Court documents show that not only is Valve a fraction the size [only 336 employees in 2021] of companies like EA or Ubisoft, it's smaller than a lot of triple-A developers
1y 11mon ago by lemmy.ca/u/alessandro in pcgaming@lemmy.ca from www.pcgamer.com
Valve is an online store first and foremost. Apples and oranges. The rest are playing catchup, as they've seen gabe get rich and fat, and they want in on that.
they've seen gabe get rich and fat
Hey, that's not true! Gabe's lost a lot of weight in recent times.
Yeah let's keep this civil
I mean calling someone who's fat fat is not really uncivil in my opinion.
Gaben made a deal with the devil, $10,000,000 for every pound lost! That's the real story here!
And he is still fat. No longer morbidly obese, but definitely fat
Me and Gabe be like
Valve is a multi-faceted company with its hands in many pies.
New euphemism for fat.
I think that is one reason why Valve has remained dominant in this space for over 20 years.
If Wolfire kept up Humble Indie Bundle instead of it being sold to IGN and losing any semblance of "indie" I'd take the complaint more seriously
I do really like Lugaru, but still
I am very ashamed that I own a single wolfire title.
I like receiver tho :\
I like Wolfire. Their head (David Rosen) had a really good procedural animation talk at GDC about a decade ago, their games are pretty good, and they started up Humble before it spun off on its own.
Before tarnishing their reputation, I'd suggest reading up on the actual complaints put forth in the lawsuit. I've done so extensively, I think they have very solid grounds to go after Valve (Valve's behaviour is comparable to Amazon's in terms of anticompetitive practices).
I read the complaints and I lost all respect. I will not be spending another cent with that company, nor will I attend any of his future talks.
The entire complaint seems to be centered around the idea that you can't sell the game for different price off platform. That's demonstrably untrue. You can sell the game for a different price of platform as long as they're not using steam keys. Which is hardly an unreasonable onus, It's not hard to generate your own keys.
The other complaint seems to be about the 30% but again you can just distribute yourself. Of course then you have to fund all your own server architecture, that's what the 30% pays for.
If that is demonstrably true, I'd like to see the demonstration. In fact, the case alleges the policy extends to non-key sales (see pts 204, 205, 207, 208).
This has already been raised in the European courts and has basically been beaten down that that there is no basis. Feel free to link to an actual court decision that proves otherwise.
It's an ongoing case, so I don't know what you expect of me here. My reply was to correct your misunderstanding about the focus of the case, which is not limited to the use of steam keys as you originally claimed.
I am not aware of the european case you reference, would you mind pointing me to where I can learn more?
Why are you getting the idea that it extends to non-steam keys as well? That's never been the case because that's not actually true. They have no control over what price you sell a product at off the platform as long as it's not using steam keys. So if they're claiming that it also includes steam keys then that's not true.
Again, I am really wanting to see this EU case you reference, because this is an issue I have been reading up on. Do you have a reference for me?
The points linked above allege Valve will delist a game from their platform if the price is lower off-platform (even for non-key sales), correct?
This is called a "Platform Most Favored Nation" clause, and it has anti-competitive effects. It is controlling the price off-platform using the leverage of market share to coerce behaviors out of publishers.
Please also link me this European court case, I have been unable to locate it myself.
Don't need that many employees to run a store, programmers/IT and marketing and you're good to go. Employees wouldn't count contractors either so they probably have a lot more "employees" than that.
Not only that, Valve has done a TON of work to outsource as much of the process of running Steam off to the users and developers. Self-publishing, a minimum of manual moderation, automated greenlight processes, automated ratings, database tags, controller configs...
Their entire business model is to make money with as little effort as possible. I've been saying for ages that people vastly underestimate how ruthlessly profitable their business is. We didn't have the numbers, but we roughly knew this is what was going on.
