Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
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My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
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Gonna piggy back off this to drop a decent summary from coffeezilla about valve's lootbox gambling problem that Valve has consistently dodged responsibility on. It's really not new news but folks should be informed/reminded of it nonetheless.
I don't watch CoffeeZilla in any large amount, but this pretty well sums up the situation in this instance.
Honestly it's both valve's fault and the legal system. They've tried to combat these sites with the trade window system back in like 2015 2016 I think, but their csgo and tf2 trading economy struggles when you have to wait a week to do stuff.
It also doesn't help when a lot of these sites dodge being legally a casino, and get away with it.
I mean, we can point at the legal system, but as you said, casinos just find new loopholes to circumvent the law. Ultimately, Valve is the group with the power to remove any gambling-adjacent mechanics from their games, but they have been pretty flaccid regarding changes because they know that they will lose money from it.
Crackdowns won't stop the gambling on CS, legislation and enforcement won't change it, but making items non-tradeable, or damaging item value or appeal through any method, can stop the gambling - but at the cost of CS's financial success and overall appeal.
Is there a proposal to do this that doesn't gut other legitimate parts of their trading system?
I'm not bothering watching all the video. I hope they highlight that a good part of the company clients are kids.
Yeah, underage gambling is a big part of the topic.
I hope the employees are compensated well compared to the profit.
As of 2021, Valve employees made roughly $430K-4.5M, depending on role. Not bad, considering the average salary in WA is around $58k.
Source:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/13/24197477/valve-employs-few-hundred-people-payroll-redacted
Holy shit
As a private company with no board and stockholders to appease, with a guy in charge who is at least a descent person, employees at valve are doing fantastic. Way higher than "industry standards".
you may think a company named valve would know a thing or two about cash flow
It's funny that these publications only learned that this year when Valve has had a publicly available company directory on their website with names, pictures and email addresses since forever.
They didn't just learn about it there have been articles about it for years and years they just post the same old article from a few years ago and act like it's new
Is Gabe taking a duck face selfie in the thumbnail?
Yeah it’s from a video where he was back seating on some voice actors doing announcement and he’s doing odd things background for comedic effect.
Yup. It‘s from the Cave Johnson Announcer Pack reveal video. Which is definitely worth a watch, even if you‘re not into Dota 2.
Might have something to do with getting underage kids hooked on gambling.
Kinda exposes the lie about entrepreneurship being about job creation. Not all high tides raise all ships.
"It's making more money per employee than Apple"
And how much are the game devs whos game are on steam making? If Valve ceo has enough money to buy a billion dollar worth fleet of mega yachts the share is simply off, Valve is making billions nobody else is.
70%...and devs are happy to pay the 30% to get on a platform that's worth a fuck. Valve carries the servers, the bandwidth and service. Tons of indie devs have made it via steam. They're a platform for games, not a healthcare company or apple that's exploiting slave labor.
Plenty of villans out there, valve and gabe isn't one of them.
That's highly debatable. Maybe not for the specific reason being discussed, but Valve, and by extension Gabe, IS complicit in stuff like CS:GO gambling which preys on the underaged and and vulnerable.
I think it just goes back to "their competition is even worse". "They let people prey on the vulnerable" doesn't hit as hard when the competition is literally preying on them themselves.
Valve is the least shitty of the competition. Maybe GOG is better, but then CDPR is only viable because they can underpay Polish devs.
Considering their only major competitor has enough money to keep trying to lure players to their significantly worse store system with free games for years now instead of going the route of actually providing a decent product I think Valve making money off their good product strategy is a good thing.
Valve takes 30% on every game sold and you don't even own the games. That's sick capitalism in action, yet everybody kisses their ass.
EDIT for the Steam jerkers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r0a7-qyjss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13eiDhuvM6Y
They do provide a good service. There’s no subscription fee. They maintain delisted games so you can download games you bought years ago that are no longer available. Not to mention steam OS and other projects like the steam deck that put pressure on other gaming companies to do better.
This could go up in a cloud of smoke at any point and it likely will as soon as Gabe passes on and the in fighting begins. So this is a “good king” situation and the system itself will not be sustainable long term by any means.
Because somehow their competition is even worse
Ah, yes, capitalism. Because they don’t have to pay to maintain servers and infrastructure or anything, right?
Nor do they pay for bandwidth when you download your 100gb game for the nth time in the past month.
