Comments
By ElevenLathe 2025-11-0720:592 reply I would encourage anyone in tech that is interested in forming a union at their workplace to sign up for CWA's CODE (Campaign to Organize Digital Employees) training: https://code-cwa.org/
CWA is a big, traditional, national union (think phone company employees, health care workers, flight attendants) that has voted to set aside a portion of their dues to help organize us, their fellow workers in the tech sector, which I consider a truly beautiful act of solidarity. They are having some successes, which seem to be building.
Getting plugged in with the training and, almost as importantly, a CWA organizer, is a great first step if you know you'd like a union but don't know where to start.
By dontlaugh 2025-11-0723:40 And if you are in the UK working in the games industry, join the union currently fighting for these workers: https://www.gameworkers.co.uk/
By annexrichmond 2025-11-0721:399 reply Are you aware of any resources for how to combat colleagues aiming to start a union? I am personally opposed to being part of a union.
By toomuchtodo 2025-11-0721:56 Support for unions in the US is at record highs, so pick carefully where you work I suppose or work as a consultant with no labor protections.
https://www.marketplace.org/2023/01/03/gen-z-is-the-most-pro...
https://thehill.com/business/4854173-union-approval-surges-p...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/12751/labor-unions.aspx
https://news.gallup.com/poll/510281/unions-strengthening.asp...
I have a simple solution for you: don't join a union if you don't want to be part of one.
By CamperBob2 2025-11-083:491 reply That option isn't always available, at least in the US. Unless you live in a right-to-work state, you may be forced to join the union as a condition of employment.
Somehow this is seen as "more progressive."
By worik 2025-11-0822:41 There is a conflicting tension.
Freeriding
If a union negotiates better conditions at a workplace, who should be subject to them? Everybody, of course IMO
But what of people who never paid union dues?
There is no nice tidy solution to that tension, only messy ones that impinge on a freedom somewhere
It is worth unionising, voluntarily
By vkou 2025-11-0721:42 If you don't like the people you're working with, you could quit.
You could also vote no on a unionization vote, or just not join. I'm sure your loyalty will get a special consideration when the next round of arbitrary layoffs (coupled with record-breaking profits) happens.
By ElevenLathe 2025-11-0721:483 reply Just don't join. Closed shops are already illegal in the US so nobody can make you.
By ndriscoll 2025-11-080:38 Only about half of US states have right-to-work laws.
By pseudalopex 2025-11-0723:00 I inferred they didn't want to be represented by a union. US law requires a union to represent non members.
> Closed shops are already illegal in the US
I do wonder what country American Airlines operates in then…
https://viewfromthewing.com/american-airlines-fired-two-flig...
Per AA's 10-K, in 2024 87% of American Airlines employees were represented by a union[1]. So according to that source it sounds like the people who were fired were union members that didn't pay their dues.
They could surely have paid their dues and left the union and kept their jobs (or could have never joined the union to begin with).
[1] https://americanairlines.gcs-web.com/node/42651/html#:~:text...
100% of flight attendants are union members and it is a closed shop as per AA's FA union and per AA.
By Brybry 2025-11-093:06 So looks like you're right but there's also some weird language technicality for "closed shop" where it's really a "union shop".
Per the APFA contract[1] employees are forced to join the union within 60 days of assignment as a flight attendant. This is technically considered a union shop (not a closed shop) because it doesn't require people to be union members before being hired.
Under the Taft-Hartley Act a lot of states (and in some situations, court decisions) have made this illegal[2] via right-to-work laws but airlines are covered under the Railway Labor Act (45 U.S.C. § 152)[3] which allows it (upheld by the US Supreme Court in Railway Employes' Department v. Hanson, 351 U.S. 225)[4] .
So, I was wrong and the employees had no choice but continue to be union members and pay dues or be fired because of airline-specific labor law.
[1] https://www.apfa.org/contract/ [page 237, 35-10]
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act
[3] https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=(title:45%20section:...
[4] https://www.loc.gov/resource/usrep.usrep351225/?pdfPage=1
By travisjungroth 2025-11-0723:06 I don’t know about this case specifically, but airlines frequently have different labor laws. They’ll be the exception to all sorts of unqualified statements.
By 000ooo000 2025-11-081:04 Are you required to be part of this union, if it forms?
Or just someone in a different phase of their career than a union typically helps out.
Unions absolutely hold back young high performers from advancing rapidly and standing out from the crowd. I was part of a few in my younger years and quickly learned they were a detriment to my earnings due to them favoring seniority and status quo over everything else.
Once you hit a certain level and stop advancing quickly the equation tends to change, and you want to be the one protected from the young whipper snappers willing to outwork you.
It’s a selfish way of thinking perhaps, but jumping from union shops to non-union tripled my wages in the time I’d have made about 40% more the first few years of entering the workforce.
Not all unions need to be structured this way - but they tend to devolve into organizations whose primary focus is protecting the old guard over everything else.
At this point of my life a union would probably be a net win for me, but only because I’d be able to enter a job at a fairly high seniority/pay level. Then vote contracts that give my cohort more benefits than those starting out.
From a game theory standpoint a union would be for the greater good at the expense of the few. If you are part of the few at any given moment of time you’d be going against your interests joining a union shop.
I’ve always thought a “guild” structure would make far more sense in the tech world.
Then don’t join. Actively trying to stop others from joining is not the same thing.
And fwiw, I’ve been in two unions that were nothing like you described. I got better conditions and in one case pay because of union organising.
By CamperBob2 2025-11-0817:361 reply As has been pointed out many times, apparently fruitlessly, the unions have lobbied hard to ensure that you don't always have a choice in the matter.
Even in the US, you are not forced to join a union.
You might have a union negotiate minimum pay and conditions on your behalf, but that doesn’t stop you from negotiation beyond that individually.
By CamperBob2 2025-11-0818:311 reply That is simply not the case. Google "Right to work" and "Union shop." At a minimum you're required to pay dues to the union.
Forcing workers to either join or pay tribute to a middleman isn't OK.
By dontlaugh 2025-11-0818:37 It seems entirely reasonable to pay dues for a benefit you receive. I don’t see why that’s such a big deal. You still don’t need to be involved in organising.
It’s entirely ok for the majority of workers to democratically decide that they shouldn’t have to fight for benefits that others get for free. Unions aren’t middlemen, they’re just the majority of workers in a workplace organising themselves.
By cafard 2025-11-0815:19 I would offer the major sports unions and SAG-AFTRA as counter-examples.
By elephanlemon 2025-11-0719:2212 reply As a kid I always lamented that every studio seemed to sell out as soon as they had the chance. Valve is basically the only one that didn’t… clearly it’s paid off very well for Gabe and the employees. Wish more people would resist the payday and keep what’s theirs.
> Valve is basically the only one that didn’t
They kind of did, with their sudden pivot from primarily making singleplayer games to almost exclusively making F2P GaaS titles the instant they got a taste of lootbox money. Half-Life 3 and Portal 3 will never happen because Valve makes 100x as much money with 1/100th of the effort by peddling Counter Strike skins.
By PetitPrince 2025-11-0720:162 reply HL3 kinda happened though, but it was called Half-Life Alyx. And while it wasn't a conventional FPS like HL1 and 2, there's absolutely no trace of GaaS in it.
Alyx is a bit of an edge case because they needed a VR showcase, and it's unlikely that a PC VR game (even a Valve one) could have sustained a healthy multiplayer population. Regardless of the reasons why it happened, it's the one and only singleplayer title they've released in the last 14 years, which neatly aligns with them discovering the joy of lootboxes 15 years ago.
To say Alyx was just an "VR demo" is pretty sad and reductive. Even today it's the one of the best VR games to be released in both fidelity and performance and as VR tech continues to improve its truly aged like fine wine
By jsheard 2025-11-0720:34 I called it a showcase, not a demo. I know it's a full-blown game in its own right.
By Something1234 2025-11-0720:231 reply What about Aperture Labs Desk Job as a demo for the deck? Full self contained single player story.
