this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Care to explain why "Valve is a terrible company" and "Steam is an awful platform"? Surely, it has tons of porn games (that you can hide), or shitty games (that is hard to sort through), or CS:GO item gambling problems (don't really care). But I kind of fail to see how the company or the client could be fundamentally bad.
The 30% cut Steam takes is quite a bit. Considering the near-monopoly it has on game distribution, that could easily mean the difference between turning a profit and not for an indie developer.
Personally their efforts towards things I support (PC handhelds, Linux gaming) and the convenience of the platform outweigh the things I dislike, but being frustrated by its problems is understandable when people don't really have another choice.
Yes, I agree that 30% is a lot. But let's look from another perspective: If a developer, for ease of calculation, sells a game for 30$ on Steam, he receives 20$. If he sells it on a competitive platform with 5% cut (that's 6x less than Steam) he gets 27$.
However, Steam is way bigger, and if a developer can sell the same game more times on Steam (33% more times to be exact), he breaks even.
More people to buy = more people to play = bigger player base => more people buy it. It is a poaitive feedback loop.
I am not arguing that 30% is good, all I am saying is I understand that Steam has to take a big cut to pay for the features it provides for "free" alongside the usual game content (cloud saves, community, workshop, utems, etc.).
Do you think any indie developer has the means to achieve a lower cost to distribution and promotion if they try to sell and support the game themselves?
Valve solves many problems for developers and these problems aren't imaginary and free to resolve.
Not saying 30% is justified for all games, but if you want a quality title it's going to cost more than just development. Since the Unity debacle we've seen some developers even say openly that costs of promotion and support dwarf costs of development.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9aCwCKgkLo
And here are some reason I personally don't like them:
This one made me giggle. Who are you, the moral internet police?
Glory to Valve for investing in Proton.
To sum it up: about the same as any platform where people can interact? What's so FOMO about a game being on sale if it's gonna be on sale next week aswell?
I fail to see how Steam Market is so bad, it is not possible to redeem the cash (unless you do it via black market, which is against the TOS), so all money is still in the system. Yeah, it is being used to do unregulated gambling, but it's a regulatory problem which should be handled by the countries to define what gambling is, and shut these sites down. Why the fuck should Steam care?
NFTs in crypto space are a joke, and everywhere else they are basically in any online software, failing to see the point here.