Every time I see a post with this specific claim, targeted at Valve, i just can’t help but laugh.
Yes. They take a cut.
Yes. Everyone else takes the same cut, so you’re biased, if you don’t understand this.
Yes. They are an undisputed leader in the market, but no, that’s not called a monopoly.
The difference is that Valve, while taking this cut, and being as big as they are, are consistently investing that money into improvement of the platform, AND also paying people to directly contribute to OSS, that affects everyone else in the market too.
Not to even mention the regular, very considerable discounts, practically platform-wide. Show me a time when Nintendo have done the same. A 10 year old copy of MK8 is still 50$
This isn’t even a bogus claim, but just a waste of everyone’s time
And paying yachts for Gaben, you forgot to mention the money also goes to doing that.
Get that in your head people, if someone can sell you stuff and it makes them a billionaire then you got overcharged, you can find all kinds of excuses to defend them, they’re still making more a day in interests with 1 billion invested than the median income over four years.
What he does with his money is none of my concern. Unlike the vast majority of other CEOs in his market cap tier, he’s actually paid fairly, compared to an average worker at Valve
I highly doubt that most people, given the opportunity, would not live like a billionaire. If someone builds a company like Valve, they’re going to live very well. That doesn’t say as much about the person as it does about the economic system.
Because you’ve been conditioned to undervalue your money. If they can make a billionaire out of someone it’s because money is being hoarded instead of being distributed as it should.
If you are going to point out that Valve is a capitalist company, I’d say you are picking on one of the rare ones that return more value than many others in the whole capitalist world economy. Gabe having a yatch is an indecent use of wealth? Yeah, no person needs or deserves a yatch while we have famine and wage slaving in the world.
If you believe the company that has the best pro-consumer practices in the industry (maybe tied with GOG thanks to their no-DRM policy) should be the first to take the responsibility to be the one that is even more altruistic, I’d say you are asking for destabilization of an already decent company to give way to the literal vultures waiting for it to die so they can have their fat shares for their shareholders.
They’re not decent if the boss can afford six yachts, they’re ripping you off while acting nice and you think you had a deal because of their nice smile.
What everyone is debating with you is that you are wrong in picking your target while your base claim of enabling someone, anyone at all, to be a billionaire is correct.
You are wrong in picking Valve or Gaben as exploitative wealthy scum, because Valve is the closest thing to something that is not exploitative corporation, while Gaben as the head and sole person having the final say in which direction to go and which not to go, has been the best guardian of unexploitative gaming entertainment. If you think I’m making these up, please search around to see if you can find the equivalent of these features in any of the meaningfully-accessible companies: Family sharing, Proton, Steam Friends, Steam Network, Steam Workshop, Steam Community Hub.
Steam Family sharing: The current version enables players to have access to the games in other’s libraries as long as those accounts are not having access at the same time. The upcoming version allows for access to other’s games as long as there are enough copies in the sharing pool. In the age others in the entertainment industry is cracking down accessibility with ever increasing prices, like Netflix’ oppression on password sharing or even having access to your own account on multiple devices, please don’t tell me this Family sharing improvements by Valve isn’t extremely pro-consumer.
Proton: Provides an almost silver bullet, or an easily configurable base template, for gaming on Linux. You can be a Windows or Mac user all you want and never give a thought to Linux, but you can’t argue not letting Windows have monopoly over PC gaming by enabling access to gaming on free OS isn’t a completely pro-consumer endeavour. It is also open source, so they are not even gatekeeping their own work on this.
Friends and Network: While having no-DRM copies from GOG is great and all, having your games connect to your friend’s games, or forming completely random lobbies in seconds, with just a couple clicks requires some always-present middleman. Your no-DRM copies can stay with you till eternity, but you’ll have to configure your own methods of connection to your friends outside your local network.
Workshop: Mods hosting for games that support it, and easy installation with 1 click. Yes, there are still free alternatives like Nexus, but they show you ads to meet their hosting needs, so in that sense they are as free as Valve sparing budget from their 30% cut from game sales to Workshop.
Community Hub: A catalogue of all game-related stuff, from guides to memes, troubleshooting threads to feedback, promotion space for developers to knowledge database for players. Open to the whole world wide web and not restricted to account walls or pay walls.
Now, I agree that even providing these services with the best quality-and-features-per-buck option out there, there shouldn’t be billionaires while there are starvation and wage slaving ones life this prominent in the world. While these issues persist, having yatches to one person’s or a few people’s name is an indecent behaviour that should not be allowed in a working social contract. However, when you look at the rest of the companies in the same industry, or even other industries, there are way worse offenders of this wealth inequality that don’t even come close to Valve in providing the same quality-and-features-per-buck value, while having billionaires and actually striving to make them more wealthy instead of providing more for the customers and workers.
Case in point: You are not even looking a gift horse in the mouth; you are beating your most hard working horse for eating a hearty meal, claiming you are right in that amount of meal is not needed to survive, all the while letting the rest of your slacking horses raid your pantry without batting an eye. Pressure the others to provide better services per buck, also at a self-sustaining rate so as to not be deprived of it a year later, first.
