I would encourage anyone in tech that is interested in forming a union at their workplace to sign up for CWA's CODE (Campaign to Organize Digital Employees) training: https://code-cwa.org/
CWA is a big, traditional, national union (think phone company employees, health care workers, flight attendants) that has voted to set aside a portion of their dues to help organize us, their fellow workers in the tech sector, which I consider a truly beautiful act of solidarity. They are having some successes, which seem to be building.
Getting plugged in with the training and, almost as importantly, a CWA organizer, is a great first step if you know you'd like a union but don't know where to start.
That option isn't always available, at least in the US. Unless you live in a right-to-work state, you may be forced to join the union as a condition of employment.
Per AA's 10-K, in 2024 87% of American Airlines employees were represented by a union[1]. So according to that source it sounds like the people who were fired were union members that didn't pay their dues.
They could surely have paid their dues and left the union and kept their jobs (or could have never joined the union to begin with).
I don’t know about this case specifically, but airlines frequently have different labor laws. They’ll be the exception to all sorts of unqualified statements.
If you don't like the people you're working with, you could quit.
You could also vote no on a unionization vote, or just not join. I'm sure your loyalty will get a special consideration when the next round of arbitrary layoffs (coupled with record-breaking profits) happens.
As a kid I always lamented that every studio seemed to sell out as soon as they had the chance. Valve is basically the only one that didn’t… clearly it’s paid off very well for Gabe and the employees. Wish more people would resist the payday and keep what’s theirs.
Valve makes a significant amount of their money from the gambling they've attached to their games, and profits immensely from the culture of farming loot boxes to gamble on for skins and such.
They also take an absurd cut of developer income and saddle devs with costs that they don't always want. (Selling on Steam? Valve takes 30% and forces you to moderate the forums on your listing page that you cannot opt out of.)
They also have an internal culture that's been fairly regularly criticized as being pretty uncomfortable for women and minorities.
Valve has done some cool stuff, but let's not lionize them too much. They are probably better than an average company, for sure, but it's important to remember that they are also sketchy in some very gross ways as well.
If you were a dev selling a game years ago when physical distribution was the only method, you'd likely end up with a lot less than 70% after both the publisher and retailer take their cut.
The difference is that the company had to risk manufacturing cartridges, distributing them, etc. If the game didn't sell, you ended up with lots of money lost.
Steam is much much easier for Valve.
I am not saying it has a value, but 30% seems a lot.
Of course, in the end that 30% we end up paying it ourselves.
It clearly isn’t easy, given that nobody else is doing it their way. Maintaining the company culture might be the toughest challenge of them all. The other game storefronts simply can’t resist muddying the water for the consumer, making the shopping experience hostile for some stupid ass monetization reasons. Shopping on Steam is a breeze, and it always feels like the store is on your side trying to help, instead of trying to get in the way. The developer-side publishing experience is much similar.
I look at neither for reviews. Steam Reviews are often bombed to hell for things like, "Game has woman. Woke." or "Game has racism." or other culture war nonsense. Or the very common, "Creator I follow on Youtube liked/disliked this game, so I left a similar review" or "Creator I dislike liked/disliked this game, so I left the opposite review". Or, the worst of all, "Game uses Unity/Unreal/Godot/Something Else, automatic dislike".
Ultimately, reviews of games tend to be pretty useless because people who play games have very little understanding of a) what makes games fun, and b) the complexity involved in making the games.
I have creators I follow whose tastes are closest to my own, and I watch their content for reviews, then go to the store that makes the best offer.
I genuinely strictly disagree; The Steam review section is usually an accurate description of the game’s quality.
The overall score tends to fairly represent the likelihood that I’ll like the game, and when in doubt reading a couple of reviews tends to give a clearer picture. And then, the reviews themselves can be rated, and there’s a “recent reviews” score that protects against review bombings and gives a clearer picture of the game’s current state. Not to say that there aren’t exceptions - there’s a poorly-received game that I’ve poured hundreds of hours into recently - but I literally wouldn’t know how to set up a better system myself.
In contrast, the Epic storefront is fucking laughable.
I use steam for the community as well. Just look at how bad reviews are on Xbox store, they are more like app store reviews... mostly complaining about a version update.
Steam also has a solid update/beta pipeline. Game companies post blog posts about new game updates so you keep up to date with development. They also did an amazing job with SteamOS which feels rock solid.
No, when you asked Nintendo to manufacture you a run of cartridges, you paid for them whether they sold or not. You took that risk. Nintendo took zero risks per game, they took the risk in the physical hardware. Legacy game distribution also never took the risk. Retailers were able to return unsold inventory. There were court cases about this when companies tried to go around Nintendo's cartridge building services to save money. Those companies largely won their court cases, so then we made the DMCA to say "No, get fucked"
The up front risk you take on Steam is $100. It still ends up being a meaningful risk because the numbers show almost nobody makes that back, because developers are so interested in selling their game on steam that the market is outright supersaturated.
>Of course, in the end that 30% we end up paying it ourselves.
I used to buy video games at walmart. Unlike games I bought at walmart, Valve has done things that retroactively add value to games I bought decades ago, like remote play together, adding internet multiplayer to games that never even thought about it, and a controller system that allows pretty much anything you can think of. Games that had zero controller support for a decade just do now, no extra download, and the required configuration is often the single button press to select whatever configuration someone else made. Valve created an entirely new software platform for games that makes it so even games that are utterly broken on modern systems can work again, and it's just built in. If I buy a game today, I'm pretty confident I can play it in 20 years. An actual system for sharing digital games with other accounts, with large caveats.
Refunds, despite Valve only offering them because it's the law in several countries and they were losing court cases, are not a thing for physical game purchases here in the US. Once you take off the shrink wrap, you are fucked.
Steam has built in support for Beta branches and old game versions that the game dev can enable. Steam has built in support for DLC, and market systems for trading and selling digital "goods", not that I really think that's a good thing but some people seem to. Steam has fully built in support for cloud saves.
Steam has a fully integrated "friends" system, and that system is convenient for the end user and includes features like screen sharing and voice chat and gifting people games.
Steam offers fully integrated mod management for at least a large subset of all possible mods for any game.
Like I cannot stress enough how even if video games were 30% more expensive in steam (they aren't, devs distributing through steam are making a larger portion of the profit than they used to), retroactively adding functionality to games I bought a decade ago and producing a system that makes it very likely I can play these same games in 20 years is so worth it. Everything else is just a bonus. Their hardware also shows great value per dollar, so the "They are overcharging" narrative just doesn't track.
Meanwhile, steam avoids problems that plague other digital storefronts. Easy returns (again, forced on them), their launcher mostly respects my resources and doesn't destroy my computer every time there's an update, the way Valve negotiates terms they have a much better setup: Even if a publisher or developer pulls their game, as long as you bought it before then you can always install it and play it. Transformers Devastation was pulled from the store years ago and cannot be purchased by anyone I think anywhere, but I can still download and play it on a new machine because that's the contract Valve got Activision to sign. The game literally doesn't have a store page anymore.
Fuck Valve's child gambling profits and invention of loot boxes, but their distribution business is unambiguously the most respectful of the consumer and developer. Only GOG with their work towards preservation and lack of DRM comes close.
I own 4000 games on steam. That's about 3900 more than I would have ever bought in a world without Steam. Their wishlist system is a direct driver of sales that wouldn't happen otherwise. When the Epic Store launched, it didn't even have a damn shopping cart.
I think it's a bit disingenuous to blame Steam for a decision Rockstar made. The final decision lies with the publisher as to what game actually ships. If they want to remove their old listings and replace them with a worse offering, that's on them.
I'm happier to pay Valve's 30% than Apple's. With Valve you could always switch to Itch or something if you didn't want to pay, but with Apple you have no alternative. Valve gives you access to a huge player base and lots of useful marketing tools and such.
Happier is a fine place to be. They are both still too high. Not everything has to be binary -- I can think Valve is offering some utility and also think that Valve is charging too much for that utility.
The fact that Gabe has a billion dollars worth of yachts probably suggests that maybe, just maaaaaybe, that 30% could be lower and Steam could still provide you the same level of marketing support and player base.
Of course now it does, but it was bootstrapped off the back of commercial success. The parent poster was suggesting Epic could only finance a game store off the commercial success of Fortnite. Which seemed to be the exact same path Valve took, so I was curious to explore why the parent felt they were different.
Difference is that Valve made a platform to support their own products. And run it fiscally responsibly from start. Where as well Epic is dumping. Trying to gain market share by giving out free stuff and possibly undercharging. Now thinking whole license model for their engine might also be harmful for any bigger competing engines...
I think while PC is a good example of epic struggling to compete with someone who took full advantage of being first mover, the apple appstore/google play mobile stores are also where they've put in significant financial/legal effort trying to create a more lucrative openings in that market as well.
It's like being a first party for a Video Game Console. Gabe Newell having a billion in Yachts, Bill Gates might have a billion dollars tied up in Real Estate. It has less to say about the personal greed of Gabe Newell and more to say about the relative size of the market.
Gabe made his initial fortune working at Microsoft. He almost lost it all putting it into Valve/Steam. At one point they were close to not even being able to make payroll. He bet everything on the company.
