Gonna piggy back off this to drop a decent summary from coffeezilla about valve’s lootbox gambling problem that Valve has consistently dodged responsibility on. It’s really not new news but folks should be informed/reminded of it nonetheless.
I don’t watch CoffeeZilla in any large amount, but this pretty well sums up the situation in this instance.
I’m not bothering watching all the video. I hope they highlight that a good part of the company clients are kids.
I hope the employees are compensated well compared to the profit.
As of 2021, Valve employees made roughly $430K-4.5M, depending on role. Not bad, considering the average salary in WA is around $58k.
Source:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/13/24197477/valve-employs-few-hundred-people-payroll-redacted
Interesting. Looks like the hardware people are the lowest paid department.
Which maybe makes sense. They’ve started to see some success there, but not the way Steam or TF2 has.
As a private company with no board and stockholders to appease, with a guy in charge who is at least a descent person, employees at valve are doing fantastic. Way higher than “industry standards”.
with a guy in charge who is at least a descent person
There is no decent billionaire
You could sort of say that, just because he is a billionaire, but unlike virtually any others, his money has come from no oppression or cheap labor or dirty money, or slavery or anything else. He hasn’t drove up pricing, his employees are paid better than anywhere else, he doesn’t exploit a need, and he doesn’t use his money and position for political power.
So the only “not descent” thing he’s really done involving that money, is having that money. But with his company being a private company, he can also keep that money as a security nest egg in case the company somehow falls on bad times and keep paying his employees.
I’d argue valve spearheading microtransactions was a bad thing, traceable to tf2 items and cases. People don’t give them enough flak for filling games with monetization.
Honestly, the actual spearheading of microtransactions were physical collectible card game companies with games like MTG.
They made a free game and offered hats. I don’t see anything predatory or wrong with charging for skins that don’t make a game “pay to win” in a game that is free. Really, I call it the least terrible monetization form.
Exactly. The main problems are two-fold:
- chance-based item acquisition - if I can buy the thing I want, that’s fine, but if it’s all chance based, it promotes gambling
- market to resell items - now there’s a cash incentive to gamble
I don’t have a problem with paid cosmetics, I have a problem with promoting gambling.
That said, I think Valve has done more good than bad, so I like them. I don’t like everything they do though.
Tbh it’s more the getting users to gamble by paying for cases that got the ball rolling. Objectively, the least terrible monetization form is buying a game outright and then earning your items through playing as they used to do before free to play became normalized. That’s why all these shitty games come out with battle passes even though game developers did just fine supporting their game for a few years without the constant money churn. Because it’s the norm, people now think it’s impossible to have a game with updates that is bought outright, yet deep rock galactic does it just fine without $60/yr worth in battle passes.
But an online only game like team fortress? It doesn’t jive well. You can’t keep the servers going and the security and the anti cheat updated on a game that you pay once for unless you want the support and the game to be worthless two or three years after it was first released.
Your idea is great for single player games and noncompetitive team games like borderlands online play, and i own tons of games like that and its 90% of what i play. Not for games like team fortress, LoL, and Fortnite. For the latter games, it would mean support and servers would shut down while lots of people would still want to play them.
I played LoL quite a bunch over decade ago. Thousand+ hours over three years, probably. I spent a total of about $40. Had Hundreds of hours in on team fortress and never spent a dime.
his money has come from no oppression or cheap labor or dirty money, or slavery or anything else.
It came from loot crates.
So don’t buy loot crates if you don’t want to.
Also, his money came from Half Life episodes 1 and 2, and creating what would be known as the “Steam” store and getting it downloaded on every PC with Half Life 2 on it. Loot boxes were side jobs that came way later.
So insightful. Really contributes to the conversation.
It’s a bit weird (skip to 10:41 for specifically the pay system)
I’ll bet they all can afford a half-dozen yachts.
It’s funny that these publications only learned that this year when Valve has had a publicly available company directory on their website with names, pictures and email addresses since forever.
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.
Is Gabe taking a duck face selfie in the thumbnail?
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.
Might have something to do with getting underage kids hooked on gambling.
“It’s making more money per employee than Apple”
And how much are the game devs whos game are on steam making? If Valve ceo has enough money to buy a billion dollar worth fleet of mega yachts the share is simply off, Valve is making billions nobody else is.
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.
Exactly. Steam’s main competitors:
- EGS - literally bribes users with free games and pays for exclusivity agreements
- Microsoft - bought Activision Blizzard, Mojang and others to try to corner the game dev market, probably hoping people would use the Microsoft and Xbox stores
- PlayStation - owns the biggest console and has tons of exclusives
- GOG - major game studio (Witcher, Cyberpunk) and distribution platform that caters to DRM-free crowd
Except EGS, all of them sell their games on Steam, and Steam completely dominates PC gaming. They don’t have any exclusives other than the handful of Valve-developed games, they don’t bribe players with free games (and their sales are rarely the best), and the only hardware they make is open to direct competition if competitors bother to make a client for it (and users can play non-Steam games through Steam as well).
The only “bad” thing Steam does is charge a 30% fee, but they also let devs sidestep that through selling free Steam keys on other stores (or directly). Valve isn’t the villain here, and they’re arguable the least bad in their industry, except maybe GOG, but their DRM-free stance has less weight due to Steam’s good policies and superior customer support.
