Isn’t Tim the guy that advocates for pedophelia through AI generation?
And Hitler was a vegetarian, but that tells us literally nothing about whether we should abuse animals in factory farms
Stop, stop, I already have so many reasons to hate him, I don’t need more.
Sure, but I think wanting to fuck children does kind of paint a vivid picture about your general moral character in a way your dietary preferences might not.
Hitler actually did both. Several of his “girlfriends” were 14 when they met.
He also managed to become the guardian of his 14 year old niece at one point.
I feel like this isn’t a reciprocal thing though. “Guy does good thing” /=/ “You shouldn’t question his judgement/his other ideas are also good. ” feels fair
However
“Guy does bad thing” = “You should question his judgement/his other ideas tend to also be bad” also feels fair
There’s an easier way to put this:
“Question everything.”
Gamers hear that Valve has been overcharging them for years, and think Epic is the villain.
Everyone’s collective dick slobbering of Valve and billionaire Gabe is embarassing as fuck.
How has valve been overcharging when devs and publishers set the prices on steam?
Because of Valve taking a 30% cut of revenue of every sale.
Valve doesn’t overcharge me.
They provide an excellent user experience. They have one of the few stores where you can actually get reliable user reviews. Their return policies are generous. I’ve never had any problems with fraud or scams. Their search and recommendation functions are pretty good.
To me, that’s a great deal and they’ve earned every penny of their markup.
Vale literally and probably does and has. 30% of revenue is not a reasonable fee for basically anything. That’s a Mafia markup.
Like lmfao, it takes dozens to hundred of devs like 5-7 years to make a game like Baldur’s Gate, and you think that Valve deserves 30% of all of their sales for managing the same basic storefront they built 20 years ago.
That’s absurd.
“overcharge” is entirely in the eye of the purchaser not the devs. Given the difference in user experience between Steam and any other launcher (sadly even/especially GOG), Steam charges less than I’d be willing to pay.
No, it’s a fucking monopoly 30% extortion fee.
Like honestly, have you ever even seriously contemplated running a business in your life?
What do you think you pay 30% of REVENUE for? Go ahead and list of out expenses for any normal business that chew up 30% of revenue.
We’ll wait to see how comparable they are to the glory that is Steam’s two decade old launcher and blob storage account.
What exactly is the problem with the launcher? It works fine.
How many people did it take to make Baldur’s Gate?
Do you think it took Valve 30% of that number to maintain steam during that time?
That’s a completely irrelevant number.
I have no idea how many devs worked on BG3 and that number has 0 impact on my enjoyment of the game. Given the number of hours I spent playing BG3, the price made it one of the cheapest forms of entertainment available.
And, as a developer, I really don’t care how much companies pay to marketing vendors. Developer pay is generally negotiated when you’re hired. I haven’t worked in B2C but, as I understand it, they usually pay bonuses on sales volume rather than profits.
You seem to be operating under some notion that particular work deserves a particular amount of pay. That’s backwards. People pay for what they get, not for what the seller’s cost of goods.
We know that Larian is doing very well financially. Their devs are happy and well paid.
You seem to be operating under some notion that particular work deserves a particular amount of pay. That’s backwards. People pay for what they get, not for what the seller’s cost of goods.
You seem to be operating with no knowledge of how capitalism is supposed to work. In the long run competition amongst consumer options forces companies to drive prices down to ~ costs + a reasonable margin.
Where that doesn’t happen is in cases of monopolies, monopsonies, oligopolies, and generally in areas where there is a lack of competition.
Like in the case of Valve’s effective PC gaming monopoly and gamer’s dumbass insistence on defending it.
We know that Larian is doing very well financially. Their devs are happy and well paid.
So the fuck what? You think every developer is? You think Larian wouldn’t appreciate 30% of all of their sales money not going straight to Valve for doing jack shit?
I haven’t studied “capitalism” but my Masters degree is in Financial Engineering. Since you seem to care about formal economics, how do you propose solving Akelof’s Market for Lemons?
Valve solves the information asymmetry. That’s a net gain for both buyers and sellers. But you’ve studied economics, so you probably know that already.
So let’s skip to the meat of the question. How do you propose determining the intrinsic value of resolved information asymmetry.
And if their percentage was unreasonably high, their competitors would sell at lower prices. Strangely, they don’t. Which tells us that Tim’s complaints are nothing but bullshit.
They don’t because they are not allowed to. Valve makes game developers sign a contract that if they want their game on Valve, they cannot put it at a lower price on any other store.
