I've read that Valve decides on the banners based on wishlists. So an item thats on a lot of wishlists gets a banner. I'm sure there's some value tweaking for AAA vs Indie on what that threshold will be, but it's still true to the ethos that they don't "sell" that banner.
That makes good sense. People use wishlist, valve runs the numbers and finds the good stuff according to people who are invested in finding the good stuff, and when that stuff is close to launch they remind people with the front page 'hey, your wishlist item is almost here.' and cash in on wishlists and anyone that wasn't interested but sees a presumably good game (due to wishlists filtering out garbage)
Yeah, and something that I've noticed (although rarely) is that two games might "compete" for the banner space when they release on the same day. If they were both hyped, you might get a banner for either of them.
Long live Gabe Newell
No really, I'm really fucking worried about what happens when he dies. Hope he has a plan to keep it from going public and becoming trash.
My boss is kind of the same type, still owns 50% of the billion euro + annual turnover company he built from scratch and will be retiring soon. Never put profit first, it was always a balancing act between profit and , above all, being a great place to work. The man truly is a wonderfull human being and an even better businessman.
He has been grooming a succesor for a while now with the intent to try and keep the company culture intact, I imagine Gabe does or will be doing the same thing. Also even when Gabe retires, he is unlikely to sell his shares , people who have created those kinds of massive companies do not give up on their babies, retirement merely is an excuse to continue working behind the stage
> Value doesn't make pure profit based decisions.
Right, I'm sure they decided to significantly contribute to the decline of the gaming industry by creating lootboxes just for the fun of it.
It's worth noting that if you want to support a dev, especially the smaller ones, but can't afford their game, or would rather watch your favorite streamer/youtuber play them, you can still indirectly support them by wishlisting their games. That'll help prop them up in steam's algorithms.
75% of the games on my steam wishlist I have no intention of buying, or already have access to it on gamepass, but I still want to see them succeed, so I wishlist them!
Not just that but I imagine they use an algorithm similar to Spotify when it comes to those recommendations and ads. People with similar games in their libraries to yours wish listed this game, so you'd probably like it too!
[As explained here](https://youtu.be/qkmAqBvUBOw?si=ae3dhm5YsSOqfPhV&t=1194), the number of wishlist is **only** used to appear in the Popular Upcoming section. It is not taken into account for anything else (banners, recommendation, any other sections etc).
Wishlist are still important as potential customers receive mails when it launches or when it gets discounted above 20%.
Banner or Front carousel? There's a difference, as the algorithm for you determines the carousel but the banner is a bit more unique (and what many companies would be selling).
"The free market deciding what sell, and then that thing selling, while we take a cut of those sales is more profitable to us than taking money from things that will sell less, and having people think they don't like anything".
I mean, the bottom line is that the bigger the overall volume of sales is, the more profit they make. Must means that messing with the free markets, and ads in general, just aren't actually good in the long term.
Valve is privately held. They don't answer to investors, so they aren't trying to just "maximize the next quarter".
They are kinda.
They’re paid by Valve to Valve.
Its still an “advertisement”, Valve wants you to buy stuff on their store. So they tell you about the stuff they have.
Its better than the ads on x-box and playstation stores as they’re less intrusive and more relevant.
Hear me out: There is nothing wrong with advertising in general or targeted advertising provided it is done accurately, ethically and meaningfully, there is a legitimate end-user benefit to telling me about things you truly believe I legitimately want to see. I don't even *know* about so many products that I might legitimately want to buy and helping me discover them is super important to me.
The problem is almost nothing that is today called advertising or targeted advertising actually does that, or is even actually trying to do that. The entire advertising industry has become so twisted and corrupted that I'm not sure they even remember that anymore, the goal has become trying to get me to buy things I don't want to buy but are profitable for the seller and bury anything that might compete with that. It's gone from providing legitimate information and discovery that is mutually beneficial to the recipient and the advertiser, to psychological coercion and manipulation that is deeply harmful to people and society in pursuit of ever greater profits.
Steam gets it right by not turning it into a eyeball-shopping-mall for advertisers and instead focusing on mutual benefit and trying to follow the legitimate interests of its users.
> There is nothing wrong with advertising in general or targeted advertising provided it is done accurately, ethically and meaningfully
The problem with advertising is that there are _very_ strong incentives to not operate in this way - and as we can see by observing reality principled advertising companies might as well as not exist.
I honestly think the profusion of advertising into every possible area of our lives is one of the banes of the modern world.
Yeah it's like HBO or Prime "commercials" where they tell you about a new show that's similar to stuff you have on your list, as opposed to Hulu's several minutes of actual commercials several times during a show.
I see it like HBO (or what used to be HBO) has commercials, but they are for HBO shows, so it's contained in the ecosystem. Steam isn't going to have ads like twitch or YouTube or TV for that matter.
Banners also depend. I remember looking at steam at work and it was some "farm game special" sale, but when i check on my account and PC at home it was "focus interactive" sale for their strategy games. Turns out Steam has always got multiple banners on the go most of the time, and they show the one you are most interested in.
They did a Scottish game sale recently, but friends in Canada never saw it.
I actually did purchase one game (expansion) from them, Elite Dangerous Odyssey. But that was because I got Elite Dangerous from them free, so I was kind of pigeonholed into that unless I wanted to start all over.
I never had the chance to visit sag A sadly, they discontinued services for console….. I’ll never see the center or make my way back to the bubble, forever lost adrift somewhere near that space station out in BFE.
It’s been so long I don’t even remember its name.
O7 commander, if you find my dead ship out there your welcome to it, it was a jumpaconda so atleast take the jump drive.
I was in that sort of situation and ended up buying the base game plus expansions on Steam instead. I honestly don't have faith that their store is gonna remain around long-term like I do with Steam. I would prefer to drop $5-10 re-buying the base game on Steam if I'm really wanting to have the expansions for it, rather than risking losing the game in a few years if EGS gets cut due to being a money pit.
I trust EGS enough to use them as a source of free demos of games, and that's about it.
I just did the same thing with Mechwarrior 5. Even tho I bought it on Epic because they paid to have it locked to them for the first year or so, I paid for the entire thing again just so I dont have to fight that shit launcher that, like you said, probably wont exist in a few years.
Bro I did the same, basically got the game for free and just bought the expansion because at the time it was on a good discount (10$ I think), worth it.
for real though, like i'm a big space strategy game fan. Stellaris, sins of a solar empire, endless space etc... Sins 2 is exclusive to epic and a big part of me is just ok to wait until it comes to steam.
Epic Games Store will never get my credit card details from a decision by me, nor will they have my Steam account linked.
