this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2024
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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.
Luckily your computer can run any software you want so there's no need to build any platform to play videogames.
I was reply to your concern of people not being able to find their games, the fediverse is an example of how you can build a non centralized network and still bring people together.
What's the point of this comment? This doesn't answer the question.
Ok then what's stopping people from doing that?
Nobody. Valve spend millions on advertising to remain popular and outshadow competitors. As a result there are many brainwashed fools who go around defending the company like you can see in this thread
I've literally never seen a tv ad for valve...hell I think I saw a print add in a gaming mag one time...but they really don't need to spend money on advertising, they provide a service better than anyone else and that's what keeps them around...EGS has been giving away titles for years now and they're platform still sucks and is a reason they're not as big as steam, not because of advertising.
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.
They was selling on their websites. There was also shops and a second hand market that this platform killed.
Steam has been around for 2 decades now, and I'll ask again. Please find me a indie game that had success when steam wasn't around, and find me one that made it in brick and mortar stores that didn't take 30%+
They cannot reasonably derive 30% when others take 12 at equal service and at the same time show record profits.
People usually don't speak about the second hand market : how many shops have they closed ? How many were laid off ?
The second hand market wasn't killed because of steam, it was killed because of digitalizing everything...on top of that. The fact that you think physical copies allowed indie games to exist, shows how extremely ignorant of this topic you are. Physical media is extremely expensive, and was not available for anyone unless a publisher took a chance on you. Even if steam didn't exist, companies would have moved to digital anyways because its cheaper and more people get the product.
It was killed by steam, they did accelerate the transition and you have no right to transfer the game licence to anybody else. CDROM wasn't expensive. Did you see the games price significantly cut since it is digital ? Owning a product doesn't need to go through a physical media. You can buy digital version too.
It wasn't killed by steam, it was killed by technological progress. CDroms were absolutely expensive to produce, print, ship etc. What do price cuts have to do with availability? As I asked before, when since steam did indie games have the audience they have now?
Also why say CD-ROM wasn't expensive and then bring up digital? You're not doing anything to prove steam is this evil thing.
For final fantasy V the cartridge cost was $15 each, total cost $37 millions for the SNES. They did a version for PS1 the CD Roms disk coast was 2$ for each. It was so that expensive that Sierra did phantasmagoria with 7 cdroms. Woldfenatein and Doom didn't rise the success because of steam. Second hand market was killed by Steam, it even gone to court. And it is illegal to resale games due to their business model.
Lol yeah I'm sure indie devs could afford to front millions for carts and CDs.
Also you still haven't answered my question, show me a indie game that had success pre-steam
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.
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:
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.
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaires-emit-more-carbon-pollution-90-minutes-average-person-does-lifetime
Mega yachts fall into the personal transportation problem. If everyone would go around in a mega yacht we would be long time extinct.
Sure, but the number of people actually using mega yachts is vanishingly small. It's so small that completely eradicating them would do exactly nothing to combat climate change because the amount they contribute is within a rounding error for any meaningful measure of climate change.
That's not true, did you read any of the link posted?
We live in a society made of billions of individuals, we are not ants or robots, everyone is supposed to do is part. Billionare part count as much as millions of people, that's how big their footprint it.
There are very few billionaires, so while their footprint is larger on an individual basis, their total footprint is absolutely dwarfed by the rest of the population. Going after billionaires may feel good because you're "sticking to the rich" or whatever, but even if we eradicate all billionaire carbon output, it wouldn't put a dent in global carbon emissions.
It's the same issue as the popular notion of taxing the rich. If we took all of Elon Musk's wealth ($486 billion from a quick check), we could fund the US government for less than a month. If we took the entire wealth of the top 400 people in the US ($5.7T combined), we still couldn't fund the US government for a year. Here's an article about it from the tax foundation (they have a right-center bias with high factual accuracy):
Financially they're a blip, and ecologically they're a blip as well. Punching up may be cathartic, but it's not going to solve the climate crisis.