By mathgeek 2025-11-0720:50 While it was more a tech demo than a full game, this one was a great game anyway.
By hamdingers 2025-11-0721:11 Alyx is a great spinoff, a mindblowing tech demo, and a thrilling prequel. It is not Half-Life 3.
By saintfire 2025-11-0720:13 Allegedly HL3 is in active development.
No official announcement yet.
By pphysch 2025-11-0720:11 HL3 is under active development though. If that's a success I'm sure they'd try a Portal 3 as well.
By jsheard 2025-11-0722:16 Games (as a Service)
By wlesieutre 2025-11-0720:291 reply Didn't Valve just deliberately tank the Counter Strike cosmetics market?
By jsheard 2025-11-0720:32 They tanked ultra-high-value items, which were primarily traded off-the-books because their value exceeded the official Steam marketplaces $1800 price cap. Bringing those prices down is good for Valve because it means more trading activity will happen on the official market, where Valve gets a cut of every transaction, rather than on third-party exchanges, where Valve gets nothing.
Simply raising the $1800 transaction limit and $2000 balance limit would have been far less disruptive, but that may have put Valve in financial regulators crosshairs. There's surely a reason why they chose those numbers in particular.
By monospacegames 2025-11-0719:311 reply Financially Valve exists in an incomparably different space compared to companies like Take Two that actually have to make games to make money.
I would rephrase this as they got there because they treat their customers with respect, they take feedback to improve their platform, they don't pack their launcher / store front with ads and trickery, and you can trust that your games will be there and not go away.
Yes, they are loot box whores but so is everyone else.
Steam is a community, social media, and a store. The community is what they built and that community is extremely loyal. That community is also what developers are paying for.
In Gaben, we trust. I have 20 years of experience saying Gabe won't fuck me over to increase EBIDA by .5%. Are they perfect? No, but they are lightyears better than most of their competitors except GOG in terms of putting consumers first.
By TiredOfLife 2025-11-0812:27 > because they treat their customers with respect
They had to be sued to get them to offer refunds
They had to be sued to get them to remove forced arbitration clause
This is what I always say about Valve. They are not morally unimpeachable, but at the end of the day I've been a regular customer for over 20 years and they've never fucked me over. I don't think I can say the same about any other software company.
By mrguyorama 2025-11-0722:531 reply And most importantly, the moment they show any indication of doing otherwise, I will happily drop them.
I keep giving Valve my money because they keep giving me good value for that money and a trustworthy environment to spend that money in. I have no loyalty. I also buy games from Humble Bundle and GOG.
I'm not excited about the prospect of losing my 4000 games but the literal only options available for consumers right now are "Pay money and get a game that we can take away at any time, fuck you over, do all sorts of bad things, and we demonstrably hate you", or "Pay money to get a game and a refund period and a bunch of features and maybe when Gabe dies we will do that other thing"
There is no alternative. GOG is run by the same people who released CyberPunk2077 as a bug ridden mess to please upper management, so they even have evidence of already straddling that line right now.
I am not sure why GOG is bad. Then again i am not sure why Cyberpunk is bad - i played it recently for the first time and its pretty fine game.
I played 3 times finished twice.
1.0 was 5/10 (quit after a few days) 1.5 was 7/10 (finished) Phantom Liberty was a 9/10 (finished)
It took 2 full years of additional development for 2077 to be in the amazing state it is in now.
By mrguyorama 2025-11-1021:591 reply I have qualms with supporting "They purposely released it unfinished and broken to get significant revenue and only then fixed it" though.
It's a terrible incentive for the industry and why I still refuse to buy No Man's Sky.
It's essentially the concept of early access but lying about not being early access.
By jeffwask 2025-11-1216:09 I was super salty about it for a few years, but I had already bought it so...
By blub 2025-11-087:33 It’s an amazing game. They released buggy because of management pressure, but fixed it.
GOG is also amazing.
By keyringlight 2025-11-0723:02 Going back further, the thing that enabled them to release their first game "when it's done" and set the ball rolling was being founded by two ex-Microsoft with piles of money, most studios don't have that luxury.
By John23832 2025-11-0719:42 > Valve is basically the only one that didn’t…
Lol Valve is taking a cut of a ridiculous amount of video game sales while releasing no games.
I like some of their work on the linux support side, but they have sold out as much as Apple has if anything.
By haunter 2025-11-0720:17 >Wish more people would resist the payday and keep what’s theirs.
Ah yeah unregulated illegal underage gambling, the great resistance. Gabe could shutdown the whole thing with 1 click, all the sites are using the Steam API, but they don't and you know why.
Valve did a lot of things good but they are also the original source of a lot of bad things from lootboxes to skin gambling to the FOMO battle pass cancer of modern gaming.
Its definitely the ones that sell. There are plenty of small studios run by founders, but often once they sell they start burning consumer trust and goodwill as if those things don't exist and have an actual cost
By Loughla 2025-11-0719:30 Once you have an IP that's massive and you know people will buy regardless of if you're a trash monster or not, there's zero incentive to do the right thing.
Until people stop buying games from these places nothing will change.
By jayd16 2025-11-0720:13 I wouldn't call this selling out, exactly. If the issue is endless crunch, its more a matter of having enough money to support it endlessly and an aging workforce that knows their worth and can push back.
The issue is trying to force (or likely, continue) bad practices when they're clearly not working and then lacking the leadership to realize that a retaliatory layoff is only going to make things worse.
By Aunche 2025-11-0720:21 Smaller studios can maintain a small team of highly passionate people that will happily work 60+ hours a week or achieve similar productivity. As a studio grows, this becomes harder to maintain. You're pressured to either become a slave driver or dilute your product and make more money through derivative content or micro transactions. For example, I heard that EA is actually a relatively chill company. What sometimes works at keeping employees and customers both happy is fostering a cult-like environment, but that can easily lead to exploitation.
By shadowgovt 2025-11-0720:08 Valve never sold out because they became the "out" other companies sell out to. They successfully built a revenue-capturing money-printer in the form of the Steam store and service and now they don't have to make games at all to keep their bottom line strong. Not to imply they shouldn't have; get that gold ring and all.
(But I may also argue the point they never sold out in terms of being a game studio as opposed to a publisher.... "So when's Half Life 3 releasing?")
By worldfoodgood 2025-11-0719:4111 reply Valve makes a significant amount of their money from the gambling they've attached to their games, and profits immensely from the culture of farming loot boxes to gamble on for skins and such.
They also take an absurd cut of developer income and saddle devs with costs that they don't always want. (Selling on Steam? Valve takes 30% and forces you to moderate the forums on your listing page that you cannot opt out of.)
They also have an internal culture that's been fairly regularly criticized as being pretty uncomfortable for women and minorities.
Valve has done some cool stuff, but let's not lionize them too much. They are probably better than an average company, for sure, but it's important to remember that they are also sketchy in some very gross ways as well.
If you were a dev selling a game years ago when physical distribution was the only method, you'd likely end up with a lot less than 70% after both the publisher and retailer take their cut.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/blogs/company-town-blog/sto...
The difference is that the company had to risk manufacturing cartridges, distributing them, etc. If the game didn't sell, you ended up with lots of money lost.
Steam is much much easier for Valve.
I am not saying it has a value, but 30% seems a lot.
Of course, in the end that 30% we end up paying it ourselves.
By throwuxiytayq 2025-11-0721:182 reply It clearly isn’t easy, given that nobody else is doing it their way. Maintaining the company culture might be the toughest challenge of them all. The other game storefronts simply can’t resist muddying the water for the consumer, making the shopping experience hostile for some stupid ass monetization reasons. Shopping on Steam is a breeze, and it always feels like the store is on your side trying to help, instead of trying to get in the way. The developer-side publishing experience is much similar.
I shop on Epic Store and GOG and it is a breeze also.
I never had issues with GOG or Epic (where I buy less to be honest), but that might be me.
But Steam has the network effect. They launched first. Of were the first that successfully did it.