Gabe owns six yachts, people should always keep that in mind when praising him, he's not the friend of the average Joe, he just realized there's profit to be made by not pissing people off, but he's still making enough profit from us to be a billionaire while the majority of people live paycheck to paycheck.
he just realized there's profit to be made by not pissing people off
It's weird that I'm nostalgic for the good old days when the ultra rich understood that
he just realized there's profit to be made by not pissing people off
I'm okay with this. Same deal with Costco's founders and CEOs. It'd be nice if billionaires didn't exist, but they do, and most of them made their profits while pissing everyone off.
I'll praise the ones that at least try to do some "good" for people. Even if their "good" is "Let's make obscene amounts of money by charging affordable prices and being the 'good guy' in the industry".
I'm not okay with this because it incentivizes companies and influencers to work together to lower people's standards.
People are proud to accept garbage these days.
I ask genuinely -- what alternative do we have?
I mean, in this case, yarrrr. but in other cases, i think, probably also yarrrr. but like, physically.
Steam won our over piracy, as did Netflix when it first came around. And even Uber -- people stopped downloading cars for years when Uber was in its heyday!
That's the thing though, they're still overcharging you and 70$+ isn't affordable prices for a game, you've just been brainwashed into thinking that your money is worth less than it is because a big chunk of it goes to enrich a few people.
Valve gets 30% for distributing it, the publisher takes another 10 to 20%, add other fees and 50% of what you're spending goes to the people doing the actual work, that means that Valve gets 60% of what the dev gets for doing barely anything.
overcharging you and 70$+ isn't affordable prices for a game
The last game I bought on Steam was less than $2 after tax.
Most games I buy on Steam are less than $20. The most expensive game I've ever bought on Steam was probably about $40. And I've done that maybe once.
And even at $70, games are cheaper now than they've ever been, adjusting for inflation. They're also generally much more expensive to produce.
Just because they're cheaper doesn't mean you don't get overcharged at the end of the day, what kind of mentality is that?
I provided numerous reasons why I don't think I've been overcharged.
I really don't understand what your point is. What do you mean by "overcharged"?
If companies make billions in profit and company owners can spend in a day more than you'll make in a lifetime without batting an eye that's because people like you, me and the vast majority of humans on this planet are paying more than things are truly worth.
We might not feel like we're paying too much for stuff, but in reality if the person at the top has billions to their name, that money comes from somewhere, we've just been convinced by them that that's the cost of things and that's it.
The truth is the 2$ game that you bought would have been 1$ in a system where there isn't a billionaire at the top. The 40$ game that you bought would have been 20$ and AAA games would cost 35$. The only reason they cost double their value is because a bunch of guys rake in millions or billions a year, they artificially increase the price everything needs to be sold for in order for companies to be able to pay them.
Your see the exact same thing happening at the grocery store, people doing the work can't afford the food they're selling while the big boss owns a house on every continent, take them out of the equation and suddenly everything can be sold for much cheaper because that's billions the company doesn't need to generate every year.
So your definition of overcharged is that we're being charged more than what we would in an alternate reality where billionaires don't exist?
I don't think imagination is a good basis of comparison. If one store is selling the game for $20 and another is selling it for $70 with nothing different between the two, then the one selling it for $70 is overcharging.
But if one real store is selling it for $70, and an imaginary store is selling it for $20, then I don't think the real store is overcharging...lol
My definition of overcharged is that if someone is able to become a multimillionaire or billionaire from people purchasing their product then their product is sold for more than it's worth, it's not real world vs imaginary world, it's rich people taking advantage of us in the real world and let me guarantee you one thing buddy, you're not rich enough to be in a position where you should defend that system, you should be angry that you have less than you deserve in your pockets while Gabe and his friends are partying on a yacht.
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/12304832
Funny how your first phrase makes it seem like you understand exactly what I'm talking about but because we're talking about a product that you like critical thinking goes out the window.
Why did you go through my comment history? Lol
Because it's always the same story with you guys, you're angry at rich people but when people point out why they exist and that a guy you love is rich then it's ok. Gotta point out the hypocrisy so maybe you'll wake up.
Lmao..."you guys"?
Great reason to go hunting through my comments to find something that you seem to have not quite understood, given its context.