I’m picking at Valve because this is a fucking discussion about Valve, why would I talk about Microsoft or Apple or Tesla or Shell in a discussion about Valve, please tell me.
And what you don’t understand is that this whole affair about “Valve taking 30% cut is overcharging” is bogus. Valve and whole others can sell fully-fledged carrots at $1M each, with Valve adding better packaging and better preservation while doing discounts regularly, all the while Epic can sell a malnourished and cut-out one at $500k each and give away a stale and cut-out one for free regularly.
Both are expensive if their base prices can be discounted by electing smaller margin of profits. (That is another topic as Steam is doing jackload of live-service that can’t be served as an offline service, without any form of subscription or recurring payments.) Even so, picking on the one that offers a sustainable price plan and fully-fledged product with extra benefits just because it is pricey for your wallet while all others in the market do a poorer job at the same prices or price-per-value is just grabbing your pitchfork because someone else started a riot against your cordial and caring overseer while the world around you is rife with jackals who’d like to be your king.
Go bug Gaben to spend more of his personal wealth gained through Valve’s distributed earnings on betterment of the product they serve rather than on the yatches. Don’t go around asking just Valve to get less cushion for experimentation, being generous in return, lax bout worker load and project development, etc., while they are the sole company doing that. Better yet, push your governments to install blanket resolutions against exorbitant wealth accumulations or uneven wealth distributions so that both better product development is prioritized and all employees are rewarded fairly if any single one is to be rewarded.
Anyway, I’m changing the discussion to be about how Stephen Hawking’s name is on Epstein’s list. Lets talk about this, I don’t care whether there are more concerning people named on that list or whether Hawking is unique for his contributions in some fields. Hell, I am not even interested in if the discussion is worthwhile through the factuality of the claim or the scope of the claim because why, this is a discussion about Stephen Hawking being on Epstein’s list now.
The cut they take is just one of the claims they have against Valve. Some of the other ones which another comment mentioned seem like fair arguments against Valve. The whole forcing pricing parity so game devs can’t offer the games for cheaper somewhere else and DLC from other platforms isn’t compatible with the Steam game and vice versa. And again you can say other platforms are doing that and worse too but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t also go after Valve for it. Just cause they’re a private company and because of that aren’t as profit driven as other companies doesn’t mean they still are gonna do things like this to increase their profits and maintain their majority market share on PC games.
Every time I see a post with this specific claim, targeted at Valve, i just can’t help but laugh.
Yes. They take a cut.
Yes. Everyone else takes the same cut, so you’re biased, if you don’t understand this.
Yes. They are an undisputed leader in the market, but no, that’s not called a monopoly.
The difference is that Valve, while taking this cut, and being as big as they are, are consistently investing that money into improvement of the platform, AND also paying people to directly contribute to OSS, that affects everyone else in the market too.
Not to even mention the regular, very considerable discounts, practically platform-wide. Show me a time when Nintendo have done the same. A 10 year old copy of MK8 is still 50$
This isn’t even a bogus claim, but just a waste of everyone’s time
And paying yachts for Gaben, you forgot to mention the money also goes to doing that.
Get that in your head people, if someone can sell you stuff and it makes them a billionaire then you got overcharged, you can find all kinds of excuses to defend them, they’re still making more a day in interests with 1 billion invested than the median income over four years.
What he does with his money is none of my concern. Unlike the vast majority of other CEOs in his market cap tier, he’s actually paid fairly, compared to an average worker at Valve
He’s
A
Billionaire
No, he’s not paid fairly, no one should have that kind of wealth.
He makes more from the interest on his fortune than the average salary at Valve even if the average is very high.
There’s no reason to defend billionaires, no matter how good they pretend to be.
I highly doubt that most people, given the opportunity, would not live like a billionaire. If someone builds a company like Valve, they’re going to live very well. That doesn’t say as much about the person as it does about the economic system.
That’s the thing though, no one should get to live like that while the majority has a hard time affording basic needs.
That doesn’t mean you got overcharged. I feel the prices I pay to Valve are fair value for what I receive in return.
Because you’ve been conditioned to undervalue your money. If they can make a billionaire out of someone it’s because money is being hoarded instead of being distributed as it should.
If you are going to point out that Valve is a capitalist company, I’d say you are picking on one of the rare ones that return more value than many others in the whole capitalist world economy. Gabe having a yatch is an indecent use of wealth? Yeah, no person needs or deserves a yatch while we have famine and wage slaving in the world.
If you believe the company that has the best pro-consumer practices in the industry (maybe tied with GOG thanks to their no-DRM policy) should be the first to take the responsibility to be the one that is even more altruistic, I’d say you are asking for destabilization of an already decent company to give way to the literal vultures waiting for it to die so they can have their fat shares for their shareholders.
They’re not decent if the boss can afford six yachts, they’re ripping you off while acting nice and you think you had a deal because of their nice smile.
What everyone is debating with you is that you are wrong in picking your target while your base claim of enabling someone, anyone at all, to be a billionaire is correct.