Is that the Epic that agreed to six-year $800 million partnership with Google recently?
Are brainwashed G*mers finally going to see Valve for the monopolistic anti-consumer sack of shits they are.
Looks at comments
I guess not.
They probably will when the steam store turns to shit, valve stops supporting Linux and making hardware they want, stops doing family sharing, and pretty much removes everything from the steam client except the store.
You have to admit, valve has a pretty good reason to be liked by consumers.
Lots of holiday deals, fair regional pricing, massive open-source contributions, hanging back from making era-defining, envelope-pushing games to just make the gaming industry on PC better.
Valve only has a good reputation because for generations of G*mers it’s the default option.
They have been indoctrinated into Steam’s system.
It wasn’t the default, it literally led the way.
By striking exclusively deals with publishers for digital distribution and using it for DRM for physical releases.
And now the generation that allowed that say to the next that Steam is the default.
Yes because before steam this never happened. Ever. They are the worst, oh hello Epic, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, didn’t see you there.
What anti-consumer is exactly about Steam? Comparatively to pretty much any other online game store, Steam is a super-pro-consumer-the-only-good-choice store.
Spent a decade saying refunds weren’t possible until the EU told them to wise up. And even then it’s the bare minimum.
Selling broken and abandoned games.
Entering deals with publishers to force physical copies of the game to use Steam. Making the disc worthless.
They have the most generous refund policy of any store and don’t force any DRM on published games. The horror!!
Looking through my favorites list games on Steam, most games have at least one alternative place where they can be bought between GOG, Epic, Itch or the publisher/devs own store. How is that a monopoly? This is without even mentioning other consoles (which you could argue are monopolies on their own).
It’s not about defending valve, it’s about not buying epic’s pro consumer rhetoric. They have a worse product, a history of anti consumer practices, and you shouldn’t let them use you to gain leverage to be able to abuse you more.
Steam is DRM, but so is Epic. And if the two, Steam/valve have contributed meaningfully to open source software and the gaming industry. In a world where capitalism rules, Steam/Valve is hardly the worst option.
I for one look forward to the Steam Deck; my HP Reverb G2 became a paperweight when it lost support overnight after a Windows update, and while it’s not completely open, I expect valve’s headset to be supported for as long as the hardware survives.
Fuck DRM, but if you want to pay for convenience and don’t care about owning your games, Steam is the best option.
Fuck DRM, but if you want to pay for convenience and don’t care about owning your games
That’s the problem. EA, Nintendo, Blizzard, etc all use to be “cool” pro-consumer companies until they suddenly werent. I hate ppl getting so use to convenience until its too late and then when we all own nothing we bought anymore and everyone is standing around going “How did this happen?”
But I want to keep using the convenience until it’s not. Nothing lasts forever.
I was almost forgetting Tim’s whole deal seems to be antagonizing more successful companies than his.
But Epic is super successful. Its Unreal Engine has almost the entire gaming landscape in a stranglehold and is making big gains in film productions.
Fortnite is one of the most successful games on Earth and EGS exclusive recently achieved one million concurrent players.
I mean Epic the storefront, not the umbrella company, as the “company” in my original quote. If we are to be pedantic, there is also Epic the game publisher.
Also Rocket League was bought by EGS and turned exclusive after it already had a following, so the numbers for it seem kinda artificial. Though that and Fortnite would also fall in the publisher branch from what I understand.
The storefront itself is seldom news-worth, except for the freebies and that time they added a shopping cart with a few years of delay. And their freebies strategy seems to not be working out as EGS has yet to see a profit from some recent news.
Then comes Tim, that if I had to guess, is trying to dig any resentments people have with Steam to try to bring its userbase to EGS.
Also Rocket League was bought by EGS and turned exclusive after it already had a following
Doesn’t change that the cited growth happened recently which is years after the takeover.
Ok, but as I tried to say right next, still that sounds like a tangent.
He wants access to massive user bases for fortnite without having to pay anything to the platforms. That’s why he’s so intent on attacking Steam, Apple and Google. Steam would be a massive increase in revenue even with a 30% cut going to steam for epic, but mutual benefit isn’t in vogue at the moment.
Being obviously self-interested doesn’t make him wrong about app store monopolies, whether Apple, Google, or Valve.