Look, the imaginary world without billionaires that you're talking about sounds great, but we live in the real world. In the real world, we aren't going to change anything for the better by whining about rich people on the internet, nor would pirating change anything for the better.
But anyways, since you went through my comments, you might've seen my complaints about Steam, and the fact that I prefer to buy most of my games on GOG because they're DRM-free. But considering that you've said a $2 game is overpriced, I don't imagine that you're looking for alternatives...lol
Yeah, you guys, you think you're the only person ready to suck Gabe's dick on here? Get in line buddy, then don't forget to complain that rich people bad when you're done swallowing.
GOG is owned by a publicly traded company with a $16B market cap
As I said, you're just a hypocrite because it just happens to be for a product you like so you become unable to think about it critically.
Lol...Where do you buy your games from, then? Or your groceries for that matter?
Holy shit Gabe Newell is a billionaire (it's just at the second paragraph). This does change my view of him and steam. So uncool.
The dude's the CEO of the most successful online gaming platform ever. Yeah, he's gonna be a billionaire.
He was a billionaire before valve even existed.
Where did you hear that?
He early joined Microsoft and probably had some stock but he left by 1996 so I hardly doubt that made him a real billionaire, (especially given the time).
Afaik his family was always very well off
He was a paperboy and a telegram messenger before college.
That doesn't scream old money boy.
Aren't you confusing him with someone else?
That doesn’t mean he wasn’t well off? Just as an example, there’s a media figure here in Brazil that has a whole ass “self made man” myth is surrounding him because at some point he was selling baubles in the street or other odd jobs like that. And it is indeed true that he did that, but his family owned a media network. So.
Oh and I don’t mean “well off” in the more “old money” sense, you are right, I’m not saying that he was billionaire level due to his family. I see why it seemed like that from what you were replying to, my bad. But I’m fairly sure I’ve read about his parent for the first time this year, and they had fairly comfortable money, to the point that him opening valve wasn’t a real financial risk for instance.
I’ll try to look for where I’ve read that, I didn’t pick it up immediately because I don’t have a pc at hand till Monday and searching for stuff on the phone is annoying. It’s not impossible that I’m mixing up with someone else, but in fairly sure that isn’t the case.
You can't just move the burden of proof on to others like this. You're just spreading misinformation, even if you ultimately turn out to be right what you're doing is unproductive and harmful.
I didn’t propose to move the burden of proof? I’m just explaining I won’t be able to verify easily before Monday.
I’m unsure if I miscommunicated something, but the I’m confused by the harshness of the reply?
The issue is that you're constantly asserting your statement without evidence and when people are offering up contradictory ideas you're asking them to present evidence ("that doesn't mean that he's NOT from a billionaire family") which is shifting the burden of proof. You made the claim, you have to prove it, if people put out other explanations also without evidence then they still don't have the burden of proof since the point under debate is the claim that you made. As the person making the claim you must prove it.
It's not meant to be harsh since this is a very low stakes conversation and topic but what you're doing willingly or unwillingly is exactly how misinformation spreads on more important topics, so it's important that you be aware and correct your behavior.
I don’t understand what you mean by “constantly”, I made one comment here and clarified when questioned. I prepended my comment with “as far as I know” is exactly because I wasn’t 100% sure on it.
And I only made the “that doesn’t mean he wasn’t” because they literally aren’t exclusionary conditions, and I cited an example as to why I’m stating that that wouldn’t necessarily contradicts my previous comment.
And I also immediately clarified that I messed up and didn’t mean “well off” in the billionaire sense. The example I had in mind wasn’t also a billionaire, but he was still from a rich family.
I’ve made a bunch of conditionals for my statement exactly so that is didn’t pass as you are describing, and made it clear that while I was remembering something about Gaben but I could be misremembering the specifics, which is why I mentioned I would be looking it up later, I just don’t want to do an extensive search on a cellphone. Which is just making me more confused as to your replies to me. Did you read my second comment fully? Are you mixing me up with someone else?