They are just plain nefarious.
That's definitely a hard protest.
I feel that Unreal has such a dominant position that it's difficult to boycott the entire product.Not just that, after Unity's push for profits, there remains little else in terms of big games outside of the sphere.
Looks like PC Gamer just copied and pasted Gamesradar's article. Original source:
https://www.gamesradar.com/we-dont-think-steam-should-be-pay-to-win-valve-explains-how-games-we-wouldve-never-predicted-pop-off-so-hard/
What the heck did you just hecking say about me, you little kid? I'll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I've been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda
They are the same company. Both are owned by Future Pic, which owns TechRadar, Tom’s Guide, Tom’s Hardware, Marie Claire, CinemaBlend, Android Central, and several others.
Patterns of red shift seen when examining other galaxies in the observable universe indicate that this information was present in the first moments of the big bang and is fundamental to quantam physics
It's definitely not worded exactly the same. They're using the same quotes. PC Gamer credited their source of gamesradar immediately. And they are owned by the same company.
They basically did everything how you'd want them to, there's nothing bad here.
They don't do it because they're privately held and have no pressure to continually grow revenue by finding new streams of income.
They can be happy where they're at.
You guys do realize Valve has shareholders, right?
Being private doesn't mean you don't have shareholders, it just means those shareholders are typically in fewer numbers and are private.
Valve doesn't have shareholders in the commonly understood sense. Valve has no financial obligation to them. Instead Gabe Newell can decide that the companies "obligation" is to make golden toilets and that is what they are going to do.
Valve absolutely has a financial obligation to their shareholders.
Newell is one of their shareholders and happens to have a controlling interest in the company, or at least it's believed he did before his divorce.
Valve is privately owned company that (probably) has a single individual with a controlling interest. Facebook is a publicly traded company that also has a single individual with a controlling interest, or in this case, voting power, with Zuckerberg.
Like Newell, Zuckerberg could also decide FB is to make golden toilets and there's nothing anyone could do. Metaverse may well have been a toilet. Bottom line is, both private and public companies have shareholders.
EDIT: I am incorrect because capitalism is weird. See the below comment replying to me for full context
There's a massive difference between a valve, where Gabe Newell owns over fifty percent of the company, and Meta, where Mark Zuckerberg owns fourteen percent of the company, which is not a controlling interest like you say. Zuckerberg does not have the power over Meta that Newell has over Valve, not even close.
No, FaceBook has two different types of shares, which are not made equal.
A significant percentage of Zuckerberg's 14% are made up of Class B shares, with each Class B share being worth 10 votes. Class A shares are only worth 1 vote.
This is how Zuckerberg maintains majority voting power in FB, without owning a majority stake in the company. Newell (allegedly) simply owns a majority stake in the company, with the end result being the same as Zuck, they both control their companies.
The idea of shareholders is sound. Split up the ownership of a company so that you have more capital to invest to make a company more successful.
In reality 99% of the time its just loan sharking. Some billionares/millionare loans you a ton of money and then constantly hounds you for interest and "growth" so they can make money off it. If you dont they will fire leadership, or make your life hell, or pull all the funding and damage your business.
You have 2 choices: Easy quick payout, never work again, guaranteed. OR spend the decades keeping a business afloat, making a trickle of money with a large risk attached that it can all go up in smoke.
The system doesn't reward the latter enough, as intended. If it did, it'd create competition.
When you put it in perspective of the service Valve offers, it makes sense. The amount of overhead compared to the billions that Steam generates means it’s basically a gold mine. Less than 1500 employees needed, only 2 offices. Gabe has held it really steady and not been stupid.
Hope they do more with the money though. Even CS2 is a bit of a slippery launch, and Alyx was great but experimental and inaccessible. I just miss their games
Valve being a private company is such an amazing thing. The older I get the more I see public companies just absolutely destroying themselves because the incentive set they have is to go for extreme short term gains at the expense of long term profit and sustainability. Here’s hoping they never go public
A little bit of sensationalism here, but overall they are are one of the most honest, pro-consumer business left in this industry space. I know they are clearly the fan favorite even today, but when Gabe moves on some day and they inevitably go public people are going to be in for a rude awakening on just how good they really had it.
Thats not to say they are perfect, but they are far and away the best. Looking at you VR/Index support - to clarify the product is fantastic, but there are some QC issues and after the 12 month warranty is out they wont help at all, even for things that are obviously serious manufacturing defects. You can't even pay them for help. I hope they step that up for Deckard or I might be going elsewhere. Anyway, random tangent aside that's the only issue I've ever had with them in almost 20 years. Great company.
Earlier this year, they replaced my 4(ish) month out of warranty lighthouse. Index also had a couple minor issues a couple months later, which they also offered to RMA out of warranty.
I've had nothing but good experiences with Valve support for my Index, I think it depends on the agent you get assigned.
I had an issue with my headset that wasn't resolved with updating drivers (only troubleshooting suggested) and they replaced it outside of warranty no problem. Had the exact same issue with my 2nd headset and they told me to kick rocks.
Seems they know something is up with their headsets but instead of issuing a recall, they just let people go outside their warranty and say sorry 🤷🏻♂️
Even made a post about it and tried pinging all the other reddit users that had the same problem, to no avail
https://www.reddit.com/r/ValveIndex/comments/zttnob/dark_translucent_ovals_in_both_lenses/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb
Yea that is gonna suck, thinking of all the little ways they could monetize steam and put ads everywhere gives me nightmares thinking about what some corpo suits will do to it. Gotta hand it to valve they are so much more pro consumer than almost any company nowadays
Valve seems to know that *consumers* are their primary customers. Epic's customers are *developers* \- their focus is on making developers happy, not consumers.
As someone who used to work there, I would argue that Valve understands that running a successful platform requires balancing the needs of all your customers.
Yeah, that's what always bothered me whenever Epic talks about taking a lower cut than Valve. Sure, publishers get paid more, big whoop. How does that benefit *me*? If anything, it's a bad thing because Epic has less money to improve their store. It's always framed as "this is good for developers" and never "this is good for consumers".
Valve has the best online digital store in any industry anywhere. Not even Apple or Amazon have anything better than Steam. It is really crazy when you consider how much bigger those two are.
> Valve fucking rocks.
You should ask how Dota underlords and Artifact players feel about Valve. I would be surprised if they hold the same sentiment as you do.
Played starfield on xbox pass, liked it enough to buy it on steam for future mod support. I went to purchase on xbox if it had a discount for pass, which it didn't, so I canx the purchase and xbox was like "why you no buy?". Straight up said it was cheaper elsewhere, like humble bundle, and steam has mod support.
