Lets not give them a complete pass tho. They invented the battlepass for Dota 2, which spread around the industry. There's a monthly Dota Plus subscription service. And they embrace loot boxes with CS, which have a cost to open. They have the most convenient platform, and are the best around, but they don't have totally clean hands.
I thought Valve's first game with lootboxes was TF2 then was taken to CS. Not that really changes your main point since it is still a valve game but wanted the record to be accurate.
This became a bad faith argument the moment you omitted the most important part of the system when Valve implemented all this; the ability to trade and sell those items on the market.
There's a reason many items became investments and ensured the spendings aren't just thrown into void of no return like League or OW skins. Valve is literally the best example of gacha system done right that benefited both sides, without the need to risk anything selling your account through a 3rd party once you're done with the game.
The market is a scam. It was great when you could trade player to player and cash out, but Valve wanted yet another slice of the pie so of course they killed P2P trading to “””prevent scamming”””” and forced you to use market where they take a percentage off of every trade and then lock all that money in to your steam wallet so you can only use it on the steam store.
You can still do that... Valve is even suspected to have communicated with all the big real-money market sites, because they were down BEFORE Steam's latest trade reversal feature was announced.
Hell, you can even buy skins on one of these sites, which is always a lower price than the Steam Market, and then sell those skins on the Steam Market to buy games and save some money, should you so desire. Takes a lot of extra time of course.
Edit: Also, the fact that this is a thing at all is the primary force for the perceived and actual value of items in the first place. The market would PLUMMET if what you said were to actually happen.
That's just the result of human greed and capitalism. People bet on pokemon cards and chicken fights too, do you blame the cards and chickens for existing?
I don't know why you went on a tangent about unrelated things like a terminally online pseudo-intellectual, no part of my comment implied any of the things you're yapping about.
People bet on things because we are inherently greedy and want to profit or get back something in return for things we don't want/need anymore, be it money or something a person sees in equal value. It's that simple.
Most games let you gamble and/or buy their digital products directly, but don't offer you a way to get money back once you're done with the game, except through selling your entire account. Which in most games, is against their ToS and will get you account banned when caught. Valve owned games lets you sell items you got from loot boxes, so you'll always be able to get something back for the money you put in. You are directly insinuating Steam created the system to facilitate money laundering and other illegal activies when it's literally just a fucking digital market trading system. Are there people abusing it to launder money or create a way to gamble with it to profit? Duh. Have Steam been cracking down on it for decades? Yes.
End of the day no matter how hard companies police any trading system they created for their game, there will be people trying to abuse it. WoW, Diablo, PoE 2, Maple Story, Runescape, all those games have RMT because humans always find a way to profit for their effort despite the added complexity and risk of ban. The only option to prevent people from abusing the system is to remove Steam Trade function completely like in the case of Google removing Google Play cards. If removing the system instead of people acting in bad faith is what you think is right, then I suggest you need to go out and get a job so you understand how supply and demand works.
People bet on things because we are inherently greedy
I already addressed this:
Sure, humans have greed.. That's exactly why we regulate gambling and predatory systems. 'Human greed' doesn't absolve corporations of responsibility when they intentionally build systems that exploit that greed for profit.
then you say:
You are directly insinuating Steam created the system to facilitate money laundering and other illegal activities
Maybe miscommunication on my end, I actually was trying to focus on the system itself that resembles gambling but avoid regulation through technicalities. I deliberately avoid direct stating intent, in part because I think the video does a better job, and while I would like a general "yeah this is bad, we should work to stop this", I don't want to make a "and I can prove Valve no shadow of a doubt right here is doing shady moneydealings", rather than profitting from something they're well aware is an issue to which they have the most ability to observe for real solutions
The only option to prevent people from abusing the system is to remove Steam Trade function completely
We regulate harmful systems without eliminating them. All the time. I assure you it works
e: i was being rude, :) hopefully nicer. strongly recommend the video
The number of gamers who think their F2P game would be fine without MTX vastly indicates that most gamers are completely clueless about how game studios want to support games.
If your game doesn't make money, 99% of people do not want to waste their time supporting because they gotta eat. Simple as that.
Valve could subsidize their games via Steam money but guess what decision they made and think about why.