I would use other words, but I don’t think you are actually interested in understanding market power, coercion, or network effects. It is a little tricky, but if you’re not just shitposting in bad faith, Lina Khan has a great paper on digital platform monopolies and Matt Stoller has a good podcast on Valvle’s monopoly in particular. Or does Matt Stoller also not understand what a monopoly is, according to you?
Appeal to expertise is not an appeal to authority. Otherwise we could never cite scientists, epidemiologists, or other experts. You might be interested in the fallacy of equivocation.
I’m glad I stopped arguing with morons.
Good luck in life.
RIP Mandy
DRM free, launcher free games or fuck off.
This. Plus offline games. All the online micro transaction bullshit is pathetic.
Reminder: Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has defended child pornography, saying that stopping it is “gatekeeping”.
Please link to a source when you say things like that.
Please come out from under the rock before you argue like that.
Thanks!
although I like a lot of what Valve does (I have a lot of Steam games, valve games, have a steam deck oled, use steamvr, etc) they are a fairly flawed company. sweeney is so great at shooting himself in the foot though that any opinion he has people will by default believe the opposite of (and probably should)
Says the guy that won’t support Linux. Fuck the completely off.
Out of all the digital stores Steam arguably offers by far the most actual functionality and features for its cut. It’s still too high, but it’s possibly the least egregious example vs Apple, Google etc
It’s only too high if they demand exclusivity.
And they don’t.
They are providing PLENTY of value to anyone who is listing their games there.
Would I like to see them do more now for small and independent outfits? I would! but 30% isn’t that much comparatively to the old days of buying physically distributed things in a brick and mortar store.
I remember buying final fantasy 2 (4) on snes and it cost 95$ US this was 1988 or 1989
Which was about 129 CAD (the exchange rate is between usd then and now is about the same conveniently for this tidbit)
Today after years of inflation it would cost about 250-260 USD or 340-355 CAD
I don’t fucking miss those days at all. And while there are multiple factors here in play, this is entirely fair to charge silksong 6 dollars ish per sale on a 20 dollar sale whilst the failing AAA games 30 dollars on a 90 dollar sale. There is a cost involved and it is because of steam, specifically steam, that made digital distribution what it is today. And by that I mean they have set the standard for what is a healthy location to sell your digital goods.
And to give an example of what garbage (yes you Tim Sweeney you giant whiny fecal faced fuck) digital distribution for games would look like if steam didnt actually do a great job, look at books.
Buying books on through amazon you pay more for them then you used to for a physical copy of the book itself.
they charge what they do because it works for everyone steam has more users and does more for them so it costs more to maintain everything which is fine for devs because people actually buy things on steam
the only time anyone ever talks about epic is to shit on them ,talk about the current free game there giving away and … well thats it at least in my experience
All right at the same fucking thing just came up that Apple is going to start charging creators 30% on fees. So does that mean that that argument is the same as valve charging 30%?
Has he (Tim Sweeney) shown up in the Epstein files yet or are we still waiting?
Tim Epic might not have gotten rich enough early enough to be noticed by Epstein
Switch to Gog :)
Has epic games developed anything like Proton? Valve isn’t just a store.
That Whataboutism is Not really relevant to the lawsuit.
Just because they made someone useful to expand their control over the games industry, that you happen to like, doesn’t mean them abusing their monopoly position isn’t still bad.
🤡
>Open source, publicly available tool to aid in Linux adoption
>“some[thing] to expand their control over the games industry”
Found the Sweeney fanboy. Just because Timmy-boy can’t install kernel-level malware on Linux doesn’t mean Gabe Newell is going to use it to conquer the Earth, bud.
Why are you acting like there aren’t steam games with additional drm?
Steam doesn’t require DRM to publish on their platform.
Neither does epic.
No, but they publicly say that they won’t support Linux because they WANT to be able to put kernel level malware. Whereas steam does not. They are not equal in this respect.
Steam also places DRM and states in their EULA that you pay to license the title and not own it. Looks like you’re a Steam fanboy. We shouldn’t be fanboys of anything but simply notice the good and bad thaf companies do because either way they aren’t our friends
Developers place DRM, that’s not s requirement of Steam publishing. Also, 99% of digital stores state you’re only buying a license. That’s a problem with modern society, not Steam.
So Steam is part of the problem. They can simply not have that in their EULA. With that attitude no change will ever happen for the better
I don’t think blaming Steam for society’s ills is a valid response.
That’s not what we’re doing. Not giving steam a pass for doing the same bad shit that you hate other companies for doing isn’t putting society’s ills into steam. It’s just not being hypocritical.