Why are you wasting your time defending billionares who are screwing the planet and everyone over? Are you getting paid or are you playing the devil advocate?
There are 800 billionares in USA alone and more than 3000 around the globe. My country italy has about 60 million people and spend 130B on public health each year. The 5.7T you mentioned would be enough to cover the healthcare spending that covers 60M people for 40 years.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/11/megayachts-environment-carbon-emissions-ban
This article breaks global emissions down by sector, and I'm assuming that private jets and private yachts (both the top contributors to billionaire emissions from your link) are included in the aviation and shipping sections, which are 1.9% and 1.7% respectively. Both areas are likely dominated by non-billionaire sources (e.g. freight and passenger travel), so we're probably looking at <1% of global emissions (probably far less) coming from billionaire jets and yachts.
I'm not saying it's okay for billionaires to be that wasteful, I'm saying it's not what's causing our problem, and even if we eliminate 100% of pollution from billionaires, we'll still have a massive problem.
More the second, but mostly because I see people blaming the wrong problem. Billionaires aren't the problem, though they are symptoms of problems we have, like high medical care costs (and again, insurance company behavior is a symptom), CO2 emissions, erosion of privacy, data breaches, etc. Yes, billionaires had a hand in each of these, but the real problem is the lack of accountability.
As the saying goes, don't hate the player, hate the game.
Do you realize how much even 1% in the scale of billions is? It more than entire small countries. If the billionare you are talking about would give you 1% of his money to defend him online you would get 50 millions.
Okay? I don't care how much money he has, I only care what kind of person he is and what he does with he resources he has.
He chooses to use his position to make a quality service that respects its users, which is sadly uncommon these days. That's honestly all I expect from a CEO, and for that he gets more respect than most CEOs, meaning I'm pretty "meh" about him. He's not a villain, but he's also not a saint, he's just a reasonable human.
If he offered me 1% of his wealth to shill for him online, I'd probably take it, because I could do so much more good with that money than the minor "evil" of being annoying shilling for a kind of okay dude. $50M means I could fund a charity I believe in and dedicate my time to it.
I honestly don't care if some people get disgusting amounts of money, I only care how get got it and what they do with it. Gabe Newell seems to care more about the service than the money, and is doing what I expect the average person would do if they had that much money. So he's a pretty okay dude.
He's the ceo of a company that promotes gambling to kids through a proprietary app and he uses their resources to stroll around in a fleet of mega yachts.
If that's your idea of a fair reasonable human you are a villain yourself.
Yeah, no.
I assume you're talking about Counterstrike skins, but CS:GO and CS:2 are both rated M in the US, and 18+ in the EU. Team Fortress 2 is M in the US, and 15-18 in the EU AFAICT. That in no way is "marketing to children," and parents can absolutely limit their kids' access to things like the Steam marketplace even if they allow their kids to play those games.
I hate microtransactions of all kinds, but Valve is by far nowhere near the worst offender here. Fortnite is rated T and had a PEGI 12, along with a bunch of merch at stores like Target (Fortnite branded nerf guns and whatnot). I could point to a ton of other games actually marketed to kids with MTX. The main difference is Valve allows Counterstrike skins to be traded, which IMO is better than just having to be stuck with a skin you don't like and being able to buy the ones directly that you do want (least unethical version of loot boxes IMO).
That said, I refuse to let my kids play any game with MTX, and I think other parents should as well. But if this is your biggest criticism of Valve, then I guess your argument is pretty weak.
There are multiple comments in the thread that point out the gambling problem including the top comment.
With you putting so much effort in defending a company that makes billions off microtransactions and promotes gambling to kids it sounds like you love them.
Your comparison should be lemmy and open source platforms not other companies like valve.
Do you really want me to believe there aren't kids below 18 playing CS in europe? Steam collects your data https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/steam they are fully aware of the actual age of their users and ignore it in the name of profits to allow it's ceo buy mega yachts.
That's a non sequitur. Correcting misinformation does not imply agreement with all policies of the company I'm correcting misinformation about.
