Gonna piggy back off this to drop a decent summary from coffeezilla about valve’s lootbox gambling problem that Valve has consistently dodged responsibility on. It’s really not new news but folks should be informed/reminded of it nonetheless.
I don’t watch CoffeeZilla in any large amount, but this pretty well sums up the situation in this instance.
Honestly it’s both valve’s fault and the legal system. They’ve tried to combat these sites with the trade window system back in like 2015 2016 I think, but their csgo and tf2 trading economy struggles when you have to wait a week to do stuff.
It also doesn’t help when a lot of these sites dodge being legally a casino, and get away with it.
I mean, we can point at the legal system, but as you said, casinos just find new loopholes to circumvent the law. Ultimately, Valve is the group with the power to remove any gambling-adjacent mechanics from their games, but they have been pretty flaccid regarding changes because they know that they will lose money from it.
Crackdowns won’t stop the gambling on CS, legislation and enforcement won’t change it, but making items non-tradeable, or damaging item value or appeal through any method, can stop the gambling - but at the cost of CS’s financial success and overall appeal.
Is there a proposal to do this that doesn’t gut other legitimate parts of their trading system?
No, there we’ll always a way to work around the trading system to have gambling. The current proposal I have seen is doing an ID check before trades but that would hamper legitimate trades since people don’t want to hand out their ID info like that.
That’s the same thing I was thinking, and I’m really not a fan of the idea.
Considering the outcry from mobile auth back then, I dont think valve will ever try for id check.
I agree in general with the other commenter that it’d be difficult to do it systemically, which is why it should fall back to moderation.
Valve could say they don’t like gambling, make that a policy, and then say anyone caught doing so will lose their inventories or somesuch, then hire a team of people to sift through Steam marketplace trade data and identify gambling transactions for punishment. It would cost Valve money and wouldn’t end gambling by a long shot, but the goal would be to try to destroy the highest profile accounts who cause new players to want to gamble.
Basically instead of sitting on their hands and getting money, they could … try a little.
casinos just find new loopholes to circumvent the law
They don’t “find new loopholes”, they explicitly lobby/capture the agencies/courts that write/interpret the rules and carve out loopholes.
Might as well say “You can’t keep money in a bank, the robbers will just find a way in” while a guy in a ski-mask walks through the front door, hands the teller a $20, and is lead directly into the vault with a complementary tot bag.
Crackdowns won’t stop the gambling on CS, legislation and enforcement won’t change it, but making items non-tradeable, or damaging item value or appeal through any method, can stop the gambling
There are countries that impose limits on what tech companies are allowed to advertise, distribute, and collect revenues on outside of the US. These countries don’t have President-elects who are joined at the hip with their country’s most wealth individuals, bending over backwards to make the billionaires happy.
Lootboxes, such as the CounterStrikes lootboxes, have simply been banned in Belgium.
It’s not too hard to do it legally.
No, they wanted to pretend like they were combating them while leaving them fully intact. There are pretty easy ways to combat it, but that also requires they destroy the market they profit so much off of. The trade window system (purposefully) did very little to stop this. It’s was purely PR, which some gullible people actually believed.
People like Valve, so they believe everything they do is honest and good. It isn’t. It may be better than some other companies, but it doesn’t make them good. You can recognize when they do the right thing while also recognizing when they’re doing the wrong things, and enabling gambling (underage or not) is bad. At a minimum, they control CS esports, so they could ban advertising from gambling sites if they don’t want to block it in its entirety.
I’m not bothering watching all the video. I hope they highlight that a good part of the company clients are kids.
Yeah, underage gambling is a big part of the topic.
I hope the employees are compensated well compared to the profit.
As of 2021, Valve employees made roughly $430K-4.5M, depending on role. Not bad, considering the average salary in WA is around $58k.
Source:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/13/24197477/valve-employs-few-hundred-people-payroll-redacted
Holy shit
Interesting. Looks like the hardware people are the lowest paid department.
Which maybe makes sense. They’ve started to see some success there, but not the way Steam or TF2 has.
They’re around a big city, so the Seattle metro is about $76k. Still great for the valve employees though.
As a private company with no board and stockholders to appease, with a guy in charge who is at least a descent person, employees at valve are doing fantastic. Way higher than “industry standards”.
with a guy in charge who is at least a descent person
There is no decent billionaire
You could sort of say that, just because he is a billionaire, but unlike virtually any others, his money has come from no oppression or cheap labor or dirty money, or slavery or anything else. He hasn’t drove up pricing, his employees are paid better than anywhere else, he doesn’t exploit a need, and he doesn’t use his money and position for political power.