You are welcome to start your own progressive game market place for PC. Go undercut him and charge 5% fees. You literally just need to dump game files on a CDN right? How hard can it be? /s
I do find it odd that this account is new and the type of posts it leaves. Seems almost like an LLM...
Heck, I've not bought games because they were not on Steam or required another launcher. Ubisoft and Rockstar are so bad that I held off on buying some games I really wanted to play; they're just that awful. EA's Origin was also pretty bad last time I checked.
I guess it's an actually hard problem to make a somewhat decent launcher in big companies with too many PMs playing turfwars, but still, almost everyone except Valve is shitting the bed so hard that as a consumer I'd happily pay quite the markup if it would allow me to avoid other launchers. They're that bad.
Indeed, when big publishers like EA and Ubisoft started leaving Steam they introduced a tiered pricing system which progressively reduces the cut to 25% or 20% after tens of millions of dollars in revenue, to lure those AAA juggernauts back. The price is now indirectly based on how much leverage you have over Valve - Ubisoft can get away with not releasing their games on Steam, so they pay 20%, while small-to-medium studios effectively have no choice, so they pay 30%.
It's especially backwards when you consider that those AAA games put far more strain on Steams infrastructure with their >150GB install sizes.
There are even games you can buy on one service and play multiplayer with people who buy it on steam! I chose to buy MSFS2020 through steam for example because the steam platform is dramatically better than the absurd way the Windows Store does anything, but we fly in the same skies!
There's no lock in or exclusivity. You can literally buy the same exact executable from multiple places, and the only change is the feature the store program supports. Buying a game through the Epic Store for example won't let you use steam input, but you can even then play it on the steam deck with some effort! I think you can even use Proton on executables you don't get through steam!
A dev can even make it so that, if you buy their game on steam, you do not have to have steam running or installed to play it. They have that freedom. They also have the freedom to mark a version of the game such that steam allows you to access that old version forever
If you are a dev who releases a game on steam, you can mint a bulk quantity of steam keys and sell or distribute those outside of steam!. Probably if you abused it, Valve would tighten it up or ban you, but why would you bite the hand that feeds you? It's how, for example, Humble Bundle initially worked.
That's right, you don't even need to buy your game from Valve to use all their features! A substantial portion of my library paid money to Amazon instead, through humble bundle.
People use Steam because it has 20 years of established trustworthiness in an industry otherwise made up entirely of assholes who hate you.
Meanwhile, in the place that Steam does poorly: Old games, GOG has much more of the market.
People actually are willing to pay for trust and care. Steam has repeatedly and regularly improved how their storefront displays information and informs consumers, because their primary problem is discoverability and wading through the mountains of games from people desperate to collect some of the money waterfall that Valve enables.
When you put a game on Steam, the contract ensures that anyone who purchases it cannot lose access without it being Valve's decision. Developers or publishers who do stupid things or pull games five years down the line cannot prevent you from playing a game you buy on steam if it isn't dependent on some server somewhere. None of the other storefronts have ANYTHING like this, mostly because they are run by the exact companies who WANT to be able to prevent you from ever playing an old game again, so they can sell the same thing to you in a new box.
Compare that to Apple's 30%, which similarly has lots of features their platform enables including unlocking significant consumer spending, but they do not give you any alternative. If you want even a single dollar from someone on an iPhone, you HAVE to pay apple 30%, and at least for a while they wanted that even to cover netflix subscriptions for example.
If you as a developer do not want to pay valve 30%, you are free to do like Notch did for Minecraft and distribute it yourself, and you are free to run into the same problem it had where my friend was unable to purchase minecraft for decades because his bank refused to send money to the Scandinavian bank involved, whereas even a literal child without a debit card can use birthday money to buy a steam gift card and purchase your game with no adult involvement. (maybe that's not a good thing for society, but it's great for game dev business).
Valve does not have a moat other than simply consumer trust. Minecraft sold a hundred million copies through a dude's website. There has literally never been a moat in computer game distribution. An entire industry of British children existed writing games and selling them in local stores. A moat has never been possible, because Valve cannot make your computer not run other software.
You are happy now and will probably be for as long as Gabe Newell is in charge of Valve. (He's 63, by the way; not quite elderly but not young either.) After he retires, well, Valve, as the dominant gatekeeper for PC gaming, has a lot of opportunities for cranking up monetization that investors would just love to get their hands on.
So it's either choosing to buy from a company that might become public after the owner dies which then succumbs to the rot that you admit is inevitable with public companies. Or choosing the companies that are already public that is already exploitative and only interested in short term gains?
Investors did not imply public. Enshittification is not limited to public companies. They did not say it was inevitable. Are GOG exploitative and only interested in short term gains?
Imagine if roads weren't public, but were built by a single private company. You have a business that moves goods by truck. You can use the private company's roads, but only if you pay 30% of the profit of your goods to the company that owns the roads. It only takes 2% of the profit to maintain the roads; the other 28% is profit (rent) for the road-owning company.
You could choose not to use the roads. But then the only way to deliver the goods is by parachute (which may be possible, but isn't practical). So you use the roads. But this means you have to jack up your prices to make any profit for yourself. Competing is much harder (tighter margins), and your customers are paying more than necessary. Everyone's life is harder, except for the road company.
Except in this example, there is nothing preventing other companies from building new roads. And in fact other companies have attempted to build new roads, competing by lowering the 30% fee to 10%, and even paying trucking companies to start using their roads. Except their roads are so poorly maintained that trucking companies choose to continue using the existing roads despite the higher fee. Also EA made some roads that went directly into the ocean for some reason.
This doesn't match with the definition of rent-seeking at all, as described in your wikipedia link:
> Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth.
To my knowledge, Valve has not manipulated public policy or economic conditions to maintain Steam's dominance. Steam hasn't pushed for legislation to prevent competitors, it hasn't prevented developers from selling their games on other platforms, and it doesn't even prevent you from installing non-Steam games on Valve's own proprietary hardware and operating system.
While I hate always connected DRM, and lamented the death of physical media when steam got huge (and also refused to get a steam account for years for that reason), we would have multiple shitty stores if steam didn't exist, I think.
Look at epic and all the other distributors. Their stores are terrible and that's with the inherent competition of going against steam. Imagine if they were the only game in town. . .
Also looking at history. Download stores run by game stores. Or some startup. Some random extra DRM involved. Shut down in a few years without recourse... Just imagine that repeating every few years. Maybe fine for Linux and Mac users who expect no longevity from their purchases. But as PC user, no not acceptable.
Don't they have a disgusting most favored nations clause that prohibits you from pricing anywhere else lower (e.g. you can't raise price X by 42% and sell on your site for X)?
I think they're being sued over delisting someone for this last I checked, even if their public policy might not interpret their MFN that way
It seems like the flat management structure allowed an ad-hoc hierarchy of cliques to form in the office anyway, pitting entrenched teams of old-timers against new hires, but implicitly. When you think of the lack of support for TF2 over the years, this is illuminating.
It's astounding that Valve/Steam are still as successful as they are in spite of this culture.
The second link is paywalled, but from the various sources I looked at, the diversity problems with Valve seem limited to "Valve refuses to spend company time/effort to support my cause". I have not seen any concrete claims of misbehavior, in direct contrast to some other video game companies.
Additionally, when I actually look into the alleged statistics of claims that "Valve is primarily white and male", the numbers ... don't actually look that bad? We shouldn't expect any company to fit national demographics exactly.
Allegations of unpaid labor are for crowdsourced translations and have nothing to do with Valve as a workplace.
This controversy is known and there are a few translators on Steam/Valve that came from the community, but nowadays it is mostly outsourced, and they do a terrible job (they replaced gamers with people who can't even bother to download the game to check the context a string is applied to).
I was a member of STS and I can say crowdsourced translations were a million times better than the now-paid translation teams Valve hires.
And yes, while it was mostly "unpaid", during my time there (2016-2020), we had a year-end rally every year which the "fastest" teams to complete translations would receive Steam wallet codes for their effort. I received up to $350 the first year of rally.
The next year they gave us Artifact keys...
and then the one Valve employee managing the server left Valve, and STS was slowly being replaced by Crowdin
they essentially killed crowdsourcing starting with Artifact. We (the STS members) had no access to new strings, then came Underlords, the new client... Only TF2 translations are crowdsourced to this day. The rest are done by their external teams.
Valve charges 30% for access to their marketplace, and allows you to sell Steam keys for your game at whatever price you want through your own sales channels, without paying Valve a cent.
I'm not sure how any of that is sketchy or gross. As far as marketplaces and platforms go, this is quite reasonable, and there are many successful games which are either not on Steam, or are cross-listed on multiple platforms, or are cross-listed on both Steam and the developer's own distribution channel.
I appreciate what you've posted here. Valve fanboyism is widespread (I'm guilty of it too) and while they are shoulders above the alternatives, it's a good reminder that no one's perfect and I'll be sure to take a closer look at the company in the future.
> They also have an internal culture that's been fairly regularly criticized as being pretty uncomfortable for women and minorities.
If they don't like the culture, then they should work elsewhere.
I hear Google is hiring.