"a bunch of conditionals for my statements" are also known as weasel words. You don't seem interested in learning from this experience.
How were they weasel words? Honestly.
I’ve commented about something I remember but that I wasn’t completely sure on. I’ve further clarified what I meant and specified the context of it. I also mentioned I intend to verify the information but just can’t right now (I’ll be able to later today, as I mentioned).
I still don’t get why are you so aggro on me. Are you sure you are not mixing me with someone else? I still don’t get what you meant by “constantly”.
What did you expect? He owns Valve who has the place to buy video games on PC with Steam.
But you'll be hard pressed to find a store front that is not owned by a billionaire or some publicly traded corporation.
cough GoG cough
I'm agreeing with you, btw.
GoG
or some publicly traded corporation
CD Projekt is a publicly traded corporation.
Exactly. Even with their DRM-free practices and such and how people want to advertise so much for them here on Lemmy, they're still a publicly traded multibillion dollar company.
I expected him to be cool, I guess
people should always keep that in mind when praising him
Why?? Good for him, stop being so envious. It's thanks to Valve I started to buy games instead of pirate them anyway. Good prices and good practices.
A billionaire from a game industry is not the same as a billionaire from a real state company or a bank. Games are not a basic need.
Nah, a billionaire is a billionaire. There's still people being exploited to get that much money. I don't completely disagree, though - at least Gaben didn't make Valve completely evil and yeah, it's better than fucking up the property market for generations of people.
Billionaires shouldn't exist. The government should regulate all these stores and force a max of 5%. They are clearly colluding and aren't competing in good faith.
This is having a negative impact on the industry, a lot of indie studios would have an easier time surviving if they weren't bled dry by what essentially is a soft monopoly.
Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony and Steam are all guilty yet you would never defend any of the other ones. Steam spends a lot of money convincing everyone Gaben is just a really cool dude and not your average billionaire.
Steam spends a lot of money convincing everyone Gaben is just a really cool dude and not your average billionaire.
Or maybe he is a really cool dude...
Gaben owns 6 yatchs and spends between 70 million and 100 million a year maintaining them. He's in the same club as Bezos and the rest.
Stop it with the fucking yatchs already, seriously. Just look at the differences between Vale and the other companys you mention. If you can't see any, you are just a troll.
You can't say anything bad about Valve other than "they make a lot of money". It gets boring.
Billionaires exist because you and me and people like us overpay for stuff, they accumulate wealth by making sure we don't. Gabe's wealth comes from the surplus generated by Valve, if they make that much surplus then they could lower their cut by a fucking lot and so could publishers that also enrich multimillionaire and billionaires.
There are no good rich people.
A lot of indie companies would still be around if it wasn't for this clear cut collusion
Can you tell me how has Valve affected the indie industry? In a bad way of course. Most of my steam games are indie games that I assure you I have bought thanks to Steam's shop visibility, review system, forums, easy refunds, cloud saves, and basically all the ease of use it gives. They don't buy small teams and extinguish or terminate them, they don't artificially inflate prices, they don't install rootkits in your computer...
How is the indie games industry worse because of Valve?
I was once in the room while a Valve rep told a bunch of indie developers to spend their own money localizing for the Chinese market or risk not getting store placement.
Valve is a big, big corpo and their MO is to make other people work for them. The software they do make is amazing, but please stop thinking they're a charity, they are extremely not.
The margins are thin in indie development, especially when they are usually offered at bargain prices. I'm going with the assumption that if these platforms had been regulated years ago, a good number of indie developers that shut their doors would have survived with the extra profit. It doesn't seem like a wild assumption to make.
Steam doesn't tell developers or publishers how much their games are worth. They only provide the tools for them to sell them, and they obliviously get a cut from it, but only if you sell. They don't ask for money in advance, they don't ask for any contract.
Valve is a store front, not a publisher. I'm thinking you are just confused about how they operate.
Valve is a store front in a soft monopoly with other similar products and colluding with them. We would have more and better quality games if the government did its job and regulated the store front industry.
