We learned just how small Valve really is this year, but also how good it is at raking in the cash: It's making more money per employee than Apple

I mean, we can point at the legal system, but as you said, casinos just find new loopholes to circumvent the law. Ultimately, Valve is the group with the power to remove any gambling-adjacent mechanics from their games, but they have been pretty flaccid regarding changes because they know that they will lose money from it.

Crackdowns won't stop the gambling on CS, legislation and enforcement won't change it, but making items non-tradeable, or damaging item value or appeal through any method, can stop the gambling - but at the cost of CS's financial success and overall appeal.

Lootboxes, such as the CounterStrikes lootboxes, have simply been banned in Belgium.

It's not too hard to do it legally.

No, they wanted to pretend like they were combating them while leaving them fully intact. There are pretty easy ways to combat it, but that also requires they destroy the market they profit so much off of. The trade window system (purposefully) did very little to stop this. It's was purely PR, which some gullible people actually believed.

People like Valve, so they believe everything they do is honest and good. It isn't. It may be better than some other companies, but it doesn't make them good. You can recognize when they do the right thing while also recognizing when they're doing the wrong things, and enabling gambling (underage or not) is bad. At a minimum, they control CS esports, so they could ban advertising from gambling sites if they don't want to block it in its entirety.

Yeah, underage gambling is a big part of the topic.

Holy shit

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.

They’re around a big city, so the Seattle metro is about $76k. Still great for the valve employees though.

with a guy in charge who is at least a descent person

There is no decent billionaire

Valve is directly responsible for skins in Counter Strike which are gotten with 100% gambling mechanics. The fact that they can be sold for real life cash adds to this. I'm not saying its only Valve doing this, plenty of other games on Steam as well, but they certainly have a horse in the race.

The government need to get involved and relegate MTX. I agree they are responsible for hosting the platform and developing the systems in the case of CS skins. It's ugly but Valve are behaving as a rational business actor in this scenario.

I’m specifically talking about CS:GO, which is the most predatory and developed by Valve to be so.

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.

Tbh valve could stop this by making it only tradeble to your friends or make the skins non tradable so they are just that, skins for you.

Lootboxes are literally gambling and redeeming them even look like slots.

Allowing the selling/trading of skins allows for a black market to emerge to convert them to currency. Valve created the conditions for this exploitive system to emerge and does nothing to stop it. You can debate whether valve has a duty to stop it but they are forever a black eye on gaming in my eyes. Just because they sell cheap games twice a year doesn’t white wash them

Counter Strike is 100% a Valve-operated casino for kids.

What?

Did you ever read their terms of use ? This company is not a work of charity. They collect all kind of datas about you. It is voracious capitalism.

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

They are stacking billions. It means they are paying peanuts compared to what they are making.

I read somewhere most of the cost is payment providers, scams, chargebacks and refunds they can't offload onto the publishers.

I like Steam but come on, they are more profitable per employee than Apple. They are clearly not hurting even if I download my games over and over.

How does valve's ass taste?

Apple and Google commissions are around 15%.

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

Exactly. Why would you care about anything else than you own selfish little ass? You do realize that you've been brainwashed by capitalism, right?

They're not preventing competition. Valve did not go out of its way to kill Epic, Epic just sucks. They're not doing anything to kill GOG either.

There's a difference between a monopoly, and people just choosing one thing over another.

There’s Xbox, but when that’s the alternative it is clear why Steam still dominates

That's highly debatable. Maybe not for the specific reason being discussed, but Valve, and by extension Gabe, IS complicit in stuff like CS:GO gambling which preys on the underaged and and vulnerable.

Devs are happy to loose 30% ? Uhrffdruhehu jirddrhuduh

valve and gabe isn’t one of them.

A guy who owns a billion dollar worth fleet of mega yachts in 2024 (climate crisis and everyone getting poorer) sounds quite the villain to me.

Tons of indie devs have made it via steam.

And even more didn't make it. Steam being so big and the market spinning around it actually works against promoting smaller games because there's just as much you can see on steam shelf.

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.

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?