They demonized all actions of Valve, for the sake of defending Epic, even to the point of painting something that aids Linux adoption across the board as if it were a secretive, locked-down part of Steam’s environment. I pointed out the failure in that. Yeah, totally the same. 🙄
That’s not remotely what I did, and I weep for the future if this is the level of reading miscomprehension we have to deal with.
Bronzebeard is being objective and certainly not taking the position you’re generalizing here
Lol, no. That was not objective. And on top of that, I was not taking the position you’re generalizing here.
In short, what happened was, Bronzebeard made a cynical and destructive statement about the existence and development of Proton. I called them out by referencing what they said. Then, you came along, picked out some reasons to be angry with Valve, attributed them to me as though I said them, and acted as though pointing them out made you superior. We are not the same.
It is at this point, will be disengaging, as my conversation with you started with you putting words in my mouth, and I have less than no interest in speaking to you further.
Again with the complete and utter lack of ability to understand that nuance exists, and both can be bad people doing self interested things, and one bad person saying something correct does not mean you agree with everything they stand for just because you agree with the one smart thing.
Like more than one of you are stuck in this moronic binary mindset. It’s pathetic.
They developed the Unreal engine. Not sure how “like Proton” you meant, but it’s used by lots of games and is quite a complex and well-regarded 3D engine.
Epic makes tons of money off licensing Unreal to developers and have since before their store was a thing.
Proton makes direct zero profit, though it does make Steam the best store for anyone on Linux.
Not sure why “direct profit” is important.
Proton is basic infrastructure for Steam Deck (which runs Linux). Valve has sold millions of units that I doubt would have been sold without Proton. There’s just a ton of games that will never be ported to native Linux.
Proton isn’t only Valve’s doing though. It’s heavily built on top of Wine which is a very mature open source project that has seen extensive leadership and contributions by CodeWeavers.
To quote an old comment of mine:
Meanwhile Steam is a feature rich platform with a bunch of features that regular C-suite types would never green light because they don’t have a direct ROI.
Direct profit is the main driving factor for decision making by C-suite types. EGS is a great example of this: it has the very bare bones of what constitutes an online store, you can see products and make purchases. Almost everything else is half assed and tacked on. It’s frankly amazing that a system like Steam exists when they could (and still could) enshittify really badly.
I don’t see how SteamOS is any different from iOS in this regard. Apple spends a ton of resources developing APIs to support all kinds of optional functionality that 3rd party developers can take advantage of. None of it earns any direct profit.
Apple directly makes money off iOS apps and in most of the world you can only buy via their store. On the other hand, I can and do buy games from GoG and run them just fine on my Steam deck and can still benefit from proton.
The only reason I buy most of my games from Steam is they make things even easier than buying from GoG.
Epic doesn’t do a single thing that doesn’t directly result in profits. Features are only added off they can derive income from them. Lawsuits are filed so they can take a larger percentage of profits. Even his twitter posts are mainly about him getting a larger cut, when he isn’t defending AI child porn.
Valve is very old school in their ‘keep improving your offering and it will work out’ way. Usually companies like that get bought out and their name run into the ground. It sadly happens in all industries, from Samsonite luggage to BioWare games and even service companies.
None of what I wrote was intended as a defence of Epic. I don’t like the company at all these days. The last game of theirs that I played was Gears of War. I loved the original Unreal but that was so long ago they might as well be a completely different company.
Anyway I think Valve has some kind of gamer reality distortion field going on. Gamers step up to defend it the way Apple fanboys defended Apple back in the Steve Jobs days. Have people forgotten that Gabe is a billionaire who just got another megayacht?
Proton is a really cool project and Valve has contributed a lot to it but it’s not charity. Valve profits a ton off Proton because it supports game sales on Steam. Linux and SteamDeck users buy a lot more games because of it, games they otherwise couldn’t even run.
The fact that Proton is open source was only partly Valve’s choice. The project is based on Wine which has an LGPL 2.1+ license, which requires Valve to release the source code to their modifications of Wine itself. The extra Proton parts don’t have to be open source, but in practice it creates a lot more work for Valve if they have to maintain their modifications as a fork rather than upstreaming as much as possible.
Sorry if I took it the wrong way. I can see some common ground in Steam vs others and Apple vs others since both focused on the user experience against really poor competition in that area, though Apple has a helluva stronger walled garden.