By throwuxiytayq 2025-11-0722:063 reply I’m going to assume that while shopping on Epic you alt-tab to Steam to read reviews and to find out what the game is actually like.
By kwanbix 2025-11-0723:25 No, I just look for video reviews.
Actually, something I always complain about Steam is that the videos of the games are not about the gameplay.
They are most of the time about the trailer, like if it was a movie. I want to see the game playing!
By Yoric 2025-11-0810:09 I certainly do.
By worldfoodgood 2025-11-0722:521 reply I look at neither for reviews. Steam Reviews are often bombed to hell for things like, "Game has woman. Woke." or "Game has racism." or other culture war nonsense. Or the very common, "Creator I follow on Youtube liked/disliked this game, so I left a similar review" or "Creator I dislike liked/disliked this game, so I left the opposite review". Or, the worst of all, "Game uses Unity/Unreal/Godot/Something Else, automatic dislike".
Ultimately, reviews of games tend to be pretty useless because people who play games have very little understanding of a) what makes games fun, and b) the complexity involved in making the games.
I have creators I follow whose tastes are closest to my own, and I watch their content for reviews, then go to the store that makes the best offer.
By throwuxiytayq 2025-11-0723:32 I genuinely strictly disagree; The Steam review section is usually an accurate description of the game’s quality.
The overall score tends to fairly represent the likelihood that I’ll like the game, and when in doubt reading a couple of reviews tends to give a clearer picture. And then, the reviews themselves can be rated, and there’s a “recent reviews” score that protects against review bombings and gives a clearer picture of the game’s current state. Not to say that there aren’t exceptions - there’s a poorly-received game that I’ve poured hundreds of hours into recently - but I literally wouldn’t know how to set up a better system myself.
In contrast, the Epic storefront is fucking laughable.
By dmix 2025-11-0721:25 I use steam for the community as well. Just look at how bad reviews are on Xbox store, they are more like app store reviews... mostly complaining about a version update.
Steam also has a solid update/beta pipeline. Game companies post blog posts about new game updates so you keep up to date with development. They also did an amazing job with SteamOS which feels rock solid.
By kcplate 2025-11-0814:09 > I am not saying it has a value, but 30% seems a lot.
I’d suggest that it’s cheap, at least historically compared to just about any other product that’s been sold. If I had a popular marketplace platform that basically sold my product without much need for human intervention on the transaction, that has real value. Honestly 30% seems like a bargain to me.
In marketing and sales of the product, any human that touches the process ultimately is getting a piece of that transaction. We may not have physical media, but that was actually probably the least of the expense associated with software products back in the day. Consider the army of people needed just to wholesale to retail, coordinate distribution, distribute…
My recollection from those days is that if the dev got 10% royalties of a purchase price they would have been ecstatic. If you offered them 70%? They probably would have thought “what’s the catch?”
By mrguyorama 2025-11-0721:502 reply No, when you asked Nintendo to manufacture you a run of cartridges, you paid for them whether they sold or not. You took that risk. Nintendo took zero risks per game, they took the risk in the physical hardware. Legacy game distribution also never took the risk. Retailers were able to return unsold inventory. There were court cases about this when companies tried to go around Nintendo's cartridge building services to save money. Those companies largely won their court cases, so then we made the DMCA to say "No, get fucked"
The up front risk you take on Steam is $100. It still ends up being a meaningful risk because the numbers show almost nobody makes that back, because developers are so interested in selling their game on steam that the market is outright supersaturated.
>Of course, in the end that 30% we end up paying it ourselves.
I used to buy video games at walmart. Unlike games I bought at walmart, Valve has done things that retroactively add value to games I bought decades ago, like remote play together, adding internet multiplayer to games that never even thought about it, and a controller system that allows pretty much anything you can think of. Games that had zero controller support for a decade just do now, no extra download, and the required configuration is often the single button press to select whatever configuration someone else made. Valve created an entirely new software platform for games that makes it so even games that are utterly broken on modern systems can work again, and it's just built in. If I buy a game today, I'm pretty confident I can play it in 20 years. An actual system for sharing digital games with other accounts, with large caveats.
Refunds, despite Valve only offering them because it's the law in several countries and they were losing court cases, are not a thing for physical game purchases here in the US. Once you take off the shrink wrap, you are fucked.
Steam has built in support for Beta branches and old game versions that the game dev can enable. Steam has built in support for DLC, and market systems for trading and selling digital "goods", not that I really think that's a good thing but some people seem to. Steam has fully built in support for cloud saves.
Steam has a fully integrated "friends" system, and that system is convenient for the end user and includes features like screen sharing and voice chat and gifting people games.
Steam offers fully integrated mod management for at least a large subset of all possible mods for any game.
Like I cannot stress enough how even if video games were 30% more expensive in steam (they aren't, devs distributing through steam are making a larger portion of the profit than they used to), retroactively adding functionality to games I bought a decade ago and producing a system that makes it very likely I can play these same games in 20 years is so worth it. Everything else is just a bonus. Their hardware also shows great value per dollar, so the "They are overcharging" narrative just doesn't track.
Meanwhile, steam avoids problems that plague other digital storefronts. Easy returns (again, forced on them), their launcher mostly respects my resources and doesn't destroy my computer every time there's an update, the way Valve negotiates terms they have a much better setup: Even if a publisher or developer pulls their game, as long as you bought it before then you can always install it and play it. Transformers Devastation was pulled from the store years ago and cannot be purchased by anyone I think anywhere, but I can still download and play it on a new machine because that's the contract Valve got Activision to sign. The game literally doesn't have a store page anymore.
Fuck Valve's child gambling profits and invention of loot boxes, but their distribution business is unambiguously the most respectful of the consumer and developer. Only GOG with their work towards preservation and lack of DRM comes close.
I own 4000 games on steam. That's about 3900 more than I would have ever bought in a world without Steam. Their wishlist system is a direct driver of sales that wouldn't happen otherwise. When the Epic Store launched, it didn't even have a damn shopping cart.
By paulryanrogers 2025-11-0722:351 reply Steam can also take away things from games you "bought", like GTA getting replaced with a lower quality remaster and different sound track.
I think it's a bit disingenuous to blame Steam for a decision Rockstar made. The final decision lies with the publisher as to what game actually ships. If they want to remove their old listings and replace them with a worse offering, that's on them.
By paulryanrogers 2025-11-090:23 GOG can't do this because (nearly all) of the hosted games have stand-alone installers that users can archive themselves. AFAIU that's not possible with Steam.
By kwanbix 2025-11-0813:13 > No, when you asked Nintendo to manufacture you a run of cartridges, you paid for them whether they sold or not. You took that risk.
That was exactly my point. Distributors like EA or Activision will charge you because they took that risk. It wasn't Nintendo or SEGA.
Valve is like Activision, not like Nintendo.
Nintendo charged you because they lost money on the consoles. Valve looses no money.
By Yoric 2025-11-0810:08 As someone who sold a few pieces of (non-gaming) software I (co-)wrote in a box in the 90s, I seem to recall that just the retailer kept ~70%. With the remaining 30%, you had to pay for the physical aspects (the box, the discs, the manual, etc.), the publisher and the developers.
By worldfoodgood 2025-11-0720:361 reply [flagged]
By aquariusDue 2025-11-0720:561 reply Well yeah, but nobody stops you from doing what Notch did with Minecraft way back when you just bought it from the games website.
itch.io and so on are still alternatives, you're not paying just for ease of digital distribution you're also paying for eyeballs.
By dymk 2025-11-0721:13 Your publisher stops you from doing that because they require you to sell it on steam and other storefronts
I'm happier to pay Valve's 30% than Apple's. With Valve you could always switch to Itch or something if you didn't want to pay, but with Apple you have no alternative. Valve gives you access to a huge player base and lots of useful marketing tools and such.
By ThrowawayR2 2025-11-0720:311 reply You are happy now and will probably be for as long as Gabe Newell is in charge of Valve. (He's 63, by the way; not quite elderly but not young either.) After he retires, well, Valve, as the dominant gatekeeper for PC gaming, has a lot of opportunities for cranking up monetization that investors would just love to get their hands on.
