Yet, no Half-life 3 😢
I like Steam, but I am trying to shop at GOG more and more. No DRM has become a big selling feature for me. I remember the days when Google was one of the “cool” companies that made tech better. Now I am suspicious of all tech companies.
I think Steam vs GOG is an actual healthy competition
I’d use GoG much more if they caught up on the Linux support side. Even their client doesn’t work on Linux, and last time I downloaded cyberpunk through a third-party launcher, it took hours because they limit the speed of downloads through the API.
When I still used windows, I’d use Steam to search for games and then buy them on Gog if they were available, but the convenience gap is just too large now :(
At least GoG has a good search feature for Linux games. Too bad it’s almost entirely porn.
But I got Silksong on GoG.
Heroic has worked well for me so far. I haven’t noticed download speed issues, but I grew up with dial-up…
What I dislike about Steam is that Valve doesn’t allow you to leave your account to somebody else upon your death.
How will steam know if I’ve done that?
That’s irrelevant. It’s the rule itself I don’t like.
Damn right I’ll give my game collection to my kid.
Neither does GOG
So if I die and I leave my harddrive full of offline installers to my kid, GOG will come delete every installer?
Won’t stop your heir playing the GOG games though
Can you just give them the passwords?
Yeah you can.
But Steam doesn’t want it, according to a support rep:
Unfortunately, Steam accounts and games are non-transferable. Steam Support can’t provide someone else with access to the account or merge its contents with another account. I regret to inform you that your Steam account cannot be transferred via a will.
This means you can leave your login details in your will, but Steam can block the account. Also, in case the login details in your will are not correct anymore or no login details were shared, Steam will not give access.
eh, idk, I think people worrying about passing down their antique game collections to the younger generation are sorta like all the old people thinking their kids are gonna want their stamp collections or old timey ‘country rose’ antique dish sets. Even worse, because it’s not like you can even re-sell those games to make a tiny profit at a flea market or whatever.
What if a 30 year old dies and their 10 year old kid can’t play the games anymore that they were playing by using family sharing?
An outlier case, which doesn’t justify changing the setup and introducing even bigger issues/abuses to solve.
If accounts allowed transfers, I’d personally have no issue with doing something like:
- Have my own personal “main” steam account
- Use secondary accounts to buy games
- Transfer any game I want to play longer term / figure I’ll revisit over to my main account; sell the secondary account on Facebook Marketplace/similar sites to recoop funds for myself on a quarterly/annual basis (removing that potential revenue from steam)
That sort of abuse would be far more common, than the outlier case you’ve listed for a young parent passing down games to a kid that’s fairly close in age.
I dunno, I inherited my grandparents’ SNES and my uncle’s PS1 and Sega Dreamcast. I probably played those consoles more than they ever did. Granted, those consoles weren’t that old by the time I got them
Long term that’s possibly wise. Track record being what it is I think steam is broadly ok, but definitely less safe than something you can download and keep forever.
I think as long as Gabe runs the show, it will be fine, but you know that there are venture capitalists and mega-corps all ready to maximize stakeholder value.
At least with GoG, you can at least download your installers if it ever begins the enshittification slide. Steam will take everything with it should it start down that path.
The question is whether or not whoever or whatever Gabe puts into his place when he steps down will act like him.
I see it as a serious likelihood he’ll proof the company against venture capital and going public
And they raised the price on the required subscription service, are closing game studios, and forcing people to only buy games through them. Oh, wait; that’s Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo…
You got me in the first half, no gonna lie.
Aaaallllmost downvoted you then, lol. My apologies.
They are ridiculously profitable though, yet they still maintain their 30% cut.
There are very very few for profit companies in the world that would even fleetingly think about reducing their profit for no reason.
That’s true. My point, however, is that the narrative around Valve is that they’re the “good guy”. In reality they’re just not as awful as the rest and are only doing the bare minimum. They’re part of the problem. You’ll never in a million years convince me that gaben is a decent guy when he owns 6 yachts. The biggest one even has a hospital, it’s ridiculous.
We also know of very little philanthropy or charity Gabe does.
This could just mean he donates non-publicly, or barely at all, we can’t be sure.
In the ideal world they’d do it oppositely, low/no cut on the first income and then increase it for the bigger productions.