I do think fanboying a for profit company is silly, but a lot of this is also driven by hate for Epic’s CEO. Epic’s just another business that wants to make money and that alone isn’t the reason people keep backing Steam on these threads. People shit on them because their CEO is an asshole who spends a lot of time bitching about other storefronts while their own still sucks 7 years after release despite the company raking in billions. Guy tries to act like he’s some underdog despite Unreal engine having a greater stranglehold over game development.
It’s very simple. Steam is not at all hostile to the user. It in fact has a bunch of qol features like the workshop or overlay, and don’t get me started on the controller configurator. Steam is good software outside of the store. Epic is literally just the store. It’s not complicated.
I find it very hostile compared to, for example, GOG which lets me download games DRM free and run them without running an app.
Steam is a battery hog and is designed to entice you to keep it running all the time. I hate leaving it running which means I don’t have access to most of my library.
Wine?
I didn’t know epic games developed that.
I think they misspelled “whine”.
That, or they’re saying Proton isn’t Valve’s work alone and that it’s heavily based on WINE. I’m not sure if that’s true, but it’s another way to read that comment.
Proton is a combination of technologies. The main ones are wine and dxvk
I never said epic made wine.
Wine is like 99% of proton. Historically it was mostly sposored by Collabora and I think they were doing it so they clould run some windows programs on mac (my memory is fuzzy, was a long time ago).
Valve came later. There were already out-of-tree patches speciffically for games. The wine team didn’t put those in because they are hacks while wines aim is 100% compatibility with windows.
As those patches grew, stuff like wine-staging emerged that would massage those patches into what the wine project would accept. And even later proton was born (i think from some guys repo, i think valve hired him).
If you want to attribute something to valve, then ACO is a better option. It’s amazing.
I’m just a bit annoyed that nobody praises wine while everybody speaks like it was all valve.
I never said epic made wine
You implied it by responding with “Wine?” to the question “Has epic developed anything similar to proton?” 🤦♂️
Yes yes whatever i dont care
Wine was never developed by Epic, as far as I know. Wikipedia showed nothing about Epic, not a word.
What do you mean? Isn’t Kratos dancing orange justice innovative enough?
How easy it is to rage bait Gaben stans.
“He is one of the good ones, he only has, like, 500 yachts” ~Reddit
“Tim Sweeney is our Robin Hood.” ~Adeptus_Obsoletus
“I’m going to support billionaire #2 because billionaire #1 is worse” ~woelkchen
“I’m going to support billionaire #2 because billionaire #1 is worse” ~woelkchen
Too bad you have neither a clue nor some talent to at least make a funny comment.
Buying games on Steam serves 100% my self interest. Some of that money goes into improving open source Linux technologies which I personally benefit from.
If you cannot make factual comments, at least learn how to be funny instead.
Not everyone worships billionaire. Just because someone says something that’s actually true for once doesn’t mean you agree with everything they say. Why is Lemmy so against the existence of nuance?
Why is Lemmy so against the existence of nuance?
“I don’t recognize a joke when I stare at it.” ~Bronzebeard
Actual people argue like this, as is evident from the other morons in this thread responding with the same exact thought process as your “joke”. If it’s no different from a serious response, then You’re not as funny as you think you are.
Because partisanship. They are on Team Gaben, and can only understand criticism of valve as expressing support for Team Epic. It’s exactly the same as when libs construe any and all criticism of Democrats as support for Trump.
They are business men that want to sell a product. If a game is only on Steam, I buy it there, if it’s only on Epic, I buy it there.
You can look this shit up you know. 3 yachts each retrofitted into marine research vessels and one under construction as another research vessel. Two “support vessels” whatever the fuck that means. The one under construction will house 75 scientists. His marine research company, inkfish, releases all findings publicly and for free.
But nobody knows this shit because he isn’t burning money on a fucking PR firm.
Two yachts for pleasure, which is entirely two yachts too many.
Look, he’s sitting upon an empire largely propped up by the fucking invention of lootboxes, the marketing of them to children and whales, and all the second and third hand markets and gambling sites that have sprung up around this shit. I’m not going to sit around and suck his dick.
But inkfish isn’t even the only “public good” organization he’s founded. And he’s also just directly donated money to existing things as well, such as considerable money into pediatric ICU in New Zealand.
On the scheme of ultra rich, he is one of the better ones.
Edit: Especially if we’re putting Gabe Newell up against Tim “banning Twitter because it allows AI generation of CSAM is gatekeeping” Sweeney
