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this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Piracy is a service problem.
For me its money problem
No offense. But if it's truly a money problem, the studios have nothing to loose by you pirating.
I can't imagine any company every wanting to do it the way I would want. I want a single service/platform that houses all the content, that way the experience is the same. For example I don't know if in one app I can double tap to the right to skip ahead and does it work on the other apps as well? probably not.
In theory that's what we had in the VHS days. But I hear you. Piracy today is a superior product in almost any scenario.
Valve is a terrible company and Steam is an awful platform but their stance on piracy is why they deserve a lot of the success they get. In a day and age where everyone was trying as hard as possible to punish their userbase as much as possible for their crappy distribution model, here came a company that actually understood why people pirate in the first place and made a vast majority of the gaming population willingly download DRM then go through it to spend billions on games they will never play.
Lol the valve fanboys found this, yikes. They downvote bombed this like a game which slightly annoyed them.
Care to explain why "Valve is a terrible company" and "Steam is an awful platform"? Surely, it has tons of porn games (that you can hide), or shitty games (that is hard to sort through), or CS:GO item gambling problems (don't really care). But I kind of fail to see how the company or the client could be fundamentally bad.
The 30% cut Steam takes is quite a bit. Considering the near-monopoly it has on game distribution, that could easily mean the difference between turning a profit and not for an indie developer.
Personally their efforts towards things I support (PC handhelds, Linux gaming) and the convenience of the platform outweigh the things I dislike, but being frustrated by its problems is understandable when people don't really have another choice.
Yes, I agree that 30% is a lot. But let's look from another perspective: If a developer, for ease of calculation, sells a game for 30$ on Steam, he receives 20$. If he sells it on a competitive platform with 5% cut (that's 6x less than Steam) he gets 27$.
However, Steam is way bigger, and if a developer can sell the same game more times on Steam (33% more times to be exact), he breaks even.
More people to buy = more people to play = bigger player base => more people buy it. It is a poaitive feedback loop.
I am not arguing that 30% is good, all I am saying is I understand that Steam has to take a big cut to pay for the features it provides for "free" alongside the usual game content (cloud saves, community, workshop, utems, etc.).
Do you think any indie developer has the means to achieve a lower cost to distribution and promotion if they try to sell and support the game themselves?
Valve solves many problems for developers and these problems aren't imaginary and free to resolve.
Not saying 30% is justified for all games, but if you want a quality title it's going to cost more than just development. Since the Unity debacle we've seen some developers even say openly that costs of promotion and support dwarf costs of development.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9aCwCKgkLo
And here are some reason I personally don't like them:
This one made me giggle. Who are you, the moral internet police?
Glory to Valve for investing in Proton.
Really telling on yourself with that one.
To sum it up: about the same as any platform where people can interact? What's so FOMO about a game being on sale if it's gonna be on sale next week aswell?
I fail to see how Steam Market is so bad, it is not possible to redeem the cash (unless you do it via black market, which is against the TOS), so all money is still in the system. Yeah, it is being used to do unregulated gambling, but it's a regulatory problem which should be handled by the countries to define what gambling is, and shut these sites down. Why the fuck should Steam care?
NFTs in crypto space are a joke, and everywhere else they are basically in any online software, failing to see the point here.
Regarding gambling, it's not quite so simple. Valve doesn't exist in a vacuum. Many rich people see what goes on in that ecosystem and they lobby their governments to make it easier for themselves to do even more audacious things. Valve can lead by example instead of opening the door
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9aCwCKgkLo
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
If you didn't sample 4chan in that time you missed out on a lot of Internet culture. Not everyone posting on there was. It was really entertaining to watch the shitshow.
It's always fascinated me that companies who understand their core value proposition of their business can be so fucked up in so many other ways and still succeed.
Yeah you're totally right.
Where the staff are actually long term users and fans of the service.
It's like fighting games. You can have a solid bread&butter and do well, even if you're completely trash at the rest of the game.