By scheeseman486 2025-11-0722:311 reply So it's either choosing to buy from a company that might become public after the owner dies which then succumbs to the rot that you admit is inevitable with public companies. Or choosing the companies that are already public that is already exploitative and only interested in short term gains?
That's actually a very easy choice to make.
By pseudalopex 2025-11-0722:51 Investors did not imply public. Enshittification is not limited to public companies. They did not say it was inevitable. Are GOG exploitative and only interested in short term gains?
By knollimar 2025-11-0721:14 Don't they have a disgusting most favored nations clause that prohibits you from pricing anywhere else lower (e.g. you can't raise price X by 42% and sell on your site for X)?
I think they're being sued over delisting someone for this last I checked, even if their public policy might not interpret their MFN that way
By 0xbadcafebee 2025-11-0720:132 reply > Valve gives you access to a huge player base and lots of useful marketing tools and such.
So does Apple. Despite this, they are both engaged in rent-seeking (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking), which has a harmful effect on everyone but them.
Imagine if roads weren't public, but were built by a single private company. You have a business that moves goods by truck. You can use the private company's roads, but only if you pay 30% of the profit of your goods to the company that owns the roads. It only takes 2% of the profit to maintain the roads; the other 28% is profit (rent) for the road-owning company.
You could choose not to use the roads. But then the only way to deliver the goods is by parachute (which may be possible, but isn't practical). So you use the roads. But this means you have to jack up your prices to make any profit for yourself. Competing is much harder (tighter margins), and your customers are paying more than necessary. Everyone's life is harder, except for the road company.
Except in this example, there is nothing preventing other companies from building new roads. And in fact other companies have attempted to build new roads, competing by lowering the 30% fee to 10%, and even paying trucking companies to start using their roads. Except their roads are so poorly maintained that trucking companies choose to continue using the existing roads despite the higher fee. Also EA made some roads that went directly into the ocean for some reason.
This doesn't match with the definition of rent-seeking at all, as described in your wikipedia link:
> Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth.
To my knowledge, Valve has not manipulated public policy or economic conditions to maintain Steam's dominance. Steam hasn't pushed for legislation to prevent competitors, it hasn't prevented developers from selling their games on other platforms, and it doesn't even prevent you from installing non-Steam games on Valve's own proprietary hardware and operating system.
By roggenilsson 2025-11-0720:441 reply >Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth
Would the PC video game market be bigger or smaller without steam?
I think it would be smaller.
While I hate always connected DRM, and lamented the death of physical media when steam got huge (and also refused to get a steam account for years for that reason), we would have multiple shitty stores if steam didn't exist, I think.
Look at epic and all the other distributors. Their stores are terrible and that's with the inherent competition of going against steam. Imagine if they were the only game in town. . .
By Ekaros 2025-11-088:20 Also looking at history. Download stores run by game stores. Or some startup. Some random extra DRM involved. Shut down in a few years without recourse... Just imagine that repeating every few years. Maybe fine for Linux and Mac users who expect no longevity from their purchases. But as PC user, no not acceptable.
By worldfoodgood 2025-11-0719:597 reply Ok!
Happier is a fine place to be. They are both still too high. Not everything has to be binary -- I can think Valve is offering some utility and also think that Valve is charging too much for that utility.
The fact that Gabe has a billion dollars worth of yachts probably suggests that maybe, just maaaaaybe, that 30% could be lower and Steam could still provide you the same level of marketing support and player base.
By daedrdev 2025-11-0720:15 You can just not sell your game on steam if you dont agree.
The sales you will miss are what steam brings to the table
By Whoppertime 2025-11-0720:121 reply The only reason EpicGameStore was able to rise as a competitor to Steam was because of the Billions Fortnite was earning.
Pretty much. If it weren’t for free games and exclusives there would be no Epic Store to speak of.
By Whoppertime 2025-11-0722:09 It's like being a first party for a Video Game Console. Gabe Newell having a billion in Yachts, Bill Gates might have a billion dollars tied up in Real Estate. It has less to say about the personal greed of Gabe Newell and more to say about the relative size of the market.
By keyringlight 2025-11-0722:57 I think while PC is a good example of epic struggling to compete with someone who took full advantage of being first mover, the apple appstore/google play mobile stores are also where they've put in significant financial/legal effort trying to create a more lucrative openings in that market as well.
By worldfoodgood 2025-11-0720:582 reply I don't understand. You think Steam exists without Half Life and Counterstrike?
By worldfoodgood 2025-11-0721:201 reply Of course now it does, but it was bootstrapped off the back of commercial success. The parent poster was suggesting Epic could only finance a game store off the commercial success of Fortnite. Which seemed to be the exact same path Valve took, so I was curious to explore why the parent felt they were different.
By Ekaros 2025-11-088:14 Difference is that Valve made a platform to support their own products. And run it fiscally responsibly from start. Where as well Epic is dumping. Trying to gain market share by giving out free stuff and possibly undercharging. Now thinking whole license model for their engine might also be harmful for any bigger competing engines...
By mathgeek 2025-11-0811:01 I don’t believe what you are asking, nor do I claim to. Claiming one thing does not automatically exclude all other causes.
That’s weird argument. How about letting man to enjoy the fruits of his work?
By worldfoodgood 2025-11-0721:191 reply That's a weird structuring of the concern. How about letting all developers enjoy the fruits of their work?
By gretch 2025-11-0722:01 they are free to do that - simply don't sell your game on steam
By sumedh 2025-11-0722:29 > The fact that Gabe has a billion dollars worth of yachts probably suggests that maybe
That is not a good argument though. Try building your own distribution and take some of those billions.
By jhatemyjob 2025-11-0720:14 I think Gabe is doing a great job. If he wants to have a billion dollars worth of yachts, that's fine by me.
By klipklop 2025-11-0723:09 Gabe made his initial fortune working at Microsoft. He almost lost it all putting it into Valve/Steam. At one point they were close to not even being able to make payroll. He bet everything on the company.
You are welcome to start your own progressive game market place for PC. Go undercut him and charge 5% fees. You literally just need to dump game files on a CDN right? How hard can it be? /s
I do find it odd that this account is new and the type of posts it leaves. Seems almost like an LLM...
> They are both still too high.
You don't get to decide that. Apple's price is not set by free market competition, Valve's is.
Valve's price is still very strongly predicated on network effects which make it very hard to avoid.
By jsheard 2025-11-0721:34 Indeed, when big publishers like EA and Ubisoft started leaving Steam they introduced a tiered pricing system which progressively reduces the cut to 25% or 20% after tens of millions of dollars in revenue, to lure those AAA juggernauts back. The price is now indirectly based on how much leverage you have over Valve - Ubisoft can get away with not releasing their games on Steam, so they pay 20%, while small-to-medium studios effectively have no choice, so they pay 30%.
It's especially backwards when you consider that those AAA games put far more strain on Steams infrastructure with their >150GB install sizes.
By Shacklz 2025-11-087:55 They absolutely earn it though. Steam just works.
Heck, I've not bought games because they were not on Steam or required another launcher. Ubisoft and Rockstar are so bad that I held off on buying some games I really wanted to play; they're just that awful. EA's Origin was also pretty bad last time I checked.
I guess it's an actually hard problem to make a somewhat decent launcher in big companies with too many PMs playing turfwars, but still, almost everyone except Valve is shitting the bed so hard that as a consumer I'd happily pay quite the markup if it would allow me to avoid other launchers. They're that bad.
By DaSHacka 2025-11-0721:15 Almost like they make the best game distribution platform around for customers, and thus customers flock to it.
By mrguyorama 2025-11-0722:32 What? What network effects?
There are even games you can buy on one service and play multiplayer with people who buy it on steam! I chose to buy MSFS2020 through steam for example because the steam platform is dramatically better than the absurd way the Windows Store does anything, but we fly in the same skies!