Why? That's not a fair comparison, because they're in completely different markets.
No, I want you to understand that the rating is part of marketing. A rating of ESRB M or PEGI 18 means the intended audience is adults. If parents let their kids play those games, they are responsible, not the publisher or developer of the game.
Not true. I've never told Steam my real age, they just know I have access to a credit card and claim to be somewhere between 18 and 100, and probably born on Jan 1. I lie because its none of their business how old I am, I'm old enough to view whatever they have on their website. My account is <18yo, so that won't help as well.
I fully appreciate that kids can do this as well. But parents should be aware of what their kids are playing, that's just basic parenting. And the marketing should give them enough pause to look into it a bit more.
I don't blame Valve here, the marketing is accurate for their target audience: adults. I still don't like loot boxes, but adults should 100% be allowed to make stupid decisions. I blame other companies that actually market their MTX-ridden crap to kids, like EGS with Fortnite, which makes me utterly sick so I've completely banned Fortnite in my house.
If a single person throw the garbage out of the window it isn't going to cause much of pollution so why don't you just throw trash out?
As the ceo of a company with millions of clients many of which are kids you are entitled more than everyone else to show the good example.
What you are saying is simply wrong anyway, mega yachts and billionares are indeed a big cause of pollution.
https://www.oxfamamerica.org/press/press-releases/richest-1-emit-as-much-planet-heating-pollution-as-two-thirds-of-humanity/
https://cleantechnica.com/2024/06/19/superyachts-for-the-super-rich-cause-a-whole-lot-of-environmental-damage/
https://www.oceanweb.com/superyachts-and-pollution-at-sea/
All of those studies are flawed as fuck. They assume the products the rich sell as polution. Do you sit there and include farmers in it as well because they sell/grow the food you eat which is a huge contributor to climate change. The yachts they buy, sit in dry dock 99% of their lives. You bitching about it is pure ignorance.
In the articles is it explained how they don't spend 99% of their live there and how they are polluting even when they are docked, they also get to show you how much of a problem that "1%" cause
I really hope you are rich yourself and own a bunch of boats because otherwise you defending a billionare is as miserable as one can get.
Estimates and 445 US residents...there is no way yachts are causing even a blip of climate change compared to everything. It's the stupidest shit ever to point a fucking boats and be like "that's why we have climate change" on any level. You could snap your fingers and make every single on of them vanish and it wouldn't do shit to turn the climate change ship around.
So yea...they basically sit in dock like I said, doing nothing.
Ah so investments are now pollution....got it.
This is why studies like these are bullshit. That right there was prefaced with "tax the rich, and it'll magically make climate change less"...which makes no fucking sense at all.
As for your "I better be rich bullshit"... that's such a copout. I'm not naive enough to think some boats are causing our climate change, I'm also not fool enough to think that rich people investing in industries is the reason we're in this predicament. Trying to blame others actions while we all contribute to it is a joke. Everything you do contributes to it, you bought anything recently that has plastic? Contributor. You have a 401k? Contributor(apparently). Drive somewhere? Yep you guessed it... contributing. Eat something not grown by you? Contributing.
So let's stop the non-sense virtue signaling. It detracts from the actual issues.
You are defending the biggest polluting individuals in the world and probably in history.
I really hope reincarnation is a thing and you get to be reborn as a seaturtle and choke in diesel fuel left by a mega yacht
You know who's the biggest polluters? Companies and governments... mainly the militaries. I'm not defending anyone, I'm telling you that you're worried about the dumbest shit ever to think that some mega yachts are the problem. Container ships and cruise liners make all those yachts look like green floating sailboats in comparison. You know who uses those cruise ships and the shit on those contrainer ships the most? Normal every day people.
You know who own companies and control the government? Have fun figure it out
Yea because the people totally have control over that...yea I forgot how fair and honest indias elections have been, same with china...tell you what, you keep harping on about how the rich are destroying the planet and nothing the rest of us do is causing it.