Nothing worse than joining a company you contributed zero to building from the ground up, then unilaterally deciding the culture needs to change according to your whims, right now.
You might feel uncomfortable working in a black barber shop. Or a cat cafe with pet allergies. You've contributed nothing to their business, they shouldn't have to change for you.
What nonsense. A decision about workplace should be a combination of factors -- workplace culture, products you can work on, compensation, skill fit, alignment with your interests, etc.
You should feel empowered to have a voice in the products of your labor. And you should feel empowered to have a voice in the culture that produces those products.
You seem to be misunderstanding how language works? Can you please explain why you think the literal word entitled had to be said by you here?
You listed a bunch of things which should be, an opinion, he says your not entitled to those things, a probable fact relevant to the likelihood of attaining your professed desires, and he then offers a solution if you are unhappy with not having the things you professed 'should' be afforded.
I made no demands and I made no assertions about entitlements. That reply to me was a strawman.
I made two statements:
1) I suggested people have multiple criteria for selecting a workplace, not just culture.
2) I suggested people should have the ability to voice their input over their work. (Note, that's a weaker claim than "people should have input over their work". Just that they should feel like they are able to voice their input.)
Neither of those two things are demands nor entitlements, and the latter I would assume would be pretty non-controversial unless you believe that bosses should have absolute and complete control over every facet of a worker's job. (I guess I work in tech, where it's pretty widely accepted that people have autonomy to make some decisions on their own about how and what work is achieved.)
I think employees are actually entitled to some of those things, like not being made uncomfortable purely because they are a minority or a female. I would find the opposite position to be an exceptionally strange take: that it is entitled to not want to work at a place that puts you in uncomfortable positions for your sex or your race.
I don't have an opinion on Valve or allegations Valve is doing that. I just find it very strange to say it's entitled for a black to want to be treated as equally as a white.
Being uncomfortable has no equivalence to racism, which you are trying to assert.
Assume a white guy voluntarily takes a job working in a wig shop that only sells black women's hair care products. He's going to be uncomfortable at some point. Does he have a right to not be uncomfortable? Should the company culture change, should they stop selling wigs and ditch their customers until he becomes comfortable?
No. The easiest solution is he should work elsewhere. He took the job knowing exactly what was involved. So no, you are not entitled to not be culturally uncomfortable.
What kind of "uncomfortable for women and minorities" if not racism or sexism?
Also wait does this mean Valve is white males-oriented culture and that minorities/women should expect to be made uncomfortable by lieu of being hired there? I think that's an even weirder take!
They kind of did, with their sudden pivot from primarily making singleplayer games to almost exclusively making F2P GaaS titles the instant they got a taste of lootbox money. Half-Life 3 and Portal 3 will never happen because Valve makes 100x as much money with 1/100th of the effort by peddling Counter Strike skins.
HL3 kinda happened though, but it was called Half-Life Alyx. And while it wasn't a conventional FPS like HL1 and 2, there's absolutely no trace of GaaS in it.
Alyx is a bit of an edge case because they needed a VR showcase, and it's unlikely that a PC VR game (even a Valve one) could have sustained a healthy multiplayer population. Regardless of the reasons why it happened, it's the one and only singleplayer title they've released in the last 14 years, which neatly aligns with them discovering the joy of lootboxes 15 years ago.
To say Alyx was just an "VR demo" is pretty sad and reductive. Even today it's the one of the best VR games to be released in both fidelity and performance and as VR tech continues to improve its truly aged like fine wine
They tanked ultra-high-value items, which were primarily traded off-the-books because their value exceeded the official Steam marketplaces $1800 price cap. Bringing those prices down is good for Valve because it means more trading activity will happen on the official market, where Valve gets a cut of every transaction, rather than on third-party exchanges, where Valve gets nothing.
Simply raising the $1800 transaction limit and $2000 balance limit would have been far less disruptive, but that may have put Valve in financial regulators crosshairs. There's surely a reason why they chose those numbers in particular.
I would rephrase this as they got there because they treat their customers with respect, they take feedback to improve their platform, they don't pack their launcher / store front with ads and trickery, and you can trust that your games will be there and not go away.
Yes, they are loot box whores but so is everyone else.
Steam is a community, social media, and a store. The community is what they built and that community is extremely loyal. That community is also what developers are paying for.
In Gaben, we trust. I have 20 years of experience saying Gabe won't fuck me over to increase EBIDA by .5%. Are they perfect? No, but they are lightyears better than most of their competitors except GOG in terms of putting consumers first.
This is what I always say about Valve. They are not morally unimpeachable, but at the end of the day I've been a regular customer for over 20 years and they've never fucked me over. I don't think I can say the same about any other software company.
And most importantly, the moment they show any indication of doing otherwise, I will happily drop them.
I keep giving Valve my money because they keep giving me good value for that money and a trustworthy environment to spend that money in. I have no loyalty. I also buy games from Humble Bundle and GOG.
I'm not excited about the prospect of losing my 4000 games but the literal only options available for consumers right now are "Pay money and get a game that we can take away at any time, fuck you over, do all sorts of bad things, and we demonstrably hate you", or "Pay money to get a game and a refund period and a bunch of features and maybe when Gabe dies we will do that other thing"
There is no alternative. GOG is run by the same people who released CyberPunk2077 as a bug ridden mess to please upper management, so they even have evidence of already straddling that line right now.
Going back further, the thing that enabled them to release their first game "when it's done" and set the ball rolling was being founded by two ex-Microsoft with piles of money, most studios don't have that luxury.
>Wish more people would resist the payday and keep what’s theirs.
Ah yeah unregulated illegal underage gambling, the great resistance. Gabe could shutdown the whole thing with 1 click, all the sites are using the Steam API, but they don't and you know why.
Valve did a lot of things good but they are also the original source of a lot of bad things from lootboxes to skin gambling to the FOMO battle pass cancer of modern gaming.
Its definitely the ones that sell. There are plenty of small studios run by founders, but often once they sell they start burning consumer trust and goodwill as if those things don't exist and have an actual cost
Once you have an IP that's massive and you know people will buy regardless of if you're a trash monster or not, there's zero incentive to do the right thing.
Until people stop buying games from these places nothing will change.
I wouldn't call this selling out, exactly. If the issue is endless crunch, its more a matter of having enough money to support it endlessly and an aging workforce that knows their worth and can push back.
The issue is trying to force (or likely, continue) bad practices when they're clearly not working and then lacking the leadership to realize that a retaliatory layoff is only going to make things worse.
Smaller studios can maintain a small team of highly passionate people that will happily work 60+ hours a week or achieve similar productivity. As a studio grows, this becomes harder to maintain. You're pressured to either become a slave driver or dilute your product and make more money through derivative content or micro transactions. For example, I heard that EA is actually a relatively chill company. What sometimes works at keeping employees and customers both happy is fostering a cult-like environment, but that can easily lead to exploitation.
Valve never sold out because they became the "out" other companies sell out to. They successfully built a revenue-capturing money-printer in the form of the Steam store and service and now they don't have to make games at all to keep their bottom line strong. Not to imply they shouldn't have; get that gold ring and all.
(But I may also argue the point they never sold out in terms of being a game studio as opposed to a publisher.... "So when's Half Life 3 releasing?")
There is nothing forcing developers to release on steam, they can sell directly through a website. It’s not Valve’s fault no other competitor has gotten close to the quality of Steam. Epic Games could have made a dent, but they decided to try to bribe customers instead of making a functioning store.
This made me laugh. I tried Epic because I got a free game that I was interested in, but could only play it on the Epic Game store. After a week, I was no longer able to login no matter what I tried. So anecdotally, your statement tracks with my experience.
For all intents and purposes it's "functioning" for me. You can search for a game, hit buy, put in your credit card number, then download/play it. I've seen some spurious arguments about how it lacks a cart or reviews, but it's a stretch to claim the lack of them makes them non "functioning". I never bulk buy games, and for reviews I can go to steam or metacritic.
In 2025 I expect an online store to have at least some cataloging option (like Steam's tags) and some user feedback (like Steam reviews or Steam community discussions). Yes, most of Steam's features are half-baked, and Valve doesn't really want to improve them (curators, user tags, guides etc.), but it's baffling that no other store gives at least the same amount of those features to you. Even though they could.
>In 2025 I expect an online store to have at least some cataloging option (like Steam's tags)
To be fair most online storefronts don't have that. Amazon/walmart at best have "categories", which epic also has. Even online content portals like spotify don't have tags, preferring something like "more like this".
> but it's baffling that no other store gives at least the same amount of those features to you. Even though they could.
The better question is why storefronts don't directly compete on price. We see with airlines that consumers are willing to put up with hellish conditions to save a few percent on airfare. Those features are definitely nice, it's just unclear how they can avoid the free-rider problem if there are competing storefronts.
> The better question is why storefronts don't directly compete on price.
The way I see it, it depends how you see who is who's customer. Is the gamer the customer of the store, or are they the customer of the developer/publisher who put out the game, and in turn is the developer/publisher the customer of the store. The store cut is the price to buy their services, and they can shop around to find different offerings at different prices, just as gamers might be able to shop around and decide what (platform features) matters to them with the options available.