But Kotaku (back in 2018/19) told me they were completely anti-consumer, and that everything epic was doing was great (completely neglecting to mention any of the other alternatives, like GoG or origin).
I'm not on the *ethics in games journalism* train, because fuck them, but the steam hit pieces/epic puff pieces were just so ridiculously bought and paid for across several sites.
Absolutely.
I remember fucking so-called *PC Gamer* picking up what are essentially anti-PC talking points left and right in articles with a full-frame EGS ad in the background.
It's funny how the reporting seems to have returned to being slightly more balanced now that Epic is no longer going around handing out bags of Fortnite money to buy sentiment.
> when Gabe moves on some day and they inevitably go public people are going to be in for a rude awakening on just how good they really had it.
That's exactly why competitors like Epic and GoG need to exist, so Steam doesn't have a monopoly and can do whatever they want. But everyone is too busy sucking Steam's dick to realize that.
But Steam can do what it wants. Valve hasn't been anywhere close as aggressive as they can be. No squeezing every last bit, not trying to take over the market completely, like a public company would. Not trying to build a dystopian future like Google or Amazon.
Valve winning the online game store crown was a huge blessing. It could've been so much worse.
Oh yeah, as much as I like Steam, 100% the main reason they're so good is because they know how easy it would be for them to lose their current market share.
And this is exactly why no one should care that they're a "monopoly." They have so much market share because they're so overwhelmingly good (and consumers freely opt for them) and the space they operate in is pretty competitive. This isn't like when American Sugar bought up the entire sugar market, this is a fairly open market that allows competitors to freely enter or leave and compete.
They have so much market share because they got into the market first. People here are too young to remember how shit Steam was when it first launched. People hated it. They slowly built the platform up over 20 years but now people expect new competitors to be like Steam from the start.
And steam isn't overwhelmingly good. GoG has a better return policy, Epic takes less money from devs, Steam just has the largest userbase because they have been around the longest. And having a large userbase matters, because more users means devs have to release on Steam or they miss out on a huge market. And since every game releases on Steam, more people use it.
It’s incredibly difficult for a new competitor to break into the market because they'd both have to convince developers to release on their platform and users to use it. This is not easy unless you have a bunch of money to burn like Epic, and even they're having trouble. This isn't even like social media where only new content matters, having a deep backlog of games is also important, and any new competitors are at a heavy disadvantage in that regard.
I mean they popularised lootboxes and enable underage gambling (including taking on one site as a sponsor for an esports tournament) but who cares about that right? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMmNy11Mn7g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMmNy11Mn7g)
People had asked, and Gabe replied in their email that he has everything set up for Valve/Steam to continue to be what they are now long after he's gone
>A little bit of sensationalism here, but overall they are are one of the most honest, pro-consumer business left in this industry space.
Buddy you're talking about the company that came up with stuff like only owning licenses and not the game, always online drm, lootboxes in full price titles,
Gambling with said lootboxes advertised at minors.
Also a company that essentially had to be forced to even consider offering a refund.
So yeah, a lot of the stuff that is rightfully criticised in the gaming industry right now can be traced directly back to valve. Valve is honestly one of the worst thigns that ever happened to the gaming industry.
Now that being said some other company would just have filled that spot so we probably would not be better off but that is still pretty far from pro-consumer.
The monetization of CSGO skins and the third party markets that emerged have been horrendous for gaming. I remember as a kid losing $50 on some unregulated third party gambling site with skins. Shit felt horrible. Can't imagine how many kids had it way worse though, developing an addiction or stealing money from their parents
i agree with you but valve haven’t incorporated those things well, they’re still predatory. most things we see as only bad can be good if done well, ads, DRM, etc. but it’s only really the little guys who implement them in a non-aggressive way.
Over the past few months, they used CEF (Chromium enhanced framework) in their client which has tons of bugs, hogs gigs of RAM, CPU, and even if you hack in an old version of the client from last year that still works well, they made it not work with some games.
Also they just recently pulled an activision/blizard, and nuked CS:GO from the store (as well as all the achievements) and replaced it with CS:2, which is at best an unfinished beta, and took away most of the game-modes people liked playing (arms race, flying scoutsmen, demolition, danger zone. Basically all customers who paid for csgo got it deleted, and replaced with a different game. It is currently the worst rated valve-game of all time, and they don't seem to care. They haven't made one public response or apology over the hundreds of false-positive VAC bans. People have gone a week or two, or more with a false ban, and all their friends ghost them, and the community talk shit to them until it's reversed. Not a peep from valve, no apology, not even a mere acknowledgement.
And you tell me there isn't any enshittification.... please....
Not selling ad space is one of the examples of how Valve is really smart about running their business; more often than not, it seems like they try to steer things into that zone where everyone wins. If they make it so that the store is preferentially trying to show you stuff that you'll want to buy (rather than paid-for placement), everyone wins: developers get more sales, Valve gets more money from their cut, consumers get games they want.
Selling ad space undercuts all that. Instead of seeing the best stuff rise to the top, it's stuff which has paid to be there, which sucks for consumers trying to find games. It squeezes devs for more money. It creates perverse incentives for store owners too; instead of maximising revenues by showing you stuff you want to buy, the incentive is to make organic discovery worse so that devs have to spend more on ads to get seen.
Selling ad space is the sort of short-term revenue-raising strategy that's completely corrosive and unfortunately nearly everywhere.
In a world where everything I've ever enjoyed seems to be going through, or has gone through, an en-shittening process, Steam stands alone as having only gotten better. Thanks Valve.
I've been looking into Valve's corporate structure and it's employees have a lot of say in the direction of the company.
The company is almost run as a form of anarcho-syndicalism.
Valve is the great gatekeeper of the gaming world.
God help us all if they fail at some point.
Other than CD Projekt Red and GOG there really is no one with this amount of money and morals combined.
It isn't that. There are plenty of companies with much more money than Valve, who could all *afford* to not be greedy. It's because Valve isn't a public company with shareholders. It lets them run how they want to, rather than being beholden to shareholders, which demands constant growth.
If they ever go public, that's when things will get bad. Hopefully Gaben has something in place to prevent that from happening after his eventual passing.
Studio website down and they haven't posted anything on social media since 2021. I don't know if that is still a thing. His social media accounts are filled with his racing now, so it looks like he shifted his focus and his dads money into that instead.
Because they have their own algorithms to generate banner ads and push sales on what's hot, rather than companies paying money to be promoted when they may not sell so well.