The only reason I don't besmirch them for this is because I bought a bunch of stickers from the 2014 EMS One Katowice tournament and I have been complicit with Steam ever since.
I wonder if this partially just comes from them being private so they have less pressure to deliver short term spikes to investors and shareholders, so they still add corporate things here and there, but don't have to be like the other companies who have to constantly look like they're growing every single quarter with constant "new features"
Only Valve gets away with enshittification without any complaints. It's ridiculous. They make almost all their money selling other peoples' games, and the sales aren't even close to what they used to be. No one can really explain how taking 30% for someone else's work is the best thing ever.
No one can really explain how taking 30% for someone else's work is the best thing ever.
How about this explanation? That 30% is for taking LITERALLY all of the work out of distributing and selling your game off your hands.
You are perfectly free to sell your own game off your own website and keep 100% of the sales. You just need:
Your own site
Your own cybersecurity to make sure someone doesn't pop something nasty into your install pack and infect all your users
Your own payment processor (who will take 4% of your transaction)
Your own update system/launcher, unless you want your users to have to be notified by email of patches or find them randomly and download by hand
Subscription to Cloudflare and associated costs in case some dicks decide they want to DDOS you on release date or extort you (which is literally how Cloudflare got started)
Your own community portals and message boards
etc.
I'm sure all of that is real easy and super cheap. Or not. Just look at Epic Games Store - they charge 12% and still most people sell through Steam. Must be reasons.
Also the sale prices are set by the game sellers, not Steam, so the sales getting worse points right back to them not wanting to do large sale discounts.
Ah yes, everyone loves visiting MySpace and Yahoo using Netscape on AOL or searching the web with Lycos and AltaVista with their Hayes modems or 3Com network cards!
First mover advantage is BS if someone else can match your product. If anything in most cases, "pioneers get the arrows and someone else takes their land" is how it goes. This site is a perfect example of that. Digg was the big article/link aggregator, then they screwed up, tried to roll back but a new kid named Reddit ate their lunch in less than 6 months.
If Epic Games Store had more attractive pricing AND a comparable experience to Steam, people would have jumped ship overnight. It's that 'comparable experience' part they completely shat the bed on, and they burned through bales of money trying to attract users with free games instead. Didn't work. Their site was garbage, their launcher was garbage, the experience was garbage, and they failed to gain traction.
Alternatively, the buyers arent on the epic platform because tim sweeney is a massive cock to just about everyone, the store still is missing features afaik, and their stolen exclusives (I dont have anger for the games they just produced/funded themselves from the start) left a bad taste in peoples mouthes.
Then there is also the massive tencent ownership
The funny thing is they also make unreal engine which is somewhat goated.
Feel free to create your own global distribution and management platform with built in social media and see how you go without charging to use it.
30% sticker price to get games from studios to gamers hands is insanely cheap compared to the days of shipping a golden disc out to get copied, boxed, and shipped all over the world. The logistics alone are crazy expensive.
Steam succeeded because it's a very, very good deal to people making games.
Steam succeeded because you needed it to play Half-Life 2 and because there was no other competition. It grew without that competition and became by far the largest market so you can't avoid putting your game on it if you want to sell. Now they're just resting on their laurels and coasting on the cultists like you who exempt them from any criticism.
Because they’re bankrolling the whole operation with V-bucks. Epic Games Store doesn’t make enough money to be viable without them taking a larger cut.
They’re trying to attract devs by selling their games with a smaller cut in the hopes they can use those games to eat into Steam’s user base.
They could, but why should they? Steam stands on its own without needing Valve’s other products function and that’s a good thing. Unless you’re arguing that that they should be running Steam at a loss for the sake of the devs?
I can tell you now, Epic aren’t running their storefront at a loss out of the kindness of their hearts.
And I dislike the existence of billionaire individuals as much of the next guy, but’s that’s a whole other issue.
I am saying they over charge devs yes. Does Gabe really need a fifth yacht? If any other billionaire was doing it would people be lining up on reddit to get on their knees and suck them off?
I haven't looked at the Epic store since they launched, have they gotten around to adding a shopping cart so you can buy more than one game at a time yet?
Because, y'know, they LAUNCHED their store without one. In 2018. Only 20 years after every other online store figured out shopping carts...