Valve allows developers to generate activation keys for their games and sell them on other platforms, where Valve gets a 0% cut. This is how you're able to buy games from places like the Humble Store and activate them on Steam. Their agreement does technically require that you don't sell at a lower price on other platforms, but as far as I know it's never been enforced.
There's a lawsuit ongoing about Valve threatening developers with delisting if they sell non-Steam copies of games (that's NOT Steam keys, but, say, a version on the Epic store) on other stores.
Can you provide a source for this? This is the first I've heard of anything like this and searching only gives results about the game delisting due to payment processor problems from a few months ago.
edit: after some additional search tweaking this is most likely in reference to Wolfire v. Valve, which is now a class-action suit.[0] The argument seems to be that Valve is engaging in anticompetitive behavior by disallowing developers from reselling Steam keys for their games for lower prices on other platforms, not selling the games themselves on other platforms. So this may or may not be what the parent post was referencing.
Yes, I have plenty of games from, e.g. the Epic Game Store on my steam deck, even in the steam home page, seamlessly.
Gamescope is even fully open-source, so you could remove the steam deck UI, and still run any game with the same performance benefits of not running it inside KDE. Of course also, you could flash a new OS on the device itself if you wanted to entirely remove Valve’s presence.
Steam Deck desktop mode is full blown KDE desktop. The only nuance is that system updates are managed by A/B partition scheme, so root is readonly. Can be made writeable but it's an overlay, so changes get lost on system update and need to be reapplied.
It's more fiddly in that you need to swap to desktop mode to do the installs, but you can get it set up so that your "external" games from Epic or Itch or emulators or whatever show up in the standard Steam UI.
Are you of the opinion that these marketplaces shouldn’t exist, that they should take a smaller percentage, that they should be entirely ad-supported, or something else?
How can user have an optional one-stop-shop that is sustainable for the long-term while not being “evil”.
No. First mover advantage is just that strong. How are the competitors to whatsapp or facebook doing? At best you have something like tiktok, which might be technically "social" media but is a totally different segment. You don't catch up with old high school buddies on tiktok, for instance.
All of the examples you gave, the challengers had some revolutionary idea/improvement on top. Tiktok had its recommendation algorithm and short videos. Google had pagerank. That's also the reason why whatsapp hasn't been supplanted. There's no room for innovation (or nobody bothered trying). The same is true for digital distribution. Every steam competitor is basically "steam but [publisher]" or in epic's case, "steam but with steam games".
That's what the person who started this comment chain said, though. Every Steam competitor has been "does the same thing as Steam, but worse" so why would anyone switch over?
There is some argument to be made that the cost benefit analysis for your average user doesn't make sense unless the platform is a significant improvement over steam. Having two fragmented systems is a huge inconvenience to users now almost to the point that I will outright refuse to play games that are not on Steam.
And for companies that shoehorn really bad launchers as an extra layer on steam like EA, you are doing the work of the devil himself
Some extremely popular games, like all the Hoyoverse stuff (Genshin/ZZZ/etc) or most of Blizzard's games, have their own launchers and aren't on Steam. So gamers are certainly willing to use non-Steam platforms and launchers if there's a reason.
That's not the same as "terrible" though? Signal is basically "whatsapp but not facebook", but you wouldn't say it's "terrible". Same with lyft (which came after uber), or ubereats (which came after many food delivery startups).
Right but if there were a better platform than Steam for buying games it'd win out in the marketplace. It's not like anyone is locked into Steam really.
Every online gaming platform other than Steam and GOG sucks. And in fact GOG competes very well with Steam precisely because it offers something Steam doesn't, which is DRM-free games. Steam didn't just beat the Epic Games Store and Origin and Games For Windows Live because it came first, it's just a better platform and the others offer nothing outside of exclusives which they paid for.
Lets not forget Ubisofts uPlay which was absolutely shambolic. Blizzard's / Activision launcher was alright though. It did the job but no where to the likes of Steam which is really feature rich.
> Blizzard's / Activision launcher was alright though.
I'd personally say it was better as a launcher. Launching Steam itself takes relatively long and when its just in the background its just there idling with ~400Mb of RAM (specifically its WebHelper), which aren't a problem with Battle.net since it idles at 170MB or you can just close it since it launches way faster.
11 percent. That is the charge back rate in gaming. The "overall" stat for all transactions is something like 3 percent.
Card processing isnt free. There are fees, and supporting card processing still has more humans in the loop than one needs. Never mind all the technology that comes with running the dam platform.
Is 30 percent a lot. It sure is. Valve isnt a charity, this is how they chose to make money.
Meanwhile, AWS has a 30+ percent margin and I dont see CTO's lining up to run hardware...
There are many ways to get people to pay you 30%. Steam and AWS use different strategies. Also AWS's margin should be way higher than 30% if they're not lighting money on fire
>11 percent. That is the charge back rate in gaming. The "overall" stat for all transactions is something like 3 percent.
1. source?
2. How does that justify a 30% rate, when presumably it's clawed back from developers?
>Card processing isnt free. There are fees, and supporting card processing still has more humans in the loop than one needs. Never mind all the technology that comes with running the dam platform.
Again, nowhere near 30% though
>Meanwhile, AWS has a 30+ percent margin and I dont see CTO's lining up to run hardware...
30% margins on renting hardware is totally different than a 30% tax on transactions, and it's disingenuous to imply they're comparable. At the very least amazon needs to spend the other 70% on running servers and investing in datacenters, whereas valve doesn't. It's studios that are actually doing the development. Valve just is charging 30% on top of that. To take an extreme example, compare the 2-3% fees charged by visa vs the ~15% gross margins that car companies make. Even though that's 5x higher, I doubt many are outraged about car companies' profiteering.
I wonder then how you expect valve to operate profitably. Paying for the maintenance and upgrade of equipment, the developers to build the features and SRE to monitor the systems, designers, marketers, HR and lawyers.
For some reason, people in tech live under the illusion that everything nontangible should be literally free
Valve also hosts and maintains the game files for consumers to download, and the bandwidth/hardware needed to serve hundreds of GBs for each game to millions of customers across the globe is not trivial.
That is bullshit, you are not even locked to using Steam on the Steam Deck. 30% is completely fair for the amount of infrastructure Steam provides to your game.
Definitely not comparable to Apple, which is forcing all iPhone users to use their own app store.
But union "busting" isn't selling out, if anything it's keeping to their true cause. Companies don't function well with adversarial units within them, and companies don't start out with unions.
> Companies don't function well with adversarial units within them
This isn't a given, this is just an opinion, and one you didn't bother trying to argue for.
Many systems do function much better with adversarial units in them. Governments have the adversarial units of checks and balances. Companies have the adversarial forces of the market. A news paper has the adversarial units of editors to their writers.
It’s a privately owned company. This leads to an entirely different relationship between employees and the top layer of management.
You have to be very misguided to believe that the c suite in most companies is not engaged in n adversarial relationship with its employees, whether those employees are unionized or not.
Very brave of them to speak out, but TBH I'm not sure I'd do it if I were worried about anonymity - their written English is flawless, which is very uncommon. Unless they took considerable care to imitate a different writing style, it's probably trivial to identify who wrote it.
In any case, a longtime friend of mine was senior graphics programmer on GTA5, and I was very close to interviewing with Rockstar in Edinburgh at his recommendation. But then I remembered how gamedev burnt me out at age 19 (my first job, at Lionhead), and how I've never been burnt out since, and decided against it. Been in offline rendering since then and never looked back.
> their written English is flawless, which is very uncommon. Unless they took considerable care to imitate a different writing style, it's probably trivial to identify who wrote it.
Rockstar North is based in Edinburgh as you say, why wouldn't English be at a high level?
Even discounting this, and despite everyone bleating on about its (very real) flaws, ChatGPT and other LLMs do quite a good job of proofreading and suggesting improvements to written English text[0]. I find it works best if you keep them on quite a tight leash but it's certainly within the compass of their capabilities to take badly written English and turn it into well written English, and even adopting a particular style to do so.
[0] Performance in other languages... well, I suspect it's still going to be quite variable, which is another valid criticism that has been levelled at the more popular mainstream models over the past year or two.
Right the fact you may not be able to understand some Scottish people because of their accent doesn't mean they're not competent English speakers, it just means the accent is difficult for you to understand, which isn't relevant when writing.
There are a few famous movie scenes where somebody deliberately uses perfectly reasonable English sentences but with such a thick accent that most English users cannot understand it, but once you know what they said you can play that sound back and yeah, that's what they said, you just couldn't understand the accent e.g..
Indeed the joke is that people keep repeating what the hard-to-understand bloke said even when it's perfectly obvious what he said, because if you can understand it then you can't tell whether it was hard to understand.
That's not even Scottish, the bloke in that scene is from Somerset, which is the far side of the country but exactly like Scotland most people in Somerset don't talk like that most of the time, but some of them do, some of the time and to them it's normal, that's just how you say words.
It was written English, not spoken. I think that's why I was confused by the statement it might give away who they are...
I know plenty of people from the area this forum post is about and everyone has a high standard of English... even the people with thick local accents and non-native English speaking Europeans.
Does Rockstar hire lots of non-European people to work in Edinburgh or something?
