realitaetsverlust
@realitaetsverlust@piefed.zip
- Comment on Steam is adding support to show estimated FPS for your hardware before buying a game 2 weeks ago:
You don’t think it’s bad enough to be upset over, but you agree it’s worse than it could be
Everything is worse than it can be. We’re not living in a utopia.
I’m not expecting a business to always act in the best interest of everyone, that is just completely unreasonable. I’m not even expecting individual people to always act in the best interest of anyone but themselves. And the fact that valve has never raised prices, never worsened their service (intentionally), never tried to shaft anyone and in general never attempted to extort their presumed “monopoly” is the highest bar I can reasonably set for any entity, business or personal.
Maybe you heard of don vultaggio, the founder and CEO of arizona ice tea. That company has never increased their prices since 1992. In an interview, when asked why, he said: “We’re successful, we’re debt free, we own everything. Why have people who are having a hard time paying their rent pay more for their drink?”. You’re not going to see me ask him to lower the price because clearly he “can afford it” (his net worth is 6 billion. Not quite gabe, but still extraordinarily wealthy). The man is doing everything I can reasonably expect from a business: Not squeeze consumers, not treat staff shitty and not worsen their product for profit. Valve is doing the same thing, just on a much much larger scale.
I feel you have completely unreasonable standards when it comes to businesses. Which is your right to have, I’m not gonna sit here and say your standards are wrong. I just think that, in a realistic world view, while your intentions may be good, your expectations are unreasonable. And I also think that is just something we’re fundamentally never going to agree on.
- Comment on Steam is adding support to show estimated FPS for your hardware before buying a game 2 weeks ago:
Where that number would need to be to not make a profit is unknown, but it’s certainly far lower. You can understand this, right?
Yes. But nobody knows. It certainly is lower. But again, and this is the last time I say this: A service needs to be finanically successful. This business is more than just it’s operating cost. On top of that, I’ll say this one again: The service is just worth it. Nobody in the world offers such an easy handling of the entire distribution chain combined with such a massive audience.
“Thats just the way things are” isn’t an argument.
While that’s true, that wasn’t my argument. My argument is that 30% is usually a fairly decent sweet spot for a platform when it comes to running a distribution system. I’ve build quite a few marketplaces in my time, and the standard fees were between 20% and 40%, all depending on how much work the platform had to do.
Again, there isn’t a choice (for developers).
There’s plenty of choice. You can choose not to sell your game on steam, put it on the EGS exclusively and accept that you’re never going to reach the audience you’d do with steam. Now you just gotta figure out if the lesser sales at 12% are more profitable than the more sales at 30%.
What do you define “defending” as?
You make defending sound like I’m a company white-knight that’ll defend a company from any wrongdoing ever, which simply isn’t the case. Valve does some shitty things and I have called them out for it. I just don’t think the 30% cut is bad in any capacity.
- Comment on Steam is adding support to show estimated FPS for your hardware before buying a game 2 weeks ago:
So the child has to ask if it can have access to a game, which is necessary anyways since children don’t generally have money. Probably a good concept and very similar to how apple or microsoft structure their child safety features.
- Comment on Steam is adding support to show estimated FPS for your hardware before buying a game 2 weeks ago:
Why do people like you always have to defend what a company does all the time?
I’m not defending them. I’m saying that a service has to be financially successful, something that many people on lemmy seemingly forgot after reading too much Marx. Are they making more than they need? Absolutely. But the value they are providing is just worth a great deal to devs and I just don’t think that giving up 30% of your sales is a bad deal for handling the entire distribution. I’ve worked in E-Commerce for over 10 years now and 30% is like the standard fee for this kind of stuff - in many industries, the fees are way higher.
So, COULD they charge less? Very likely. But I don’t really see why. The service they provide is just worth that much. I think it’s a fantasy that companies can suddenly start to charge less just because they already have a lot of money.
Notably, the Epic layoff was for Fortnite, because of a reduction in players, not the Epic store team.