There's no lock in or exclusivity. You can literally buy the same exact executable from multiple places, and the only change is the feature the store program supports. Buying a game through the Epic Store for example won't let you use steam input, but you can even then play it on the steam deck with some effort! I think you can even use Proton on executables you don't get through steam!
A dev can even make it so that, if you buy their game on steam, you do not have to have steam running or installed to play it. They have that freedom. They also have the freedom to mark a version of the game such that steam allows you to access that old version forever
If you are a dev who releases a game on steam, you can mint a bulk quantity of steam keys and sell or distribute those outside of steam!. Probably if you abused it, Valve would tighten it up or ban you, but why would you bite the hand that feeds you? It's how, for example, Humble Bundle initially worked.
That's right, you don't even need to buy your game from Valve to use all their features! A substantial portion of my library paid money to Amazon instead, through humble bundle.
People use Steam because it has 20 years of established trustworthiness in an industry otherwise made up entirely of assholes who hate you.
Meanwhile, in the place that Steam does poorly: Old games, GOG has much more of the market.
People actually are willing to pay for trust and care. Steam has repeatedly and regularly improved how their storefront displays information and informs consumers, because their primary problem is discoverability and wading through the mountains of games from people desperate to collect some of the money waterfall that Valve enables.
When you put a game on Steam, the contract ensures that anyone who purchases it cannot lose access without it being Valve's decision. Developers or publishers who do stupid things or pull games five years down the line cannot prevent you from playing a game you buy on steam if it isn't dependent on some server somewhere. None of the other storefronts have ANYTHING like this, mostly because they are run by the exact companies who WANT to be able to prevent you from ever playing an old game again, so they can sell the same thing to you in a new box.
Compare that to Apple's 30%, which similarly has lots of features their platform enables including unlocking significant consumer spending, but they do not give you any alternative. If you want even a single dollar from someone on an iPhone, you HAVE to pay apple 30%, and at least for a while they wanted that even to cover netflix subscriptions for example.
If you as a developer do not want to pay valve 30%, you are free to do like Notch did for Minecraft and distribute it yourself, and you are free to run into the same problem it had where my friend was unable to purchase minecraft for decades because his bank refused to send money to the Scandinavian bank involved, whereas even a literal child without a debit card can use birthday money to buy a steam gift card and purchase your game with no adult involvement. (maybe that's not a good thing for society, but it's great for game dev business).
Valve does not have a moat other than simply consumer trust. Minecraft sold a hundred million copies through a dude's website. There has literally never been a moat in computer game distribution. An entire industry of British children existed writing games and selling them in local stores. A moat has never been possible, because Valve cannot make your computer not run other software.
Apple's price definitely gets affected by competition.
https://9to5mac.com/2025/05/19/apple-may-lower-app-store-com...
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/apple-announces-app-s...
By vkou 2025-11-0721:01 Valve charges 30% for access to their marketplace, and allows you to sell Steam keys for your game at whatever price you want through your own sales channels, without paying Valve a cent.
I'm not sure how any of that is sketchy or gross. As far as marketplaces and platforms go, this is quite reasonable, and there are many successful games which are either not on Steam, or are cross-listed on multiple platforms, or are cross-listed on both Steam and the developer's own distribution channel.
I'll give you lootboxes, they are pretty shitty.
By kotaKat 2025-11-0720:40 > They also take an absurd cut of developer income and saddle devs with costs that they don't always want.
Fun fact: Nintendo's revenue split on WiiWare was 60/40, and required minimum downloads to even get your revenue out of Big N.
> They also have an internal culture that's been fairly regularly criticized as being pretty uncomfortable for women and minorities.
Source?
By tyg13 2025-11-0720:28 No, that's the game engine.
By worldfoodgood 2025-11-0720:403 reply By jimbokun 2025-11-0721:29 Not going to spend an hour watching a video.
The medium link says nothing about women and minorities specifically. It's a critique of flat management structures in general.
By doright 2025-11-0722:42 Another source from 6 years ago: https://youtu.be/41XgkLKYuic
It seems like the flat management structure allowed an ad-hoc hierarchy of cliques to form in the office anyway, pitting entrenched teams of old-timers against new hires, but implicitly. When you think of the lack of support for TF2 over the years, this is illuminating.
It's astounding that Valve/Steam are still as successful as they are in spite of this culture.
The second link is paywalled, but from the various sources I looked at, the diversity problems with Valve seem limited to "Valve refuses to spend company time/effort to support my cause". I have not seen any concrete claims of misbehavior, in direct contrast to some other video game companies.
Additionally, when I actually look into the alleged statistics of claims that "Valve is primarily white and male", the numbers ... don't actually look that bad? We shouldn't expect any company to fit national demographics exactly.
By worldfoodgood 2025-11-0721:262 reply Additional allegations of discrimination: https://discriminationandsexualharassmentlawyers.com/valve-c...
Allegations of unpaid labor: https://web.archive.org/web/20160209211205/https://www.reddi...
Did the plaintiff win that suit? (A quick Google didn't find the outcome.)
As for the second, I'm confused as to why anyone would provide unpaid labor to a large, profitable corporation.
By xinayder 2025-11-0723:57 I was a member of STS and I can say crowdsourced translations were a million times better than the now-paid translation teams Valve hires.
And yes, while it was mostly "unpaid", during my time there (2016-2020), we had a year-end rally every year which the "fastest" teams to complete translations would receive Steam wallet codes for their effort. I received up to $350 the first year of rally.
The next year they gave us Artifact keys...
and then the one Valve employee managing the server left Valve, and STS was slowly being replaced by Crowdin
they essentially killed crowdsourcing starting with Artifact. We (the STS members) had no access to new strings, then came Underlords, the new client... Only TF2 translations are crowdsourced to this day. The rest are done by their external teams.
By josefx 2025-11-0722:34 Going by the short update on this page, no: https://kotaku.com/former-valve-employee-sues-for-3-1-millio...
By xinayder 2025-11-0723:58 Allegations of unpaid labor are for crowdsourced translations and have nothing to do with Valve as a workplace.
This controversy is known and there are a few translators on Steam/Valve that came from the community, but nowadays it is mostly outsourced, and they do a terrible job (they replaced gamers with people who can't even bother to download the game to check the context a string is applied to).
By Bombthecat 2025-11-0721:39 How much money do they make through counter strike loot boxes and selling games etc?
By throw10920 2025-11-0913:37 The only thing absurd is this comment.
> They also take an absurd cut of developer income
30%-20% is by no means "absurd", given the incredible value that Steam provides to developers: content delivery, payment processing, cloud saves, ratings, game tags, social integration, wishlisting and sale notification, search indexing, game discovery, a bunch of incredibly useful APIs including networking and input, Linux compatibility, and many, many other things.
In fact, 30% of revenue is well under what it would cost me to implement all of the features that I want from Steam as a developer, unless I somehow won the jackpot and ended up selling millions of copies (in which case I would end up only paying 20% of revenue anyway).
> and saddle devs with costs that they don't always want. (Selling on Steam? Valve takes 30%
Which you already mentioned, while somehow conveniently omitting the fact that the cut decreases to 20% if your revenue is high enough.
> and forces you to moderate the forums on your listing page that you cannot opt out of
This is the single possibly objectionable thing here.
> They also have an internal culture that's been fairly regularly criticized as being pretty uncomfortable for women and minorities.
~~Allegations~~ mean nothing. Are there successful lawsuits?
> Valve has done some cool stuff, but let's not lionize them too much.
Valve is incomparably better than every other major game distribution platform, which is the comparison that we're making. You are very intentionally making manipulative and dishonest points to try to paint Valve as worst than it is. Which makes sense, because you're a throwaway account.
I appreciate what you've posted here. Valve fanboyism is widespread (I'm guilty of it too) and while they are shoulders above the alternatives, it's a good reminder that no one's perfect and I'll be sure to take a closer look at the company in the future.
By worldfoodgood 2025-11-0722:57 That's all I was saying. Valve is way ahead of most of the rest of everyone else. But they are still shady.
We should be ok with pointing at the shady parts of things we like and going, "It would be better if it were not so shady."
