch at all.

On the other hand, if you're someone who is frustrated with the commercial nature of current stores and are pining for the simpler times - itch is very much going to scratch that... Itch.

I personally end up mostly on Steam, but on the occasion that I've really wanted to support a developer (usually puzzle games like Patrick's Parabox) I'll go to itch. The bundle for Ukraine recently also had some excellent finds in there.

tl; dr - if you are an indie connoisseur then yes, if you just want to game then probably not.

> Long time steam user and have never felt compelled to buy any of that.

That's really the trick. Valve is targeting "whales" in the same way that mobile games are. Just not as blatently.

CS:GO and the attached gambling economy regularly goes on to destroy wallets of parents and others at risk of gambling behavior.

Ok, but that's specific to CSGO, not steam in general. No game I own seems to have gambling or micro transactions, or they're just not blatantly trying to shove it into my face so that I didn't even notice. Compare this to any mobile game or pay2win games that aren't even really playable without constantly pouring in money.

Valve certainly isn't a saint, but when it comes to steam, it's a decent platform that gets the job done and doesn't get in your way, no dark patterns there.

This Linux thing can't be over-stated. I'm a dad with 2 teenage daughters and yet aside from school devices and their phones they never touch anything but Linux. Steam is a huge reason why that's possible.

"Milking" doesn't simply mean charging for services, it means collecting money in unfair or abusive way.

I'm not sure that Steam pioneered them but microtransactions are great, they enabled high quality games be free or at least cheap to access for casual players and the few who really dive deep into the content pay accordingly.

Loot boxes and other stuff are things that people want and enjoy. Can be unhealthy for some people but let's not pretend that there are large number of people living on the streets because Steam milked them away like an illegal casino.

Their ways are not designed to make you sell your car to buy a skin.

They also pioneered 2 hour no question return policy, Linux support and a store that was mostly global in a world where everyone else treated us non-americans like crap.

When Nintendo sold me a game thats unplayably busted on the Switch they just shrugged and told me to suck it up. Steam didn't.

They also pioneered a store that plays less of a moral police than any others.

(Despite all that, I usually prefer GoG these days because I despise DRM and Steams login limit.)

To be fair, Valve were sued into enacting their return policy by the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC), and no longer offer flash sales because of it.

Linux support is nice though.

That doesn't change the fact that noone else really offers this. I accidentally bought a wrong copy of a game on PS5 and they just told me to go away because I "already downloaded it". The download started automatically. I didn't even boot up the PS5 from the time I did the purchase and the time I contacted support (which also gave me a runaround of "oh, you're on UK store not EU store, go away and wait for another 45 minutes).

Seems like Australia should sue other stores as well.

Fwiw Meta offers this on the quest store. But that might just be that it's a new space. And my personal experience is this policy made me buy more stuff. Every game has basically a 2hour demo for 14 days

EGS offers the same return window.

That's just not true, GoG offer a 30 day refund even if you played the game with no maximum time, Xbox say you get a refund if you haven't "accumulated a significant amount of play time", Epic offer a under 2 hour refund and Origin seem to have a similar stance. Looks to me like 2 hours play time is a industry standard and Steam aren't doing anything special.

These windows appeared after Steam pioneered them and most of them require contacting support which can literally take hours if you're not from US (if you can even get it).

Haven't tried with GoG though, never needed it there.

Origin was doing 2 hour refunds around 2 years before Steam

The oldest articles I can find:

Origin [2013]: https://www.pcgamer.com/ea-origin-refunds/

Steam [2015]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2015/06/02/valve...

And as another person (and if my own memory serves) mentioned, Steam's move was nearly entirely driven by pending lawsuits.

Don't get me wrong, I primarily use Steam and support them because they're the only company really caring about Linux, but I don't think they can be given the credit for pioneering the current refund landscape.

The one time I requested an Xbox One game refund (downloaded, unplayed) it was a brief form to fill out online - quick and easy.

EA with Origin was doing refunds years before Steam was, so could you clarify how Steam "pioneered" them? Check your facts.

Steam was the first store implementing the 2 hour limit.

And for GOG not to have a limit on playtime makes sense, since (unless you use Galaxy), they have no way of knowing how much you've played a game.

When SimCity was an unplayable mess that basically couldn't deliver on most of the features for weeks after launch, I emailed EA, said it didn't match the quality or features they advertised. Within 2-3 days I had a refund.