My stepdad is Glaswegian :) Funny that you immediately assume I'm having difficulty understanding the accent (I can do a pretty good Scottish accent, along with several others BTW!), and conflating that with the average level of English writing you see on the internet.
I'm going to get downvoted into a massive smoking hole in the ground for daring to state this opinion, but, as a lifelong enjoyer of the English language: native speakers butcher it the most.
E.g. someone who grew up playing piano might be able to play at an incredibly advanced level, while also being terrible at reading or writing sheet music.
The science around skills acquired during childhood/adolescence vs. learned skills is interesting. For example, I would not be surprised if non-native speakers, on average, have a better handle of the difference between effect/affect, there/their, etc.
>I would not be surprised if non-native speakers, on average, have a better handle of the difference between effect/affect, there/their, etc.
That’s from training system rather than age.
You’ll rarely catch me mixing up there and their because I’ve learned those words reading them, and in written form they’re very distinguishable.
I couldn’t write a poem to save my life though, because I can’t tell which words in English rhyme - the written form of an English word isn’t trustable.
An interesting example is natives with different accents making different mistakes - Latino Spanish speakers for example commonly confuse c and s while writing, as it’s a similar sound.
Spain's dialect however pronounces those letters very distinctly (their famous “lisp”) so to Spaniards it’s obvious which one to use.
English is my 4th language, after German, Afrikaans and Indonesian. People get very angry about it when it's pointed out, and yes, "you just say Bingo" (non-native speakers tend to get idioms and certain turns of phrase wrong), but at least we get singular vs plural, past vs present vs future tense etc right. I'm not sure why but "most" (therein lies the thesis) native speakers struggle so much with that basic stuff, to say nothing of its vs it's, were vs we're vs where, maybe caring about much vs many, past perfect "had had 'had had', had had"...
Shoot the messenger if you want, but the evidence is literally ubiquitous.
At a guess: polyglots try to raise the error floor of their languages / not make basic common mistakes, whereas monoglots have no concern with / perception of this all.
Why can't this style of management just take hold at a game company?
I suspect that hollywood has a pretty similar release cycle, and I've never heard of the dysfunctional management in that industry. (maybe it is normalized? maybe people don't expect a job after a movie is done?)
The crunch culture in the film industry is legendary, particularly in visual effects, where many studios go out of business. There has recently been mass layoffs in the industry and much of the employment is temporary from film to film.
I think the offline gameplay of GTA is becoming dated. Playing GTAV just felt like cut scene, then chores, cut scene, then chores, rinse, repeat. To be fair, I don't understand the purpose of GTA online but it was wildly popular.
I’m also kind of concerned about the game itself suffering. If they’re shedding institutional knowledge to avoid unions we could end up with a vibe coded GTA 6.
Like imagine if MindsEye had thirteen years of anticipation before it came out.
I'll probably end up buying GTA 6, once it's on sale or something; good people worked on it too I would imagine, and helped make it a good game.
Also, with apologies for the whataboutism, we unfortunately finance thugs all day every day (my internet provider, German government and pension, Deutsche Bahn, etc are massive extortionists); it's not really black and white.
It’s so nice to be guilted into supporting awful people, because a bunch of nice people were abused by the awful people but at least the art will keep one entertained and the corpos keep on abusing.
It's so easy to forget or ignore the good people whose great work was overshadowed by random controversy out of their hands. It's not the fault of the programmers who wrote the animation systems, or the artists who styled the characters' hair, that some random dickface manager pulled a random dickface move.
I write this out of pure sympathy for the incredible work that I know gamedevs do, I'm not associated with Rockstar at all.
And this is why "vote with your wallet" does not work. As a consumer there's no way to decide who gets the money.
In fact, even the people who made the game (did the actual work, not managers, advertisers, etc.) don't get to decide.
Correct me if I am wrong but the programmers, designers, artists have already been paid and any money from sales goes to the company and its execs/shareholders.
(And yes, employees can also be shareholders but they almost always own such a tiny share it does not really matter. In a just world, ownership would be distributed automatically according to time_worked * skill_level.)
EDIT: I might have overstated by saying it doesn't work but it definitely doesn't have the same level of effect as people collectively saying "this behavior is wrong and you will be punished for it, regardless if I buy the product" (for example by editing laws). It also doesn't allow any control over how the money is distributed among those who worked on it (compared to for example adding a law that limits absolute/relative spending on marketing - whether you think it's a good idea or not).
Target's CEO saw a significant impact to their compensation, a change in role, and ~1800 layoffs occurred because of the Target boycott. Boycotts work. Voting with your wallet works.
> The Quiet Part Out Loud: Target Ditching DEI Cost The CEO His Job And Investors $12 Billion
So, it would not be hard to impair Rockstar with a coordinated, sustained economic retaliation campaign against them. If it kills the company, we help workers find other jobs and shareholders learn a lesson about capital allocation. Poorly run companies die all the time, some just need to be helped along.
Please don't try to spread the idea that it "does not work", it's incorrect and discourages one of the most effective non-violent mechanisms consumers have for driving change in market economies. It may not necessarily be sufficient (coordinated boycotts, for instance, are much more effective than individual decisions), it may not always be an option (particularly when there aren't viable alternatives), it may not work immediately, there may not be enough people who "vote" a certain way, and there may be insufficient information to make informed decisions--but consumers absolutely decide which products and companies live and die, and every single dollar you spend allocates power.
> and any money from sales goes to the company and its execs/shareholders
Some companies may share a profit. I heard that Activision used to pay some of the revenue from Call of Duty to the developers, although I can't confirm it. And it was a long time ago, not sure if they still do.
I hear this argument with some regularity and i don't think it would work the way you expect. Have you gamed it out in your head?
1) A lot of people would immediately stop contributing to open source. In fact i ahead have because ML is being used to launder my work to use it without resourcing my licenses. Same with any other area where people share their work for free. It would all be monetized by those with access to better advertising.
2) Anything published would be immediately scooped up by the big players. How would a small competitor like Nebula compete with YouTube if YouTube took all its content and offered it for free with ads?
3) How would you even know who the original creator was if those stealing the work stripped away attribution? They already do but at least you have some limited ways to fight them.
1) I contribute to open source because I want the thing to exist. I use open licenses because I don't want anybody to use the law to deny anybody else access to it. If we gut the parts of the law by which others would deny access, I no longer have to worry about licensing, but my original motivated is untouched.
2) what do you mean "scooped up"? What's to stop a small platform from providing the same content that a large platform does, if we've done away with intellectual property?
3) I'm confused. If you're paying somebody to create a proposed work, and then they create it and get paid for doing so, and then nobody is allowed to restrict access to it, where does the theft come in?
1) So you are perfectly happy with somebody else taking over, taking your code, giving it a different name, or not even that, spending a bit of money on advertisement to get more users than you, adding features to drag over your users, then taking development private and enshittifying it? EEE?
You have to understand in this world, advertising and network effects are much stronger than building a good product.
2) Again, advertising, cost of storage, having a better (meaning more addiction inducing) algorithm, etc.
3) You said it yourself, people have to create something first (which will be stolen or as you phrase it, unrestricted) so they can prove themselves so that anybody pays them to produce the next thing. Or would you pay a random guy with no credentials and no portfolio claiming he can create what you want?
Or what if somebody creates something really good but it's a one off. He changes hobbies, has children, has to care for an elderly parent, ... and doesn't have time to create more. Should he not get paid for the value of his existing work?
Your take basically means people will only get paid as long as more value can be extracted from them and then they're no longer economically viable so screw them.
1&2) its not my code, its just code that I wrote. The enshittification problem goes away if anybody can fork it and make a less enshittified version. We could have--brace yourself for this radical concept--competition over who could make a better thing. All the bad things you're saying will happen if we don't assert ownership over data are in fact only happening because we assert ownership over data.
Somebody else owning the solution to our problems is why we tolerate such abuse. Otherwise we could cut out the abuse parts and solve the problem directly.
3) I was unspecific about how much money they'd get ahead of time versus upon completion because I figure that ought to be a case-by-case thing.
The idea that people should be able to live well based on having done good work in the past is a good one. Let's make that happen, but why should it have anything to do with property? If I build a particularly strong bridge which surpasses expectations re: longevity shouldn't I get the same retroactive compensation as somebody who wrote a particularly good book? If I publish freely the cure for a disease, should society not reward me to a greater extent than if I sold the patent to a company that will decline to act on the discovery because it's more profitable to treat that disease than to cure it?
The things you seem to want from intellectual property are important, but pushing the concept of property beyond what is natural for it is a harmful way to achieve them.
A) its not working particularly well for the artists
B) its not working at all for workers outside that domain
C) it has all kinds of really awful side effects which are far more harmful than whatever good we can reasonably expect it (property) to do.
When IP was invented to justify the church's right to prevent the wrong kind of bible from being printed we didn't have the ability to implement the alternatives that are available to us today. The best we could do is play-by-the-rules-or-we'll-take-your-printer. We have new capabilities now, let's solve these problems head on instead of leaning on ideas from the 1600's to do so.
Better product does not matter, advertising and network effects do.
Think about this: with IP you have strictly more options than without. You can literally release under public domain if you want to. People generally don't.