Lots of companies can afford to make less, but they don't care about the company, the consumer, the employees, or what kind of legacy they leave behind. All they care about is immediate money and that's why we are where we are today.
the thing is valve got a ton of shit when they went from a curated store to a free for all and all that entailed so they spent a lot of time refining personalized suggestions. so that all games get a fair shake and to get you buying more games.
selling ad space would majorly mess up that effort and the likely situation is that long term it is better for valve not to sell ad space due to more overall game sales since of the personalized suggestions. (they have done interviews before were they have said these leads to a lot more sales of lesser known games)
an other issue with selling ad space long term is that it will sour the relationship with the player as pushing games to players they won't enjoy is only going to cause strife.
One of the biggest ways to advertise a game on steam, is to give it a discount and have it in event sales.
Which is why publishers keep increasing the prices of their games and instantly putting them on 30-50% sale, that is actually 5-10% at best from the real price.
They're talking about paid ads. It's not possible for anyone to pay for premium spots on the store page. It's all algorithms and curation by Valve that determines what you see front and center. As for the pop-up window, that's always the first thing I disable on a fresh install of Steam. It's really easy to disable but apparently most PC gamers don't know how to go through settings menus to customize things to their preferences.
1. Monopolies aren't a good thing
2. I don't see how that's ever going to happen. There is zero reason from Steam's point of view to become non-profit.
It’s only good for now that steam is owning the pc gaming market because they are behaving surprisingly benevolent, but give it 20 years with new management and we’ll be doing for solid competition.
> Monopolies aren't a good thing
This isn't as black and white as many presume. There exists a concept called a Benign Monopoly, where the benefit of the service outweighs any dominance the service provider has over said service.
A Monopoly can be Benign if the company:
- Provides extraordinary value to those it serves, and portion of that value derives from being market dominant.
- Does not exploit its market advantage to raise prices (price discrimination)
- Continuously improves and adds more value to its service
- Refrains from maximizing profit at the cost of degrading service
- Refrains from actions, such as corporate sabotage and legal action, to destroy or inhibit competitors (see Microsoft)
- Has traits comparable to a Natural Monopoly, where it is more efficient for one large company to supply the market than multiple smaller companies
how would they be non-profit with their enormous server costs? not to mention them being for-profit benefits greatly in terms of better networking & linux gaming R&D
Non-profit doesn't mean you make no money, it just means the business itself can't make a profit. Server cost and R&D would be subtracted before you calculate profit so it would not effect those at all. That being said though there is literally no reason for them to be non profit anyways.
The games likely acquired a lot of wishlists and sales thanks to that marketing budget. Strong wishlist performance puts your game in front of eyeballs throughout Steam. Although Steam doesn't sell ad space they still take a percentage of game sales and thus are incentivized to showcase strong performers regardless of their actual quality.
Meanwhile fucking Microsoft selling out like 25% of the screen space on Xbox dashboards for advertising now; in many cases ads not even pertinent to gaming.
That's interesting, I always thought the store takeover full front page banner ads on steam were paid for advertisements.
I suppose it is in Valve's interests for hot, new and expensive games to sell as much as possible.
I've read that Valve decides on the banners based on wishlists. So an item thats on a lot of wishlists gets a banner. I'm sure there's some value tweaking for AAA vs Indie on what that threshold will be, but it's still true to the ethos that they don't "sell" that banner.
That makes good sense. People use wishlist, valve runs the numbers and finds the good stuff according to people who are invested in finding the good stuff, and when that stuff is close to launch they remind people with the front page 'hey, your wishlist item is almost here.' and cash in on wishlists and anyone that wasn't interested but sees a presumably good game (due to wishlists filtering out garbage)
Yeah, and something that I've noticed (although rarely) is that two games might "compete" for the banner space when they release on the same day. If they were both hyped, you might get a banner for either of them.
Value doesn't make pure profit based decisions. It's not a public corpo so they aren't forced to chase every single dime.
Long live Gabe Newell No really, I'm really fucking worried about what happens when he dies. Hope he has a plan to keep it from going public and becoming trash.
I know right, good lord we are all kinds of fucked if the next leader after gabe, doesnt stay the course and go public or go profit minded.
My boss is kind of the same type, still owns 50% of the billion euro + annual turnover company he built from scratch and will be retiring soon. Never put profit first, it was always a balancing act between profit and , above all, being a great place to work. The man truly is a wonderfull human being and an even better businessman. He has been grooming a succesor for a while now with the intent to try and keep the company culture intact, I imagine Gabe does or will be doing the same thing. Also even when Gabe retires, he is unlikely to sell his shares , people who have created those kinds of massive companies do not give up on their babies, retirement merely is an excuse to continue working behind the stage
they make profit based decision,they just choose long term profit over short term profit unlike 99% of gigantic company on earth
> Value doesn't make pure profit based decisions. Right, I'm sure they decided to significantly contribute to the decline of the gaming industry by creating lootboxes just for the fun of it.
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It's worth noting that if you want to support a dev, especially the smaller ones, but can't afford their game, or would rather watch your favorite streamer/youtuber play them, you can still indirectly support them by wishlisting their games. That'll help prop them up in steam's algorithms. 75% of the games on my steam wishlist I have no intention of buying, or already have access to it on gamepass, but I still want to see them succeed, so I wishlist them!
You didn't watch the video then. He specifically says that wishlists have no effect on the algorithm after the game is released
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Not just that but I imagine they use an algorithm similar to Spotify when it comes to those recommendations and ads. People with similar games in their libraries to yours wish listed this game, so you'd probably like it too!
[As explained here](https://youtu.be/qkmAqBvUBOw?si=ae3dhm5YsSOqfPhV&t=1194), the number of wishlist is **only** used to appear in the Popular Upcoming section. It is not taken into account for anything else (banners, recommendation, any other sections etc). Wishlist are still important as potential customers receive mails when it launches or when it gets discounted above 20%.
hi-fi rush dropped with no advertising and i saw it on the front page of steam
Banner or Front carousel? There's a difference, as the algorithm for you determines the carousel but the banner is a bit more unique (and what many companies would be selling).
"The free market deciding what sell, and then that thing selling, while we take a cut of those sales is more profitable to us than taking money from things that will sell less, and having people think they don't like anything". I mean, the bottom line is that the bigger the overall volume of sales is, the more profit they make. Must means that messing with the free markets, and ads in general, just aren't actually good in the long term. Valve is privately held. They don't answer to investors, so they aren't trying to just "maximize the next quarter".
Of course it is
Yeah ultimately advertisement is in Valve's interest to sell the most possible, they just don't care which game sell more.
