Can think about Steam tax whatever you want, but they provide a hell of a lot more than just a half-assed store and some exposure for your games like Epic does. Don’t get me wrong, I do gratefully take the free games and I do appreciate the competition, what I want to say is that Steam doesn’t just pocket that money. They provide forums; frameworks for stuff like modding and achievements; a much better client useful beyond games they sell; subsidized hardware and support for Linux as an alternative to Windows. All of this also benefits game developers one way or another and costs money to develop and maintain. (Software) engineers are anything but cheap.
Epic does have its steamworks alternative called epic online services which provide more or less the same functionality (achievements, p2p networking, anti cheat…) but it’s also completely free, cross store, and cross engine
I agree partially. They are competent rather than just able to do whatever cause money.
Now if they invested their profits into workers salaries and made a bid for management salaries to only double per rank, we would be going somewhere.
Does Valve officially have managers now? Last I checked, they had this extremely flat structure of everyone being basically equal and people self-determining what they’re working on and how
Thats what I heard as well, doesn’t change the fact that management gets paid 10-100 times of an engineer and profits go to the owner/s not the workers.
Are you talking about Valve, or generally? Because as I said, I don’t think there is such a thing as a generic manager role at Valve, much less one that gets paid so much more than other roles. How much of the profit goes to Gabe directly vs the employees or reinvested into the company I don’t know, but if you want to complain about compensation gaps, I’m very sure that Valve is absolutely not the company to start with.
although valve is by no means the worst offender, they’re no angel either. Between raking in billions of dollars and taking no small cut from game developers (plus the fact that they take 100 $ just to put games on steam, even for free from what I read) they arent our savior by a long shot.
FOSS is. We‘re seeing massive effort of people to democratize software development and it is glorious. So while I get that valve isnt an example for the worst of the worst, they still fit in „billionaire bad“.
It does suck, but I think the only thing Tim Epic can do is to fix his own store.
Tim Epic
Lmao
Reminds me of how one time Trump had a meeting with Tim Cook and called him Tim Apple
I loathe Epic Store but I wish there was better competition to Steam. They definitely offer better cuts for devs but I think they still need to understand what makes Steam popular the way that it is. There’s a huge social media aspect, proton, bigger picture with the controller support…
We are in a very delicate situation where Valve can do whatever they want. They can suddenly decide to start making steam worse for users, adding more ads than we already have and we won’t be able to do anything, because in the end we don’t really own anything we have there.
Edit: many typos lol
The competition for Steam is GoG as it is effectively the only platform to offer you something Steam doesn’t.
gog has always been so anal about linux though, that it kind of feels like a epic games to me. you can’t have a platform ran on drm free games, and then when people want to play them on linux (the “drm free” platform), they ignore and alienate them.
How has it been anal about Linux? Are we talking Galaxy? The launcher is pretty butt and it’s better to just download the games directly and then they can be run with proton because of the lack of DRM.
Generally Steam does a lot more, especially for linux but GoG is the only store offering DRM free as the default.
I always forget GoG exists lol
What do they offer that steam doesn’t? Old games?
There’s other things but mostly the lack of DRM.
Proton really only caters to a very small ~3% of enthusiasts and stands to potentially benefit Valve far more than any individual consumer.
Valve could definitely decide they want to be dicks tomorrow, but they haven’t in the last 3 decades, so why start now?
… Because everyone else started now. And so far they all got away with it.
They didn’t start now, they started a very long time ago.
OK a bit of a rant from me but here I go:
Tim could easily see a smaller cut from Valve for a big game and say “yeah that’s great sign me up” but he doesn’t. He literally says “You should support the smaller players rather than the large ones”. He’s arguing to give a better rate to struggling developers rather than the successful ones. That’s what the COO says “umadbro” to. Honestly, that’s enough for me to really reconsider buying new games from Steam.
The issue is: This is exactly how Sweeney talks to people on Twitter. There was a particularly good reply to him once, which basically went: I agree with you and support your principled stance, but I can’t trust you because you are such a troll.
This is the problem. I truly believe Sweeney is a good person, and he actually wants more open markets not just for Epic but for everyone. Yes, he ships Unreal which smaller devs use and a sale for them means a sale for him, but really you don’t lean into things like this unless you actually want to democratise making games as a principled stance.
But he can just be such a jerk that people just don’t like talking to him or dealing with him or his companies. It’s frustrating to be honest, because he can be such a voice for good.