Instead of regulating, you seem to imply these costs should be passed down to us instead and the indie industry should just bring up it's prices, just so Gaben can keep his six yatchs. I think you are confused about your own self interests.
you seem to imply these costs should be passed down to us instead
They already are.
I really think you know nothing about what you talk or how the market works, this isn't even fun.
It sounds like they are parroting what that guy from Epic Games is saying. While that guy also is a millionaire.
You think people have it against Gabe only? All multimillionaires billionaires exist at your expense buddy, none of them deserve to exist and their companies don't deserve the profit that made them billionaires.
Instead of circle jerking it with your buddy, why don't you point out where I'm wrong.
To be clear these are my own opinions and I clearly think Epic Games should be regulated just like the other platforms.
I think all the platforms are predatory and taking advantage (except gog), it's you guys that are giving steam a free pass when they are at best slightly better than the others but still shit. I guess bootlicking is easy if steams marketing team convinces you it's in your best interest.
I haven't seen any evidence backing up your claims. And I'm not here to convince you of anything. You're the one making these bold claims. How about backing them up then?
"I haven't seen any evidence"
Buddy, where do you think billionaires' money comes from?
Less than 400 employees with 8500 million in revenue while the indie industry struggles backs it up.
The fact that Gaben is a multi billionaire backs it up.
No one becomes a billionaire through hard work, it's stolen wealth. Ask yourself if your arguments can be just as easily applied to bezos, it might give you some perspective on how insane it is to be defending Gaben and his ridiculously fat stack of cash.
I said this was costing us indie studios
You said they chose what price they put up their game for, implying the best solution is us paying more instead of steam getting less
I explained I think this is a bad decision for us the consumers and the industry as a whole and more importantly, that steam can absolutely afford to pay less.
Reread the whole conversation and try to understand what I'm saying if you want me to continue conversing with you. You seem to be ignoring my points and we are going in circles.
Implying I don't know what a store front is or how it works is condescending.
It's disgusting to see people defending the people that are exploiting them and preventing them from being more than average.
Could use a few to develop a new linux distribution for entirely new markets and use cases, design and manufacture innovative cutting edge consumer hardware, and count to three.
I'm surprised they didn't really try to make Steam OS a real distro for regular PCs, but at the same time there's no real money to be made...
They tried that first, it didn't go so well.
Yeah, that's why I said they didn't really tried, the distro isn't even distributed anymore
Honestly it would probably be worth it as a flagship project to keep their staff engineers excited about something.
I know they earn piles and piles of money, but some people just quit when they've got enough cash, so you need an other sort of carrot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distributionhttps://distrowatch.com/search.php?status=All
There are almost one thousand distros. What's one more?
Exactly, proton was much more usefull
Well that explains why they don't make many games.
I heard half life alyx was pretty good. I also heard rumors that they're making a TF2 successor. Also, didn't a new counter-strike just come out?
Still, you have a point. Artifact was a disgusting trend-chasing cashgrab. They still haven't commented on Half life 3, which is despicable behavior imo.
Don't let any TF2 fan hear you call Deadlock its successor. It appears to be Overwatch gameplay mixed with Moba style map layouts.
But yeah HL:A was indeed amazing.
Tbh, deadlock is more moba than overwatch imo.
Alyx is great. Probably the closest thing to Half Life 3 we're going to get. But even that's four years old now.
I think we'll get more half life but not for 5 - 10 years
Half life alyx was great, and they are not making a TF2 successor. They are making an overwatch looking game, TF2 will be better still and I will continue to play TF2. (I'm the TF2 fan the comment below said not to let hear you, the only video game I play is TF2)
And one of their employes doesn't have depth perception.
I'm sure that he can perceive the depth that the shaft of that valve is drilling into his eye socket when you turn it. That should count for something.
You legitimately don't need a lot of employees to make a good product or have a successful company.
I genuinely believe a lot of the bloat in modern companies comes from hiring people just to hire them, not because they add any significant value to either the company or customers.