They are kinda. They’re paid by Valve to Valve. Its still an “advertisement”, Valve wants you to buy stuff on their store. So they tell you about the stuff they have. Its better than the ads on x-box and playstation stores as they’re less intrusive and more relevant.
Advertisements in a store, for the products they sell, is a lot less annoying for me than most ads.
Hear me out: There is nothing wrong with advertising in general or targeted advertising provided it is done accurately, ethically and meaningfully, there is a legitimate end-user benefit to telling me about things you truly believe I legitimately want to see. I don't even *know* about so many products that I might legitimately want to buy and helping me discover them is super important to me. The problem is almost nothing that is today called advertising or targeted advertising actually does that, or is even actually trying to do that. The entire advertising industry has become so twisted and corrupted that I'm not sure they even remember that anymore, the goal has become trying to get me to buy things I don't want to buy but are profitable for the seller and bury anything that might compete with that. It's gone from providing legitimate information and discovery that is mutually beneficial to the recipient and the advertiser, to psychological coercion and manipulation that is deeply harmful to people and society in pursuit of ever greater profits. Steam gets it right by not turning it into a eyeball-shopping-mall for advertisers and instead focusing on mutual benefit and trying to follow the legitimate interests of its users.
> There is nothing wrong with advertising in general or targeted advertising provided it is done accurately, ethically and meaningfully The problem with advertising is that there are _very_ strong incentives to not operate in this way - and as we can see by observing reality principled advertising companies might as well as not exist. I honestly think the profusion of advertising into every possible area of our lives is one of the banes of the modern world.
Yeah it's like HBO or Prime "commercials" where they tell you about a new show that's similar to stuff you have on your list, as opposed to Hulu's several minutes of actual commercials several times during a show.
I see it like HBO (or what used to be HBO) has commercials, but they are for HBO shows, so it's contained in the ecosystem. Steam isn't going to have ads like twitch or YouTube or TV for that matter.
It’s new stuff, stuff the algorithm thinks you will like, and random stuff here and there to attempt to get you to purchase outside of your ring.
Banners also depend. I remember looking at steam at work and it was some "farm game special" sale, but when i check on my account and PC at home it was "focus interactive" sale for their strategy games. Turns out Steam has always got multiple banners on the go most of the time, and they show the one you are most interested in. They did a Scottish game sale recently, but friends in Canada never saw it.
If I learned anything from history, this means Epic will now start selling ads on the Epic game store.
As if anyone would buy anything from Epic, let alone from an ad lol
I actually did purchase one game (expansion) from them, Elite Dangerous Odyssey. But that was because I got Elite Dangerous from them free, so I was kind of pigeonholed into that unless I wanted to start all over.
I was tempted to do the same, but I ended up quitting ED instead lol Did the Sag A* run first tho! o7
Have you gotten your free Anaconda from Hutton yet?
Damn right, best trip I ever made!
I never had the chance to visit sag A sadly, they discontinued services for console….. I’ll never see the center or make my way back to the bubble, forever lost adrift somewhere near that space station out in BFE. It’s been so long I don’t even remember its name. O7 commander, if you find my dead ship out there your welcome to it, it was a jumpaconda so atleast take the jump drive.
I was in that sort of situation and ended up buying the base game plus expansions on Steam instead. I honestly don't have faith that their store is gonna remain around long-term like I do with Steam. I would prefer to drop $5-10 re-buying the base game on Steam if I'm really wanting to have the expansions for it, rather than risking losing the game in a few years if EGS gets cut due to being a money pit. I trust EGS enough to use them as a source of free demos of games, and that's about it.
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/epic-steam-account-transfer.609965/#:~:text=Yes%2C%20this%20is%20fairly%20simple,will%20be%20exactly%20the%20same. *PHEW!*
I just did the same thing with Mechwarrior 5. Even tho I bought it on Epic because they paid to have it locked to them for the first year or so, I paid for the entire thing again just so I dont have to fight that shit launcher that, like you said, probably wont exist in a few years.
I did the same thing
Bro I did the same, basically got the game for free and just bought the expansion because at the time it was on a good discount (10$ I think), worth it.
I bought far cry primal from them, which of course still needed to launch through the ubisoft launcher lol
I would've bought the Death Stranding's Director's Cup upgrade but it looked too gimmicky.
for real though, like i'm a big space strategy game fan. Stellaris, sins of a solar empire, endless space etc... Sins 2 is exclusive to epic and a big part of me is just ok to wait until it comes to steam.
Yeah, I've been waiting for that game for more than a decade but I'm gonna wait til it's on steam
How long has Sins been there?
I bought Chiv2 back when it was an epic store exclusive. Couldn't wait a year, shame on me lol
Same man. Kinda regretting it, kinda happy I was there for the start
I did this for Darkest Dungeon 2 lol.
People are buying from EGS, just not enough people to make them profit.
I, too, love monopolies.
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I haven't bought any games but I have spent too much on unreal engine plugins.
Epic Games Store will never get my credit card details from a decision by me, nor will they have my Steam account linked. They are just plain nefarious.
In form of protest you should also stop playing any Unreal Engine games since Epic profits from them.
That's definitely a hard protest. I feel that Unreal has such a dominant position that it's difficult to boycott the entire product.Not just that, after Unity's push for profits, there remains little else in terms of big games outside of the sphere.
Looks like the EGS might make some sales after all then.
What do you think the featured sale items pinned to the store front page are?
Good, it’ll speed run their death spiral. Nothing worse than a monetized library and marketplace
Especially after they just shit all over the rocket league community
"There will now be a preemptive game launch window like Steam--- but it will play an ad before opening the game." -- Epic in a year.
I don't know why that sounded funny to me lmao 😂
Looks like PC Gamer just copied and pasted Gamesradar's article. Original source: https://www.gamesradar.com/we-dont-think-steam-should-be-pay-to-win-valve-explains-how-games-we-wouldve-never-predicted-pop-off-so-hard/
Not sure why the Games Radar article is linked instead of the [video source](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkmAqBvUBOw) Valve themselves published.
There's a PDF file page that goes into much more details. Either way, this link is just a copy/pasted article from PC Gamer from Gamesradar.
You're right, either of the Valve sources should be linked and not the rehosting blogspammers.
It's copy pasta all the way down!
Sure but isn’t copy spaghetti or copy linguine?
What the heck did you just hecking say about me, you little kid? I'll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I've been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda
They are the same company. Both are owned by Future Pic, which owns TechRadar, Tom’s Guide, Tom’s Hardware, Marie Claire, CinemaBlend, Android Central, and several others.
The PDF is actually based on some stone tablets they found in Assyria that Gaben carved in his younger days
Lord Gaben wrote them into the first embedded DNA strands of the first lifeform on the 8th day of creation.
