I love the readme on the gitlab page [1]. It feels so.. friendly :)
> This repository contains CAD files for the external shell (surface topology) of Steam Controller and the Steam Controller Puck, under a Creative Commons license. This includes an STP model of each, an STL model of each, and an engineering drawing with critical features/keep outs for each.
Feel free to use these to make your own Puck holders, Controller sweaters, or whatever else you want to create!
Your Steam Controller is yours, and you have the right to do with it what you want. That said, we highly recommend you leave it to professionals. Any damage you do will not be covered by your warranty – but more importantly, you might break your Steam Controller, or even get hurt! Be careful, and have fun.
Valve is the company where we spend a lot of money and they deserve it.
The rest is companies that trick people into giving them money (battlepass! lootboxes!) and they don't deserve it.
People often forget that consumers as a whole are the ones holding the power, and the sad part is that rewarding a company with a good product with your money stopped being the business model and it's now the exception.
I don't disagree with most of your statement, but Valve has and continues to make lots of money from loot boxes in both CS and TF2. Just want to point out that they do do stuff like that too.
Valve is not literally the first but they played a big part in normalizing both lootboxes and micro transactions. Don't rewrite history just because you are a fan.
Not to mention their role in you not owning your games.
> Not to mention their role in you not owning your games.
I do use Steam to "purchase" games, and it irks me that they're still allowed to show "Buy" when in reality you're essentially leasing/renting the game, can't believe it's legal for them (and others) to trick people like this still.
A Steam purchase I have more confidence in than a physical game copy to survive. I trust Steam to honor its agreement with me more than I trust in myself and my feline overlords to keep a game CD alive.
In a previous timeline, this has led to me going on ebay to find CDs of a long lost game (EarthSiege 2), which I promptly uploaded to the Internet Archive as the one distributed by the current license-holder at the time had an older, unstable version with bugs and, more importantly, no audio and my own original copy got damaged to hell and beyond...
Sure, I agree with all of those things, but the fact still stands, Steam is actively lying to customers as the store pages say "Buy" and "Purchase", not "Rent" or "Lease", which are more accurate. You don't actually own the product.
Don't get me wrong, as mentioned, I use Steam and like Steam/Valve, but that move is a bit shitty regardless.
How could it be confusing when that's actually what happens? Imagine HN showed "Delete comment" instead of "Reply" under the comment input, don't you agree that be misleading?
There is a product in the cart, which is a game, and the button says "Purchase", no where does it say anywhere that it's a license (although that's obvious), nor that I don't actually "own" this game after I "purchase" it.
Sure, minor detail perhaps, but I'd still argue that something Steam could do better, and since the industry is lacking self-regulation about this, I'd argue more regulations are needed for this even.
It's on the cart page, before you check out. And I do agree that it should be much more front-and-center, rather than the sort of fine-print thing they have now.
What? Valve basically invented making money with skins and lootboxes, it started with TF2 hats. There is an insane amount of money in the CS2 skin market.
I didn't say Valve is perfect. But they're definitely worth the money I spend there. Great service, proper support, regional pricing, and the list goes on. Everything works today. The work they've put on Proton/Linux gaming easily wins my support.
Did they screw up sometimes? Sure. And I'm from the days when Steam didn't exist. I remember the NoSTEAM game versions in shady sites, including Half-Life 2. Steam was hated with a passion back then. They won by ultimately providing great value and service.
I had a rough time with Proton a few years ago and ended up setting up my most recent gaming rig as a Windows 11 machine. In retrospect it was probably unfair to judge it on dime-a-dozen Humble Bundle leftovers from a decade ago when most of the effort is spent on supporting new releases.
But yeah... just this week I was traveling for work and my kid reached out wanting to play a little Deep Rock Galactic with me. I couldn't believe how easy everything was from my Ubuntu 24.04 laptop. Steam, proton, Discord, all of it just worked and I wouldn't even have realised it wasn't running natively if I hadn't noticed the extra proton download in the Steam client.
> The work they've put on Proton/Linux gaming easily wins my support.
Lets not be naive here, this is the money they are saving in Windows licenses for the Steam Deck, and having their own store instead of Windows Store/XBox PC App.
Yet they are doing zero to foster native Linux games.
There isn't much they can do to foster native Linux support beyond trying to increase the number of people gaming on Linux. It's a chicken-and-egg problem, and you need to make the platform desirable to developers before they will start developing for it.
This is the chicken-and-egg problem though. If you don't get the Linux/Steam Deck audience large enough first, then that tradeoff won't be worth it to developers.
Valve have the money to pay developers to make a Linux port or ensure it works with Proton (maybe they already do in some cases?), if they really wanted to put the heat on Microsoft. Well, any not owned or being published by Microsoft i suppose.
Valve seem happy to let things happen more organically however.
> Yet they are doing zero to foster native Linux games.
"zero" might be a bit harsh, considering that they do some things at least, compared to others who literally do nothing. Steam the platform has native Linux support, what games are natively available is visible on Store listings, and a bunch of the SDKs (all of them even maybe?) are available natively on Linux too. The situation could have been a lot worse.
It will get more worse, with Proton there is no value in e.g. using Vulkan, just use DirectX, and the convinience of modern GPU programming tooling in Visual Studio, HLSL code completion with CoPilot, PIX debugger, and then let Valve have to worry about running it on Linux.
> with Proton there is no value in e.g. using Vulkan
Valve themselves seems to disagree with you here, considering they still have Linux native SDKs available for integration, and are releasing their own games with native Linux support.
I'm guessing if what you say is true, Valve would be the first to move towards that reality you paint, but we haven't seen that yet, I'm doubting we'll ever see that, but the ones who live will see I suppose :)
Valve will get their OS/2 and netbooks moment if they don't foster a proper native Linux games ecosystem, but yeah lets cheer for Windows games translation on Linux while it lasts.
I think there's a reasonable argument that the most stable Linux gaming API surface is actually Proton.
None of this is really going to change until we end up with a situation like the EA/Apple Store conflict: a major player unable to sell a game on Windows for some reason.
Also, it's something of a pragmatic choice -- Valve did put major effort into native Linux games around 2013, but the effort fell flat for a number of reasons.
Proton is them trying a different path towards severing or lessening the Windows dependence, in my opinion.
Totally agree with you there, as much as I love to hate non-transferability, revokable licenses, permanent VAC bans on accounts that got hacked, I still find Steam the most convenient path to "owning" games in one place.
The Linux work done for Steam Deck is fantastic and I do credit their efforts with inspiring others to work on similar projects that extend and complement what Valve achieved. Much of the hard effort did go into Windows games on Linux before Valve looked at it; everything the WINE project, Codeweavers did, gaming via Lutris since 2009, however Valve have definitely been a force multiplier.
Trust is earned and I think Valve are doing pretty well on that front, especially when you look at the differences to other PC stores, Ubisoft, EA, and to some extent Epic. GOG and Itch are very different beasts.
To some extent I miss the time where Steam was totally curated, you had to make an impact to get your game on the platform, back before it was a free-for-all of shovelware and low-effort slop. Occasional controversies aside, at least on Steam the tools / marketing funnel are there to keep the popular games at the forefront of the store whilst also being fairly open to allow devs to publish without being the chosen one.
Is there a danger of doing to games what Spotify has done to music? Maybe, but I reckon the super deep-discount sales have calmed somewhat and are happening later in game's long-tail part of the lifecycle or used as promo for sequels.
There are plenty of publishers that choose to mainly avoid going that route, often the traditional established publishers with console outlets they don't want to cannibalise, for example Sony and Konami.
> Is there a danger of doing to games what Spotify has done to music?
I think such business model ultimately doesn't scale well for games (several million-dollars production budgets sharing minuscule pieces of a ~$20 all-you-can-eat subscription pie).
Microsoft always knew this, they didn't try to win the market, they tried to subvert the business model, probably expecting the industry as a whole moving towards it -- which didn't happen at all, at least not yet.
Simple math would prove this. There's no way acquiring half the good studios in the world and make them release flop after flop was a break-even operation. It's several orders of magnitude behind.
Most of the market talks Nintendo, Sony, XBox, Apple Arcade, Android.
Exactly because they aquired half the good studios, they happen to be one of the biggest publishers, people forget some of those studios keep using their own branding instead of anything Microsoft, and it would hurt Steam if Microsoft decides all those studios would pull out of it.
Microsoft moved to a subscription service because they botched the launch of the Xbox One, with users accumulating digital libraries on the PlayStation, and that failure is something that has continued to drag them further and further down.
I agree that turning CS into a casino wasn’t a tasteful choice on Valve’s part but as someone who has played CS at least once a week for decades I can understand that they needed to find a way to cover server costs somehow. I paid $15 dollars for CS:GO and have clocked 4,500 hours in the game. I don’t gamble but I’d rather those who choose to fund the server costs than Valve charge a monthly subscription to everyone. Skin sales alone would have accomplished this without having to have loot boxes and keys and that’s where I think Valve went overboard with it. Also, for a game that provides so much revenue I expect better anti-cheat and more VAC bans, which are rare.
They didn't need to cover server costs for CS 1.6. I wonder why that is? Hint: CS 1.6 wasn't designed from the ground up as a microtransaction vehicle so could have servers run by the community unlike CS:GO where centrally run servers are needed to make microtransactions work, not the other way around.
The lootboxes drop as a normal course of gameplay, you buy keys to open them. People still play TF2 so presumably some still open boxes. It's also the base unit of trading for high value items.
CS lootboxes are the least shitty ones in the entire industry. There is 0% pay to win, if anything the skins are a disadvantage because they usually stand out.
I didn't say that lootboxes were pay to win and most lootboxes in games are not. That doesn't mean it's not still profiting from and enabling gambling and addiction.
There's a lot of evidence showing that gambling as a child leads to gambling problems as an adult, and loot boxes are just gambling aimed to a large degree at children.
Valve games are even worse for this because Steam trading allows 3rd party sites to sell cosmetics directly for cash, and some of these cosmetics are worth tens of thousands of dollars. It's just children gambling money but with a thin veneer of video game over the top.
And I see no problem with that. I have never bought a single skin for Counter Strike nor Team Fortress 2 and I have bunch. Well, I used to, but then CS2 came out and all of a sudden my skins and unopened boxes were valued at hundreds of euros and I sold them on steam.
If you think enabling childhood gambling addictions and unregulated gambling systems aren't a problem then I don't know what else to say to you. Lootboxes are gambling, plain and simple.
Gamblers will always find a way to gamble. I like getting cosmetics for free even if they are randomized. I don’t think I have ever bought keys to loot boxes, I just don’t see the point.
Americans would rather mention TF2, a game with less than 10 thousand concurrent players and probably making a modicum of money, than ever pretend that game exists or has influenced other games.
Regardless of how many concurrent players it has now, TF2 was massively influential to other FPS games, and it's still held with high regard by the community. It was also one of the first major games to introduce loot boxes.
Valve uses battlepasses and lootboxes (i.e. gambling for minors) as much as the worst in the industry. They are far from a good corporation.
Gabe is just better at PR than the competition and gamers are irrationally tribal and will defend whatever they consider to be part of while ignoring all the bad parts.
I'd like to have an honest conversation about this, but imo Valve is no better than the iOS app store: it aggressively rent seeks and has essentially destroyed the shareware model (which was the best way to discover software in the 80s-90s). It has also willingly been complicit in underage gambling via loot boxes for more than a decade now.
I think Gabe Newell is a visionary for building Steam in 2003, way before Jobs had the same idea, but absolutely everyone and their mother hated Steam back then. I remember the memes on IRC and various forums (and I've been on Steam for a very[1] long time, the first or second day it came out I think). Two decades later, props to them and their useful acolytes for gaslighting the entire gaming community. No idea how Gaben is regarded as some sort of Christlike figure these days, but here we are.
Maybe it's just a "lesser of two evils" thing, as companies/platforms like EA and Ubisoft are the absolute scum of the earth.
I don't know about the rest of your claims ("shareware was the best way to discover software" is really a personal opinion), but this is just factually false.
Unlike iOS, where you cannot publish an app unless you pay the 30% cut, there is nothing that prevents you from developing and a Windows/MacOS/Linux game yourself. You can simply choose to not use Steam - but the benefits of developing and publishing with it (myriad SDKs, game servers, networking, social features, trading cards, anti-cheat, achievements, payment methods, reviews, discovery, forums, launchers, updates, CDN, and on and on and on...) are so overwhelming that it is simply worth it for the vast majority of gamedevs.
Fact: Steam is not rent-seeking - the value that they provide is tremendous, and you are not forced to use them, which makes them non-rent-seeking by definition.
> you are not forced to use them, which makes them non-rent-seeking by definition.
That's not how it works. Those two things aren't mutually exclusive. Plenty of businesses engage in rent seeking without having a captive (by most definitions) audience. All that's required is a very modest barrier (ex network effect, non-zero switching cost, etc) and a sufficiently large audience.
Rent seeking isn't even mutually exclusive with adding value. A business can do both simultaneously by virtue of being able to multitask. Most businesses offer more than a single product or service after all.
So first off, you start out by lying about my words, so we immediately know you're not operating in good faith.
What I said:
> Steam is not rent-seeking - the value that they provide is tremendous, and you are not forced to use them, which makes them non-rent-seeking by definition.
That's a compound statement that you cut off to change the substance of. What you quoted:
> you are not forced to use them, which makes them non-rent-seeking by definition.
And now that we've called out your lie, we can move on to the substance, which is also incorrect.
The definition of rent-seeking disagrees with everything that you've said:
"The attempt to profit by manipulating the economic or political environment, especially by the use of subsidies."
> Rent seeking isn't even mutually exclusive with adding value.
This is factually incorrect - both according to the dictionary definition of the phrase, and according to the way that it's used casually, which is extraction of value without creation of it.
I'm glad that this is happening in the open - when people have to actively lie to try to push a narrative about Steam, it really shows that they have no legitimate points - every thread where these lies are exposed just (justly) boosts Valve's reputation.
You are not assuming good faith, nor are you interpreting what I wrote in the most plausible manner.
I did not misrepresent you. You made two claims and I objected to the second. My objection stands regardless of the presence or absence of the claim about Steam providing value.
Notice that I took no position on whether or not Steam is rent seeking, instead merely disputing the reasoning that you expressed.
However even if I had taken a position to the contrary, I don't see how the definition you quoted would be at odds with that. I think it is fairly reasonably to see a dominant player with network effects as possessing sufficient economic power to meet the criteria you laid out. For that matter it's quite presumptuous on your part to assume that everyone else is on board with the particular definition that you selected there.
And it goes without saying that I disagree with your latter assertion of factual incorrectness. No dictionary disputes the ability of a business to multitask.
Actually interestingly enough if we use your definition then you can rent seek while simultaneously adding value to the same product just so long as you're also engaging in unreasonable market manipulation to increase your profit in the process. Amusingly my working definition had been somewhat more restrictive.
> I did not misrepresent you. You made two claims and I objected to the second.
I made a single claim with two parts:
1. the value that they provide is tremendous
2. you are not forced to use them
And then my conclusion was: these make them non-rent-seeking by definition.
You intentionally rewrote my argument to change its meaning, you know that you are, and you're continuing to lie about it.
I don't need to argue with you further - I've pointed out that you're fundamentally dishonest to other readers, and that's all I need to do from here on.
As someone who worked in game dev in 2008, we loved Steam, for the same reason we loved the iOS App Store. We take it for granted these days but the ability to self-publish on a first class platform and receive 70% of the sales revenue literally redefined the indie game dev industry.
Use of the term ‘rent seeking’ is, in my experience, often correlated with a sense of entitlement and a lack of appreciation for what is actually provided. It’s only rent seeking if no additional value is added which is clearly not the case here.
I'm surprised you haven't been flagged or just a dead comment. Any signals that Apple is not pure evil for taking 30% is not part of the echo chamber group think around here. People never want to admit that it costs money to retail your product no matter where it is. In the physical world, there's manufacturing and delivery costs. Getting shelf space at a retailer takes a lot of negotiating where you have very very little room to bargain. Retailers will even force you to buy back unsold product. Yes, software doesn't have all of that but have their own nuances. A lot of indie game devs don't have time/skill/want to do a lot of what an app store can do. Expecting to get all of that for free because it is software is just not sane. If you are self-hosting all of it, it will not be free as you will be paying for payment processors and a hell of lot more in attracting eyeballs.
You can sponsor a promotion; sales on a bunch of games - but it's not "Brought to you by the cool refreshing taste of Pepsi" it's like "Berlin Game Developers".
Steam as DRM is basically the best case scenario. It is opt-in for developers, meaning there is no DRM at all for some games on Steam. You can download it, back it up, run it without Steam. The games that do use Steam's DRM are trivial to "crack" by replacing a DLL in game folder with a stub (you can find open source ones on GitHub). If Steam had no DRM I think publishers would lean more on other options which are worse for customers.
Shareware died before Steam. Steam launched in 2003 and didn't sell any 3rd party games until 2005. Nobody gave a shit about shareware in 2003. Nobody gave a shit about shareware in 2010 when Steam seriously became useful as a place to play more than the Orange Box and Counter-Strike.
I hated Steam when I first encountered it, but it's not a requirement to publish a game on PC/Mac/Linux. Nor is the process to install non-Steam games full of scary warnings like Google Play even on their own platform SteamOS. And they do let publishers give keys to 3rd party stores to sell unlike virtually every other platform. They aren't perfect but they are nowhere near what Apple does with iOS.
"destroyed the shareware model". You know that they only sell games, and just have the games that they made in the list too(them just being amazing and popular). It's not some easy task as recovering old systems when there are every type of games imaginable. Even if valve made a option to do that, no one will since other companies don't do anything like that.
Wouldn't the Steam digital demo system be the modern evolution of the shareware model? For free you can access a limited portion of the game to try it and consider eventually buying it.
Steam is just a storefront. They hold no monopoly position or power. It's not comparable to iOS app store. Devs are free to list their game on any other storefront concurrently.
This is the same argument Microsoft used ("we're just an OS, totally not a monopoly"). I think to anyone that spends any time doing any PC gaming, it's obvious that Steam is the only relevant storefront by a country mile.
Or did they just get there first, and stayed first due to network effects? Initially, nobody wanted steam. People definitely don't want a second steam - which in practice means sticking to the first one.
I can see why you might think that but I believe that's actually insurance against Microsoft going the Apple route and hamstringing Steam in the process. They needed a near first class platform that would never be used against them to exist and they needed the switching cost for end users to be near zero. By leveraging pre-existing FOSS projects they managed to avoid the vast majority of the development costs which would otherwise have been prohibitive.
Could say the same thing about AT&T, Bell Labs, etc. There’s a lot of precedent here, but most saliently, how you become a monopoly is not really relevant. They absolutely are one. But I’m being already aggressively downvoted with no counter arguments so the Gaben fanboys are here. (Defending a deca-billionaire is hard work, after all.)
What’s your solution then to them being a monopoly? How would you meaningfully break them up? While they outperform the sales of Epic and Gog I’m not sure how they’re abusing their position or how they’re keeping others from entering?
You could separate the storefront from the distribution platform / client. Valve's ~30% cut is often justified by the visibility being on the Store gives you but you can't opt out of that while still reaching the captured audience that definitely don't want yet another client software bloating up their system.
> Could say the same thing about AT&T, Bell Labs, etc.
No, you cannot. AT&T/Bell Labs was a monopoly - they physically controlled distribution networks that made it so you had to use them.
Valve does not. There is nothing that prevents you from simply selling your game without Steam.
And even if there wasn't, claims that Valve is a monopoly are factually false - there are many other storefronts that exist, and many games are published on more than one storefront at once. And, Steam does not gate an OS or platform like Microsoft and iOS do.
> But I’m being already aggressively downvoted with no counter arguments
Every one of your arguments is being countered (such as the claim that "relevance is anticompetitive" which isn't even false, it's nonsensical). Including this one.
> Defending a deca-billionaire is hard work, after all.
...and there's the emotional manipulation. It's pretty clear you're just a propagandist who has a grudge against Steam (maybe you work for Epic?), given that you're going up and down the thread with emotional non-arguments that try to redefine words, pull at peoples' emotions (like the billionaire comment), or just flat-out lie.
Except they do. They control the Steam distribution network. It may not be physical but you still have to use it to reach a large portion of PC Gamers due to network effects and no one wanting to run multiple clients.
Currently you have to also make use of their other services like the Store, and pay for them with a large sales cut, in order to use the distribution network, no matter if you want those services or not.
Tautologically true and therefore irrelevant. That's exactly the same as saying "Walmart has a monopoly over Walmart's physical stores" - that's not a meaningful statement and it has nothing to do with either monopoly status or consumer harm.
> It may not be physical
...and therefore it's categorically different. Don't be dishonest.
> you still have to use it to reach a large portion of PC Gamers
It's called a "distribution channel". You only "have" to use it, in the sense that most people look for stuff in Steam before they do anywhere else, but it is factually different than a telecom monopoly, where you cannot get internet from more than one provider in your neighborhood. This comparison is irrelevant and highly dishonest.
> due to network effects
No, network effects are secondary. People do not install Steam because their friends are there, they install Steam because they want to buy a game or download the games they already have. That's not "network effects" - that's using the tool.
> no one wanting to run multiple clients
Also untrue - almost every single person that I know uses multiple clients, and I've only ever once heard someone refuse to install an additional client, and it was on principle (Epic Games).
> Currently you have to also make use of their other services like the Store, and pay for them with a large sales cut, in order to use the distribution network, no matter if you want those services or not.
...and because it's one of the largest digital distribution networks in the world, this is entirely fair.
You're very clearly trying to stretch the definition of "monopoly" and manufacture harm, without actually knowing anything about Steam or how people use it.
Disagreeing with someone either ideologically or about the definition of a word or some other criteria does not mean that the other party is being dishonest. It is not reasonable to bandy about such accusations.
Steam does control the vast share of desktop gaming. But has no influence on console (Xbox, playstation, switch) or mobile (android, ios). They are a monopoly.
But they don’t abuse their monopoly so they haven’t broken any laws.
Your partitioning between those two things is good, but I still don't think that either label applies to them:
> Steam does control the vast share of desktop gaming.
Between the Epic Games Store, GOG, Humble Bundle, Xbox, Origin, Itch, and a few others, I don't believe their control is anywhere close to the fraction needed for Steam to be a "monopoly", either legally or in casual speak.
> Steam does control
...and, what's more, they don't "control" anything - what prevents you from either using multiple clients (on the player side) or selling on multiple storefronts (on the developer side)?
A monopoly has to monopolize some limited resource or market - you can't really have a monopoly if there's no limiting or exclusivity. That's like saying that Fortnite is "monopolizing" the battle royale genre because it's the most popular - it is the most popular, but there's no exclusivity because you can always play another battle royale in addition to Fortnite.
Monopolies need pie charts (limited resources that are taken by a single actor), but Steam is a bar in a bar chart.
Google controls 90% of the search market and the browser market. There is nothing preventing anyone from searching on Bing. Yet, the correct terminology is control of the market.
Google has a monopoly on search. Have they abused that monopoly? That’s a legal question that’s currently in court.
Steams share is somewhere in the 70s and it is far stickier than Google. A gamer can’t abandon their steam library easily. Have they abused this monopoly position? IMO no, but my knowledge is limited.
You're being downvoted because you're pushing punishing a company for having a better product. They do not engage in anticompetitive practices, there is no enforced barrier to entry in the market nor do they gate entry like the companies you have listed. They are only a monopoly because they have the best product.
That a really silly comparison. An OS is a big deal, you can't just switch off. Steam is a video game store. You can install shit from anywhere. People stick to steam because it's good. It's not morally wrong to have the best product on the market.
If you want the audience as an indie developer, it would behoove you to launch on Steam (because they're a monopoly). Again, MS used all these cute arguments, and they don't really work. There's a reason Valve is always playing very nicely with regulators (especially w.r.t. the gambling stuff). They don't really want to rock the boat, but a benevolent monopoly is still a monopoly and I do think that a 30% cut for running a distribution platform is pretty predatory, especially as bandwidth has been commoditized.
Again, it is not wrong to make the best product. It behooves any manufacturer to sell to distributors with largest reach, especially if it is a non-exclusive agreement, and this is perfectly normal market activity. You seem unaware of the legal definition of monopoly; Valve is nowhere near it. The made up internet definition, having a majority of sales in a market, is just what happens when the product is good. Actually it would be a bit of a market failure for the best product to not have the most sales.
Also please don't point to the failure of Epic or other stores; they're just bad products. Epic store didn't even have a shopping cart for years. No one competent is competing, and that's not Valve's problem.
> If you want the audience as an indie developer, it would behoove you to launch on Steam
Correct, because they're a huge distribution channel, and literally anyone who has ever tangentially touched business knows this and accepts that it is fair to pay for this.
> (because they're a monopoly)
Factually incorrect. Nobody forces you to use Steam. You can create and launch and sell a Windows or Mac or Linux game without ever touching steam. You can self-publish and run your own game servers and CDN, or you can use the Epic Games Store, or you can use GOG, Humble Bundle, Xbox, Origin, Itch, or any of a dozen others.
> Again, MS used all these cute arguments
This is extremely dishonest. Microsoft controlled an operating system, only one of which can run at a time. If you are running Windows, you're not running Linux. And Microsoft entered into distribution deals with OEMs to pre-install Windows, leading to massive default-choice effects. Neither of these are true for Steam - you can install and run every single platform I listed above at the same time, and I've never seen a computer come pre-installed with Steam ever.
> I do think that a 30% cut for running a distribution platform is pretty predatory, especially as bandwidth has been commoditized
So, you have no idea what Steam actually does.
Steam is, in addition to being one of the largest digital distribution platforms in the US (if not the world) - which is by itself worth paying a 30% cut for, a SDK and networking provider that gives you a social network, input (gamepad/keyboard/mouse) library, achievements, digital trading cards, update system and CDN, real-time voice comms, product key redemption, license tracking, DRM, anti-cheat, user forums, and many other things.
If you only criticize things that you actually understand, you'll end up looking a lot less foolish, and undercutting your own points as a result.
What? You can literally just download an exe from any website and run it.
If you're complaining that Valve owns a big list of games and a ton of eyeballs, and not being on that list means those eyeballs don't see you when they look at that list, idk what to tell you because they seem to have earned that part of their business pretty fairly.
I think you are blaming Valve for forces way beyond Valve's control. Valve isn't perfect, but it is a way better steward for PC gaming and PC gamers than any other American tech company would be.
It's harder to say that when they invented loot crates. Sure everyone's doing it now, and someone else would've done it eventually, but Valve pioneered it.
I suppose, yeah, some things would be a lot worse without Steam, so there's that.
Yes, I was there. I sat through a presentation about their original concept for selling content in Team Fortress. Trust me when I say that it turned out nothing like they originally conceived of-- which is a whole different story. The whole idea that they "invented" loot crates is weird because the idea goes back to collectable card games and other things. I am not saying they are without fault.
Yeah, because that would be like selling packs of baseball cards to kids with enticements like chewing gum, a practice that was outlawed in the United States in the 1950's.
That is not true. Gachapon mechanics existed long before, valve only took it to western market, not knowing the consequences. Remember this is way before gambling sites. It was a way to earn a cool random hat on TF2.
I'm aware of what Korean MMOs were doing years earlier, but it feels different, in a way I can't quite put into words. I suspect there's a psychological aspect to earning the chest and buying the key.
But yeah, maybe I'm pushing a distinction that doesn't exist, and it's all just forms of trading cards (which themselves were popularized by tobacco companies).
I feel like it's innocent and we made it into what it is. If valve was the first one to bring cactus plant to the people and we started pleasuring ourself with it. It wouldn't be Valve's fault.
In the end it's like trading cards. Way to collect a cool cosmetic that doesn't break the game and trade it with people, making a community and new friends.
Yeah right, they just accidentally massively profit from it. Come on dude, Valve has behavioral psychologists on staff. They don't just accidentally abuse players.
They are for profit business. Even grocery chains have behavioral psychologists. Valve doesn't run the gambling sites, they even tried to stop it multiple times. [1][2]
Valve doesn't pocket anything from the direct trade. Their cut is the same regardless the selling price of an item, except when traded through steam marketplace.
The only benefit valve stands to gain from this is the free marketing. Their business in this sense is not much different from trading cards, except the goods are digital.
As much as I like Valve, it's difficult to ignore how large a part they played in shifting the PC market towards F2P.
I bought TF2 with the Orange Box, and for a few years it was amazing. Then it went F2P with hats, and overnight the player base turned into a cesspit (and the hats themselves completely ruined the aesthetic that they spent years painstakingly crafting).
They still do that, Valve popularized the concepts of battle passes (with Dota 2) and loot boxes (with Team Fortress 2). They also took a paid game with TF2 and added all that monetization after the fact.
Counter-Strike especially has a pretty nasty gambling scene that Valve refuses to control, even though its only possible because of their marketplace and APIs.
The only real in-game purchase in Counter-Strike is the game itself to gain access to the ranking system. The skins are a superfluous add-on.
They knowingly profit from gamblers if you will but gamblers are going to gamble.
The gamblers were offered e-sport or gambling and they chose the latter.
You could use Robinhood to build up a growth portfolio starting from a handful of dollars or you could use it to buy 0DTE OTM options on credit. Guess which one the gamblers chose.