This was years before Valve would issue refunds even for other similarly broken titles.

I requested refunds from them before they got sued by the ACCC, got told to take it up with the game developer. Contact the game developer who told me to take it up with Valve.

Afterwards they just tell me I played too many hours (ironically because I was trying to repro the issue on a few maps to demonstrate it wasn't me/my computer/etc that was shit)

I don't care if they offer or not, if a company refuses me a refund as per consumer law in Germany, I will file a complaint against them on the Consumer Protection Agency and let their legal team handle it.

Guess what, I usually get my refunds back from companies that tell me to f** off.

>"oh, you're on UK store not EU store, go away and wait for another 45 minutes"

Is anything stopping the UK from keeping the same consumer protection laws inherited from the EU?

I don't know - the issue wasn't the laws in my case. It was that I opened my local PSN page, clicked "get support" and it somehow connected me with UK support chat. Which then, after 45 minutes of waiting, just told me that I need to try again on my local support page with no helpful link. Back in line for me it was. I never noticed at which point exactly did the PSN page redirect me to UK page...

so far we have kept those same laws, so no, in principle nothing is stopping the UK from keeping them :)

The whole point of Brexit was to boldly charge ahead into a bright future, unburdened by EU's anti-innovation laws (some of which are known as "consumer protection laws").

Apple App Store does no questions asked returns, devs complain. When it's Steam, devs praise.

But yes, to your point, Sony doing it on Cyberpunk was extraordinary.

I purchased movies to watch with my kids on Google Play after which I found out they did not come with Dutch subtitles, which was unexpected for me. Asked for a refund and received it immediately, unexpectedly!!

Sure, they did that because they got forced to by a specific regulatory body, but most companies when something like that happens enable it only the regions they're legally required to do so. Valve appear to have just implemented it, then turned on worldwide because it seems like a good idea.

Australia only requires returns for defective products. Valve used to be in violation but now they are well beyond the legal requirements in allowing change of mind refunds as well.

I see flash sales often, what is your definition of a flash sale?

And to give credit where credit is due, EA Origin was earlier to the punch at refunding digital sales. In fact that was one of it's selling points when it initially started.

They only added the refund policy because they were breaking consumer rights in some counties and they even got fined by Australia for it. It's funny that people think they did it out of care for the customer.

The regional pricing cannot be overstated - when I lived in a country with a PPP ratio of 0.5 (vs US), Steam always felt to have realistic local prices while other stores were 2x or more expensive. It really drove the normalization of non-piracy in various countries IMHO.

Most of the people in this thread won’t understand the pain of having to buy something denominated in dollars, especially as a kid with no money. That’s probably why I’ll be loyal to Steam forever.

Most people on this site don't know and don't care externalized cost of dollar denominated currency and reserve currency status so long as their goods and vacations come cheap.

Yeah that's why all the Hongkong key shops exist because Valve is so fucking generous with its prices

> When Nintendo sold me a game thats unplayably busted on the Switch they just shrugged and told me to suck it up. Steam didn't.

Star Wars Republic Commando, by chance?

It was actually Sexy Brutale which consistently runs with less than 15fps, looks blurry to the point where it's hard to see things and occasionally crashes. It's really not playable.

I've tried a refund when the studio publicly stated they have no intention of patching the game after launch.

Oh, that really sucks, Sexy Brutale is actually a great game on other platforms. Pity the port was so botched.

>They also pioneered 2 hour no question return policy,

I don't consider that a positive. Big Box stores usually have 15 days for returns.

having a 15 day return period for games that can be beaten five times in that period doesn't make sense

to be clear that is 2 hours of playtime, not realtime. You can refund something you bought months ago but never played.

A lot of big box stores don't want to do 1:1 refunds if the seal has been broken.

> They also pioneered a store that plays less of a moral police than any others.

They banned loli.

https://kotaku.com/steam-is-banning-sex-games-with-young-loo...

And a whole host of other games: Hatred, Active Shooter, Rape Day, Super Seducer 3. In many cases, Valve retroactively edited its content policies to justify banning such games.

Like that's better than the 14 day no questions asked return policy the EU already had. The one they smeared to buy a new law allowing such malpractice?

In Australia, Nintendo are required to refund in this scenario too (and would).

These are consumer law issues that should extend beyond games.

You're talking about Valve, while OP is talking about Steam.

