111–120 of 211 posts
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Also, sometimes you need to first be a bit inefficient and lax in order to later come up with really good ideas and solutions.
IMO it’s really hard to argue with the quality valve software is putting out. I can’t really name a game that isn’t considered a must play that they’ve made
Valve gets a lot of heat for slowing down on first party gaming content, but I think Steam has been a net positive for the gaming community. There are certainly some cases where the accessibility has created "noise" and other trouble, but overall I think this is a good thing. Their 30% cut is absolutely justified once you start looking into everything they do for you as a developer and the market that you have access…
This is probably true on balance, but needs to be tempered with the reality that they also pioneered or popularized many of the worst parts of modern gaming. Always-on DRM, paid DLC, loot boxes and exploitive monetization, esports gambling (indirectly, they were complicit until legal pressure forced them not to be), FOMO monetization, "early access" and launching incomplete games, etc. All exist in their modern forms at least in part due to Valve.
Disclaimer: I'm a valve fanboy who buys all their first party software and hardware. They still put out great products despite the ways they've changed gaming for the worse.
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> I'm not sure why Steam always seems to be exempt from the "perils of digital ownership" arguments Because they have been consistently good citizens for more than 2 decades. They built a reputation. Something other companies are eager to piss away at the first opportunity to sell out or squeeze their customers. It’s not surprising that Valve is successful and trusted with this approach. What is surprising is that it…
Which is a great way to run a business that you care about owning for a long time. But as a consumer you have to think about what happens when leadership changes—PE buys them and starts reputation mining. It takes a while to burn through the good will and for a few years you can make a lot more money off of that than you can continuing thing as usual.
Chet Faliszek, writer for games like Half-Life and the lead writer for Portal/Portal 2 has since confirmed that this handbook was never given to employees. It was created and released as part of advertising them as an employer.
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At least one former employee has confirmed that exactly the problems you are describing were a problem at Valve. https://www.wired.com/2013/07/wireduk-valve-jeri-ellsworth/
>"they pretty much killed off our project.” That project was CastAR — augmented reality glasses which Jeri Ellsworth is now working on as a separate project, having been handed the legal rights to do so by Valve . But how many billion-dollar companies would do that? Just give the rights to the ex-employees? I think most other companies would have not. So, in that sense, Valve is unusual, even if it's not the oranizat…
Valve gets a lot of heat for slowing down on first party gaming content, but I think Steam has been a net positive for the gaming community. There are certainly some cases where the accessibility has created "noise" and other trouble, but overall I think this is a good thing. Their 30% cut is absolutely justified once you start looking into everything they do for you as a developer and the market that you have access…
I'm very scared about the future though. What happens when Gabe is gone? The entire PC Gaming industry is essentially locked in to a single platform. If Steam decided to charge $10/mo people have so much invested into their libraries they would likely do it. What about $20 or $30 per month? I'm not sure why Steam always seems to be exempt from the "perils of digital ownership" arguments
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You really missing my point here. Problem with platforms is that platform-holders are taking bigger cut from a small struggling companies than they take from likes of EA or Ubisoft. If you look at majority of small and mid-size game development studios Valve is basically taking half of their income unless your game earns more than $10,000,000. It's totally okay to like Valve or Steam as gamer. As fellow gamers I tota…
On other hand how much developer time would have been spend on building own distribution, billing and related customer support. Time spend on doing it yourself would not be free either. 30% for this is high, but then there is also the discoverability. Which I think does beat google by long way. So they probably would not have sold as many copies without popular platform.
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On other hand how much developer time would have been spend on building own distribution, billing and related customer support. Time spend on doing it yourself would not be free either. 30% for this is high, but then there is also the discoverability. Which I think does beat google by long way. So they probably would not have sold as many copies without popular platform.
This is exactly what I was trying to point out. Steam's developer services can save a massive amount of time for developers, time which is especially valuable to indie studios. I still feel that the 30% is steep, I'd prefer if Steam took a cut based on how many of their underlying services you used, but its wrongheaded to deny that Steam provides many useful features for developers that can save a lot of time. https:…
And I am absolutely certain that some developers would exploit this in someway.
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I'm very scared about the future though. What happens when Gabe is gone? The entire PC Gaming industry is essentially locked in to a single platform. If Steam decided to charge $10/mo people have so much invested into their libraries they would likely do it. What about $20 or $30 per month? I'm not sure why Steam always seems to be exempt from the "perils of digital ownership" arguments
> I'm not sure why Steam always seems to be exempt from the "perils of digital ownership" arguments Because they have been consistently good citizens for more than 2 decades. They built a reputation. Something other companies are eager to piss away at the first opportunity to sell out or squeeze their customers. It’s not surprising that Valve is successful and trusted with this approach. What is surprising is that it…
#1 on its own isn't so bad, you should indeed treat reputation as a valuable asset, but the way their style of logic invariably jumps to "and therefore you should sell, sell, sell it!" is the source of the problems we see. Especially because they're likely to jump jobs before the consequences occur. We really ought to have a culture of looking askance at executives and decision makers who never spend more than 2 years at a job, rather than celebrating them. If they've never had to live with the effects of their decisions they're really just a fresh-out-of-college person with 10 instances of the same two years of experience.
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As consumer I very much agree with you, but as game developer 30% is abysmal amount of money. Imagine you're indie developer or owner of a small 3-10 people studio that finally released reasonably successful game: 1 - Let's say you invested $100,000 of your own money for vertical slice and managed to find a publisher to give you $200,000 to complete the game. 2 - Ignore that you had some failed games before, but this…
I would note that they do provide quite an immense amount of value to developers. Achievements, transferable inventory system, multi-player (steam networking), among other things. The 30% cut still feels high, especially since most games can't or won't take advantage of every single service Steam provides, but I do think they provide quite a bit of developer value that needs to be factored in.