I’d like to point out that TF2 was part of the Orange Box bundle that included Half Life, Portal, and TF2. Those single player games were never given away for free, so as a purchaser of the bundle, I wasn’t miffed TF2 went free to play. In fact, quite the opposite. Because TF2 is free, there are like 50k people to play with me everyday. I think $0 is the right price for TF2.
I agree CS is icky re: skins and gambling. But to say “refuses to control” is disingenuous. They’ve done many things to curtail gambling, like preventing tourneys from displaying gambling sponsors and adding trade restrictions that hampered bot activity. Valve is between a rock and a hard place here- they recognize gambling is a net negative on the value of their game (hence the curtailing and remonetization efforts). Remember, valve didn’t create skin trading with the expectation of third party gambling, so this is something unprecedented they’ve had to figure out as they go. Despite its drawbacks, the gambling market has some positives that valve can’t ignore. It creates liquidity and demand for the skins. People who pay hundreds of dollars for skins hate to see their value plummet. So if valve nuked gambling today, it would upset a lot of folks. I think valve has done a phenomenal job balancing their business needs with the social obligations with the players.
They also nickel and dime the adults, but only the ones who make the games.
It's fine though, because they're nice to players and they've brainwashed them into giving their money to Valve instead of to the developers who actually make the games they fucking play.
Without steam, I'd still be playing my CD version of Homeworld 2.
I have paid $10 for every $1 of game I play, perhaps as high as $100:$1. A 30% cut of that seems totally reasonable. I have hundreds of games I keep just in case, and have played 10s of games I'd never have considered because they dont appear in Game Informer, PC Gamer, GoG, Twitch, Youtube, or other channels. They just are magically brought to me by steam, and I buy it and try it because I'm an adult now.
If game creators hate this, I feel bad for them, but I don't want anything to change as a consumer.
Of course 30% seems reasonble to you, you're not the creator of the games. It's quite confusing to me that you're endorsing the side that has an insane ROI instead of the side that is sufferring greatly to make ends meet.
A 70% take would have blown the minds of developers pre-Steam. Retailers took 40% and were ruthless about shelf space and inventory. Distributors took 20%. Plus you had to actually make a box/CD/etc. They were lucky to keep 30% not pay it.
This doesn't mean Valve is perfect but if a developer is "suffering" because of a 30% cut they probably need to improve their pricing/game/community/etc.
Retailers and distributors had actual costs they needed to cover for the services they provided. Steam largely does not seeing how profitable they are.
It still is a damn good deal. Steam abstracts a whole lot of messes. In ye olde times you as a game developer had to acquire a publisher for each country you'd plan on selling your game to deal with local distribution structures and laws, taxes, payments, update distributions, DRM and anti-cheat, user management...
Steam conveniently abstracts all of that for you. One stop shop. No complex deals just to deal with getting paid for your game (or additional content), barely any chargeback fraud, you don't even have to deal with stuff such as Germany's highly complex age rating because Steam abstracts that with a questionnaire. Steam claimed to recognize and support 237 countries [1], although that list includes disputed countries, so take it with a grain of salt, but in general I'd say unless a country is affected by US sanctions (i.e. North Korea, Iran, Russia, Belarus) or has its own restrictions (i.e. China), chances are 99% you as a publisher can sell your game in this country with everything being taken care of.
And on top of that, gamers likely will already have a Steam account with payment already set up, which means far, far less friction than the likes of Epic Games impose.
The market rate for this is low single digit percents.
>update distributions
Bandwidth is not worth a percentage of game revenue. If it were it would be <1%.
>DRM
Steam's DRM is terrible.
>anti-cheat
Also terrible.
>user management...
This is not worth a percentage of revenue.
All of these together is not worth 30%. The only thing worth 30% is the ability for the Stram store to put your game in front of a random person. Being able to reach new customers.
> The market rate for this is low single digit percents.
We're talking about virtually every country on Earth. Good luck trying to replicate that, the taxes/legal entity part alone will cost you an arm and a leg in setup time, not to mention ongoing costs in accounting, filing reports and dealing with other bureaucracy BS.
> Bandwidth is not worth a percentage of game revenue.
I'm not talking about bandwidth or a CDN here. I'm talking about a reliable and easy mechanism to get updates distributed to end-users - consisting of a management backend, the CDN and finally a client side software that's actually doing the upgrades. And the latter is something many have tried and failed to do or ended up getting 0wned in the process (e.g. just recently notepad++ [1]).
> Steam's DRM is terrible.
Is it? Sure, for some AAA titles you'll see Denuvo slopped on top, but for the wide masses, Steam's DRM is more than enough.
> [user management] is not worth a percentage of revenue.
Managing user data is an utter PITA in the era of GDPR et al, and on top of that it creates a need for customer support resources - people forget their password, get hacked, god knows what else. As a game dev under any of the major storefronts, you don't have to deal with that at all.
Why would you need to? Notice that the comment you replied to used the phrasing "market rate". The service you're describing is commoditized today and none of the major players charge anywhere near 30%.
> The service you're describing is commoditized today
Payment, yes, that is effectively commoditized. But Stripe, Paypal or cryptocoins only solve the "collect and move money across the world" part, not the "deal with the BS around taxes and tariffs in an N-N matrix of countries for publishers and consumers".
As a publisher of a game or other piece of software, I either have to use one of the global storefronts (Apple's App Store, Google's Play Store, Steam, Epic, Microsoft Store) to abstract this problem away for me (and all of them but MS have a somewhat comparable revenue share), or I have to find publishers in each jurisdiction I want to sell and negotiate with them and have additional expenses and efforts in repatriating the income, or I have to go and create my own legal entity for each jurisdiction and deal with filing the proper taxes and other BS on my own. Oh and notably the latter case also applies to dealing with sanctions lists - can't imagine OFAC being happy when my, say, Swiss subsidiary has the sanctioned offspring of a Russian oligarch buy a game from them?
This regulatory moat of doing international business is what keeps revenue shares at ~30% across the global stores. It is extremely difficult to build a competitor for the messes I mentioned - otherwise, someone else would have stepped up long ago to capture this gigantic money spigot.
You're implying that Sales, Marketing, and Distribution is not a valuable service by saying 30% is not reasonable. I work in the electronics industry selling components. Suppliers regularly give us 30% margin, far more on some products, despite the upfront cost of making a new microcontroller or FPGA being far in excess of the most expensive video games ever made, with our value add being, to be frank, much less than Steam. 30% margin is about average for distribution, be it food, minerals, cars, or any other industry.
If I didn't have Steam (or equivalent service like GoG), I wouldn't buy new games. That's just reality. I would play the same games I have for decades. Instead, Steam has created a very effective recommendation engine that gives me a great selection. That's more than worth a 30% cut.
I'm endorsing my side. Not Steam's side, or the creator's side.
Maybe their business model is awful, but I love what they do, and what they have done. They have made my linux machine a top tier gaming option, freeing me from the only use of windows left. They have brought me the steam deck, which has a thriving accessory market due to their creative commons licensing. Etc etc. They are pro consumer.
I want steam to continue largely as is. In an ideal world all artists would be better compensated for the joy they bring to the world, but I'm quite happy as a consumer of art. Not to be too harsh, but frankly, the existence of struggle for recognition does not entitle artists to a penny of my money or a second of my time beyond the transaction they propose, nor does it entitle them to anything that Valve does or makes. That we can all work together well is a function of a local solution to the tension of conflicting interests. Valve is seeking a balance. It could be much worse for both sides.
But if you want, think of it this way - all of Steam's profits, billions of dollars, are only 30% of the sales they have brought. They made 17 Billion in rev last year, so nearly 25 Billion went to game makers / publishers. This is 2-3x what spotify paid to artists in the same year.
Regarding the 30% cut. Developers can actually generate steam keys and publish them on third-party sites which can be redeemed by users on Steam. Developers then get 100% of the profit.
But they're only limited to 5000 keys. beyond that requires special approval, which is not given if the game is being sold more outside Steam than inside.
The complaint is that the platform they are using for advertising, distribution and/or community isn't giving them enough free keys? Just want to make sure I understand the relationship and expectations.
> Are the developers allowed to sell those keys for less than the Steam price?
I believe so. However, even if it's not I don't see any other platform allowing you to use their service and sidestep platform fees. Someone mentioned above that there might be limitations for the number of keys, but I'm not aware.
They're demonstrably not. I'd advise you to read up on the concept of a monopoly.
> They made 17 Billion in rev last year, so nearly 25 Billion went to game makers / publishers. This is 2-3x what spotify paid to artists in the same year.
And? I don't understand why you're just comparing two values in absolute values. You're talking as if Valve is giving away money.
Steam gets me and many others to spend a lot more than 50% more on games than we would otherwise. I’m pretty confident that they push a lot more money to creators than they’d getting otherwise, even leaving aside the old publishing revenue splits that gave devs a lot less than 70%. A lot of those games, I’ve never even installed. Blasted Steam sales…
If they're suffering greatly to make ends meet, then why use Steam at all? The only reason I can think of is that Steam provides a great customer experience, making that 30% worth it for the developers.
You do not have hundreds of games. You have a non-transferable license to play those games while they are made available by Valve and while your account is not banned.
Aren't steam account suspensions pretty much limited to criminal activity? Any other kind of restriction doesn't prevent you from playing the games you have licenses for.
For the most part, yes. There have been rare instances of Games being removed from Steam though (not just the store) and more common cases of games being significantly altered compared to the version you paid for (e.g. removed soundtracks due to licensing disputes).
I agree that 30% is too large of a cut, but what would be appropriate? 15%? Steam does add a ton of value from an immediate audience, solid advertising opportunities, and amazing distribution for the developer.
As that has done both sides of games, I would like to propose some doubts for people to consider on that is dissimilar to the standard b2b saas; for to clarity I'm not saying 30% is good
- One chargeback for your 5$ game can consume you 55$ or more, handful and you permanently lose the ability to accept the payment anywhere including future businesses outside of games
- Amount of people that will take parents cards is eye watering
- The value of offline payment acceptance in the form of physical cards (kids do not possess standard payment rails but can acquire your game on steam in the cash)
- They don't take flat 30% for almost a decade now
- You don't often get to use Stripe or 2-3%. Your cost closer about 15% if you choose to process you own payments
Publisher gives you development budget because most games arent made by one person and you need money. At least $50,000 - $150,000 for a small PC games.
Then publisher takes 70-90% before recoup and 50% afte of what remain after VAT, refunds and Valve's 30%.
Problem is when you spent $100,000 and sold lets say for $400,000:
* Valve gets $133,000
* Publisher gets $100,000 + $90,000
And you get $90,000 and real number would be much worse because VAT, refunds, etc.
Oh, dont forget to pay your taxes on $90,000. Good luck!
> One chargeback for your 5$ game can consume you 55$ or more, handful and you permanently lose the ability to accept the payment anywhere including future businesses outside of games
This sounds like personal experience. Can you elaborate?
Edit: OHH perhaps you are saying this is one of the benefits of Steam; that it shields you from all this.
> Edit: OHH perhaps you are saying this is one of the benefits of Steam; that it shields you from all this.
Yes. In a sijmilar way: regular companies get Stripe at commodity pricing, games get xsolla, paysafe, tebex, and a massive compliance questionnaire, games are software (to you) but closer to porn or gambling on risk (to MoRs and processors).
People are less "likely" to charge back Steam because of their other games being frozen and Steam has volume to dilute chargebacks whereas you starting out may hit double digit dispute rates in one. Whether this is fair is an exercise best left to the reader ;.
likely what they are implying is that chargebacks have indirect costs that you can ballpark around $50 per chargeback. So steam would likely take back the $5 revenue from the developer for the $5 chargeback, but the costs of processing the chargeback are absorbed by steam. i do not know if they have a separate chargeback fee they charge developers for it but it wouldnt make sense to as steam is the one validating and processing payments
EA presented their numbers for their online store. They were making something like 12%, and losing money.
They ran it at a loss and try to use its existence to declare everyone else overcharging. Apple, Google, Steam. Meanwhile, they were unable to make money, just proving they don't know how business works.
And doesn't forbid you from using their platform for free if you sell the keys by yourself and you can also decide to publish your game to other stores...
How about charging for services rendered based on cost to produce them rather than some arbitrary number. Some effective competition would be good, but likely outcome is publishers taking more.
I never understood people who argue steam doesn’t have real competition.
The number of fully funded attempts to compete with steam is impressive. Steam has more competition than any other of the major app stores. Steam also had to provide additional value over pre-existing methods of installing games on the PC in a way the Android Play Store or the PlayStation Store did not have to.
It is incredible how much the other stores fumbled the implementation. As a rule, Epic, Origin, etc apps were terrible. Laggy, bad UI, sometimes difficult to even complete a purchase.
You would have thought that close relationship with the games industry- someone must know how to make a high performance native application. Yet it always felt like web developers pumping out another half assed Electron platform. The Steam store must generate billions in revenue -put some real manpower behind the engineering.
What's more, Epic spends order of magnitude a billion dollars per year on free games on the Epic Store. People still don't want the Epic Store because it's crap. Like Jesus H. Fucking Christ, do these assclowns ever get a clue?
I'm very fine with them not getting a clue though, Valve spends money and effort on promoting Linux and Epic (Tim Sweeney) kinda does the opposite. With all the shit Microsoft is pulling, he still prefers Windows while complaining about it.
I feel like that just becomes another situation where bigger organizations get more bargaining power and get better deals, so you’re just kind of shifting problems. I’m not saying a flat percentage like they have is necessarily the best solution, but I’m not sure trading problems is a good idea either. Just seems like a different way for smaller developers to get screwed.
Developers choose to give Steam 30% of their revenue because they know the steam channel increases their revenue by more than 30%. Doesn't that make it a good deal for developers?
Attention span is finite and Steam took a big chunk of it from gamers, in other words there is a chance that in a world where everyone hated closed platforms like steam (for not allowing reselling or any other reason) direct ads would be more favorable for developers than steam, or word of mouth, or any of it's alternatives.
Ok, so now you're criticizing them for being too successful.
They don't own the OS, they don't (until very recently) own the hardware, they haven't really made any major uncompetitive or anti-consumer moves I'm aware of, and they provide a service that the majority of devs consider worth it.
I guess you could argue they're taking advantage of a bit of a "natural monopoly", but there's still plenty of room for other people to eat their lunch, and things like itch seem to have carved out a niche for devs that would rather keep their money than get the additional services Steam offers.
I don't think Steam is flawless, but for how powerful they are, they sure seem a lot less evil than almost every other large corporation.
Sure, if we were in an alternative reality, things would be different.
Valve built a platform that gamers like, and gamers like it for all the choices Valve made.
I also find it interesting you chose "not allowing reselling" as a thing that would have made users not like steam... but not allowing reselling is probably the feature that game developers like the most! I wouldn't be surprised if developers would choose to keep the 30% fee over dropping the fee but changing to allow reselling.
Vendors give the Mafia 30% of their revenue because they know the protection racket increases their revenue by more than 30%. Doesn't that make it a good deal for vendors?
When I'm interested in an indie game, I always go first to the developer's website to see if I can just buy a copy directly from them. The vast, vast majority of the time I have to buy it through Steam, maybe Epic, and itch/gog if I'm lucky. It's vanishingly uncommon for them to host the game themselves.
For indies Steam's network lock-in effects are so strong that if you sell without their cut off Steam, instead of same price eating their cut on Steam, you likely do worse. Because selling off-Steam takes one sale out of their algorithm.
Same reason to embed your trailer on your site with YouTube, even if you could afford the bandwidth and keep users from having to watch ad-rolls--self-hosted and the YouTube algorithm will punish you.
A huge part of the high profits portions of the economy is based on this kind of winner take all capture.
My understanding is the tools that Steam provides as part of it's developer platform are top notch. And there are a lot of integration points such as cloud saves, social, match making, achievements, store, and so on. There is also a robust CD pipeline.
I can easily see this providing value above and beyond most other retailers that would sell video games. For example, Best Buy takes a 30% cut for physical merchandise, without providing any of the above mentioned features.
to be fair, every gaming company nowadays is also doing this and still choosing go nickel and dime the adults and not do anything positive for the community
Steam lets you trade your items with others. with all the copycats that came out, im not sure any of them allow for you to trade things you bought with other players within the same game, let alone letting them buy it off you for virtual currency you could use to buy other games with
To be fair, the trading feature is part of what enables the gambling system to work (i.e. selling weapon skins). Most game companies will explicitly try to not have a trading system on any items that are obtained by random chance because, well, gambling.
except a lack of trading features encourages more gambling because youre not allowed to directly purchase or trade for items you want that are only dropped through random chance and are thus forced to gamble for them.
without trading they effectively remove everything about exchanging money for goods except the gambling part. and for regular microtransaction stores without gambling, it just kills the second hand market for sake of profits
steams dollar system is very clearly 1 directional as well. you put money into steam and it never comes out without violating their terms of service
the point isnt to eliminate gambling. the point is to make sure the people gambling are doing it responsibly. and if you do that and enable trading then you have other benefits to the ecosystem and make it easier to engage with it however you want, even if it's just to only buy old unpopular items for cheap. because if thats all you want to do, you are forced to pay for fewer "fresh" items from the shop in other games or gamble a little bit and live with whatever you get (which will also likely be less total items for same price in addition to likely not being the unpopular items you would have selected)
so i have a hard time believing the companies that dont have a trading system are doing so for any reason other than try to squeeze more money out of normal users who would have otherwise spent less in a more robust market system.
I too disapprove of the csgo/dota2 gambling markets on principle, but how many people actually participate in it? Like, 10k? 100k? 1 million? That seems hard to believe.
Valve engaged in price fixing by preventing publishers from selling games at a lower price than other platforms. They're committed to openness to the extent that it helps them undercut consoles, but not to the extent of allowing others to undercut them. Selling cheap open hardware seems like classic "commoditize your complement" tactics. (Especially since most gamers will probably just buy from the steam store when using their hardware anyways...)
I'm glad valve exists, but they are not a charity and do not need your sympathy.
The term you are looking for is price gouging (i.e., having a higher price than everyone else). However, these terms (price fixing, gouging, undercutting) are completely vaccuous, and can be equally applied to any market price, making the accusation moot. Monopoly law is just a racket designed to allow rent seeking behavior by companies who do not want to compete.
I am not holding that against them whatsoever. I just not count this as one of their good deeds for industry because it was done under regulatory pressure.
I really wish the company would talk more about the post-Gabe transition, or at least begin to give us a rough indication of where the company plans to go.
Those of us who have been customers over 20 years often have a pretty significant investment in Steam content, and Gabe is getting old.
No company will ever do that. Even if they did, no one on the planet should expect it to play out as described. The whole anti-DRM position is based on the fact promises aren't worth a damn thing.
Publicly announced succession plans happen fairly regularly, especially for a company as stable as Valve. Tim Cook is 65 and just did so for Apple. The announcement of Ternus was hardly a bolt from the blue, either. Gabe is 63, and there is little to no indications.
Ignoring how many counter examples of this there are, why wouldn't Gaben do this given that he's majority owner of the company? He can do whatever he wants.
Scuba diving is a pretty risky activity on the scale of things that rich people do in their everyday life. Golf and cycling are a lot safer.
Scuba fatalities fall into a few buckets, the big two are inexperience/bad decision making, and older folks with health issues (underwater heart attacks/respiratory distress, basically).
As a former dive pro, an overweight 63 year old is someone that I would keep a very close eye on while diving.
The odds are pretty low, but there is a reason that many life insurance companies exclude scuba divers from their coverage.
That said, I'm happy to let him live as dangerously as he wants, he deserves it.
It's not that risky Scuba diving is about as dangerous as driving in terms of fatality per 100,000. The mitigation of this risk is different too. Theoretically if you do everything correct in scuba your chance of death is virtually zero which means that your risk profile decreases with experience. Driving does not enjoy the same luxury you could be a perfect driver and get obliterated by a semi-truck running a red light at any time.
The most common reason people die while on scuba is running out of air, if you always buddy and you have a bail-out cylinder that should be essentially impossible while rec diving
"but there is a reason that many life insurance companies exclude scuba divers from their coverage."
They will refuse to cover you outside of rec diving because of all the reasons I just stated
The stats you cited normalize for participants but NOT frequency. The average diver spends several hundred times less time diving than they do driving. Most certified divers dive once or less per year.
As I stated, the most common way to die diving is from a heart attack or other health incident according to DAN. Running out of air is a very uncommon cause of death in rec diving absent a primary factor like entanglement. So no, you are absolutely not reducing your chance to 0 by doing everything right. You are eliminating the chance of suffering a death from one of the things that doesn’t kill a lot of divers. An overweight old person doing an activity that stresses your lungs and circulatory system in an unforgiving environment is inherently high risk no matter how thorough their skills and preparation.
Double check your health insurance, many exclude rec diving as well.
Every single dive instructor has a story of seeing an old guy have a heart attack, myself included (he survived, barely). The only other death I know of besides old guy heart attacks where I worked was a young guy that had a heart attack.
Not when you normalize by time spent doing the activity.
If you normalize by incidents per participant, sure.
Keep in mind that the average recreational diver does one or fewer dive trips per year, with maybe 10 dives on a very dive intensive trip. A small population of divers are massively more active. Drivers on the other hand have the opposite distribution. A very active driver spends more time in their car in a week than even the most active recreational divers.
It's just due to one person (GabeN) holding majority of the stock and choosing to run the company this way. Gabe will retire or die at some point and then anything might happen.
Our culture only deserves what we feel strongly enough to enshrine and enforce as law.
Americans like to clown on the EU, but consumer protections and privacy laws don’t magically pop up on their own, and businesses don’t all magically act in the consumers’ best interests unless they are legally made to.
I agree, but I think two factors are at play here:
1) Valve is not in desperate need for capital, Steam and their older games are money printing machines therefore they don’t feel the need to release new games all the time. This is a pro and a con, they don’t feel the need to release same-y, barely iterative titles to make ends meet which means the overall quality of the games we do get is much higher. But at the same time it’s no telling when Valve just decides the juice isn’t worth the squeeze anymore.
2) the games that Valve do release are always a standard deviation above the other games of that similar genre at the time. Their ability to take a mechanic, or an engine, or a combination of the two and meaningfully expand and revolutionize in that space cannot be understated - and as game technology progresses, making similar impacts at that scale takes longer and is much harder than the previous title. Half Life Alyx was such a quantum leap in VR quality and I don’t think it’s talked about enough. Deadlock takes the MOBA genre to a whole new level in terms of gameplay depth and complexity. I think they’re taking their time with titles and they know the predecessors that came before them.
Still essentially Steam is a DRM system + another invasive program running on your pc, that absolutely doesnt need to, in addition to the game you want.
..
I vote with my wallet, I avoid buying anything from Steam.
Gog and Itch.io are where I go out of my way to spend my money.
Itch.io is amazing! All the coolest games are there + the developer experience is about a million times better than Steam, just sensible and utilitarian. Steam dev experience is a kafkaesque nightmare.
..
Back in 2000 because of these features Steam was the epitome of digital evil. it's just that all other tech companies (google, apple, MS, sony, samsung, etc.) have become so supremely evil over time, whereas Valve has remained at its year 2000 level of evil and so now seems positively angelic compared to its peers.
...
I will also note that Valve probably are one of the biggest heralds of the year of the Linux desktop just by doing tonnes of work making games run in it well and hassle free. The biggest barrier to entry for Linux had long been that games dont work, thats basically solved now.
So they get a bonus point for that.. Steam is still filth I dont want or need on my system tho.
> I will also note that Valve probably are one of the biggest heralds of the year of the Linux desktop just by doing tonnes of work making games run in it well and hassle free. The biggest barrier to entry for Linux had long been that games dont work, thats basically solved now. So they get a bonus point for that..
And that's not charity either. Valve realized they needed to hedge their bets when Microsoft threatened to fuck them over with the Windows Store. Linux (or more specifically, SteamOS) is their backup plan.
This seems like the opposite of almost every family dynasty company that has ever existed. The second generation might keep things on track. The third generation never will.
I was recently saying to a friend and fellow fan (after getting a Steam Deck, for work purposes obviously) that the stuff Valve does is absolutely how “f#%k you” money should be used.
Not that I defend all of Valve’s business practices, but last I heard, you’re only prevented from sell games cheaper on other platforms if the thing you’re selling is Steam keys.
AFAIK, this restriction doesn’t apply if you’re distributing via a different market place.
If that’s true, that seems fair since you’re relying on Valve’s infrastructure to support the sale.
I mean are we forgetting about kids gambling lootboxes in CS and Valve doing nothing to regulate it?
I mean yes compared to the rest of the gaming companies that are long way gone like Blizzard etc, Valve seems to be the better, but its not like they are saints...
It always amazes me how us as people forget the past (which is not even far away).
venture capital are the real enemies here. valve has stayed out of that game which is why they've managed to focus on delivering value to their users. as soon as venture capital gets involved, investors are now the customer and the customers are effectivly the product.
Valve wasn't always like this. They were infamous for never allowing refunds, but due to EU regulations they just did a complete about face and has one of the friendliest refund policies in the ESD business. Probably just behind Costco or something.
The introduction of the refund made them get rid of their deep discounted flash sales though.
Real OGs remember that you could get fairly new AAA games for a song on, like, a random Wednesday. It was part of the initial appeal of Steam. Those explicitly went away because of the refund policy.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/4pnd4p/psa_yes_there... (People were really upset at the time)
Their new refund policy is great, but it wasn't completely free to consumers.
The "played for less than two hours" refund policy is more of a compromise than great, IMHO.
It works well for games that are quick to run and enjoy. However, quite a few of the games I've played will easily burn two hours on loading, compiling shaders, watching unskippable branding animations (splash screens), tuning graphics settings, setting up key bindings, and working past miscellaneous bugs.
Steam's "play time" clock starts when the game executable is launched, and keeps running during all of that nonsense, even at title screens and menus. Some games have run past Valve's return window before I got even a minute of play time.
It would be nice if one of Steam's widely used APIs (Steamworks?) included a way for a game to register when it is actually being played, as opposed to loading or setting up or sitting at a pause screen. I think this would help with the return window problem, and finally make the played hours count on our Steam profiles somewhat accurate.
Counter-anecdote: I've played a game where the developer included a bug that gave other players arbitrary code execution on my PC and left it online while fixing the bug. I've never launched it since and had owned it less than 48 hours. Steam rejected my refund.
I always used the "doesn't work on my system". Though, most of the games I've refunded were really not working on Linux the way I'd like and I just didn't want to hack around or have to reboot into Windows for that game.
> The "played for less than two hours" refund policy is more of a compromise than great, IMHO.
Don't forget the two weeks since purchase, which is especially nefarious as Steam banks on people buying many games through sales that they will only play much later.
I requested a refund of Cyberpunk 2077 after 3 hours (and the second time I refunded the same game - I still didn't like it) and I got it no questions asked.
If a game takes more then five minutes to become fun then return it. I've returned plenty of games with under five minutes of play time, because I don't have the patience to purchase boredom.
Two hours is far more than enough to determine if a game is for you.
There are entire genres where that makes no sense. It would be like returning a book because the first page didn't immediately grab you. Not everything should be designed for attention deficit teenagers.
50-75% off of AAA games from that year were not uncommon. I don't think the sales have ever really been comparable ever since. There are people who have put together Wayback machine compilations to compare - I just took a look at the 2014 and 2015 deals (refunds were ~ 2015) and there was a remarkable drop-off in the sales and variety of games at deep discount.
I think more importantly for Valve though - the daily flash sales were incredibly important to drive engagement and grow their presence.
I think the "why didn't Valve offer refunds before" is kind of revisionist. It wasn't clear that refunds were even a necessary component of cheaper digital games at the time.
You could get entire publisher catalogues for peanuts. I think at least half my steam library is useless filler because I bought every game WB ever published for $40 to get the new batman game or similar.
I payed like 100 bucks (probably less, i don't remember the exact amount) for everything valves ever published, which isn't as good of a deal but shows it can still be done
I think one precursor could have been EA's debacle with Sim City in 2013, when they apparently had a huge wave of disappointed customers doing chargebacks. I'm not aware of any public statement/evidence of this, but it really wouldn't surprise me if their payment processor leaned on them to provide a better means of accomplishing that, and it gave them a way to portray their store as customer friendly.
The EU was just moving slowly as it always does. Action was on the Horizon in the EU as well, which probably contributed to Valve deciding to offer refunds everywhere instead of just in Australia.
I think at this point Steam might as well just release the hounds and let third parties build and sell steam compatible hardware (the Android play). Their own attempts have been, well, not great. Dealing with hardware supply chains is a very different game than software. They already have a platform, the hardware is purely for distribution. Whether they make a profit on hardware or not doesn't really matter. They are basically the opposite of Apple.
Steam already supports 3rd-party controllers and VR headsets. SteamOS is available on several 3rd-party handhelds. What more do you need for "steam compatible hardware"?
Do they support any third-party controllers that are anything like the Steam controller(s)? To my knowledge, third party support is only for traditional game-console-like controllers.
According to Wikipedia, they already officially support the Lenovo Legion Go S.
Not sure what you mean by "not great," the Steam Deck is awesome. The one in our household is like 3 years old and still sees daily use. They have been very well received by the PC gaming community.
SteamOS is mostly just the regular Steam client on top of Linux. You will get more or less the same overall experience by starting with a reasonably capable GPU, then installing any mainstream Linux distro, then installing the Steam client, and making a few tweaks. Valve has been very active in upstreaming fixes and features to upstream projects like the Linux kernel and Wine, so the Steam Deck (and soon Steam Machine) doesn't actually have any special sauce, it's just a nice self-contained unit for those who just want to play games and not be bothered by the OS under the hood.