Valve is good in many ways! Valve would be better if it didn't profit from getting kids to gamble on skins!
By Forgeties79 2025-11-0720:25 10% if it’s a Linux copy ;)
By sugarpimpdorsey 2025-11-0720:361 reply > They also have an internal culture that's been fairly regularly criticized as being pretty uncomfortable for women and minorities.
If they don't like the culture, then they should work elsewhere.
I hear Google is hiring.
Nothing worse than joining a company you contributed zero to building from the ground up, then unilaterally deciding the culture needs to change according to your whims, right now.
You might feel uncomfortable working in a black barber shop. Or a cat cafe with pet allergies. You've contributed nothing to their business, they shouldn't have to change for you.
By worldfoodgood 2025-11-0720:412 reply What nonsense. A decision about workplace should be a combination of factors -- workplace culture, products you can work on, compensation, skill fit, alignment with your interests, etc.
You should feel empowered to have a voice in the products of your labor. And you should feel empowered to have a voice in the culture that produces those products.
By sugarpimpdorsey 2025-11-0720:482 reply They're a game company. They're not feeding the poor.
Your employment is "at will".
You are not entitled to any item in your list of demands.
You are, however, free to leave at any time for something more suited to your tastes.
By KittenInABox 2025-11-0721:271 reply I think employees are actually entitled to some of those things, like not being made uncomfortable purely because they are a minority or a female. I would find the opposite position to be an exceptionally strange take: that it is entitled to not want to work at a place that puts you in uncomfortable positions for your sex or your race.
I don't have an opinion on Valve or allegations Valve is doing that. I just find it very strange to say it's entitled for a black to want to be treated as equally as a white.
By sugarpimpdorsey 2025-11-0722:082 reply Being uncomfortable has no equivalence to racism, which you are trying to assert.
Assume a white guy voluntarily takes a job working in a wig shop that only sells black women's hair care products. He's going to be uncomfortable at some point. Does he have a right to not be uncomfortable? Should the company culture change, should they stop selling wigs and ditch their customers until he becomes comfortable?
No. The easiest solution is he should work elsewhere. He took the job knowing exactly what was involved. So no, you are not entitled to not be culturally uncomfortable.
By KittenInABox 2025-11-082:161 reply What kind of "uncomfortable for women and minorities" if not racism or sexism?
Also wait does this mean Valve is white males-oriented culture and that minorities/women should expect to be made uncomfortable by lieu of being hired there? I think that's an even weirder take!
By throw10920 2025-11-0913:26 > What kind of "uncomfortable for women and minorities" if not racism or sexism?
Women generally have different interests than men, and different cultures generally have different interests and expectations than others. This is extremely well documented, as is the fact that people have a harder time being comfortable and fitting in around others who are unlike them or don't share their interests.
> wait does this mean Valve is white males-oriented culture
If Valve mostly hires white males, then either you're expecting the employees to not socialize at all (leading to no culture), which is sociopathic, or yes, that's exactly what you would expect.
You're objecting to reality and truth because it offends you, for some reason? There's literally nothing objectionable with any of the above. Being uncomfortable implies zero moral wrongdoing. You should do some reflection and/or research.
By throw10920 2025-11-0913:23 It's kinda wild how part of the modern zeitgeist is entitlement to be comfortable, and how irrationally people will defend that entitlement, including to the point of being literally racist and sexist.
By worldfoodgood 2025-11-0720:591 reply > You are not entitled to any item in your list of demands.
Can you point to the word entitled in my posts? Or are you putting words in my mouth?
Can you point to any demands? Or are you arguing against something I didn't say?
By thereisnospork 2025-11-0721:341 reply You seem to be misunderstanding how language works? Can you please explain why you think the literal word entitled had to be said by you here?
You listed a bunch of things which should be, an opinion, he says your not entitled to those things, a probable fact relevant to the likelihood of attaining your professed desires, and he then offers a solution if you are unhappy with not having the things you professed 'should' be afforded.
By worldfoodgood 2025-11-0723:061 reply I don't think you understand how discourse works?
I made no demands and I made no assertions about entitlements. That reply to me was a strawman.
I made two statements: 1) I suggested people have multiple criteria for selecting a workplace, not just culture. 2) I suggested people should have the ability to voice their input over their work. (Note, that's a weaker claim than "people should have input over their work". Just that they should feel like they are able to voice their input.)
Neither of those two things are demands nor entitlements, and the latter I would assume would be pretty non-controversial unless you believe that bosses should have absolute and complete control over every facet of a worker's job. (I guess I work in tech, where it's pretty widely accepted that people have autonomy to make some decisions on their own about how and what work is achieved.)
By inquirerGeneral 2025-11-080:28 [dead]
By abtinf 2025-11-082:25 > but it's important to remember that ... as well
Hello LLM.
By righthand 2025-11-0720:46 They definitely get a free pass from people. Valve is plenty evil.
Gabe is the Apple of PC gaming, taking a 30% tax on all transactions. It's not this particular kind of evil, but it is a different kind of evil.
There is nothing forcing developers to release on steam, they can sell directly through a website. It’s not Valve’s fault no other competitor has gotten close to the quality of Steam. Epic Games could have made a dent, but they decided to try to bribe customers instead of making a functioning store.
By SaltyBackendGuy 2025-11-0719:28 This made me laugh. I tried Epic because I got a free game that I was interested in, but could only play it on the Epic Game store. After a week, I was no longer able to login no matter what I tried. So anecdotally, your statement tracks with my experience.
>instead of making a functioning store.
For all intents and purposes it's "functioning" for me. You can search for a game, hit buy, put in your credit card number, then download/play it. I've seen some spurious arguments about how it lacks a cart or reviews, but it's a stretch to claim the lack of them makes them non "functioning". I never bulk buy games, and for reviews I can go to steam or metacritic.
In 2025 I expect an online store to have at least some cataloging option (like Steam's tags) and some user feedback (like Steam reviews or Steam community discussions). Yes, most of Steam's features are half-baked, and Valve doesn't really want to improve them (curators, user tags, guides etc.), but it's baffling that no other store gives at least the same amount of those features to you. Even though they could.
>In 2025 I expect an online store to have at least some cataloging option (like Steam's tags)
To be fair most online storefronts don't have that. Amazon/walmart at best have "categories", which epic also has. Even online content portals like spotify don't have tags, preferring something like "more like this".
> but it's baffling that no other store gives at least the same amount of those features to you. Even though they could.
The better question is why storefronts don't directly compete on price. We see with airlines that consumers are willing to put up with hellish conditions to save a few percent on airfare. Those features are definitely nice, it's just unclear how they can avoid the free-rider problem if there are competing storefronts.
By skotobaza 2025-11-089:22 I think directly reducing the games' prices will not have the same effect as with traveling, since games are digital and non-mandatory goods, so less people will be swayed by reduced price; unless we are talking about 50% less, of course, which is why people use key reselling sites, because there it is noticeable (and people don't care about legality in that case).
That said, Epic is indirectly competing "on price" by paying publishers and developers for their store exclusivity, for free giveaways and even for just using Unreal Engine. But it's the price for developers, not customers. Tim Sweeney said multiple times that he thought supporting developers was more important than customers, and that customers would follow developers. I don't know how whether it worked though.
By keyringlight 2025-11-0723:08 > The better question is why storefronts don't directly compete on price.
The way I see it, it depends how you see who is who's customer. Is the gamer the customer of the store, or are they the customer of the developer/publisher who put out the game, and in turn is the developer/publisher the customer of the store. The store cut is the price to buy their services, and they can shop around to find different offerings at different prices, just as gamers might be able to shop around and decide what (platform features) matters to them with the options available.
Valve allows developers to generate activation keys for their games and sell them on other platforms, where Valve gets a 0% cut. This is how you're able to buy games from places like the Humble Store and activate them on Steam. Their agreement does technically require that you don't sell at a lower price on other platforms, but as far as I know it's never been enforced.
There's a lawsuit ongoing about Valve threatening developers with delisting if they sell non-Steam copies of games (that's NOT Steam keys, but, say, a version on the Epic store) on other stores.
