Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license(digitalfoundry.net) |
Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license(digitalfoundry.net) |
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.
> 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
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.
Privately held company
> how long it can possibly last
Till VC's or IPO day
..
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 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).
*Owner must be a decent human being
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.
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.
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.
Everybody else could stand to take lessons from them
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.
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.
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.
And then there was the N64 controller...
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.
Glad to see that valve is using the best CAD software :)
Just because it was withdrawn in 2005 does not exclude its wide use in industry
And the latest!
https://steamcommunity.com/games/353370/announcements/detail...
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.
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?
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 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.
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!
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?
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
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 more helpful for making things that conform to the controller, like a holder or stand for your desk or carrying case.
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.
Can only hope that Stop Killing Games is the first shell in winning back our digital rights
The gambling thing is whack but at least it's not polymarket.
"Underpriced good at it again" would be more accurate.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's exactly how you create a walled garden. You build a garden. Get people in. Then wall it up.
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.
So it’s the controller and not Windows then, if partial functionality is okay (which seems fine to me).
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.
on Linux I think there's a kernel level driver, but I'm not sure
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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've no relationship with the brand btw, I'm just a happy customer.
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.
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.
Can you provide any evidence for this claim?
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.
Wait what?? Is this true? How did I not know this important detail?
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'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
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
I'd be extremely surprised if they didn't do that.
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.
Me, I don't think so. I just think people really wanted to get one.
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.
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.
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.
Berkshire Hathaway, Novo Nordisk, ASML, TSMC, Saab, Atlas Copco, Texas Instruments.
(Perhaps not that many from the US though, relatively speaking? Not sure TBH.)
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.
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.
Likely to change soon though with the steam machine release
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.
Humble Bundle 100% does both, sells games cheaper and redeemable through Steam keys, and has been doing so for many years.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042915/what-are-som...
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?
> This repository contains CAD files for the external shell (surface topology) of Steam Controller and the Steam Controller Puck
Then Apple's lawyers come for your liver.
Edit: spolling, I have a fever.
Are they compliant in the Australian market now?
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.
Of course you won't have modern input controls, since you'll be left to either MKB or XInput which lacks gyro and more.
EDIT: I see others here mention 2 max. Haven't heard that before, but that makes more sense to me.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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...
Note: the Windows support is a WIP and the devs don't have the new Steam Controller
It would be better if they released drivers instead.
#93459=APPLICATION_PROTOCOL_DEFINITION('international standard', 'config_control_design',1994,#93458);
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.
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:
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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's not true. You get a reduced functionality controller with trackpads that can still be used to start steam back up.
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)
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
Those of us who have been customers over 20 years often have a pretty significant investment in Steam content, and Gabe is getting old.
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.
[0]: https://imgur.com/a/2XbM18n
edit: fixed image link
- 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 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.
There's no nice way to say this, but maybe you need to re-evaluate your relationship with this video game company.
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.
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.
But since it’s a global market the missing supply raises prices everywhere…
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 "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.
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.
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.
Two hours is far more than enough to determine if a game is for you.
At least personally, I'd prefer having to wait a few months and having a good refund policy over more sales
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.
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.
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.
4x, city builders, deck builders, RTS, RPG, etc; these can all be fun in short order, if the games are well designed.
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
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.
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.
$ 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
% file /Volumes/Steam/Steam.app/Contents/MacOS/steam_osx
/Volumes/Steam/Steam.app/Contents/MacOS/steam_osx: Mach-O universal binary with 1 architecture: [x86_64:Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64]
/Volumes/Steam/Steam.app/Contents/MacOS/steam_osx (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64% 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
We have an epidemic of addiction to gambling in youth, where the arrow points at lootboxes as the gateway drug..
If there is one to blame for the gambling epidemic, look at EA and FIFA.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So of course every single company look at Valve and decide they should do the complete opposite of everything Valve does except loot boxes.
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.
It's really funny to read this given that Valve largely invented loot boxes!
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
funny, I was thinking the same thing with "shareware model" replaced by "warez model".
You can't buy the top search result position on Steam. That alone sets them far apart for me.
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.
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 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 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).
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
Could you perhaps back that claim up with some documentation from Valve?
Another POV is, nobody on HN has any idea what he's talking about, it's all vibes.
I'm glad valve exists, but they are not a charity and do not need your sympathy.
I have paid $10 for every $1 of game I play, perhaps as high as $100:$1. A 30% cut of that seems totally reasonable. I have hundreds of games I keep just in case, and have played 10s of games I'd never have considered because they dont appear in Game Informer, PC Gamer, GoG, Twitch, Youtube, or other channels. They just are magically brought to me by steam, and I buy it and try it because I'm an adult now.
If game creators hate this, I feel bad for them, but I don't want anything to change as a consumer.
You do not have hundreds of games. You have a non-transferable license to play those games while they are made available by Valve and while your account is not banned.
- One chargeback for your 5$ 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 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.
Edit: whoops that’s completely false. I do not know where I got that idea
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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 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.
I suppose, yeah, some things would be a lot worse without Steam, so there's that.
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).
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.
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.
So that essentially means a publisher takes even more than valve, while doing almost nothing.
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!
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.
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 ;.
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"
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is exactly how it's setup right now.
They certainly have a better card deck than Loki Entertainment used to have.
"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.
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 :)
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.
Proton is them trying a different path towards severing or lessening the Windows dependence, in my opinion.
But the improvement has been so great (and so downhill in Windows camp) that now Proton is the performance benchmark apparently...
They simply have the best product and won the market.
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.
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.
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.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3932890/Escape_from_Tarko...
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 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.
Don't get me wrong, as mentioned, I use Steam and like Steam/Valve, but that move is a bit shitty regardless.
> A purchase of a digital product grants a license for the product on Steam.
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.
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.
Valve seem happy to let things happen more organically however.
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.
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...
Because for the wide masses you don't actually need any DRM, which is about what Steam provides: nothing.
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%.
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.
A list that's growing by the day lol
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