They aren't going to let you advertise them as Steam-branded hardware without an agreement, but there are multiple handhelds that have done so to be branded officially Steam Compatible.
They tried this many years ago with the original steam machines, it went horribly. Also, you can install SteamOS or Bazite on most machines. Not sure what the issue is here.
SteamOS does not currently really work on modern desktops/laptops. You can force it but it’s really not made for it. They’re pretty clear about that, I think they even pulled down the OS download page from their site and now clearly mark it as for restoring old machines.
Likely to change soon though with the steam machine release
Yeah I’ve been using it as a daily driver, no windows partition or anything, for over a year. It’s been great. Having an AMD CPU/GPU combination definitely helps though
Imagine if everybody did this. You break some stupid plastic part on something? No need to throw it away, just print an exact replacement on the spot. Or maybe tweak it first so it's less flimsy then print the replacement.
If you want a purple Steam Controller, you can load Valve's STL into your favorite slicer, 3D print a new shell, transplant the electronics, and you're done.
If you want a purple MacBook, could you do the same with those Apple PDFs?
Headphone piece broke. Replacement was covered under warranty. Once. After that it was $30 a pop from amazon for the replacement part. Both of the parts provided under warranty (it was a set of 2) broke in the same way.
Figured if the parts break that regularly, I would wind up spending $500 in just a few years on replacement parts, might as well just get a printer. The part already had a model available (it was apparently a common issue), and the printed version hasn't broken yet.
I know nothing about making models, so the fact that the community already had the replacement part ready to print for me was a huge win, and Valve doing this basically guarantees that there will be a variety of "Controller stand, with puck slot" and replacement part prints available. HUGE win.
It's a flavor of 3D modeling called "constraint-based." You've heard the adage that if you give a million monkeys typewriters, eventually one will write something coherent? Constraint systems embody that same idea: There are infinite possible 3D models. You keep adding constraints until you narrow it down to only one possible solution that fulfills all of them.
I've been learning FreeCAD, while it's still more frustrating than Fusion or SolidWorks it's much better than it used to be pre-1.1, and it's FOSS. Also constraint-based, I've been using the new spreadsheet view as the source of all constraint dimensions, with parts derived by binding to top, front, or right-side orthographic "master" sketches. Much like hand-drawn design, where you draw the orthographic views and use those directly to create an isometric view.
Large companies obviously are happy to screw their customers in various ways but I've had pretty good luck with smaller and especially more local businesses. I once had a jeweler gift me an ultrasonic cleaner when I asked them how best to clean a difficult to clean ring (presumably they had recently bought a new one).
Caring about the products they make and their customers seems like sorta the default for most people but large companies learn apathy eventually (or maybe it's mostly the companies that prioritize growth this way that become big). I wonder if less top down control at companies (especially by finance investors) would have them be better to consumers.
This was always the dream for 3D printing, heck going back to classic Star Trek replicators and other science fiction. Granted, even with these models available it's kinda difficult to print large organic shapes like the main housing shells on most affordable consumer printers so I suspect there might not be too many people actually doing it. However, having the exact CAD files makes designing mods and 3rd party upgrades much easier.
Going a step further, imagine hardware manufacturers noticing specific defects, then publishing new updated CAD files for a part that lasts better than the last, for customers who already have 3D printers to print their own upgrades/"patches".
That can work, but 3d printing doesn't in general make for strong parts (layers). Most of the time you want some form of molding or CNC subtractive machining (either plastic of metal) - while some hobbyists have this, 3d printing is far more common. (and often easier)
You might be surprised at how durable FDM parts can be if you know what you're doing, especially if you're willing to blow a some extra filament on making it solid. Orient the layer lines perpendicular to the sheer forces and it can be stronger than the original molded part.
FDM in PLA/PETG sure, although recent advances have improved on this via things like brick layers.
Resin based printers are a whole different story though. They can make really durable parts. And even FDM with more advanced filaments have gotten competitive.
I still think it's weird that Valve is viewed as so friendly to gamers when they're probably more responsible for taking away game ownership on PC than any other one company.
Prior to Steam, I used to routinely buy used games, give away copies of games I didn't play anymore, etc. Steam basically ruined all of that.
Prior to Steam there was StarForce and other copy protection messing up your OS and DVD drives, and plenty of stuff needed online activation as well. Of the last few physical games I bought, none work anymore, Bioshock couldn't be installed due to lack of patch servers last time I tried and Arkham Asylum failed due to GFWL being dead. Even when everything worked, you often had to manually go hunt for patches, sometimes multiple that needed to be installed in the right order, and that might not even be compatible with the localized version of the game you had.
Still sucks that used games died and the forced game upgrades that come with Steam have their issues too, but PC gaming was a horrible mess before Steam cleaned that up. Heck, I'd rather rebuy a game on Steam than find out what those vintage DVD copy protection does to a modern Windows. Most PCs don't even have a DVD drive anymore anyway.
There were definitely issues, but I think that some of those basically extend from Steam and the way it worked. GFWL was Microsoft's competition to Steam, so it just copied Steam (~3 years after a Steam came out) and worked similarly to the way other physical releases worked after Steam became popular.
It's true that some of the heavy DRM was an issue back then, but I'm not convinced that's guaranteed to be less of an issue going forward. Steam probably won't live forever, and there are tons of titles on Steam that use Steam DRM, third party DRM, or rely on servers that will kill the game eventually. Just because the lifecycle is longer now doesn't make it less of a mistake than it was previously.
My biggest complaint, though, is that the ownership terms simply got shittier with Steam. Many of those old games, even from big, "evil" publishers like EA, explicitly allow license transfers in their EULAs. Steam explicitly forbids transfers.
> I'm not convinced that's guaranteed to be less of an issue going forward.
I am sure it's going to be an issue at some point in the future, it already is an issue when it comes to sharing games or keeping older versions around, but what's the alternative? The alternative isn't no DRM, it's whatever DRM Apple, Google, Microsoft, Epic, EA and friends come up with, and of all of those, I take Steam any day.
Even GOG kind of loses to Steam here, as while GOG gave us DRM-free downloads, Steam gave us Linux support and Windows-emulation and I'd rather have Steam DRM on Linux than being stuck on Windows with DRM-free GOG games. And unless I am missing something, GOG's DRM-free games didn't lead to a used digital games market either, they explicitly forbid selling or sharing in their user agreement[1]:
>> 3.3 Your GOG account and GOG content [games] are personal to you and cannot be shared with, sold, gifted or transferred to anyone else.
Digital goods ownership is just not a thing that exists at the moment. There was an attempt based on blockchain with Robot Cache[1], but that just shutdown.
Says you. Steam made DRM a no-brainer for developers and even got almost all players to stop complaining about it. If that hadn't happened who's to say where we would have ended up.
> Steam gave us Linux support and Windows-emulation
No, Wine gave us Windows-emulation. Even DXVK was not originally developed by Valve. They polished it all to make it more user friendly and fixed game specific issues, which is nice of course, but let's not pretend that it was simply impossible to play Windows games before Gaben graced us with his attention.
> Digital goods ownership is just not a thing that exists at the moment. There was an attempt based on blockchain with Robot Cache[1], but that just shutdown.
Right of first sale is well tested for digital goods sold on physical media and cannot be restricted by EULAs no matter what they say. Do you have evidence that courts would see this differently with a digital download?
> If that hadn't happened who's to say where we would have ended up.
We went through numerous years of that before Steam became a thing, almost a whole decade passed between the Internet getting popular and Steam really taking off. DRM filled DVDs and online installs with activation limits were the results.
> but let's not pretend that it was simply impossible to play Windows games before Gaben graced us with his attention.
Let's also not pretend that fiddling for hours with Wine configs is somehow similar to pressing "Play" and having stuff Just Work™. That extra level of polish that Valve provided is critical for making it actually useful for the masses.
> Do you have evidence that courts would see this differently with a digital download?
Can you show me a place were I can buy used digital games? Itch.io doesn't disallow reselling games as far as I can tell, but yet we don't have a used digital games market. Buying a random .zip file, with no proof of ownership, is just not something people are interesting in.
It isn't entirely tautologous. You could use the extra word to location the information, if for some reason the link in the footnote somehow got lost or wasn't included in the first place.
It sold out in less than an hour. Scalpers are at it again. Units are showing up for as much as $300 in resell-value already. What I don't get is why their shop page just gives me an "out of stock" panel, instead of the purchase button. Why won't they just let me buy and pay it, and have it ship whenever? Is having customers to regularly check for new stock (and potentially missing it) better than ... just having them buy it in advance like a pre-order? I really don't get it. Like wouldn't it even make for a better forecasting indicator when it comes to resupplying?
I'm not performing any sort of moral judgement here, I'm using 'underpriced' to describe a good that is sold below its equilibrium pricetag.
Companies are free to do what they like, but lower prices will always lead to scenarios like this, where these go out of stock before demand is satisfied, and this discrepancy is what allows scalpers to exist in the first place.
Is it more moral to allocate goods to the people who are willing to pay the most for them, or to the people who have good scalping bots/happen to get lucky
They could sell the first few for more and settle down to their normal price after a time.
There isn't sustainable demand for a $300 steam controller, that's why they didn't price it there, not because they didn't want to sell for a huge profit. Ther is, however, a much smaller market of people who will pay a premium to be first, hence the resellers.
I honestly don’t understand that world. I wanted one, I was willing to drop a hundred bucks on a controller I wanted but did not need - but they messed up the launch, they didn’t have enough supply to cover demand, so I shrugged and moved on with the my life.
Who is actually out there 1) buying up these controllers to scalp them and 2) who is actually buying them at an inflated price from scalpers?
Like what is the point, what fun is there in playing this game… when I’ve already got a controller I’m happy with? You know? Why worry about this?
Valve is "messing up" all launches in my opinion if I go by your definition. They always are out of stock pretty fast.
Look at the Steam Deck. To this day you have to check every day (at least in Germany) if there is any stock now.
For the scalpers part; I know a lot of people who would pull out a stack of money for anything Valve/Steam branded.
I personally needed a new controller and when I saw the release date I set multiple alarms because at some point you just know how fast they’ll be sold out.
In my (german) memory, I could buy my steam deck quite problem free. The supply issues only really started end of last year/start of this year, due to the global RAM shortages. Before that, I can't recall there being availability issues. (at least in germany)
> Like what is the point, what fun is there in playing this game…
I got to ask
What made you want to live this kind of life?
He said, "There ain't no rest for the wicked
Money don't grow on trees
I got bills to pay, I got mouths to feed
There ain't nothing in this world for free
I know I can't slow down, I can't hold back
Though you know, I wish I could
Oh no, there ain't no rest for the wicked
Until we close our eyes for good"
Cage The Elephant - "Ain't No Rest For The Wicked"
Note that they don't check every second so they might miss some smaller restocks (or really orders which got closed and resulted in a few more units being re-added, since the actual stock is fully gone).
I've been trying really hard to get this new Steam Controller, I've been dreaming about playing grand strategies from my bed on the TV, but using a mouse in the bed is awful! This controller is essentially made for me. No luck so far at all the last few days, despite spending quite a few hours checking every few seconds! Region is also Germany. I've given up until the next restock Valve has announced will come "soon", but I'm guessing I'll miss it because there's too many bots aimed at their store page, not even sure why to be frank, are there really thousands of people willing to spend 3x for a singular controller, even if it's a nice one? The market seems to indicate that.
It stayed in stock in other countries for longer than the US. I ordered mine late on Tuesday, many hours after it launched. Was quoted "6-10 business days" for delivery, and it arrived this morning, approx 3 days after ordering.
Looks like a super cool feature for disabled players.
Regular controllers are good for people with the default number of arms, legs and fingers.
But if you have some kind of disability, it's often pretty unique.
Regular game/computer controllers for disabled folks were pretty pricey last time I've checked.
AFAIK, 3d printing is not that expensive. Many places have hacker spaces or just people who print for almost free.
So I guess it's a huge win for people who need accommodations. I'm very happy for that!
I'm not disabled myself, it was just the first thought I had when I've read the news.
Even if Valve and Steam is great and overall a blessing for the PC space, I don't like the direction they take with this controller. It only works with Steam, it can't work on a desktop OS without it, despite standard layout. It is a subtle move towards a walled garden.
Windows is designed for gamepads to emulate an Xbox controller. All those Steam Deck competitors are implemented as an Xbox controller with a partial keyboard grafted on. That's why you need Legion Space or Armoury Crate to make them usable - they tell the controller firmware what keybindings to send for those rear paddles.
InputPlumber serves this purpose on Linux. Without it, you just get ABXY, start, select, nav, and shoulder buttons - the same layout that's been on the Xbox forever, because games don't understand the random partial keyboard that shares an internal USB hub with the Xbox pad clone. Thankfully on Linux, you're not stuck with one durable keybinding per paddle - once InputPlumber unifies that USB hub back into a controller, you can map all its buttons per-game with Steam Input. This controller brings that same convenience to Windows too.
It's not that Valve is making a proprietary controller - it's that the Windows gaming ecosystem assumes a proprietary controller, and Valve doesn't conform to that assumption. Instead, they provide a fully featured controller and let you configure it per-game in Steam. Considering Steam is the launcher most people use for most games, that's a totally reasonable tack.
Answering a now-deleted answer regarding PS4 controllers working out of the box on Windows:
PS4 controller support on Windows used to be a huge hassle, because you had to install DS4Windows to make it work. Nowadays, Windows automatically downloads the proprietary drivers to make it work, but I'm not sure if that covers the PS4 controller-specific features such as the touchpad, gyroscope, lightbar or if it enables XInput support. I think the PS4 controller situation supports what OP above is claiming.
But then I would have to install Steam, create an account, have it running in the background. And in case of macOS I would have to install Rosetta as well.
It would be better if they released drivers instead.
The Steam client is free and well-supported on all gaming OSes. It also provides Steam Input, which ensures customization parity with Steam Deck. In Valve's eyes, cross-platform support is already here.
A custom driver could always be made by the community. It feels a little absurd to expect Valve to write and support four different gamepad drivers, when they only need one.
> A custom driver could always be made by the community. It feels a little absurd to expect Valve to write and support four different gamepad drivers, when they only need one.
That is what the entire industry does though. Imagine if you needed an application running in the background for every peripheral you have, for your monitor, for your GPU, for running a hotspot on your smartphone over USB. Imagine having to install a piece of software to access a thumb drive. And that all those applications also needed user accounts. That is the entire point of having drivers.
For complex gamepads, the entire industry most certainly doesn't do that. It's not a class-compliant device, the preexisting OS-level mechanisms for Xinput and DirectInput do not accommodate anything but fight rudimentary fight sticks. The same goes for the original touchpad-based Steam Controller.
Just checked. Still needs it. I don't have Rosetta installed and I don't want to install Rosetta just to be able to use a game controller with DuckStation or Aethersx2. When I can also connect a PS4 controller and not need any of that.
This appears to only be in the Steam beta - the version available for download still requires Rosetta. There doesn't seem to be a direct download for the beta - you have to opt into it after installing Steam.
Windows supports Generic HID game controllers with 8 axis and 128 buttons already. And a few hat switches. And if your devices needs more than that, you can enumerate as multiple devices if needed. Not sure if there is a HID type for rumble support though. So, there's no reason a Steam Controller couldn't operate without a special driver. Some functionality may require custom software to support though. I have several Virpil controls and the entire setup will function as a simple set of generic HID devices. The only special bit is some software you can optionally run to control advance per-application remapping. I don't have a Steam Controller, so I have no idea if it can show up as a generic HID controller or not.
2 thumbsticks is already 4 axes. Add 2 triggers and it's 6 axes. Add gyroscope and it's 9 axes. That's more than 8. And I haven't mentioned the touchpads.
A single physical USB device can enumerate as multiple virtual devices. This lets you easily side-step the limits *if* the game supports input from multiple controllers at the same time. The games I use controllers for allow you to map to multiple controllers, mouse, and keyboard, all at once. The touchpad could simply enumerate as a HID Touchpad. Apparently Windows already has a Touchpad Haptic HID Profile even.
Honestly, if Valve is making you require Steam to fully use the Steam Controller, that's disappointing because, as far as I can tell, nothing it's doing can't be accessed via HID usage.
It's a bit more tricky, a Generic HID just gives you a DirectInput device, while reasonably modern games use Xinput. Microsoft never provided a way to map DirectInput devices to Xinput. For Xinput to work a Microsoft specific USB protocol is needed, not a Generic HID device. Many third party controllers have a switch or button combination to switch between XInput and DirectInput modes for this reason.
Microsoft has a new API with GameInput that addresses this situation and allows mapping Generic HID devices onto game controller via config file, but it doesn't work retroactively, it only works for games that use the new GameInput API.
Valve could of course provide a way to switch and emulate other protocols too, just like other third party vendors do, but there is no USB standard that makes things "just work" in Windows when it comes to gamepads, you always need extra drivers, USB modes or other hacks.
On consoles the situation is even worse, modern consoles deliberately lock out any unlicensed third party controller. Playstation3 was the first and last console that supported standard USB controller, while PS5 doesn't even support PS4 controller.
Most of them I would assume. Everything from 2006 forward started to use Xinput. DirectInput support only shows up in racing sims, flight simulators, fighting games and emulation. But all the big AAA games have been built around Xbox360 style control schemes for two decades.
But it's all a bit theoretical, since most modern gamepads have Xinput support, and the generic HID devices are mostly flightsticks or SNES-style gamepads that wouldn't have enough buttons and axis for modern games in the first place. Another issue is that most games don't offer input remapping for gamepads.
But with SteamInput and homebrew tools like x360ce there are many ways to make generic USB devices compatible Xinput, so it's not like you can't use them. It's just not something that works out of the box.
That may explain it then. I use flight controllers and driving controllers. Both just show up as generic HID devices and both are easily used in the games I play.
If all the games respected HID and Valve did something proprietary, I would understand the skepticism. The truth is that most games are engineered with platform integration (e.g. for achievements, controller mapping, etc.), and fallback to the Xbox API. It's reasonable for Valve to sell a controller that takes full advantage of their platform.
Also, Valve's primary OS is Linux-based. There's surely either already a module upstream in the kernel or one is coming soon. That is: open source software to take full advantage of this controller. That's not the same thing as a walled garden.
Seeing as the original Steam Controllers kernel drivers were community reverse engineered rather than Valve contributed, I don't know if I believe in them to make one for the new one either: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-Controller-RE-Kernel
That spliced in USB hub looks messy. Does a new controller necessitate Xinput? I assume Windows still supports DirectInput, which was used in the past with more complex controllers. I'd recently brought up "JOY.CPL" in Windows 10. It would hinge on whether DirectInput can talk to games that expect Xinput.
> It would hinge on whether DirectInput can talk to games that expect Xinput.
As far as I know, nope.
Some games also get really confused if you have Xinput and DirectInput devices plugged in at the same time - for me, Silksong (and unity games in general) don't work if I have a throttle+stick plugged in.
And it's worse than just taking input from the wrong thing, the game can't recognize input from any of throttle, stick, or controller.
Only controller by itself works.
Microsoft has made such a mess of controller I/O that they were kind of forced to go with their jank translation layer made from scratch and running with their main product - it makes sense, especially built up piece by piece
Of course now that they've made controllers work properly, they'll use that work to support their own controller, and in particular enable features like analog triggers + gyro aiming + rumble (xinput can't do these simultaneously), extra buttons (xinput can't do this), and the trackpads (you guessed it).
And it is Windows, because on Linux the controller does work without Steam if you get the right drivers. It doesn't get the full features but it's functional as a gamepad, at least.
For the OG controller on Linux, it was/is possible to use third-party open source software like "sc-controller" to map the pads and rebind things the way Steam does, without needing Steam running.
I don't have any reason to believe that similar projects won't work for the new version.
SDL2 and SDL3 have steam controller support. Also, now that SDL2-Compat is a thing (alongside sdl12-compat), this means literally every game/software that uses SDL 1-3 for controllers on Linux (and windows too) should support the steam controllers.
> Using The Steam Controller Completely Outside Of Steam
> [...] However, at least on the newly released Fedora KDE 44, the system does appear to detect it as a basic gamepad out of the box.
> [...] I installed LIMBO from GOG with GE-Proton and it worked great even with vibration.
More example games are described there as well. A few apparently get confused by the Steam Controller presenting itself as a game controller, a keyboard, and a mouse, but most seem to be fine.
Those tests were done on Linux. I wonder if it's any different on Windows.
On Linux, whenever I connect to my computer without steam running, it will show up as a standard USB HID device. This means, funny enough, I can use the trackpads like a mouse n stuff on my desktop environment.
However, SDL3 (and SDL2 via sdl2-compat and SDL1 via sdl12-compat with sdl2-compat (lol)) supports the steam controller. This means that, without using steam, I get native gyro support and stuff in software like Ryujinb and Citron.
Furthermore, at least on linux, there is sc-controller which is a userland driver that makes the steam controller present itself as a standard Xbox controller. Of course, this means you aren't gonna be able to use the fancy features directly in the game, but it does mean for software that doesn't use SDL and isn't on steam directly, it will act as an FOSS alternative steam input layer. Also, it even has Cemuhook motion server. This mean before SDL3 added gyro support for the steam controller (giving any emulator using SDL3 and SDL2 via sdl2-compat gyro support native), you could have still used gyro controls. Also, with Proton now, I think there is a flag to tell Proton to use SDL input method instead of steam input. I think this means (i have to test it), that you can use SDL to use steam controller with proton outside of steam.
I think on windows, we will see something like sc-controller.
It does work as a keyboard/mouse without Steam. The idea is to have it default to something you can navigate the OS with until you launch steam big picture mode.
The original steam controller had a program to allow users to map the controls without steam, hopefully it will add support for the new one as well.
> It only works with Steam, it can't work on a desktop OS without it
I was very curious about this, No video I saw even said anything about the Steam Software being needed, and is extremely disappointing, on my computer I make a point that I only have steam running if I am playing a steam game. If I am not it is not running and it does not auto start.
Now if it works with steam closed, I am slightly more ok with it but I would love a driver that is not coupled with Steam.
Though I do think it aligns with Valve’s initiatives lately. I don’t think I would go so far as to say walled garden but SteamOS is clearly geared towards using the Steam Store for everything (sure it has desktop mode, but the focus is clear) and their half assed Windows support (despite promises) on the Steam Deck.
Don’t get me wrong, Valve has done a lot of good but I do worry at how quick we are to defend them. I mean I even see people defending their rumored use of AI saying things like “well if there is any company I would trust it would be Valve”. Yeah that won’t backfire.
Edit:
Wait, it won’t even work with a game if it isn’t launched through steam? Are the other comments correct? If that is true, Yeah that is a big nope for me and of course more are not talking about it.
I refuse to let steam or any software run that is not related to my current task.
Why do we criticize Razer for shady practices with their hardware and software but it is fine that Valve did this?
I expect it to work fine without steam. Nobody is going to invest in a completely propriety comms protocol. it will probably be usbHID and a usb keyboard descriptor(or whatever the bluetooth equivalent is). Instruct your usb attach code to attach it as a game pad and it will work fine.
However, the configuration utility for it is part of steam, it is a highly configurable controller, so much so that it could be argued much of it's utility is lost without this configurator.
I don't buy that argument completely, nothing would be stoping them from just not bundling the drivers with Steam and also not requiring that I launch games through steam (if that is true).
While we could argue about the state of Windows, Steam also did not have to engineer it this way and the requirement of launching through Steam feels deliberate.
From what I can find, as others have mentioned, the 8BitDo controllers don't require Steam to be running to work. I presume the PS5 controller likely also does not (I will test this later)
On both macOS and Windows I have used borrowed PS4 and 8BitDo controllers and I can confirm that you do not need a Sony/8BitDo user account or any of their software running in the background for the controller to work.
I only tried one game, but I just tried plugging my PS5 controller into my PC and it worked without needing to install anything in Mass Effect Legendary Edition, and Steam is not running so it isn't Steam Input handling it.
My PC may have installed something on its own, but I did not.
However I don't have an issue if there is a driver, the requirement of Steam running and apparently launching the game through steam is the issue here.
Edit:
I just realized I completely missed the not in your message:
> I can confirm that you do not need a Sony/8BitDo user account or any of their software running in the background for the controller to work.
so I guess my reply was not necessary, I need more coffee...
You don't have to launch games through steam and the controller works fine, just like a normal controller. However if you want to take full advantage of all of the controller's features and be able to remap buttons easily then you can use Steam Input which tries to unify the awful mess that is input device standards across platforms and games.
If you don't want to then there are other options to take full advantage of the features like sc-controller. However this is not as user friendly as using Steam Input.
It's generally a good idea to read and understand before freaking out and getting outraged and spreading FUD.
It's a specific Windows issue too, and not unique to the steam controller. Xinput doesn't work with generic USB controllers, because you know, Microsoft. Hence why you need cope software for Sony controllers.
Valve does deserve criticism for the royal pain certain things are though. For example non-technical users will absolutely struggle to get Proton working without Steam, the process in doing so is purposefully kept undocumented and esoteric. There's 100% a little bit of undesirable obfuscation Valve does to push you towards just using Steam to run their OSS. It's definitely non-Free in the purist sense.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this. Operating systems don't typically include drivers out of the box for every single interface that could possibly connect to it. Often you'll get 'generic' drivers on Windows that at least map some of the basic inputs, but up until like late Windows 8 iirc Windows didn't even include that. Previously if you wanted to connect ANY controller to your PC you had to install third party drivers to make that work. So Valve bundling their controller drivers with steam just kinda... makes sense? Are you saying you would prefer to go find the drivers or have them written by not Valve instead? I really don't understand the 'walled garden' take here. You could go build your own drivers for this if you really wanted to, you don't need to use Valve's software.
USB HID protocol has been designed with huge flexibility and self descriptive devices in mind so that in theory you shouldn't require a custom drivers for vast majority of current input devices even controllers order of magnitude more complex than anything currently sells. Just like you don't need a custom driver for each usb flash driver.
In practice half-assed HID drivers by OS, badly designed OS<->application APIs, hardware manufacturers copy pasting HID descriptors from other devices, not following the standard properly, firmware bugs getting fixed with drivers instead of firmware fixes, intentional discrepancies from standard, console manufacturers reinventing the wheel has lead to the current mess.
Where do you see that SteamOS Holo is GPL3? A package is not required to be GPL, and most of SteamOS is a customized arch installation, there's no guarantee that SteamOS itself is GPL. And which repo are you talking about, I don't see it on their gitlab for SteamOS Holo?
As someone else said, the driver is in Steam, not SteamOS. Even on a Steam Deck you have to run Steam in desktop mode to have the buttons on the deck work.
Its been a minute since I've been on desktop mode, but aren't they just a trackpad at that point and none of the button/haptic functionality exists outside of moving the mouse and clicking?
I do wish there was some kind of stand-alone driver for it. But I think part of the problem is also Windows themselves whos gamepad support is a pile of dog crap for anything that isn't a direct xbox controller replacement. Even retro gamepads pretend to be an xbox controller because they know if they don't 90% of games will be broken.
I assume(hope?) it is usb device class HID(or whatever the equivalent is for blootooth devices), this is well understood and there will be SDL/independent drivers for it in a day.
On the one hand Microsoft's Xinput is sort of nice for standard interoperability. On the other it is sort of a crippled specification, woefully inadequate for anything other than a xbox controller, their earlier direct input driver spec(xinput is a shim on top of this) was more capable. but I still don't think it can specify a touchpad.
I'm getting an 8BitDo controller because of the Steam lock-in on the Steam Controller. I can use the 8BitDo on all of my hardware without having to install software. It doesn't have the trackpads but for the rest is a very solid controller and also has Hall effect joysticks.
If you want to utilize all features of an 8BitDo controller at once, you also need Steam. XInput mode means no gyro, no back buttons bindable in software, Switch mode gives you gyro but makes your triggers digital, and you still can't bind the back buttons in software. You're limited to duplicating an existing input via the 8BitDo app and binding it globally at the firmware level. If you use the 8BitDo Pro 2 with Steam in DInput mode, you get analog triggers, gyro, and the back buttons are bindable in software per-game. This was not the case on release, 8BitDo and Valve worked together and gave this improved support via an update.
The software around controllers is universally bad, and Valve is the first to really try to fix it. We need a successor to XInput that is less limited.
It's been driving me crazy seeing all the hate Valve is getting over compatibility concerns when Valve is the only one making controller support on Windows outside of an Xbox controller work. For years I just assumed I couldn't use many of my controllers on Windows, until Steam added the ability to act as the in between and properly handle it. Microsoft has no interest in making anything other than their Xbox controllers work, and everyone suggesting some sort of "I can just buy X as an alternative" has some major caveat that gets conveniently ignored.
The Steam controller doesn't have Hall effect sticks; they're TMR. Also, my 8bitdo controller does need special software to use a couple buttons on it. And it's the cheapest possible model, not a super advanced one. It just has more buttons than xinput supports.
This isn't to say that you're wrong about your main point. Steam is heavyweight to use just as an input profile selector at application launch. But you should be careful about details if you choose to include them.
I can highly recommend Gamesir controllers. I haven't tried all of course, they make a lot of different ones, but generally it's a great brand for very high quality controllers at crap-controller price. Better bang for the buck than 8BitDo (who focus more on style than functionality).