But capitalism gonna capitalism, and the whales could be legitimate competitions. So they get it cheap, while the fish pay 30% to be on the biggest market
If I were in their shoes I wouldn’t either, reducing the cut now increases the chance you would need to increase it later which for a platform largely thriving off goodwill would not be the smartest decision.
I haven’t purchased anything in months because my job pays badly, and fuck this capitalist hellscape, but if I was going to buy more games steam is the most likely source. Linux support, cloud saves, game recording, remote play, fairly unobtrusive client, drm at the seller’s discretion.
Plus with rare exceptions you will always be able to continue to play all of those games on any hardware you can install steam at no additional cost.
Glares at FF7 Rebirth with an Nvidia GPU
That worked for me fine on Linux (pop!_os). Remake worked on the steam deck, too.
Which GPU? Anything above I think a 10xx has an issue with the shaders the game uses. There’s supposedly a workaround for arch (CachyOS) but I couldn’t get it working.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER. Got it before I got laid off and before prices went super crazy.
I’m only playing on a
1k1080p monitor so i wasn’t pushing it very hard, but it ran without issue.1k is pretty expensive for a monitor, that better be high res and high refresh rate lol
Turns out for some reason I thought the old 1920x1080 kind of display was 1k. Nope. That’s not what you call that.
Not the other person, but I’m using a 4090 on Ubuntu 26.04 and haven’t had any issues with Remake or Rebirth.
And solid customer service.
I bought 2 things today, totalling £3.47, and one was a 6 dlc pack for a game I’ve got 1000ish hours in. Honestly should have just saved the £2 on the dlc pack, it’s just a bunch of furniture.
Obviously, releasing an expensive piece of hardware that is in high demand reflects in the numbers.
I’ve had 1500€ put aside for the Steam Frame since January. I expected I’d be waiting till the next spring to get a chance to buy it. To my surprise and absolute delight, I was apparently at the front of the line. I’ve received my unit three days ago and it’s been a blast.
Captain: the figure is gross revenue, profit margin is ~40%
Hardware is more no?
Profit margin is company wide metric, calculated from financial statements. It includes all the products&services company produces
They don’t release financial statements, that 40% is entirely fabricated lol. Everything is estimates, it’s stated only about 100 times in the link.
Hardware has higher profit ratio, it’s not 40%. Most is 30% from game sales, but hardware is almost 100%. That average is not even an estimate, it’s completely made up dude. It’s not 40%, I was asking them a question so the would rethink or provide the source, but clearly people believe the fake data they presented.
There’s absolutely no way it’s only 40%. Games alone are 30% for third party, their own games is close to 100%. So those two alone average far over 40% and that’s not including hardware that’s almost solely profit.
Profit margin % means share of revenue you get to keep after all the expenses
Example: Say a game sold for 100€, revenue of valve is 30€, valve expenses on that sale is 18€, so actual profit is 12€.
Data of private companies isn’t required to published regularly but same as in the article, it can be voluntarily shared by the company.
Calling it fabricated implies accounting fraud, which is serious legal offense (equivalent of accusing a person of murder). So, being skeptical of the numbers is a good investor mindset but throwing baseless accusations is punishable offense in itself
Let’s be civil, people
I think they’re saying you came up with that 40% number yourself. Did steam ever reveal that info?
I didn’t do any original sophisticated research since my interest in the story is very low, so i reposted the figure from literally Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation (Search page by “profit margin”)
Huh Steam only accounts for 60% of their revenue? Amazing.
Almost 100%? Are you saying it costs, quite literally, basically nothing to make hardware?
hardware is almost 100%.
Source?
Profit on hardware in this economy?
Somebody is, it’s just not Valve.
TSMC and the memory foundries
In the month after the Sony disc debacle and Microsoft slamming a katana into its own belly?
Absolutely shocking.
Yeah all those fans of physical media immediately switched to PC
If I have to deal with digital media I prefer to do it on one where hardware configurations are open and operating system isn’t locked.
Digital media on a locked hardware platform that doesn’t let you load your OS of choice or even programs makes for a more restrictive digital media experience.
You can, with a little effort, back up your steam install files. In the unlikely event that Valve pulls the rug users have the option to insure against it.
