A steaming relationship: where you work for free

[mjukis]

Probably the only thing on video games that I think has been worth reading for the last couple of months: https://www.polygon.com/2017/5/16/15622366/valve-gabe-newell-sales-origin-destructive I think it deserves it's own thread. Ugh I'm so fuckin tired of all this shit.

 

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As far as Valve is concerned, it's a fantastic arrangement: You do all the hard work for free, knowing that you might never be paid, but hoping you will at some point.

 

 

[Kyir]

I found the article to be a little over the top personally. Valve's not a wonderful organization, but not many are, and it provides services people think are worth the cost. If anything, I'm more upset with other providers of comparable services to never deliver anything that creates real competition.

[Zeusthecat]

Yeah, that article definitely went overboard with its characterizations. I think it made some really bold claims for how harmful they are to consumers and the gaming industry without providing enough compelling evidence to back those claims up. I did not find the piece compelling at all. Plus, what Kyir said.

[rohlfinator]

I generally agree with the overall gist of the article, but yeah, telling your readers that they're all puppets of the Gabe meme cult is probably not the best way to make that argument.

 

The "we provide free marketing for Steam Sales" point feels a couple of years too late -- I feel like in 2017 I'm just as likely to see complaints about the sales as excitement.

[Twig]

Steam is a monopoly in the digital games market and there needs to be competition. GOG is probably the closest, but it probably does a mere fraction of what Steam does.

 

As anyone who's talked to me about Steam before will know, I think people are way too harsh on Valve's various solutions. I generally agree that Real People would solve most of the problems Steam has (e.g., curation what the fuck Valve), but this article is goes overboard.

 

But even though it goes overboard, it's not necessarily wrong.

[Henke]

Most of this falls flat for me. People make memes because it will get them likes(we all want to be popular on the internet), and they make mods because they love the games, not because Valve mindtricked them into it. People have been making Fan Missions for Thief 1 and 2 since they came out 17 years ago, and noone has received a cent for it. Did the evil Looking Glass Studios trick them into it? No, people love making mods and levels for the games they love! Simple as that. It only gets shady when Valve starts paying people to make mods and then only gives them 25% of the cut. Would've been better if they hadn't tainted the hobby of mod-making by bringing money into it at all. There's a saying that goes something like: "A man will gladly do a hobby for free, but start paying him for it and he'll immediately want a raise."

 

And is 30% cut of sales that bad? You're still gonna get much more visibility, and thus sales, than if you sell it on your website or itch.io. It's not like you're getting nothing for those 30%. The whole infrastructure of the store, forums, refund-system, built-in screenshot and sharing functions, easy way to distribute patches, Steam Workshop which makes installing mods WAY less of a headache than in the old days, smoother ways to connect with friends in online games, etc.

 

No, I don't think Steam/Valve is some benevolent force for good. They simply provide a service, and that service is better than anything else on the market.

[Laco]

Reading this the other day mildly frustrated me, which seems to put me in the same boat as most here. As Twig said it's not actually wrong, just disingenuous and over the top.

 

While Steam is in a position of dominance now, that wasn't always the case. In my opinion it did great things for PC gaming, especially for the first decade of its existence, to the extent that the market wouldn't really exist today without it. Valve worked very hard and solved some difficult problems so completely that no competitor on any platform has come close. Despite a few iffy practices Steam is way more consumer-friendly than almost any other store I can think of, GOG and itch.io being wonderful exceptions.

 

I found this line particularly amusing:

 

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we give that marketing away, for free, to a billion-dollar corporation every year

 

Uh, no. The sale is the marketing. That's what sales are for. They're not a new concept. People make memes and talk excitedly because they're consistently such good sales, though personally I don't know anyone who's especially cared for at least a few years.

 

There are definitely problems with Valve, like any big company. Communication could be a lot better, they should pay marketplace creators more, and some real competition to motivate them to invest in improving the platform would be great. Let's talk about those, but this "wake up, sheeple!" angle is just tiresome.

[mjukis]

It's not that valve does not bring anything to the table, they clearly do. That's so beyond basic I don't really know how to approach that type of comment? Does that excuse valve having a competition for maybe getting to sell your work with them taking 3/4ths of the cut, them setting the price of your work, while taking on none of the costs?

[Zeusthecat]

They provide a platform and ecosystem for these artists to sell their work and make money off of intellectual properties that they do not own, something that I'm pretty sure no other similar service out there provides. And the costs for Valve to run the servers and manage that ecosystem are certainly not zero. 

 

I can agree with the argument that 75% is a pretty steep cut, but it is their storefront, their intellectual properties, and I don't think they are "evil" for setting the terms the way they have and for curating that market as they see fit. They could certainly do a bit better, but I don't think it is as evil and exploitative as that article makes it out to be. 

[Kyir]

Even if those specific terms are  unfair, it's still a problem of an uncompetitive market, which I primarily blame on the poor quality of the products provided by other organizations. Valve can currently operate the way it does because there are no other organizations who can take advantage of dissatisfaction about Valve's practices, but I don't think that's reflective of misguided consumer loyalty to the "brand" or whatever in the way the article seems to suggest. There just aren't currently any satisfactory alternatives (in my eyes, at least,) and it's not the responsibility of consumers to sacrifice quality just to make a market competitive, it's the responsibility of firms to provide high quality products that entice a change in consumer habits.

