There’s a lot of money to be made as a middleman.
If there’s a gold rush, you want to be the guy selling shovels.
this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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For a real comparison steam is the distributor, storefront, advertiser, and support. A bit more than just 'a middleman'.
A vertically integrated middleman is even more profitable.
If there's a gold rush, you want to run the railroads, build the houses, sell the shovels and open the general store I guess
Fortunately, that's illegal now. If only those laws would be applied to modern things
You're missing the actual biggest key component. It's also a built in community forum with tons of user-requested settings. They mostly know how to cater and rarely backtrack a quality of life feature.
They're multiple middle men at once
IDK, retail can be a tough business, just ask GOG and Epic.
It's a lot of work becoming the de facto standard, but once you've made it, the money just rolls in.
At least gog has something unique in that they offer drm free games. Epic just buys fucking exclusives to try to force people over.
However, neither have learned the lesson from Valve: make it a really good experience.
GOG still doesn't have as good of support as Valve, and I don't think Epic is even trying with EGS. I'm happy to use a Valve competitor, but they need to make a good product first. GOG is close, and now that they seem to be sharing sales revenue with Heroic, I might buy more from them on my Steam Deck. But Valve just makes everything work so nicely that I'm hard pressed to find a reason to use another.
The thing with Valve is that they didn't just build a store for PC games and that's it.
Steam Input practically solved the issue of games not supporting your particular gamepad. There's Steam Remote Play, Proton for Linux compatibility, workshop for mods, well built systems for player to player trades, cloud saves that actually work...
Steam is what makes the PC a gaming platform, rather than a box capable of technically running games.
And yet Valve's competitors can't even make a halfway decent store. They can cry about monopolies and whatnot, but at the end of the day, they just don't have a compelling product.
I'm not expecting GOG or EGS to provide all those extra services, but they need to at least be a decent store, and that means better customer service and decent discoverability, yet they fail at actually being a store.
Your comment about guys selling shovels is in violation of my patent about commenting about shovels.
You'll need to pay me a license of $300 USD for every day this comment is left online.
I would make the comparison to the monopolized railroad instead of selling shovels. There is Vanderbilt level moneys in setting up a transport network that only you control and rent seek from.
And there's a lot of other guys selling shovels, too. It's not that anticompetitive when someone is selling better shovels than anyone else and also charging a premium for them. Anticompetitive would be having the best and undercutting everyone else on pricing in order to make sure no other sellers had a chance.
I mean… yeah no shit. You’re telling me the guys selling products other people make in an almost entirely digital system have a more profitability per staff than the people who develop their own products?
It’s always odd that people treat Steam like it’s this small almost indie company with it’s actually a gigantic monolith with a near monopoly in the PC gaming market
I feel like the people who think of steam as a small/indie company have that impression because it's not public and is shockingly uncontroversial for a company its size (at least in terms of revenue).
I'll never understand the absolute cock worship of steam. They're just a huge, near monopolistic gaming store that apparently requires daily fellatio on this platform. Apparently, I'm supposed to agree or get smashed with the typical vitriol one gets with disagreeing with the hive. You Assholes
I'll never understand why some people look at the fact that steam is popular because of their policies, and can't help but make a comment like this equating that popularity to cock worship.
Like, we get it bro. You're thinking about cocks and you're mad about a half decent game store. What compelled you to combine those thoughts on a public forum?
The weird thing is that this isn't even the first comment I've seen like this. Dudes that are mad about steam want everyone else to know about steam's massive, throbbing cock for some reason. This guy alone has posted 3 of these.
Valve abducts kids into gambling, mine people data, promotes DRMs and proprietary software. All of that out of geed and seeking profits.
Especially to kids videogames are really alluring, it's important to warn everyone against evil and greedy companies.
Ok, let's take this point by point:
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Steam doesn't allow actual gambling. It's illegal in the US and they typically don't sell games that are not legal in the US. Conflating other types of games as gambling when there is no actual money on the line is a dishonest and transparent attempt to make steam look bad
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Valve has no control over the DRM policies of the games that they sell. Valve creates an anti-cheat and that's about as involved as they get. DRM is a gaming company corporate decision not publisher or distributor. If simply allowing DRM is what you mean by "promoting" then that is another count of dishonesty.