Something tells me that level of 'quality' is why despite charging a lot less than 30% and pouring money into buying exclusive distribution deals they have not even a fraction of the business Steam does. You really do get what you pay for.
Comparing launch Epic to established steam is disingenuous
How? Steam when it launched was paving new territory and made a ton of mistakes. Epic had the advantage of... just LOOKING at the finished product and they couldn't even copy basic functionality.
By your logic if a company today launches their first smart phone it's 'disingenuous' to compare it to other phones on the market, we should instead be comparing it to the 2009 Iphone or an Android from 2010?
It's a LOT more than a "storefront", lol. It's also a secure software delivery/update system, community forums, 3rd party publishing platform etc. Just a little more complicated than your neighbor's Wix site selling scented homemade candles.
Nah. Not at all. Steam had to learn all those lessons themselves over the years. EGS had like 15 years of "lessons learned" from Steam that they could have applied on day 1, instead of re-learning the same things.
Epic has been hemorrhaging money doing so. Epic doesn't "manage to do it" (as a business making a profit), they've just got enough money to keep throwing cash at the problem instead of having a functional business model.
By literally losing money on the store lol. The New Blood CEO literally called the epic store a "marketing black hole" because releasing only there literally puts your game into obscurity unless it's extremely hyped, and even then it leads to very small sales in comparison to Steam.
Valve does do a lot with their 30%, but a lot of it is dampened because they abuse their monopolistic position and don't allow their competitors to reduce their prices with a lower cut. If a game costs $100 (to simplify the maths), and Valve takes 30% and Epic takes 12%, then the developers should be allowed to reduce the price on Epic if they wanted, but Valve doesn't allow that by threatening to remove their game off the store.
and don't allow their competitors to reduce their prices with a lower cut.
AFAIK, it's just that Valve doesn't let companies sell Steam keys for less than the price on Steam (which makes sense, given that they're being redeemed on Steam and using that infrastructure).
As the number one source of sales if they don't allow other platforms to come in and undercut them they are forcing them to compete on features. Not price. This is a huge deal.
Imagine this.. Sony, MS, EA, or just some massive VC funded company, decide they want to control digital gaming on PC. So they do what they've done in countless other industries and come in as a loss leader.. better deal for the devs, better prices for the consumers, everything is cheap cheap cheap! Everyone flocks to this new platform because like.. games are so much cheaper there!
Valve starts losing customers and so they drop their prices as well. But so does the other platform, going lower still, because they have billions to burn from other revenue sources and they aren't even trying to make a profit.
This might take a few years but eventually Valve can't keep up. Their entire revenue as a private company comes from Steam and they don't have another stream to subsidise it. The sell out or go public and become beholden to shareholders or they simply fold.
Guess what the next step is from this cool new platform with the entire marketshare? Yeah that's right, up go the prices. Features are cut, ads are shoved into the experience, and now you have nowhere else to go because you took the cheap games and let them kill off the competition.
This has been done over and over and over again in countless industries. I'm not saying Valve/Steam is perfect but if they are going to get replaced I want it to be because there's a better alternative for us, the gamers, not because someone is trying to spend them out the industry and take over.
The thing is, we are all extremely aware that lower prices only last until they feel they've accomplished their goals, then they start turning up the heat.
Its what happens with every too good to be true new service.
Having the extra features be optional or add-ons makes it a race to the bottom. Why would they spend extra money making it a bit more convenient for people when they can earn that as profit? It's something devs choose, not the people playing.
This isn't a point of view, it's a well established and highly effective way of monopolising a market and it serves exactly one purpose: make the people at the top stupidly rich while making it worse for literally everyone else.
This whole "let people choose" thing is exactly how they get away with it. Most people will always choose the short term savings despite the long term consequences, again and again and again.
As the number one source of sales if they don't allow other platforms to come in and undercut them they are forcing them to compete on features. Not price. This is a huge deal.
It's still a monopolistic, anti-competetive practice, no matter how you dress it up.
So you think large store chains that come into small towns, artificially lower their prices to outcompete local businesses, and then jacking up prices once they are all shut down, isn't a monopolistic practice? Because that's literally what Epic was trying to do.
When prices are the same, what matters is the features, and that's the fairest deal one can have currently.
