I mean, I'll give full Kudos to Valve for investing in Linux gaming, it wasn't exactly a selfless maneuver, but it is still valuable and makes the world a better place.

And I'll give them Kudos for contributing to VR, but they neither popularized it, nor make the best headsets, both of those titles go to Oculus. They do have the hands down best VR game ever made, but even that is not what popularized VR, Beat Saber is.

Ultimately, Valve has made billions and billions in profits on top of all that investment, and on top of paying all their employees $300k+ salaries + stock. I like a lot of what Steam offers, but it's also objectively unquestionable that they could have offered all of what they offer for far less money, but their de facto monopoly means that everyone will buy from them no matter what.

Because, let's be real, gamers aren'tt hating Epic for having to download mods through a third party mod site, they're hating them for having to use a second launcher / store.

[–] fartsparkles@sh.itjust.works 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

They could have gone Unix and not contributed upstream like PlayStation did.

Oculus was a device. Valve built SteamVR literally for the Rift (I had the original developer model and using Steam was pretty much essential). Valve also ensured that SteamVR supported other devices too when they came to market, levelling the playing field and enabling consumers to pick and choose hardware without having to buy games across multiple different marketplaces.

Valve pay their employees what they’re worth and share their success with them rather than devaluing them and extracting value from them. That’s pretty good going. And given how much they do with so few, it says a lot about their culture and ethic.

I don’t know about other gamers but I dislike EGS because it’s simply an inferior product and I vote with my wallet. If they offer me more value than a competitor, I’ll gladly use them. I use GOG, itch.io, and Xbox GamePass so it’s not like I’m averse to other platforms. I just don’t see why, if a game is on EGS and Steam (and not on GamePass), what value is there to me as a consumer with going with EGS?

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca -3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Valve pay their employees what they’re worth and share their success with them rather than devaluing them and extracting value from them. That’s pretty good going. And given how much they do with so few, it says a lot about their culture and ethic.

Gabe Newell is a literal billionaire. Valve executive are not taking a hit to pay them fairly, Steam just prints so much money that they can pay them more than they have to. Rather than lowering prices for the rest of consumers they decided to pay their staff exorbitant salaries in addition to themselves. It's better than just paying themselves, but it's not noble or good on a broad scale, it's them taking more societal resources than they need to provide a service.

I don’t know about other gamers but I dislike EGS because it’s simply an inferior product and I vote with my wallet. If they offer me more value than a competitor, I’ll gladly use them. I use GOG, itch.io, and Xbox GamePass so it’s not like I’m averse to other platforms. I just don’t see why, if a game is on EGS and Steam (and not on GamePass), what value is there to me as a consumer with going with EGS?

Again, not saying anyone should prefer EGS, but this thread started off because someone said Epic was a bad publisher, which is just based of their hate for EGS, not based on anything to do with their merits as a publishing partner.

[–] Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

400 people with higher wages than average for their field VS millions of customers keeping more money in their pockets...

Surprisingly most lemmings would choose the former 🤷

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I honestly cannot fathom how gamers don't see how much Valve has fleeced them. Like you said, it's literally just 400 tech workers who would have had $150-200k salaries get to win the lottery and get $300k-500k salaries, at the expense of every single other gamer who just wanted to play a game at the end of their shift.