Nor do they have a ton of functions and services for both devs and consumers like easy refunds, regional pricing, steam keys, trading cards, steam workshop, steam forums, chatrooms, remote play... just to name some.
Yeah, such moneygrabbing comic book villains that just sit in their pile of money and don't provide anything good.
Ah, yes, capitalism. Because they don’t have to pay to maintain servers and infrastructure or anything, right?
They are stacking billions. It means they are paying peanuts compared to what they are making.
I read somewhere most of the cost is payment providers, scams, chargebacks and refunds they can't offload onto the publishers.
Honestly, I pay for the service alone.
Pirating games is easy-ish enough so if Valve ever enshittifies I will be quickly learning how to remove Steam's DRM and put all my games on a server and never purchase another video game in my lifetime.
They provide an easy platform for me to buy games so I use them. The steam deck too. Just because they have a competent product, i don't think that justifies any arse kissing. Like you say, they're a company and they're in business to make money.
Yeah, I can see why developers would be unhappy about the 30%. Maybe there's an argument to be made that the platform gives these games a greater potential market but I don't know enough about the business to try making that argument.
As far as capitalism goes they are not the shittiest of companies out there.
They have predatory tactics with lootboxes on their popular games though.
But most of their practices are not anticonsumer.
And they do not enforce drm and their own drm is a joke, so you can basically own most games if you want with very little effort. Just copy the files and have a generic steam crack around and you are golden for most cases.
I believe this is something to be aware of and if this is something you don't want use GOG instead. But in reality as long as Steam exists you will be able to download and play your games. If Steam ceases to exists then you will not be able to download them, but there will be ways to still play them, if you previously downloaded them. It is not like "owning" movies on Amazon (or just recently on the Playstation Store), where you always need to stream the movies.
Yeah. Really wish they were more like gog or itch
Honestly, I'll probally care about this more when someone else tries to make a service remotely close to what steam provides. Hell epic is probally the closest we got and they are in the red AND lacking in function set that steam provides. Steam charges 30% up until 10m and then 25 till 50m then it'd 20% while giving a multitude of extra services the other companies charging similar rates don't, seems fair to me.
some examples:
Looking into it, IGN made a nice picture (2019 though so a little old perhaps) so I'll add that too
did pcgamer learn it by reading a similar article awhile back?
A great deal of that money comes Valve running an illegal underage casino, and getting young kids addicted to gambling.
Valve running an illegal underage casino
Valve doesn't run the casino. Valve owns the real estate under the casino and collects a rent. The casino is run by a kaleidoscope of fly-by-night marketing firms after being constructed with sweatshop labor from development studios in countries with abysmal labor laws.
Turns out, it takes very few employees to be the landlord of a casino. But the casino can't make money without a battalion of scammy sales shits and a legion of cheap construction workers. Valve can't make money without these workers. But because it collects rents on the real estate rather than revenues on the casino itself, it doesn't need to include these staffers in its accounting books.
Valve is directly responsible for skins in Counter Strike which are gotten with 100% gambling mechanics. The fact that they can be sold for real life cash adds to this. I'm not saying its only Valve doing this, plenty of other games on Steam as well, but they certainly have a horse in the race.
Agreed, we should not make it seem like Valve has no responsibility just because it doesn't directly own the casinos, gambling sites, etc. They benefit financially from the way the whole system is set up and they know it. Every round and transaction directly benefits Valve financially. The more underage people get addicted to the casino system they have going on, the more money Valve gets.
I mean, who made the GUI a copy of a slot machine?
They could end this whole thing tomorrow if they wanted to.
No, there's companies that abuse valves market for their underground casinos.
I honestly don't get why you are mad at valve when they are not even in the slighest involved in that process apart from offering the market system. That's like being mad at cloudflare or AWS because a website that scams you uses it.
It's because Epic Games is spending a shitload of money astroturfing these idiots into believing that Valve is personally running a massive counter strike casino and you need to THINK OF THE CHIILLLLDREEEEEEEN.
Which is ironic because fortnite is specifically tailored to children/teens and has had lootboxes until they got sued, had to remove it and were like: "Oh actually we always though lootboxes were stupid :( so we removed them :( pls like us :(."
Now they're probably trying to harm valve this way, which is dumb because counter strike is rated 18+.
And yeeees, no kid gives a shit about age rating - well aware of that. But I'm not sueing porn sites because kids can access porn with just clicking "Yes" on the popup.