 

The way I see it, pretty much every other game marketplace has essentially given up ever trying to compete with Valve and are just content hanging out in its periphery. I'm not going to blame a company for trying to make money when its supposed competition aren't even trying. 

[Gormongous]

1 hour ago, Kyir said:

Even if those specific terms are  unfair, it's still a problem of an uncompetitive market, which I primarily blame on the poor quality of the products provided by other organizations. Valve can currently operate the way it does because there are no other organizations who can take advantage of dissatisfaction about Valve's practices, but I don't think that's reflective of misguided consumer loyalty to the "brand" or whatever in the way the article seems to suggest. There just aren't currently any satisfactory alternatives (in my eyes, at least,) and it's not the responsibility of consumers to sacrifice quality just to make a market competitive, it's the responsibility of firms to provide high quality products that entice a change in consumer habits.

 

The way I see it, pretty much every other game marketplace has essentially given up ever trying to compete with Valve and are just content hanging out in its periphery. I'm not going to blame a company for trying to make money when its supposed competition aren't even trying. 

 

I think one of the goals of GOG Galaxy was getting users to have larger libraries with GOG and have more inherent loyalty to GOG thereby. It hasn't really worked yet, I think, partially because loyalty to a digital games service seems to be an odd mix of library size, friend circle, friend features, and perceived company evilness. GOG seem like really nice people, but no one seems to use them use them, so... Valve's still the default, at least for me.

[Kyir]

The fact that GOG Galaxy does not function at all for me isn't doing it any favors in my book either.

[Twig]

When Blizzard announces that Destiny 2 will be the first non-Blizzard (heh, okay, sure, be cute, you weirdos) game on their digital platform, and then in same announcement says there won't be any more for the foreseeable future...

 

When Uplay (vomit) and Origin (eh) make no real effort to be a platform for anything but Ubisoft and EA games...

 

It sucks.

 

Gog is, I'll reiterate, easily the second best platform. In some ways, they're the best. No DRM! Fuck yeah! But, they're lacking a significant amount of features that make Steam the primary platform. Steam isn't just A Store. It's a platform and a community (albeit a largely shitty one, as I imagine all large consumer-focused communities must be?). It has tons of useful features within and without games. Gog doesn't have most of that, and I don't know if it ever will. And that's why Steam wins. (EDIT: I use Galaxy and it works mostly fine, but the way it doesn't automate patches is a big negative in my book. Back in the day (and probably still to this day) that was my NUMBER ONE feature of Steam. Nothing else mattered/s more.)

 

Itch.io is a good platform for what it is. It's not trying to compete, and probably shouldn't.

 

I also think the ideal situation is a platform owner that doesn't also make its own games, but I recognize that's not very realistic. I used to say that I wished Steam would just separate from Valve and become its own entity, completely disconnected. I stopped because it'll never happen. Of course, many features they've developed for Steam have gone hand-in-hand with the games they make, but ehhh.

[Jutranjo]

It feels like GoG's forums are much more useful than Steam's.

[mjukis]

Related to the battle.net/destiny thing: it's weird to me how blizzard/activision made all this effort to make a platform for selling games/updating/chatting/streaming/etc and they still several years down the line have not made any effort to expand that beyond blizzards own titles? It's baffling to me. I did install Origin to play titan fall 2, for the first time since battlefield 3.... the client is SO BAD. 

[Twig]

Yeah with the Battle.net "relaunch" I legit expected to start seeing No-Blizzard Activision titles on there at the very least, but.

 

[osmosisch]

18 hours ago, Twig said:

I use Galaxy and it works mostly fine, but the way it doesn't automate patches is a big negative in my book.

How do you mean? As far as I could tell it's been updating my games just fine. But maybe I've been sort of imagining it, I haven't paid close attention.

[Twig]

It wasn't an automatic update. It made me download the updates (through the client) and then apply them myself.

 

To be fair, I tried the beta very early on. Possibly this is something that was addressed. Forgot to consider it was the beta, so things are bound to change. 

[osmosisch]

Oh yeah, I checked release history, auto-updating wasn't in the first release but it got added in fairly soon.

[Twig]

I retract that complaint, then!

[Badfinger]

On 5/21/2017 at 8:55 AM, mjukis said:

Related to the battle.net/destiny thing: it's weird to me how blizzard/activision made all this effort to make a platform for selling games/updating/chatting/streaming/etc and they still several years down the line have not made any effort to expand that beyond blizzards own titles? It's baffling to me. I did install Origin to play titan fall 2, for the first time since battlefield 3.... the client is SO BAD. 

 

My brain goes back and forth on this. It's easy to look at the Blizzard launcher and say "Why are there so few games on this?!" and then realize it's World of Warcraft, Diablo, Hearthstone, and Overwatch on there and the launcher is serving and updating like 75+ million people, plus the probably larger than you (I) think contingent of Heroes of the Storm players. Also Starcraft.

 

Even adding a game I expect to be a very big influx like Destiny is going to be a moderate increase to the launcher rather than doubling its usage rate or whatever.

 

Two other things 1) Activision doesn't actually put out very many games a year so the growth rate on the launcher would be small if they kept it to in-publisher games and 2) All the games on the list have game-as-service as at least part of their model. Call of Duty is a franchise that puts out another game every year.