Treating your customers decently can lead to profits in the long run. What an insight. They should teach that at business schools.
Valve has fundamentally different goals from Microsoft and Sony
Microsoft and Sony want to increase profit a couple percentage for the next quarter
Valve wants to be profitable 10, 20, 30 years into the future
Thing is, they have been doing this for over a decade. Publicly traded companies can’t compete long-term, if there’s a well funded provate competitor
Publicly traded companies can’t compete long-term, if there’s a well funded private competitor
That’s why these companies love the idea of purchasing half the industry or using their resources to operate at a loss and squeeze out private competitors.
If they can’t compete, they can consolidate.
Then trust busting needs to happen
The gaming industry is fine. The “wall street gaming industry” is not.
It’s about time these corporate feral hogs start to feel the pain of the free market but they deserve much worse, bankruptcy. Xbox still exists, no leaders were laid off, their parent company still supports genocide, and this is all a problem.
Do you really want your games to pay for 8-10 figures a year for a hollow executive team’s risk free compensation? One where they have 0 liability, $0 of their own money on the line, literally not even gamers, to be the last word on what games make it into our hands and how they wring our wallets dry?
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Online subscription is a joke at this point
Reminds me of the film Air and the principle “If we do the right thing we’ll make money damn near automatic.”
But what about number go up this quarter?
But I need a return on my investment now! Short term profits! Short term profits! SHORT TERM PROFITS!
Being customer friendly. What a novel idea.
I feel like this is not rocket science here, this is like business 101.
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Make the customer happy
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Enjoy increased sales and revenue
N,o, it is economics and at some point over the last decade or so companies decided that the customer should be subjected to a constant shift of quality until it arrives at a level where it is the worst they are possibly willing to accept. Quality down profits up. Welcome to our new world.
This is the new “the customer is always right” attitude.
profits down but stocks rise with increased investment.
The concept of “firing your customers” even became part of marketing strategy in the last decade. Amazing what kind of nonsense bubbles up out of the muck when markets see less competition.
Right behind us, is what they meant.
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20 years ago, the exact opposite was said about Steam and they didn’t change much. People just got used to it.
No.
As a person who resisted hard 20 years ago, they earned it. I didn’t get used to it, I found value. In cloud saves, in steam sales, in no pushy advertising, and so on.
As a Linux user over 20 years they also did what nobody else really tried. That matters a lot.
My husband remembers buying The Ship in a store, and when he went to install it out said he had to install something called Steam for the multiplayer. He was baffled and annoyed.
Now all the games we have save a few from GOG are steam.
Some games are bought directly from the developer too.
They failed at first attempt with steamOS, but they learned the lesson, and came back swinging with years of preparation.
Yeah the steam “sales” that cost more than used physical games because valve killed them. How generous of Gabe.
The steam cult among PC gamers is fucking absurd. Valve did more damage to PC gaming than any other company on the planet.
If it weren’t for national and local governments repeatedly suing them we wouldn’t even have their meager 2 hour refund policy.
I see 0 reason to buy a used game over pirating it so I don’t really see what was lost. In both cases the devs get nothing, and buying from someone else is a hassle, and having large physical media instead of just some files is also annoying.
If we didn’t have steam we’d instead have the fucking epic games store or EA origin (or whatever they renamed it to). Just because valve isn’t perfect doesn’t mean any publically traded company wouldn’t have been so much worse. And they also did plenty of actual positives with SteamOS, Steam Deck, being the first to push consumer VR with the Vive…
Sure they didn’t change much if you ignored all the improvements they made to the platform.
If they didn’t the other competitors wouldn’t be irrelevant today.
They literally cornered the digital sales market from the very beginning with HL2. It has nothing to do with “improvements to the platform”. By the time other companies had the infrastructure to try to catch up it was far too late. If you wanted to sell a PC game digitally, you had to do it on steam.
So much ridiculous counterfactual revisionist history in this thread.
By the time other companies had the infrastructure to try to catch up
How many years did it take epic to implement a shopping cart for their store? It’s so horrible they’re scrapping the entire store and rebuilding from scratch. Almost a decade and they couldn’t get the basics right.
They haven’t changed much? They have like literally a million more games available on their store now.
The basic principle is the same: a DRM-enabled online store, and more often than not the only source for certain games, a monopoly.
DRM is not required by Steam. Developers choose to add it.
No difference from a customer perspective.
Thats like blaming the hotel because your vacation had bad weather.
More like blaming the traveling platform when all hotels use a crappy feature they provide that no one asked for.
And with those resources they decided to make a huge long term investment in making PC gaming on windows optional, then even the worse experience. Don’t see that loser Tim sweeny doing anything of that value… It’s not exactly a monopoly either… You can install any other available store on your pc, unlike consoles. More competition would be great but steams market share was earned in an environment that wasn’t a walled garden.
