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Comment by immibis | Hacker News Reader

Gabe is the Apple of PC gaming, taking a 30% tax on all transactions. It's not this particular kind of evil, but it is a different kind of evil.

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There is nothing forcing developers to release on steam, they can sell directly through a website. It’s not Valve’s fault no other competitor has gotten close to the quality of Steam. Epic Games could have made a dent, but they decided to try to bribe customers instead of making a functioning store.

This made me laugh. I tried Epic because I got a free game that I was interested in, but could only play it on the Epic Game store. After a week, I was no longer able to login no matter what I tried. So anecdotally, your statement tracks with my experience.

>instead of making a functioning store.

For all intents and purposes it's "functioning" for me. You can search for a game, hit buy, put in your credit card number, then download/play it. I've seen some spurious arguments about how it lacks a cart or reviews, but it's a stretch to claim the lack of them makes them non "functioning". I never bulk buy games, and for reviews I can go to steam or metacritic.

In 2025 I expect an online store to have at least some cataloging option (like Steam's tags) and some user feedback (like Steam reviews or Steam community discussions). Yes, most of Steam's features are half-baked, and Valve doesn't really want to improve them (curators, user tags, guides etc.), but it's baffling that no other store gives at least the same amount of those features to you. Even though they could.

>In 2025 I expect an online store to have at least some cataloging option (like Steam's tags)

To be fair most online storefronts don't have that. Amazon/walmart at best have "categories", which epic also has. Even online content portals like spotify don't have tags, preferring something like "more like this".

> but it's baffling that no other store gives at least the same amount of those features to you. Even though they could.

The better question is why storefronts don't directly compete on price. We see with airlines that consumers are willing to put up with hellish conditions to save a few percent on airfare. Those features are definitely nice, it's just unclear how they can avoid the free-rider problem if there are competing storefronts.

> The better question is why storefronts don't directly compete on price.

The way I see it, it depends how you see who is who's customer. Is the gamer the customer of the store, or are they the customer of the developer/publisher who put out the game, and in turn is the developer/publisher the customer of the store. The store cut is the price to buy their services, and they can shop around to find different offerings at different prices, just as gamers might be able to shop around and decide what (platform features) matters to them with the options available.

I think directly reducing the games' prices will not have the same effect as with traveling, since games are digital and non-mandatory goods, so less people will be swayed by reduced price; unless we are talking about 50% less, of course, which is why people use key reselling sites, because there it is noticeable (and people don't care about legality in that case).

That said, Epic is indirectly competing "on price" by paying publishers and developers for their store exclusivity, for free giveaways and even for just using Unreal Engine. But it's the price for developers, not customers. Tim Sweeney said multiple times that he thought supporting developers was more important than customers, and that customers would follow developers. I don't know how whether it worked though.

Valve allows developers to generate activation keys for their games and sell them on other platforms, where Valve gets a 0% cut. This is how you're able to buy games from places like the Humble Store and activate them on Steam. Their agreement does technically require that you don't sell at a lower price on other platforms, but as far as I know it's never been enforced.

There's a lawsuit ongoing about Valve threatening developers with delisting if they sell non-Steam copies of games (that's NOT Steam keys, but, say, a version on the Epic store) on other stores.

Can you provide a source for this? This is the first I've heard of anything like this and searching only gives results about the game delisting due to payment processor problems from a few months ago.

edit: after some additional search tweaking this is most likely in reference to Wolfire v. Valve, which is now a class-action suit.[0] The argument seems to be that Valve is engaging in anticompetitive behavior by disallowing developers from reselling Steam keys for their games for lower prices on other platforms, not selling the games themselves on other platforms. So this may or may not be what the parent post was referencing.

[0] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/wolfire-and-dark-catts-antitru...

This is in no way true because there is no requirement to use steam for PC releases.

Apple is a firm technical gatekeeper to their ecosystem. Steam is not at all analogous to that for PCs.