Afaik, theyl aid off people across the entire company. The reason was a reduction in fortnite money, but the layoffs were even across the UE development teams.
Why can’t we criticize them? Why does anyone still have loyalty to any corporation in the modern day?
You can. I just don’t agree with that criticism. Valve does shitty things at times. The fact that they are really opaque when it comes to algorithms and support decisions is shit, the price parity rule, while being standard in the industry, is shit and the lack of control for early access games is pretty shit - we can criticize all that and more.
And yes, you can also criticize the 30% cut. That’s your right. However, I’m just not agreeing with that stance. That isn’t defending a company, even tho you’re trying to frame it as such. That’s just me having a different opinion. And you trying to frame disagreement as “being loyal to a company” is a great way to completely stifle a discussion. Why even argue at that point, just insult me and move on lmao.
- Comment on Steam is adding support to show estimated FPS for your hardware before buying a game 2 weeks ago:
What are these other ways then? Hell, if you can think of something that does not include age verification or the removal of the entire steam marketplace, I’m more than willing to listen.
Gambling is a heavily regulated industry
And all of those regulated gambling sites (at least those in the EU) require you to provide ID or a valid bank account - both things you only have as an adult and basically qualify as an age verification. There is no other way. You cannot ensure a person is who she says she is if you have no legal document. And yes, of course a child could steal it from their parents, but then the parent is legally responsible for any damages that incur.
The problem is they don’t, and there’s nothing we can do about that
Oh, there definitely is things we can do about that. We can punish the parents if kids use social media before legal age, for example. In germany, there are fines on certain things. If you child is missing from school repeatedly, for example, you can get fined. And I feel it’s time to punish parents if their child does stuff on the internet that it shouldn’t do and the parents have absolutely a chance to prevent the behavior. A child won’t buy a smartphone/PC and a internet connection by themselves. These are provided by the parents and the parents then have the responsibility to set up the device in a way that ensures their child is protected.
And who suffers when they don’t? Not me, not you, and not the parents. Its the children.
Initially, yes. When overreaching government surveillance is introduced (only to protect the children and avoid terrorism, of course), I’m suffering pretty badly aswell since that’s not a world I want to live in. And that’s not a world you want to live in either.
So this might be harsh to say, but the future of society is more important than the kids with shitty parents.
- Comment on Steam is adding support to show estimated FPS for your hardware before buying a game 2 weeks ago:
Adults are vulnerable too.
Yes, but those adults are responsible for themselves.
You’re paiting this thread like valve is good and we are asking valve to do more good by doing job of the parents while in reality we want valve to stop doing evil that valve does.
No, not at all. I just don’t think that offering a marketplace that is abused by a massive third party gambling industry is “evil”. The marketplace in general is a cool feature imo and I see no reason to remove it. As soon as you introduce rarity, you will have a certain value attached to those items. It’s a lot like playing an MMO - if you have a rare drop, you can sell that shit on ebay for actual money. Removing the entire concept of value from skins is honestly pretty stupid. And all because you want to “protect the children” and people with no impulse control.
In short: You want to take a feature away because some people abuse it and potentially harm people, and I just don’t think that’s right.
And yet you will insist that you are not defending a corporation. The delusion is crazy.
It’s not about defending valve, it’s about me not wanting people like you to remove good features from platforms.
- Comment on Steam is adding support to show estimated FPS for your hardware before buying a game 2 weeks ago:
Real-money-and-equivalent gambling could be removed from Steam completely
As the entire betting and gambling market is outside of steam, the only thing they could do is removing the entire steam marketplace, which would be a pretty impactful step that overall would just take a fairly cool feature away. I think it’s honestly pretty cool that I can make use of skins or other items in games that I no longer play, much better than playing a game, having plenty of skins and then do nothing with them.
As for child safety, Steam already has parental control features. I don’t know how extensive/useful are they, though.
Idk either, but from what I know, child safety features in most platforms are pretty extensive and powerful these days.
