this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2025
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Steam
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They really figured out the infinite money glitch.
They've been nothing but fair to me as a customer but the cynic in me thinks they've got an excessive amount of good will to squander since they dominate the PC gaming scene.
Please don't become shitty. And please release new non competitive games.
Gaben said it best when he said "piracy is a service issue, not a price issue." There is no other company that even comes close to matching Steam's services, both to consumers and developers. The industry could become a different place when he dies. I don't see any other CEO continuing to spend money to innovate and expand services rather than offer less and charge more to extract record profits.
This is absolutely mad cope, but I want to believe that, as forward thinking as Gabe is, he either will find a worthy successor, or already has one lined up to ensure the company isn't saced for all it's worth when he's gone.
There's no reason he couldn't have it go co-op. But what could happen vs what will, we just won't know.
I feel the same, I know that things will likely go downhill if he goes. That's why I also buy GoG games, I want to be able to download them if things go sour with Steam.
You can downlowad some of the steam games. DRM is possible, but not mandatory
CDPR came to the rescue even outside of GOG. My son bought Cyberpunk 2077 the other day on Steam and luckily for me it comes without DRM so I can even play it while he is playing.
Oh, I didn't knew.
Developers really trying to kill that by having buggy /launchers that run off steam launcher on top
I mean this is obvious af
When Netflix had 90% of the shows that you wanted to watch and they weren’t annoying little fucks with account sharing and geo location, everyone was happy to support them
But once paying users feel like they are being taken advantage of, instead of catered to, they leave.
There’s so many cases where pirating is not only cheaper (duh) it’s actually a better product/experience. And when you charge to provide a worse product/experience than what people can get for free, then you can’t be surprised at the outcome
Price has become a big issue lately too.
I can only hope he has made some form of training program to have someone like him in place to follow behind him. I do worry about it as well, though. It's been such a fun ride along the way.
When you said "training program" it made me think Portal style. Like the new exec gets hired or promoted and wakes up in an Aperture facility voiced by Gabe.
You know, I could see that, though for some reason it feels like Gabe would be more wholesome and much less completely unhinged when he rants.
Now I want Portal 3 with a segment voiced by him.
Provide a decent service then sit back and watch your would-be competition develop increasingly effective footguns?
Yep that the one
That's what you can do if you're not publicly traded. The supposedly "wise" market whenever anything goes wrong always seems to insist on burning down decades of good-will to extract a few bucks.
the average person really needs to realize that most businesses are just hilariously incompetent, the only reason things stay together is because of shittily paid workers doing their jobs despite management's best efforts.
I laugh whenever some one thinks the government is "inefficient" and that the company will be more efficient. I've watched publicly traded companies waste a tonne of money on various boondoggles.
Usually the company survives despite the incompetence for other reasons.
If they were publicly traded they could have started to do the smart things that investors like to see, like spending billions to integrate AI in steam. Why is there no AI in steam yet ? Clearly a failure, Gabe should be replaced by a CEO that would not lose time and money in frivolous things like Linux (what is Linux BTW ?) and start improving the company values by adding AI and firing employees.
When Gabe dies, steam falls
Not necessarily. That man has proven he cares about his legacy. I'd severely doubt he hasn't come up with provisions to try to prevent that from happening.
That ia what I am afraid of :(
Steam offers a lot more to developers than a storefront to sell your games. The App Store is an extremely minimal offering to developers for the amount of money they demand in exchange.
Sure, I’m aware. But nothing on the level of what Valve offers.
Steamworks
Because they got monopoly for controlling the OS too. No one will give a crap about the 30% if the app store and iOS are made by different entities.
Before steam, digital sales of games wasn't really a thing outside of a few niche examples. The 30% cut was the same percentage that retail stores were taking.
The difference is physical retail had a lot of overhead. Steam just creates a new key and adds it to your account. Yeah, they also have to store the game data and distribution up to the ISP, but that's really cheap compared to storing physical games at physical locations that only have access to their local buyers. Valve's profit margins are significantly higher. They could probably take 5% and this would still be true.
Storage and bandwidth definitely weren't cheap in 2003. Additionally Steam provides features that a brick and mortar store could never even think of providing, including updates, DRM, instant access to global consumers, community features, in-depth data analytics, and the ability to adjust pricing in real time.
While a lot of the work Valve has put in Steam seems both obvious and ubiquitous today, these were features they pioneered for both developers and consumers.
I'd also like to point out that the only digital marketplace I'm aware of that charges less than 30% by default (Epic) is famous for losing billions of dollars in the endeavor.
To access the same number of people, all around the world, compared to physical stores it's essentially a rounding error. Rent alone for all the stores would be far more than Valve had to spend, then you need employees to operate the stores and all the other ongoing costs. Storage was not as cheap, and from a consumer point of view it wasn't cheap, it it's far cheaper than physical stores around the world.
Not sure how that's relevant, but yes. I didn't say they didn't.
Again, sure. It doesn't contradict anything I said so I don't know why you said it.
Once again, sure. It doesn't change anything in my comment.
I don't know why if anyone says anything that is not just gobbling Valve's cock with enthusiasm they get people showing up talking about how great they are. Sure, I like them too. It doesn't mean there aren't reasons to complain. That's how you end up with companies enshitifying.
It almost feels like bots how frequent it is, but I just think you people have a compulsion to defend them from what isn't even criticism, like they're going to praise you for it. Well guess what? They don't even know you exist.
They're a private company, so the data is not available, but we can estimate. GameStop, which IIRC is only US based, not global, has total expenses of about $2b/y. Valve, meanwhile, spends $221m paying employees in their gaming division, which is larger than the Steam division (that we don't have data for).
As you can see, the cost of operating Steam is significantly lower than operating physical stores. That's obvious to anyone, but for some reason I had to prove it to you.
They have to include them anyway, because almost no game is sold exclusively on Steam. The only features they don't have to include are features for the customer, so that's not relevant. The features relevant to developers are access to market (which is the same as physical retail) and DRM, which they have to include anyway if it's available outside of Steam. Just for reference though, Denuvo is about $100k/y, which is close to the cost of 1 employee.
My god, you people are so frustrating. I said Steam provides a good service. I only said their profit margins are significantly higher than physical retail (which is obvious), and you act like I'm saying people should avoid it. You're so dramatic. You people are against anyone saying anything besides Valve should make more money. It's crazy.
Iirc valve will even allow devs to generate as many steam keys as they want and sell them outside of steam for no cut whatsoever (and Steam will still provide support for the game on the launcher for those keys). And virtually no devs do it. They prefer to take the 30%. So that tells me that what they charge is more than fair to the devs
Yeah generating a steam key to sell yourself isn't free but last time I made some it was less than a buck. I'm going on an old memory but I think it was $0.17 each.
Incredibly cheap I’d say
Unfortunately a lot of their money comes from profiting off of CSGO loot box skins from children. A billion dollar industry. So in a way, they are shitty already, in a sense.