Having strictly more options is always better _by definition_. You're literally saying people will be better off if you take away their choice. Stop and think, man.
2) Don't ignore a point you don't like. Tell me how a small creator can compete with a big corporation. Take into account marketshare and network effects.
3) You were unspecific because you can't control it and you know it. With IP the artist can decide if the money offered is good enough for permission to use his work. Without IP you shift the decision how much to pay entirely to the people with money, artists have 0 say. They can only say "please" and "thank you".
A) How now? I don't see creators giving away their work for free under public domain, citing it's better for them.
B) Ok, let's come up with a system which rewards creators, builders, workers in other professions.
C) Like what?
So what are those alternatives except "give away your work for free and hope to get paid next time"? Because this one is already possible today and creators don't use it because it would suck for them.
> And this is why "vote with your wallet does not work". As a consumer there's no way to decide who gets the money.
Huh? That doesn't make any sense. "Vote your wallet" does not mean throw money on the ground haphazardly and pray that it finds its way to the appropriate home. It means hand the money directly to the person you want to have it. There is no way to avoid deciding who gets the money. That's the only choice you get to make.
This makes me sad, R* has made some of my most favorite games, especially Red Dead Redemption 2.
They make so much money, why can't they play nice and treat their employees like human beings?
I don't recall reports of Valve (Steam, also super profitable) stooping. Is Rockstar a genetic relative of GAFA, because this is more like what I've come to expect from Amazon.
Valve is a "flat" organization, where your compensation is determined based on peer review.
Rockstar, and owner Take-Two (largely owned by institutional investors--well known for their historical championing of workers rights and fondness of unions), both seem to have your typical corporate hierarchies, where executives are fairly and correctly compensated for being more productive than over 200 software engineers combined.
It may sound simplistic but its the truth and there are plenty of other examples and history around this - Starbucks recently. 30 employees unionizing may not have any significant impact on their profits, but if they let that union grow it would have a lot more members demanding better working hours or wages over time. A strong union also generally leads to a loss of control by management where they have to negotiate more with workers which they don't like. Why do you think they were fired?
Firings in this case were for union busting. Illegal union busting is profitable - that's why business owners do it. Because it's illegal, they will make up a different excuse for why the workers were fired. They will never admit to illegal union busting. So you should not take their statements as good faith.
Firings reduce expenses, the equation above explains the rest. Of course, that's only in the short term, but that's what exec bonuses are given out on!
This is also true if humans in general, at all stations in life, including union members and union leaders. Is there any offer a union would refuse on the grounds that’s too much?
People like getting more money, but they don't die without it. You can get a job that pays just enough to pay your bills and work at it until you die. Companies can't do that under capitalism. They take on debt and require growth to pay back their investors, or they don't take on debt and get undercut by a competitor who does.
I imagine the GP was referring to the fact that Costco experiences that kind of growth while giving their employees excellent pay and benefits. Even low-level store employees typically make $20-30 an hour.
> They make so much money, why can't they play nice and treat their employees like human beings?
Because they can.
In the gaming industry the biggest studios get away with running sweat shops because there's endless hordes of brilliant engineers and artists who had always dreamed to make videogames and need a huge name on the CV to move to better places.
> They make so much money, why can't they play nice and treat their employees like human beings?
Because they want to make great games. It's sad but we've never figure out how to replicate the creative output that crunch and stress triggers. I don't understand it and frankly I couldn't stand it so I left the industry but I won't pretend that we have a solution too the problem.
The meager earnings in years previous to that are beyond wiped out. In fact, expect a lot more squeeze if you work at Take Two or a lot more rent seeking if you are a customer, because based on the stock price movement, the market is expecting a lot more net income.
Edit: looks like they set a ton of money on fire by overpaying for Zynga a few years ago. Customers and employees are going to be paying for that bad decision for a long time.
It's true that Take Two lost money but it's also true that Rockstar makes them tremendous amounts of money. Lifetime revenues from GTA5 are estimated to be near or exceeding 10 billion USD.
Managing to lose money on those kinds of profits is arguably further evidence that leadership there is overpaid.
Businesses desire growth, not conservation or charity. And that desire is frequently achieved through illegal means. Wage theft for instance is a far greater sum than the total of robbery in the US. The criminality is rampant!
Meta is also in the news today for making 10% of its revenue from scams, as well as for having codified policy that scammers representing at least 0.15% of their revenue must be protected from any moderation.
Capitalism is based on/grew out of the Norman feudalism, where lords were foreign conquerors who cared nothing about the locals, local land, local societal norms. They only cared about rent extraction for themselves (todays C suit class) and to pay the nobles above them (the market). They simply removed themselves one step, created corporations to remove all personal liability, and ramped up the profit extraction to a global scale. Just look at the first large scale joint stock company, the East India Company. Could corporatism have had a worse/more evil progenitor?
Systems need to be managed. If you cook with high temperatures and let your attention wander then the food burns. If you drive fast with bald tires then you may fly off the road. We know that strong regulation on industry, especially monopolies, high taxes on the wealthy, and powerful unions can keep Capitalism in balance, but we have chosen not to use these mechanisms. Is that Capitalism being flawed or is it us as custodians failing in our basic duties?
We've been through this before. As recently as the 1930s the Capitalist economy tried to eat itself and had to be stopped. That is historical and everything changes, but the basic principles are the same. Find out where things are going wrong and address that with some basic controls and limits.
> They make so much money, why can't they play nice and treat their employees like human beings?
That's not how human nature works. Greed doesn't lead to idealism or altruism, it invariably leads to entitlement and more greed. The rich are never satisfied with hundreds of billions, they insist upon trillions.
That’s not a Union thing, that’s a system thing. Anyone fiercely on either extreme of the spectrum is missing the forest for the trees and proudly waving their willful ignorance of the dynamics of power.
In an ideal scenario, Unions and Shareholders would cooperate to achieve suitable outcomes for both parties; in reality, the amount of power needed to even get a Union off the ground and keep it sustained against the onslaught of Capital means those who wield said power are inclined to use it often. It’s why the (debatably) smarter gamble has been more workers forming anti-Capital institutions: cooperatives, union-first enterprises, sustainable corporations with stringent, anti-Capital bylaws. By removing Capital’s power early, those who do come to the table are more likely to negotiate in good faith rather than scorched-earth tactics.
Don’t slight unions as a whole just because power dynamics in a Capitalist society dictate everything be a zero-sum game. Instead, focus on building a better game and fairer set of rules, and recognize Unions are part of that.
This is just a belief. A belief that allows you to do anything, and can absolve anyone of any evil.
Why stop there? Why have systems or government at all? Why even bother making murder illegal? After all, it's human nature. After all, it's just how life works. After all, the strong win, and the weak get eaten. Everyone knows that.
I'd strongly disagree, as there are examples of societies that don't exhibit these traits. See the Kogi from Colombia for example. A necessity environmental condition seems to be that social groups size stays within certain limits (around 120 as I remember).
> Instead, focus on building a better game and fairer set of rules, and recognize Unions are part of that.
I’d prefer a more European system. But faced with a choice between American-style unions with their mob roots and silicon valley, I’ll choose the latter.
Wouldn't have happened under Dan Houser. R* made too much money for its own good.
On another note, heard on Bloomberg today that they've been working on GTA 6 for 10 years at this point. Considering the size of their development teams it's possible that more manhours may have gone into this single title than all video games that were made until the PS1 era combined.
What makes you think Dan would've handled it any differently? Rockstars got a long well known track record of being in crunch mode with obscene hours, that didn't suddenly start after Dan left.
> On another note, heard on Bloomberg today that they've been working on GTA 6 for 10 years at this point.
It’s incredible to think about what else has happened during these past 10 years of development. Or think about other decade long stretches and what was accomplished.
Not cutting short what the undertaking of this is, just that the scale of this project spanning a decade is fascinating.
I'm an American who was retaliated against in the past for collective bargaining efforts. Luckily, that's illegal here as codified by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (it probably is in the UK too, I'm just not as familiar with their laws). I filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and eventually won my case, receiving compensation with interest; the Company also had to inform all employees of their collective bargaining rights digitally and physically.
Once the government shutdown ends, I highly recommend the affected American individuals file a complaint with the NLRB via their website: https://www.nlrb.gov/
(Employment Tribunal, but yes.) If even half the stuff in the posting is true, it should be an easy win. Unfortunately Legal Aid for Employment Tribunals has been cut to the bone, but their union should be able to help here by taking the case up on their behalf.
Every union I've been a part of has been more of a pain than its worth, or has tried to keep individuals from become any more successful that others. I don't understand the obsession with them on HN.
I work for a sector with a strong union and feel the benefits of collective bargaining every day. Higher wages, better job security, and many basic accomodations that are codified in an EBA that one might have to otherwise fight for (eg work from home at least two days a week is something that is protected in our eba thanks to our union).
Just because some unions aren’t as good as others is not a reason to dismiss unions.
I used to work at a university that was NON-union, but basically ensured our benefits/raises were always at LEAST as good as the unionized university across town negotiated. THAT's a way to avoid unionizing efforts.