Are they? Their returns policy is crap compared to GOG. Not sure how its even legal for them to refuse refunds just because you used a product for over 2 hours.
The key is being consistent and transparent. We got gut punched by the Steam Machine price, but it was an expected and transparent outcome. XBOX and Sony are so volatile that it’s making Steam look like a saint. From laying people off, to constant price increases, to the disc situation. Both these companies need to chill tf out.
Add to this MS buying up all of these game studios to do nothing with them and then kill them because they’re so inept.
Fuck yeah, love you Valve.
Love your contributions to Linux more though.
Gaben-kun will notice you
Maybe he’ll even send me a Steam Frame! Or a yacht! I heard he has a bunch of those.
Ew. That’s a corporation. Stop.
If a corporation does something good, it’s OK to say, “Hey, good job. I love that!”
If a corporation does something legitimately shitty, it’s definitely OK to criticize them mercilessly too (I do it all the time, would recommend).
What’s not OK is trying to tell people what they can or can’t praise/criticize.
The echo chamber on this platform is spacious.
Good lord you people are so gross. It’s actually more than OK for me to tell you that worshiping some greedy billionaire is an insane and unhealthy thing to do.
Go touch grass, Gabe doesn’t give sit about anything except making huge gobs of money. Steam fanboys are a bunch of weirdos.
Holy shit who said anything about worshiping? Unhinged response. Follow your own advice and touch some grass buddy.
I dunno, even if it results in billions or even trillions of humans deaths, I’d rather corpo die than let one thrive. The best form of economics that is not only financially but morally sounds is that of anarchy
You’d rather the entire human race be wiped out than a corporation do well?
You probably should stop having your own opinions, you really suck at them.
One appears to actually like their customers and the other two are actively hostile towards them. I’m sure somebody at Microsoft/Sony are scratching their heads trying to figure out what’s wrong.
Sony’s disc move just screams of a corporate accountant trying to improve the financials and they pick one of the dumbest options to cut costs on. Retailers are obviously upset as digital download cards probably sell like crap compared to physical copies. Outside of gifts I have no idea why anybody would bother.
Also worth mentioning Sony’s CEO and CSO sold 56% and 18% of their shares 2 days after the disc announcement to the tune of millions.
Sony has a 457m lawsuit against them for antitrust issues which they’ve historically defended with…physical disc sales. So I’m happy to see that decision blowing up in their face and I’ll wait for the outcome on that.
That’s the point. It’s not about the disc. It’s about cutting out retailers.
Games sell at the same price or cheaper at the retailer as they do digitally, and the retailer takes a cut. Games sold through PSN or the Xbox store make Sony and Microsoft way more money.
And that’s before we get to used sales.
Tell me again how many discs valve is selling? What happens to your steam account when you die?
I like valve, but don’t fool yourselves, Gabe N does not give a shit about the customers any more than Asha or Hideaki.
Well, that’s just objectively incorrect. Gabe at least recognizes that piracy is a service problem and being consumer friendly is more profitable in the long-term. People like Asha and Hideaki can’t seem to figure that one out no matter how much evidence is given to them.
i love steam but he does raise a good point. vavle explicitly said that steam acc is legally not transferable. there’s no second hand market and your library is legally gone for good when youre gone.
no matter how good valve is right now. the threat of enshittification is real, and will remain so until the discourse of the right of owning digital game is settled.
Oh yeah, Steam is not perfect by a long stretch. It mostly looks good by comparison with it’s competitors who appear to take being gently asked NOT to shit directly down their customers throats as basically a death threat. Was just pointing out that saying Gabe doesn’t give a shit is incorrect, as he does give a shit insofar as giving a shit has actually turned out to be the best long term strategy for Steam’s profits.
That said, Steam actually does have a history of honouring wills to transfer a dead persons library to someone else on death, despite that technically being disallowed by their ToS. So they aren’t bound to do it legally, but they do currently tend to. Which honestly might get them into some legal hot water if they ever try to enforce that term.
Valve is one of the few companies that has historically honored people’s bequests and allowed bequeathing their libraries to others after they die. Unlike say Apple who has outright said that your iTunes purchases disappear into the ether when you die.
Why would I want more plastic crap? I have zero issue with this.
My account is my entertainment, I see no reason to have it after I die. My kids don’t want it, they have their own.
The savings and convenience far outweighs any second hand retail. I am glad I don’t have to burden my kids and family with even more physical crap they would have to toss out.
Valve’s main advantage is they don’t have to make up heinous policies in the quarterly game of “tug off the shareholders”.
