this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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They can shake down corpos as much as they want, I don't care. Sony and Microsoft have been shaking down corporations for 30% for decades, it's fine by me if they get shook down.
Not corpos, though. Corpos have deals with all platforms, they're not concerned about positioning on Steam. Valve will go to them, and if they don't their marketing budget will carry them.
No, it's the indies who end up bending over backwards to fit Valve's marching orders. It was contentious for a while, during the awkward period when Steam was figuring out how to crowdsource store placement. Now that they've successfully done so they invest very little and get to tell indies what to spend their budgets on, which they do often and explicitly.
If I had to compare the relationship, it's closest to Youtube and content creators. Have you noticed how every Youtube video now has a little intro with highlights from later on? Like that.
I feel like your first statement is a massive stretch.
Through Steam, GoG, and Epic the Indies can avoid the far more expensive 30-70% cut publishers take.
I'm not going to pretend content creators on Youtube don't massively benefit from youtube. There's a reason kids now-a-days want to be youtubers not astronauts or something. Does it suck to be beholden to corporate overloards? Yeah. But if you work at EA, Google, Valve, CDPR, Epic, Apple... you're shook down for your wages all the same.
You get nothing from those compared to Steam, though. The only third party that can compete, and that's declined a bit, is Nintendo. And Nintendo is a bit of an additive thing, anyway. It's where you go when you can afford it or got big enough on Steam to get some attention.
I'm not gonna say it's impossible to survive around the edges of Steam, but man, if you're an indie dev and Valve says jump you are up in the air before you even ask how high.
I have to say, it's crazy how many things get more palatable in these conversation when you point out that Valve does them. Microtransactions, cosmetics, NFTs, content creation guidelines... it's a lot easier to get people to admit the upsides when it's those guys.
Which is fair. The thing is I'm not even against most of those practices in principle, and I agree that Valve are good at making them smooth and friendly. The big exceptions are the absolute mess they made of crowdsourcing store curation and the ungodly mess of the CSGO skin grey market. And they have more than enough brand clout to get those swept under the rug. Coca Cola wishes they had the brand loyalty Valve gets.
I'm just saying that's any employer. If you make all your money through Steam then Valve is your employer. If you make all your money through Youtube then Google is your employer. If you make all your money through Twitch then Amazon is your employer.
On PC you get to pick who you're going to have fuck you. You can pick to Minecraft it and open your own website and hope that works out or you can have Valve/CDPR/Epic in your pants telling you what you can make and how much you can have of it.
Welcome to capitalism I guess.
But indie devs don't work for Valve.
I guess technically video creators don't work for Youtube, although that one is murkier. Steam is a storefront.
Think of Amazon, actually. That's probably a better comparison. Amazon workers work for Amazon. Their relationship with Amazon has to do with labour conditions and so on.
But if you're a seller, or a small store that tries to sell online your relationship with Amazon is not a labour relationship but it's still extremely asymmetrical. You have no power in that dynamic.
I mean, you're absolutely right, that's modern late-stage capitalism. The astounding thing is how well Valve manages to position itself outside that. Just look at all the pushback that pointing that out gets you in this and other threads. Poeple HATE the idea that Valve exists in that space. "Good guy Valve" is deeply ingrained and it demands that you think about them in a different way than Amazon and Youtube.
Woah that's some gig economy bullshit like saying Uber drivers don't work for Uber or something. I refuse to engage in glorifying that corporations aren't responsible for people who rely on them for their livelihood.
There's nuance to it. You can't ever get good enough at driving that Uber gives you a special deal, and you aren't selling each of your rides to people on multiple services at once. The power dynamic isn't quite as lopsided, at least not for everybody.
But... it's also not completely different, especially for the smaller devs. Valve definitely comes from that same tech upstart mentality, and it only drifted further into it as they stopped being primarily a game developer and became primarily a storefront.
I guess I'm just saying most of the complaints with Valve are complaints with capitalism at large. Valve is a business that wants to make profit.
I would fucking love to have a decentralized ptp game hosting and sharing servi... oh that's just piracy. Something that indy devs typically struggle with.
Work is work the need to be paid out of the hands of a massive corporation is just capitalism no matter how you slice it. I'm not going to cheer lead for any capitalist entity as they bicker who fucks their workers least.
Piracy and its interactions with indie development are way more nuanced than that, but sure, yeah, Valve is a corporation like any other corporation. That's all I'm saying.
That their branding work spares them a lot of criticism and judgement from the same industry-standard practices that are seen as an affront elsewhere in both game development and the larger online content creation industry.
Well yeah, most companies get out of criticism via branding. Look at plastics and how it was lied that it was recyclable when most plastic goes straight to landfill.
To add to this comment, remember that the base cut is 30%, but it goes down to 25% and later to 20% as the game reaches certain thresholds of revenue. This isn't meant to shake down the large corporations (indies benefit the least from this policy), but to make their system appealing enough to developers large enough to be able to try their luck somewhere else.