I've no relationship with the brand btw, I'm just a happy customer.
Wait, really? So if you have two copies of the same game, one bought from Steam and the other from Epic Store, Steam Controller will only work for the Steam one?
Just add the launcher to steam, and you can set the input profile for the game just fine.
Better yet if you use Heroic instead of the official Epic launcher, it will let you add the game directly to Steam.
This is basically how people use 3rd party games on the steam deck. You want them added to steam as 3rd party games for easy access in game mode, so you just add any non-steam games to steam. Heroic and other launchers make it pretty effortless, but you can do it manually as well.
It's a bit more complicated than that (on Windows) because Steam doesn't make a virtual gamepad to the OS. The way Steam handles the input is by hooking into the games individually. So to use Steam for other games, you need to add them to Steam as non-steam games.
Even open source controller remapping tools (not just Steam Controller) and similar used ViGEmBus which is no longer maintained. You can have it do mouse/keyboard though, those don't require custom drivers.
Id bet some money it has more to do with certification. Consoles ban 3rd party controllers that provide a competitive edge. Steam controller is exactly that.
I wish people stopped spreading misinformation like this.
No the controller works for any game, outside of steam, without steam launched.
The only restriction is that to configure the controller, you need steam.
Otherwise, you can select a profile for desktop use that is mkb or a generic gamepad, and run your games through that.
Of course, you won't have many of the modern features, since XInput does not support anything fancy. Want these features on your controller (not just the steam one, the 8bitdo, the switch 1/2, etc..) you will need modern input API... which are provided by Steam!
There was and probably will be third party applications to configure the controller outside of Steam.
It is NOT a walled garden at all and imo, the best of both world.
That's how it worked with the original controller, and how it works with the steam deck.
Like I said, it won't have all the modern features as it will be stuck on a MKB profile or a Xbox gamepad profile (or whatever you configure). But it will work
I still use the original steam controller, and I can tell you this is not true. If steam is not launched, the controller runs in a keyboard/mouse emulation mode and is not detected as a controller. This behavior is hardcoded in the firmware and cannot be changed.
Either they changed something, but that's how it worked for the previous controller and how it works on the deck. Haven't received mine to test, but I would be surprised if they nerfed the controller without Steam.
Of course you won't have modern input controls, since you'll be left to either MKB or XInput which lacks gyro and more.
To be frank, it sounds like you are also spreading misinformation. In a follow-up you even said that you have not received yours to test and that you are only assuming based on the previous steam controller.
But your comment here is very definitive and is a major problem at how quick we are to defend Valve when we don't actually know.
Because people are saying the same shit about the previous controller, when it's verifiably false. The new controller operates on exactly the same principles
It has an on-device fallback mode when Steam isn't running, and you can program (from steam) how it appears to the OS in that mode. It was originally developed for people plugging in their own PCs to a TV, so operates as a trackpad by default. Would your preference to be for them to release a Steam Controller programming app on every platform? Push Microsoft to integrate its extended functionality with Windows xinput?
Nothing wrong with AP203, it has the most support in other software's.
Obviously AP214 would be nice for colors but the model is probably shrink-wrapped (AP242 is not needed, nobody needs PMI)
Just because it was withdrawn in 2005 does not exclude its wide use in industry
Creo (and Onshape) both support STEP AP242 export, but customers may choose to export to an older version for better compatibility with third-party systems that have not implemented recent standards.
Generally, at export time, choosing the oldest format version which still has all of the features you need will make it most likely others will be able to open the data.
They also did this for the original steam controller, which I used a lot. When the back panel broke (its a trigger and battery cover) I was able to 3d print a replacement that has held up great.
I sometimes watch "Ben Heck Hacks" live-streams rebuilding game controllers for people with disabilities [1]. People like him are what these files are for.
I know multiple people whom are quite attached to 10+ year old mice that haven't been manufactured for quite some time, and would like to keep the familiar shape and design.
Can anyone share their experience enjoying the two pads they put on their controllers?
I have a Steam Deck and love it, but the only experience I have with those pads is “dammit I accidentally touched the pad again.” If I want a mouse, I just connect a Bluetooth mouse.
I thought for sure everyone knew it was a flop and we’d never see it again, but obviously that’s not right since they are back. What am I missing?
Besides being a mouse, you can map it to a virtual menu with as many shortcuts as you want, the shortcuts being key presses/combos, allowing you to bind way more things than would otherwise fit on a controller. You can also set up mouse regions so that the trackpad only maps to a part of the screen and will instantly jump there, like for moving around an inventory window or minimap.
For games without controller support or where KB+M has an advantage, the trackpads are a game changer. Imagine a hotbar like in Minecraft or Terraria, but instead of having to go left or right one at a time with your bumpers, you could spawn a radial menu with the touchpad and instantly flick to "8" or "5" or "1" to select those slots.
I've always been a M+KB player and especially for FPS games I've always found it impossible to aim with the sticks, so the trackpads really helped in this regard. Especially for older games that may not natively support joysticks it was a game changer (I recently played Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay)
It's hard to imagine quickly centering onto a headshot pixel (or group of maybe 12 pixels) with a trackpad. Especially if the target is moving.
I'd like to see a video of someone demonstrating real in-game use of these trackpads on different types of games. None of the reviews I've seen so far go into any detail on it.
EDIT: I found the trackpad usage detail I was looking for. But it's not using the new controller, just a steam deck. Looks a lot more accurate than I imagined. https://youtu.be/0BQEg3puMsc
The touch pads work great for emulating a mouse in certain games. I've played many hours of Civ V and VI on the deck thanks to the touch pads. You can even configure them to act as a radial menu or touch menu where different areas of the touch pad emulate different keys.
I played through whole Half-Life 2 on steam deck with aiming and shooting using right touch pad and it was alright. Strongly suspect though the game should have a support for it properly otherwise it feels janky in everything else I tried with it. No idea what's the use case for left pad though - I sometimes play with it during loading screens due to nice sound it makes, that's about it
In steam deck desktop mode, the touchpad-as-mouse makes it just bearable enough to use. I can't use desktop mode with a wireless Xbox controller with no touchpads. It's really the missing input type that makes the steam deck a complete tv-docked PC.
I downloaded one of the models, but it is only the outer mold line, with no internal features. Not sure how useful this is to someone who needs to replace their shell, or modify it.
How does it work if this is under the creative commons license? Can 3rd parties sell this controller per the model? Other 3rd party vendors got around this by making a very minor change.
It's just the external topology so it's really only going to be useful for making things that attach to the controller (skins, mounts, accessibility adapters, etc) or just toy models. Valve asks you to contact them if you want to sell an accessory using this model.
You could use the shape of the controller, but I don't think that is really giving much of an advantage to third party manufacturers. Scanning the shape of the controller and creating a clone with that shape is the easiest part of creating a generic competitor.
I don't fully understand this narrative that is going around about scalpers and the controller. So many people online are claiming it was only scalpers who were able to purchase one. I am also not a scalper (as someone else said), and was able to purchase one. We don't know how many they actually had in stock in total but let's say it's around 30K, from what I have searched on eBay and other reselling sites it would only seem like less than 1% of the stock is being sold by resellers/scalpers. I think it was just a high demand product. I know scalpers are a problem in much of the entertainment industry right now, but it's also becoming a scape goat for anything you just weren't able to buy yourself. It's quite annoying and getting old fast.
It’s hard to participate in any gaming communities because you quickly realize they’re all kids who have no idea about markets but they all talk like foremost experts on every subject
This is not just gaming communities and it is not just kids. The number of adults who don't understand basic supply and demand is astonishing.
Every discussion about Ticketmaster and/or scalpers is full of people who think if it wasn't for scalpers and ticketmaster, we could all go to every concert we want to for a reasonable price.
It is the same thing with the tech community and the price of hard drives, RAM, and GPUs right now. I have seen so many comments by people saying they "aren't going to support the price gouging" and seem to think manufacturers are just taking advantage of the hype to increase their prices.
The societal advantage of raising prices with demand is that it will lead to more supply generally, but in some cases supply is just simply limited and cannot be expanded enough sensibly. This leads just to people earning money without any additional economic benefit and often the poor suffering because of it (like with oil currently).
Of course DRAM manufacturers are taking advantage of the current situation, they're companies and making money is what companies are for. The problem is that DRAM manufacturing works in boom-bust cycles, building a new factory is capital intensive and slow, so additional supply will come too few and too late to press prices down to a sensible rate above manufacturing costs.
The funniest to me was people being confused why cutting of the strait of Hormuz would increase gas prices in the US when the US produces enough to supply its own demand.
But since it’s a global market the missing supply raises prices everywhere…
Does Ticketmaster not amplify prices and use perceived scarcity to drive up prices? They can due that because Live Nation is a monopoly in all but name.
If the tickets still sell out at the higher prices, than it is real scarcity, not artificial scarcity.
Each show has a set number of seats... it isn't an artificial monopoly, it is an intrinsic monopoly. People don't want to just go to A concert, they want to go to a SPECIFIC concert, and a concert venue only holds a set amount of people.
The only thing that's worse is seeing people like you defend scams, exploitation and worsening of consumer experience with trite high school "economics" explanations - and then insulting abused parties because of it.
I managed to buy one, I also have no intention to sell it anytime soon. I do wish there were better protections against scalpers though, they are a blight.
It's also very important to understand that Valve has 100% control of the marketplace. They don't have to hope that Best Buy or Walmart or whatever secure their system against scalpers. They can enforce account history requirements and rate limiting or what ever they please.
I'd be extremely surprised if they didn't do that.
These days it's hard to tell and there's always a mix of both with any high demand items so it makes the stock limits even more pronounced. With how Valve has done hardware releases lately though I imagine it's more a stock limitation.
Is it really? I go to my "local" second-hand marketplace and I see countless of listings for the new Valve Controller. I think it's fair to say most of those aren't "Ops, I made a purchase and I can't return it" but most likely being scalpers. No doubt, some of them are fake as well, but regardless, tends to be fairly easy to see when things are being scalped or if it's actually just high demand, if it's the latter, you don't see tons of second-hand listings the day after it opened.
Right, they're saying you only see the side of the resellers, you have no idea the number of people who purchased it to keep it (like many of us in the thread). So in reality you may be only seeing less than 1% of stock for resell and not the 99% that are just buying it to keep it like normal. It's just confirmation bias that you assume everyone is buying to resell it cause that's all you're able to see.
I also got one and didn't think scalpers were the problem at the time. I have since seen eBay listings of people trying to sell the controllers (that they don't even have yet) for 3x the price, though, so they maybe did play a role. There was a limit of 2 controllers per Steam account and they sold out within 30 minutes, so not sure if bots were used or what. There wasn't a lot of time to mess around. I've seen a lot of people who wanted one couldn't get one. Personally I added it to my cart about 2 minutes before the official start time and then it took 12 minutes or so of retrying to actually check out.
I added it to my cart 2 minutes before and spent 3 hours trying before realizing that just because it's in your cart doesn't mean it exists since it was actually out of stock.
I don't really understand this argument. Is your position that if scalpers didn't exist you'd have a better chance of getting this product?
Scalpers have no effect on the supply of a product, they only affect the demand of the product and specifically they reduce the demand for the product by increasing the price.
I got 2. 1 for me and 1 for my brother. I sat with the page loaded and waiting. It opened a few minutes early and I was able to still order a 2nd about 5 minutes into sale
I think nobody but valve knows and they are not telling us. We don't know how many units were sold and how the protections were (at least I didn't see anything). Some people seem to assume that scalpers are to blame when a product is sold out really fast (which is understandable when looking at past hardware releases).
Me, I don't think so. I just think people really wanted to get one.
I know the steam deck had good scalper limitations. You had to have a steam account in good standing (no vac bans) that had a game purchase from before the deck was available for purchase, as well as a limit of how many one account could purchase.
There was a limit of 2 steam controllers for this sale, but it sounds like that limit was only per transaction, and didn't prevent an account from placing multiple transactions (if the store would load for long enough to allow it). I don't think any of the other limitations were in place.
I have one and didn't have any issues buying, nor heard anyone have any issues buying in the past... In fact, the Steam Controller was considered a flop.
As long as we are doing controller chat, I want to reminisce about the original Xbox Elite controller with replaceable batteries. Very expensive but the weight was nice, the replaceable buttons and joysticks were great, and the replaceable batteries meant that a rechargable battery wasn't going to degrade overtime and make it unusable.
Unfortunately it had some real flaws. The back buttons weren't supported even on windows, I had to use 3rd party software like REWASD to map them to keyboard keys. And despite the high cost of the device, the rubber on it degraded and broke off pretty quickly. And the controller didn't have backlit buttons!
Sometimes I love Volvo... The interesting part is not the CAD files themselves, but the signal/no-cover engineering diagrams. That’s the kind of detail modders usually have to reverse engineer themselves.
Does the release of the controller mean that valve solved the issues with the supply chain of their announced products? I know that the main problem is the rising prices of memory chips, but I would hope this leads to an announcement about the Steam Machine and (I'm still hoping...) HLX/HL3
I wish people would stop referring to "creative common licenses" as if they were even remotely comparable. The license in this case is CC BY-NC-SA which at least allows derivatives but really anything NC should not exist in CC even if its not as bad as the no-derivate jokes.
CC = "Creative Commons" not "Covetous Corporations"
If you're trying to make a profit, you can invest capital to do your own development or reach out to the source to arrange compensation.
This astroturfing of open licenses as if they are solely for the exploitation of profit and not of the common good is a terrible trend.
They engineered something and gave it away for free. It appears as if you are complaining that you can't use it to generate profit. This seems entitled to me, am I misunderstanding your position?
Compare it to Sony who still put potentiometers in their controllers. Good luck desoldering and replacing that once analogs inevitably start to drift. It's super easy to damage something else in the process as I learned.
I'm no big Sony supporter or even a fan of the PS5 controllers, but changing the sticks is not that scary. I find reassembling the whole thing cleanly harder than swapping out a stick assembly.
The pain point was desoldering the old analog, I found a lot of other people online struggle with this particular part.
It's probably way easier if you have proper soldering setup at home, which won't be true for average person just expecting an easy fix. I understand how it can be quick and simple for someone with more experience
I'm not really that good at soldering, maybe I just got lucky? I've only changed a stick twice on a PS5 controller, maybe on the third time I will mess it up horribly haha
As somebody not very familiar with CAD/3D printing, etc how hard is it to produce it myself (couple units for personal use)? What would be the average cost? Did anybody do it?
It's just the "outline" of the controller/puck, it doesn't include internal features for the internals. You won't be building your own controller off these files (without a lot of work).
It's more helpful for making things that conform to the controller, like a holder or stand for your desk or carrying case.
Valve will open-source the entire controller, the operating system, the hardware schematics, and the manufacturing process before they'll tell you what's happening with Half-Life 3.
The joysticks in the STP file don't seem to properly import into Plasticity; the STL files don't have this problem. Though I appreciate that there is even STP at all!
Great news! Open-sourcing the CAD files under Creative Commons is a fantastic move by Valve. This will enable the community to create custom modifications and accessibility adaptations for the Steam Controller.
Dont care about controller, memory card or deck charger or whatever other irrelevant addition to existing products you have. I just want an update on the Frame. And yesterday too. Thank you for very much for your time and attention. Until our eyes meet again.
Apologies for not responding sooner. I did not want you to feel neglected. You know that Valve does not care much about what some rando online wrote in HN post right? Well, have you considered the possibility that they care even less about you defending it:D? Just a thought for these trying times.
I love the readme on the gitlab page [1]. It feels so.. friendly :)
> This repository contains CAD files for the external shell (surface topology) of Steam Controller and the Steam Controller Puck, under a Creative Commons license. This includes an STP model of each, an STL model of each, and an engineering drawing with critical features/keep outs for each.
Feel free to use these to make your own Puck holders, Controller sweaters, or whatever else you want to create!
Your Steam Controller is yours, and you have the right to do with it what you want. That said, we highly recommend you leave it to professionals. Any damage you do will not be covered by your warranty – but more importantly, you might break your Steam Controller, or even get hurt! Be careful, and have fun.
[1] https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/SteamHardware/SteamController
Sometimes I wonder what we did to deserve Valve and how long it can possibly last.
It's the other way around.
Valve is the company where we spend a lot of money and they deserve it.
The rest is companies that trick people into giving them money (battlepass! lootboxes!) and they don't deserve it.
People often forget that consumers as a whole are the ones holding the power, and the sad part is that rewarding a company with a good product with your money stopped being the business model and it's now the exception.
I don't disagree with most of your statement, but Valve has and continues to make lots of money from loot boxes in both CS and TF2. Just want to point out that they do do stuff like that too.
They also didn't/don't put a stop to the gambling sites, scams and non-scams, done with those lootboxes.
We have an epidemic of addiction to gambling in youth, where the arrow points at lootboxes as the gateway drug..
Valve is far from the first, only, or worst actors in this field. Skin lootboxes are not much more than a flex.
If there is one to blame for the gambling epidemic, look at EA and FIFA.
Valve is not literally the first but they played a big part in normalizing both lootboxes and micro transactions. Don't rewrite history just because you are a fan.
Not to mention their role in you not owning your games.
> Not to mention their role in you not owning your games.
I do use Steam to "purchase" games, and it irks me that they're still allowed to show "Buy" when in reality you're essentially leasing/renting the game, can't believe it's legal for them (and others) to trick people like this still.
A Steam purchase I have more confidence in than a physical game copy to survive. I trust Steam to honor its agreement with me more than I trust in myself and my feline overlords to keep a game CD alive.
In a previous timeline, this has led to me going on ebay to find CDs of a long lost game (EarthSiege 2), which I promptly uploaded to the Internet Archive as the one distributed by the current license-holder at the time had an older, unstable version with bugs and, more importantly, no audio and my own original copy got damaged to hell and beyond...
[1] https://archive.org/details/sierra-earth-siege-2
Sure, I agree with all of those things, but the fact still stands, Steam is actively lying to customers as the store pages say "Buy" and "Purchase", not "Rent" or "Lease", which are more accurate. You don't actually own the product.
Don't get me wrong, as mentioned, I use Steam and like Steam/Valve, but that move is a bit shitty regardless.
I think it would be extremely confusing for customers if the steam “Buy” button was renamed to “Rent” or “Lease”.
It would only be confusing because customers are currently being misled and the new label would no longer match their faulty mental model.
How could it be confusing when that's actually what happens? Imagine HN showed "Delete comment" instead of "Reply" under the comment input, don't you agree that be misleading?
how about "Purchase License"
When I check out on Steam it displays this text to me:
> A purchase of a digital product grants a license for the product on Steam.
This is what I see on the checkout page: https://i.imgur.com/diOkyCM.png
There is a product in the cart, which is a game, and the button says "Purchase", no where does it say anywhere that it's a license (although that's obvious), nor that I don't actually "own" this game after I "purchase" it.
Sure, minor detail perhaps, but I'd still argue that something Steam could do better, and since the industry is lacking self-regulation about this, I'd argue more regulations are needed for this even.
It's on the cart page, before you check out. And I do agree that it should be much more front-and-center, rather than the sort of fine-print thing they have now.
https://imgur.com/a/D1LKUUi
What? Valve basically invented making money with skins and lootboxes, it started with TF2 hats. There is an insane amount of money in the CS2 skin market.
And I forgot to mention in-game currency.
I didn't say Valve is perfect. But they're definitely worth the money I spend there. Great service, proper support, regional pricing, and the list goes on. Everything works today. The work they've put on Proton/Linux gaming easily wins my support.
Did they screw up sometimes? Sure. And I'm from the days when Steam didn't exist. I remember the NoSTEAM game versions in shady sites, including Half-Life 2. Steam was hated with a passion back then. They won by ultimately providing great value and service.
I had a rough time with Proton a few years ago and ended up setting up my most recent gaming rig as a Windows 11 machine. In retrospect it was probably unfair to judge it on dime-a-dozen Humble Bundle leftovers from a decade ago when most of the effort is spent on supporting new releases.
But yeah... just this week I was traveling for work and my kid reached out wanting to play a little Deep Rock Galactic with me. I couldn't believe how easy everything was from my Ubuntu 24.04 laptop. Steam, proton, Discord, all of it just worked and I wouldn't even have realised it wasn't running natively if I hadn't noticed the extra proton download in the Steam client.
Very nice work.
honestly, older games from humble bundle usually work really really well in my experience. i’d say give the experience a go again if you have the time
> The work they've put on Proton/Linux gaming easily wins my support.
Lets not be naive here, this is the money they are saving in Windows licenses for the Steam Deck, and having their own store instead of Windows Store/XBox PC App.
Yet they are doing zero to foster native Linux games.
There isn't much they can do to foster native Linux support beyond trying to increase the number of people gaming on Linux. It's a chicken-and-egg problem, and you need to make the platform desirable to developers before they will start developing for it.
They can do an Apple/Sony/Google/Nintendo/Xbox move, "Want your game on Steam Deck? Support Linux".
They certainly have a better card deck than Loki Entertainment used to have.
This is the chicken-and-egg problem though. If you don't get the Linux/Steam Deck audience large enough first, then that tradeoff won't be worth it to developers.
Valve have the money to pay developers to make a Linux port or ensure it works with Proton (maybe they already do in some cases?), if they really wanted to put the heat on Microsoft. Well, any not owned or being published by Microsoft i suppose.
Valve seem happy to let things happen more organically however.
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> Yet they are doing zero to foster native Linux games.
"zero" might be a bit harsh, considering that they do some things at least, compared to others who literally do nothing. Steam the platform has native Linux support, what games are natively available is visible on Store listings, and a bunch of the SDKs (all of them even maybe?) are available natively on Linux too. The situation could have been a lot worse.
It will get more worse, with Proton there is no value in e.g. using Vulkan, just use DirectX, and the convinience of modern GPU programming tooling in Visual Studio, HLSL code completion with CoPilot, PIX debugger, and then let Valve have to worry about running it on Linux.
> with Proton there is no value in e.g. using Vulkan
Valve themselves seems to disagree with you here, considering they still have Linux native SDKs available for integration, and are releasing their own games with native Linux support.
I'm guessing if what you say is true, Valve would be the first to move towards that reality you paint, but we haven't seen that yet, I'm doubting we'll ever see that, but the ones who live will see I suppose :)
Valve will get their OS/2 and netbooks moment if they don't foster a proper native Linux games ecosystem, but yeah lets cheer for Windows games translation on Linux while it lasts.
Valve is actively contributing upstream changes to Wine with Proton. As long as they continue to do that the scenario you envision shouldn’t happen.
I think there's a reasonable argument that the most stable Linux gaming API surface is actually Proton.
None of this is really going to change until we end up with a situation like the EA/Apple Store conflict: a major player unable to sell a game on Windows for some reason.
Also, it's something of a pragmatic choice -- Valve did put major effort into native Linux games around 2013, but the effort fell flat for a number of reasons.
Proton is them trying a different path towards severing or lessening the Windows dependence, in my opinion.
That is like saying the most valuable gaming API is Dolphi, MAME, or LinUAE.
Almost certainly more people playing 80s and 90s games through emulation than on original hardware, so .. yes?
Except the main reason is because 80s and 90s hardware is dead, or hard to come by and repair.
Not naive at all. I'm pretty well aware of the monetary incentives and that they're focusing on their own use case.
But the improvement has been so great (and so downhill in Windows camp) that now Proton is the performance benchmark apparently...
Yes, and it has provided enough heat that Microsoft finally decided it was time for the netbook-like reaction, so lets see how long it holds.
Totally agree with you there, as much as I love to hate non-transferability, revokable licenses, permanent VAC bans on accounts that got hacked, I still find Steam the most convenient path to "owning" games in one place.
The Linux work done for Steam Deck is fantastic and I do credit their efforts with inspiring others to work on similar projects that extend and complement what Valve achieved. Much of the hard effort did go into Windows games on Linux before Valve looked at it; everything the WINE project, Codeweavers did, gaming via Lutris since 2009, however Valve have definitely been a force multiplier.
Trust is earned and I think Valve are doing pretty well on that front, especially when you look at the differences to other PC stores, Ubisoft, EA, and to some extent Epic. GOG and Itch are very different beasts.
To some extent I miss the time where Steam was totally curated, you had to make an impact to get your game on the platform, back before it was a free-for-all of shovelware and low-effort slop. Occasional controversies aside, at least on Steam the tools / marketing funnel are there to keep the popular games at the forefront of the store whilst also being fairly open to allow devs to publish without being the chosen one.
Is there a danger of doing to games what Spotify has done to music? Maybe, but I reckon the super deep-discount sales have calmed somewhat and are happening later in game's long-tail part of the lifecycle or used as promo for sequels.
There are plenty of publishers that choose to mainly avoid going that route, often the traditional established publishers with console outlets they don't want to cannibalise, for example Sony and Konami.
> Is there a danger of doing to games what Spotify has done to music?
I think such business model ultimately doesn't scale well for games (several million-dollars production budgets sharing minuscule pieces of a ~$20 all-you-can-eat subscription pie).
Microsoft always knew this, they didn't try to win the market, they tried to subvert the business model, probably expecting the industry as a whole moving towards it -- which didn't happen at all, at least not yet.
Simple math would prove this. There's no way acquiring half the good studios in the world and make them release flop after flop was a break-even operation. It's several orders of magnitude behind.
Most of the market talks Nintendo, Sony, XBox, Apple Arcade, Android.
Exactly because they aquired half the good studios, they happen to be one of the biggest publishers, people forget some of those studios keep using their own branding instead of anything Microsoft, and it would hurt Steam if Microsoft decides all those studios would pull out of it.
Microsoft moved to a subscription service because they botched the launch of the Xbox One, with users accumulating digital libraries on the PlayStation, and that failure is something that has continued to drag them further and further down.
Which game of theirs has paid-for currency? I don't think you get more points with Dota Plus.
I feel like a lot of things Valve does, with the exception of loot boxes, are the bare minimum of what a good (not great) companies should do.
So of course every single company look at Valve and decide they should do the complete opposite of everything Valve does except loot boxes.
I agree that turning CS into a casino wasn’t a tasteful choice on Valve’s part but as someone who has played CS at least once a week for decades I can understand that they needed to find a way to cover server costs somehow. I paid $15 dollars for CS:GO and have clocked 4,500 hours in the game. I don’t gamble but I’d rather those who choose to fund the server costs than Valve charge a monthly subscription to everyone. Skin sales alone would have accomplished this without having to have loot boxes and keys and that’s where I think Valve went overboard with it. Also, for a game that provides so much revenue I expect better anti-cheat and more VAC bans, which are rare.
They didn't need to cover server costs for CS 1.6. I wonder why that is? Hint: CS 1.6 wasn't designed from the ground up as a microtransaction vehicle so could have servers run by the community unlike CS:GO where centrally run servers are needed to make microtransactions work, not the other way around.
A company choosing to take a loss on a service is not the same as not needing to pay for it, it was getting paid for.
people are still buying tf2 loot boxes?
The lootboxes drop as a normal course of gameplay, you buy keys to open them. People still play TF2 so presumably some still open boxes. It's also the base unit of trading for high value items.
CS lootboxes are the least shitty ones in the entire industry. There is 0% pay to win, if anything the skins are a disadvantage because they usually stand out.
I didn't say that lootboxes were pay to win and most lootboxes in games are not. That doesn't mean it's not still profiting from and enabling gambling and addiction.
Maybe hot take in this age, but loot boxes for cosmetics aren't a problem when you can get cosmetics by just playing.
There's a lot of evidence showing that gambling as a child leads to gambling problems as an adult, and loot boxes are just gambling aimed to a large degree at children.
Valve games are even worse for this because Steam trading allows 3rd party sites to sell cosmetics directly for cash, and some of these cosmetics are worth tens of thousands of dollars. It's just children gambling money but with a thin veneer of video game over the top.
Almost every game that has lootboxes, even only for cosmetics, is super stingy with cosmetics you can earn in-game through normal gameplay.
And I see no problem with that. I have never bought a single skin for Counter Strike nor Team Fortress 2 and I have bunch. Well, I used to, but then CS2 came out and all of a sudden my skins and unopened boxes were valued at hundreds of euros and I sold them on steam.
If you think enabling childhood gambling addictions and unregulated gambling systems aren't a problem then I don't know what else to say to you. Lootboxes are gambling, plain and simple.
Let’s put age limit on gaming then.
Gamblers will always find a way to gamble. I like getting cosmetics for free even if they are randomized. I don’t think I have ever bought keys to loot boxes, I just don’t see the point.
That's not the problem. Valve enabling people selling them for real money is.
..and Dota2..
Ah yeah, I forgot about Dota2, sorry. It's just a genre I don't pay any attention to, but you're right.
Americans would rather mention TF2, a game with less than 10 thousand concurrent players and probably making a modicum of money, than ever pretend that game exists or has influenced other games.
Regardless of how many concurrent players it has now, TF2 was massively influential to other FPS games, and it's still held with high regard by the community. It was also one of the first major games to introduce loot boxes.
TF2 has over 30,000 active players right now though..
https://steamdb.info/app/440/charts/
25,000 are bots farming drops
What does that have to do with Americans specifically?
> The rest is companies that trick people into giving them money (battlepass! lootboxes!) and they don't deserve it.
It's really funny to read this given that Valve largely invented loot boxes!
Maybe not lootboxes but most certainly battlepass.
Although not in its modern iteration.
And they've done legendary doublespeak while looking the other way!
