this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2023
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Valve is what happens when someone who's not just outright fucking evil invents a money printing machine
Yeah, and somehow they managed to invent like 90% of all "evil" MTX and DRM in the process, take a bigger cut than competitors and actively reject having a returns policy until pushed by regulators and competitors, all the while being super not evil.
It's a fine line to walk, that.
Having worked with DRM systems since long before Valve existed, I'm reasonably certain this is just plain false.
Yeah, and I don't remember Half-life being the game that introduced the world to horse armor.
The user is being hyperbolic, but is referring to their substantial role in popularising loot boxes, as well as the marketplace that has spawned a real gambling industry around it. Kids gamble on 3rd party sites for marketplace prizes and Valve does very little to interfere.
Not to mention that Steamworks DRM is practically non-existent anyways (and that it also wasn't necessary to use, it's rare, but some games just don't protect their game with any DRM).
Blending the storefront with a DRM solution? No, that was them.
That's their entire call to fame. They first turned their auto-patcher into a DRM service, then they enforced authorization of physical copies through it and eventually it became the storefront bundled with the other two pieces. If somebody did it before them I hadn't heard of it, but I'll happily take proof that I was wrong.
None of the pieces were new, SecuROM and others had been around for years, a few publishers had download and patch managers and I don't remember who did physical auth first, but somebody must have. But bundling the three? That was Steam.
I said not outright evil, not good.
Hah. Fair enough.
I mean, I'd say that's probably true of most companies making videogames. People are really hyperbolic about this stuff.
I mean, do you have any good examples though? Because most of those things are blatantly false and/or happened 9+ years ago. If that's that's the worst you've got then Valve is must be amazing.
Loot boxes were, if not invented by them, definitely popularised.
That was like 15 years ago hahaha
Itβs not a trend they abandoned - Counter Strike is still a huge source of deceptive digital item trade. It also spread to Team Fortress 2 in the meantime.
Didnβt TF2 have it first?
I made soooo much money offβa TF2. Bought an index!
I'm sure it did start with tf2 and dota 2 has them too
They straight up don't want people reselling games they own. They could do it easily, they just don't want to.
Yeah, Steam does cool things, but the moment you start thinking that very huge corporation somehow cares about you, you're doomed. Companies don't care about people, they care about numbers. Especially huge companies like Valve.
I don't know if many companies allow you to resell your digital goods in the first place (other than, funny enough, Valve themselves who let your resell digital Steam assets).
Valve's DRM prevents the resale of physical PC games, as Steam codes are single-use. They singlehandedly killed the used PC games market.
See what I mean? That's nuts. That's a nuts sentence right there. Imagine having a brand so sticky that people go "but did they do something really bad recently?
For the record, Valve's games run loot boxes today. Like, right now you can buy loot boxes from Valve. CS gambling is also still happening, although I'm not into it enough to know how much better it is these days.
They invented the battlepass, too, that's a Dota 2 thing. Hey, remember how people refer to buying cosmetics for games as "buying hats"? That one's from TF2. Oh, and technically the trading cards you get for purchases are NFTs,, since the term doesn't require the tokens to be stored in a blockchain.
And then there's the dev side. Everybody was super pissed with them on that end while they were figuring out greenlight processes, which... I'm not sure if they did or people just kinda got used to what's there. And if you're around devs you'll know that Valve's whole deal is to tell people what to do and give them zero support to do it. And there are other horror stories about shadowbans and Apple-style manual rejections and delistings and stuff, but at that point you're getting more into inside baseball and I wouldn't expect it to be shaping public perception at all.
Well I'm not going to be eternally mad at Coca Cola because they put cocaine in their soda a century ago, there's got to be a cut-off point somewhere. If I'm going to hate them it's because of the things they are doing right now. Valve over the last eight years has been pretty well-behaved considering their market position gives them the capacity to be way worse. There's nothing stopping them from
buying up exclusivity contracts
making a DRM that actually functions
developing only proprietary software
making their games pay-to-win
I will be eternally mad at Coca Cola because they took the cocaine out of their soda a century ago.
Oookay, so we're all cool with MTX cosmetics, loot boxes, battlepasses and lacking full ownership or transferability of games, then?
I'm just trying to figure out if the things Valve is doing right now are fine for everybody or just for Valve.
Which again, is my problem. I'll keep saying it, because having to argue for reality makes it sound like I'm a hater. I like Steam, I think Valve games are generally great (and it's a shame they've stopped making them), and I think Valve's management is a good example of many of the pros of a private company (look at Twitter for all the cons).
But holy crap, no, man, they are THE premier name in GaaS. Everybody is taking their cues from Valve, Epic or both in that space. Their entire platform is predicated on doing as little as possible and crowdsourcing as much as possible to keep the money machine churning. Corporations are not your friends.
There has to be a cut off somewhere. Are you still pissed off at Ford for being pro-Nazi in the 30s?
I'm pissed with ford for single handedle fucking our infrastructure, can't live without a car now. But anyway things that company's do 10 years ago or 90 stick around
Does Henry Ford being a nazi impact your purchasing decisions now?
Yes it effects my decision, I'd only buy defenders and vw's anyway
If he were still alive and running the company I do think that subject would probably come up, yeah.
But honestly, it's not a cutoff problem. Steam changed how games are marketed forever. I don't like the ways that went. I don't like that they killed physical media. I don't like that they killed ownership.
Those things are still happening. It's not over. They are still pushing that process. Today.
And then there's the MTX they're still pushing today. The loot boxes they're selling today. The race-to-the-bottom sales. The UGC nightmare landscape. ItΒ΄s all in there right now.