I want to add to this that valve is also very clearly an anomaly in todays business environment. They are not striving for infinite growth but methodical, strategic steady growth.
That in my mind is how you grow a company, maximising returns for investors is a good idea only for the investors, it deviates the company from the objective which is providing a solution to a problem. It seems to me that Valve despite all the criticism it receives for the high fee on the sales of copies is doing a terrific job on resolving that problem. Also, extending the market to Linux is not a monetary driven decision at all, but it buys back the fidelity of many customers which gain a new feature without any repercussion on stock prices, which are non existent since there aren’t any investors to obey to. The hope is that Gabe will continue on this way and when the problem of passing the baton will present itself, it will be dealt with the future of the company and the industry at large in mind.
They're not beholden to investors, so the company can be exactly as big as Gabe thinks he can manage.
Prior to the mass layoffs of late, companies like Google and Facebook used to hire developers just so their competition could not.
The easiest way for a manager to justify a raise is to increase the headcount under them.
This is like comparing Spotify and Taylor Swift.
I personally think that if valve with their size managed to make a game and maintain their infrastructure for other publishers to use, wtf did the competitor do this whole time?
wtf did the competitor do this whole time?
It's definitely a cultural problem. Companies like EA are completely clueless on the needs or desires of the average gamer. Their idea is to shape those needs and desires how they see fit. It's why they spend so much on advertising and viral marketing rather than making good products.
They hire 1/10th of Valves developer count and spend the entire budget on marketing.
It appears to work really well seeing how people keep buying Ubitrash and EA games no matter how bad the previous one was.
They spend billions to shoot themselves in the foot
Pay their management big bucks aka distribute money to the least qualified.
Well, they don't develop any games. You don't require a lot of people to run a store.
"Their" last game, Counter Strike Global Offensive, is 12 years old, and was developed by a contractor: Hidden Path Entertainment. Ony then Valve took over to maintain it. And anyone familiar with the current situation around the game (CS2) knows how much "development" is going on there.
ok well this is just wrong.
HLA definitely counts, and CS2 IS the current game their working on and making.
HLA was also an extrememly popular game.
My bad with HLA. But CS2 is a glorified engine update, and is not even near the features CSGO had. In the current state the game is a mess.
Sure they are working on it. All 3 three developers. Which is exactly my point. It's impossible to compare valve to the other studios, because valve isn't making games anymore. They just happen to own some eternal IPs where the fan base (myself included) eats their shit.
its a little more than an engine update, and you're forgetting that a game engine is like 80% of the game itself.
It also updates maps, and map textures, which is another like 10% of the game, and the rest would be like, actual gameplay, which CS players don't want to change, and uh, i believe they did.
Even when they did make games (portal) for example, they literally contracted a uni team that was making it for a project.
In another comment you say yourself they are not developing games. What's your point? You're just arguing to argue now.
CS 2 and is missing key features, a working anticheat included, and is not getting any meaningful content for months (the missing features included).
In another comment you say yourself they are not developing games.
i did?
If you're talking about the comparison to a triple A game studio, yeah they aren't a triple A game studio, they aren't making a fucking witcher 4. This is like comparing fucking BMW to some guy who creates gokarts in his spare time because he thinks it's fun.
Regardless, an indie game team of about 3 people can produce a really good game. I'm surprised you seem to think valve isn't more than a small indie team managing more than one game.
Every game ever is missing a working anticheat. They're probably not doing large content releases because their busy working on the fucking anticheat :)
Half Life Alyx is far more recent
The most polished VR game ever made.
All the little attention to details, the design, the narrative, everything shows how much they care about that game.
a non game development company not developing games is smaller than a game development company that develops games?
That's weird...
I'm pretty sure my local pub has fewer employees than EA as well I'm just not really sure what the relevance of it is.
funny, huh?
Alligatoah looking ahh
Who on Earth is surprised by that. Primarily a store front most of their staff will be customer support.
If they’re looking at employee count then I worry that Valve isn’t going to lose this