So the only “not descent” thing he’s really done involving that money, is having that money. But with his company being a private company, he can also keep that money as a security nest egg in case the company somehow falls on bad times and keep paying his employees.
I’d argue valve spearheading microtransactions was a bad thing, traceable to tf2 items and cases. People don’t give them enough flak for filling games with monetization.
Honestly, the actual spearheading of microtransactions were physical collectible card game companies with games like MTG.
They made a free game and offered hats. I don’t see anything predatory or wrong with charging for skins that don’t make a game “pay to win” in a game that is free. Really, I call it the least terrible monetization form.
Exactly. The main problems are two-fold:
- chance-based item acquisition - if I can buy the thing I want, that’s fine, but if it’s all chance based, it promotes gambling
- market to resell items - now there’s a cash incentive to gamble
I don’t have a problem with paid cosmetics, I have a problem with promoting gambling.
That said, I think Valve has done more good than bad, so I like them. I don’t like everything they do though.
Tbh it’s more the getting users to gamble by paying for cases that got the ball rolling. Objectively, the least terrible monetization form is buying a game outright and then earning your items through playing as they used to do before free to play became normalized. That’s why all these shitty games come out with battle passes even though game developers did just fine supporting their game for a few years without the constant money churn. Because it’s the norm, people now think it’s impossible to have a game with updates that is bought outright, yet deep rock galactic does it just fine without $60/yr worth in battle passes.
But an online only game like team fortress? It doesn’t jive well. You can’t keep the servers going and the security and the anti cheat updated on a game that you pay once for unless you want the support and the game to be worthless two or three years after it was first released.
Your idea is great for single player games and noncompetitive team games like borderlands online play, and i own tons of games like that and its 90% of what i play. Not for games like team fortress, LoL, and Fortnite. For the latter games, it would mean support and servers would shut down while lots of people would still want to play them.
I played LoL quite a bunch over decade ago. Thousand+ hours over three years, probably. I spent a total of about $40. Had Hundreds of hours in on team fortress and never spent a dime.
his money has come from no oppression or cheap labor or dirty money, or slavery or anything else.
It came from loot crates.
So don’t buy loot crates if you don’t want to.
Also, his money came from Half Life episodes 1 and 2, and creating what would be known as the “Steam” store and getting it downloaded on every PC with Half Life 2 on it. Loot boxes were side jobs that came way later.
So insightful. Really contributes to the conversation.
It’s a bit weird (skip to 10:41 for specifically the pay system)
I’ll bet they all can afford a half-dozen yachts.
you may think a company named valve would know a thing or two about cash flow
The valve is actually broken, stuck in the on position.
It’s funny that these publications only learned that this year when Valve has had a publicly available company directory on their website with names, pictures and email addresses since forever.
They didn’t just learn about it there have been articles about it for years and years they just post the same old article from a few years ago and act like it’s new
Their super high revenue/profit per employee has been reported on periodically for years. I remember hearing this fact literally ten years ago.
Is Gabe taking a duck face selfie in the thumbnail?
Yeah it’s from a video where he was back seating on some voice actors doing announcement and he’s doing odd things background for comedic effect.
Yup. It‘s from the Cave Johnson Announcer Pack reveal video. Which is definitely worth a watch, even if you‘re not into Dota 2.
Might have something to do with getting underage kids hooked on gambling.
“It’s making more money per employee than Apple”
And how much are the game devs whos game are on steam making? If Valve ceo has enough money to buy a billion dollar worth fleet of mega yachts the share is simply off, Valve is making billions nobody else is.
70%…and devs are happy to pay the 30% to get on a platform that’s worth a fuck. Valve carries the servers, the bandwidth and service. Tons of indie devs have made it via steam. They’re a platform for games, not a healthcare company or apple that’s exploiting slave labor.
Plenty of villans out there, valve and gabe isn’t one of them.
That’s highly debatable. Maybe not for the specific reason being discussed, but Valve, and by extension Gabe, IS complicit in stuff like CS:GO gambling which preys on the underaged and and vulnerable.
I think it just goes back to “their competition is even worse”. “They let people prey on the vulnerable” doesn’t hit as hard when the competition is literally preying on them themselves.
Valve is the least shitty of the competition. Maybe GOG is better, but then CDPR is only viable because they can underpay Polish devs.
GOG support is pretty awful, and they make weird development decisions.