And again, I am cool with that being the world we live in. I'm even much more friendly to many of those concepts than the average gamer, I just don't pretend Steam is not doing those things.
I don't hate Steam. But Steam's vision for what gaming looks like is not mine. I don't particularly like it and I absolutely need a viable alternative to exist alongisde them indefinitely.
But what does that have to do with comparing it to epic? Epic isnt giving you a physical market, they are taking the next step towards digital ownership loss. Epic took the idea of loot boxes and gave it hyper cancer in fortnite, and uses that hyper cancer cash to fund giving you free games. The list goes on and on. Epics vision is not to undo the damage steam caused, its to worsen the damage to try and push it further.
If this was about the shit trends steam created, sure ok. But all of these problems with steam are things they did in the past establishing themselves, and are things epic is now actively doing to establish itself while taking each one a step further.
If these are problems for steam to have done, then supporting epic over steam is making the exact same mistake again, yes?
I haven't looked at Fortnite in ages, but I'm pretty sure there aren't any loot boxes in it anymore. They first let you preview them before buying and now I think it's all direct purchases for cosmetics and a battlepass. CS2 launched this year and it's still loot boxes all the way down.
So... how does the statute of limitations work now? Is Fortnite now cool with you but CS2 isn't? Or is it more that whatever Epic does is bad and whatever Valve does is good?
EDIT: Also, add "destroying the previous game to replace it with a fake sequel that is really just a patch" to their list of crimes against gaming. They didn't invent that one, because I see you there in the corner, Activision, we haven't forgotten about you, but it sure does suck.
CS2 is just a bad game tbh, but the loot boxes are still the same as they were when they put them in tf2. Fortnite specifically grinds my gears because of the active pointed targeting of kids. I like gambling, I dont mind adults choosing to gamble. I used to play mtg, the actual inventor of loot boxes. But fortnite wants to be the childrens gaming hub, and also sell loot boxes and battle passes. Thats pushing the line past where it was set.
But, like... Again, valve did these things and then set the line. Epic is pushing that line further. If the conversation was "hey why is valve shitty?" you would have a point. But thats not the convo. The conversation is "why is epic worse than valve?" And the answer is valve set shit standards that it holds to, but epic is trying to take those standards and push them further so it can be valve2, with worse established practices.
Youre saying "well valve made these bad decisions, whats the statute of limitations?" Ok, epic is actively trying to repeat those decisions. Why shouldnt we have learned from history, and not reward them doing the things you wish valve hadnt done?
Or do you prefer we have this same conversation in a decade, about epics decisions in the past tense?
No, you're not listening to me.
Epic. Took the lootboxes. Out of Fortnite.
Altogether. No loot boxes. None. They're gone.
So no, they're not pushing that line further. They were actually relatively early in reacting to regulator pressure by backing off from those. I'm gonna guess because they were caught having poorly designed underage checks and slapped with an exemplary fine, so it's not like they didn't get strong external incentives.
But if your argument is that Epic does it worse on a purely moral standpoint... well, you're objectively wrong and have been for about four years. The more interesting question is why do you not know this?
That's been my point all along. Valve's big win is branding. Their brand is absolute solid gold. They get a crazy amount of free passes no matter what they do. They're not bulletproof against controversy, but they're maybe the closest to that I can think of in the games industry.
Plenty of competitors have been more consumer-friendly than them in specific issues. EA started unconditional refunds when Valve was actively whining about regulators wanting them to do them. Epic backed out from loot boxes while Valve is actively adding them to new games. They are known to be the worst profit sharers, and it gets rougher the smaller a dev is... They're great at features and they do take very compelling stances in specific issues (many of them driven by the lifelong blood feud between Gabe and his former coworkers at Microsoft), but they are disproportionately seen as a league above every other first party regardles of facts.
That the kind of branding work you build a masters around right there. It's nuts.
Epic has done all of that and more lol
Their DRM is easily bypassable with SteamEmu, as opposed to other inventions like Denuvo
Ah, so if it's crackable it's fine?
Somebody tell Denuvo, they're off the hook.
Seriously, why try so hard to go to bat for a brand name? I get that everybody wants to root for something these days, but I'm too old to pick sides between Sega and Nintendo and I'm mature enough to reconcile that Steam can have the best feature set in a launcher and also be a major player in the process of erasing game ownership and the promotion of GaaS.
Since I can almost guarantee you major publishers would not publish on steam without some sort of DRM, yeah Im fine with them having an easily crackable form of DRM. Especially since they're not exactly jumping to prevent people from doing it.
Oh, they are not. Their DRM wiki page for devs goes "this DRM is easily crackable, we really recommend you use secondary DRM on top of it, see how to do that below". I linked to that elsewhere.
Which is... you know, fine, but definitely one of the reasons I always check if a game is on GOG first before buying it on Steam.
They invented Denuvo?
Drm = digital rights protection
Denovo is a form of drm made by iredto
Technically, Denuvo isn't DRM, it's anti-tamper. It protects the actual DRM from being modified or removed. It's closer to an anticheat, as it ensures the game wasn't modified.
Fun fact: my autocorrect changes anticheat to Antichrist.
... right. And it's also considered one of the premier "evil" DRMs.
So I ask again... they invented Denuvo?
Oh, is that the bar? I hadn't received the memo. That's cool, then, because Activision, Epic, Microsoft and Ubisoft didn't invent Denuvo either, so we're all good.
All their platfomrs support it and sell games with it, though.
For the record, Steam actively suggests using multiple online features and multiple layers of DRM to minimize piracy:
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/drm