Games

They didn't just learn about it there have been articles about it for years and years they just post the same old article from a few years ago and act like it's new

Their super high revenue/profit per employee has been reported on periodically for years. I remember hearing this fact literally ten years ago.

Yeah it’s from a video where he was back seating on some voice actors doing announcement and he’s doing odd things background for comedic effect.

Yup. It‘s from the Cave Johnson Announcer Pack reveal video. Which is definitely worth a watch, even if you‘re not into Dota 2.

Considering their only major competitor has enough money to keep trying to lure players to their significantly worse store system with free games for years now instead of going the route of actually providing a decent product I think Valve making money off their good product strategy is a good thing.

Because somehow their competition is even worse

Ah, yes, capitalism. Because they don’t have to pay to maintain servers and infrastructure or anything, right?

Nor do they pay for bandwidth when you download your 100gb game for the nth time in the past month.

Nor do they have a ton of functions and services for both devs and consumers like easy refunds, regional pricing, steam keys, trading cards, steam workshop, steam forums, chatrooms, remote play... just to name some.

Yeah, such moneygrabbing comic book villains that just sit in their pile of money and don't provide anything good.

Honestly, I pay for the service alone.

Pirating games is easy-ish enough so if Valve ever enshittifies I will be quickly learning how to remove Steam's DRM and put all my games on a server and never purchase another video game in my lifetime.

They provide an easy platform for me to buy games so I use them. The steam deck too. Just because they have a competent product, i don't think that justifies any arse kissing. Like you say, they're a company and they're in business to make money.

Yeah, I can see why developers would be unhappy about the 30%. Maybe there's an argument to be made that the platform gives these games a greater potential market but I don't know enough about the business to try making that argument.

As far as capitalism goes they are not the shittiest of companies out there.

They have predatory tactics with lootboxes on their popular games though.

But most of their practices are not anticonsumer.

And they do not enforce drm and their own drm is a joke, so you can basically own most games if you want with very little effort. Just copy the files and have a generic steam crack around and you are golden for most cases.

Yeah. Really wish they were more like gog or itch

Honestly, I'll probally care about this more when someone else tries to make a service remotely close to what steam provides. Hell epic is probally the closest we got and they are in the red AND lacking in function set that steam provides. Steam charges 30% up until 10m and then 25 till 50m then it'd 20% while giving a multitude of extra services the other companies charging similar rates don't, seems fair to me.

some examples:

1. gog: 30%
   • store
   • review system
2. epic: 12% (isn't turning a profit)
   • store
   • cloud save
   • return system
3. steam 30
   • store
   • mod workshop
   • reviews
   • discussion forum
   • return system
4. Microsoft store 12%
   • store
   • review system

Looking into it, IGN made a nice picture (2019 though so a little old perhaps) so I'll add that too

I believe this is something to be aware of and if this is something you don't want use GOG instead. But in reality as long as Steam exists you will be able to download and play your games. If Steam ceases to exists then you will not be able to download them, but there will be ways to still play them, if you previously downloaded them. It is not like "owning" movies on Amazon (or just recently on the Playstation Store), where you always need to stream the movies.

Valve running an illegal underage casino

Valve doesn't run the casino. Valve owns the real estate under the casino and collects a rent. The casino is run by a kaleidoscope of fly-by-night marketing firms after being constructed with sweatshop labor from development studios in countries with abysmal labor laws.

Turns out, it takes very few employees to be the landlord of a casino. But the casino can't make money without a battalion of scammy sales shits and a legion of cheap construction workers. Valve can't make money without these workers. But because it collects rents on the real estate rather than revenues on the casino itself, it doesn't need to include these staffers in its accounting books.

No, there's companies that abuse valves market for their underground casinos.

I honestly don't get why you are mad at valve when they are not even in the slighest involved in that process apart from offering the market system. That's like being mad at cloudflare or AWS because a website that scams you uses it.