As someone who only uses Steam (and used to play TF2 before all the hat things, but not DotA), I still see Steam in a good way. And I actually discovered that Valve indeed created all the things you mentioned (except NFT markeplace, which I believe is an exaggeration).

I believe that it's good that EGS is trying to compete with Steam, but on the other hand, I'm scared that EGS's tactics will force Steam to use the same tactics and make it less user-friendly.

Fair comment, but steam is, or at least used to be, worse in this regard than valve. They gamified sales. Flash sales, loot boxes for buying stuff, trading said loot on steam marketplace, etc.

I e, they pushed gambling and gacha stuff to children. I've always felt they had come up with a perverse incentive s structure with these sales.

> you'd realise they're one of greediest in the business.

it's not greedy if the users are buying it willingly. The game is not pay to win - you can skip all of it, and just enjoy the game on its own.

Not many free to play games can be said to have this.

Agreed, as long as the items are only cosmetic, I don't care how much they cost. They're entirely optional, unlike the "optional" pay-to-win items that cost you thousands of hours of grinding if you don't pay.

It is 2022, we have the internet and long histories of everything everyone has said and done. A 5 point list of things you don't like isn't really an argument in the modern era. You really should put the effort in to link that into an actual complaint. Anyone or any company that has done anything of note has got a few points about them that aren't pure and perfect.

Valve pioneered a lot of those things before anyone even realised that they were profitable. The way they stumbled into the gambling market looked, from where I sat, like an accidental evolution of a company that was experimental and evidence based. Particularly on DOTA - unless something really changed since the last time I looked you can play the whole game for free and the winner is determined purely by skill. Valve is being entirely reasonable in how they make money - giving people who are huge fans of the game a way to spend money on it.

I played Dota for years without ever feeling the need to spend on cosmetics. Valve prides themselves on a free-to-play, pay-to-look-fancy-in-game model. I didn’t care about the looks, so I played the game for free.

Other games have a free-to-play but pay-to-win model. League of Legends requires you to pay if you want to play with the newer, more powerful characters. Hearthstone is free to play but adds newer, more powerful cards every season. Building a competitive deck of cards could cost $150-200 per season.

That’s not to say I like this lootbox bullshit. It preys on people who have a weakness for gambling. If I were wired differently I could have spent thousands on them. I think they should be regulated out of existence.

You can, over time, unlock the new characters in League of Legends without having to pay real money though, right?

It’s true, but new characters are very “expensive”, even in the free currency. I have an embarrassing number of hours in league (4 digits) and do not have all the characters unlocked. Compare to Dota where I had every character unlocked at hour zero.

It's literally a free game, with no strings attached. The only downside is the game gets heavier on resources with these items when you play with players with these items.

Valve is certainly doing(has done) better than the market ethically, you need to look into their competition to see the state.

Nothing you list is mandatory, you're free to ignore it. I didn't even know about them. So no, I don't consider that "milking".

You mean the company that pioneered the single most fair microtransactions in existence? I've played many F2P games, and not a single one has ever been as fair as Dota 2. Short of giving away everything for free, there is no way they could've monetized more fairly.

Also the fact that it is one of the few where you can sell your lootbox results... Albeit for store credit with 15% tax. But still, that alone puts it beyond others.

Battlepasses where a cut is added to the price pools of events. I agree they are pioneers. Why is everyone else just pocketing their battlepass earnings still 5 years later and offering tiny price pools?

Blizzard once crowdfunded a prize pool and ran away with the money.

If valve is milking users, then everyone else is butchering them.

I never once felt I had to use any of those though...

Their tournament organizing is piss poor for how much the battlepasses bring in

Can't agree more on the DOTA2 part. Valve doesn't invest much on the community, tournaments and even the game itself. Now the game is already dead in NA, CN coming next. Let alone the derivatives, like Artifact and AutoChess (DOTA Underloads)

But all this stuff is strictly optional - the skins do not affect your win-rate.

(There were some edge cases e.g. CSGO agents but they are working to bring it down to a tiny difference)

> Microtransactions, real money loot-boxes, gambling, NFT marketplace, battlepasses

I feel like I'm out of the loop here. Didn't those come more from mobile gaming and Asian free to play MMOs or Battle Royales? Didn't Valve make the "traditional" buy-once games like Half-Life, Portal, HL-derivatives like Team Fortress/CS?