You are wrong in picking Valve or Gaben as exploitative wealthy scum, because Valve is the closest thing to something that is not exploitative corporation, while Gaben as the head and sole person having the final say in which direction to go and which not to go, has been the best guardian of unexploitative gaming entertainment. If you think I’m making these up, please search around to see if you can find the equivalent of these features in any of the meaningfully-accessible companies: Family sharing, Proton, Steam Friends, Steam Network, Steam Workshop, Steam Community Hub.
Steam Family sharing: The current version enables players to have access to the games in other’s libraries as long as those accounts are not having access at the same time. The upcoming version allows for access to other’s games as long as there are enough copies in the sharing pool. In the age others in the entertainment industry is cracking down accessibility with ever increasing prices, like Netflix’ oppression on password sharing or even having access to your own account on multiple devices, please don’t tell me this Family sharing improvements by Valve isn’t extremely pro-consumer.
Proton: Provides an almost silver bullet, or an easily configurable base template, for gaming on Linux. You can be a Windows or Mac user all you want and never give a thought to Linux, but you can’t argue not letting Windows have monopoly over PC gaming by enabling access to gaming on free OS isn’t a completely pro-consumer endeavour. It is also open source, so they are not even gatekeeping their own work on this.
Friends and Network: While having no-DRM copies from GOG is great and all, having your games connect to your friend’s games, or forming completely random lobbies in seconds, with just a couple clicks requires some always-present middleman. Your no-DRM copies can stay with you till eternity, but you’ll have to configure your own methods of connection to your friends outside your local network.
Workshop: Mods hosting for games that support it, and easy installation with 1 click. Yes, there are still free alternatives like Nexus, but they show you ads to meet their hosting needs, so in that sense they are as free as Valve sparing budget from their 30% cut from game sales to Workshop.
Community Hub: A catalogue of all game-related stuff, from guides to memes, troubleshooting threads to feedback, promotion space for developers to knowledge database for players. Open to the whole world wide web and not restricted to account walls or pay walls.
Now, I agree that even providing these services with the best quality-and-features-per-buck option out there, there shouldn’t be billionaires while there are starvation and wage slaving ones life this prominent in the world. While these issues persist, having yatches to one person’s or a few people’s name is an indecent behaviour that should not be allowed in a working social contract. However, when you look at the rest of the companies in the same industry, or even other industries, there are way worse offenders of this wealth inequality that don’t even come close to Valve in providing the same quality-and-features-per-buck value, while having billionaires and actually striving to make them more wealthy instead of providing more for the customers and workers.
Case in point: You are not even looking a gift horse in the mouth; you are beating your most hard working horse for eating a hearty meal, claiming you are right in that amount of meal is not needed to survive, all the while letting the rest of your slacking horses raid your pantry without batting an eye. Pressure the others to provide better services per buck, also at a self-sustaining rate so as to not be deprived of it a year later, first.
I’m picking at Valve because this is a fucking discussion about Valve, why would I talk about Microsoft or Apple or Tesla or Shell in a discussion about Valve, please tell me.
And what you don’t understand is that this whole affair about “Valve taking 30% cut is overcharging” is bogus. Valve and whole others can sell fully-fledged carrots at $1M each, with Valve adding better packaging and better preservation while doing discounts regularly, all the while Epic can sell a malnourished and cut-out one at $500k each and give away a stale and cut-out one for free regularly.
Both are expensive if their base prices can be discounted by electing smaller margin of profits. (That is another topic as Steam is doing jackload of live-service that can’t be served as an offline service, without any form of subscription or recurring payments.) Even so, picking on the one that offers a sustainable price plan and fully-fledged product with extra benefits just because it is pricey for your wallet while all others in the market do a poorer job at the same prices or price-per-value is just grabbing your pitchfork because someone else started a riot against your cordial and caring overseer while the world around you is rife with jackals who’d like to be your king.
Go bug Gaben to spend more of his personal wealth gained through Valve’s distributed earnings on betterment of the product they serve rather than on the yatches. Don’t go around asking just Valve to get less cushion for experimentation, being generous in return, lax bout worker load and project development, etc., while they are the sole company doing that. Better yet, push your governments to install blanket resolutions against exorbitant wealth accumulations or uneven wealth distributions so that both better product development is prioritized and all employees are rewarded fairly if any single one is to be rewarded.
Anyway, I’m changing the discussion to be about how Stephen Hawking’s name is on Epstein’s list. Lets talk about this, I don’t care whether there are more concerning people named on that list or whether Hawking is unique for his contributions in some fields. Hell, I am not even interested in if the discussion is worthwhile through the factuality of the claim or the scope of the claim because why, this is a discussion about Stephen Hawking being on Epstein’s list now.
The cut they take is just one of the claims they have against Valve. Some of the other ones which another comment mentioned seem like fair arguments against Valve. The whole forcing pricing parity so game devs can’t offer the games for cheaper somewhere else and DLC from other platforms isn’t compatible with the Steam game and vice versa. And again you can say other platforms are doing that and worse too but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t also go after Valve for it. Just cause they’re a private company and because of that aren’t as profit driven as other companies doesn’t mean they still are gonna do things like this to increase their profits and maintain their majority market share on PC games.