The entry ticket means billions… They lock the game market.
Nobody at Valve is preventing anyone from making a good alternative. Network effects are what makes one platform better than multiple platforms in this space, especially in the multiplayer match-making and other features where players are interacting.
A great deal of that money comes Valve running an illegal underage casino, and getting young kids addicted to gambling.
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.
I’m specifically talking about CS:GO, which is the most predatory and developed by Valve to be so.
CS:GO, which is the most predatory
Plenty of Gacha Games are more predatory than CS:GO. Valve is happy to host them all. CS:GO is a big money maker precisely because it has a large and enduring user base that isn’t fixated on Pay2Win game mechanics. Compare that to SummonerWars or Diablo Immortal or even just Candy Crush. There’s no contest.
It’s not just the tactics that make it the most predatory. It’s the massive platform and promotion that it gets by being a valve product.
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.
It’s because Epic Games is spending a shitload of money astroturfing these idiots into believing that Valve is personally running a massive counter strike casino and you need to THINK OF THE CHIILLLLDREEEEEEEN.
Which is ironic because fortnite is specifically tailored to children/teens and has had lootboxes until they got sued, had to remove it and were like: “Oh actually we always though lootboxes were stupid :( so we removed them :( pls like us :(.”
Now they’re probably trying to harm valve this way, which is dumb because counter strike is rated 18+.
And yeeees, no kid gives a shit about age rating - well aware of that. But I’m not sueing porn sites because kids can access porn with just clicking “Yes” on the popup.
I like lootboxes, if they’re done the way Heroes of the Storm does them.
You can’t buy them with real money, you can only get by playing the game, they can contain any random item from the game’s cash shop, and if you want to just buy the item outright instead of hoping it drops in a loot box…
Aren’t the kids mostly playing Fortnite and not Counter Strike? Doesn’t Fortnite outright advertise to children, have FOMO practices design to keep people addicted and spending money, and promote gun violence.
Well we need to see Valve in court over this how dare they make, host, and promote Fortnite!
Wait… Valve doesn’t make, promote or host Fortnite…
Curious
Fucking lol. The lengths you things go to. Just shaking my head at how fucking stupid you must think the average person is. What an incredibly hostile world you have to live in.
Kinda exposes the lie about entrepreneurship being about job creation. Not all high tides raise all ships.
Valve takes 30% on every game sold and you don’t even own the games. That’s sick capitalism in action, yet everybody kisses their ass.
EDIT for the Steam jerkers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r0a7-qyjss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13eiDhuvM6Y
Because somehow their competition is even worse
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
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.
I know according to their license if steam ceases to exist you lose everything, but I can’t see them ceasing to exist and having it not end up being a bloody mess. There is no way with how large steam is that if they decide to file for closure tomorrow that regulators wouldn’t get involved in trying to provide a way that everyone doesn’t lose their games. I believe steam has hit the point that banks are where enough people use the platform that if it tried to close government is going to get involved
Of course this is under the understanding that it’s a just choose to close situation, if it is a financial issue, I would expect that people would see that coming ahead of time and they would have a longer period of trying to find out a solution. And that solution could very well end up being a court order saying every purchase that’s been on Steam has to be able to be played without the steam client when they close the doors
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:
- gog: 30%
- store
- review system
- epic: 12% (isn’t turning a profit)
- store
- cloud save
- return system
- steam 30
- store
- mod workshop
- reviews
- discussion forum
- return system
- 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
- gog: 30%
And the share of Valve in the computer video game market is around 75% and even more than 80% in Europe. This company is clearly in a monopoly situation that prevents any competition. This situation is clearly undesirable.
There’s Xbox, but when that’s the alternative it is clear why Steam still dominates
The problem does not come from other plateforms but from the abuse of dominant position.
In what way did Valve abuse their monopoly position?
having a monopoly isn’t illegal but abusing it is
did pcgamer learn it by reading a similar article awhile back?
Is that just clever wording or are the employees actually seeing bigger checks?
For once, it looks like the answer is that they do see some big checks. From an article someone posted further down the thread:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/13/24197477/valve-employs-few-hundred-people-payroll-redacted
Lowest paid department is hardware, with an average of about $430k/employee.
Now, that is an average, and it’s hard to tell from here if a few highly paid employees in each department are throwing that number off.
It’s not ‘clever wording’, it says what it is - dividing profit by the number of employees results in a higher number for valve.
The heading isn’t comparing employee paychecks,it’s about overall company performance.
deleted by creator
Cool story. Where is Half-Life 3?
Hey moneybags Gabe…where is Half-Life 3?
According to Valve itself Half Life 3 doesn’t exist because they are out of ideas, Valve has always been a clan of tech wizards rather than writers
And they refuse to release a game unless it does something interesting. They don’t want to be a game studio, but they will make a game to prove a point:
- Steam - exists so Valve could easily update its games
- Half Life: Alyx - drive demand for VR
- Portal - interesting tech demo of portal mechanic
Their pace of game dev has reduced because the Steam service and hardware ventures are taking top priority. Why make a game when there’s much more interesting stuff to do elsewhere that will drive the core business?