Valve uses battlepasses and lootboxes (i.e. gambling for minors) as much as the worst in the industry. They are far from a good corporation.
Gabe is just better at PR than the competition and gamers are irrationally tribal and will defend whatever they consider to be part of while ignoring all the bad parts.
I'd like to have an honest conversation about this, but imo Valve is no better than the iOS app store: it aggressively rent seeks and has essentially destroyed the shareware model (which was the best way to discover software in the 80s-90s). It has also willingly been complicit in underage gambling via loot boxes for more than a decade now.
I think Gabe Newell is a visionary for building Steam in 2003, way before Jobs had the same idea, but absolutely everyone and their mother hated Steam back then. I remember the memes on IRC and various forums (and I've been on Steam for a very[1] long time, the first or second day it came out I think). Two decades later, props to them and their useful acolytes for gaslighting the entire gaming community. No idea how Gaben is regarded as some sort of Christlike figure these days, but here we are.
Maybe it's just a "lesser of two evils" thing, as companies/platforms like EA and Ubisoft are the absolute scum of the earth.
[1] https://steamcommunity.com/id/dvxirl/
> it aggressively rent seeks
I don't know about the rest of your claims ("shareware was the best way to discover software" is really a personal opinion), but this is just factually false.
Unlike iOS, where you cannot publish an app unless you pay the 30% cut, there is nothing that prevents you from developing and a Windows/MacOS/Linux game yourself. You can simply choose to not use Steam - but the benefits of developing and publishing with it (myriad SDKs, game servers, networking, social features, trading cards, anti-cheat, achievements, payment methods, reviews, discovery, forums, launchers, updates, CDN, and on and on and on...) are so overwhelming that it is simply worth it for the vast majority of gamedevs.
Fact: Steam is not rent-seeking - the value that they provide is tremendous, and you are not forced to use them, which makes them non-rent-seeking by definition.
> you are not forced to use them, which makes them non-rent-seeking by definition.
That's not how it works. Those two things aren't mutually exclusive. Plenty of businesses engage in rent seeking without having a captive (by most definitions) audience. All that's required is a very modest barrier (ex network effect, non-zero switching cost, etc) and a sufficiently large audience.
Rent seeking isn't even mutually exclusive with adding value. A business can do both simultaneously by virtue of being able to multitask. Most businesses offer more than a single product or service after all.
So first off, you start out by lying about my words, so we immediately know you're not operating in good faith.
What I said:
> Steam is not rent-seeking - the value that they provide is tremendous, and you are not forced to use them, which makes them non-rent-seeking by definition.
That's a compound statement that you cut off to change the substance of. What you quoted:
> you are not forced to use them, which makes them non-rent-seeking by definition.
And now that we've called out your lie, we can move on to the substance, which is also incorrect.
The definition of rent-seeking disagrees with everything that you've said:
"The attempt to profit by manipulating the economic or political environment, especially by the use of subsidies."
https://www.wordnik.com/words/rent%20seeking
Steam is doing none of that.
> Rent seeking isn't even mutually exclusive with adding value.
This is factually incorrect - both according to the dictionary definition of the phrase, and according to the way that it's used casually, which is extraction of value without creation of it.
I'm glad that this is happening in the open - when people have to actively lie to try to push a narrative about Steam, it really shows that they have no legitimate points - every thread where these lies are exposed just (justly) boosts Valve's reputation.
You are not assuming good faith, nor are you interpreting what I wrote in the most plausible manner.
I did not misrepresent you. You made two claims and I objected to the second. My objection stands regardless of the presence or absence of the claim about Steam providing value.
Notice that I took no position on whether or not Steam is rent seeking, instead merely disputing the reasoning that you expressed.
However even if I had taken a position to the contrary, I don't see how the definition you quoted would be at odds with that. I think it is fairly reasonably to see a dominant player with network effects as possessing sufficient economic power to meet the criteria you laid out. For that matter it's quite presumptuous on your part to assume that everyone else is on board with the particular definition that you selected there.
And it goes without saying that I disagree with your latter assertion of factual incorrectness. No dictionary disputes the ability of a business to multitask.
Actually interestingly enough if we use your definition then you can rent seek while simultaneously adding value to the same product just so long as you're also engaging in unreasonable market manipulation to increase your profit in the process. Amusingly my working definition had been somewhat more restrictive.
> I did not misrepresent you. You made two claims and I objected to the second.
I made a single claim with two parts:
1. the value that they provide is tremendous
2. you are not forced to use them
And then my conclusion was: these make them non-rent-seeking by definition.
You intentionally rewrote my argument to change its meaning, you know that you are, and you're continuing to lie about it.
I don't need to argue with you further - I've pointed out that you're fundamentally dishonest to other readers, and that's all I need to do from here on.
The real value Steam "provides" are the network effects. That's rent seeking.
> The real value Steam "provides" are the network effects.
Actual people who play video games disagree with you. Don't speak about things you're ignorant of.
> That's rent seeking.
Factually incorrect. Steam provides services and convenience that developers and players find incredibly useful.
As someone who worked in game dev in 2008, we loved Steam, for the same reason we loved the iOS App Store. We take it for granted these days but the ability to self-publish on a first class platform and receive 70% of the sales revenue literally redefined the indie game dev industry.
Use of the term ‘rent seeking’ is, in my experience, often correlated with a sense of entitlement and a lack of appreciation for what is actually provided. It’s only rent seeking if no additional value is added which is clearly not the case here.
I'm surprised you haven't been flagged or just a dead comment. Any signals that Apple is not pure evil for taking 30% is not part of the echo chamber group think around here. People never want to admit that it costs money to retail your product no matter where it is. In the physical world, there's manufacturing and delivery costs. Getting shelf space at a retailer takes a lot of negotiating where you have very very little room to bargain. Retailers will even force you to buy back unsold product. Yes, software doesn't have all of that but have their own nuances. A lot of indie game devs don't have time/skill/want to do a lot of what an app store can do. Expecting to get all of that for free because it is software is just not sane. If you are self-hosting all of it, it will not be free as you will be paying for payment processors and a hell of lot more in attracting eyeballs.
The problem with Apple is not the 30% cut, it's that you're not allowed to use other app stores or install apps without their store.
"has essentially destroyed the shareware model (which was the best way to discover software in the 80s-90s)"
funny, I was thinking the same thing with "shareware model" replaced by "warez model".
> imo Valve is no better than the iOS app store
You can't buy the top search result position on Steam. That alone sets them far apart for me.
You can buy the rotating banner at the top.
You can't. Check the very bottom of this page: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/visibility
You can sponsor a promotion; sales on a bunch of games - but it's not "Brought to you by the cool refreshing taste of Pepsi" it's like "Berlin Game Developers".
I meant the carousel.
you can’t, actually
Steam is also cross-platform.
But sadly still essentially all-DRM.
Steam as DRM is basically the best case scenario. It is opt-in for developers, meaning there is no DRM at all for some games on Steam. You can download it, back it up, run it without Steam. The games that do use Steam's DRM are trivial to "crack" by replacing a DLL in game folder with a stub (you can find open source ones on GitHub). If Steam had no DRM I think publishers would lean more on other options which are worse for customers.
Shareware died before Steam. Steam launched in 2003 and didn't sell any 3rd party games until 2005. Nobody gave a shit about shareware in 2003. Nobody gave a shit about shareware in 2010 when Steam seriously became useful as a place to play more than the Orange Box and Counter-Strike.
I hated Steam when I first encountered it, but it's not a requirement to publish a game on PC/Mac/Linux. Nor is the process to install non-Steam games full of scary warnings like Google Play even on their own platform SteamOS. And they do let publishers give keys to 3rd party stores to sell unlike virtually every other platform. They aren't perfect but they are nowhere near what Apple does with iOS.
If you think they aggressively rent seek then you do not know the history of game publishing.
"destroyed the shareware model". You know that they only sell games, and just have the games that they made in the list too(them just being amazing and popular). It's not some easy task as recovering old systems when there are every type of games imaginable. Even if valve made a option to do that, no one will since other companies don't do anything like that.
> has essentially destroyed the shareware model
Wouldn't the Steam digital demo system be the modern evolution of the shareware model? For free you can access a limited portion of the game to try it and consider eventually buying it.
Steam is just a storefront. They hold no monopoly position or power. It's not comparable to iOS app store. Devs are free to list their game on any other storefront concurrently.
This is the same argument Microsoft used ("we're just an OS, totally not a monopoly"). I think to anyone that spends any time doing any PC gaming, it's obvious that Steam is the only relevant storefront by a country mile.
Relevance isnt anti competitive. Comparing them to Microsoft who not only monopolized but enforced it via product bundling is not the same at all.
They simply have the best product and won the market.
Or did they just get there first, and stayed first due to network effects? Initially, nobody wanted steam. People definitely don't want a second steam - which in practice means sticking to the first one.
They are headed Apple/Microsoft way though with SteamOS and Steam Deck/Machine.
I can see why you might think that but I believe that's actually insurance against Microsoft going the Apple route and hamstringing Steam in the process. They needed a near first class platform that would never be used against them to exist and they needed the switching cost for end users to be near zero. By leveraging pre-existing FOSS projects they managed to avoid the vast majority of the development costs which would otherwise have been prohibitive.
The best insurance against monopolistic behavior is to get there first.
Could say the same thing about AT&T, Bell Labs, etc. There’s a lot of precedent here, but most saliently, how you become a monopoly is not really relevant. They absolutely are one. But I’m being already aggressively downvoted with no counter arguments so the Gaben fanboys are here. (Defending a deca-billionaire is hard work, after all.)
What’s your solution then to them being a monopoly? How would you meaningfully break them up? While they outperform the sales of Epic and Gog I’m not sure how they’re abusing their position or how they’re keeping others from entering?
> How would you meaningfully break them up?
You could separate the storefront from the distribution platform / client. Valve's ~30% cut is often justified by the visibility being on the Store gives you but you can't opt out of that while still reaching the captured audience that definitely don't want yet another client software bloating up their system.
> Could say the same thing about AT&T, Bell Labs, etc.
No, you cannot. AT&T/Bell Labs was a monopoly - they physically controlled distribution networks that made it so you had to use them.
Valve does not. There is nothing that prevents you from simply selling your game without Steam.
And even if there wasn't, claims that Valve is a monopoly are factually false - there are many other storefronts that exist, and many games are published on more than one storefront at once. And, Steam does not gate an OS or platform like Microsoft and iOS do.
> But I’m being already aggressively downvoted with no counter arguments
Every one of your arguments is being countered (such as the claim that "relevance is anticompetitive" which isn't even false, it's nonsensical). Including this one.
> Defending a deca-billionaire is hard work, after all.
...and there's the emotional manipulation. It's pretty clear you're just a propagandist who has a grudge against Steam (maybe you work for Epic?), given that you're going up and down the thread with emotional non-arguments that try to redefine words, pull at peoples' emotions (like the billionaire comment), or just flat-out lie.
> Valve does not.
Except they do. They control the Steam distribution network. It may not be physical but you still have to use it to reach a large portion of PC Gamers due to network effects and no one wanting to run multiple clients.
Currently you have to also make use of their other services like the Store, and pay for them with a large sales cut, in order to use the distribution network, no matter if you want those services or not.
> They control the Steam distribution network.
Tautologically true and therefore irrelevant. That's exactly the same as saying "Walmart has a monopoly over Walmart's physical stores" - that's not a meaningful statement and it has nothing to do with either monopoly status or consumer harm.
> It may not be physical
...and therefore it's categorically different. Don't be dishonest.
> you still have to use it to reach a large portion of PC Gamers
It's called a "distribution channel". You only "have" to use it, in the sense that most people look for stuff in Steam before they do anywhere else, but it is factually different than a telecom monopoly, where you cannot get internet from more than one provider in your neighborhood. This comparison is irrelevant and highly dishonest.
> due to network effects
No, network effects are secondary. People do not install Steam because their friends are there, they install Steam because they want to buy a game or download the games they already have. That's not "network effects" - that's using the tool.
> no one wanting to run multiple clients
Also untrue - almost every single person that I know uses multiple clients, and I've only ever once heard someone refuse to install an additional client, and it was on principle (Epic Games).
> Currently you have to also make use of their other services like the Store, and pay for them with a large sales cut, in order to use the distribution network, no matter if you want those services or not.
...and because it's one of the largest digital distribution networks in the world, this is entirely fair.
You're very clearly trying to stretch the definition of "monopoly" and manufacture harm, without actually knowing anything about Steam or how people use it.
Disagreeing with someone either ideologically or about the definition of a word or some other criteria does not mean that the other party is being dishonest. It is not reasonable to bandy about such accusations.
I think you’re confusing
1. Being a monopoly
2. Abusing monopoly status.
Steam does control the vast share of desktop gaming. But has no influence on console (Xbox, playstation, switch) or mobile (android, ios). They are a monopoly.
But they don’t abuse their monopoly so they haven’t broken any laws.
Your partitioning between those two things is good, but I still don't think that either label applies to them:
> Steam does control the vast share of desktop gaming.
Between the Epic Games Store, GOG, Humble Bundle, Xbox, Origin, Itch, and a few others, I don't believe their control is anywhere close to the fraction needed for Steam to be a "monopoly", either legally or in casual speak.
> Steam does control
...and, what's more, they don't "control" anything - what prevents you from either using multiple clients (on the player side) or selling on multiple storefronts (on the developer side)?
A monopoly has to monopolize some limited resource or market - you can't really have a monopoly if there's no limiting or exclusivity. That's like saying that Fortnite is "monopolizing" the battle royale genre because it's the most popular - it is the most popular, but there's no exclusivity because you can always play another battle royale in addition to Fortnite.
Monopolies need pie charts (limited resources that are taken by a single actor), but Steam is a bar in a bar chart.
I’m using the correct terminology.
Google controls 90% of the search market and the browser market. There is nothing preventing anyone from searching on Bing. Yet, the correct terminology is control of the market.
Google has a monopoly on search. Have they abused that monopoly? That’s a legal question that’s currently in court.
Steams share is somewhere in the 70s and it is far stickier than Google. A gamer can’t abandon their steam library easily. Have they abused this monopoly position? IMO no, but my knowledge is limited.
You're being downvoted because you're pushing punishing a company for having a better product. They do not engage in anticompetitive practices, there is no enforced barrier to entry in the market nor do they gate entry like the companies you have listed. They are only a monopoly because they have the best product.
That a really silly comparison. An OS is a big deal, you can't just switch off. Steam is a video game store. You can install shit from anywhere. People stick to steam because it's good. It's not morally wrong to have the best product on the market.
If you want the audience as an indie developer, it would behoove you to launch on Steam (because they're a monopoly). Again, MS used all these cute arguments, and they don't really work. There's a reason Valve is always playing very nicely with regulators (especially w.r.t. the gambling stuff). They don't really want to rock the boat, but a benevolent monopoly is still a monopoly and I do think that a 30% cut for running a distribution platform is pretty predatory, especially as bandwidth has been commoditized.
Again, it is not wrong to make the best product. It behooves any manufacturer to sell to distributors with largest reach, especially if it is a non-exclusive agreement, and this is perfectly normal market activity. You seem unaware of the legal definition of monopoly; Valve is nowhere near it. The made up internet definition, having a majority of sales in a market, is just what happens when the product is good. Actually it would be a bit of a market failure for the best product to not have the most sales.
Also please don't point to the failure of Epic or other stores; they're just bad products. Epic store didn't even have a shopping cart for years. No one competent is competing, and that's not Valve's problem.
> If you want the audience as an indie developer, it would behoove you to launch on Steam
Correct, because they're a huge distribution channel, and literally anyone who has ever tangentially touched business knows this and accepts that it is fair to pay for this.
> (because they're a monopoly)
Factually incorrect. Nobody forces you to use Steam. You can create and launch and sell a Windows or Mac or Linux game without ever touching steam. You can self-publish and run your own game servers and CDN, or you can use the Epic Games Store, or you can use GOG, Humble Bundle, Xbox, Origin, Itch, or any of a dozen others.
> Again, MS used all these cute arguments
This is extremely dishonest. Microsoft controlled an operating system, only one of which can run at a time. If you are running Windows, you're not running Linux. And Microsoft entered into distribution deals with OEMs to pre-install Windows, leading to massive default-choice effects. Neither of these are true for Steam - you can install and run every single platform I listed above at the same time, and I've never seen a computer come pre-installed with Steam ever.
> I do think that a 30% cut for running a distribution platform is pretty predatory, especially as bandwidth has been commoditized
So, you have no idea what Steam actually does.
Steam is, in addition to being one of the largest digital distribution platforms in the US (if not the world) - which is by itself worth paying a 30% cut for, a SDK and networking provider that gives you a social network, input (gamepad/keyboard/mouse) library, achievements, digital trading cards, update system and CDN, real-time voice comms, product key redemption, license tracking, DRM, anti-cheat, user forums, and many other things.
If you only criticize things that you actually understand, you'll end up looking a lot less foolish, and undercutting your own points as a result.
And yet, Escape from Tarkov is not on Steam, which would seem 5o contradict what you're saying.
> And yet, Escape from Tarkov is not on Steam, which would seem 5o contradict what you're saying.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3932890/Escape_from_Tarko...
Hey - your bot is failing (presumably you read replies)
What? You can literally just download an exe from any website and run it.
If you're complaining that Valve owns a big list of games and a ton of eyeballs, and not being on that list means those eyeballs don't see you when they look at that list, idk what to tell you because they seem to have earned that part of their business pretty fairly.
GOG is pretty good too. I just wish they had better native Linux support.
Yes, true. Same thing with most software companies - they forget 100% of their value logs off at 5pm.
If you're a software CEO reading this, your company value doesn't come from your customers, clients or contracts. It's the people doing the work.
VALVe are the original lootbox hawkers
We let kids gamble so much money in games that they don't have to nickel and dime the adults.
That's true now, but Valve has been like this since the start, way before skins and microtransactions.
You’re ignoring how much of a role the TF2 hats played in pushing microtransaction skins.
Steam came out in 2003. TF2 hats came out in 2009. It’s lived in the world of micro transactions way longer than it lived in the before times.
I think you are blaming Valve for forces way beyond Valve's control. Valve isn't perfect, but it is a way better steward for PC gaming and PC gamers than any other American tech company would be.
It's harder to say that when they invented loot crates. Sure everyone's doing it now, and someone else would've done it eventually, but Valve pioneered it.
I suppose, yeah, some things would be a lot worse without Steam, so there's that.
Yes, I was there. I sat through a presentation about their original concept for selling content in Team Fortress. Trust me when I say that it turned out nothing like they originally conceived of-- which is a whole different story. The whole idea that they "invented" loot crates is weird because the idea goes back to collectable card games and other things. I am not saying they are without fault.
And various games from Asia were already doing lootboxes in video game form since about the time Valve was founded.
You could also argue loot crates are just the digital version of Pokémon card packs
You could, but that doesn't make /either/ an acceptable to market towards kids.
Yeah, because that would be like selling packs of baseball cards to kids with enticements like chewing gum, a practice that was outlawed in the United States in the 1950's.
Was it outlawed in the 50s? I remember getting baseball cards with gum in the 90s...
Eh, Topps did in the 1950s and The American Tobacco company did it in 1909.
That is not true. Gachapon mechanics existed long before, valve only took it to western market, not knowing the consequences. Remember this is way before gambling sites. It was a way to earn a cool random hat on TF2.
I'm aware of what Korean MMOs were doing years earlier, but it feels different, in a way I can't quite put into words. I suspect there's a psychological aspect to earning the chest and buying the key.
But yeah, maybe I'm pushing a distinction that doesn't exist, and it's all just forms of trading cards (which themselves were popularized by tobacco companies).
I feel like it's innocent and we made it into what it is. If valve was the first one to bring cactus plant to the people and we started pleasuring ourself with it. It wouldn't be Valve's fault.
In the end it's like trading cards. Way to collect a cool cosmetic that doesn't break the game and trade it with people, making a community and new friends.
We made it into "buy 20 spins"
> not knowing the consequences
Yeah right, they just accidentally massively profit from it. Come on dude, Valve has behavioral psychologists on staff. They don't just accidentally abuse players.
They are for profit business. Even grocery chains have behavioral psychologists. Valve doesn't run the gambling sites, they even tried to stop it multiple times. [1][2]
Valve doesn't pocket anything from the direct trade. Their cut is the same regardless the selling price of an item, except when traded through steam marketplace.
The only benefit valve stands to gain from this is the free marketing. Their business in this sense is not much different from trading cards, except the goods are digital.
[1] https://www.hltv.org/news/43421/valve-bans-skins-gambling-ca... [2] https://www.polygon.com/2017/1/30/14440958/team-fortress-2-g...
As much as I like Valve, it's difficult to ignore how large a part they played in shifting the PC market towards F2P.
I bought TF2 with the Orange Box, and for a few years it was amazing. Then it went F2P with hats, and overnight the player base turned into a cesspit (and the hats themselves completely ruined the aesthetic that they spent years painstakingly crafting).
2013 rather than 2009, I think? The pyro dropped in 2010, and I'm pretty certain hats came later.
I'd call crates the beginning, and those came with the Mann-conomy update in 2010.
Most other companies would still nickel and dime the adults, though.
They still do that, Valve popularized the concepts of battle passes (with Dota 2) and loot boxes (with Team Fortress 2). They also took a paid game with TF2 and added all that monetization after the fact.
Counter-Strike especially has a pretty nasty gambling scene that Valve refuses to control, even though its only possible because of their marketplace and APIs.
The only real in-game purchase in Counter-Strike is the game itself to gain access to the ranking system. The skins are a superfluous add-on.
They knowingly profit from gamblers if you will but gamblers are going to gamble.
The gamblers were offered e-sport or gambling and they chose the latter.
You could use Robinhood to build up a growth portfolio starting from a handful of dollars or you could use it to buy 0DTE OTM options on credit. Guess which one the gamblers chose.
I’d like to point out that TF2 was part of the Orange Box bundle that included Half Life, Portal, and TF2. Those single player games were never given away for free, so as a purchaser of the bundle, I wasn’t miffed TF2 went free to play. In fact, quite the opposite. Because TF2 is free, there are like 50k people to play with me everyday. I think $0 is the right price for TF2.
I agree CS is icky re: skins and gambling. But to say “refuses to control” is disingenuous. They’ve done many things to curtail gambling, like preventing tourneys from displaying gambling sponsors and adding trade restrictions that hampered bot activity. Valve is between a rock and a hard place here- they recognize gambling is a net negative on the value of their game (hence the curtailing and remonetization efforts). Remember, valve didn’t create skin trading with the expectation of third party gambling, so this is something unprecedented they’ve had to figure out as they go. Despite its drawbacks, the gambling market has some positives that valve can’t ignore. It creates liquidity and demand for the skins. People who pay hundreds of dollars for skins hate to see their value plummet. So if valve nuked gambling today, it would upset a lot of folks. I think valve has done a phenomenal job balancing their business needs with the social obligations with the players.
They also nickel and dime the adults, but only the ones who make the games.
It's fine though, because they're nice to players and they've brainwashed them into giving their money to Valve instead of to the developers who actually make the games they fucking play.
Without steam, I'd still be playing my CD version of Homeworld 2.
I have paid $10 for every $1 of game I play, perhaps as high as $100:$1. A 30% cut of that seems totally reasonable. I have hundreds of games I keep just in case, and have played 10s of games I'd never have considered because they dont appear in Game Informer, PC Gamer, GoG, Twitch, Youtube, or other channels. They just are magically brought to me by steam, and I buy it and try it because I'm an adult now.
If game creators hate this, I feel bad for them, but I don't want anything to change as a consumer.
Of course 30% seems reasonble to you, you're not the creator of the games. It's quite confusing to me that you're endorsing the side that has an insane ROI instead of the side that is sufferring greatly to make ends meet.
A 70% take would have blown the minds of developers pre-Steam. Retailers took 40% and were ruthless about shelf space and inventory. Distributors took 20%. Plus you had to actually make a box/CD/etc. They were lucky to keep 30% not pay it.
This doesn't mean Valve is perfect but if a developer is "suffering" because of a 30% cut they probably need to improve their pricing/game/community/etc.
Retailers and distributors had actual costs they needed to cover for the services they provided. Steam largely does not seeing how profitable they are.
The economy is not static. A good deal in the past is not necessarily a good deal in the present.
It still is a damn good deal. Steam abstracts a whole lot of messes. In ye olde times you as a game developer had to acquire a publisher for each country you'd plan on selling your game to deal with local distribution structures and laws, taxes, payments, update distributions, DRM and anti-cheat, user management...
Steam conveniently abstracts all of that for you. One stop shop. No complex deals just to deal with getting paid for your game (or additional content), barely any chargeback fraud, you don't even have to deal with stuff such as Germany's highly complex age rating because Steam abstracts that with a questionnaire. Steam claimed to recognize and support 237 countries [1], although that list includes disputed countries, so take it with a grain of salt, but in general I'd say unless a country is affected by US sanctions (i.e. North Korea, Iran, Russia, Belarus) or has its own restrictions (i.e. China), chances are 99% you as a publisher can sell your game in this country with everything being taken care of.
And on top of that, gamers likely will already have a Steam account with payment already set up, which means far, far less friction than the likes of Epic Games impose.
That definitely is worth a cut.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40263518
>taxes, payments
The market rate for this is low single digit percents.
>update distributions
Bandwidth is not worth a percentage of game revenue. If it were it would be <1%.
>DRM
Steam's DRM is terrible.
>anti-cheat
Also terrible.
>user management...
This is not worth a percentage of revenue.
All of these together is not worth 30%. The only thing worth 30% is the ability for the Stram store to put your game in front of a random person. Being able to reach new customers.
> The market rate for this is low single digit percents.
We're talking about virtually every country on Earth. Good luck trying to replicate that, the taxes/legal entity part alone will cost you an arm and a leg in setup time, not to mention ongoing costs in accounting, filing reports and dealing with other bureaucracy BS.
> Bandwidth is not worth a percentage of game revenue.
I'm not talking about bandwidth or a CDN here. I'm talking about a reliable and easy mechanism to get updates distributed to end-users - consisting of a management backend, the CDN and finally a client side software that's actually doing the upgrades. And the latter is something many have tried and failed to do or ended up getting 0wned in the process (e.g. just recently notepad++ [1]).
> Steam's DRM is terrible.
Is it? Sure, for some AAA titles you'll see Denuvo slopped on top, but for the wide masses, Steam's DRM is more than enough.
> [user management] is not worth a percentage of revenue.
Managing user data is an utter PITA in the era of GDPR et al, and on top of that it creates a need for customer support resources - people forget their password, get hacked, god knows what else. As a game dev under any of the major storefronts, you don't have to deal with that at all.
[1] https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/hijacked-incident-info-up...
> Is it? Sure, for some AAA titles you'll see Denuvo slopped on top, but for the wide masses, Steam's DRM is more than enough.
Because for the wide masses you don't actually need any DRM, which is about what Steam provides: nothing.
> Good luck trying to replicate that,
Why would you need to? Notice that the comment you replied to used the phrasing "market rate". The service you're describing is commoditized today and none of the major players charge anywhere near 30%.
> The service you're describing is commoditized today
Payment, yes, that is effectively commoditized. But Stripe, Paypal or cryptocoins only solve the "collect and move money across the world" part, not the "deal with the BS around taxes and tariffs in an N-N matrix of countries for publishers and consumers".
As a publisher of a game or other piece of software, I either have to use one of the global storefronts (Apple's App Store, Google's Play Store, Steam, Epic, Microsoft Store) to abstract this problem away for me (and all of them but MS have a somewhat comparable revenue share), or I have to find publishers in each jurisdiction I want to sell and negotiate with them and have additional expenses and efforts in repatriating the income, or I have to go and create my own legal entity for each jurisdiction and deal with filing the proper taxes and other BS on my own. Oh and notably the latter case also applies to dealing with sanctions lists - can't imagine OFAC being happy when my, say, Swiss subsidiary has the sanctioned offspring of a Russian oligarch buy a game from them?
This regulatory moat of doing international business is what keeps revenue shares at ~30% across the global stores. It is extremely difficult to build a competitor for the messes I mentioned - otherwise, someone else would have stepped up long ago to capture this gigantic money spigot.
Covered by your reference to less friction, but there's also a trust level that goes with being on "Steam" vs random website.
Indie games would be far more of a gamble to buy if Steam wasn't around, and just finding them would be a huge hurdle.
> unless a country is affected by US sanctions
A list that's growing by the day lol
That's tariffs and you gotta admit, Steam abstracted that away, too! Everyone else had to deal with Trump's latest BS on their own.
You're implying that Sales, Marketing, and Distribution is not a valuable service by saying 30% is not reasonable. I work in the electronics industry selling components. Suppliers regularly give us 30% margin, far more on some products, despite the upfront cost of making a new microcontroller or FPGA being far in excess of the most expensive video games ever made, with our value add being, to be frank, much less than Steam. 30% margin is about average for distribution, be it food, minerals, cars, or any other industry.
If I didn't have Steam (or equivalent service like GoG), I wouldn't buy new games. That's just reality. I would play the same games I have for decades. Instead, Steam has created a very effective recommendation engine that gives me a great selection. That's more than worth a 30% cut.
I'm endorsing my side. Not Steam's side, or the creator's side.
