News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious biased sources will be removed at the mods’ discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted separately but not to the post body. Sources may be checked for reliability using Wikipedia, MBFC, AdFontes, GroundNews, etc.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source. Clickbait titles may be removed.
Posts which titles don’t match the source may be removed. If the site changed their headline, we may ask you to update the post title. Clickbait titles use hyperbolic language and do not accurately describe the article content. When necessary, post titles may be edited, clearly marked with [brackets], but may never be used to editorialize or comment on the content.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials, videos, blogs, press releases, or celebrity gossip will be allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis. Mods may use discretion to pre-approve videos or press releases from highly credible sources that provide unique, newsworthy content not available or possible in another format.
7. No duplicate posts.
If an article has already been posted, it will be removed. Different articles reporting on the same subject are permitted. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners or news aggregators.
All posts must link to original article sources. You may include archival links in the post description. News aggregators such as Yahoo, Google, Hacker News, etc. should be avoided in favor of the original source link. Newswire services such as AP, Reuters, or AFP, are frequently republished and may be shared from other credible sources.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
Idk. I don't want Valve to fail. I think that'd overall make things worse for gamers. I just want them to stop operating a casino.
I'm not sure where I stand there. Steam is a great platform, but for purely capitalistic reasons. The only reason they aren't as bad as other platforms is because they're privately-owned and take the long view because they don't have to worry about the day-to-day fluctuations on stock value.
Gabe isn't your friend. He's a billionaire yacht-collector who makes the vast majority of his money by taking a massive cut from other company's products because of their virtual monopoly that exists because they launched an online marketplace in 2004.
Let’s be a bit fair, your local store selling a physical copy is also taking a cut of the other companies profits. The 30% valve charges would be just the same as GameStop/other store would be marking up the game from wholesale prices. (I still would rather have physical copies, but valve charging a percentage on each sale has always been a bs argument against them)
This is a very bad comparison. Valve has by some estimates the highest profit per employee of any corporation in the world. Reasonable markups in a competitive market are a far cry from the ludicrous extraction tax Valve (and Apple, and Google) impose as monopolist app store operators.
The store isn’t also making games.
Like how Apple gets to take 30% of Spotify subscriptions and they operate a competing music service. That’s where it becomes wrong.
Of course, Valve doesn’t make games either now, so maybe it’s a moot point.
Deadlock would like a word
Gacha trash. Let me know when they're making Portal 3 or Half-Life 3. And really, it doesn't even have to be those franchises, but I mean, a single-player game that you pay for once and that's it, and it has puzzles that make you think. What they were known for before they started making money off other people's work and stopped creating wonderful things.
I mean, I know they still work on their gacha games.
Might seem like I'm moving goalposts and maybe I did, but I'm just nostalgic for when they made unforgettable games like Portal and Half-Life 2.
Okay, so you're just a nostalgic hater. Deadlock is a masterpiece.
I’m just talking about the talking point of them taking a cut of sales, it’s the exact same as a store adding markup. A store is adding way more than 30% on most physical goods. Data storage and bandwidth are fucking expensive and 30% honestly isn’t that much.
CIA bot out here defending capitalist exploitation as reasonable lmao
Oh fuck off, out of all the fucking companies out there fucking raping the world steam isn’t one of them
Valve represents the acme of capitalism, with likely the highest profit per employee of any corporation that has ever existed, and you’re out here sucking them off?
30% makes sense for a physical store with high overhead, inventory, staffing, and other expenses.
Valve could take a 5% cut and still make a ton more than a retail store for the same product.
Open steam settings > Downloads, click the dropdown at the top. That whole dropdown menu? That's what their cut pays for. Rack space, network capacity, and storage, to deliver ALL games on steam efficiently, across the planet. That ain't cheap. And that's only part of what it pays for.
STOP👏DEFENDING👏MONOPLIES
You know what it costs to run a retail store? And even in 2025 GameStop had 10 times as many retail store locations as Valve had employees.
And it's not like retail has no tech infrastructure expenses.