- Comment on Steam is adding support to show estimated FPS for your hardware before buying a game 2 weeks ago:
It is. There is no other way to “protect the children” if you don’t want parents to do their job.
- Comment on Steam is adding support to show estimated FPS for your hardware before buying a game 2 weeks ago:
Disagree. Not because I don’t want corporations to do something, but because the ways they’d need to implement are a net-negative overall.
There’s a huge discussion going on right now about age verification on OS level. That’s exactly the kind of shitty results we get when we have other entities being responsible for child safety than the parents. And that’s not a world I want to live in. I don’t want to have to upload my government ID to any service I want to use and live in a borderline surveillance state because parents aren’t able to pay attention to their children.
- Comment on Steam is adding support to show estimated FPS for your hardware before buying a game 2 weeks ago:
I’ve had a long-winded discussion about that a few days ago. Yes, 12% would be great for devs, but guess what, 0% would be even better.
Steam takes care of the entire e-commerce and distribution side, which is very expensive. Just look up what publishers used to take back in the day for taking over game distribution, that was like 70%. Not exactly a time you want to go back to as indie dev.
If you think a 12% cut would be viable, idk. However, epic just recently laid off 1000 people so idk how financially successful that company currently is.
- Comment on Steam is adding support to show estimated FPS for your hardware before buying a game 2 weeks ago:
We need more kids being exposed to gambling
I’m honestly tired of debating that point again and again. However, to summarize my stance on this: If parents are unable or unwilling to monitor what their child is playing or spending money on, that is not the problem of steam - or any platform for that matter. It’s also not EAs fault if a child is spending thousands of bucks in ultimate team. If my child stole my credit card and did that, I would refund the money immediately and get his account locked. It’s honestly tiring of hearing people demanding companies to “protect the children” when many parents do fuck all to protect or educate THEIR children.
I can’t even discribe how sad it is to be a person that needs to get defensive about a corporation because their service is alright for the most part.
Saying that a 30% cut is justified for everything steam offers isn’t “defending” steam, it’s just stating my opinion, but yeah whatever, you do you.
- Comment on Steam is adding support to show estimated FPS for your hardware before buying a game 2 weeks ago:
But but but the 30% cut is too high it’s not justified and the epic game store takes only 12%!!!!!!111
- Comment on GDC 2026 Report - 36% of devs use generative AI, while 28% target Steam Deck and 8% Linux 2 months ago:
The thing is, this is most certainly the case. I’m willing to bet that every dev uses LLMs every now for certain tasks. Having it find a bug you just can’t find yourself because you’ve been at the problem for like an hour, or have it implement a method that you already know how it should look like so it’s basically just a big autocomplete. I’m also willing to bet that artists will have LLM generate a concept for an asset if they are really out of ideas. It’s like asking friends “hey can you come up with an idea for X” and then you get 15 different inputs, all of them suck ass but there is something that jiggles your inspiration and lets you come up with something.
- Comment on I was recently gifted a Steam Deck for Christmas! If you only had a budget of, let's say 50 bucks, what would you get? 3 months ago:
Idk where this rumor came from, but the original makers have never said that lol.
- Comment on Witchfire director says “everybody should attempt to support” Steam Deck as it just makes games better for everyone 4 months ago:
No
- Comment on Witchfire director says “everybody should attempt to support” Steam Deck as it just makes games better for everyone 4 months ago:
Steam Deck verified is like 90% done towards linux support
- Comment on Witchfire director says “everybody should attempt to support” Steam Deck as it just makes games better for everyone 4 months ago:
It’s not really about working harder. Before, it just wasn’t a justifiable expense investing time into ensuring proton support or even linux support because a sub 1% OS just isn’t “worth” supporting from a financial standpoint. That changed with the steamdeck and because the steamdeck is actually just a small PC with built-in controller, things that profit the deck also profit the linux ecosystem.
Honestly the steam deck was a genius move from valve.