As for milking its users, Steam (the platform) is an incredible value (for purchases, refunds, reseller ecosystem, etc.) and an awesome utility (community mods, auto updates, reviews, cloud sync, streaming, Proton, multiplayer APIs, etc.). I think the one fair gripe about them is that they take a pretty large cut from developers and force them to use the Steam payment processing, which takes another big cut. But for end users (players) it's a wonderful platform, especially compared to its peers like GOG Galaxy, the EA/Ubi/Microsoft clients, the Epic Game Stores... none of those come close in usability.

Individual titles within the platform might choose to use lootboxes and other crappy monetization schemes, but that's on them, not Steam. There are thousands of games that have better monetization models, and Steam helped revive the dormant indie PC gaming industry and then blew it up a thousandfold... almost none of those games have predatory pricing models.

As for cosmetic skins, what's wrong with that? Who cares how much they charge for those if it doesn't provide a gameplay advantage of any sort, just blinky particles? Compared to any ACTUAL predatory P2W game, I'd so much rather support games that only sell cosmetics.

It seems so unfair to reduce all that Valve has done for the PC gaming to "lootboxes and high priced skins". Without Steam PC gaming would probably have died by now, and with it the most amazing renaissance in indie titles since the shareware days.

> Didn't Valve make the "traditional" buy-once games like Half-Life, Portal, HL-derivatives like Team Fortress/CS?

There's a reason that the slogan "we used to make games, now we make money" has been half-jokingly attributed to Valve. For years, their biggest revenue producers have been their free-to-play games with cosmetic microtransactions such as CS:GO, DOTA2, and TF2. As far as I know, their last "traditional" game was Portal 2 in 2011. Half-Life: Alyx could be argued to have similar production value, but was released as more of an erstwhile "pack-in title" for the Valve Index headset.

Oh wow, I didn't realize those games evolved into cosmetic marketplaces. (I bought TF2 and CS:GO when they were still one-time purchases).

But they're purely cosmetic? That sounds like a wonderful business model for all involved, especially vs the predatory P2W crap that's really infesting the market (especially in mobiles and MMOs). I'd probably also rather than a F2P cosmetics-only game over a buy-once game... if only because that usually implies there will be a proper server farm hosting the games, lessening cheaters or peer to peer hosts with terrible connections.

TF2 has functional items, but you can generally receive them from playing or buying them for a fixed price, around $1 each. Realistically for $30 you won't lack items.

The cosmetics will cost you, though.

I hear they also balance TF2 quite well such that the functional items don't really give an advantage, just a different play style

Valve pioneered most of that stuff, just that they sorta let go of the accelerator at some point and let other companies who were initially following their lead surpass them in exploitativeness so theyre not too associated with it nowadays.

Although I suppose its dubious whether real world money gambling (valve) is more or less exploitative than the gambling directly implemented into game design that the rest of the industry took up.

Isn't there a pretty big difference between gambling for cosmetics and gambling for gameplay advantage? The former is like buying clothes... sure, you can spend as much money as you want on them, but it doesn't really affect anyone else. Whereas P2W gambling totally screws up game balance for all the other players because it monetizes the power curve.

I have a hard time accepting TF2 hats were exploitative. The cosmetic items have no impact on gameplay, and I played the game while completely ignoring trading items. It never felt like gambling, unlike in EA games.

Real money in exchange for non-cosmetic items (weapons, characters, skills, more attempts per day on boss X or dungeon Y) is awful and must die, I do not condone it. It should be outright outlawed.

Real money in exchange for convenience (storage space in PoE) or purely cosmetic items (non-combat pets, hats, angel wings, whatever) ? Fine.

Yeah, Steam is not looking out for users. It locks everything behind DRM too.

The "good for users" alternative to Steam is GOG, but it's basically an also-ran in the market.

I have a love/hate relationship with Steam. I love that it "just works" on Linux, but I hate the DRM and lock-in. When I mostly used a PC I'd always favor GOG or some other distribution method, although I did have lots of Steam games as well. Now that I own a Steam Deck - and playing non-steam games is a bit of a pain in the rear (but at least possible) - I find myself buying into the platform even more (which, no doubt, was the entire purpose of the Steam Deck).

I agree with what you're saying but just to note, the DRM is optional although most devs take them up on it. Kerbal Space Program is one example of a game where iirc you can just copy the folder out and run it on any machine.