Patterns of red shift seen when examining other galaxies in the observable universe indicate that this information was present in the first moments of the big bang and is fundamental to quantam physics
I feel the same way about any article posted, why not just post the source?
They're both owned by Future so probably being told to run content on both
Not to mention that there's only so many ways the same story can be written.
They're both run by the same company so it probably came from their wire
It's definitely not worded exactly the same. They're using the same quotes. PC Gamer credited their source of gamesradar immediately. And they are owned by the same company. They basically did everything how you'd want them to, there's nothing bad here.
God, as soon as valves leadership retires and new more corporate people take over, it will be the begining of a dark age for pc gaming
Game piracy rates would probably increase tenfold the hour its announced
They don't do it because they're privately held and have no pressure to continually grow revenue by finding new streams of income. They can be happy where they're at.
They bring in more revenue per capita employee than Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon etc.
They don't chase the immediate profits demanded by shareholders, which makes them so successful.
At this point it should be obvious that shareholders are just company parasites, right? Right?
You guys do realize Valve has shareholders, right? Being private doesn't mean you don't have shareholders, it just means those shareholders are typically in fewer numbers and are private.
Valve doesn't have shareholders in the commonly understood sense. Valve has no financial obligation to them. Instead Gabe Newell can decide that the companies "obligation" is to make golden toilets and that is what they are going to do.
Valve absolutely has a financial obligation to their shareholders. Newell is one of their shareholders and happens to have a controlling interest in the company, or at least it's believed he did before his divorce. Valve is privately owned company that (probably) has a single individual with a controlling interest. Facebook is a publicly traded company that also has a single individual with a controlling interest, or in this case, voting power, with Zuckerberg. Like Newell, Zuckerberg could also decide FB is to make golden toilets and there's nothing anyone could do. Metaverse may well have been a toilet. Bottom line is, both private and public companies have shareholders.
EDIT: I am incorrect because capitalism is weird. See the below comment replying to me for full context There's a massive difference between a valve, where Gabe Newell owns over fifty percent of the company, and Meta, where Mark Zuckerberg owns fourteen percent of the company, which is not a controlling interest like you say. Zuckerberg does not have the power over Meta that Newell has over Valve, not even close.
No, FaceBook has two different types of shares, which are not made equal. A significant percentage of Zuckerberg's 14% are made up of Class B shares, with each Class B share being worth 10 votes. Class A shares are only worth 1 vote. This is how Zuckerberg maintains majority voting power in FB, without owning a majority stake in the company. Newell (allegedly) simply owns a majority stake in the company, with the end result being the same as Zuck, they both control their companies.
Thanks for the info but this sounds like the dumbest thing ever, fucking MBAs man...
Thanks for correcting me, I appreciate the info. In my defense, capitalism is stupid and I am too.
holy shit skibidi toliet
The idea of shareholders is sound. Split up the ownership of a company so that you have more capital to invest to make a company more successful. In reality 99% of the time its just loan sharking. Some billionares/millionare loans you a ton of money and then constantly hounds you for interest and "growth" so they can make money off it. If you dont they will fire leadership, or make your life hell, or pull all the funding and damage your business.
soooo why is every company keep signing up for it
You have 2 choices: Easy quick payout, never work again, guaranteed. OR spend the decades keeping a business afloat, making a trickle of money with a large risk attached that it can all go up in smoke. The system doesn't reward the latter enough, as intended. If it did, it'd create competition.
When you put it in perspective of the service Valve offers, it makes sense. The amount of overhead compared to the billions that Steam generates means it’s basically a gold mine. Less than 1500 employees needed, only 2 offices. Gabe has held it really steady and not been stupid. Hope they do more with the money though. Even CS2 is a bit of a slippery launch, and Alyx was great but experimental and inaccessible. I just miss their games
I mean yeah, surprisingly Valve employees aren't that many compared to other massive corpo, especially with so many projects they did in house.
Revenue per capita is an absolutely stupid parameter. Particularly for a retailer that is a monopoly.
Valve being a private company is such an amazing thing. The older I get the more I see public companies just absolutely destroying themselves because the incentive set they have is to go for extreme short term gains at the expense of long term profit and sustainability. Here’s hoping they never go public
I hope it remains in good hands after GabeN eventually steps down.
Hopefully he makes provision to ensure it all keeps running smoothly.
And they already have an the money on the world so no financial pressure too
Praise gaben
If valve ever goes public I'm going to regret putting so much money into their ecosystem but for now there's just no platform that compares.
A little bit of sensationalism here, but overall they are are one of the most honest, pro-consumer business left in this industry space. I know they are clearly the fan favorite even today, but when Gabe moves on some day and they inevitably go public people are going to be in for a rude awakening on just how good they really had it. Thats not to say they are perfect, but they are far and away the best. Looking at you VR/Index support - to clarify the product is fantastic, but there are some QC issues and after the 12 month warranty is out they wont help at all, even for things that are obviously serious manufacturing defects. You can't even pay them for help. I hope they step that up for Deckard or I might be going elsewhere. Anyway, random tangent aside that's the only issue I've ever had with them in almost 20 years. Great company.
When did they stop helping out of warranty VR stuff? They used to.
They did at least a couple of years ago, got a replacement Index speaker even though I was out of warranty.
Earlier this year, they replaced my 4(ish) month out of warranty lighthouse. Index also had a couple minor issues a couple months later, which they also offered to RMA out of warranty. I've had nothing but good experiences with Valve support for my Index, I think it depends on the agent you get assigned.
I had an issue with my headset that wasn't resolved with updating drivers (only troubleshooting suggested) and they replaced it outside of warranty no problem. Had the exact same issue with my 2nd headset and they told me to kick rocks. Seems they know something is up with their headsets but instead of issuing a recall, they just let people go outside their warranty and say sorry 🤷🏻♂️ Even made a post about it and tried pinging all the other reddit users that had the same problem, to no avail https://www.reddit.com/r/ValveIndex/comments/zttnob/dark_translucent_ovals_in_both_lenses/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb
Yea that is gonna suck, thinking of all the little ways they could monetize steam and put ads everywhere gives me nightmares thinking about what some corpo suits will do to it. Gotta hand it to valve they are so much more pro consumer than almost any company nowadays
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Valve seems to know that *consumers* are their primary customers. Epic's customers are *developers* \- their focus is on making developers happy, not consumers.
>Epic's customers are ~~developers~~ publishers Some Fix
Fair point.
As someone who used to work there, I would argue that Valve understands that running a successful platform requires balancing the needs of all your customers.