I have a teacher in the family - it's been an unequivocal necessity for them - otherwise the city / schoolboard would run roughshod over them - like 1% raises over 5 years, while their coffers are full.
And there's always a few (*&@#$ parents who think they're "all that" who would try to have individual teachers fired just because their 1st grader only got a "B" when they're clearly a generational prodigy... Unions really help with that.
I worked for Chance Coach and I don't remember the exact Union they were all a member of. I was worked as a contract employee for Volt Technical Services. I was told I was required to pay dues even though I wasn't a permanent employee, which was an absolute fabrication of a lie told to me by union leaders on the job site I later learned (I was swindled out of a few hundred bucks, but as a teenager I didn't really know any better).
They had several (4 I think?) union-mandated breaks during the day, which I got in trouble for not taking several times. The reason given was if I didn't take my breaks than they could disappear for everyone. I also was willing to do any job given to me, and given that I had some shop and machining experience, was happy to help with any task given, which made me an asset to management as they cold put me in anywhere as needed to help production along, but angered old crotchety employees that didn't want me in their space and were happy doing the absolute minimum to collect their wage.
So yeah, my experience with Unions is they breed mediocracy and pull everyone down that wants to set themselves apart to management. Wages were standardized rather than based on individual accomplishments so there was no incentive to excel.
I'm certainly not "anti-union" but my original comment is that HN thinks Unions are this utopia and in a sober reality they often aren't.
I am an individual who doesn't like just being one of a group, so I have never joined a union, but I support some union actions at my employer and so I too go on strike (and thus don't get paid) if I agree with the cause of their action. It can be simultaneously true that unions aren't perfect and that unionisation is better than not.
Indeed that's par for the course, there's plenty to dislike about democracy, but the alternatives we've tried are worse for example.
Try to work at a place that has a union and decide to not be part of it... then you can see the true face of injustice. Don't want to be extorted out of union fees? Good luck, you are better off working somewhere else.
This is not representative of all unions, and the union fees are generally small compared to the higher wages that wouldn’t exist were there not a union in place. Mathematically you give a little to get a lot.
Having been a member of the Teamsters union, I completely agree.
It seems likely the vast majority of HN has never been a member of a union themselves given the audience, so the obsession feels like a savior complex IMO.
Yeah, unions accomplished a lot of good things many decades ago. But if you think they haven't morphed over those decades and are still automatically a net positive for all workers, I could probably sell you a bridge.
For my experience at Teamsters, there was zero incentive for employees to actually perform. Everything was done by senority across the board, and you're literally just aging and waiting your turn.
The insurance was good, the wages were average, and the incentive to do better was non-existent. And yes, firing people unless they did something egregious was much, much harder.
I just don't buy the narrative that if you don't threaten employee's and "whip them into shape" that then there's no incentive to do good. I refuse to believe that not firing people is, somehow, causing them to coast.
Pretty much everyone I know who works hard does so in spite of their circumstances. Not because of them.
Of the engineers I've worked with, the cooks I've worked with, the waiters I've worked with... the hard working ones don't win. They get taken advantage of and run into the ground. They perform, and perform more, and more, and that exclusively works against them.
And, as you go up the ladder, you can very clearly see the hard work and competence thin out more and more. The people who are successful aren't smart, or hard working, they're just good at maintaining a status quo.
These are not unionized places. So, maybe it's a capitalism thing.
* I want to keep liking GTA, and to keep giving Rockstar more money, for each new chapter and new console/device. If it turns out that Rockstar was union-busting and defaming, then I really hope that they soon have a we-messed-up moment, and genuine corrective action for whatever went wrong.
* Has anyone heard of game-buying consumers voting en masse with their pocketbooks over ethical/social concerns about a game/publisher/studio?
(I absolutely don't mean something like the Gamergate psychosis, though that was the first very loosely related event that came to mind. I mean respectable commercial boycotts, for admirable reasons.)
Rockstar has historically always had anti-worker practices baked in, with crunch culture being the obvious one. They aren't your or their workers friend.
They're in it to make boatloads of cash and will do whatever to whoever is needed.
And no, consumers have never really cared in the gaming space. They won't do anything differently because of this.
> And no, consumers have never really cared in the gaming space. They won't do anything differently because of this.
Consumers almost never care outside of isolated causes du jour or when it directly affects someone they know. Look at all the self-proclaimed socialists and progressives walking around with iPhones manufactured by Foxconn, a company known for treating its employees so badly there were inquiries into the suicide rates of their workers at one point.
While I have my concerns about unions, they are absolutely necessary in many cases. Companies are not your friend, nor are your fellow consumers most of the time.
Yeah, I wanted to say that but figured someone would make a big stink about it.
It's the truth though. It doesn't matter if the product was produced as a result of slave labor, union-busting, corporate government coups, extensive pollution, monopolistic behavior, manipulation either of or from the government, theft of natural resources, etc.
People just go 'la la la I can't hear you' and buy whatever they want.
And to some extent I don't blame people for doing that. To really dig into the actions of even a single company could take months of careful research. And given how convoluted the ownership charts can be, you may end up finding that 3/4 or more of what you buy is from a company with despicable practices - I mean shoot look at what Nestle owns.
I don't know if there's a solution. Even if you got people to do all the hard work (ha!), it would be hard for people to get around it.
> To really dig into the actions of even a single company could take months of careful research.
That's a really good point. With the way modern supply chains work, it may not even be possible to really know if you're buying something that was ethically produced or not.
They are going to get smacked down hard in the UK, if the post has the events described accurately.
What was done was blatantly illegal, EVEN IF the people weren't fired for union organizing, which Rockstar will have a hard time explaining away since they fired only people involved in union organizing.
The fired employees in the UK (not sure about Canada) will get back pay and penalties once the unavoidable legal process finishes.
I'm sure, however, Rockstar will consider all of the sanctions they'll receive as price of doing business.
The accusations of "IP theft" are already flying. Creative people, technical people, and everyone must stop working for megacorps and form their own, civilized worker-owned co-ops. Corporations will never respect those who perform labor, and will never ensure sustainable work environments.
Good news is that, especially given the modern distribution methods, they are already very free to raise capital or take their life savings and make courageous bets on their creativity!
Given all the research that shows that unions actually depress wages and damage companies, it's incredible to see a few HN comments in support. It's okay to recognize that unions are bad and that the best companies, and their products, don't need to be held hostage by a very small number of grifters.
A rational person would agree that unions, like anything else, have pros and cons. They can do good, but also can do harm. It's the commenters here seem to fly off on emotional rants that derail the conversations. The thinking is capital takes less risk than labor; and that model of thinking makes it easy to ascribe faults to capital, but not to labor. You can't argue your way out of that. When you have to manage a bunch of employees and run payroll, bonuses, benefits, increments, that is when you'll know who takes more risk.
I'll believe you that capital is the bigger risk taker when limited liability is revoked.
or if we change bankruptcy such that labour is paid out rather than creditors.
laws are setup to reduce and limit the risk for capital, and capital can hedge its risks where labour cannot. Generally nobody is able to work to full time jobs
Um, Capital sits at the bottom of the payment waterfall, labor, suppliers, lenders, creditors all have priority claims. Capital returns are vastly more volatile than labor compensation. Most startups burn and die, but employees still get paid (keeping illegal practices aside). Capital bears most of the uncertainty that labor doesn't.
To argue your point, the strongest argument is that labor cannot easily diversify or easily re-train for new sectors. But there aren't entire job sectors being wiped out with any kind of regularity or high frequency. Mostly people take skills from one job into another.
And speaking more about the US, social safety nets (not arguing that they're perfect) have some role to play when labor faces downsides. There is no "unemployment" for a company (again I'm talking about average businesses without cherry picking the too big to fail examples - which are a tiny percentage when looking at the number of small/medium/large businesses that operate around the world).
Doing my own research, ChatGPT summarizes the state as generally unions improve wages and working conditions for employees much more than they pay in premiums. This has gone down since the 1970s but is still a noticeable effect. Indeed the 40 hour work week comes from unions. There is a negative effect on profitability, but that’s subject to interpretation:
> The negative effect on profitability from unionization may reflect that unions raise labour costs (via higher wages/benefits) and may impose work rules or other constraints that reduce flexibility. The classic model: higher labour cost → lower margins, unless offset by higher productivity or price increases. But the productivity and growth effects are less clear: many studies find little or no negative effect on productivity or capital structure, suggesting that unions may shift the distribution of returns (towards workers) rather than clearly kill growth.
So it may be worth revisiting the research you cited so decisively against unions as it likely contradicts your belief about them.
No but one step further than OP went making unsubstantiated claims that actually contradicts the actual research that paints a much more complicated picture.
>... the actual research that paints a much more complicated picture.
Given that ChatGPT is still very much in a "trust, but verify" state (on a daily basis it confidently states falsehoods about subject matter I'm highly familiar with, for instance), I'm wondering if you followed up to confirm that the data at the sources provided by ChatGPT accurately reflected what it told you.
If you're going to insist that others revisit their research, I would hope that you're making a good faith effort towards doing the same.
Cherry picking examples to paint broad brush/strokes doesn't work. There are game companies all over the world, and have varying levels of work/life balance. Your crude caricature is just that; crude.
