Games

Honestly, I pay for the service alone.

Pirating games is easy-ish enough so if Valve ever enshittifies I will be quickly learning how to remove Steam's DRM and put all my games on a server and never purchase another video game in my lifetime.

They provide an easy platform for me to buy games so I use them. The steam deck too. Just because they have a competent product, i don't think that justifies any arse kissing. Like you say, they're a company and they're in business to make money.

Yeah, I can see why developers would be unhappy about the 30%. Maybe there's an argument to be made that the platform gives these games a greater potential market but I don't know enough about the business to try making that argument.

As far as capitalism goes they are not the shittiest of companies out there.

They have predatory tactics with lootboxes on their popular games though.

But most of their practices are not anticonsumer.

And they do not enforce drm and their own drm is a joke, so you can basically own most games if you want with very little effort. Just copy the files and have a generic steam crack around and you are golden for most cases.

I believe this is something to be aware of and if this is something you don't want use GOG instead. But in reality as long as Steam exists you will be able to download and play your games. If Steam ceases to exists then you will not be able to download them, but there will be ways to still play them, if you previously downloaded them. It is not like "owning" movies on Amazon (or just recently on the Playstation Store), where you always need to stream the movies.

Yeah. Really wish they were more like gog or itch

Honestly, I'll probally care about this more when someone else tries to make a service remotely close to what steam provides. Hell epic is probally the closest we got and they are in the red AND lacking in function set that steam provides. Steam charges 30% up until 10m and then 25 till 50m then it'd 20% while giving a multitude of extra services the other companies charging similar rates don't, seems fair to me.

some examples:

1. gog: 30%
   • store
   • review system
2. epic: 12% (isn't turning a profit)
   • store
   • cloud save
   • return system
3. steam 30
   • store
   • mod workshop
   • reviews
   • discussion forum
   • return system
4. Microsoft store 12%
   • store
   • review system

Looking into it, IGN made a nice picture (2019 though so a little old perhaps) so I'll add that too

No, there's companies that abuse valves market for their underground casinos.

I honestly don't get why you are mad at valve when they are not even in the slighest involved in that process apart from offering the market system. That's like being mad at cloudflare or AWS because a website that scams you uses it.

For once, it looks like the answer is that they do see some big checks. From an article someone posted further down the thread:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/13/24197477/valve-employs-few-hundred-people-payroll-redacted

Lowest paid department is hardware, with an average of about $430k/employee.

Now, that is an average, and it's hard to tell from here if a few highly paid employees in each department are throwing that number off.

It's being phrased as an ROI per employee "asset", not as compensation per actual employee.

Gabe is pocketing most of this.

It's not 'clever wording', it says what it is - dividing profit by the number of employees results in a higher number for valve.
The heading isn't comparing employee paychecks,it's about overall company performance.