6 ms·

Considering how much this particular system has been linked to real life crime and gangs, you're not far off. People downvoting you must either not be aware of

by c048 11mo ago

Considering how much this particular system has been linked to real life crime and gangs, you're not far off. People downvoting you must either not be aware of this, or have a personal stake in it.

computerex 11mo ago
I think people have a hard time viewing Valve as “evil” given what they have done in the gaming industry.
- cubefox 11mo ago
  They take a 30% cut on Steam, i.e. on most PC games. They are printing money. They have an absurdly high profit-per-employee ratio. That's a failure of capitalism, called rent seeking.
  - throw10920 11mo ago
    This is an outright falsehood. "Rent-seeking" involves extracting value without providing any. Steam factually provides a huge amount of value to both developers and to players. Steam is a huge success of capitalism. Suggest not using words like "rent-seeking" without knowing what they mean.
    - suslik 11mo ago
      Not to mention how much they did for Linux gaming.
    - cubefox 11mo ago
      > Steam factually provides a huge amount of value to both developers and to players. This is an outright falsehood. Other providers could host those games for much less than the 30% fee. Hosting costs are extremely low nowadays. It's basically nothing compared to the development cost of an AAA game. This is often many years and hundreds of people working on a game. The hosting costs are completely minor in comparison. By your definition, any monopoly selling you strongly overpriced stuff would be a "huge success of capitalism". But it isn't. Just because something is useful, doesn't mean it can't be massively overpriced due to competition not working as it should. Proper market competition should ensure that no company can extract huge profit margins for trivial things. Like hosting games.
      - throw10920 11mo ago
        > Other providers could host those games for much less than the 30% fee. Hosting costs are extremely low nowadays. It's basically nothing compared to the development cost of an AAA game. This is often many years and hundreds of people working on a game. The hosting costs are completely minor in comparison. Steam does far more than just host, and everyone who uses it knows this, so it's clear that you either have no idea what Steam does (in which case you should not be commenting) or you're actively lying about it. Steam provides payment processing, cloud saves, ratings, game tags, social integration, wishlisting and sale notification, search indexing, game discovery, a bunch of incredibly useful APIs including networking and input, Linux compatibility, and many, many other things. > By your definition, any Monopoly selling you strongly overpriced stuff would be a "huge success of capitalism". This is not only false, due to the above value-adds, but intentionally false because I never gave a definition - you made one up and attributed it to me to lie about my positions. And yes, there is competition - the fact that you don't know this is yet another indicator that you're totally ignorant of anything relevant to the conversation. There's the Epic Games Store, GOG, the EA App, Battle.net, the Xbox one/Windows Store, and more. And you know what the most popular one is, by a large margin, because it provides value to both devs and players? Steam. That's the market at work. Your comments are false due to your total ignorance of reality, and your malicious lying about my statements indicates that you don't care that they're false - you'll say anything plausible, regardless of truth, to advance whatever agenda you have.
        Imustaskforhelp 11mo ago