People were pleading for Linux support for GOG Galaxy before Steam Deck released, and that’s precisely the crowd that would be most interested in DRM-free games. And when Steam Deck came out, they could have made official support for it and maybe worked with a hardware manufacturer to make a GOG-version of a Deck competitor, but no, they didn’t, even when Valve did all the work to improve Linux compatibility.
GOG has good policies, but their service is only so-so. I would be spending most of my gaming money with them (hundreds per year) oft they had proper Linux support, but I guess they don’t value my business. Valve does, and they have decent support, so they get my money.
valve and gabe isn’t one of them.
A guy who owns a billion dollar worth fleet of mega yachts in 2024 (climate crisis and everyone getting poorer) sounds quite the villain to me.
Tons of indie devs have made it via steam.
And even more didn’t make it. Steam being so big and the market spinning around it actually works against promoting smaller games because there’s just as much you can see on steam shelf.
So we’re at a point that, someone who owns something because they’re rich makes them evil?
Y’all have lost the damn plot if that’s the case.
No billionaire has clean hands. Think beyond just Steam. If an if an indy developer wants to independently release a game they’ll probably fail. Why? Because if you’re not on Steam or one of the other big services you won’t get noticed. They’re also big enough that no competing services are going to show up. They’re priced out. You’re automatically excluded from the market. Steam, Epic, et al by default are rent extractors first. You want to play as a dev? You’re forced to pay.
You are forced to pay either way or do you think hosting (both installers/updates and some sort of multiplayer matchmaking), marketing, payment providers,… all work for free? Without something like Steam you would just likely be forced to pay someone just to manage all of that for you as an extra employee (or multiple part time employees or outsourced services).
People forget what it was like matchmaking pre-steam. Games would vanish if they weren’t some huge game publisher with a big following.
The fuck? Are you suggesting there is somehow a better way for people to find indie games? Let’s say steam doesn’t exist at all, and every indie dev has to host their own website and files…tell me how you plan on getting people to find their games?
You are on lemmy, a open source and decentralized platform where thousand of different instances federate with each others…
Cool, that still doesn’t answer the question…and if you’re suggesting that people build a decentralized platform to rival steam…no one is stopping them from doing so.
Yes. They did that decades without sharing their profits.
Uhh no…no they didn’t. B&Ms existed before the net and digital copies became Common place. The indie scene exploded with steam/itch/gog storefronts. The hell are you talking about, find me multiple indie games that have awards from decades ago. I’ll wait.
You can absolutely do your own marketing, host your own infrastructure, etc, but that’s way more expensive than just paying Steam’s cut. Some games went that way (e.g. Minecraft), but most see a ton of success through Steam and decide their fee is worth the cut.
I don’t see how that’s a bad thing. Indie devs should focus on making a good game and creating promo content for it, and let Valve handle distribution, multiplayer, sales, etc.
Valve is successful because they make a good product that both users and developers like. EGS has a much lower profit share and provides far fewer services, and devs understandably choose Steam because it offers better value.
I wish their cut was lower, but the arrangement seems more than fair.
If devs think they can provide a better service, they’re free to sell their game directly on their website if they want. They can even sell Steam keys and not pay any cut on those from their own website, so they can compare direct sales and Steam sales easily.
So we’re at a point that,
We are at a point where if we don’t reduce emissions humanity is doomed. A fleet of private mega yachts is a smack in the face to everyone trying to change for good and so is a smack spending billions on “toys” when the average person is struggling to pay rent.
You seem to have lost track of the plot and of reality, look around yourself there’s a disaster or a tragedy happening every single day.
Mega yachts aren’t causing our issues. 3rd world countries with no regulations for environmental impact and consumerism is. Most of these yachts just sit in a port doing nothing but collecting dust 99% of the time. Thinking that getting rid of yachts is going to even scratch the surface of our environmental problems is a joke.
Exactly, it’s just virtue signaling.
If you look at sources for pollution, it’s largely:
- energy production (esp. in industrializing countries)
- personal transportation (esp in US, we’re the second top polluter, and transportation is #1 or #2, depending on how you count it)
- heating and cooling houses and offices - in the US (from previous EPA link), household use is #1 or #2 depending on how you count it, and heating and cooling uses the lion’s share of that
From this data, the most effective thing to focus on in combating climate change is improving efficiency of energy production (solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, etc instead of coal, gas, etc). The next most effective thing is improving efficiency of transportation, followed by improving efficiency of heating and cooling (e.g. getting people to use heat exchanges instead of separate gas and AC). Yachts, cruise ships, and other related luxury items don’t even register on the list of priorities and are merely a blip. They’re very visible wastes of energy, but they’re lately harmless.
