I remain baffled at how few studios sell their games directly on their own site.
The practical barriers are virtually nonexistent, so I’m assuming there’s some form of capitalist fuckery going on behind the scenes that makes it financially unviable?
there’s some form of capitalist fuckery going on behind the scenes that makes it financially unviable?
Uhh. It’s that Steam is an effective monopoly?
They hold all the attention, all the recommendations, so if you aren’t on Steam you are practically invisible.
There are a few major games that only self publish. Starsector is one, of the top of my head. Hence it is practically invisible to most.
Ok but publishing yourself doesn’t block you from also listing on Steam, or does it?
It determines the price. If you “self-publish” on a web shop or something with DRM free downloads, you have to price it the same as on Steam, otherwise Steam may delist you. So devs can’t get around the 30% fee by offering a discount on their store.
And… practically, if the storefronts are the same price, most will just buy on Steam.
There can be other complications related to scammers, but that’s not Valve’s fault. Supporting both also takes more dev effort.
Rimworld took this route, at least for some time. It started only self published via the Ludeon Store yet ended up mostly on Steam because that’s where all the attention and mods went. I have the game bought both places, oddly enough.
Common misconception. You only have to price-match when selling Steam keys on another platform. If you sell a non-Steam copy of the game, you can price it however you want
also it didn’t particularly make sense on its own terms. Even if I am committed to pricing the same as on Steam, I still get to keep that extra 30% on the sales that I do make.
And it’s not as though the sum total of marketing you do for a game is stick it up on Steam and wait for the recommendations to pour in. But still most game promos and ads I see include a Steam link rather than one to the studio’s store.
There’s over 100,000 games on Steam now, so the notion that you’re relying them to market your game for you is highly suspect.
Do people here, on Lemmy of all places, still not worry about Valve being a monopoly?
It worries me, deeply. Especially with how the community already makes up excuses for them doing anticompetitive things.
There is only one way that ends.
I can’t think of a single example of a “happy sustainable monopoly” in history, but at best they must be vanishingly rare.
As far as I’m aware only gog really “competes” with them the other platforms are worse by a lot.
…This is exactly what I am talking about.
Why do people pivot to whataboutisms?
Valve is an effective monopoly. There is no talking around that.
They have made many straight-up anticompetitive moves, to cement that. The biggest example in my mind is the “other storefront pricing policy,” but there have been several over the years.
What other companies are doing is irrelevant to that point, unfortunately, as they don’t have enough market share to compete. It does not excuse Valve or make the situation any less worrying to me.
Valve is only a monopoly because they are the best. If another storefront showed up and covered the gaps in what valve offers then they’d be able to carve out a niche for themselves like gog with drm free downloads. You can’t get that on steam. The others such as epic only seem to be able to come up with anti competitive bullshit that only harms the consumer. All these fucking companies these days seem to have forgotten that they exist to serve us. Steam at least still has a great deal of momentum in that direction. They do far more for us than any of the other options IMO. It’s not even close.
oblig
I mean both true but yeah
santa, gaben has been good this year, give him another boat
100% hard agree. Not launching an IPO is the single best thing Gaben has ever done. Letting in corporate executives would utterly destroy Valve and run them into the ground to fund their golden parachutes. It’s happened time and again. Professional “executives” do not run companies for the benefit of the customer they run them into the ground to make themselves richer. Kudos to Gaben for being intelligent enough to recognize this and keep Valve private.
Well that’s because pretty much all of the competition are terrible.
There hasn’t really been much innovation in digital market space since the concept arose. Valve started it and a few other companies over the years of tried, including Microsoft and all have failed.
I think valve succeeded because they weren’t trying to make a digital market place, it started out as just a distribution platform so not every decision was about how to make the most money out of the customer. You make the money on the games, not the platform and then you build up from there.
Yeah really is down to the only platform that isn’t repeatedly shooting itself in the foot is GoG and their no DRM policy has a lot of major publishers saying no deal.
In all other cases it’s less what Valve does right, and more what everyone around them is doing wrong.
I and I guess itch.io as well but that’s mostly because of how easy it is to get a game on the platform so it’s really good for small games and demos.