Steam isn't even analogous to that on their own Steam Deck, where they absolutely could have been.

No requirement to use an apple phone either

PCs are plenty accessible to developers without Steam.

Can a Steam Deck install games without using Steam? If so, big advantage over Google Play and the App Store.

Yes, which is why nobody attacks them from that angle.

It's more fiddly in that you need to swap to desktop mode to do the installs, but you can get it set up so that your "external" games from Epic or Itch or emulators or whatever show up in the standard Steam UI.

Yes, I have plenty of games from, e.g. the Epic Game Store on my steam deck, even in the steam home page, seamlessly.

Gamescope is even fully open-source, so you could remove the steam deck UI, and still run any game with the same performance benefits of not running it inside KDE. Of course also, you could flash a new OS on the device itself if you wanted to entirely remove Valve’s presence.

Sure, it is a Linux box after all

Steam Deck desktop mode is full blown KDE desktop. The only nuance is that system updates are managed by A/B partition scheme, so root is readonly. Can be made writeable but it's an overlay, so changes get lost on system update and need to be reapplied.

It's not an overlay, it just gets mounted separately from root - there's an overlay for /etc and possibly a few other directories, this is to allow user changes to configuration to be kept after upgrades

Changes get wiped because (as you mentioned) it's an a/b partition; when you switch partitions you lose the changes.

You can actually enable an overlay for root changes, but this causes other issues - you get to choose if you want to track packages you've installed, or packages that are in the base system. It's either in the overlay and you keep your changes but not the base system changes, or it's in the base system and you lose track of changes made in your overlay. - updates to the base system of packages that have been uninstalled in the overlay can cause inconsistencies like orphaned files (the new system update includes extra files from this package that haven't been removed by your uninstall. Hopefully some other package doesn't take this as a sign that an optional dependency library is fully installed, the linked subdependencies might be missing) - updates to the base system can be overridden in specific files that were modified in your overlay, causing packages to become non-functional - imagine rebuilding a library 4.5 to add a feature (or updating to v 4.7), then the base system updates that library to 4.8. All other software now expects version 4.8, but instead your overlay is providing 4.5. better hope it's only a minor patch update and not an update providing a feature, or worse, a major breaking update.

Are you of the opinion that these marketplaces shouldn’t exist, that they should take a smaller percentage, that they should be entirely ad-supported, or something else?

How can user have an optional one-stop-shop that is sustainable for the long-term while not being “evil”.

Uhhh....

11 percent. That is the charge back rate in gaming. The "overall" stat for all transactions is something like 3 percent.

Card processing isnt free. There are fees, and supporting card processing still has more humans in the loop than one needs. Never mind all the technology that comes with running the dam platform.

Is 30 percent a lot. It sure is. Valve isnt a charity, this is how they chose to make money.

Meanwhile, AWS has a 30+ percent margin and I dont see CTO's lining up to run hardware...

>11 percent. That is the charge back rate in gaming. The "overall" stat for all transactions is something like 3 percent.

1. source?

2. How does that justify a 30% rate, when presumably it's clawed back from developers?

>Card processing isnt free. There are fees, and supporting card processing still has more humans in the loop than one needs. Never mind all the technology that comes with running the dam platform.

Again, nowhere near 30% though

>Meanwhile, AWS has a 30+ percent margin and I dont see CTO's lining up to run hardware...

30% margins on renting hardware is totally different than a 30% tax on transactions, and it's disingenuous to imply they're comparable. At the very least amazon needs to spend the other 70% on running servers and investing in datacenters, whereas valve doesn't. It's studios that are actually doing the development. Valve just is charging 30% on top of that. To take an extreme example, compare the 2-3% fees charged by visa vs the ~15% gross margins that car companies make. Even though that's 5x higher, I doubt many are outraged about car companies' profiteering.

Valve also hosts and maintains the game files for consumers to download, and the bandwidth/hardware needed to serve hundreds of GBs for each game to millions of customers across the globe is not trivial.

