Valve is not your friend

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Xavderion wrote:

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Deadpeng wrote:

Remember the bad days when computer games cost like 30-70 to get an original boxed copy off the shelf while we were only primary school/ middle school kids with no financial capability? Valve settled the score for us once and for all.

You could easily spend ~100 bucks in today's money on one N64 game back then. Shit was expensive.

But its sill the same today with console games.

Steam makes PC games so cheap that I cant be mad at it.

Author of article is being overly melodramatic: there is more to life than Good Guys and greedy villains. Valve is in between, a concept alien to this writer. Furthermore, they don't understand economics at all.

I do think Valve is shorting content creators, but ultimately Valve (and Uber, etc) will suffer as a result, as good user-created content and mods (and drivers, etc) simply won't be there, so the middleman megacorporation won't make money off of them. It would behoove Valve to value quality creators more. But it is emphatically not your duty to be some kind of social justice consumer; it is the creators' fight, not yours, and if you're getting quality cheap then Valve is doing right by you. 30% of zero is zero.

Oh, and when viable competition inevitably rises against Steam, its slogan will be: at least 51% to content creators. Anticorporatist hipsters will pour in, and with the right backroom dealings major publishers (ironically, megacorporations themselves) will drop Steam for the new guys, providing them with much-needed exclusive titles.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Oh, and when viable competition inevitably rises against Steam, its slogan will be: at least 51% to content creators. Anticorporatist hipsters will pour in, and with the right backroom dealings major publishers (ironically, megacorporations themselves) will drop Steam for the new guys, providing them with much-needed exclusive titles.

So the question I always ask when these arguments come up is, "how much do you believe a distributer should make" the lore is that steam makes 30% of a sale, but what a lot of people will claim is standard retail markup, is 100% so retail stores would make 50% of a product. That said, frankly I think steam has been great for AAA companies in terms of piracy, a better distribution platform has reduced the urge to steal games. The important question then becomes, "is steam good for smaller developers" I think that is also a resounding yes, it creates an environment where smaller games can get much more visibility than they otherwise would due to steam greenlight, and just putting games on the front page. So people will complain about DRM, but I remember when I would go to a store and buy a game and have to input a string of digits, and that's just DRM. In the digital age, DRM is annoying and depending on how it's implemented can be outright awful, but at the end of the day, if done right, DRM is just trying to stop people from stealing stuff that's super easy to steal otherwise, and steam is a pretty non invasive DRM, you only need to be connected to install the game, otherwise you can just play the game in offline mode (whether or not the game then wants you to be connected to steam is another thing and not a steam issue.)

As for hating on other DRM, a lot of it is just implemented more invasively than steam is, Origin is getting there but still has a rather high RAM usage, UPlay is awful, and has a memory leak, and also makes you use it when you bought the game on other platforms. Blizzard's is fine i guess. So it mostly comes down to steam is just less invasive, other platforms will probably get there.

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sarahaustin wrote:

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Deadpeng wrote:

Remember the bad days when computer games cost like 30-70 to get an original boxed copy off the shelf while we were only primary school/ middle school kids with no financial capability? Valve settled the score for us once and for all.

Yeah, by dumping DRM on them. Now you can buy boxed copies with steam DRM.

I still prefer to have physical copies. Movies, music, video games, books. All consumable media, really.

Maybe I'm old fashioned, or maybe I just hate change (I probably hate change), but I would sooner buy physical goods than their digital counterparts that require a password that can be forgotten, an account that can be lost, or a machine that can be stolen or fall into disrepair (yes, I realize my physical copies of media can be stolen or damaged as well: I'm keenly aware of the hypocrisy).

But I have noticed the trend towards physical goods to now include DRM bullshit where, if I buy a physical product, I am still forced to register it online with enough red tape to sink the Titanic (keep in mind I'm not used to going through any of it - I'm sure some of you consider it extremely light by now).

I like to think that if I purchased the product, and have a valid CD-Key not in use, all I need to do is register that and then I'm good to go. No; I have to create some stupid Steam or Origin account or some other nonsense.

TL;DR: If I go through the trouble to purchase a physical copy, I don't want to be bogged down by all of the digital bullshit. It's starting to make me feel like I might as well be a digital consumer, and end my physical spree. Physical products are just creating an extra step for me to go through now.

[/rant]

I don't care about good guys and dank memes. I'm not entirely sure what dank even means...

What I care about as a consumer is;

• The prices I have to pay.
• The convenience available.
• Quality of customer service.
• Reliability (server uptime, etc.)

Valve certainly aren't perfect here. But they're basically close enough in all honesty. They have the games, the sales, the auto-update functionality - the fact of the matter is they provide a good service. The reason people like Valve is that they like what Steam does.

If you ask me, the real reason Steam is successful is the same reason Google is - they married what's good for the consumer with what's good for them. Steam has all the games, keeps them updated for you, and reduces the number of account names and passwords you need to remember. This is what a monopoly looks like, and monopolies are bad for consumers - but the convenience of every game being in one place is undeniable. Customers want them to be a monopoly.

The author rambles about internet memes, DRM, Valve attempting to win a court case, people being excited about getting good deals, people not playing every game they own, legalese being overly cautious, and plenty more besides. Some of these things could have been a good topic to write an article on; others are nontroversies, but all piled on top of each other they come across as nothing more than a hit piece. Someone on the internet doesn't like Valve, so went digging for dirt and are throwing mud at the wall to see what sticks. Typical blog-level tripe from Polygon.

"Hate [person/company] because of this! And that! And the other thing!"

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sarahaustin wrote:

Well, steam proponents hate on all other DRM but love steam. Hypocrisy at its finest.

That's a claim from the article that simply isn't true.

EA I have a vendetta against at this stage in the game. GOG I have not done business with (yet) and Steam is OK as far as I am concerned.

No one is perfect, guys.

AbdulAlhazred wrote:

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TL;DR: If I go through the trouble to purchase a physical copy, I don't want to be bogged down by all of the digital bullshit. It's starting to make me feel like I might as well be a digital consumer, and end my physical spree. Physical products are just creating an extra step for me to go through now.

Yes. That is why I stopped. Like you I would have preferred physical copies, even having to wait for a special delivery package was an excitement now lost, but when they make it a pain? No thanks.