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Gabe Newell ordered to make in-person deposition for Valve v. Wolfire Games lawsuit
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this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
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No, it doesn't. It means that they add massive value and more people buy more games as a direct result of the value that they add. Valve has done more to grow the PC gaming space than anyone else and there isn't anything close.
They could take 50% and they would still offer by far the best value out there with nothing else close. Their cut is extremely generous to developers.
Epic is the only one offering a meaningfully different cut from anyone else, and they're doing it by being absolute dogshit at everything connected to their store in any way.
Don't forget itch.io for its "pay what you want model" which is also the same from the developer side.
"They could take more and still control the market" is a confession, not a counterargument.
And it directly contradicts saying they need that much money, in order to... "provide value." An aggressive hand-wave that ignores how Sony and Microsoft take the same cut for platforms they own and control completely.
This 30% off-the-top is a de facto standard that's basically just left over from when Nintendo had 90% market share and had to physically manufacture cartridges months in advance. I don't care what Valve says they're providing - they did not do half as much per game as the people who made the fucking game. They don't deserve a third of their money.
They could take more and still deserve it.
What they "need" is irrelevant. They deserve every penny.
If valve never existed, the best case companies would make way less than half as much on PC gaming, and a meaningful proportion would literally make nothing because distributing software for revenue is extremely difficult for a normal person or small team to do. Anyone paying 30% is getting a bargain, because distributing the same volume by themselves would cost more than that in labor and other costs.
The entire PC gaming market exists because Valve created it.
I got a binder full of PC CD-ROMs that says "bullshit."
Valve has contributed to the PC gaming market. But they got there by shoving their middleman service into a game everyone bought anyway, at a store, because Steam did not exist. It sucked. It sucks a lot less now, in part because they take an entire fucking third of every sale, and if you think all those sales could only possibly happen by taking that much money from them, you're not even listening to yourself.