this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2024
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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.
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.