Gabe’s strategy is public information at this point. He’s gone on record several times with the information.
The focus is on what gamers want first. Reduce barriers to entry. Simplify the process. That naturally attracts customers and the money making happens as a result.
Every single other company has this reversed.
Probably not. Even MS couldn’t do it and they owned the platform. Now Valve push Linux. No other store really runs on that, and certainly not in a way that lets you run games written for Windows.
Epic are closest to being a competitor, and they’re still just a free games platform that will only run until the Fortnite money stops coming in.
One of my favorite quotes about Epic (it may have been Tim Sweeney) was something like “people would rather pay for a game on Steam than get it for free on the Epic Store” and it’s true. Hell even games I’ve got for free on Epic I’ve still purchased (probably on sale) on Steam.
Epic are closest to being a competitor, and they’re still just a free games platform that will only run until the Fortnite money stops coming in.
Appreciate the reminder to play the games I need to on that platform
Have they tried making a better product?
Or scratch that. Have they tried making a product that is as good?
Valves secret is that selling digital games is profitable 100% of the time, so they never needed to enshittify.
A lot of services are straight up unprofitable and need to go to extreme lengths of ruining the experience just to make a single positive dollar. Those lengths are also often poorly thought out or actively destructive to the platform. Valve just sells games with essentially 0 overhead past servers (insanely expensive, btw, but you know what i mean)
Turns out that the best business plan is a profitable one out of the gate with people who care about their work instead of vampires that bleed your customers dry
More money now temporarily is better then always getting money forever.
Yeah, but have you considered being an MBA demon and wanting even more money?
Investing into customers and their overall happiness and loyalty works out, go figure.
The King who has never seen grass will starve to death on an iron throne.
Even if I’m playing a game I bought from GoG, I still need Steam involved for its controller support or Proton if I’m on Linux.
You can run proton without Steam.
Amazing what is possible when you’re not beholden to shareholders that only give a shit about quarterly profits at the expense of everything else, including the entire business.
Perhaps businesses should have a rule that investors can’t take money out for 10 years. Perhaps then they would actually engage in some long-term strategies.
There is already short term vs long term capital gains tax, but it’s only one year. Maybe they could tweak that a bit
We only need one digital store front. The people should collectively own it.
- Provide a good and cheap service.
- Improve the service over time with some of the money you make.
- Make pro-consumer choices knowing full well you can afford it.
- ???
- Watch competition repeatedly shoot itself in the crotch.
- Profit.
Do they realize that what they really said was: having shareholders destroys businesses.
The full quote in the context of the article makes it even worse:
“As long as Valve is independent and not a publicly traded company, they probably have a certain ambition, but not an extraordinary ambition,” Rosier says. “So I think they can still decide to make some decisions that are player-first, and that helps, right? To get the goodwill from the players.”
So, customers like using a product that focuses on the customers to create profits, rather than extracting profits by abusing the customer? How unambitious… /s
This is what is endemic in our current shareholder first sustem, it’s not about profits, it’s about leveraging the stock, products, customers, image and every other tool at their disposal to manage the value that the shareholders control so they can game the stock market as they see fit. Everything else is secondary.
and that helps, right? To get the goodwill from the players
It helps?! It HELPS?!! That’s the fuckin customer base right there, that’s engagement, customer retention, customer satisfaction and THE top reason for sales.
“It helps” pffftt… it does not help, it’s the ENTIRE PRODUCT
The industry is unwilling to cope with this fact
Anyone who isn’t head deep in Capitalism understands that, yeah.
shareholders in public companies dont care about the health of the business
Lol, this is an unironically awesome takeaway.
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I was thinking around the same, more specifically that what they’re saying is that “in the long run companies managed to produce value for shareholders actually produce less value that companies managed to produce value for a single private owner”.
This is actually pretty consistent with what we see in many industries with both kinds of companies and a pretty daming indictment of publicly traded companies as a mechanism for increasing value creation.
Note the exception to the rule is Private equity looking for a place to unload debt and need a fall guy
Private companies have shareholders as well.
That’s a new one for me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder
Both public companies and private corporation have shareholders.