        > Your comments are false due to your total ignorance of reality, and your malicious lying about my statements indicates that you don't care that they're false - you'll say anything plausible, regardless of truth, to advance whatever agenda you have. They seem to live in this bubble where steam is extremely bad or something. Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems. I think valve is still decent but I prefer Gog-games more if I can be honest, valve has drm but I appreciate their customer service from what I know and the amount of good games it produced like portal and the steam marketplace is still a very nice thing imo. I don't think steam is rent-seeking at all and I agree with your statement on it. Now I still believe that CS-GO's lootboxes are still an issue tho, maybe I am not understanding the significance of change so much Steam still does nothing to prevent gambling for children and people selling the skins on the other websites, I am not understanding how this change changes that, I read some other comment in here which said that you can have contracts which convert the rare to extremely rare Only in steam marketplace so maybe they stopped the other shady websites/the youtubers they sponsor by limiting their influence.... I don't understand :/ I still feel like Steam had turned a blind eye to child gambling for a long time and Coffeezilla had made a video about it which I can refer to. > There's the Epic Games Store, GOG, the EA App, Battle.net, the Xbox one/Windows Store, and more. And you know what the most popular one is, by a large margin, because it provides value to both devs and players? Steam. That's the market at work. The same is true for linux/Windows as well. You could say that windows has the market at work but the point becomes moot. It isn't as if there aren't better options (GOG) but that its rather good enough Like I said nothing is as good or as bad as it seems, my opinion on steam is barely good enough partially because of its previous responses on turning a blind eye to the whole situation but maybe this is changing with this thing they did right now but I am still not sure how.
  - knome 11mo ago
    having a high profit-per-employee is not the definition of rent seeking. valve is certainly not rent-seeking. it offers service that is valuable to users, and take care of online infrastructure for games published through it, indefinitely, at no running cost to the developer.
    - cubefox 11mo ago
      It's not "high", it's extremely high. They just have a few hundred employees while making several millions of profit per employee. More than Apple. They are printing money. > valve is certainly not rent-seeking. it offers service that is valuable to users, A 30% fee just for hosting the game is not valuable. > and take care of online infrastructure for games published through it, indefinitely, at no running cost to the developer. The cost is substantial. It costs the developer 30%. That's a huge chunk of the total revenue. Hosting a game is very cheap, and could probably be done with less than a 3% fee. Often Valve will make more profit from a game than the developer itself. Sometimes the developer will lose money (after subtracting development cost) but Valve will still make a big profit with that game.
      - dugidugout 11mo ago
        While I can't argue whether 30% is actually fair, I do believe you are disregarding some benefits steam brings which may seem trivial. The hosting of online-games and facilitation of sales is not their only service. One that has traceable value that immediately comes to mind is the illusion of a central authority for achievements. I have personally purchased many titles a second time to register my feats with steam and anecdotally see similar sentiment among older gamers. Achievements feel worthless in isolation but provide fulfillment when socially recognized. These are sales being manifested solely through Steam's position. Now, back to whether this social permanence is worth the 30% Steam is extracting, I do have my opinions. Steam is technically "rent-seeking" from a strict economic classification, but is this more-so a case of the lighthouse or the railroad?
      - kube-system 11mo ago
        Their high profit is indicative of the high level of value they provide. They're far from the only store to buy/sell games in. Steam's users use Steam because they prefer it to the alternatives.

