Gonna piggy back off this to drop a decent summary from coffeezilla about valve's lootbox gambling problem that Valve has consistently dodged responsibility on. It's really not new news but folks should be informed/reminded of it nonetheless.
I don't watch CoffeeZilla in any large amount, but this pretty well sums up the situation in this instance.
Honestly it's both valve's fault and the legal system. They've tried to combat these sites with the trade window system back in like 2015 2016 I think, but their csgo and tf2 trading economy struggles when you have to wait a week to do stuff.
It also doesn't help when a lot of these sites dodge being legally a casino, and get away with it.
No, they wanted to pretend like they were combating them while leaving them fully intact. There are pretty easy ways to combat it, but that also requires they destroy the market they profit so much off of. The trade window system (purposefully) did very little to stop this. It's was purely PR, which some gullible people actually believed.
People like Valve, so they believe everything they do is honest and good. It isn't. It may be better than some other companies, but it doesn't make them good. You can recognize when they do the right thing while also recognizing when they're doing the wrong things, and enabling gambling (underage or not) is bad. At a minimum, they control CS esports, so they could ban advertising from gambling sites if they don't want to block it in its entirety.
I mean, we can point at the legal system, but as you said, casinos just find new loopholes to circumvent the law. Ultimately, Valve is the group with the power to remove any gambling-adjacent mechanics from their games, but they have been pretty flaccid regarding changes because they know that they will lose money from it.
Crackdowns won't stop the gambling on CS, legislation and enforcement won't change it, but making items non-tradeable, or damaging item value or appeal through any method, can stop the gambling - but at the cost of CS's financial success and overall appeal.
Is there a proposal to do this that doesn't gut other legitimate parts of their trading system?
I'm not bothering watching all the video. I hope they highlight that a good part of the company clients are kids.
Yeah, underage gambling is a big part of the topic.
I hope the employees are compensated well compared to the profit.
As of 2021, Valve employees made roughly $430K-4.5M, depending on role. Not bad, considering the average salary in WA is around $58k.
Source:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/13/24197477/valve-employs-few-hundred-people-payroll-redacted
Holy shit
As a private company with no board and stockholders to appease, with a guy in charge who is at least a descent person, employees at valve are doing fantastic. Way higher than "industry standards".
It's a bit weird (skip to 10:41 for specifically the pay system)
you may think a company named valve would know a thing or two about cash flow
It's funny that these publications only learned that this year when Valve has had a publicly available company directory on their website with names, pictures and email addresses since forever.
They didn't just learn about it there have been articles about it for years and years they just post the same old article from a few years ago and act like it's new
Is Gabe taking a duck face selfie in the thumbnail?
Yeah it’s from a video where he was back seating on some voice actors doing announcement and he’s doing odd things background for comedic effect.
Yup. It‘s from the Cave Johnson Announcer Pack reveal video. Which is definitely worth a watch, even if you‘re not into Dota 2.
Might have something to do with getting underage kids hooked on gambling.
"It's making more money per employee than Apple"
And how much are the game devs whos game are on steam making? If Valve ceo has enough money to buy a billion dollar worth fleet of mega yachts the share is simply off, Valve is making billions nobody else is.
70%...and devs are happy to pay the 30% to get on a platform that's worth a fuck. Valve carries the servers, the bandwidth and service. Tons of indie devs have made it via steam. They're a platform for games, not a healthcare company or apple that's exploiting slave labor.
Plenty of villans out there, valve and gabe isn't one of them.
That's highly debatable. Maybe not for the specific reason being discussed, but Valve, and by extension Gabe, IS complicit in stuff like CS:GO gambling which preys on the underaged and and vulnerable.
I think it just goes back to "their competition is even worse". "They let people prey on the vulnerable" doesn't hit as hard when the competition is literally preying on them themselves.
Valve is the least shitty of the competition. Maybe GOG is better, but then CDPR is only viable because they can underpay Polish devs.
Considering their only major competitor has enough money to keep trying to lure players to their significantly worse store system with free games for years now instead of going the route of actually providing a decent product I think Valve making money off their good product strategy is a good thing.
The entry ticket means billions... They lock the game market.
Valve takes 30% on every game sold and you don't even own the games. That's sick capitalism in action, yet everybody kisses their ass.
EDIT for the Steam jerkers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r0a7-qyjss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13eiDhuvM6Y
They do provide a good service. There’s no subscription fee. They maintain delisted games so you can download games you bought years ago that are no longer available. Not to mention steam OS and other projects like the steam deck that put pressure on other gaming companies to do better.
This could go up in a cloud of smoke at any point and it likely will as soon as Gabe passes on and the in fighting begins. So this is a “good king” situation and the system itself will not be sustainable long term by any means.
Because somehow their competition is even worse
Ah, yes, capitalism. Because they don’t have to pay to maintain servers and infrastructure or anything, right?
Nor do they pay for bandwidth when you download your 100gb game for the nth time in the past month.
Nor do they have a ton of functions and services for both devs and consumers like easy refunds, regional pricing, steam keys, trading cards, steam workshop, steam forums, chatrooms, remote play... just to name some.
Yeah, such moneygrabbing comic book villains that just sit in their pile of money and don't provide anything good.
Ah, yes, capitalism. Because they don’t have to pay to maintain servers and infrastructure or anything, right?
They are stacking billions. It means they are paying peanuts compared to what they are making.
Honestly, I pay for the service alone.
Pirating games is easy-ish enough so if Valve ever enshittifies I will be quickly learning how to remove Steam's DRM and put all my games on a server and never purchase another video game in my lifetime.
They provide an easy platform for me to buy games so I use them. The steam deck too. Just because they have a competent product, i don't think that justifies any arse kissing. Like you say, they're a company and they're in business to make money.
Yeah, I can see why developers would be unhappy about the 30%. Maybe there's an argument to be made that the platform gives these games a greater potential market but I don't know enough about the business to try making that argument.
As far as capitalism goes they are not the shittiest of companies out there.
They have predatory tactics with lootboxes on their popular games though.
But most of their practices are not anticonsumer.
And they do not enforce drm and their own drm is a joke, so you can basically own most games if you want with very little effort. Just copy the files and have a generic steam crack around and you are golden for most cases.
I believe this is something to be aware of and if this is something you don't want use GOG instead. But in reality as long as Steam exists you will be able to download and play your games. If Steam ceases to exists then you will not be able to download them, but there will be ways to still play them, if you previously downloaded them. It is not like "owning" movies on Amazon (or just recently on the Playstation Store), where you always need to stream the movies.
Yeah. Really wish they were more like gog or itch
did pcgamer learn it by reading a similar article awhile back?
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