WaltSee wrote on Oct 29, 2024, 13:09:
I've never understood why some people seem to be personally affronted when the distributorship of hardware and/or software visibly expands, providing them with more options instead of fewer purchasing options.

No one is complaining about more options.
In fact, they're usually complaining about less options, re: EGS exclusives.

WaltSee wrote on Oct 29, 2024, 13:09:
ANYWAY...:)...I've always been a fan of Steam from the beginning, even when I scoffed at Newell's idea that online distribution would soon eclipse brick & mortar distribution! We were both right on that one! He, in that online has eclipsed b&m (no dirty puns here...;)), and me in that it's taken over 20 years to get to this point.

That happened in 2012... 12 years ago.
Steam launched in 2003... so it took 9 years.

HoSpanky wrote on Oct 29, 2024, 11:05:
As soon as ANY other platform has even half the functionality and features that Steam has, then this doofus' argument might hold water. Show me one other storefront with:
Something akin to Workshop.
Native VR support (not just asking someone else's storefront to do it for them).

Yep. Really great features when you are publishing games without modding/workshop support or non-VR games. Who doesn't like parting with 30% for useless shit?

Come on, dude. What is this? Communism? One for all, all for one? Fuck that shit.

Steam's 30% fee is preposterous. It might have been justified 20 years ago when Steam were the only guys and when the number of customers and transactions was small so you had to earn a lot of dinero to cover the costs.

But that was 20 years ago. Steam has become a behemoth with billions of transactions per year. The costs have actually decreased because broadband has become so much more affordable (gigs like Steam just buy Exabyte packs for el cheapo). Servers are much cheaper thanks to virtualization. You no longer need a 19" rack for each individual server.
The gross costs have naturally risen because of the sheer scale of the operation nowadays but the costs per transaction or per customer must be a tiny fraction of what they once were back in the early 2000s.

All of this was also a topic on a recent episode of German DevPlay and those guys (the head honchos of KingArt and Black Forest Games) also agreed unanimously that Steam's 30% cut is completely insane in 2024.
The 30% was actually established by Apple before Steam ages ago and everyone else just copied that model and barely anyone ever adjusted it for transaction growth, customer growth and sinking costs per transaction.

That is why Steam is as obscenely rich as they are and why they are regarded as possibly THE most profitable company (per employee) in the world. Steam would very easily still be extremely profitable if they would charge the same 12% as EGS. They just choose not to because Gabe likes money (a.k.a he's one greedy bastage).

P.S.: Well, OK, technically Steam has caved under Epic's pressure and they have that layered revenue system now where $10+ million revenue you "only" need to part with 25% and $50+ million revenue it is "only" 20% and there are rumors that the big guys like EA, Ubi etc. came back to Steam because of even better conditions so that's a start, I guess. Even Valve/Gabe are probably embarrassed at their own highway robbery cut by now. Rightfully so.

I've never understood why some people seem to be personally affronted when the distributorship of hardware and/or software visibly expands, providing them with more options instead of fewer purchasing options. It's weird for me to consider that some people seem threatened, personally, by the "hideous" specter of increased competition....;) Go figure. I used to think that was bunk and that people were making up stories about how increased options and choice simply turned off some people! "Nobody is that dense," I remember thinking. I also didn't believe that stories from Russia about Russians being daunted by "too many choices" were true. I still find such stories as likely false, but I'm not as adamant about that as I used to be!...;) They do it in the US as well...!

I well remember a few years ago (I can't be the only one) when Steamworks refused to let you move games to custom drives and directories, at all (!), and when some drives for game installations were green while others were off-limits red, for reasons that Valve seemed less than enthusiastic *cough* about sharing. Not that long ago, actually, if you wanted to change a game's install location inside Steamworks, you had to uninstall the game and then reinstall it (and download it again) to the preferred drive. Valve was happy with that for years, as I recall from firsthand experience. One of my favorite examples of Valve's confused thinking on some issues was how they botched the software organization of their iconic HL2 games just to save a bit of space on their servers with The Orange Box...;)

I wrote Valve support with a ticket and asked support to tell me why I couldn't simply install each of the HL2 games separately to the directories of my choice instead of the mixed up install abomination that is the Orange Box and later refinements on Steam's servers. I'll never forget the answer: Valve said that, paraphrased, "You can't always move your game from one drive to another and there's no real way to do that sometimes." Yes, that was the sum total of Valve support's answer when I asked them how to install all of my HL2 games individually to the locations of my choice...;)

I still think it's a weird attempt not to tell us why they did that with the Orange box. In my case, I had purchased and owned licensed copies of all the HL2 games that were installable to separate locations from day 1--then, years later, I bought the Orange Box in a spasm of weakness because I already owned the games included and lumped together in the Orange Box! In trying to reward Valve for its splendid HL2 games and (still) unfinished stories/episodes, with my Orange Box purchase, they chopped my HL2 installations to hell and back with Orange Box...!...;) Oh, Joy...;) Icing on the cake--my separate installations for each HL2 game don't work that way anymore and have been usurped by the abominable Orange Box HL2 organization last time I checked.