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What data can they possibly mine? They get an email address, some gameplay time, location data, and Hardware data. All of this stuff is pretty freely available and doesn't really sell for anything, nor is it really violating any privacy. And besides that, you can directly opt out of Hardware surveys.
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Asserting that video games are a problem for kids and that steam is evil or profit-driven because of that is also pretty dishonest given that there are basically no game distributors that keep kids from playing video games. What you are essentially saying is that we should start doing like China does and limit kids ability to gain at all. Even then that is a government regulation and not at all on steam.
I would like to just point out the absurdity of saying that kids should not be able to play video games because of steam. For the last 40 years video games have been marketed primarily to kids. Are you going to say the same about Nintendo or Atari? Are you now asserting that companies shouldn't Market to kids at all? Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds?
- To round it all off, literally everything you listed are things that every gaming company or distributor does in some capacity and does not make Steam different or worse. It sounds like you just have a problem with the industry in general
Thank you for this. For some reason theres new accounts showing up on lemmy who just start spouting nonsense and lies just to get other people to hate on something thats trying to make a difference.
Steam is great. For all the bad decisions they may have made, the good ones they've made outweigh them by a thousand. Compared to Epic who i believe has done more damage to the gaming industry.
Also lets not forget, Epic was the one pushing for crypto games. Valve comepletely banned those on their store. So who's getting kids addicted to gambling now?
I can see the rationality of it. Once anything gets big enough there are always going to be people who look at the flaws and decide that the thing shouldn't exist or are maybe just upset because they don't face enough scrutiny.
But also covert marketing is definitely a thing. That is to say that people who may have an interest in seeing steam fail or lose market share one day definitely are a presence on social media that is as open as lemmy.
Steam might not be perfect, but despite what the critics would have you believe, steam is still better than a lot of alternatives.
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When I want top-level, triple-AAA journalism, I get my news from a shitty blog site that looks like it was built in the Year 2000.
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You really love posting this comment in every post about steam, don't you?
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Honestly, I think some of it is a bit over the top. At the end of the day, they're a company producing a product and not the chosen savior. But as far as giant companies go, they're almost everything you could want.
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Lots of pro-consumer policies. From making returns a thing, to never taking away access like some stores, to big sales. If the idea of buying a digital game in 2004 and still having access to it in 2024 doesn't sound revolutionary to you, it's because you haven't paid attention to how other companies run their stores.
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Open source contributions. Gaming on Linux is getting a huge shot in the arm from Valve, Steam, and the Steam Deck, both through direct contributions and indirectly through showing it's viability.
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Employees, by all accounts, are well taken care of and enjoy their jobs.
They aren't perfect, but the bar for a company, especially in the gaming industry, being ethical is so low that the way Valve operates makes them basically saints by comparison.
They got me to stop pirating by making it easier and safer, so I think they're pretty neat.
What can I say? They treat me right.
Are steam workers particularly happy or something?
From everything I've seen they really take care of their employees.
Kids (the majority of steam customers) are really easy to brainwash and manipulate. Valve probably also spends millions on advertising
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Yeah, when you sell loot boxes of digital skins that are widely used on 3rd party illegal e-sports gambling sites, you make billions. Great job, Valve. Ever wonder why e-sports teams have these "BETKING360"-sponsors? It's because young men have money to gamble with and the potential for being the next generation of gambling addicts. Valve knows that, it just doesn't facilitate gambling directly. It just plays bank
I have no love for Gabe Newell, even if he has these charming video skits he sometimes does for TI or whatever
Abducting kids into gambling and mine their data sure it's a profitable business, especially when many videogames are literally designed on purpose to be addictive like drugs.
This reads like "Videogames bad!!"
From what I garnered this is revenue, not profit. Also comparing the companies to Apple, FB & Microsoft is not really a fair comparison. I know it was the Valve employees doing this. Probably a better choice would have been something like a restaurant chain or store like Walmart.
Valve also makes ridiculous buck from their games. Every VR user wants to play Alyx, and Dota 2 with Counter Strike 2 are two of the most popular multiplayer games without being complete shitshows (like Fortnite, Roblox and whatever the hell goes on on mobile phones). Not to mention an occasional instant classics like Portal 2.
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