But only for companies participating in the equity ownership, right? I’m not fully versed with that, so need to ask here. I don’t know how this works with Gabe and Valve. I think the important detail here is, that Valve is not publicly traded and can decide who buys shares from their company and could reject any money. I don’t think this is possible with publicly traded companies, right?
Ownership of companies via shares is only for LLCs (which is a possibility but in practice uncommon) and Corporations and both Sole Proprietorships and Partnerships do not have shares.
That said, it is indeed possible for a company to have ownership by shares and not be publicly traded (i.e. not in the stock market) so for example a corporation with no traded shares would be a private corporation.~
This is what I found out for the US by searching for “types of companies” and “LLC shares”.
The countries I lived in and owned companies in Europe have similar things but with different names (for example what a Partnership in the US is roughly what’s called a “Society by quotas” in Portugal and is actually the most common kind of company).
In my experience people that never had their own registered business don’t usually know any of this because they have no need to look into it.
Yeah, often times if a company needs a loan then they open up a stake.
i think in private corporations only a very limited amount of shareholders can have shares
If they are shareholders, they hold at least one share. Every one of them. There’s no limit on number of shareholders or shares held. But those shares are not publicly traded.
There are limits on shareholders in private companies.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/5/500-shareholder-threshold.asp
Looks like the number is 2000, but that excludes employees. It used to be 500.
That’s only a (USA) reporting limit. A private company can still have more than 2000 shareholders, but it must then publicly report its finances like a public company would.
Fair… but why would any private company do that without going public? Do any?
If EA, Ubisoft, Bethesda, Epic and the rest established single high quality store for all their games, they would be able to compete. But it will never happen.
I still can’t wrap my head around this. Steam is kinda ok and it works but the experience is not really good. So the bar isn’t that high. But the other stores are so ridiculously worse. They only need to do an ok-ish UI.
These companies are extremely predatory towards the consumers and to each other. The whole idea of cooperation is utterly alien to them
I’m amazed you’d say that honestly. What about Steam is not really good? Personally I love the meta-gaming of the platform itself - leveling up your profile, participating in events, earning digital collectibles you can showcase. I also love the fact that a game remains in your library even if it’s no longer available for sale. And it’s great to be able to go into airplane mode, and still have access to your library. What are they missing that would change it from “not really good” to “good” or even “great?”
leveling up your profile, participating in events, earning digital collectibles you can showcase
YMMV.
This makes me feel icky just reading it. All that feels like spam to me.
And it’s great to be able to go into airplane mode, and still have access to your library.
Except not really, as it’s still locked by Steam DRM, and all sorts of factors can break it (like family sharing in my case).
GoG is what true offline gaming looks like, with all features enabled.
Not the person you’re asking, but personally I don’t care for that. That’s basically bloat to me. The storefront itself is decently sluggish though it’s gotten better with the years, it’s not very easy to actually browse for things, finding less popular things that isn’t slop is a chore in and of itself. The client is also decently heavy.
I like Steam, but I see things worth improving on.
To answer your question. Not right now. The internet sort of fell into a handful of giants that were determined to be the gateways for whatever specific product. Google became the default search engine. Facebook because the default social media. Twitter was the… whatever you want to call that stupid shit.
Valve got pc gaming distribution. It had to happen this way because we got tired of having 23 different login accounts and having to remember your icq 45 digit code to talk to this friend but aim to talk to these 3.
The side effect is it created essentially monopolies and all these companies slid towards evil. Google is literally helping the government make kill bots not. That’s a thing. And anyone pretending valve isn’t a corpo monster with blood on its hands as they made their billions getting an entire generation of children addicted to gambling, you’re out of your mind. Gaben is smart to keep himself basically a positive game meme instead of pulling a musk and revealing to the world you’re a Nazi prick. But they’re all the same.
The reality though? It can all evaporate overnight. Facebook is still used plenty but it’s not the thing the kids are going to. They’ve shifted what they do and care about. The same could happen to valve anytime. Will it be epic that dethrones them? Probably not. But it could happen when the way people game fundamentally changes.
At least when GoG vaporizes, the install files will still work.
And for what’s not on GoG the other DRM free platforms, like Fitgirl, tend to fill the gaps.