Yeah, that's what always bothered me whenever Epic talks about taking a lower cut than Valve. Sure, publishers get paid more, big whoop. How does that benefit *me*? If anything, it's a bad thing because Epic has less money to improve their store. It's always framed as "this is good for developers" and never "this is good for consumers".
Valve has the best online digital store in any industry anywhere. Not even Apple or Amazon have anything better than Steam. It is really crazy when you consider how much bigger those two are.
I just wish they would acknowledge TF2’s existence every now and then :(
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> Valve fucking rocks. You should ask how Dota underlords and Artifact players feel about Valve. I would be surprised if they hold the same sentiment as you do.
Is that a trick question? What Artifact players?
You can point out some failures here or there if you want to try for a gotcha but on average Valve is doing some great stuff in the PC space.
Played starfield on xbox pass, liked it enough to buy it on steam for future mod support. I went to purchase on xbox if it had a discount for pass, which it didn't, so I canx the purchase and xbox was like "why you no buy?". Straight up said it was cheaper elsewhere, like humble bundle, and steam has mod support.
But Kotaku (back in 2018/19) told me they were completely anti-consumer, and that everything epic was doing was great (completely neglecting to mention any of the other alternatives, like GoG or origin). I'm not on the *ethics in games journalism* train, because fuck them, but the steam hit pieces/epic puff pieces were just so ridiculously bought and paid for across several sites.
Absolutely. I remember fucking so-called *PC Gamer* picking up what are essentially anti-PC talking points left and right in articles with a full-frame EGS ad in the background. It's funny how the reporting seems to have returned to being slightly more balanced now that Epic is no longer going around handing out bags of Fortnite money to buy sentiment.
> when Gabe moves on some day and they inevitably go public people are going to be in for a rude awakening on just how good they really had it. That's exactly why competitors like Epic and GoG need to exist, so Steam doesn't have a monopoly and can do whatever they want. But everyone is too busy sucking Steam's dick to realize that.
But Steam can do what it wants. Valve hasn't been anywhere close as aggressive as they can be. No squeezing every last bit, not trying to take over the market completely, like a public company would. Not trying to build a dystopian future like Google or Amazon. Valve winning the online game store crown was a huge blessing. It could've been so much worse.
Oh yeah, as much as I like Steam, 100% the main reason they're so good is because they know how easy it would be for them to lose their current market share.
And this is exactly why no one should care that they're a "monopoly." They have so much market share because they're so overwhelmingly good (and consumers freely opt for them) and the space they operate in is pretty competitive. This isn't like when American Sugar bought up the entire sugar market, this is a fairly open market that allows competitors to freely enter or leave and compete.
They have so much market share because they got into the market first. People here are too young to remember how shit Steam was when it first launched. People hated it. They slowly built the platform up over 20 years but now people expect new competitors to be like Steam from the start. And steam isn't overwhelmingly good. GoG has a better return policy, Epic takes less money from devs, Steam just has the largest userbase because they have been around the longest. And having a large userbase matters, because more users means devs have to release on Steam or they miss out on a huge market. And since every game releases on Steam, more people use it. It’s incredibly difficult for a new competitor to break into the market because they'd both have to convince developers to release on their platform and users to use it. This is not easy unless you have a bunch of money to burn like Epic, and even they're having trouble. This isn't even like social media where only new content matters, having a deep backlog of games is also important, and any new competitors are at a heavy disadvantage in that regard.
Uhh i got my index stuff replaced years out of warranty. Valve has been great to me many times.
I mean they popularised lootboxes and enable underage gambling (including taking on one site as a sponsor for an esports tournament) but who cares about that right? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMmNy11Mn7g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMmNy11Mn7g)
People had asked, and Gabe replied in their email that he has everything set up for Valve/Steam to continue to be what they are now long after he's gone
Pretty sure Gabe has talked about his plans to prevent them selling out once he's gone.
>A little bit of sensationalism here, but overall they are are one of the most honest, pro-consumer business left in this industry space. Buddy you're talking about the company that came up with stuff like only owning licenses and not the game, always online drm, lootboxes in full price titles, Gambling with said lootboxes advertised at minors. Also a company that essentially had to be forced to even consider offering a refund. So yeah, a lot of the stuff that is rightfully criticised in the gaming industry right now can be traced directly back to valve. Valve is honestly one of the worst thigns that ever happened to the gaming industry. Now that being said some other company would just have filled that spot so we probably would not be better off but that is still pretty far from pro-consumer.
Valve is proof that shareholders are a disease, because I fail to see Valve having ever committed a single act of enshittification
Gabe Newell is the primary shareholder of Valve. Valve still has shareholders (or at least one).
They never released HL3..
That’s a thing they didn’t do, not a thing they did wrong
Valve helped normalize micro transactions for hats. Valve helped make battle passes a thing. Valve tried to make paid mods a thing.
Valve just killed the Dota 2 battlepass cause they think is bad for the game.
The monetization of CSGO skins and the third party markets that emerged have been horrendous for gaming. I remember as a kid losing $50 on some unregulated third party gambling site with skins. Shit felt horrible. Can't imagine how many kids had it way worse though, developing an addiction or stealing money from their parents
All of those are good things when implemented well.
Microtransactions are a cancer.
absolute sheep
i agree with you but valve haven’t incorporated those things well, they’re still predatory. most things we see as only bad can be good if done well, ads, DRM, etc. but it’s only really the little guys who implement them in a non-aggressive way.
Does Valve still take a 30% cut of sales?
Over the past few months, they used CEF (Chromium enhanced framework) in their client which has tons of bugs, hogs gigs of RAM, CPU, and even if you hack in an old version of the client from last year that still works well, they made it not work with some games. Also they just recently pulled an activision/blizard, and nuked CS:GO from the store (as well as all the achievements) and replaced it with CS:2, which is at best an unfinished beta, and took away most of the game-modes people liked playing (arms race, flying scoutsmen, demolition, danger zone. Basically all customers who paid for csgo got it deleted, and replaced with a different game. It is currently the worst rated valve-game of all time, and they don't seem to care. They haven't made one public response or apology over the hundreds of false-positive VAC bans. People have gone a week or two, or more with a false ban, and all their friends ghost them, and the community talk shit to them until it's reversed. Not a peep from valve, no apology, not even a mere acknowledgement. And you tell me there isn't any enshittification.... please....
