Comment on They even do Price Discrimination on video games now
Katana314@lemmy.world 3 days agoOkay.
So, host a game on your own website, with its own patching process, payment systems, and forum. See how long it takes you, and how many sales you get out of it.
Once you do that, you may start to realize where that 30% is going. Sure, once you have the game and are playing it, you can say, “gee, it’s weird that Valve took a 30% cut of this work”. But it’s like seeing a long list of credits at the end of a movie when you were only aware of the signature voice of the lead actor.
jwiggler@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
It’s not like this, because most (not all) of those credits actually worked on the movie, itself. Their labor went into the thing that was produced in the end. I’m not arguing there’s no cost to distribution. It’s just not value-adding and so it ends up being extractive imo.
I’m also not trying to claim there’s no productive work involved with maintaining a distribution platform, or that they aren’t necessary. That’s one of the issues, they are necessary, and there is one big player, and anyone who wants to sell their good is beholden to them. Valve still has a feudal-lord-like position in relation to the people who actually make the games, themselves.
Katana314@lemmy.world 3 days ago
If you’ve ever watched those credits, you’d know that’s not true. Credits don’t just go to people who assembled lighting rigs or held the boom mic - they also go to the offices that negotiated with local governments to arrange on-sight shooting, or production studios that fronted funding, or people who provided QA and support for the animation software the CGI studio is using. Much of it becomes distantly disconnected, and that’s exactly what the relation to Steam becomes.
You’re also perhaps being disingenuous about the “one big player” thing. It is possible, and achievable for individuals to write their own launcher. I teased it as being more work than an indie dev often wants, but it’s still doable. Factorio and Minecraft famously did this a long time ago AND got initially popular as a result. Many Asian games run their own Windows launcher. As a result, they collect 100% of revenue, but forfeit some Steam exposure. Notably, some large publishers can cut better deals with Steam based on that popularity; “We don’t need you, but we both gain a bit more from working together”.
Some indies have even learned about this the reverse way, in seeing that merely because Steam is popular, publishing there doesn’t necessarily cover advertising for them; and even a good game can fade into obscurity. There’s some pretty heavy misconceptions relating Steam alone to a game’s level of success.
On the other hand, people have tried to argue Epic, Origin, and others failed because they “weren’t as popular as Steam”, but they’re also generally not as good a product as Steam - not just due to poorer programming, but choosing to not even offer certain core features like reviews.
jwiggler@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
But these are value-adding things too, wouldn’t you say? They end up being integral to the making of the thing itself. Different from distribution which is just, as I see it, granting access to a market that you control so the good can be sold.
I’m definitely not being disingenuous – I’m not a Valve-hater out here trying to convince people they’re evil. I use Steam and would rather use it than any other platform. It’s simply better. But that’s not really relevant to what I’m saying, besides it’s implication that it makes Steam more attractive to potential buyers of games. In relation to me, these platforms aren’t a product at all. They’re marketplaces devs have to pay a tax to access. As you note, it’s possible to bypass them – but I’d wager that makes things much much harder for the dev. I’d guess Factorio and Minecraft are exceptions to the rule.
But yeah, you do have a point that are others out there. I’d consider them extractive, too. As I see it, theyre less so a service and moreso based on ownership and control of infrastructure that probably should be common property.
Katana314@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Ownership of infrastructure THEY BUILT.
Why is it fair that only the Factorio developer gets to sell Factorio? I have a copy of the game myself, and even built my own mod where the engineer says “lol” and you can go around to other engineers and say “lol” to them. It’s just that the Factorio dev has ownership and control of the base game, and restricts how people sell modded versions. It’s basically feudalism where he has complete control over Factorio versions.
Okay, that was a full paragraph of sarcasm. There ARE some industries where ownership of one thing, like a river or limited capacity for internet wiring, causes monopolistic control. But when we’re not reliant on a limited resource, except for the main one of “user attention”, you can’t justify it as “monopoly control”. It’s just “Bob makes the best pies, so everyone goes to his store instead of Alex’s.” If Alex wants the same attention, they need to build their own incredible pie recipe from scratch - they have access to the same street, the same apples, and the same flour.