Game’s usually don’t work without steam. Try to run game by running the executable directly; 99% will fall to launch. Sorry
that “a little effort” meant specifically finding the way to launch games without Steam, I reckon. apparently most games on Steam have only the very basic Steam DRM: make a back up of the game, deal with the DRM, and keep it available to play whenever
99% will fail to launch
Yeah that’s not true. Only games that use Steam DRM will not work without Steam (though you can get them to work, hence the existence of piracy).
Steam DRM is completely optional on the part of the devs. If you don’t like that you can’t just launch the .exe or whatever, then take it up with the devs who chose that DRM scheme.
Ok gimme am example of a game that you can launch directly then. All the ones I tried didn’t work
Hard drives are physical storage.
It’s not a “physical media” issue, it’s about monopolizing and raising prices.
I hate to say it, but I’m never going to purchase anything on steam. 23 Y/o account with one refund and they’re refusing to refund twenty some dollars for a scam game. Fuck Steam.
Never had an issue with them refunding stuff. Are you sure there isn’t more to this story?
There isn’t, I guess it’s my fault because I get busy. I should have just gotten a refund the day I got it.
What game did you play for two hours without realising it was a scam?
I didn’t even play it for two hours… 48 minutes clocked; between crashing and just sitting there trying to get it to work I roughly played it for 15 minutes. I was 9 days late on requesting a refund, but I have other things to take care of and I had to look up online how to even get a refund now.
The game was BodyCam; probably the biggest piece of shit I’ve ever played. I generally got the gist that more money was spent on advertising than whatever that garbage is. And look it’s not about difficulty or anything, I wanted to play something between and Arma.
What I got was the empty pistachio shell. I had more fun with DeadLock, which is also early access and free and not it’s even my style of game; I played it because a friend wanted to.
The reason I say it’s a scam; I joined their discord sever and of course they announce that they will be doing a collaboration with another game. Like okay, that’s a wtf really? This flaccid garbage isn’t worth the $30 and you’re starting a new project.
Whoever down-voted me; understand that I had steam since the first week of launch. While at this point it’s better than all the other stuff overall, it sure was a shit show. Most of you don’t understand how annoying it was to buy Half-Life 2 only to have to wait weeks before being able to play it–should have bought the CD version. Or to go from playing CS1.5 at 300 FPS to playing CS1.6 at no higher than 40. And it’s not like I’m not going to keep using Steam, those 800 games aren’t going to play themselves, but I’m not spending a dime again.
I have a singular question.
Would your actions (asking for a refund after the window had closed) have resulted in the same outcome at any other retailer?
Probably, most retailers will write it off and move on just so you leave them alone. I would also go as far as saying that 8 days past isn’t oh yeah I waited a year. I had gotten a complete refund for the half-ass–almost killed me alignment job, it only took 5-6 phone calls but hey eventually they gave me my money back. Personally I’ve rarely ran into issues and well there’s always charge backs. I would imagine that part of it was using some “funds” from “selling” skins from CS; which I don’t consider it as selling since you don’t get a check in the mail for the dollar amount.
Steam has reached a point of being big enough not to care.
I mean everyone can defend Steam all they want, but it’s not as if they haven’t done shady practices either. They’re just the lesser evil. And it goes as far as all the battle passes I wasted money on in CSGO, as well as buying the game for it only to become free, all those maps are out of rotation. And then CSGO disappears and magically becomes CS2.
Also 14 days? I don’t know of any refund policy is that short. But it’s okay, I will take the loss and just never spend a cent.
How is bodycam a scam? I’m enjoying atm. I agree there isn’t much to the game right now in terms of game modes and maps, but it’s not like they’re hiding that lol. I suggest you actually look at some let’s plays before buying a game to see what’s currently in it. You bought an early access game and don’t like that the game is still early in development?
I probably should have watched a streamer instead of their promotional videos. To each his own, but I think the bar for early access has gotten so low I should have expected that I was going to be wasting money on trash.
Your game didn’t play, then you waited nearly a month before asking a refund?
Disregarding the long wait, I’ve heard plenty of people who got a refund even long after buying it. They’re pretty flexible if you explain the issue.
I made about 8 attempts now. And sorry I get busy between work, classes, and life a week fly’s by.
I’m sure the steam frame helped a bit. They also have an ever increasing consumer base.
Probably. Wish I could’ve bought one.