And the minefield of user cloud storage; I'm amazed that they've managed to avoid basically any abuses of the service.

I wonder then how you expect valve to operate profitably. Paying for the maintenance and upgrade of equipment, the developers to build the features and SRE to monitor the systems, designers, marketers, HR and lawyers.

For some reason, people in tech live under the illusion that everything nontangible should be literally free

>For some reason, people in tech live under the illusion that everything nontangible should be literally free

Strawman.

I would assume it's less than 11% for steam due to their incredibly consumer friendly refund policy.

I would think so too - aren't the majority of "gaming" transactions microtransactions in mobile games?

Is AWS not being forced on CTO's? I don't see what AWS does that you can't self-host in an OVH container.

There are many ways to get people to pay you 30%. Steam and AWS use different strategies. Also AWS's margin should be way higher than 30% if they're not lighting money on fire

Plenty of companies have tried to compete with gabe, they’re all just terrible at it

No. First mover advantage is just that strong. How are the competitors to whatsapp or facebook doing? At best you have something like tiktok, which might be technically "social" media but is a totally different segment. You don't catch up with old high school buddies on tiktok, for instance.

- Facebook was not first. Before it was friendster and myspace.

- Tiktok was not first. Before it was vine and youtube.

- Google was not first. Before it was yahoo and altavista.

Plenty of todays big companies were not the first in their area.

All of the examples you gave, the challengers had some revolutionary idea/improvement on top. Tiktok had its recommendation algorithm and short videos. Google had pagerank. That's also the reason why whatsapp hasn't been supplanted. There's no room for innovation (or nobody bothered trying). The same is true for digital distribution. Every steam competitor is basically "steam but [publisher]" or in epic's case, "steam but with steam games".

That's what the person who started this comment chain said, though. Every Steam competitor has been "does the same thing as Steam, but worse" so why would anyone switch over?

That's not the same as "terrible" though? Signal is basically "whatsapp but not facebook", but you wouldn't say it's "terrible". Same with lyft (which came after uber), or ubereats (which came after many food delivery startups).

Right but if there were a better platform than Steam for buying games it'd win out in the marketplace. It's not like anyone is locked into Steam really.

Every online gaming platform other than Steam and GOG sucks. And in fact GOG competes very well with Steam precisely because it offers something Steam doesn't, which is DRM-free games. Steam didn't just beat the Epic Games Store and Origin and Games For Windows Live because it came first, it's just a better platform and the others offer nothing outside of exclusives which they paid for.

Lets not forget Ubisofts uPlay which was absolutely shambolic. Blizzard's / Activision launcher was alright though. It did the job but no where to the likes of Steam which is really feature rich.

> Blizzard's / Activision launcher was alright though.

I'd personally say it was better as a launcher. Launching Steam itself takes relatively long and when its just in the background its just there idling with ~400Mb of RAM (specifically its WebHelper), which aren't a problem with Battle.net since it idles at 170MB or you can just close it since it launches way faster.

There is some argument to be made that the cost benefit analysis for your average user doesn't make sense unless the platform is a significant improvement over steam. Having two fragmented systems is a huge inconvenience to users now almost to the point that I will outright refuse to play games that are not on Steam.

And for companies that shoehorn really bad launchers as an extra layer on steam like EA, you are doing the work of the devil himself

Some extremely popular games, like all the Hoyoverse stuff (Genshin/ZZZ/etc) or most of Blizzard's games, have their own launchers and aren't on Steam. So gamers are certainly willing to use non-Steam platforms and launchers if there's a reason.

That didn't stop overwatch 2 from eventually making its way over to Steam. They also have the best integration, once your steam account is linked to your Battle.NET account you don't have to even think about the launcher

That is bullshit, you are not even locked to using Steam on the Steam Deck. 30% is completely fair for the amount of infrastructure Steam provides to your game.

Definitely not comparable to Apple, which is forcing all iPhone users to use their own app store.

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