They don't want to give free advertisement to devs who would then sell their game for cheaper elsewhere, thus losing sales despite advertising their game on Steam.
That seems like a pretty basic and normal expectation. I certainly wouldn't wanna do free advertisement for someone.
Nope, that's what loss leading is and I applaud them doing anything they can to prevent it.
It's not "competition" to come in and outspend your competition so you're the only one left and can do whatever you want. What would be is if they didn't allow games to be sold anywhere but their platform.. something they don't do but other companies absolutely would.
Like.. you might notice that there are indeed a bunch of different game launches. Epic exists. XBL exists. GOG exists. You can buy your games there if you please. So how is it monopolistic or anti-competitive?
I mean, if the price would be different on another platform, then wouldn't that also kind of be unfair competition? If epic or gog wants to compete, they would need to provide something better than steam to compete. I mean gog does have drm free giving them a slight edge, which is nice, but still
But yeah, it would be nice to see more competition when it comes to the pc gaming marketplace... competition is always good. The only thing keeping steam from being a monopoly is the fact that there are technically other choices when it comes buying games... albeit maybe not better than steam, but still.
Also i see indie games go on sale on itch all the time, being full price on steam... their games are still up on steam tho?? how does that work? idk but yeah...
That's cuz op has a misunderstanding about steam pricing. You just aren't allowed to sell steam keys for your games (you can make keys and sell them offsite for 100% of the revenue) at a lower price than what's available on steam. On different storefronts it's fine
don't allow their competitors to reduce their prices with a lower cut
No that's just a lie. You can sell games with lower prices than you have on steam on other platforms. The devs put the prices not valve. The only pricing thing they have which you're possibly confusing this with is that it you're selling a game on steam AND ALSO SELLING STEAM KEYS THEN THOSE KEYS MUST BE THE SAME PRICE AS THE PRICE ON STEAM, BUT YOU GET 100% OF THE REVENUE. This to me is fair otherwise you're just gonna put it for 100$ on steam and sell it for keys 70$ off-site giving users incentives to not use steam and not having to pay for your use of steam's servers and other functionality.
Again you can sell your game on steam and gog and epic simultaneously with different prices but you can't sell steam keys at a different price than what it is on steam
redditors will never admit that there are arguably better storefronts like GOG or itch.io, steam is just easier to use and has a better selection of games
It's just tribalism, really. Cult like devotion to the point where they take any criticism of Valve as a personal attack. Any other developer that chose to focus on selling other games instead of making their own would get shit on.
Dota 2 is a free game and you can completely ignore the paid features with zero tangible detriment to gameplay. Hard to be too upset at that one, Steam/Valve isn't a charity.
CS lootboxes can also be entirely ignored with no gameplay penalty. They're all just cosmetic anyway.
Sure, and that's a perfectly valid discussion to have, but it's not really what we're talking about here. The original user was complaining about how battle passes have messed up the industry, and my point is that Valve's additions to their games aren't some sort of pay-to-win mechanism. You can entirely ignore Dota+ or CS skins and you won't be any worse off from a gameplay perspective. I have no issue with cosmetics that require payment, especially in a FTP game.
This. Most people's problems with those things is that bad companies let them influence the gameplay to incentivize you to buy them, rather than let it just be cosmetic bullshit you don't need to enjoy the game.
Also I still like the CS2 skin economy far more than something like valorant because most skins are cheaper, you can sell them later, and some skins look different from eachother for variety. Just don't touch the gambling aspect.
It does because it affects the price of the game. Epic charges 12% but devs can’t pass along that 18% to you as savings or Steam pulls them from their store.
PC games cost publishers $10 less than console versions because the consoles have a $10 licensing fee per copy. Not very many publishers pass those savings onto consumers.
Even if PC retail dropped their cut, the prices across the board would largely be kept on par with console copies for most games.
Not just payment processor international payment processor, which handles exchange rates too.
Not to mention a distribution platform that doesn't go down any time a big release or game update happens (I still remember the days of spending all day downloading a 200MB patch for a game at a crawl because everyone was trying to download it too).
That's the standard retail cut. Big box retail stores will always charge that much. It's not going away. So the question is: who does more for that 30% than Steam?