Good point. It facilitates DRM, but it doesn't mandate it.

I feel like this exemplifies Steam. It's not unambiguously anti-consumer, and it does provide some real value, so many of us are willing to accept the tradeoffs involved.

Even with DRM, historical context is important. Steams DRM usually had better terms (family sharing etc) than the competition and it was also more lightweight. It was DRM which really did not get in most gamers way compared to say the abominations that Ubisoft shipped. They're not GoG but they're far from the worst and I always felt like Valve cared a lot more about these sort of things then they had to given their market dominance.

TBF I have been playing to Dota for seven years, and I've never spent 1 cent for it.

Steam did not pioneer these things. They were a thing in MMO's since around 2000, then rose to ridiculous properties in the early 2010's with Facebook (farmville) and mobile (clash of clans) games. The current spat, I believe, started in 2016 with Overwatch, quickly followed by the series of "live service" games like Fortnite.

I think the key is that it feels like Steam-the-marketplace is merely making such tools available to individual developers/publishers of specific games.

Then if a game is an exploitative grindfest, blame falls on the dev/publisher for choosing to implement whatever-it-is.

Are you speaking about the game which costed (at least) tens of millions to develop and everyone can play it for free, with no in-play disadvantage?

Oh, hi Tim Sweeney.

The answer is simple, the company is not public it's private. it doesn't seek infinite growth which is impossible thing to to.

Yeah this is a key point when you consider Valve’s strategy. Gabe still owns >50%, and is a billionaire without a tonne of outside ventures, he can afford to play around a bit.

I think this is why they’ve been able to experiment so much the last few years, to varying success.

Didn't it kinda reach the ceiling already when it comes to PC game market share? Hard to grow above that

Meh, I don't know. The whole reason Steam even exist is because Valve decided to lock CS 1.6 and later HL2 behind it. It's a long time ago now, but the way I remember things people hated Steam for years before the general perception started to change 15 or so years ago.

Edit: I'm also pretty sure they patched in-game ads into CS 1.6 at some point, but can't remember for sure. Anyone else recall that?

Not really.

The reason Steam exists and is as strong as it is, is because every other game developer abandoned PC gaming and went to the consoles, for an entire decade.

Including Microsoft.

People not only hated Steam, they hated PC gaming.

No, the other poster is right.

You had to use Steam to get HL2. This got them on enough PCs that they could build the dominance they have today.

There are obviously other reasons for their success, but the other poster is spot on both about what they did, and how many people felt about it at the time.

> because every other game developer abandoned PC gaming and went to the consoles, for an entire decade [...] People not only hated Steam, they hated PC gaming

There couldn't be anything more false. Game developers flocked to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 because Microsoft and Sony entered a bidding war and flooded them with money upfront to build exclusives for their platforms, while in the PC gaming space there was no such "free" money to be had upfront, as game studios had to fund development themselves or raise money from publishers and hope the end product would be a success to get their money back and make a profit on top to stay afloat.

And people didn't hate PC gaming, they hated the poor quality XB360/PS3 ports that were being pushed on the PC platform.

I remember that. While it might not have been clear at the time, Valve definitely made Steam a value add. Friends lists, cloud saves, etc.

I think we can get a clearer picture if we compare it to Epics launch: No cloud saves at all, shoddy service all around. The only thing they had going for them was buying up exclusives (many of which had already been promised as Steam releases). Steam/Valve is really a saint in comparison, even back then.

>Valve definitely made Steam a value add. Friends lists, cloud saves, etc.

I mean, at launch these features definitely did not exist (cloud saves) or were buggy (friends lists). Holding Half Life 2 hostage behind steam was definitely controversial at the time, and Steam was kind of... not great for quite a while. Valve were in it for the long haul though and it really is a great ecosystem now, there are still some gripes to be had but like you say, compared to every other store on PC there really is no competition.

A fun article from the time it was released: https://www.dslreports.com/shownews/32981

The reason people hated Steam at the time of CS 1.6 is because those people who owned CS on WON would need to repurchase CS on Steam. Since all new players were on Steam it meant that the existing playerbase were excluded (there was no WON/Steam cross-play).

Ah yes I remember steam being called a "steaming pile of shit" and an animated gif of the steam logo using used to drive a piston into a man's rear end being passed around. I recall the friends service was constantly broken. I had a copy of CS 1.5 on USB for local LAN usage.