OK, I've already written far more than I intended but sometimes can't avoid when making a specific point--and that's on me!...;) Probably this kind of stuff matters only to me and a few other weirdos like me, but much of the very positive changes that have come to Steamworks in recent years are the direct result of pressure from developers and publishers (and consumers!) on Valve to provide convenience features to bring Steam in line with competitor stores like Epic, Gog, and others. That's a fact which I've directly witnessed.

Publishers and Devs have demanded these convenience features from Valve for Valve's 30% commissions, when these other stores often provide much better deals to the game devs and their publishers for a lot less than 30%. It's only been in the last couple of years that Valve has made it possible for me to include all of my many terabytes of storage for games and utilities in full, so that now I can move any Steam game to any of my 18 separate game partitions (D:/ through W:/ in unbroken linear organization) spanning some ~11 TBs between a total of 4 physical drives, as I finally replaced my aging collection of old HDDs at home with ~4 TBs of NVMe drives and an 8 TB HDD and a 4 TB HDD. "Fascinating, Captain--rare examples of Old Earth computer tech!"

ANYWAY...:)...I've always been a fan of Steam from the beginning, even when I scoffed at Newell's idea that online distribution would soon eclipse brick & mortar distribution! We were both right on that one! He, in that online has eclipsed b&m (no dirty puns here...;)), and me in that it's taken over 20 years to get to this point. I like Steam just fine, but much of the convenience for Steam customers today has come about because of competitive pressure from other companies. One company can never do it all. It reminds me of how people thought that Intel could easily supply the entire world all by its lonesome. Not true then, not true today...;) Not true for Steam and Valve, either, imo.

Rhett wrote on Oct 29, 2024, 09:57:
Also, despite RDR 1 being my most favorite game of all time, I wouldn't go near that re-release. Apparently (at least, from some light googling) it was outsourced, even. I don't trust R* not to cut corners anymore. It's all about money first, game second with them now.

The outsourcing is great news. It is physically impossible to do a shittier job with porting to PC than PC-hating Rockstar so them keeping their incompetent stubby fingers out of it is confidence inspiring. Not $50 kind of inspiring but once it drops to $15, I'll probably give it a whirl.

> How about the ability to see games that were previously installed onto a drive and re-integrating them
To be fair, Ubi does that, too
but Epic doesn't and Origin doesn't.

As soon as ANY other platform has even half the functionality and features that Steam has, then this doofus' argument might hold water. Show me one other storefront with:
Something akin to Workshop.
Native VR support (not just asking someone else's storefront to do it for them).

How about the ability to see games that were previously installed onto a drive and re-integrating them? Only Battle.net does that one, ALL the other stores want to re-download massive games rather than just do a check of the data that's already there.

That's ignoring a warehouse of other features I personally never use. Does any other storefront have a store interface mode that's designed to work with a controller (BigScreen mode)? Where's your fucking forums at, Epic?

Steam may charge the (actually standard) 30% instead of Epic's varying rates, but Epic's app and storefront is a fucking JOKE.

Well Gavrilović is free to publish his titles ob EGS for only 12%, but I am guessing he will be bitching about that reduced customer base too.

If you don't want to pay “full price” for RDR don't. Not really seeing the problem here.

Yep, Steam isn't just sitting around collecting money (well, most of the time). The features make it 100x better than Epic or any of the individual publisher launchers.

Also, despite RDR 1 being my most favorite game of all time, I wouldn't go near that re-release. Apparently (at least, from some light googling) it was outsourced, even. I don't trust R* not to cut corners anymore. It's all about money first, game second with them now.

Ironically Steam is where I bought Disco Elysium.

I greatly prefer Steam as a platform. Not only is my account close to 20 years old and thus have a ton of games on it, it has so many awesome features, overlay, friends list, chat, controllers, achievements, cloud saves, great sales, etc. It's just the best platform and I know if I get a Steam Deck someday that'll work nice with it.

FFS! I want all of my games on Steam - I already have Steam, Ubi, Epic, Battlenet and Origin launchers and I rarely, if every, remember to play something that isn't on Steam.

I've been on Steam since 24th September 2003 and, as a customer, Steam is where it's at for me.

Put your game on the other platforms, too, just don't try and get me off Steam or ask me to support you in crushing Steam (looking at you, Epic Fail Store).

The shear ignorance of so many developers as to the reality of all retail channels taking a 30% cut always is amazing. That is how retail exists. They pay the game pubisher a set price to stock their items, and they add 30% to the retail price. One of the most ignorant spews I have seen this year. The real reason for the job losses, is AI and general improvements to existing job productivity, fewer knowledge workers can do the same work. It has zero to do with how retail works.

Can't they just say they already got money from Epic to be an epic exclusive? I mean other devs just say so openly instead of trying to be coy about it.

May the words of Rafal Ganowicz ring forever.