masterspace

How is it at the expense of the game player? Even if they paid less, the publisher and developers aren't going to pass the savings on to the consumer. That's wishful thinking in the same vain as hoping Starbucks would make their drinks cheaper because their rent went down.

This is the most dumbass asinine defense. So now you're pro landlord rent gouging?

Jesus fucking Christ how are people upvoting this flat out landlord simping crap.

It does not fucking matter if Ubisoft remains greedy. Every single independent self publishing dev gets 15% more money. If a landlord gogiges Starbucks, they're also going to gouge the independent business, and the family needing somewhere to live.

If anything, one can argue that the 30% fee shelled out by the publisher pays for the various nice-to-haves that players get on Steam, like: a functional review system, free cloud save syncing, the workshop, game discussion forum, friends system, family sharing, game streaming, Steam input (which is a godsend for accessibility), etc.

"Oh my corporate landlord might be owned by a billionaire and every single one of his employees might be a multimillionaire, but he's a good landlord because he gives us a washing machine. It might be old and clunky and never repaired, but hey that makes him a saint, right?"

The fucking fact that you brought up landlords rent seeking as a non issue is the dumbest fucking thing I've ever heard. You need to go outside, give your head a shake, and do fucking better.

Valve has ripped off every single game purchase to the tune of billions and billions of dollars (taking an objective 15% more than they need to from the total cost of every single game), for the past 20 years.

But let's thank them for that! Thanks Valve for making every single working class gamer poorer. We all love the fact that every single Valve employee is a multimillionaire, at the expense of literally every single game player and developer. What kind generosity! /S

Ultimately, yes, everything they do is entirely for their own benefit. But, they're also free to focus on their long-term growth and returns. As long as the leadership doesn't get changed to a bunch of shit-for-brains golden parachute MBAs, they're going to want to keep their customers happy. It's good for them, and it's not terrible for us. Everybody wins

No, they don't. Literally every single gamer across the world pays 15% more on every single game purchase, for literally no reason except to make the 1% at Valve even richer.

And they don't have to hire MBAs because gamers dick ride them like Gabe isnt a self serving billionaire and keep forking over an extra 15% and then thanking them for the opportunity to do so.

So?

I'd like to see a Sankey graph of where Valve's money goes before I praise them that much for helping out a Linux distribution a bit.

Lots of major companies like Microsoft and IBM also contribute to Linux, it doesn't make them saints nor even necessarily compare to what they get for using the volunteer dev work inside Linux.

Gabe Newell is a billionaire, Steam is a defacto monopoly that objectively charges more than they have to, and literally everyone who works at Valve is in the 1%. Let's not fall over ourselves dick-riding them.