At release internet speeds were honestly too slow and the software was filled with bugs.

Steam milks developers instead of users, so that does indeed tend to generate value for the customer. The situation isn't ideal, but Valve is certainly the least bad option for computer games. Alternative platforms were mostly implemented by larger studios. The incentive was probably to cut out the middle man of course. Ironic if you look at the state of the IT industry.

Also, Steam has a long term strategy in the interest of customers and I believe gaming in general. Supporting other platforms as Windows for example. They are smart enough to look beyond the horizon and can make predictions for possible developments in the market. I highly appreciate that as a customer.

Does it really "milk" developers though... The "customers" of Steam are the developers not the people buying games. They make money not by selling games (well okay, Valve does sell first party games via Steam too) but by selling the ability to sell games to developers.

App stores like Steam, for all their problems, provide real tangible value to developers. It simplifies distribution of files and updates (no need to set up your own CDN/P2P network and write server/client code to handle game updates), provides integration of payment (no need to negotiate your own deals with payment processors), and in Steam's case also provides extra gaming specific value-adds like cloud saves and DRM that would also be costly to build/integrate in-house. If you think about all this, the cut they take could be justified for the right customer.

The difference between Steam and something like the Apple App Store is that Steam does not have have monopoly power over PC game/software distribution. As a developer you get to decide whether Steam's cut justifies their value to you individually. If you don't like Steam or it doesn't make sense for you, you don't need to use it. And many indie developers do exactly this -- they sell at conventions, release physical media, offer direct downloads/sales from their own site, use competing platforms like itch.io, Patreon, Dlsite etc.

Steam is good because the platform they are on is competitive and thus to succeed you have to justify your value.

It's privately owned. The requirement for infinite growth so investors can get rich off other people's work is what kills everything publicly traded. It's what is killing Netflix and what will kill Game Pass.

I love Steam and I hope it's never bought out.

As much as I wish Valve made more games, I'd prefer this to them being publicly traded.

If they got bought out I’d worry for the future of my game library.

I agree, I've been a happy customer of theirs for ~20 years and always felt like I was getting a good deal, and many of the annoyances of the platform seem mostly imposed by publishers (origin/uplay logins, online/drm requirements etc.)

Plus often the strategies competitors cook up actively put me off, I don't want the additional overhead of managing more accounts/payment options/social platforms I already have more then I want. And making me jump through those hoops to play an exclusive game will more often then not mean I just don't play the game

Valve is a private corporation that is run to make profits for its owners. It is not run to jack up its stock price so it behaves differently from other corporations it runs more like a family run business not a corporation.

By being a walled garden monopoly, you're inherently milking the users.

It's not, though.

I mean, I don't remember the last time something came exclusively through Steam by exclusivity agreements. That cannot be said for Epic Games though.

Sure Epic had to come up with ways to increase their competitive advantage while having an inferior product with smaller catalog and worse ux, all problems inherent to a newer product trying to penetrate a consolidated market.

Steam felt like it was just there, adding features and improvements in a slow but steady pace and really offering value to both players, by introducing sales and democratizing access to games (sure in the EU and US it might seem less important, but coming from Brazil I can't begin to tell how much of an impact digital outlets had to providing access to quality games on emergent markets), and to developers by single handely making piracy somewhat obsolete.

Sure it had problems like high fees for small devs, a case can be said that this monopoly over time started hurting the small dev, or the massive flow of low quality games, but to call it a walled garden is a far cry from reality. We gamers got it good and we sometimes don't appreciate it. Just look at the state of streaming services to see what could have been.

It's not a monopoly, you're right. I misspoke.

It's a walled garden, because you can't use their various services on their own or with third-party services. The games themselves are just rented to you, you can't run them without your Steam account.

You absolutely can, the DRM part of Steam is optional choice by the developer. It can just be a Game Downloader.

You can even sell codes in your own store, WITHOUT STEAM GETTING MONEY. That's incredibly generous.

I don't understand why you would expect them to give away their features for free. That's like expecting a a restaurant letting you use their cutlery and tables with your own food.

Finally, you have never and will never truly own a game. No, not even when they came as CDs. It was always just a limited license.

> Finally, you have never and will never truly own a game. No, not even when they came as CDs. It was always just a limited license.

This is a common red herring - nobody means owning the actual IP for a game when they mention owning physical games. They mean having control over when, where and how a game is played.