By mjr00 2025-11-0721:36 Can you provide a source for this? This is the first I've heard of anything like this and searching only gives results about the game delisting due to payment processor problems from a few months ago.
edit: after some additional search tweaking this is most likely in reference to Wolfire v. Valve, which is now a class-action suit.[0] The argument seems to be that Valve is engaging in anticompetitive behavior by disallowing developers from reselling Steam keys for their games for lower prices on other platforms, not selling the games themselves on other platforms. So this may or may not be what the parent post was referencing.
[0] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/wolfire-and-dark-catts-antitru...
This is in no way true because there is no requirement to use steam for PC releases.
Apple is a firm technical gatekeeper to their ecosystem. Steam is not at all analogous to that for PCs.
By threetonesun 2025-11-0719:59 Steam isn't even analogous to that on their own Steam Deck, where they absolutely could have been.
By immibis 2025-11-088:21 No requirement to use an apple phone either
By duxup 2025-11-0719:26 PCs are plenty accessible to developers without Steam.
Can a Steam Deck install games without using Steam? If so, big advantage over Google Play and the App Store.
By chrisnight 2025-11-0720:35 Yes, I have plenty of games from, e.g. the Epic Game Store on my steam deck, even in the steam home page, seamlessly.
Gamescope is even fully open-source, so you could remove the steam deck UI, and still run any game with the same performance benefits of not running it inside KDE. Of course also, you could flash a new OS on the device itself if you wanted to entirely remove Valve’s presence.
Steam Deck desktop mode is full blown KDE desktop. The only nuance is that system updates are managed by A/B partition scheme, so root is readonly. Can be made writeable but it's an overlay, so changes get lost on system update and need to be reapplied.
By efreak 2025-11-106:54 It's not an overlay, it just gets mounted separately from root - there's an overlay for /etc and possibly a few other directories, this is to allow user changes to configuration to be kept after upgrades
Changes get wiped because (as you mentioned) it's an a/b partition; when you switch partitions you lose the changes.
You can actually enable an overlay for root changes, but this causes other issues - you get to choose if you want to track packages you've installed, or packages that are in the base system. It's either in the overlay and you keep your changes but not the base system changes, or it's in the base system and you lose track of changes made in your overlay. - updates to the base system of packages that have been uninstalled in the overlay can cause inconsistencies like orphaned files (the new system update includes extra files from this package that haven't been removed by your uninstall. Hopefully some other package doesn't take this as a sign that an optional dependency library is fully installed, the linked subdependencies might be missing) - updates to the base system can be overridden in specific files that were modified in your overlay, causing packages to become non-functional - imagine rebuilding a library 4.5 to add a feature (or updating to v 4.7), then the base system updates that library to 4.8. All other software now expects version 4.8, but instead your overlay is providing 4.5. better hope it's only a minor patch update and not an update providing a feature, or worse, a major breaking update.
By jamie_ca 2025-11-0720:34 It's more fiddly in that you need to swap to desktop mode to do the installs, but you can get it set up so that your "external" games from Epic or Itch or emulators or whatever show up in the standard Steam UI.
By daedrdev 2025-11-0720:20 Yes, which is why nobody attacks them from that angle.
By Phelinofist 2025-11-0720:37 Sure, it is a Linux box after all
By al_borland 2025-11-0719:40 Are you of the opinion that these marketplaces shouldn’t exist, that they should take a smaller percentage, that they should be entirely ad-supported, or something else?
How can user have an optional one-stop-shop that is sustainable for the long-term while not being “evil”.
Uhhh....
11 percent. That is the charge back rate in gaming. The "overall" stat for all transactions is something like 3 percent.
Card processing isnt free. There are fees, and supporting card processing still has more humans in the loop than one needs. Never mind all the technology that comes with running the dam platform.
Is 30 percent a lot. It sure is. Valve isnt a charity, this is how they chose to make money.
Meanwhile, AWS has a 30+ percent margin and I dont see CTO's lining up to run hardware...
By koakuma-chan 2025-11-0721:46 Is AWS not being forced on CTO's? I don't see what AWS does that you can't self-host in an OVH container.
I would assume it's less than 11% for steam due to their incredibly consumer friendly refund policy.
By immibis 2025-11-0816:16 I would think so too - aren't the majority of "gaming" transactions microtransactions in mobile games?
By immibis 2025-11-088:24 There are many ways to get people to pay you 30%. Steam and AWS use different strategies. Also AWS's margin should be way higher than 30% if they're not lighting money on fire
>11 percent. That is the charge back rate in gaming. The "overall" stat for all transactions is something like 3 percent.
1. source?
2. How does that justify a 30% rate, when presumably it's clawed back from developers?
>Card processing isnt free. There are fees, and supporting card processing still has more humans in the loop than one needs. Never mind all the technology that comes with running the dam platform.
Again, nowhere near 30% though
>Meanwhile, AWS has a 30+ percent margin and I dont see CTO's lining up to run hardware...
30% margins on renting hardware is totally different than a 30% tax on transactions, and it's disingenuous to imply they're comparable. At the very least amazon needs to spend the other 70% on running servers and investing in datacenters, whereas valve doesn't. It's studios that are actually doing the development. Valve just is charging 30% on top of that. To take an extreme example, compare the 2-3% fees charged by visa vs the ~15% gross margins that car companies make. Even though that's 5x higher, I doubt many are outraged about car companies' profiteering.
By bossyTeacher 2025-11-0720:191 reply I wonder then how you expect valve to operate profitably. Paying for the maintenance and upgrade of equipment, the developers to build the features and SRE to monitor the systems, designers, marketers, HR and lawyers.
For some reason, people in tech live under the illusion that everything nontangible should be literally free
By gruez 2025-11-0720:28 >For some reason, people in tech live under the illusion that everything nontangible should be literally free
Strawman.
Valve also hosts and maintains the game files for consumers to download, and the bandwidth/hardware needed to serve hundreds of GBs for each game to millions of customers across the globe is not trivial.
By cwillu 2025-11-0719:56 And the minefield of user cloud storage; I'm amazed that they've managed to avoid basically any abuses of the service.
Plenty of companies have tried to compete with gabe, they’re all just terrible at it
No. First mover advantage is just that strong. How are the competitors to whatsapp or facebook doing? At best you have something like tiktok, which might be technically "social" media but is a totally different segment. You don't catch up with old high school buddies on tiktok, for instance.
- Facebook was not first. Before it was friendster and myspace.
- Tiktok was not first. Before it was vine and youtube.
- Google was not first. Before it was yahoo and altavista.
Plenty of todays big companies were not the first in their area.
All of the examples you gave, the challengers had some revolutionary idea/improvement on top. Tiktok had its recommendation algorithm and short videos. Google had pagerank. That's also the reason why whatsapp hasn't been supplanted. There's no room for innovation (or nobody bothered trying). The same is true for digital distribution. Every steam competitor is basically "steam but [publisher]" or in epic's case, "steam but with steam games".
That's what the person who started this comment chain said, though. Every Steam competitor has been "does the same thing as Steam, but worse" so why would anyone switch over?
There is some argument to be made that the cost benefit analysis for your average user doesn't make sense unless the platform is a significant improvement over steam. Having two fragmented systems is a huge inconvenience to users now almost to the point that I will outright refuse to play games that are not on Steam.
And for companies that shoehorn really bad launchers as an extra layer on steam like EA, you are doing the work of the devil himself
Some extremely popular games, like all the Hoyoverse stuff (Genshin/ZZZ/etc) or most of Blizzard's games, have their own launchers and aren't on Steam. So gamers are certainly willing to use non-Steam platforms and launchers if there's a reason.
By vablings 2025-11-1018:38 That didn't stop overwatch 2 from eventually making its way over to Steam. They also have the best integration, once your steam account is linked to your Battle.NET account you don't have to even think about the launcher
That's not the same as "terrible" though? Signal is basically "whatsapp but not facebook", but you wouldn't say it's "terrible". Same with lyft (which came after uber), or ubereats (which came after many food delivery startups).