Maybe their business model is awful, but I love what they do, and what they have done. They have made my linux machine a top tier gaming option, freeing me from the only use of windows left. They have brought me the steam deck, which has a thriving accessory market due to their creative commons licensing. Etc etc. They are pro consumer.
I want steam to continue largely as is. In an ideal world all artists would be better compensated for the joy they bring to the world, but I'm quite happy as a consumer of art. Not to be too harsh, but frankly, the existence of struggle for recognition does not entitle artists to a penny of my money or a second of my time beyond the transaction they propose, nor does it entitle them to anything that Valve does or makes. That we can all work together well is a function of a local solution to the tension of conflicting interests. Valve is seeking a balance. It could be much worse for both sides.
But if you want, think of it this way - all of Steam's profits, billions of dollars, are only 30% of the sales they have brought. They made 17 Billion in rev last year, so nearly 25 Billion went to game makers / publishers. This is 2-3x what spotify paid to artists in the same year.
Regarding the 30% cut. Developers can actually generate steam keys and publish them on third-party sites which can be redeemed by users on Steam. Developers then get 100% of the profit.
But they're only limited to 5000 keys. beyond that requires special approval, which is not given if the game is being sold more outside Steam than inside.
The complaint is that the platform they are using for advertising, distribution and/or community isn't giving them enough free keys? Just want to make sure I understand the relationship and expectations.
So publish the game on your own website? Why do you need to use Steam in this case?
Are the developers allowed to sell those keys for less than the Steam price?
> Are the developers allowed to sell those keys for less than the Steam price?
I believe so. However, even if it's not I don't see any other platform allowing you to use their service and sidestep platform fees. Someone mentioned above that there might be limitations for the number of keys, but I'm not aware.
> Valve is seeking a balance.
They're demonstrably not. I'd advise you to read up on the concept of a monopoly.
> They made 17 Billion in rev last year, so nearly 25 Billion went to game makers / publishers. This is 2-3x what spotify paid to artists in the same year.
And? I don't understand why you're just comparing two values in absolute values. You're talking as if Valve is giving away money.
Steam gets me and many others to spend a lot more than 50% more on games than we would otherwise. I’m pretty confident that they push a lot more money to creators than they’d getting otherwise, even leaving aside the old publishing revenue splits that gave devs a lot less than 70%. A lot of those games, I’ve never even installed. Blasted Steam sales…
If they're suffering greatly to make ends meet, then why use Steam at all? The only reason I can think of is that Steam provides a great customer experience, making that 30% worth it for the developers.
> I have hundreds of games
You do not have hundreds of games. You have a non-transferable license to play those games while they are made available by Valve and while your account is not banned.
Aren't steam account suspensions pretty much limited to criminal activity? Any other kind of restriction doesn't prevent you from playing the games you have licenses for.
For the most part, yes. There have been rare instances of Games being removed from Steam though (not just the store) and more common cases of games being significantly altered compared to the version you paid for (e.g. removed soundtracks due to licensing disputes).
I agree that 30% is too large of a cut, but what would be appropriate? 15%? Steam does add a ton of value from an immediate audience, solid advertising opportunities, and amazing distribution for the developer.
As that has done both sides of games, I would like to propose some doubts for people to consider on that is dissimilar to the standard b2b saas; for to clarity I'm not saying 30% is good
- One chargeback for your 5$ game can consume you 55$ or more, handful and you permanently lose the ability to accept the payment anywhere including future businesses outside of games
- Amount of people that will take parents cards is eye watering
- The value of offline payment acceptance in the form of physical cards (kids do not possess standard payment rails but can acquire your game on steam in the cash)
- They don't take flat 30% for almost a decade now
- You don't often get to use Stripe or 2-3%. Your cost closer about 15% if you choose to process you own payments
> They don't take flat 30% for almost a decade now
Yes Valve is very generous.
They take MORE from developers who make LESS money. I sure bottom 98% of developers never sell above $10,000,000 to decrease cut from 30% to 25%.
Very few indie devs or small indie studios ever sell over 50,000-100,000 copies.
PS: In practice if your project funded by publisher it means that you as developer will make less money from a game than Valve.
> PS: In practice if your project funded by publisher it means that you as developer will make less money from a game than Valve.
So that essentially means a publisher takes even more than valve, while doing almost nothing.
Publisher gives you development budget because most games arent made by one person and you need money. At least $50,000 - $150,000 for a small PC games.
Then publisher takes 70-90% before recoup and 50% afte of what remain after VAT, refunds and Valve's 30%.
Problem is when you spent $100,000 and sold lets say for $400,000:
* Valve gets $133,000
* Publisher gets $100,000 + $90,000
And you get $90,000 and real number would be much worse because VAT, refunds, etc.
Oh, dont forget to pay your taxes on $90,000. Good luck!
> One chargeback for your 5$ game can consume you 55$ or more, handful and you permanently lose the ability to accept the payment anywhere including future businesses outside of games
This sounds like personal experience. Can you elaborate?
Edit: OHH perhaps you are saying this is one of the benefits of Steam; that it shields you from all this.
> Edit: OHH perhaps you are saying this is one of the benefits of Steam; that it shields you from all this.
Yes. In a sijmilar way: regular companies get Stripe at commodity pricing, games get xsolla, paysafe, tebex, and a massive compliance questionnaire, games are software (to you) but closer to porn or gambling on risk (to MoRs and processors).
People are less "likely" to charge back Steam because of their other games being frozen and Steam has volume to dilute chargebacks whereas you starting out may hit double digit dispute rates in one. Whether this is fair is an exercise best left to the reader ;.
Yeah - steam handle this for you.
Wait, does steam absorb chargeback fees and not pass them through to the developer?
likely what they are implying is that chargebacks have indirect costs that you can ballpark around $50 per chargeback. So steam would likely take back the $5 revenue from the developer for the $5 chargeback, but the costs of processing the chargeback are absorbed by steam. i do not know if they have a separate chargeback fee they charge developers for it but it wouldnt make sense to as steam is the one validating and processing payments
EA presented their numbers for their online store. They were making something like 12%, and losing money.
They ran it at a loss and try to use its existence to declare everyone else overcharging. Apple, Google, Steam. Meanwhile, they were unable to make money, just proving they don't know how business works.
Does that count the ludicrous number of games they have given away? That has to be a boat anchor on their financials.
You mean Epic Games, don't you?
And doesn't forbid you from using their platform for free if you sell the keys by yourself and you can also decide to publish your game to other stores...
How about charging for services rendered based on cost to produce them rather than some arbitrary number. Some effective competition would be good, but likely outcome is publishers taking more.
I never understood people who argue steam doesn’t have real competition.
The number of fully funded attempts to compete with steam is impressive. Steam has more competition than any other of the major app stores. Steam also had to provide additional value over pre-existing methods of installing games on the PC in a way the Android Play Store or the PlayStation Store did not have to.
It is incredible how much the other stores fumbled the implementation. As a rule, Epic, Origin, etc apps were terrible. Laggy, bad UI, sometimes difficult to even complete a purchase.
You would have thought that close relationship with the games industry- someone must know how to make a high performance native application. Yet it always felt like web developers pumping out another half assed Electron platform. The Steam store must generate billions in revenue -put some real manpower behind the engineering.
What's more, Epic spends order of magnitude a billion dollars per year on free games on the Epic Store. People still don't want the Epic Store because it's crap. Like Jesus H. Fucking Christ, do these assclowns ever get a clue?
I'm very fine with them not getting a clue though, Valve spends money and effort on promoting Linux and Epic (Tim Sweeney) kinda does the opposite. With all the shit Microsoft is pulling, he still prefers Windows while complaining about it.
I remember the early days of the Epic Store, there was no "shopping cart" feature, you could only buy one game at a time.
I think GoG is a great store and Battle.Net is fine for what it is.
"attempts" is the key word here. Hard to compete with a monopoly backed up with network effects.
It is a red water business, and no one will ever want to switch off from multiple years of game investment.
I feel like that just becomes another situation where bigger organizations get more bargaining power and get better deals, so you’re just kind of shifting problems. I’m not saying a flat percentage like they have is necessarily the best solution, but I’m not sure trading problems is a good idea either. Just seems like a different way for smaller developers to get screwed.
> bigger organizations get more bargaining power and get better deals
This is exactly how it's setup right now.
I thought the 30% was universal. Well that’s a bummer to learn
https://www.geekwire.com/2018/valves-new-steam-revenue-shari...
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Linux releases they only take 10% FWIW
Edit: whoops that’s completely false. I do not know where I got that idea
That sounds great but I can't find any information about it. Do you have a link, please?
Nope
ok
Developers choose to give Steam 30% of their revenue because they know the steam channel increases their revenue by more than 30%. Doesn't that make it a good deal for developers?
Attention span is finite and Steam took a big chunk of it from gamers, in other words there is a chance that in a world where everyone hated closed platforms like steam (for not allowing reselling or any other reason) direct ads would be more favorable for developers than steam, or word of mouth, or any of it's alternatives.
Ok, so now you're criticizing them for being too successful.
They don't own the OS, they don't (until very recently) own the hardware, they haven't really made any major uncompetitive or anti-consumer moves I'm aware of, and they provide a service that the majority of devs consider worth it.
I guess you could argue they're taking advantage of a bit of a "natural monopoly", but there's still plenty of room for other people to eat their lunch, and things like itch seem to have carved out a niche for devs that would rather keep their money than get the additional services Steam offers.
I don't think Steam is flawless, but for how powerful they are, they sure seem a lot less evil than almost every other large corporation.
Sure, if we were in an alternative reality, things would be different.
Valve built a platform that gamers like, and gamers like it for all the choices Valve made.
I also find it interesting you chose "not allowing reselling" as a thing that would have made users not like steam... but not allowing reselling is probably the feature that game developers like the most! I wouldn't be surprised if developers would choose to keep the 30% fee over dropping the fee but changing to allow reselling.
Vendors give the Mafia 30% of their revenue because they know the protection racket increases their revenue by more than 30%. Doesn't that make it a good deal for vendors?
Plenty of devs choose to sell on other platforms or directly and do fine. Steam doesn't have a monopoly on games the way Apple and Google do
When I'm interested in an indie game, I always go first to the developer's website to see if I can just buy a copy directly from them. The vast, vast majority of the time I have to buy it through Steam, maybe Epic, and itch/gog if I'm lucky. It's vanishingly uncommon for them to host the game themselves.
For indies Steam's network lock-in effects are so strong that if you sell without their cut off Steam, instead of same price eating their cut on Steam, you likely do worse. Because selling off-Steam takes one sale out of their algorithm.
Same reason to embed your trailer on your site with YouTube, even if you could afford the bandwidth and keep users from having to watch ad-rolls--self-hosted and the YouTube algorithm will punish you.
A huge part of the high profits portions of the economy is based on this kind of winner take all capture.
My understanding is the tools that Steam provides as part of it's developer platform are top notch. And there are a lot of integration points such as cloud saves, social, match making, achievements, store, and so on. There is also a robust CD pipeline.
I can easily see this providing value above and beyond most other retailers that would sell video games. For example, Best Buy takes a 30% cut for physical merchandise, without providing any of the above mentioned features.
All distribution channels that existed before steam are still available. Multiple competitors to steam are available.
Nah, I'm happy to pay the guild, they put that 30% to good use. I just wish their partner portal wasn't a gigantic pile of crap in return.
Again that old, tired argument. nobody has a gun to the devs head to force them to sell on steam
You can choose to not host your game on steam. Plenty of developers do.
"We" is the kids' parents, and I would assume it's the parents' money.
to be fair, every gaming company nowadays is also doing this and still choosing go nickel and dime the adults and not do anything positive for the community
Steam lets you trade your items with others. with all the copycats that came out, im not sure any of them allow for you to trade things you bought with other players within the same game, let alone letting them buy it off you for virtual currency you could use to buy other games with
To be fair, the trading feature is part of what enables the gambling system to work (i.e. selling weapon skins). Most game companies will explicitly try to not have a trading system on any items that are obtained by random chance because, well, gambling.
except a lack of trading features encourages more gambling because youre not allowed to directly purchase or trade for items you want that are only dropped through random chance and are thus forced to gamble for them.
without trading they effectively remove everything about exchanging money for goods except the gambling part. and for regular microtransaction stores without gambling, it just kills the second hand market for sake of profits
steams dollar system is very clearly 1 directional as well. you put money into steam and it never comes out without violating their terms of service
the point isnt to eliminate gambling. the point is to make sure the people gambling are doing it responsibly. and if you do that and enable trading then you have other benefits to the ecosystem and make it easier to engage with it however you want, even if it's just to only buy old unpopular items for cheap. because if thats all you want to do, you are forced to pay for fewer "fresh" items from the shop in other games or gamble a little bit and live with whatever you get (which will also likely be less total items for same price in addition to likely not being the unpopular items you would have selected)
so i have a hard time believing the companies that dont have a trading system are doing so for any reason other than try to squeeze more money out of normal users who would have otherwise spent less in a more robust market system.
Hmmmm, I suppose that makes sense
Does Valve even own games played by kids anymore? Aren't all of the cs skin traders and tf2 players in their 20s at youngest?
They are not. The literal selling point of valve's games for kid gambling is that you don't need to pass KYCs for gambling with steam credits.
> literal selling point
Could you perhaps back that claim up with some documentation from Valve?
The problem with Steam is developers are paying 30% to introduce their players to CSGO and DOTA2.
Another POV is, nobody on HN has any idea what he's talking about, it's all vibes.
I too disapprove of the csgo/dota2 gambling markets on principle, but how many people actually participate in it? Like, 10k? 100k? 1 million? That seems hard to believe.
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This kind of naiive cynicism is exactly why we don't deserve Valve, and will eventually lose companies like them.
Valve engaged in price fixing by preventing publishers from selling games at a lower price than other platforms. They're committed to openness to the extent that it helps them undercut consoles, but not to the extent of allowing others to undercut them. Selling cheap open hardware seems like classic "commoditize your complement" tactics. (Especially since most gamers will probably just buy from the steam store when using their hardware anyways...)
I'm glad valve exists, but they are not a charity and do not need your sympathy.
The term you are looking for is price gouging (i.e., having a higher price than everyone else). However, these terms (price fixing, gouging, undercutting) are completely vaccuous, and can be equally applied to any market price, making the accusation moot. Monopoly law is just a racket designed to allow rent seeking behavior by companies who do not want to compete.
If your “we” is Australia, you could have implemented consumer protections then sued Valve for ignoring them: https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/valve-to-pay-3-million...
That was 9 years ago.
Are they compliant in the Australian market now?
They are, but they only implemented proper refunds after being pushed by Australia.
How long do you plan on holding that against them?
I am not holding that against them whatsoever. I just not count this as one of their good deeds for industry because it was done under regulatory pressure.
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Gabe better be immortal.
I really wish the company would talk more about the post-Gabe transition, or at least begin to give us a rough indication of where the company plans to go.
Those of us who have been customers over 20 years often have a pretty significant investment in Steam content, and Gabe is getting old.
AFAIK his son has been working there for quite a while and is the heir apparent.
I don't know anything about his son, but hopefully "don't screw up your father's legacy" is a core tenet for him. That news gives me slight hope.
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No company will ever do that. Even if they did, no one on the planet should expect it to play out as described. The whole anti-DRM position is based on the fact promises aren't worth a damn thing.
Publicly announced succession plans happen fairly regularly, especially for a company as stable as Valve. Tim Cook is 65 and just did so for Apple. The announcement of Ternus was hardly a bolt from the blue, either. Gabe is 63, and there is little to no indications.
> No company will ever do that
Ignoring how many counter examples of this there are, why wouldn't Gaben do this given that he's majority owner of the company? He can do whatever he wants.
They have a vat with brain hookups[0] waiting to place Gabe in, so immortality is nigh. No post-Gabe transition needed.
[0]: https://imgur.com/a/2XbM18n
edit: fixed image link
He’s going to die in a fucking scuba diving accident, I have nightmares about it constantly
I highly doubt it for a number of factors.
- Most of his dives look to be rec depth
- He isn't running any crazy gear like a CCR
- He has instant access to a chamber, so any DCS worries are virtually zero
- There is no go-itis for him. If weather is bad, he just packs up and sails to somewhere nicer
Out of all the rich people hobbies, scuba is about the safest
Scuba diving is a pretty risky activity on the scale of things that rich people do in their everyday life. Golf and cycling are a lot safer.
Scuba fatalities fall into a few buckets, the big two are inexperience/bad decision making, and older folks with health issues (underwater heart attacks/respiratory distress, basically).
As a former dive pro, an overweight 63 year old is someone that I would keep a very close eye on while diving.
The odds are pretty low, but there is a reason that many life insurance companies exclude scuba divers from their coverage.
That said, I'm happy to let him live as dangerously as he wants, he deserves it.
It's not that risky Scuba diving is about as dangerous as driving in terms of fatality per 100,000. The mitigation of this risk is different too. Theoretically if you do everything correct in scuba your chance of death is virtually zero which means that your risk profile decreases with experience. Driving does not enjoy the same luxury you could be a perfect driver and get obliterated by a semi-truck running a red light at any time.
The most common reason people die while on scuba is running out of air, if you always buddy and you have a bail-out cylinder that should be essentially impossible while rec diving
"but there is a reason that many life insurance companies exclude scuba divers from their coverage."
They will refuse to cover you outside of rec diving because of all the reasons I just stated
The stats you cited normalize for participants but NOT frequency. The average diver spends several hundred times less time diving than they do driving. Most certified divers dive once or less per year.
As I stated, the most common way to die diving is from a heart attack or other health incident according to DAN. Running out of air is a very uncommon cause of death in rec diving absent a primary factor like entanglement. So no, you are absolutely not reducing your chance to 0 by doing everything right. You are eliminating the chance of suffering a death from one of the things that doesn’t kill a lot of divers. An overweight old person doing an activity that stresses your lungs and circulatory system in an unforgiving environment is inherently high risk no matter how thorough their skills and preparation.
Double check your health insurance, many exclude rec diving as well.
Every single dive instructor has a story of seeing an old guy have a heart attack, myself included (he survived, barely). The only other death I know of besides old guy heart attacks where I worked was a young guy that had a heart attack.
I'm pretty sure just riding in a car is more dangerous.
Not when you normalize by time spent doing the activity.
If you normalize by incidents per participant, sure.
Keep in mind that the average recreational diver does one or fewer dive trips per year, with maybe 10 dives on a very dive intensive trip. A small population of divers are massively more active. Drivers on the other hand have the opposite distribution. A very active driver spends more time in their car in a week than even the most active recreational divers.
He owns hospital ships as part of his fleet so presumably they are equipped for literally any medical issues that might befall him.
> I have nightmares about it constantly
There's no nice way to say this, but maybe you need to re-evaluate your relationship with this video game company.
Have you warned Gabe about this
Hope Linus isn't on that same expedition.
It's just due to one person (GabeN) holding majority of the stock and choosing to run the company this way. Gabe will retire or die at some point and then anything might happen.
I'm optimistic provided they continue to be privately held and don't parachute in a professional executive to be CEO after Gabe departs.
This is the answer. Enshitification is a requirement of the fiduciary duty of public companies. A private company can stay good forever.
Fiduciary duty doesn’t mean what you think it does.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042915/what-are-som...
Fiduciarily speaking, you don’t know what I think it means
> what we did to deserve Valve
Privately held company
> how long it can possibly last
Till VC's or IPO day
Yeah, it seems that it is much easier to avoid enshittification when you are publicly held (and print money)
Valve is what our culture deserves from all corporations. The fact that it seems like such an outlier is an indictment.
Our culture only deserves what we feel strongly enough to enshrine and enforce as law.
Americans like to clown on the EU, but consumer protections and privacy laws don’t magically pop up on their own, and businesses don’t all magically act in the consumers’ best interests unless they are legally made to.
The number of big innovations out of the EU in the past 25 years also rounds to 0. Don't fool yourself into believing the two things are unrelated.
I just wish they made more games than they currently do. Their games are always nicely polished and unique / creative in their own respect.
I agree, but I think two factors are at play here:
1) Valve is not in desperate need for capital, Steam and their older games are money printing machines therefore they don’t feel the need to release new games all the time. This is a pro and a con, they don’t feel the need to release same-y, barely iterative titles to make ends meet which means the overall quality of the games we do get is much higher. But at the same time it’s no telling when Valve just decides the juice isn’t worth the squeeze anymore.
2) the games that Valve do release are always a standard deviation above the other games of that similar genre at the time. Their ability to take a mechanic, or an engine, or a combination of the two and meaningfully expand and revolutionize in that space cannot be understated - and as game technology progresses, making similar impacts at that scale takes longer and is much harder than the previous title. Half Life Alyx was such a quantum leap in VR quality and I don’t think it’s talked about enough. Deadlock takes the MOBA genre to a whole new level in terms of gameplay depth and complexity. I think they’re taking their time with titles and they know the predecessors that came before them.
For that, I’m willing to wait.
Still essentially Steam is a DRM system + another invasive program running on your pc, that absolutely doesnt need to, in addition to the game you want.
..
I vote with my wallet, I avoid buying anything from Steam. Gog and Itch.io are where I go out of my way to spend my money.
Itch.io is amazing! All the coolest games are there + the developer experience is about a million times better than Steam, just sensible and utilitarian. Steam dev experience is a kafkaesque nightmare.
..
Back in 2000 because of these features Steam was the epitome of digital evil. it's just that all other tech companies (google, apple, MS, sony, samsung, etc.) have become so supremely evil over time, whereas Valve has remained at its year 2000 level of evil and so now seems positively angelic compared to its peers.
...
I will also note that Valve probably are one of the biggest heralds of the year of the Linux desktop just by doing tonnes of work making games run in it well and hassle free. The biggest barrier to entry for Linux had long been that games dont work, thats basically solved now. So they get a bonus point for that.. Steam is still filth I dont want or need on my system tho.
> I will also note that Valve probably are one of the biggest heralds of the year of the Linux desktop just by doing tonnes of work making games run in it well and hassle free. The biggest barrier to entry for Linux had long been that games dont work, thats basically solved now. So they get a bonus point for that..
And that's not charity either. Valve realized they needed to hedge their bets when Microsoft threatened to fuck them over with the Windows Store. Linux (or more specifically, SteamOS) is their backup plan.
Privately owned company, GabeN is getting on a bit now, he does have a son mind, we'll see what happens later on.
He has three, that's a good redundancy plan.
so he can count to three after all, interesting
Until the current management retires, as it usually goes.
In my experience family held companies do tend to keep their values somewhat intact on succession.
This seems like the opposite of almost every family dynasty company that has ever existed. The second generation might keep things on track. The third generation never will.
Valve will only be good if it stays privately owned. Good things go to shit as soon as investors become involved
Don’t mention the cs case gambling
~30% commission on each game
I felt the same about early 00s Google. It will probably not last forever.
I was recently saying to a friend and fellow fan (after getting a Steam Deck, for work purposes obviously) that the stuff Valve does is absolutely how “f#%k you” money should be used.
Probably more CEOs should go diving regularly. Valve will stay good as long as Gabe is president. I fear it'll go down the drain once he leaves.
Except for their strong arm tactics forcing software companies to not be able to sell their games cheaper on other platforms:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2g1md0l23o
Not that I defend all of Valve’s business practices, but last I heard, you’re only prevented from sell games cheaper on other platforms if the thing you’re selling is Steam keys.
AFAIK, this restriction doesn’t apply if you’re distributing via a different market place.
If that’s true, that seems fair since you’re relying on Valve’s infrastructure to support the sale.
Is that a thing anymore?
Humble Bundle 100% does both, sells games cheaper and redeemable through Steam keys, and has been doing so for many years.
Humble bundle might have a deal with them, given the charitable nature and also how long-running it is.
They're a private company. Not all private companies are good, but all public ones inevitably turn terrible.
There are some counter-examples of companies that have been publicly traded for a long-ish time and still aren't "terrible":
Berkshire Hathaway, Novo Nordisk, ASML, TSMC, Saab, Atlas Copco, Texas Instruments.
(Perhaps not that many from the US though, relatively speaking? Not sure TBH.)
I think many more companies would operate like this if acquisition and mergers were much more difficult.
Valve practically has a monopoly on PC gaming, I think they're pretty fat and happy too ;D
A triumph of private ownership and stewardship over publicly traded corporate governance.
Dropping half life is the biggest sin, and I will never forgive them.
Really?
I mean are we forgetting about kids gambling lootboxes in CS and Valve doing nothing to regulate it?
I mean yes compared to the rest of the gaming companies that are long way gone like Blizzard etc, Valve seems to be the better, but its not like they are saints...
It always amazes me how us as people forget the past (which is not even far away).
i hope i’m wrong, but probably as long as gabe does.
venture capital are the real enemies here. valve has stayed out of that game which is why they've managed to focus on delivering value to their users. as soon as venture capital gets involved, investors are now the customer and the customers are effectivly the product.
I know. Long live Gabe.
son of gaben may live upto the legend, otherwise it ends with him
That's what you get when a company is not public and makes more money than the owner(s) can spend.
*Owner must be a decent human being
[dead]
Valve wasn't always like this. They were infamous for never allowing refunds, but due to EU regulations they just did a complete about face and has one of the friendliest refund policies in the ESD business. Probably just behind Costco or something.
The introduction of the refund made them get rid of their deep discounted flash sales though.
Real OGs remember that you could get fairly new AAA games for a song on, like, a random Wednesday. It was part of the initial appeal of Steam. Those explicitly went away because of the refund policy. https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/4pnd4p/psa_yes_there... (People were really upset at the time)
Their new refund policy is great, but it wasn't completely free to consumers.
> Their new refund policy is great,
The "played for less than two hours" refund policy is more of a compromise than great, IMHO.
It works well for games that are quick to run and enjoy. However, quite a few of the games I've played will easily burn two hours on loading, compiling shaders, watching unskippable branding animations (splash screens), tuning graphics settings, setting up key bindings, and working past miscellaneous bugs.
Steam's "play time" clock starts when the game executable is launched, and keeps running during all of that nonsense, even at title screens and menus. Some games have run past Valve's return window before I got even a minute of play time.
It would be nice if one of Steam's widely used APIs (Steamworks?) included a way for a game to register when it is actually being played, as opposed to loading or setting up or sitting at a pause screen. I think this would help with the return window problem, and finally make the played hours count on our Steam profiles somewhat accurate.
That only applies to the automatic refund. I've refunded a handful of games well past that window, so long as you justify it, I've never had an issue.
Counter-anecdote: I've played a game where the developer included a bug that gave other players arbitrary code execution on my PC and left it online while fixing the bug. I've never launched it since and had owned it less than 48 hours. Steam rejected my refund.
This is very good to know!
I always used the "doesn't work on my system". Though, most of the games I've refunded were really not working on Linux the way I'd like and I just didn't want to hack around or have to reboot into Windows for that game.
They definitely do reject at least some refunds outside the window even if you can get lucky like gp.
> The "played for less than two hours" refund policy is more of a compromise than great, IMHO.
Don't forget the two weeks since purchase, which is especially nefarious as Steam banks on people buying many games through sales that they will only play much later.
No, it only takes effect upon release. Before you're free to refund whenever you want.
I mean, heck, even considering pure playtime a lot of modern AAA game takes 2+ hours before you ever make it out of the tutorial.
I requested a refund of Cyberpunk 2077 after 3 hours (and the second time I refunded the same game - I still didn't like it) and I got it no questions asked.
If a game takes more then five minutes to become fun then return it. I've returned plenty of games with under five minutes of play time, because I don't have the patience to purchase boredom.
Two hours is far more than enough to determine if a game is for you.
There are entire genres where that makes no sense. It would be like returning a book because the first page didn't immediately grab you. Not everything should be designed for attention deficit teenagers.
What genre takes more than 5m to find any indication of enjoyment from it?
4x, city builders, deck builders, RTS, RPG, etc; these can all be fun in short order, if the games are well designed.
They still have absolutely massive sales, they just aren't random anymore.
At least personally, I'd prefer having to wait a few months and having a good refund policy over more sales
50-75% off of AAA games from that year were not uncommon. I don't think the sales have ever really been comparable ever since. There are people who have put together Wayback machine compilations to compare - I just took a look at the 2014 and 2015 deals (refunds were ~ 2015) and there was a remarkable drop-off in the sales and variety of games at deep discount.
I think more importantly for Valve though - the daily flash sales were incredibly important to drive engagement and grow their presence.
I think the "why didn't Valve offer refunds before" is kind of revisionist. It wasn't clear that refunds were even a necessary component of cheaper digital games at the time.
You could get entire publisher catalogues for peanuts. I think at least half my steam library is useless filler because I bought every game WB ever published for $40 to get the new batman game or similar.
I payed like 100 bucks (probably less, i don't remember the exact amount) for everything valves ever published, which isn't as good of a deal but shows it can still be done
I think one precursor could have been EA's debacle with Sim City in 2013, when they apparently had a huge wave of disappointed customers doing chargebacks. I'm not aware of any public statement/evidence of this, but it really wouldn't surprise me if their payment processor leaned on them to provide a better means of accomplishing that, and it gave them a way to portray their store as customer friendly.
It was Australian regulations. The EU was happy to do nothing and keep letting us get ripped off.
Useful links:
https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/valve-to-pay-3-million...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/29/service-v...
The EU was just moving slowly as it always does. Action was on the Horizon in the EU as well, which probably contributed to Valve deciding to offer refunds everywhere instead of just in Australia.
It feels very much written by a team of humans. Here's to hoping I'm not wrong.
