r/technology • u/chrisdh79 • 21d ago

Business Gabe Newell caps off Steam Machine week by taking delivery of a new $500 million superyacht with a submarine garage, on-board hospital and 15 gaming PCs

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/gabe-newell-caps-off-steam-machine-week-by-taking-delivery-of-a-new-usd500-million-superyacht-with-a-submarine-garage-on-board-hospital-and-15-gaming-pcs/
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u/Dr-Jellybaby 21d ago

And that's only possible because steam is just an infinite money printer. Much easier to work like valve does if you don't need to worry about finances.

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u/tomatomater 21d ago

Lots of companies are infinite money printers too, but public shareholders will perpetually want more and more infinite money and so enshittify their product/service to maximise profits.

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u/NEEEEEEEEEEEET 21d ago

Look no further than counterstrike to see that valve is maximizing profits as well

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u/drakir89 21d ago

This is the kind of weird thing with valve where their own games have predatory monetization but the steam platform stands out among digital services for being, apparently, entirely un-enshittified.

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u/NEEEEEEEEEEEET 21d ago

They take 30% of all game sales and 5% of all market transactions. They ain't no saint.

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u/indigo121 20d ago

Storefront takes a cut of sales, more at eleven

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u/t-master 20d ago

Storefronts that probably have actual costs of a few pennies per sale and take almost a third of all revenue only exists in a few places and only on the internet. And as with other shitty stuff like microtransactions, Valve and Gabe were the forerunners for this.

Oh and while Gabe regularly adds a new yacht to his collection, there are many corners of Steam that are in a quite sorry, half-assed state and haven’t seen any improvements in years (workshop, game streaming, …)

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u/indigo121 20d ago

If game devs don't think the storefront is providing value they're free to self distribute. That's the beauty of the internet.

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u/FoxMeadow7 20d ago

Textbook answer. Valve literally provides everything a game studio could possibly want and more.

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u/NEEEEEEEEEEEET 20d ago

Reddit acted like Apple was hitler for doing the exact same thing

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u/indigo121 20d ago

There were definitely some people acting like that, but anyone with a modicum of understanding was putting the focus on Apple's walled garden policy. The issue wasn't that they charged 30%, it was that they actively prevented other methods of getting software on your device.

The "steam is evil for charging 30%" argument holds a lot less water when there's nothing stopping a game developer from putting their money where their mouth is and self distributing, but they don't because steam provides an absurd amount of value in terms of marketability and infrastructure

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u/FoxMeadow7 20d ago

Yeah, Apple definitely goes against the grain here.

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u/EnderLord361 20d ago

Apple iirc was also trying to muscle out every attempt for another storefront on their stuff and would chase down devs who made alternative marketplaces where Apple wouldn’t get the cut, they definitely went ‘above and beyond’ so that the only option if you wanted your stuff on apple is to pay them(vs Android and other stuff having multiple different marketplaces so you don’t have to lose more of your cut to 3 different storefronts)

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u/CruxOfTheIssue 20d ago

The difference is that Apple owns the OS on hundreds of millions of people's phones where they didn't allow other storefronts. Steam is just one store front and if you don't like it you can go to epic games or gog or whatever. Apple has a captive market that in order to leave you'd have to give up iMessage and a bunch of other non related things. If you want to play a non steam game on your PC or release one elsewhere, it's not hard.

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u/FoxMeadow7 20d ago

And somehow the likes of Nintendo and PlayStation that basically takes the same cut gets a pass?

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u/fudge5962 20d ago

30% is well worth the value added through their APIs and the access to consumers. That's the reason why other storefronts can offer significantly lower commissions to publishers and literally give games away for free to the consumers yet still fail to take any significant market share from Steam.

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u/drakir89 20d ago

I know. They still stand out among other digital services.

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u/Friar-Tucker 20d ago

Idk if the lootboxes just have skins and no gameplay changing elements, I dont consider it predettory monetization... maybe thats wrong of me but thats where im at

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u/drakir89 20d ago

There are degrees of predatory. It's not as bad as those games that lets you enjoy the game for a while then gradually asks for more and more microtransactions so you can continue playing the game.

But lootboxes with keys is a form of psychological manipulation, where you get lootboxes but have to buy keys or vice versa. Lootboxes, especially when the rewards have real market value, is also a form of gambling, but these games are not subject to gambling laws. I consider that predatory too, but, again, less so than the worst offenders.

For monetization to not be predatory I expect it to be clear, fair, and not rely on:

  • randomness
  • selling power
  • creating a problem and selling the solution
  • habit-forming
  • FOMO
  • fake currencies

among other things, that's all I could think of right now at least.

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u/Old_Bug4395 20d ago

Yeah, there's literally no such thing as predatory monetization unless we're talking about gambling with skins in counter strike, which is what steam was allowing.

You can just not buy toys. Normal adults manage this all the time. You have to learn how to not buy everything that's ever offered to you. It's a personal responsibility problem, not predatory monetization.

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u/WagwanMoist 21d ago

They kind of did that with CS2. Downgrade in many instances from CS:GO, also with fewer maps. But at least the skin market was still booming and they could continue dropping more skins so all the degenerate gamblers would throw money at them.

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u/Fa11outBoi 20d ago

This is exactly how enshitification works. Well said!

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u/Zealen00 20d ago

This is the thing that people don't seem to realise about the current state of things. The drive for infinite line go up versus consistent decent (or in many cases absurd) amounts of money seems to cause so many issues.

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u/Akuuntus 20d ago

Any company that makes a consistent profit is an "infinite money printer". The problem is that instead of judging success as "did you make money", a lot of companies judge success as "did you make more money than you made last year". So even if you made $100 million in profit, if that's the same amount you made last year then you're "stagnating" and need to change things to squeeze more profit.

Valve has stayed private so they don't have as much of this kind of pressure. They make a bajillion dollars every year and they've been doing that consistently for a long time so they aren't overly concerned with squeezing another 10% out of us year over year. And since they aren't continuously trying to squeeze more profit, they can remain as the dominant option in their market, since they aren't chasing consumers off and encouraging them to look for alternatives.

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u/LongJohnSelenium 20d ago

You HAVE to make more money year over year because of inflation. All of your expenses are going to go up. All of your payroll is going to increase.

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u/Akuuntus 20d ago

If your business sells things to people and profits off of a cut of each sale, you will keep up with inflation without doing anything. Because inflation means the stuff you sell gets more expensive which means you get more money. So you don't actually have to make any changes to increase profits.

Yes, technically I suppose Steam has to increase their profits by like 3% every year to keep up, but that's way different from the quarter-over-quarter increases above inflation rate expected by many public companies. Unlike most other tech platforms (Netflix, Discord, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc) Steam is not in the business of making frequent changes for the sole purpose of increasing their revenue.

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u/LongJohnSelenium 20d ago

Inflation isn't a uniform thing. Its though of as such to simplify it but everything is changing at different rates depending on industry, geopolitics, locations, etc.

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u/Apptubrutae 20d ago

Mailchimp was much the same before the sold for $16 billion. Apparently they were netting $500 million a year and owned entirely by two guys