It’s all been fucked by AI RAM and SSD (and still GPU) prices. If anyone tries for a next gen £1000 console, they’ll be going the same way as Sega.
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More importantly, the entire software (shops, operating system) and hardware are not a locked down platform and controlled by a single company. And the Steam prices (one word: sales) and rights (refund policy, games never get rewoked) are the best among the industry.
I would like to think people cared about that but I don’t think it’s true.
What exactly do you mean people don’t care about? I mean which part of my reply, as I brought up multiple points. I think people care about all points I brought up.
All of them
How do you come to this conclusion that nobody would care? About game prices and refund policy? I’m baffled.
I look at the choices that people overwhelmingly make.
What choices do you mean? Steam is the defacto standard on PC. Also just because most people use something (like Windows as operating system), does not mean they don’t care or get annoyed by Windows. Just for the analogy. Millions of people care about the points I listed. And you can see it in forums and social media or YouTube video creators too, if you don’t believe me.
You are not very specific about what you think. It is hard to understand about what exactly you talk. What choices, which people?
Mint is cool, but have you tried Bazzite? I just switched a while back and it’s been a pretty solid gaming experience.
Valve is the only only one supporting Linux!. The rest are greedy fucks.
I mean…on one hand, it’s pretty easy for
SteamValve to be doing well. They’re the only major platform that’s released a new console this year (except for Nintendo), they’re the hardware manufacturer with the biggest recent success (except for Nintendo) in the Steam Deck, and they’re the only major platform without any well-publicized egg on their face (except for Nintendo). It also helps that they basically own the entire PC space outright, where the other platforms are fighting amongst themselves (except for Nintendo).But that brings up the Italian-plumber-with-a-powerup-that-turns-him-into-an-elephant in the room. Nintendo has been doing really well, too; and while, since the Wii, they’ve largely abandoned the power gamer space to the three players mentioned in this headline, the Switch 2 was a crazy release.
Obviously, Steam has made a lot of great bets that have paid off, they’ve managed to keep up customer goodwill by limiting anti-competitive behavior and focusing on good product and service over vendor lock-in, and they’re clearly the least anti-consumer player in the space right now. But Nintendo’s strategy of “make the games so compelling and polished that people won’t care about the lock-in” is basically the polar opposite, and it’s working too; so I don’t know how well we can draw conclusions about the industry from this.
Nintendo lost me when they declared they could remotely brick my switch 2 if they didn’t like what I did with it. Their wars against modders who make better versions of their games than Nintendo does is also lame. Most people won’t care but for me at least, I’m not interested in them anymore.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m not even saying I disagree, but I don’t think those move the needle on public sentiment like the Sony and Microsoft stuff. “Well, I don’t pirate Switch games, so my console won’t get bricked.” vs “Hey! But I buy physical copies of games!” and “Hey! They’re laying off a bunch of people, and I can imagine how that would feel.”
Honestly, what Sony is doing to capture platform lock-in isn’t substantially different from what Nintendo did. They were just quieter about it, or maybe they phrased the announcement better, or maybe they just get away with it because it’s not as visceral.
Sony is also not actively getting patents that are so broad the it stifles competition like Nintendo does, and did specifically to try and win the Palworld lawsuit.
No, they’re probably doing it too. They definitely did it in mobile phones, suing Apple for having phone call ringer silencing tech in their phones for instance; I would be surprised if they aren’t doing it in gaming too.
But did Sony get that patent after the fact, or did they already have it and went after Apple for using the tech? Both are stupid, the first is just worse than the other.
Personally, I don’t think the patent should’ve been granted in the first place, so either way I think it’s totally stupid.
Nintendo got a lot of hate and took a big loss with the palworld lawsuit.
I don’t know how big a hit they actually took from that. If you ask the average gamer, I don’t know if they even are aware that it happened. I think the Sony physical media thing and the Microsoft layoffs have broken containment much more than the Palworld thing, though I don’t have any evidence of that.
Post it. You know which meme.
I want an edit of the “he can’t keep getting away with this” to “he can’t keep winning” lol.
Funny to see articles like this after the wave of steam machine bad press. If you visit console based subreddits there are so many bagging in Steam.
Meanwhile you’ll never own a PlayStation disc again after next year. Great contribution to the industry Sony!
The funny thing, is that if you check the people who bought the steam machine, they’re happy with their purchase too
ANOTHER $200 BILLION DOLLARS TO STEAM &VAVLE!
Steam sales.
Are poop now.
The crossplatform gaming is way better than even two years, I play games with friends on xbox or playstation all the time, no special software it all just works. So yeah im definitely never buying a conolae again lol.
Now if only they can bring down the cost of the Steam Deck and Steam Machine