Not sure about their other departments, but at least in March there was no LLM coding in their Source2 & game teams.
https://x.com/ZPostFacto/status/2035784300575305895
Probably won't stay that way:
https://x.com/ZPostFacto/status/2050780692062376287
Looking forward to finally getting HL3 /s
I wonder if these LinkedIn bros know we can all spot their LLM writing clear as day, and it’s repulsive.
LinkedIn lizards have always communicated in non-mortal language forms even before the AIpocalypse. It's probably part of their secret handshake.
I think at this point Steam might as well just release the hounds and let third parties build and sell steam compatible hardware (the Android play). Their own attempts have been, well, not great. Dealing with hardware supply chains is a very different game than software. They already have a platform, the hardware is purely for distribution. Whether they make a profit on hardware or not doesn't really matter. They are basically the opposite of Apple.
Steam already supports 3rd-party controllers and VR headsets. SteamOS is available on several 3rd-party handhelds. What more do you need for "steam compatible hardware"?
Do they support any third-party controllers that are anything like the Steam controller(s)? To my knowledge, third party support is only for traditional game-console-like controllers.
According to Wikipedia, they already officially support the Lenovo Legion Go S.
Not sure what you mean by "not great," the Steam Deck is awesome. The one in our household is like 3 years old and still sees daily use. They have been very well received by the PC gaming community.
SteamOS is mostly just the regular Steam client on top of Linux. You will get more or less the same overall experience by starting with a reasonably capable GPU, then installing any mainstream Linux distro, then installing the Steam client, and making a few tweaks. Valve has been very active in upstreaming fixes and features to upstream projects like the Linux kernel and Wine, so the Steam Deck (and soon Steam Machine) doesn't actually have any special sauce, it's just a nice self-contained unit for those who just want to play games and not be bothered by the OS under the hood.
As far as I know there's nothing preventing third parties from building and selling hardware with SteamOS or a similar software stack.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SteamOS
They aren't going to let you advertise them as Steam-branded hardware without an agreement, but there are multiple handhelds that have done so to be branded officially Steam Compatible.
They tried this many years ago with the original steam machines, it went horribly. Also, you can install SteamOS or Bazite on most machines. Not sure what the issue is here.
SteamOS does not currently really work on modern desktops/laptops. You can force it but it’s really not made for it. They’re pretty clear about that, I think they even pulled down the OS download page from their site and now clearly mark it as for restoring old machines.
Likely to change soon though with the steam machine release
Bazzite is great, though. And doesn't lock you in to Steam or DRM if you don't use them.
Yeah I’ve been using it as a daily driver, no windows partition or anything, for over a year. It’s been great. Having an AMD CPU/GPU combination definitely helps though
What is "Steam compatible hardware"? Isn't that like saying "App Store compatible hardware"?
I wish more IT companies were like Valve.
Valve and Costco are the only two companies I respect anymore
Everybody else could stand to take lessons from them
Both based in the same area :)
Valve and Panic should be models for software companies
Imagine if everybody did this. You break some stupid plastic part on something? No need to throw it away, just print an exact replacement on the spot. Or maybe tweak it first so it's less flimsy then print the replacement.
Sounds like this is just the external dimensions? That's mostly just useful for creating accessories. That's not too special, Apple does this too. https://developer.apple.com/accessories/dimensional-drawings...
Those PDFs are useless.
If you want a purple Steam Controller, you can load Valve's STL into your favorite slicer, 3D print a new shell, transplant the electronics, and you're done.
If you want a purple MacBook, could you do the same with those Apple PDFs?
No, you can't, because it doesn't include any internal topology.
> This repository contains CAD files for the external shell (surface topology) of Steam Controller and the Steam Controller Puck
If somebody wants to reverse engineer it all they have to do is buy one.
Then Apple's lawyers come for your liver.
Edit: spolling, I have a fever.
This is why I bought a 3d printer.
Headphone piece broke. Replacement was covered under warranty. Once. After that it was $30 a pop from amazon for the replacement part. Both of the parts provided under warranty (it was a set of 2) broke in the same way.
Figured if the parts break that regularly, I would wind up spending $500 in just a few years on replacement parts, might as well just get a printer. The part already had a model available (it was apparently a common issue), and the printed version hasn't broken yet.
I know nothing about making models, so the fact that the community already had the replacement part ready to print for me was a huge win, and Valve doing this basically guarantees that there will be a variety of "Controller stand, with puck slot" and replacement part prints available. HUGE win.
Fusion is a really cool tool to learn.
It's a flavor of 3D modeling called "constraint-based." You've heard the adage that if you give a million monkeys typewriters, eventually one will write something coherent? Constraint systems embody that same idea: There are infinite possible 3D models. You keep adding constraints until you narrow it down to only one possible solution that fulfills all of them.
I've been learning FreeCAD, while it's still more frustrating than Fusion or SolidWorks it's much better than it used to be pre-1.1, and it's FOSS. Also constraint-based, I've been using the new spreadsheet view as the source of all constraint dimensions, with parts derived by binding to top, front, or right-side orthographic "master" sketches. Much like hand-drawn design, where you draw the orthographic views and use those directly to create an isometric view.
I love FreeCAD, designed some parts, did a bunch of Solidworks challenges and entered CAD comps.
I also love playing with build123d, dune3d (uses solvespace constraint) and SolveSpace.
Do love Solidworks but I'm on linux now so time to embrace the other options more.
Large companies obviously are happy to screw their customers in various ways but I've had pretty good luck with smaller and especially more local businesses. I once had a jeweler gift me an ultrasonic cleaner when I asked them how best to clean a difficult to clean ring (presumably they had recently bought a new one).
Caring about the products they make and their customers seems like sorta the default for most people but large companies learn apathy eventually (or maybe it's mostly the companies that prioritize growth this way that become big). I wonder if less top down control at companies (especially by finance investors) would have them be better to consumers.
This was always the dream for 3D printing, heck going back to classic Star Trek replicators and other science fiction. Granted, even with these models available it's kinda difficult to print large organic shapes like the main housing shells on most affordable consumer printers so I suspect there might not be too many people actually doing it. However, having the exact CAD files makes designing mods and 3rd party upgrades much easier.
Going a step further, imagine hardware manufacturers noticing specific defects, then publishing new updated CAD files for a part that lasts better than the last, for customers who already have 3D printers to print their own upgrades/"patches".
That can work, but 3d printing doesn't in general make for strong parts (layers). Most of the time you want some form of molding or CNC subtractive machining (either plastic of metal) - while some hobbyists have this, 3d printing is far more common. (and often easier)
You might be surprised at how durable FDM parts can be if you know what you're doing, especially if you're willing to blow a some extra filament on making it solid. Orient the layer lines perpendicular to the sheer forces and it can be stronger than the original molded part.
FDM in PLA/PETG sure, although recent advances have improved on this via things like brick layers.
Resin based printers are a whole different story though. They can make really durable parts. And even FDM with more advanced filaments have gotten competitive.
"Your steam controller is yours, unlike your games, which you have no right to resell, or leave them as inheritance when you die"
I still think it's weird that Valve is viewed as so friendly to gamers when they're probably more responsible for taking away game ownership on PC than any other one company.
Prior to Steam, I used to routinely buy used games, give away copies of games I didn't play anymore, etc. Steam basically ruined all of that.
Prior to Steam there was StarForce and other copy protection messing up your OS and DVD drives, and plenty of stuff needed online activation as well. Of the last few physical games I bought, none work anymore, Bioshock couldn't be installed due to lack of patch servers last time I tried and Arkham Asylum failed due to GFWL being dead. Even when everything worked, you often had to manually go hunt for patches, sometimes multiple that needed to be installed in the right order, and that might not even be compatible with the localized version of the game you had.
Still sucks that used games died and the forced game upgrades that come with Steam have their issues too, but PC gaming was a horrible mess before Steam cleaned that up. Heck, I'd rather rebuy a game on Steam than find out what those vintage DVD copy protection does to a modern Windows. Most PCs don't even have a DVD drive anymore anyway.
There were definitely issues, but I think that some of those basically extend from Steam and the way it worked. GFWL was Microsoft's competition to Steam, so it just copied Steam (~3 years after a Steam came out) and worked similarly to the way other physical releases worked after Steam became popular.
It's true that some of the heavy DRM was an issue back then, but I'm not convinced that's guaranteed to be less of an issue going forward. Steam probably won't live forever, and there are tons of titles on Steam that use Steam DRM, third party DRM, or rely on servers that will kill the game eventually. Just because the lifecycle is longer now doesn't make it less of a mistake than it was previously.
My biggest complaint, though, is that the ownership terms simply got shittier with Steam. Many of those old games, even from big, "evil" publishers like EA, explicitly allow license transfers in their EULAs. Steam explicitly forbids transfers.
> I'm not convinced that's guaranteed to be less of an issue going forward.
I am sure it's going to be an issue at some point in the future, it already is an issue when it comes to sharing games or keeping older versions around, but what's the alternative? The alternative isn't no DRM, it's whatever DRM Apple, Google, Microsoft, Epic, EA and friends come up with, and of all of those, I take Steam any day.
Even GOG kind of loses to Steam here, as while GOG gave us DRM-free downloads, Steam gave us Linux support and Windows-emulation and I'd rather have Steam DRM on Linux than being stuck on Windows with DRM-free GOG games. And unless I am missing something, GOG's DRM-free games didn't lead to a used digital games market either, they explicitly forbid selling or sharing in their user agreement[1]:
>> 3.3 Your GOG account and GOG content [games] are personal to you and cannot be shared with, sold, gifted or transferred to anyone else.
Digital goods ownership is just not a thing that exists at the moment. There was an attempt based on blockchain with Robot Cache[1], but that just shutdown.
[1] https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/212632089-GOG-User...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Cache
> The alternative isn't no DRM
Says you. Steam made DRM a no-brainer for developers and even got almost all players to stop complaining about it. If that hadn't happened who's to say where we would have ended up.
> Steam gave us Linux support and Windows-emulation
No, Wine gave us Windows-emulation. Even DXVK was not originally developed by Valve. They polished it all to make it more user friendly and fixed game specific issues, which is nice of course, but let's not pretend that it was simply impossible to play Windows games before Gaben graced us with his attention.
> Digital goods ownership is just not a thing that exists at the moment. There was an attempt based on blockchain with Robot Cache[1], but that just shutdown.
Right of first sale is well tested for digital goods sold on physical media and cannot be restricted by EULAs no matter what they say. Do you have evidence that courts would see this differently with a digital download?
> If that hadn't happened who's to say where we would have ended up.
We went through numerous years of that before Steam became a thing, almost a whole decade passed between the Internet getting popular and Steam really taking off. DRM filled DVDs and online installs with activation limits were the results.
> but let's not pretend that it was simply impossible to play Windows games before Gaben graced us with his attention.
Let's also not pretend that fiddling for hours with Wine configs is somehow similar to pressing "Play" and having stuff Just Work™. That extra level of polish that Valve provided is critical for making it actually useful for the masses.
> Do you have evidence that courts would see this differently with a digital download?
Can you show me a place were I can buy used digital games? Itch.io doesn't disallow reselling games as far as I can tell, but yet we don't have a used digital games market. Buying a random .zip file, with no proof of ownership, is just not something people are interesting in.
Thank God the publishers had nothing to do with those onerous terms in exchange for using Valves storefront!
Can only hope that Stop Killing Games is the first shell in winning back our digital rights
[random reflection] saying on their gitlab page instead of git page, is comparable to saying on their AWS website instead of Web page? :P
It isn't entirely tautologous. You could use the extra word to location the information, if for some reason the link in the footnote somehow got lost or wasn't included in the first place.
Sometimes I think Valve is just showing off
Valve just can't stop winning.
I love steam. I have a lot of concerns with a lot of the companies shuffling billions around. But not steam. They treat everyone fair.
The gambling thing is whack but at least it's not polymarket.
It sold out in less than an hour. Scalpers are at it again. Units are showing up for as much as $300 in resell-value already. What I don't get is why their shop page just gives me an "out of stock" panel, instead of the purchase button. Why won't they just let me buy and pay it, and have it ship whenever? Is having customers to regularly check for new stock (and potentially missing it) better than ... just having them buy it in advance like a pre-order? I really don't get it. Like wouldn't it even make for a better forecasting indicator when it comes to resupplying?
> It sold out in less than an hour. Scalpers are at it again.
"Underpriced good at it again" would be more accurate.
God forbid a company want to sell something for a smaller profit than they can make by selling it only to the people with that most money
I'm not performing any sort of moral judgement here, I'm using 'underpriced' to describe a good that is sold below its equilibrium pricetag. Companies are free to do what they like, but lower prices will always lead to scenarios like this, where these go out of stock before demand is satisfied, and this discrepancy is what allows scalpers to exist in the first place.
Is it more moral to allocate goods to the people who are willing to pay the most for them, or to the people who have good scalping bots/happen to get lucky
Is this question not ridiculous?
A company can make something without the need to be greedy. If you allow backordering like OP mentioned, it goes a good way to resolving the issue.
Agreed, it's an absurd false dichotomy
They could easily do both.
They could sell the first few for more and settle down to their normal price after a time.
There isn't sustainable demand for a $300 steam controller, that's why they didn't price it there, not because they didn't want to sell for a huge profit. Ther is, however, a much smaller market of people who will pay a premium to be first, hence the resellers.
It's not underpriced at all.
then how can scalpers sell them for more money than the original asking price? also see my other comment cf use of the term and equilibrium price
I honestly don’t understand that world. I wanted one, I was willing to drop a hundred bucks on a controller I wanted but did not need - but they messed up the launch, they didn’t have enough supply to cover demand, so I shrugged and moved on with the my life.
Who is actually out there 1) buying up these controllers to scalp them and 2) who is actually buying them at an inflated price from scalpers?
Like what is the point, what fun is there in playing this game… when I’ve already got a controller I’m happy with? You know? Why worry about this?
Valve is "messing up" all launches in my opinion if I go by your definition. They always are out of stock pretty fast. Look at the Steam Deck. To this day you have to check every day (at least in Germany) if there is any stock now.
For the scalpers part; I know a lot of people who would pull out a stack of money for anything Valve/Steam branded. I personally needed a new controller and when I saw the release date I set multiple alarms because at some point you just know how fast they’ll be sold out.
In my (german) memory, I could buy my steam deck quite problem free. The supply issues only really started end of last year/start of this year, due to the global RAM shortages. Before that, I can't recall there being availability issues. (at least in germany)
Yeah, even in the US they were even on sale on multiple occasions.
> Like what is the point, what fun is there in playing this game…
I got to ask What made you want to live this kind of life?
He said, "There ain't no rest for the wicked
Money don't grow on trees I got bills to pay, I got mouths to feed There ain't nothing in this world for free
I know I can't slow down, I can't hold back Though you know, I wish I could Oh no, there ain't no rest for the wicked Until we close our eyes for good"
Cage The Elephant - "Ain't No Rest For The Wicked"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2Z0sON2UPc
...in the US. Other countries have stock.
As a resident of Germany, I disagree.
Yeah I'm pretty sure there's no stock around in every single region, at least according to this: https://www.steamhardwarestock.com/history
Note that they don't check every second so they might miss some smaller restocks (or really orders which got closed and resulted in a few more units being re-added, since the actual stock is fully gone).
I've been trying really hard to get this new Steam Controller, I've been dreaming about playing grand strategies from my bed on the TV, but using a mouse in the bed is awful! This controller is essentially made for me. No luck so far at all the last few days, despite spending quite a few hours checking every few seconds! Region is also Germany. I've given up until the next restock Valve has announced will come "soon", but I'm guessing I'll miss it because there's too many bots aimed at their store page, not even sure why to be frank, are there really thousands of people willing to spend 3x for a singular controller, even if it's a nice one? The market seems to indicate that.
It stayed in stock in other countries for longer than the US. I ordered mine late on Tuesday, many hours after it launched. Was quoted "6-10 business days" for delivery, and it arrived this morning, approx 3 days after ordering.
Looks like a super cool feature for disabled players.
Regular controllers are good for people with the default number of arms, legs and fingers. But if you have some kind of disability, it's often pretty unique.
Regular game/computer controllers for disabled folks were pretty pricey last time I've checked.
AFAIK, 3d printing is not that expensive. Many places have hacker spaces or just people who print for almost free.
So I guess it's a huge win for people who need accommodations. I'm very happy for that!
I'm not disabled myself, it was just the first thought I had when I've read the news.
For disabled players, this is also super promising: https://byowave.com/products/proteus-controller
> Regular controllers are good for people with the default number of arms, legs and fingers.
And then there was the N64 controller...
That third hand really gave you and advantage.
I don't know why people find it so confusing. I don't remember any kids I knew at the time being confused by it.
It just provides you with two different ways to hold it: one where you're using the D-Pad, and one where you're using the analog stick.
I'm not claiming it was the pinnacle of controller design or anything, but it was fine.
Designed by Aliens on Planet Earth. Manufactured in China.
I know that msft gets a lot of (rightful) hate, but mad props for the accessibility controller.
Even if Valve and Steam is great and overall a blessing for the PC space, I don't like the direction they take with this controller. It only works with Steam, it can't work on a desktop OS without it, despite standard layout. It is a subtle move towards a walled garden.
I'm not sure that's Valve's fault.
Windows is designed for gamepads to emulate an Xbox controller. All those Steam Deck competitors are implemented as an Xbox controller with a partial keyboard grafted on. That's why you need Legion Space or Armoury Crate to make them usable - they tell the controller firmware what keybindings to send for those rear paddles.
InputPlumber serves this purpose on Linux. Without it, you just get ABXY, start, select, nav, and shoulder buttons - the same layout that's been on the Xbox forever, because games don't understand the random partial keyboard that shares an internal USB hub with the Xbox pad clone. Thankfully on Linux, you're not stuck with one durable keybinding per paddle - once InputPlumber unifies that USB hub back into a controller, you can map all its buttons per-game with Steam Input. This controller brings that same convenience to Windows too.
It's not that Valve is making a proprietary controller - it's that the Windows gaming ecosystem assumes a proprietary controller, and Valve doesn't conform to that assumption. Instead, they provide a fully featured controller and let you configure it per-game in Steam. Considering Steam is the launcher most people use for most games, that's a totally reasonable tack.
Answering a now-deleted answer regarding PS4 controllers working out of the box on Windows:
PS4 controller support on Windows used to be a huge hassle, because you had to install DS4Windows to make it work. Nowadays, Windows automatically downloads the proprietary drivers to make it work, but I'm not sure if that covers the PS4 controller-specific features such as the touchpad, gyroscope, lightbar or if it enables XInput support. I think the PS4 controller situation supports what OP above is claiming.
Can Valve do the same with their controller? Release a Windows driver so that I can use it with my emulators?
You may be able to use SC-Controller: https://github.com/C0rn3j/sc-controller
Note: the Windows support is a WIP and the devs don't have the new Steam Controller
You would just need to add your emulators as non-steam games in Steam. Then you get controller support.
But then I would have to install Steam, create an account, have it running in the background. And in case of macOS I would have to install Rosetta as well.
It would be better if they released drivers instead.
The Steam client is free and well-supported on all gaming OSes. It also provides Steam Input, which ensures customization parity with Steam Deck. In Valve's eyes, cross-platform support is already here.
A custom driver could always be made by the community. It feels a little absurd to expect Valve to write and support four different gamepad drivers, when they only need one.
> A custom driver could always be made by the community. It feels a little absurd to expect Valve to write and support four different gamepad drivers, when they only need one.
That is what the entire industry does though. Imagine if you needed an application running in the background for every peripheral you have, for your monitor, for your GPU, for running a hotspot on your smartphone over USB. Imagine having to install a piece of software to access a thumb drive. And that all those applications also needed user accounts. That is the entire point of having drivers.
For complex gamepads, the entire industry most certainly doesn't do that. It's not a class-compliant device, the preexisting OS-level mechanisms for Xinput and DirectInput do not accommodate anything but fight rudimentary fight sticks. The same goes for the original touchpad-based Steam Controller.
I don’t think steam needs Rosetta anymore.
Just checked. Still needs it. I don't have Rosetta installed and I don't want to install Rosetta just to be able to use a game controller with DuckStation or Aethersx2. When I can also connect a PS4 controller and not need any of that.
You have an old Steam.app stub, download the latest one and rosetta will not be necessary.
If you had rosetta it would be able to self-update to the new universal binary, without it you have to do this one update manually.
I downloaded from here and I instantly get a pop-up about requiring Rosetta.
https://store.steampowered.com/about/
Odd if true. It's clearly a universal binary, not sure what's going wrong for you.
$ file steam_osx
steam_osx: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures: [x86_64:Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64] [arm64]
steam_osx (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
steam_osx (for architecture arm64): Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64
This appears to only be in the Steam beta - the version available for download still requires Rosetta. There doesn't seem to be a direct download for the beta - you have to opt into it after installing Steam.
Not the OP, but I just downloaded the latest stub from an M2 MacBook Air using Safari and it appears to be an x86_64-only binary:
CMD+I on Steam.app says: "Application (Intel)".
% file steam_osx
steam_osx: Mach-O universal binary with 1 architecture: [x86_64:Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64]
steam_osx (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
Windows supports Generic HID game controllers with 8 axis and 128 buttons already. And a few hat switches. And if your devices needs more than that, you can enumerate as multiple devices if needed. Not sure if there is a HID type for rumble support though. So, there's no reason a Steam Controller couldn't operate without a special driver. Some functionality may require custom software to support though. I have several Virpil controls and the entire setup will function as a simple set of generic HID devices. The only special bit is some software you can optionally run to control advance per-application remapping. I don't have a Steam Controller, so I have no idea if it can show up as a generic HID controller or not.
2 thumbsticks is already 4 axes. Add 2 triggers and it's 6 axes. Add gyroscope and it's 9 axes. That's more than 8. And I haven't mentioned the touchpads.
> you can enumerate as multiple devices if needed
A single physical USB device can enumerate as multiple virtual devices. This lets you easily side-step the limits *if* the game supports input from multiple controllers at the same time. The games I use controllers for allow you to map to multiple controllers, mouse, and keyboard, all at once. The touchpad could simply enumerate as a HID Touchpad. Apparently Windows already has a Touchpad Haptic HID Profile even.
Honestly, if Valve is making you require Steam to fully use the Steam Controller, that's disappointing because, as far as I can tell, nothing it's doing can't be accessed via HID usage.
It's a bit more tricky, a Generic HID just gives you a DirectInput device, while reasonably modern games use Xinput. Microsoft never provided a way to map DirectInput devices to Xinput. For Xinput to work a Microsoft specific USB protocol is needed, not a Generic HID device. Many third party controllers have a switch or button combination to switch between XInput and DirectInput modes for this reason.
Microsoft has a new API with GameInput that addresses this situation and allows mapping Generic HID devices onto game controller via config file, but it doesn't work retroactively, it only works for games that use the new GameInput API.
Valve could of course provide a way to switch and emulate other protocols too, just like other third party vendors do, but there is no USB standard that makes things "just work" in Windows when it comes to gamepads, you always need extra drivers, USB modes or other hacks.
On consoles the situation is even worse, modern consoles deliberately lock out any unlicensed third party controller. Playstation3 was the first and last console that supported standard USB controller, while PS5 doesn't even support PS4 controller.
Just out of curiosity, what modern game won't function with a generic HID game controller?
Most of them I would assume. Everything from 2006 forward started to use Xinput. DirectInput support only shows up in racing sims, flight simulators, fighting games and emulation. But all the big AAA games have been built around Xbox360 style control schemes for two decades.
But it's all a bit theoretical, since most modern gamepads have Xinput support, and the generic HID devices are mostly flightsticks or SNES-style gamepads that wouldn't have enough buttons and axis for modern games in the first place. Another issue is that most games don't offer input remapping for gamepads.
But with SteamInput and homebrew tools like x360ce there are many ways to make generic USB devices compatible Xinput, so it's not like you can't use them. It's just not something that works out of the box.
That may explain it then. I use flight controllers and driving controllers. Both just show up as generic HID devices and both are easily used in the games I play.
> Considering Steam is the launcher most people use for most games, that's a totally reasonable tack.
That's exactly how you create a walled garden. You build a garden. Get people in. Then wall it up.
It's an ecosystem problem though.
If all the games respected HID and Valve did something proprietary, I would understand the skepticism. The truth is that most games are engineered with platform integration (e.g. for achievements, controller mapping, etc.), and fallback to the Xbox API. It's reasonable for Valve to sell a controller that takes full advantage of their platform.
Also, Valve's primary OS is Linux-based. There's surely either already a module upstream in the kernel or one is coming soon. That is: open source software to take full advantage of this controller. That's not the same thing as a walled garden.
Seeing as the original Steam Controllers kernel drivers were community reverse engineered rather than Valve contributed, I don't know if I believe in them to make one for the new one either: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-Controller-RE-Kernel
That surprises me. I knew there was a hid-steam, but I didn't know its provenance.
FWIW, it appears Valve is sponsoring development now. Vicki, one of the maintainers of the SteamOS kernel, is the most recent contributor to https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/hid/hi...
It's too annoying to search more recent linux-input submissions to see if anything has been pushed upstream yet specific to the new controller.
That spliced in USB hub looks messy. Does a new controller necessitate Xinput? I assume Windows still supports DirectInput, which was used in the past with more complex controllers. I'd recently brought up "JOY.CPL" in Windows 10. It would hinge on whether DirectInput can talk to games that expect Xinput.
> It would hinge on whether DirectInput can talk to games that expect Xinput.
As far as I know, nope.
Some games also get really confused if you have Xinput and DirectInput devices plugged in at the same time - for me, Silksong (and unity games in general) don't work if I have a throttle+stick plugged in.
And it's worse than just taking input from the wrong thing, the game can't recognize input from any of throttle, stick, or controller. Only controller by itself works.
Microsoft has made such a mess of controller I/O that they were kind of forced to go with their jank translation layer made from scratch and running with their main product - it makes sense, especially built up piece by piece
Of course now that they've made controllers work properly, they'll use that work to support their own controller, and in particular enable features like analog triggers + gyro aiming + rumble (xinput can't do these simultaneously), extra buttons (xinput can't do this), and the trackpads (you guessed it).
And it is Windows, because on Linux the controller does work without Steam if you get the right drivers. It doesn't get the full features but it's functional as a gamepad, at least.
> It doesn’t get the full features but it’s functional as a gamepad at least
So it’s the controller and not Windows then, if partial functionality is okay (which seems fine to me).
For the OG controller on Linux, it was/is possible to use third-party open source software like "sc-controller" to map the pads and rebind things the way Steam does, without needing Steam running.
I don't have any reason to believe that similar projects won't work for the new version.
SDL2 and SDL3 have steam controller support. Also, now that SDL2-Compat is a thing (alongside sdl12-compat), this means literally every game/software that uses SDL 1-3 for controllers on Linux (and windows too) should support the steam controllers.
> I don't have any reason to believe that similar projects won't work for the new version.
Sc-controller theoretically works, somebody with the hardware has to test though:
https://github.com/C0rn3j/sc-controller/issues/98
Not really, just things that haven't been implemented in drivers yet.
> It only works with Steam, it can't work on a desktop OS without it, despite standard layout.
This review says otherwise:
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/05/the-new-steam-controll...
> Using The Steam Controller Completely Outside Of Steam
> [...] However, at least on the newly released Fedora KDE 44, the system does appear to detect it as a basic gamepad out of the box.
> [...] I installed LIMBO from GOG with GE-Proton and it worked great even with vibration.
More example games are described there as well. A few apparently get confused by the Steam Controller presenting itself as a game controller, a keyboard, and a mouse, but most seem to be fine.
Those tests were done on Linux. I wonder if it's any different on Windows.
it is different on Windows, yeah. it presents itself as several keyboards and mice and does not work as a gamepad.
on Linux I think there's a kernel level driver, but I'm not sure
I have an OG Steam controller.
On Linux, whenever I connect to my computer without steam running, it will show up as a standard USB HID device. This means, funny enough, I can use the trackpads like a mouse n stuff on my desktop environment.
However, SDL3 (and SDL2 via sdl2-compat and SDL1 via sdl12-compat with sdl2-compat (lol)) supports the steam controller. This means that, without using steam, I get native gyro support and stuff in software like Ryujinb and Citron.
Furthermore, at least on linux, there is sc-controller which is a userland driver that makes the steam controller present itself as a standard Xbox controller. Of course, this means you aren't gonna be able to use the fancy features directly in the game, but it does mean for software that doesn't use SDL and isn't on steam directly, it will act as an FOSS alternative steam input layer. Also, it even has Cemuhook motion server. This mean before SDL3 added gyro support for the steam controller (giving any emulator using SDL3 and SDL2 via sdl2-compat gyro support native), you could have still used gyro controls. Also, with Proton now, I think there is a flag to tell Proton to use SDL input method instead of steam input. I think this means (i have to test it), that you can use SDL to use steam controller with proton outside of steam.
I think on windows, we will see something like sc-controller.
It does work as a keyboard/mouse without Steam. The idea is to have it default to something you can navigate the OS with until you launch steam big picture mode.
The original steam controller had a program to allow users to map the controls without steam, hopefully it will add support for the new one as well.
> It only works with Steam, it can't work on a desktop OS without it
I was very curious about this, No video I saw even said anything about the Steam Software being needed, and is extremely disappointing, on my computer I make a point that I only have steam running if I am playing a steam game. If I am not it is not running and it does not auto start.