by c048 11mo ago

Considering how much this particular system has been linked to real life crime and gangs, you're not far off. People downvoting you must either not be aware of this, or have a personal stake in it.

computerex 11mo ago

I think people have a hard time viewing Valve as “evil” given what they have done in the gaming industry.

cubefox 11mo ago
They take a 30% cut on Steam, i.e. on most PC games. They are printing money. They have an absurdly high profit-per-employee ratio. That's a failure of capitalism, called rent seeking.
- throw10920 11mo ago
  This is an outright falsehood. "Rent-seeking" involves extracting value without providing any. Steam factually provides a huge amount of value to both developers and to players. Steam is a huge success of capitalism. Suggest not using words like "rent-seeking" without knowing what they mean.
  - suslik 11mo ago
    Not to mention how much they did for Linux gaming.
  - cubefox 11mo ago
    > Steam factually provides a huge amount of value to both developers and to players. This is an outright falsehood. Other providers could host those games for much less than the 30% fee. Hosting costs are extremely low nowadays. It's basically nothing compared to the development cost of an AAA game. This is often many years and hundreds of people working on a game. The hosting costs are completely minor in comparison. By your definition, any monopoly selling you strongly overpriced stuff would be a "huge success of capitalism". But it isn't. Just because something is useful, doesn't mean it can't be massively overpriced due to competition not working as it should. Proper market competition should ensure that no company can extract huge profit margins for trivial things. Like hosting games.
    - throw10920 11mo ago
      > Other providers could host those games for much less than the 30% fee. Hosting costs are extremely low nowadays. It's basically nothing compared to the development cost of an AAA game. This is often many years and hundreds of people working on a game. The hosting costs are completely minor in comparison. Steam does far more than just host, and everyone who uses it knows this, so it's clear that you either have no idea what Steam does (in which case you should not be commenting) or you're actively lying about it. Steam provides payment processing, cloud saves, ratings, game tags, social integration, wishlisting and sale notification, search indexing, game discovery, a bunch of incredibly useful APIs including networking and input, Linux compatibility, and many, many other things. > By your definition, any Monopoly selling you strongly overpriced stuff would be a "huge success of capitalism". This is not only false, due to the above value-adds, but intentionally false because I never gave a definition - you made one up and attributed it to me to lie about my positions. And yes, there is competition - the fact that you don't know this is yet another indicator that you're totally ignorant of anything relevant to the conversation. There's the Epic Games Store, GOG, the EA App, Battle.net, the Xbox one/Windows Store, and more. And you know what the most popular one is, by a large margin, because it provides value to both devs and players? Steam. That's the market at work. Your comments are false due to your total ignorance of reality, and your malicious lying about my statements indicates that you don't care that they're false - you'll say anything plausible, regardless of truth, to advance whatever agenda you have.
      - Imustaskforhelp 11mo ago
        > Your comments are false due to your total ignorance of reality, and your malicious lying about my statements indicates that you don't care that they're false - you'll say anything plausible, regardless of truth, to advance whatever agenda you have. They seem to live in this bubble where steam is extremely bad or something. Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems. I think valve is still decent but I prefer Gog-games more if I can be honest, valve has drm but I appreciate their customer service from what I know and the amount of good games it produced like portal and the steam marketplace is still a very nice thing imo. I don't think steam is rent-seeking at all and I agree with your statement on it. Now I still believe that CS-GO's lootboxes are still an issue tho, maybe I am not understanding the significance of change so much Steam still does nothing to prevent gambling for children and people selling the skins on the other websites, I am not understanding how this change changes that, I read some other comment in here which said that you can have contracts which convert the rare to extremely rare Only in steam marketplace so maybe they stopped the other shady websites/the youtubers they sponsor by limiting their influence.... I don't understand :/ I still feel like Steam had turned a blind eye to child gambling for a long time and Coffeezilla had made a video about it which I can refer to. > There's the Epic Games Store, GOG, the EA App, Battle.net, the Xbox one/Windows Store, and more. And you know what the most popular one is, by a large margin, because it provides value to both devs and players? Steam. That's the market at work. The same is true for linux/Windows as well. You could say that windows has the market at work but the point becomes moot. It isn't as if there aren't better options (GOG) but that its rather good enough Like I said nothing is as good or as bad as it seems, my opinion on steam is barely good enough partially because of its previous responses on turning a blind eye to the whole situation but maybe this is changing with this thing they did right now but I am still not sure how.
- knome 11mo ago
  having a high profit-per-employee is not the definition of rent seeking. valve is certainly not rent-seeking. it offers service that is valuable to users, and take care of online infrastructure for games published through it, indefinitely, at no running cost to the developer.
  - cubefox 11mo ago
    It's not "high", it's extremely high. They just have a few hundred employees while making several millions of profit per employee. More than Apple. They are printing money. > valve is certainly not rent-seeking. it offers service that is valuable to users, A 30% fee just for hosting the game is not valuable. > and take care of online infrastructure for games published through it, indefinitely, at no running cost to the developer. The cost is substantial. It costs the developer 30%. That's a huge chunk of the total revenue. Hosting a game is very cheap, and could probably be done with less than a 3% fee. Often Valve will make more profit from a game than the developer itself. Sometimes the developer will lose money (after subtracting development cost) but Valve will still make a big profit with that game.
    - dugidugout 11mo ago
      While I can't argue whether 30% is actually fair, I do believe you are disregarding some benefits steam brings which may seem trivial. The hosting of online-games and facilitation of sales is not their only service. One that has traceable value that immediately comes to mind is the illusion of a central authority for achievements. I have personally purchased many titles a second time to register my feats with steam and anecdotally see similar sentiment among older gamers. Achievements feel worthless in isolation but provide fulfillment when socially recognized. These are sales being manifested solely through Steam's position. Now, back to whether this social permanence is worth the 30% Steam is extracting, I do have my opinions. Steam is technically "rent-seeking" from a strict economic classification, but is this more-so a case of the lighthouse or the railroad?
    - kube-system 11mo ago
      Their high profit is indicative of the high level of value they provide. They're far from the only store to buy/sell games in. Steam's users use Steam because they prefer it to the alternatives.