Physical games give more control to the user, assuming DRM allowed that.

(and the real issue is having DRM or not, not being physical vs digital - for example my physical DVD copy of Bioshock has some stupid DRM limitation whereas my GOG copy is fully DRM-free, giving me more control than the physical one)

Didn't know that about the DRM part of Steam being optional.

> I don't understand why you would expect them to give away their features for free.

Incentives? Won't comment to that. But, what I expect is that my services and tools don't constrain their interoperability. Open protocols are nothing new. Neither are closed platforms.

> It's a walled garden, because you can't use their various services on their own or with third-party services. The games themselves are just rented to you, you can't run them without your Steam account.

If this really were an issue, GOG would be a lot more popular. Most people just don't care. It's actually really nice having Steam just auto-manage my entire library across all my devices, seamlessly, with all the mods and updates and files and such all taken care of. And being able to seamlessly stream to the TV/phone/Steam Deck is great, along with Big Picture mode.

I have several DRM-free titles on GOG that I never end up using -- only bought them there because they were slightly cheaper -- but now I wish bought them on Steam instead, because it's so much easier to actually PLAY the game that way.

Sometimes walled gardens are nice if the alternative is the untamed wilds...

As for "renting" games, well, not so long ago they were $50 a pop and if you broke the CD, too bad. Now those same games are routinely discounted by 75%+, and my library has increased in size a hundred times because of it. If it takes a rental model to get us there, that seems like a great tradeoff, honestly... like movies, most games don't really have infinite longevity anyway. If I can play it for a few years and then it eventually disappears for whatever reason (which almost never happens, btw), usually they will re-release an updated version later on with improved graphics and such anyway. It's not like digital games are a collector's item. In fact the subscription services (Xbox Game Pass, etc.) take that one step further I wish more games did that. The idea of "owning" a copy of software is dubious to begin with... one way or another you're paying for the development, whether it's a buy-once model + expansion packs, buy-once + DLC, subscription, lootboxes... every game does it differently these days, but overall players have a lot more games at a lot more price points.

GOG is the go-to example for why this isn't a walled garden. It is an extremely difficult market to penetrate, but right now there is a niche for every need out there.

Steam is definitely a walled garden, it's just not the ONLY garden. Epic has a fenced one with mediocre gardeners, the publishers have their own planter boxes, there's the untamed wilds of the pirate scene, etc.

It's (thankfully) not like the Apple/Google Play duopoly. You can still by and large sell PC games however you want, but a lot of devs/publishers choose Steam both because of its marketshare and because of its useful features.

That is true for all consolidated markets. Everyone could in theory create a service to compete with Amazon. There is really nothing preventing people from doing that apart from the fact that it is extremely difficult to penetrate that market.

In this sense those are walled gardens, but because of the nature of those markets. E-commerce, telecommunications, datacenter, banking to some degree are all examples of hard to penetrate markets.

The original article goes on to explain that going head to head against solutions that are consolidated in these market are a waste of time and money. Better to find and exploit a niche that is still untouched.

I'm not sure that's a completely fair characterisation, they definitely have an overwhelming market share but competitors such as GOG, Epic, Uplay, Origin do exist and often interoperate with Steam. And while publishers/developers will go to Steam because that's where most customers are I'm not aware of any Steam store policy/rule that says games can't be simultaneously sold through other marketplaces

Steam is not monopoly because you can buy the games everywhere else and run them.

I totally use gog and other stores.

> The thing with Steam is - at no point in history it felt like the company is just milking its users.

As someone who purchased Half-Life in a physical box in a retail store before Steam so much as existed and was happy downloading update patches and using a server browser until Steam forced me to create a Steam account and become a Steam user to continue playing Half-Life online, this is true. I feel more exploited than milked.

The question ultimately is: how do you create an ecosystem which fairly compensates and doesn't brutally overwork game staff? Relying purely on game sales is difficult. Games are expensive to produce and gamers, sans whales, are generally quite price sensitive. Gamers are also a famously tough crowd to please. Indie game economics work by saving costs on production, either by keeping art simple so many fewer artists are required or otherwise constraining the game space. Even then, the majority of indie games flop. I don't have an answer, but everywhere I've looked in the games industry, margins are razor thin.

> The question ultimately is: how do you create an ecosystem which fairly compensates and doesn't brutally overwork game staff?