Each Valve employee also makes about what 10 GameStop employees do, salaries at Valve are often mid to high 6 digits.
Which is not to say that GameStop is cheap to run, but hey, neither is Steam.
Not 10 times the employees. 10 times the nunber of stores as Valve has employees.
Let's look at the cost of just floor-level associates. If Gamestop employees made an average of $14 an hour and they have 2 employees working and were open 11 hours a day an average (standard is 10am to 9pm - they actually work shorter hours on Sunday, but there's also time spent opening and closing the store and extra hours on holidays other than Christmas, so 11 is low). That comes out to over 100 grand per store just in nominal hourly wages for floor associates.
Valve would have to pay 7 figures on average per employee to have the same staffing cost as Gamestop's lowest-paid employees.
I mean, sure. But I think you might be underestimating the infrastructure costs. They aren't just using a few 10GB switches. They also aren't just using a single data center to store and deliver games. Then, you have to consider all of the redundancies involved, the contractors, the data center contracts, etc. Even if they don't have their own DCs, AWS or Azure at this level is $$$$$$.
Storing, transferring, and hosting at this scale is not cheap by any means. It makes GameStop's tech infrastructure look like peanuts in comparison.
I've worked in retail and in tech. Tech infrastructure is expensive, but they save a metric fuckton by not requiring physical space. You could fit the entirety of all of valve's Tech infrastructure in a single building. Of course, they don't do that - they have it distributed in data centers all over the world. But they are renting space in server racks, whereas Gamestop is renting thousands of retail spaces for 100 grand a year, another 100 grand each on staffing them, and a metric fuckton on inventory. And their cut of the sales is tiny.
People saying they charge 30% are wrong. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo charge 30%. Gamestop's margin on a new game is like 10-15 percent. They make more on used games, but only if they sell. Their 100% markup on used games versus what they pay doesn't mean as much when lots of those games go unsold. At least new games can be returned to the manufacturer.
That is not true, they have multiple data centers. I completely disagree on the costs as well. A single high capacity switch can cost tens of thousands (of which they have probably hundreds) and that's not even mentioning storage, electricity, rack space, server cost ($$$$). The land is the cheapest part of data centers.
Have you worked in or with a data center? It was most of my job for 6 years.
I didn't mention Steam's cut of sales, but I do want to mention that you can refund steam games as long as you don't play them for longer than 2 hours. This is actually better than GameStop or retailers who normally only accept returns of sealed, new copies. So I'm not sure why you'd being that up when it defeats your point.
Hundreds of things that cost tens of thousands of dollars versus thousands of things that costs hundreds of thousands a year.
You're literally saying that Steam's server costs are orders of magnitude less than Gamestop's retail store location costs.
That is literally what I'm saying, yes. I take it you have never worked on the operations side of data centers?
Relative to the money being spent on games it is incredibly cheap.
Grocery stores in my experience take on average 30-50% of the cut of anything they sell.
From working at one and managing orders/invoices.
It varies depending on the product, the profit margin on soda for example is often over 100%, other products such as milk would be negative (loss leaders), but in general, most non-junk food groceries usually have a single digit profit margin
Agreed, Steam is the only website I can buy video games from(GOG, i dont like their usage of GenAI and the current people behind it,Epic games, subpar features and the company behind it),i appreciate Valve's contributions to Linux,and i like their philosophy of no cutscenes and extensive playtesting.
If Valve fails, we'll have so many great alternatives, though!
Who needs a forum, mod portal, user reviews, or Linux support anyways?
This just brought back a wonderful memory of playing original Overwatch and my hard drive failing in the middle of a match. Out of nowhere character models were being replaced with floating blue orbs and sounds were missing, but I could still finish the match with what was loaded into RAM!
This one is actually a game changer if you play WoW for a bit every few years lol
Game's like 100 gigs by now, but you can get started after just a few gigabytes downloaded. Like 5 minutes on even my mediocre 150 mbps downlink.
In contrast, it used to take me several hours to get into it on a slower connection before this feature.