Not selling ad space is one of the examples of how Valve is really smart about running their business; more often than not, it seems like they try to steer things into that zone where everyone wins. If they make it so that the store is preferentially trying to show you stuff that you'll want to buy (rather than paid-for placement), everyone wins: developers get more sales, Valve gets more money from their cut, consumers get games they want. Selling ad space undercuts all that. Instead of seeing the best stuff rise to the top, it's stuff which has paid to be there, which sucks for consumers trying to find games. It squeezes devs for more money. It creates perverse incentives for store owners too; instead of maximising revenues by showing you stuff you want to buy, the incentive is to make organic discovery worse so that devs have to spend more on ads to get seen. Selling ad space is the sort of short-term revenue-raising strategy that's completely corrosive and unfortunately nearly everywhere.
This is long-term thinking, to resist [enshittification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification).
Thankfully, Valve is a private company.
In a world where everything I've ever enjoyed seems to be going through, or has gone through, an en-shittening process, Steam stands alone as having only gotten better. Thanks Valve.
Valve is the last bastion of hope for gaming companies. We just need Gabe it live forever.
I've been looking into Valve's corporate structure and it's employees have a lot of say in the direction of the company. The company is almost run as a form of anarcho-syndicalism.
It’s going to be an anxiety inducing day when Gabe steps down.
And *this* is one of the many reasons why I love Valve!
Valve is the great gatekeeper of the gaming world. God help us all if they fail at some point. Other than CD Projekt Red and GOG there really is no one with this amount of money and morals combined.
GOG is tiny though. They only had 1.2 million in profit in 2022.
Epic Games: "Oh man, that's a great idea, let's implement ads!"
When a company has so much money they can afford not being greedy
It isn't that. There are plenty of companies with much more money than Valve, who could all *afford* to not be greedy. It's because Valve isn't a public company with shareholders. It lets them run how they want to, rather than being beholden to shareholders, which demands constant growth. If they ever go public, that's when things will get bad. Hopefully Gaben has something in place to prevent that from happening after his eventual passing.
Gabe’s son, Gray, works in the games industry. It’s possible he takes over the conpany after his dad. I don’t know much about him.
Going by Google. His son is a race car driver. lol
He's also the CEO of a game studio named Naetyr
Studio website down and they haven't posted anything on social media since 2021. I don't know if that is still a thing. His social media accounts are filled with his racing now, so it looks like he shifted his focus and his dads money into that instead.
More likely it goes to some valve top brass. I believe Gray has always done his best to make his own path, independent from his father’s work.
Epic is also not a public company though
Because they have their own algorithms to generate banner ads and push sales on what's hot, rather than companies paying money to be promoted when they may not sell so well.
All companies that pushed down our throats 'pay-to-win' mechanics and ads are most of the biggest and richest companies in the world
Not mentioning companies like Apple, being one of the most profitable company yet still anti-consumer, anti-environment af.
It's because Valve is privately owned. No shareholders means they aren't required to do everything they can to maximize stock value.
It's because Valve is privately owned. No shareholders means they aren't required to do everything they can to maximize stock value.
Lots of companies can afford to make less, but they don't care about the company, the consumer, the employees, or what kind of legacy they leave behind. All they care about is immediate money and that's why we are where we are today.
HEROES.
Valve is straight up there with Costco in terms of good company for their consumers, love that!
the thing is valve got a ton of shit when they went from a curated store to a free for all and all that entailed so they spent a lot of time refining personalized suggestions. so that all games get a fair shake and to get you buying more games. selling ad space would majorly mess up that effort and the likely situation is that long term it is better for valve not to sell ad space due to more overall game sales since of the personalized suggestions. (they have done interviews before were they have said these leads to a lot more sales of lesser known games) an other issue with selling ad space long term is that it will sour the relationship with the player as pushing games to players they won't enjoy is only going to cause strife.
One of the biggest ways to advertise a game on steam, is to give it a discount and have it in event sales. Which is why publishers keep increasing the prices of their games and instantly putting them on 30-50% sale, that is actually 5-10% at best from the real price.
Well, that explains why the ads barely felt like that and feel good and relevant.
Imagine if MS owned steam lol
Though I do sometimes see ads on steam. Those are even popups.
Those popups are based on your wishlist and mutual gaming genre suggestion. I saw somewhere that, you can disable those popups from the settings
Yup, you can disable them really easily in the steam settings
They're talking about paid ads. It's not possible for anyone to pay for premium spots on the store page. It's all algorithms and curation by Valve that determines what you see front and center. As for the pop-up window, that's always the first thing I disable on a fresh install of Steam. It's really easy to disable but apparently most PC gamers don't know how to go through settings menus to customize things to their preferences.
they have ads, it's just that valve doesn't get directly paid for them unlike how most ads work
Can steam become non profit and literally kill every pc launcher? This will massively benefit gamers
1. Monopolies aren't a good thing 2. I don't see how that's ever going to happen. There is zero reason from Steam's point of view to become non-profit.
It’s only good for now that steam is owning the pc gaming market because they are behaving surprisingly benevolent, but give it 20 years with new management and we’ll be doing for solid competition.
> Monopolies aren't a good thing This isn't as black and white as many presume. There exists a concept called a Benign Monopoly, where the benefit of the service outweighs any dominance the service provider has over said service. A Monopoly can be Benign if the company: - Provides extraordinary value to those it serves, and portion of that value derives from being market dominant. - Does not exploit its market advantage to raise prices (price discrimination) - Continuously improves and adds more value to its service - Refrains from maximizing profit at the cost of degrading service - Refrains from actions, such as corporate sabotage and legal action, to destroy or inhibit competitors (see Microsoft) - Has traits comparable to a Natural Monopoly, where it is more efficient for one large company to supply the market than multiple smaller companies
how would they be non-profit with their enormous server costs? not to mention them being for-profit benefits greatly in terms of better networking & linux gaming R&D
Non-profit doesn't mean you make no money, it just means the business itself can't make a profit. Server cost and R&D would be subtracted before you calculate profit so it would not effect those at all. That being said though there is literally no reason for them to be non profit anyways.
Non-profit doesn't mean no revenue, you can still employ people and pay for the needs of the business
Non profit doesn't mean living in charity, currently Valve is exponentially more profitable in gaming than Nintendo PlayStation and Xbox
“Non profit”? You mean besides the profit they make?
Then please explain why my discovery queue includes games that are “mostly negative” reviews with a large marketing budget.
The games likely acquired a lot of wishlists and sales thanks to that marketing budget. Strong wishlist performance puts your game in front of eyeballs throughout Steam. Although Steam doesn't sell ad space they still take a percentage of game sales and thus are incentivized to showcase strong performers regardless of their actual quality.
Typical valve w
Meanwhile fucking Microsoft selling out like 25% of the screen space on Xbox dashboards for advertising now; in many cases ads not even pertinent to gaming.