Right but if there were a better platform than Steam for buying games it'd win out in the marketplace. It's not like anyone is locked into Steam really.
Every online gaming platform other than Steam and GOG sucks. And in fact GOG competes very well with Steam precisely because it offers something Steam doesn't, which is DRM-free games. Steam didn't just beat the Epic Games Store and Origin and Games For Windows Live because it came first, it's just a better platform and the others offer nothing outside of exclusives which they paid for.
Lets not forget Ubisofts uPlay which was absolutely shambolic. Blizzard's / Activision launcher was alright though. It did the job but no where to the likes of Steam which is really feature rich.
By NekkoDroid 2025-11-080:19 > Blizzard's / Activision launcher was alright though.
I'd personally say it was better as a launcher. Launching Steam itself takes relatively long and when its just in the background its just there idling with ~400Mb of RAM (specifically its WebHelper), which aren't a problem with Battle.net since it idles at 170MB or you can just close it since it launches way faster.
By preisschild 2025-11-0720:51 That is bullshit, you are not even locked to using Steam on the Steam Deck. 30% is completely fair for the amount of infrastructure Steam provides to your game.
Definitely not comparable to Apple, which is forcing all iPhone users to use their own app store.
By guywithahat 2025-11-0720:423 reply But union "busting" isn't selling out, if anything it's keeping to their true cause. Companies don't function well with adversarial units within them, and companies don't start out with unions.
Case and point: Valve doesn't have a union.
By ab5tract 2025-11-0721:30 It’s a privately owned company. This leads to an entirely different relationship between employees and the top layer of management.
You have to be very misguided to believe that the c suite in most companies is not engaged in n adversarial relationship with its employees, whether those employees are unionized or not.
By array_key_first 2025-11-0723:51 > Companies don't function well with adversarial units within them
This isn't a given, this is just an opinion, and one you didn't bother trying to argue for.
Many systems do function much better with adversarial units in them. Governments have the adversarial units of checks and balances. Companies have the adversarial forces of the market. A news paper has the adversarial units of editors to their writers.
By NoraCodes 2025-11-0720:50 The phrase is "case in point", and unionized companies often do quite well.
Very brave of them to speak out, but TBH I'm not sure I'd do it if I were worried about anonymity - their written English is flawless, which is very uncommon. Unless they took considerable care to imitate a different writing style, it's probably trivial to identify who wrote it.
In any case, a longtime friend of mine was senior graphics programmer on GTA5, and I was very close to interviewing with Rockstar in Edinburgh at his recommendation. But then I remembered how gamedev burnt me out at age 19 (my first job, at Lionhead), and how I've never been burnt out since, and decided against it. Been in offline rendering since then and never looked back.
By flumpcakes 2025-11-0719:473 reply > their written English is flawless, which is very uncommon. Unless they took considerable care to imitate a different writing style, it's probably trivial to identify who wrote it.
Rockstar North is based in Edinburgh as you say, why wouldn't English be at a high level?
By bartread 2025-11-0720:10 Even discounting this, and despite everyone bleating on about its (very real) flaws, ChatGPT and other LLMs do quite a good job of proofreading and suggesting improvements to written English text[0]. I find it works best if you keep them on quite a tight leash but it's certainly within the compass of their capabilities to take badly written English and turn it into well written English, and even adopting a particular style to do so.
[0] Performance in other languages... well, I suspect it's still going to be quite variable, which is another valid criticism that has been levelled at the more popular mainstream models over the past year or two.
By tialaramex 2025-11-0720:012 reply Right the fact you may not be able to understand some Scottish people because of their accent doesn't mean they're not competent English speakers, it just means the accent is difficult for you to understand, which isn't relevant when writing.
There are a few famous movie scenes where somebody deliberately uses perfectly reasonable English sentences but with such a thick accent that most English users cannot understand it, but once you know what they said you can play that sound back and yeah, that's what they said, you just couldn't understand the accent e.g..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs-rgvkRfwc
Indeed the joke is that people keep repeating what the hard-to-understand bloke said even when it's perfectly obvious what he said, because if you can understand it then you can't tell whether it was hard to understand.
That's not even Scottish, the bloke in that scene is from Somerset, which is the far side of the country but exactly like Scotland most people in Somerset don't talk like that most of the time, but some of them do, some of the time and to them it's normal, that's just how you say words.
By flumpcakes 2025-11-0721:13 It was written English, not spoken. I think that's why I was confused by the statement it might give away who they are...
I know plenty of people from the area this forum post is about and everyone has a high standard of English... even the people with thick local accents and non-native English speaking Europeans.
Does Rockstar hire lots of non-European people to work in Edinburgh or something?
By pixelpoet 2025-11-0720:03 My stepdad is Glaswegian :) Funny that you immediately assume I'm having difficulty understanding the accent (I can do a pretty good Scottish accent, along with several others BTW!), and conflating that with the average level of English writing you see on the internet.
I'm going to get downvoted into a massive smoking hole in the ground for daring to state this opinion, but, as a lifelong enjoyer of the English language: native speakers butcher it the most.
This is true of many skills you grow up learning.
E.g. someone who grew up playing piano might be able to play at an incredibly advanced level, while also being terrible at reading or writing sheet music.
The science around skills acquired during childhood/adolescence vs. learned skills is interesting. For example, I would not be surprised if non-native speakers, on average, have a better handle of the difference between effect/affect, there/their, etc.
By kace91 2025-11-0721:24 >I would not be surprised if non-native speakers, on average, have a better handle of the difference between effect/affect, there/their, etc.
That’s from training system rather than age.
You’ll rarely catch me mixing up there and their because I’ve learned those words reading them, and in written form they’re very distinguishable.
I couldn’t write a poem to save my life though, because I can’t tell which words in English rhyme - the written form of an English word isn’t trustable.
An interesting example is natives with different accents making different mistakes - Latino Spanish speakers for example commonly confuse c and s while writing, as it’s a similar sound.
Spain's dialect however pronounces those letters very distinctly (their famous “lisp”) so to Spaniards it’s obvious which one to use.
English is my 4th language, after German, Afrikaans and Indonesian. People get very angry about it when it's pointed out, and yes, "you just say Bingo" (non-native speakers tend to get idioms and certain turns of phrase wrong), but at least we get singular vs plural, past vs present vs future tense etc right. I'm not sure why but "most" (therein lies the thesis) native speakers struggle so much with that basic stuff, to say nothing of its vs it's, were vs we're vs where, maybe caring about much vs many, past perfect "had had 'had had', had had"...
Shoot the messenger if you want, but the evidence is literally ubiquitous.
By maleldil 2025-11-0823:50 Native speakers also seem to have given up on "less" vs "fewer" entirely.
By pseudalopex 2025-11-0722:551 reply Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.[1]
By hamdingers 2025-11-0721:151 reply In much the same way chess grand masters make moves that don't make sense to the novice.
By pixelpoet 2025-11-0722:43 At a guess: polyglots try to raise the error floor of their languages / not make basic common mistakes, whereas monoglots have no concern with / perception of this all.
By bowmessage 2025-11-0720:042 reply If they were careful, which I'm sure they were, the flawless English is the result of a round of LLM proofreading.
By martin-t 2025-11-0720:10 That's what I am thinking.
I'd use a local LLM too to make sure the original prompt does not leak and can't be connected to the published output.
By pixelpoet 2025-11-0720:06 Yeah I was thinking about that, these days you just run whatever text you want to anonymise through an LLM with some instructions for style.
> I've never been burnt out since
Why can't this style of management just take hold at a game company?
I suspect that hollywood has a pretty similar release cycle, and I've never heard of the dysfunctional management in that industry. (maybe it is normalized? maybe people don't expect a job after a movie is done?)
By mrkpdl 2025-11-0721:29 The crunch culture in the film industry is legendary, particularly in visual effects, where many studios go out of business. There has recently been mass layoffs in the industry and much of the employment is temporary from film to film.