This is a problem that has to be solved by those actually able to do something, and that is the regulatory agencies for the US and EU, not multinational corporations or placing the responsibility on individual consumers. The multinational corporations have no interest in kneecapping their "competitive advantages", and consumers don't care or don't even know just how fucked up the entire entertainment industry is ("crunch time" isn't just an issue in games, but also in movies!).

That's stuff like actually enforcing labor regulations (e.g. the Directive 93/104/EC that prescribes a maximum week work time of 48h)... and that linked together with stuff like passing "supply chain laws" (that hold corporations liable for labor rights violations by their suppliers) should put a stop on these practices.

Unfortunately, labor regulations enforcement is pretty scarce in the EU as it is, and the US are pretty much a regulatory wild west, at least when seen from an European perspective.

The main issue as I see it in the game dev space (can't speak to other parts of the gaming industry) is that faaaar too many people naively go into it because they like playing video games, got into programming because they were on the computer anyway, and then hop into the industry bright-eyed and bushy tailed. That's just a recipe for mistreatment. Whereas in web-dev, for example, no one is excited at the prospect of developing a new CRUD app for some megacorp, so we get paid handsomely for our skills.

Unions may be controversial in the broader software development sphere, but they're obviously desperately needed in game dev.

(P.S. Re: "margins are razor thin": A lot of this comes down to the gaming industry's version of Hollywood accounting. The big publishers like EA, Ubisoft, etc. are making a killing off of their mistreatment of their studios' staff)

> (P.S. Re: "margins are razor thin": A lot of this comes down to the gaming industry's version of Hollywood accounting. The big publishers like EA, Ubisoft, etc. are making a killing off of their mistreatment of their studios' staff)

Sorry, I meant "everywhere I look outside of the big publishers" instead of "everywhere I look." Of course, the big publishers make crazy money by milking old franchises and through large economies of scale. If that's the kind of games industry we want, then it looks like the working model is oligopoly.

Being privately owned has its advantages

They don't have to milk the user when they do that to themselves. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't seem there are many PC-exclusive publishers around anymore for several decades now.

Of course they do - loot boxes in tf2 and other games enable underage gambling. I can't think of a worse way to monetize your users.

Unlike Magic the Gathering in the 80s and 90s.

MtG is actually much worse because the lootboxes contain items that give you advantage in the game. AFAIK all Valve games only have cosmetic items.

I just want to be able to play N++ without having to launch two apps to do so.

> at no point in history it felt like the company is just milking its users.

Still, the EULA states that steam is a subscription, for currently 0 (USD|EUR) per month. So at any time they might increase that fee.

Thanks for the downvotes. Read the EULA. Then think about the rule of the messenger vs. the content of the message.

> The thing with Steam is - at no point in history it felt like the company is just milking its users.

You mean like to "solve the cheaters problem" they made so that free users in tf2 can no longer use the chat, while it's still full of cheaters?

"Felt" is really the right word for this, because almost every bad practice in the industry was pioneered by Valve, particularly in TF2. They're just really good at inducing reciprocity.

Large scale Microtransactions (TF2).

Cosmetic Microtransactions in a Single Player / Coop game (Portal 2).

Loot Boxes (TF2, though they really got bad with CS:GO).

And worst of all, a planned economy that collects "sales tax" and enables children to gamble. Not even "simulated" gambling where all you get is a cosmetic locked to your account. Just straight up gambling. With cashing out if you happen to be lucky and know when to stop.

Oh, and don't forget paid mods - a concept that has similarities to previous Steam Workshop games, but blew up right in their face when it involved a third party that people usually just joke about having their players fix all bugs for them after ship.

Your timeline could use some work. Oblivion's 'horse armor' DLC was in 2006, and the first DLC came about a decade prior. The earliest I could find was the "Cuss Pack" for Redneck Rampage from 1997. Also, you cannot withdraw money from your Steam account.

Very nit-picky. I didn't say DLC itself was bad, but the scale at which TF2 and Portal 2 had these elements was rather unprecedented (having bundles going into the hundreds of dollars).

Also, sure, you can't withdraw from a Steam account. But that doesn't mean it's not monetary value. It's easy enough to find someone who wants a game and you buy them a gift and they give you the money instead. And paying for CSGO items outside the ecosystem is tolerated enough that people still do it.

Yeah, I even think the mass harvesting of data(steam hardware survey, usage stats) is fun and interesting.

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