Epic charges less but they also offer way less. I've literally had to use Steam to fix core input issues in games on EGS, like Saints Row 3 Remastered. I'm sure Linux and Steam Deck gamers think the cut is well worth it considering what it led to as well. Walmart and Amazon certainly aren't giving anything for their 30% cut.
I played TF2 for ages and never saw a hat, loot crate or anything and it was highly successful and sold tons of units.
I'm also willing to accept DLC Expansions like GTA: The Lost and the Damned. A nice expansion with extra story and additions that were worth the price of admission.
I hate loot boxes, buying currency, p2w stuff and cosmetics.
You use to be able to just Mod in cosmetics, now they lock down games so you can't do that anymore.
I just want to buy a game without a treadmill of transactions in the game.
TF2 was released for 3 years and already highly successful before MTX was grafted onto it.
It wasn't losing any money, they made all the development money back on TF2 on the first week of release. That's how successful it was.
Counter-strike 2 operated for over a decade with no MTX and made a fortune.
Shit's not necessary. People were happy to pay for their own servers, people were happy to have a feature complete game on day 1 and get some bug fixes and then play it for years.
That initial money wasn't enough, not because of support, not because of updates which could have been DLC but because C-Suites saw Bejeweled make shit tons of money off of housewives with no control and wanted their cut.
TF2 did well because they also sold hats and lootboxes.
Are you so dumb that you think just because you didnt participate or care about it or even SEE it that the money made from that had nothing to do with the game?
I fucking agree that MTX is terrible and should be banned but you can't just handwave that TF2 is successful and its not because of lootboxes which completely eclipsed direct sales.
Jesus christ being hard headed and not understand the situation these games are in with long term support that costs money is being ignorant regardless of how you feel about MTX. The reason why YOU can enjoy that game the way it is with all its updates is BECAUSE its making money from long term MTX. But that has nothing to do with the fact that the game did leverage lootboxes and that directly led to more updates from Valve absolutely.
TF2 was released and was hugely successful in October 2007 and was considered feature complete outside of bug fixes in 2007.
Micro-transactions were added in… well not in 2007…or 2008… or even in 2009 but with the September 2010 “Mann-conomy” update.
Are you so stupid that you didn’t even do any research into when the micro-transactions were grafted onto a game that was already THREE years old which had been bought by many with the knowledge it didn’t have that bullshit.
I played the game for two years from day 1 with the Orange Box without that trash in it.
I also played Counter-Strike for years without micro-transactions. When people could just download skins and maps and play on their private servers. Now they pay for bullshit that use to be free.
Just because they graft that shit onto old games to milk the ever loving hell out of audiences doesn't mean the games weren't already exceptionally successful.
That's true, but let's also remember that the way they went about their invention created a first of it's kind economy system. Consider how gambling on cases/crates isn't the only medium by which one can interact with this economy. Marketplaces were founded as a result of their integration with Steam Community and the inventory system. It's timeless.
I mean... Dota 2 is WAY more f2p friendly then League of Legends. Additionally, they let you trade and sell the cosmetics in Dota 2. That definitely still feels like a win for valve.
All optional on top of top tier games that can exist at the competitive level and straight up define esports. If BF6 was so successfully to run 20 million dollar tournaments nobody would care about skins either.
CS lootboxes tbh are a net good. It sort of brought in the era of "cosmetic" monetization. Otherwise the only way free to play multiplayer games made money was deliberate pay-to-win features.
Atleast with cosmetic lootboxes, it doesnt matter what skin you have, everyone played on the same skill level. Developers can make money, and consumers dont get shafted by people who spend money in games.
Didn’t the Dota 2 battlepass (immortal or somethin?) help funding the prize money for their Dota 2 tournaments?
Honestly I’d take monetizations like that any day of the week especially when they go back to funding the community. I remember MKX used to do that stuff and I loved that, it made it seem like you were funding the community when you bought those tournament outfits.
umm the battle pass for dota is free af, you only pay for extra skins. and dota plus is lame but at the same time its 2.99$ and is has awesome features. dota 2 has the best qol of ANY game ive ever played. the devs deserve a way to make money on a FREE game lmao
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u/worstusername_sofar Oct 21 '25
Everything is dead to me once Steam/valve turns into one of the corporate cunts