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Comment by haunter | Hacker News Reader

While I like them

1, companies are not our friends

2, they ruined gaming foerever with lootboxes pioneered by TF2 and enabled the whole illegal digital gambling system with CSGO which is going for more than a decade now. They could shut it down but they don’t because they also benefit from it and the ship has now sailed. And it’s a billion dollar unregulated black market.

3, they ruined gaming forever with the whole battlepass system pioneered by Dota 2

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Valve likely played a role in normalizing lootboxes in Western markets, but they definitely didn't invent the idea. MapleStory was doing lootboxes years earlier, and EA's Fifa was doing P2W lootboxes prior to TF2.

Their model of cosmetic-only lootboxes is also far less obnoxious than the P2W form that has taken over mobile gaming. Many mobile games today are designed to be as obnoxious as possible in the hopes that the player will crack open their wallet for a shortcut.

> Valve likely played a role in normalizing lootboxes in Western markets, but they definitely didn't invent the idea.

My first thought was that lootboxes were a natural development of Japanese gacha toys, and Wikipedia's article does cite them as a precedent for lootboxes.

Not that it was a pay-real-money-to-spin situation, but Legend of Zelda: Minish Cap had a gacha-based minigame mechanic in the game, and that came out several years before TF2, let alone TF2's shift towards free-to-play mechanics.

If you wanna go further back, magic the gathering booster packs are just lootboxes. Old arcade games were pay to win via extra lives/tries for more quarters

I remember laughing at the lawsuits claiming that Pokemon cards were promoting gambling to children. In retrospect they were right and I wish they'd won.

I’d not give Valve credit for lootboxes when Pokémon and baseball cards surely were the direct parents of lootboxes. Not would I credit CSGO for creating the digital item economy when Diablo 2 and Diablo 3 were doing that much earlier on.

Seriously, the pass Valve gets from allowing a gambling empire to piggyback on their API and profit from the lootboxes that fuel it is crazy to me. "Yeah they might have a pseudo-monopoly but their product is good, I think the 30% cut is fine." would be laughed at in most other sectors. They barely even try for their market position, people just rejected competition and scream it's not Steam because "I don't want multiple launchers"

Don't twitch and apple take 30% cuts as well? Seems pretty standard for content distribution platforms.

Don’t forget Sony, and MS, and Nintendo.

Valve just has a lot of goodwill, they don't feel the need to comment on every social issue, they censor less than the competition, they are very indie friendly, they'd rather just not put out a sequel than churn out yearly releases, the tech they have put out has been (mostly) innovative and still retains popularity.

They also have the goodwill for helping make gaming on linux practical enough that there can be a handheld gaming console that runs linux (plus, of course, popularizing that entire new market segment).

They also don't constantly change large parts of Steam. Point is, people like that Valve is relatively stable, and that's why they insist on sticking to it. The industry is otherwise such a shitshow. The stability is an especially important value for a platform that holds, in many cases, thousands of dollars worth of games for people.

> "Yeah they might have a pseudo-monopoly but their product is good, I think the 30% cut is fine." would be laughed at in most other sectors.

In most other sectors the bar is higher. They've earned their near-monopoly fair and square (unlike Apple, they don't do anything to block competing marketplaces - they're not even preinstalled) by being head and shoulders above their competitors in terms of quality - the fact that that's due to those competitors all sawing their own legs off doesn't change that.

They might have some features that Steam has but that platform has been in hard development for a long while now.

When you've tried the others and then been denied playing your game because of their crappiness... it gets old quick.

You are glossing over how every other launcher is a piece of crap written by the lowest costing bidder to spy on me even when I'm not playing a game from it. "They barely even try for their market position." Not one launcher comes anywhere close in terms of feature set. Valve alone is the reason gamers aren't shackled to windows anymore, only Steam gives disabled people the ability to forcibly remap controllers so they can play games, only Steam offers gamers in every country the opportunity to refund games after they bought them in client without any back and forth, library sharing, functional reviews independent of developer moderation, open access to developers, robust community features, even the steam overlay is amazing. Even with Fortnite and free games every few weeks, Epic is struggling to gain market share because of how GOOD Steam is and how fairly Valve treats its customers.

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