Now if it works with steam closed, I am slightly more ok with it but I would love a driver that is not coupled with Steam.
Though I do think it aligns with Valve’s initiatives lately. I don’t think I would go so far as to say walled garden but SteamOS is clearly geared towards using the Steam Store for everything (sure it has desktop mode, but the focus is clear) and their half assed Windows support (despite promises) on the Steam Deck.
Don’t get me wrong, Valve has done a lot of good but I do worry at how quick we are to defend them. I mean I even see people defending their rumored use of AI saying things like “well if there is any company I would trust it would be Valve”. Yeah that won’t backfire.
Edit:
Wait, it won’t even work with a game if it isn’t launched through steam? Are the other comments correct? If that is true, Yeah that is a big nope for me and of course more are not talking about it.
I refuse to let steam or any software run that is not related to my current task.
Why do we criticize Razer for shady practices with their hardware and software but it is fine that Valve did this?
I expect it to work fine without steam. Nobody is going to invest in a completely propriety comms protocol. it will probably be usbHID and a usb keyboard descriptor(or whatever the bluetooth equivalent is). Instruct your usb attach code to attach it as a game pad and it will work fine.
However, the configuration utility for it is part of steam, it is a highly configurable controller, so much so that it could be argued much of it's utility is lost without this configurator.
This is a windows issue, not a hardware issue.
I don't buy that argument completely, nothing would be stoping them from just not bundling the drivers with Steam and also not requiring that I launch games through steam (if that is true).
While we could argue about the state of Windows, Steam also did not have to engineer it this way and the requirement of launching through Steam feels deliberate.
From what I can find, as others have mentioned, the 8BitDo controllers don't require Steam to be running to work. I presume the PS5 controller likely also does not (I will test this later)
On both macOS and Windows I have used borrowed PS4 and 8BitDo controllers and I can confirm that you do not need a Sony/8BitDo user account or any of their software running in the background for the controller to work.
I only tried one game, but I just tried plugging my PS5 controller into my PC and it worked without needing to install anything in Mass Effect Legendary Edition, and Steam is not running so it isn't Steam Input handling it.
My PC may have installed something on its own, but I did not.
However I don't have an issue if there is a driver, the requirement of Steam running and apparently launching the game through steam is the issue here.
Edit:
I just realized I completely missed the not in your message:
> I can confirm that you do not need a Sony/8BitDo user account or any of their software running in the background for the controller to work.
so I guess my reply was not necessary, I need more coffee...
> I don't buy that argument completely
"I refuse to accept reality, you are wrong."
You don't have to launch games through steam and the controller works fine, just like a normal controller. However if you want to take full advantage of all of the controller's features and be able to remap buttons easily then you can use Steam Input which tries to unify the awful mess that is input device standards across platforms and games.
If you don't want to then there are other options to take full advantage of the features like sc-controller. However this is not as user friendly as using Steam Input.
It's generally a good idea to read and understand before freaking out and getting outraged and spreading FUD.
It's a specific Windows issue too, and not unique to the steam controller. Xinput doesn't work with generic USB controllers, because you know, Microsoft. Hence why you need cope software for Sony controllers.
Valve does deserve criticism for the royal pain certain things are though. For example non-technical users will absolutely struggle to get Proton working without Steam, the process in doing so is purposefully kept undocumented and esoteric. There's 100% a little bit of undesirable obfuscation Valve does to push you towards just using Steam to run their OSS. It's definitely non-Free in the purist sense.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this. Operating systems don't typically include drivers out of the box for every single interface that could possibly connect to it. Often you'll get 'generic' drivers on Windows that at least map some of the basic inputs, but up until like late Windows 8 iirc Windows didn't even include that. Previously if you wanted to connect ANY controller to your PC you had to install third party drivers to make that work. So Valve bundling their controller drivers with steam just kinda... makes sense? Are you saying you would prefer to go find the drivers or have them written by not Valve instead? I really don't understand the 'walled garden' take here. You could go build your own drivers for this if you really wanted to, you don't need to use Valve's software.
USB HID protocol has been designed with huge flexibility and self descriptive devices in mind so that in theory you shouldn't require a custom drivers for vast majority of current input devices even controllers order of magnitude more complex than anything currently sells. Just like you don't need a custom driver for each usb flash driver.
In practice half-assed HID drivers by OS, badly designed OS<->application APIs, hardware manufacturers copy pasting HID descriptors from other devices, not following the standard properly, firmware bugs getting fixed with drivers instead of firmware fixes, intentional discrepancies from standard, console manufacturers reinventing the wheel has lead to the current mess.
But they're not drivers included with steam. In order for it to work you must launch the game through steam.
Kinda. SteamOS is open source, so it's not really walled.
It's possible they deferred making generic drivers to release faster and those will come out later,kinda like steamOS windows drivers came out later
The driver exists in the proprietary Steam client, not in SteamOS itself.
You don't need SteamOS. This is strictly a Windows issue and the controller works fine on MacOS and Linux.
> SteamOS is open source, so it's not really walled.
SteamOS is technically licensed under GPL, but Valve has yet to release the source code for 3.0 (4 years ago...)
The last activity in the public kernel repository was 9 years ago.
Where do you see that SteamOS Holo is GPL3? A package is not required to be GPL, and most of SteamOS is a customized arch installation, there's no guarantee that SteamOS itself is GPL. And which repo are you talking about, I don't see it on their gitlab for SteamOS Holo?
As someone else said, the driver is in Steam, not SteamOS. Even on a Steam Deck you have to run Steam in desktop mode to have the buttons on the deck work.
> Even on a Steam Deck you have to run Steam in desktop mode to have the buttons on the deck work.
That's not true. You get a reduced functionality controller with trackpads that can still be used to start steam back up.
Its been a minute since I've been on desktop mode, but aren't they just a trackpad at that point and none of the button/haptic functionality exists outside of moving the mouse and clicking?
Essentially yes.
Does that mean that chrome for non standard behaviours are ok because chrome is open source?
I do wish there was some kind of stand-alone driver for it. But I think part of the problem is also Windows themselves whos gamepad support is a pile of dog crap for anything that isn't a direct xbox controller replacement. Even retro gamepads pretend to be an xbox controller because they know if they don't 90% of games will be broken.
I'm not sure what you mean, it works outside of Steam. For example, SDL has full steam controller support.
How custom is it?
I assume(hope?) it is usb device class HID(or whatever the equivalent is for blootooth devices), this is well understood and there will be SDL/independent drivers for it in a day.
On the one hand Microsoft's Xinput is sort of nice for standard interoperability. On the other it is sort of a crippled specification, woefully inadequate for anything other than a xbox controller, their earlier direct input driver spec(xinput is a shim on top of this) was more capable. but I still don't think it can specify a touchpad.
SDL, who's main developer has been at Valve for years, already has added support for it back in November: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/main/src/joystick/hid...
I'm getting an 8BitDo controller because of the Steam lock-in on the Steam Controller. I can use the 8BitDo on all of my hardware without having to install software. It doesn't have the trackpads but for the rest is a very solid controller and also has Hall effect joysticks.
If you want to utilize all features of an 8BitDo controller at once, you also need Steam. XInput mode means no gyro, no back buttons bindable in software, Switch mode gives you gyro but makes your triggers digital, and you still can't bind the back buttons in software. You're limited to duplicating an existing input via the 8BitDo app and binding it globally at the firmware level. If you use the 8BitDo Pro 2 with Steam in DInput mode, you get analog triggers, gyro, and the back buttons are bindable in software per-game. This was not the case on release, 8BitDo and Valve worked together and gave this improved support via an update.
The software around controllers is universally bad, and Valve is the first to really try to fix it. We need a successor to XInput that is less limited.
THANK YOU
It's been driving me crazy seeing all the hate Valve is getting over compatibility concerns when Valve is the only one making controller support on Windows outside of an Xbox controller work. For years I just assumed I couldn't use many of my controllers on Windows, until Steam added the ability to act as the in between and properly handle it. Microsoft has no interest in making anything other than their Xbox controllers work, and everyone suggesting some sort of "I can just buy X as an alternative" has some major caveat that gets conveniently ignored.
This isn't even just a Windows thing either; Steam Input works pretty well on Linux for me.
The Steam controller doesn't have Hall effect sticks; they're TMR. Also, my 8bitdo controller does need special software to use a couple buttons on it. And it's the cheapest possible model, not a super advanced one. It just has more buttons than xinput supports.
This isn't to say that you're wrong about your main point. Steam is heavyweight to use just as an input profile selector at application launch. But you should be careful about details if you choose to include them.
I can highly recommend Gamesir controllers. I haven't tried all of course, they make a lot of different ones, but generally it's a great brand for very high quality controllers at crap-controller price. Better bang for the buck than 8BitDo (who focus more on style than functionality).
I've no relationship with the brand btw, I'm just a happy customer.
For now. Valve has a long history of shipping compatibility after release.
Yeah it'd be great if they can embed the steam input layer and have it run on other consoles, but there's too much overlay to disentangle.
Wait, really? So if you have two copies of the same game, one bought from Steam and the other from Epic Store, Steam Controller will only work for the Steam one?
Just add the launcher to steam, and you can set the input profile for the game just fine.
Better yet if you use Heroic instead of the official Epic launcher, it will let you add the game directly to Steam.
This is basically how people use 3rd party games on the steam deck. You want them added to steam as 3rd party games for easy access in game mode, so you just add any non-steam games to steam. Heroic and other launchers make it pretty effortless, but you can do it manually as well.
You can add any executable to Steam, not only the games they sell, as far as I know.
The controller will work with Steam running in the background
It's a bit more complicated than that (on Windows) because Steam doesn't make a virtual gamepad to the OS. The way Steam handles the input is by hooking into the games individually. So to use Steam for other games, you need to add them to Steam as non-steam games.
Even open source controller remapping tools (not just Steam Controller) and similar used ViGEmBus which is no longer maintained. You can have it do mouse/keyboard though, those don't require custom drivers.
Id bet some money it has more to do with certification. Consoles ban 3rd party controllers that provide a competitive edge. Steam controller is exactly that.
It's features work fine without Steam on Linux.
I wish people stopped spreading misinformation like this.
No the controller works for any game, outside of steam, without steam launched.
The only restriction is that to configure the controller, you need steam.
Otherwise, you can select a profile for desktop use that is mkb or a generic gamepad, and run your games through that. Of course, you won't have many of the modern features, since XInput does not support anything fancy. Want these features on your controller (not just the steam one, the 8bitdo, the switch 1/2, etc..) you will need modern input API... which are provided by Steam!
There was and probably will be third party applications to configure the controller outside of Steam. It is NOT a walled garden at all and imo, the best of both world.
> No the controller works for any game, outside of steam, without steam launched.
Can you provide any evidence for this claim?
That's how it worked with the original controller, and how it works with the steam deck.
Like I said, it won't have all the modern features as it will be stuck on a MKB profile or a Xbox gamepad profile (or whatever you configure). But it will work
I still use the original steam controller, and I can tell you this is not true. If steam is not launched, the controller runs in a keyboard/mouse emulation mode and is not detected as a controller. This behavior is hardcoded in the firmware and cannot be changed.
It's not hardcoded, you can configure the default profile for when Steam is not running, and you can set it up as a gamepad
This contradicts all reviews I've read, but good if true.
Either they changed something, but that's how it worked for the previous controller and how it works on the deck. Haven't received mine to test, but I would be surprised if they nerfed the controller without Steam.
Of course you won't have modern input controls, since you'll be left to either MKB or XInput which lacks gyro and more.
To be frank, it sounds like you are also spreading misinformation. In a follow-up you even said that you have not received yours to test and that you are only assuming based on the previous steam controller.
But your comment here is very definitive and is a major problem at how quick we are to defend Valve when we don't actually know.
Because people are saying the same shit about the previous controller, when it's verifiably false. The new controller operates on exactly the same principles
> It only works with Steam, it can't work on a desktop OS without
Wait what?? Is this true? How did I not know this important detail?
Only for windows, and maybe mac
It has an on-device fallback mode when Steam isn't running, and you can program (from steam) how it appears to the OS in that mode. It was originally developed for people plugging in their own PCs to a TV, so operates as a trackpad by default. Would your preference to be for them to release a Steam Controller programming app on every platform? Push Microsoft to integrate its extended functionality with Windows xinput?
Here is the model viewable in a web browser, for anyone interested https://share.plasticity.xyz/r/BDt8nFGQYVsdhi-v5SHSOn6jtBQUV...
"FILE_DESCRIPTION((''),'2;1'); FILE_NAME('IBEX_SOLID','2025-11-20T09:57:55',('stevec'),(''), 'CREO PARAMETRIC BY PTC INC, 2020454','CREO PARAMETRIC BY PTC INC, 2020454','');"
Glad to see that valve is using the best CAD software :)
Using a data schema standard that was withdrawn in 2005.
Nothing wrong with AP203, it has the most support in other software's. Obviously AP214 would be nice for colors but the model is probably shrink-wrapped (AP242 is not needed, nobody needs PMI)
Just because it was withdrawn in 2005 does not exclude its wide use in industry
They are not even using the newest version of AP203.
I will feel free to ignore comments on AP242 from PTC if they can't be bothered to use it.Creo (and Onshape) both support STEP AP242 export, but customers may choose to export to an older version for better compatibility with third-party systems that have not implemented recent standards.
Generally, at export time, choosing the oldest format version which still has all of the features you need will make it most likely others will be able to open the data.
>2020454
And the latest!
They also did this for the original steam controller, which I used a lot. When the back panel broke (its a trigger and battery cover) I was able to 3d print a replacement that has held up great.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/353370/announcements/detail...
I sometimes watch "Ben Heck Hacks" live-streams rebuilding game controllers for people with disabilities [1]. People like him are what these files are for.
1: https://www.youtube.com/@BenHeckHacks/streams
Files are here: https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/SteamHardware/SteamController
I wish computer mice did this.
I know multiple people whom are quite attached to 10+ year old mice that haven't been manufactured for quite some time, and would like to keep the familiar shape and design.
Can anyone share their experience enjoying the two pads they put on their controllers?
I have a Steam Deck and love it, but the only experience I have with those pads is “dammit I accidentally touched the pad again.” If I want a mouse, I just connect a Bluetooth mouse.
I thought for sure everyone knew it was a flop and we’d never see it again, but obviously that’s not right since they are back. What am I missing?
Besides being a mouse, you can map it to a virtual menu with as many shortcuts as you want, the shortcuts being key presses/combos, allowing you to bind way more things than would otherwise fit on a controller. You can also set up mouse regions so that the trackpad only maps to a part of the screen and will instantly jump there, like for moving around an inventory window or minimap.
For games without controller support or where KB+M has an advantage, the trackpads are a game changer. Imagine a hotbar like in Minecraft or Terraria, but instead of having to go left or right one at a time with your bumpers, you could spawn a radial menu with the touchpad and instantly flick to "8" or "5" or "1" to select those slots.
I've always been a M+KB player and especially for FPS games I've always found it impossible to aim with the sticks, so the trackpads really helped in this regard. Especially for older games that may not natively support joysticks it was a game changer (I recently played Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay)
It's hard to imagine quickly centering onto a headshot pixel (or group of maybe 12 pixels) with a trackpad. Especially if the target is moving.
I'd like to see a video of someone demonstrating real in-game use of these trackpads on different types of games. None of the reviews I've seen so far go into any detail on it.
EDIT: I found the trackpad usage detail I was looking for. But it's not using the new controller, just a steam deck. Looks a lot more accurate than I imagined. https://youtu.be/0BQEg3puMsc
> It's hard to imagine quickly centering onto a headshot pixel (or group of maybe 12 pixels) with a trackpad
These days it's hard to imagine me doing it with a mouse even :) The gyro takes some getting used to but it can indeed be really precise
I can play FPS games decently on controller using the Original Steam Controller's pads.
The touch pads work great for emulating a mouse in certain games. I've played many hours of Civ V and VI on the deck thanks to the touch pads. You can even configure them to act as a radial menu or touch menu where different areas of the touch pad emulate different keys.
Thanks. Is it not annoying to play Civ with a touchpad vs a mouse? Or is this just a convenience for situations where you can’t use a mouse?
I played through whole Half-Life 2 on steam deck with aiming and shooting using right touch pad and it was alright. Strongly suspect though the game should have a support for it properly otherwise it feels janky in everything else I tried with it. No idea what's the use case for left pad though - I sometimes play with it during loading screens due to nice sound it makes, that's about it
In steam deck desktop mode, the touchpad-as-mouse makes it just bearable enough to use. I can't use desktop mode with a wireless Xbox controller with no touchpads. It's really the missing input type that makes the steam deck a complete tv-docked PC.
Played Factorio for tens of hours using the Steam Deck touchpad
Best usecase for them (according to me) is top down strategy/base building games
Some people use them for radial menus, like selecting a weapon or pings or whatever
Can't wait to use it as a mouse for my Windows-based couch gaming PC.
I downloaded one of the models, but it is only the outer mold line, with no internal features. Not sure how useful this is to someone who needs to replace their shell, or modify it.
I believe it's for people who want to design enclosures, stands etc for their controllers
How does it work if this is under the creative commons license? Can 3rd parties sell this controller per the model? Other 3rd party vendors got around this by making a very minor change.
There exist multiple CC variations, this instance is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 wouldn't let you sell it no
It's just the external topology so it's really only going to be useful for making things that attach to the controller (skins, mounts, accessibility adapters, etc) or just toy models. Valve asks you to contact them if you want to sell an accessory using this model.
You could use the shape of the controller, but I don't think that is really giving much of an advantage to third party manufacturers. Scanning the shape of the controller and creating a clone with that shape is the easiest part of creating a generic competitor.
If only scalpers didn’t scoop up every unit
I don't fully understand this narrative that is going around about scalpers and the controller. So many people online are claiming it was only scalpers who were able to purchase one. I am also not a scalper (as someone else said), and was able to purchase one. We don't know how many they actually had in stock in total but let's say it's around 30K, from what I have searched on eBay and other reselling sites it would only seem like less than 1% of the stock is being sold by resellers/scalpers. I think it was just a high demand product. I know scalpers are a problem in much of the entertainment industry right now, but it's also becoming a scape goat for anything you just weren't able to buy yourself. It's quite annoying and getting old fast.
It’s hard to participate in any gaming communities because you quickly realize they’re all kids who have no idea about markets but they all talk like foremost experts on every subject
This is not just gaming communities and it is not just kids. The number of adults who don't understand basic supply and demand is astonishing.
Every discussion about Ticketmaster and/or scalpers is full of people who think if it wasn't for scalpers and ticketmaster, we could all go to every concert we want to for a reasonable price.
It is the same thing with the tech community and the price of hard drives, RAM, and GPUs right now. I have seen so many comments by people saying they "aren't going to support the price gouging" and seem to think manufacturers are just taking advantage of the hype to increase their prices.
The societal advantage of raising prices with demand is that it will lead to more supply generally, but in some cases supply is just simply limited and cannot be expanded enough sensibly. This leads just to people earning money without any additional economic benefit and often the poor suffering because of it (like with oil currently).
Of course DRAM manufacturers are taking advantage of the current situation, they're companies and making money is what companies are for. The problem is that DRAM manufacturing works in boom-bust cycles, building a new factory is capital intensive and slow, so additional supply will come too few and too late to press prices down to a sensible rate above manufacturing costs.
The funniest to me was people being confused why cutting of the strait of Hormuz would increase gas prices in the US when the US produces enough to supply its own demand.
But since it’s a global market the missing supply raises prices everywhere…
Does Ticketmaster not amplify prices and use perceived scarcity to drive up prices? They can due that because Live Nation is a monopoly in all but name.
If the tickets still sell out at the higher prices, than it is real scarcity, not artificial scarcity.
Each show has a set number of seats... it isn't an artificial monopoly, it is an intrinsic monopoly. People don't want to just go to A concert, they want to go to a SPECIFIC concert, and a concert venue only holds a set amount of people.
Then they build new stadiums that are physically larger but have fewer seats.
The only thing that's worse is seeing people like you defend scams, exploitation and worsening of consumer experience with trite high school "economics" explanations - and then insulting abused parties because of it.
There are a lot of scams in the world, but high prices for desirable things with capped supply aren't caused by a scam.
I don't think you can really escape this anywhere online. Hacker News has the same problem, really.
Future HN posters in training.
I managed to buy one, I also have no intention to sell it anytime soon. I do wish there were better protections against scalpers though, they are a blight.
It's also very important to understand that Valve has 100% control of the marketplace. They don't have to hope that Best Buy or Walmart or whatever secure their system against scalpers. They can enforce account history requirements and rate limiting or what ever they please.
I'd be extremely surprised if they didn't do that.
From what I've read the limitation was having a "premium" account (spent at least $5 on Steam) and maximum controllers was 3 per account.
EDIT: I see others here mention 2 max. Haven't heard that before, but that makes more sense to me.
I really wonder how many scalpers there were. I got one. I am not a scalper. Maybe it was just high demand for limited stock.
These days it's hard to tell and there's always a mix of both with any high demand items so it makes the stock limits even more pronounced. With how Valve has done hardware releases lately though I imagine it's more a stock limitation.
> These days it's hard to tell
Is it really? I go to my "local" second-hand marketplace and I see countless of listings for the new Valve Controller. I think it's fair to say most of those aren't "Ops, I made a purchase and I can't return it" but most likely being scalpers. No doubt, some of them are fake as well, but regardless, tends to be fairly easy to see when things are being scalped or if it's actually just high demand, if it's the latter, you don't see tons of second-hand listings the day after it opened.
I understand but you don't know how many people got one to keep it compared to how many just resell it.
> but you don't know how many people got one to keep it compared to how many just resell it
But you do? If someone puts it up on second-hand markets, they're not intending to keep it, they're intending to resell it, why put it up otherwise?
Right, they're saying you only see the side of the resellers, you have no idea the number of people who purchased it to keep it (like many of us in the thread). So in reality you may be only seeing less than 1% of stock for resell and not the 99% that are just buying it to keep it like normal. It's just confirmation bias that you assume everyone is buying to resell it cause that's all you're able to see.
I also got one and didn't think scalpers were the problem at the time. I have since seen eBay listings of people trying to sell the controllers (that they don't even have yet) for 3x the price, though, so they maybe did play a role. There was a limit of 2 controllers per Steam account and they sold out within 30 minutes, so not sure if bots were used or what. There wasn't a lot of time to mess around. I've seen a lot of people who wanted one couldn't get one. Personally I added it to my cart about 2 minutes before the official start time and then it took 12 minutes or so of retrying to actually check out.
I added it to my cart 2 minutes before and spent 3 hours trying before realizing that just because it's in your cart doesn't mean it exists since it was actually out of stock.
I don't really understand this argument. Is your position that if scalpers didn't exist you'd have a better chance of getting this product?
Scalpers have no effect on the supply of a product, they only affect the demand of the product and specifically they reduce the demand for the product by increasing the price.
I got 2. 1 for me and 1 for my brother. I sat with the page loaded and waiting. It opened a few minutes early and I was able to still order a 2nd about 5 minutes into sale
I got one a day later.
I'm hoping that the controller sale was a test/recon run for preventing scalping for the Frame/Machine.
I think valve typically has pretty good scalper protection. Was that not the case this time?
I think nobody but valve knows and they are not telling us. We don't know how many units were sold and how the protections were (at least I didn't see anything). Some people seem to assume that scalpers are to blame when a product is sold out really fast (which is understandable when looking at past hardware releases).
Me, I don't think so. I just think people really wanted to get one.
I know the steam deck had good scalper limitations. You had to have a steam account in good standing (no vac bans) that had a game purchase from before the deck was available for purchase, as well as a limit of how many one account could purchase.
There was a limit of 2 steam controllers for this sale, but it sounds like that limit was only per transaction, and didn't prevent an account from placing multiple transactions (if the store would load for long enough to allow it). I don't think any of the other limitations were in place.
I doubt that. Do you have any sources for that claim?
I have one and didn't have any issues buying, nor heard anyone have any issues buying in the past... In fact, the Steam Controller was considered a flop.
Wrong Steam Controller. Valve released a new one with the same name on the 4th of may. Stupid naming.
Funny the first one was a flop yet they released a second one.
the first one wasn't a flop. They got sued (abd lost) for patent violation and hsd to stop making it.
As long as we are doing controller chat, I want to reminisce about the original Xbox Elite controller with replaceable batteries. Very expensive but the weight was nice, the replaceable buttons and joysticks were great, and the replaceable batteries meant that a rechargable battery wasn't going to degrade overtime and make it unusable.
Unfortunately it had some real flaws. The back buttons weren't supported even on windows, I had to use 3rd party software like REWASD to map them to keyboard keys. And despite the high cost of the device, the rubber on it degraded and broke off pretty quickly. And the controller didn't have backlit buttons!
This should be mandatory for any company that wants to be allowed to sell their products in the market.
It's information age. Information about publicly offered stuff should be public.
Unfortunately we rely on voluntary heartwarming gestures like this one and reverse engineering attempts by hobbyists.
Cool! Other examples of this are Apple and Ford. https://developer.apple.com/accessories/Accessory-Design-Gui... https://www.ford.com/support/how-tos/owner-resources/vehicle...
Sometimes I love Volvo... The interesting part is not the CAD files themselves, but the signal/no-cover engineering diagrams. That’s the kind of detail modders usually have to reverse engineer themselves.
Does the release of the controller mean that valve solved the issues with the supply chain of their announced products? I know that the main problem is the rising prices of memory chips, but I would hope this leads to an announcement about the Steam Machine and (I'm still hoping...) HLX/HL3
I wish people would stop referring to "creative common licenses" as if they were even remotely comparable. The license in this case is CC BY-NC-SA which at least allows derivatives but really anything NC should not exist in CC even if its not as bad as the no-derivate jokes.
CC = "Creative Commons" not "Covetous Corporations"
If you're trying to make a profit, you can invest capital to do your own development or reach out to the source to arrange compensation.
This astroturfing of open licenses as if they are solely for the exploitation of profit and not of the common good is a terrible trend.
They engineered something and gave it away for free. It appears as if you are complaining that you can't use it to generate profit. This seems entitled to me, am I misunderstanding your position?
Compare it to Sony who still put potentiometers in their controllers. Good luck desoldering and replacing that once analogs inevitably start to drift. It's super easy to damage something else in the process as I learned.
I'm no big Sony supporter or even a fan of the PS5 controllers, but changing the sticks is not that scary. I find reassembling the whole thing cleanly harder than swapping out a stick assembly.
The pain point was desoldering the old analog, I found a lot of other people online struggle with this particular part.
It's probably way easier if you have proper soldering setup at home, which won't be true for average person just expecting an easy fix. I understand how it can be quick and simple for someone with more experience
I'm not really that good at soldering, maybe I just got lucky? I've only changed a stick twice on a PS5 controller, maybe on the third time I will mess it up horribly haha
Plenty of people indeed do have good "luck" and repair these, apparently even putting in better parts.
yes, you can replace them with hall effect analogs, as they should be right out of the factory
This sounds amazing.
As somebody not very familiar with CAD/3D printing, etc how hard is it to produce it myself (couple units for personal use)? What would be the average cost? Did anybody do it?
It's just the "outline" of the controller/puck, it doesn't include internal features for the internals. You won't be building your own controller off these files (without a lot of work).
It's more helpful for making things that conform to the controller, like a holder or stand for your desk or carrying case.
Any word on when their new hardware will come out? It's been 6 months since the steam machine etc was announced and you still can't order one
IIRC it's been delayed due to the recent increase in RAM prices
Open sourcing the CAD files is a huge win for repairability. I wish more hardware companies would adopt this approach for discontinued products.
They only open-sourced the external surface, not the internals, so it doesn't help repairability much
Without reading the README, just by seeing the STP file I knew Valve wants the community to give its controller life.
Amazing. This is gonna be useful for my handheld project.
The day Gaben would fade away will be very sad moment for gaming industry. Steam is rare incredible company.
Valve will open-source the entire controller, the operating system, the hardware schematics, and the manufacturing process before they'll tell you what's happening with Half-Life 3.
I can't believe that it sold out in 30 minutes!
Valve is an exception in a rotten business.
GigaBASED, FOSS-pilled. Gaben protects
Valve is an exemplary company.
Keychron did it a while ago
What, no gerbers?
man i love valve
Pretty cool
The joysticks in the STP file don't seem to properly import into Plasticity; the STL files don't have this problem. Though I appreciate that there is even STP at all!
W valve - Good Guy Gabe does it again.
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What exactly motivates you to AI generate useless replies?
When I have my own house I will put the biggest picture of Gaben possible in my office.
More companies should do this when they discontinue hardware. The community will keep it alive longer than you ever would, and it costs you nothing.
This is the brand new Steam Controller though, not the old, discontinued one.
Great news! Open-sourcing the CAD files under Creative Commons is a fantastic move by Valve. This will enable the community to create custom modifications and accessibility adaptations for the Steam Controller.
Just in case anyone from valve is reading:
Dont care about controller, memory card or deck charger or whatever other irrelevant addition to existing products you have. I just want an update on the Frame. And yesterday too. Thank you for very much for your time and attention. Until our eyes meet again.
what a bad boy we got over here
Apologies for not responding sooner. I did not want you to feel neglected. You know that Valve does not care much about what some rando online wrote in HN post right? Well, have you considered the possibility that they care even less about you defending it:D? Just a thought for these trying times.