What's sad is that unionizing will accelerate whatever the decline of the company is causing the dissatisfaction. Wiser for employees to just jump ship or found a new game studio when this kind of decline happens.
The chances of a company turning around are super low, adding a union makes it harder. Just run.
The alternative to every company is to proactively repair the conditions incentivizing the formation of a union. It continues to amaze me that those in charge of making those decisions choose decline over alternatives.
> The thing holding back unions in the U.S is the unions themselves and the laws around them. Once a union forms, they have entirely too much power.
This is a nice summary of the central issue with unions in the U.S. A rational person can quickly see why people are clamoring for unions in the U.S. and also why American companies are so resistant.
Besides a complete stranglehold on labor markets in a number of industries where the government is required to use union labor for infrastructure projects and they limit the number of laborers to drive up price. Or how about the Plumbers union that forced the city of Chicago to continue installing lead pipes until the federal government had to force them to stop. Beyond that, the power to promote good workers or make necessary changes across the org. For example, why doesn't Chicago have any driver-less trains and a conductor shortage? The unions are preventing both.
> I am aware of one employee who had a panic attack at this moment, and HR hung up on them during this panic attack not caring at all about their wellbeing.
I love GTA/Red Dead but Rockstar really is just another monopoly (in terms of creativity) at this stage. More mid sized studios, like Rockstar when it started/midway, would be better.
Also the narrative and dialogue is ever so slightly overated in Rockstar games because the competition is quite nerdy/square in that department as are most of the audience. The ending of Red Dead II was actually quite trite, especially in terms of dialogue and narrative (in my opinion) even though the game is incredible overall. It is honestly still very far from a Tarantino script.
“Monopoly” has a particular meaning. Would you describe how Rockstar is one? Or is even one of a small list of “big dogs” / defacto choices in a specific industry?
Yes, that's vague. I specifically mean a creative monopoly. Compare the writing and dialogue of a Paul Thomas Anderson or Tarantino movie to Rockstar. Most of their games don't come close. Because it's a game the standard for storyline and dialogue is slightly lower because you are like "wow I am almost literally a cowboy/Nico". I wonder if we will see a mix of games with genuinely Tarantino style writing and narrative + technical / design implementation. Small studios doing this faster and more ethically would be better. People who quit Rockstar are very talented with something to prove too.
I genuinely cringed at the end of RDII due to the dialogue just feel the need to mention that again...
I would encourage anyone in tech that is interested in forming a union at their workplace to sign up for CWA's CODE (Campaign to Organize Digital Employees) training: https://code-cwa.org/
CWA is a big, traditional, national union (think phone company employees, health care workers, flight attendants) that has voted to set aside a portion of their dues to help organize us, their fellow workers in the tech sector, which I consider a truly beautiful act of solidarity. They are having some successes, which seem to be building.
Getting plugged in with the training and, almost as importantly, a CWA organizer, is a great first step if you know you'd like a union but don't know where to start.
And if you are in the UK working in the games industry, join the union currently fighting for these workers: https://www.gameworkers.co.uk/
Are you aware of any resources for how to combat colleagues aiming to start a union? I am personally opposed to being part of a union.
Support for unions in the US is at record highs, so pick carefully where you work I suppose or work as a consultant with no labor protections.
https://www.marketplace.org/2023/01/03/gen-z-is-the-most-pro...
https://thehill.com/business/4854173-union-approval-surges-p...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/12751/labor-unions.aspx
https://news.gallup.com/poll/510281/unions-strengthening.asp...
I have a simple solution for you: don't join a union if you don't want to be part of one.
That option isn't always available, at least in the US. Unless you live in a right-to-work state, you may be forced to join the union as a condition of employment.
Somehow this is seen as "more progressive."
Just don't join. Closed shops are already illegal in the US so nobody can make you.
I inferred they didn't want to be represented by a union. US law requires a union to represent non members.
Only about half of US states have right-to-work laws.
> Closed shops are already illegal in the US
I do wonder what country American Airlines operates in then…
https://viewfromthewing.com/american-airlines-fired-two-flig...
Per AA's 10-K, in 2024 87% of American Airlines employees were represented by a union[1]. So according to that source it sounds like the people who were fired were union members that didn't pay their dues.
They could surely have paid their dues and left the union and kept their jobs (or could have never joined the union to begin with).
[1] https://americanairlines.gcs-web.com/node/42651/html#:~:text...
I don’t know about this case specifically, but airlines frequently have different labor laws. They’ll be the exception to all sorts of unqualified statements.
If you don't like the people you're working with, you could quit.
You could also vote no on a unionization vote, or just not join. I'm sure your loyalty will get a special consideration when the next round of arbitrary layoffs (coupled with record-breaking profits) happens.
Are you required to be part of this union, if it forms?
As a kid I always lamented that every studio seemed to sell out as soon as they had the chance. Valve is basically the only one that didn’t… clearly it’s paid off very well for Gabe and the employees. Wish more people would resist the payday and keep what’s theirs.
Valve makes a significant amount of their money from the gambling they've attached to their games, and profits immensely from the culture of farming loot boxes to gamble on for skins and such.
They also take an absurd cut of developer income and saddle devs with costs that they don't always want. (Selling on Steam? Valve takes 30% and forces you to moderate the forums on your listing page that you cannot opt out of.)
They also have an internal culture that's been fairly regularly criticized as being pretty uncomfortable for women and minorities.
Valve has done some cool stuff, but let's not lionize them too much. They are probably better than an average company, for sure, but it's important to remember that they are also sketchy in some very gross ways as well.
If you were a dev selling a game years ago when physical distribution was the only method, you'd likely end up with a lot less than 70% after both the publisher and retailer take their cut.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/blogs/company-town-blog/sto...
The difference is that the company had to risk manufacturing cartridges, distributing them, etc. If the game didn't sell, you ended up with lots of money lost.
Steam is much much easier for Valve.
I am not saying it has a value, but 30% seems a lot.
Of course, in the end that 30% we end up paying it ourselves.
It clearly isn’t easy, given that nobody else is doing it their way. Maintaining the company culture might be the toughest challenge of them all. The other game storefronts simply can’t resist muddying the water for the consumer, making the shopping experience hostile for some stupid ass monetization reasons. Shopping on Steam is a breeze, and it always feels like the store is on your side trying to help, instead of trying to get in the way. The developer-side publishing experience is much similar.
I shop on Epic Store and GOG and it is a breeze also.
I never had issues with GOG or Epic (where I buy less to be honest), but that might be me.
But Steam has the network effect. They launched first. Of were the first that successfully did it.
I’m going to assume that while shopping on Epic you alt-tab to Steam to read reviews and to find out what the game is actually like.
No, I just look for video reviews.
Actually, something I always complain about Steam is that the videos of the games are not about the gameplay.
They are most of the time about the trailer, like if it was a movie. I want to see the game playing!
I look at neither for reviews. Steam Reviews are often bombed to hell for things like, "Game has woman. Woke." or "Game has racism." or other culture war nonsense. Or the very common, "Creator I follow on Youtube liked/disliked this game, so I left a similar review" or "Creator I dislike liked/disliked this game, so I left the opposite review". Or, the worst of all, "Game uses Unity/Unreal/Godot/Something Else, automatic dislike".
Ultimately, reviews of games tend to be pretty useless because people who play games have very little understanding of a) what makes games fun, and b) the complexity involved in making the games.
I have creators I follow whose tastes are closest to my own, and I watch their content for reviews, then go to the store that makes the best offer.
I genuinely strictly disagree; The Steam review section is usually an accurate description of the game’s quality.
The overall score tends to fairly represent the likelihood that I’ll like the game, and when in doubt reading a couple of reviews tends to give a clearer picture. And then, the reviews themselves can be rated, and there’s a “recent reviews” score that protects against review bombings and gives a clearer picture of the game’s current state. Not to say that there aren’t exceptions - there’s a poorly-received game that I’ve poured hundreds of hours into recently - but I literally wouldn’t know how to set up a better system myself.
In contrast, the Epic storefront is fucking laughable.
I use steam for the community as well. Just look at how bad reviews are on Xbox store, they are more like app store reviews... mostly complaining about a version update.
Steam also has a solid update/beta pipeline. Game companies post blog posts about new game updates so you keep up to date with development. They also did an amazing job with SteamOS which feels rock solid.
No, when you asked Nintendo to manufacture you a run of cartridges, you paid for them whether they sold or not. You took that risk. Nintendo took zero risks per game, they took the risk in the physical hardware. Legacy game distribution also never took the risk. Retailers were able to return unsold inventory. There were court cases about this when companies tried to go around Nintendo's cartridge building services to save money. Those companies largely won their court cases, so then we made the DMCA to say "No, get fucked"
The up front risk you take on Steam is $100. It still ends up being a meaningful risk because the numbers show almost nobody makes that back, because developers are so interested in selling their game on steam that the market is outright supersaturated.
>Of course, in the end that 30% we end up paying it ourselves.
I used to buy video games at walmart. Unlike games I bought at walmart, Valve has done things that retroactively add value to games I bought decades ago, like remote play together, adding internet multiplayer to games that never even thought about it, and a controller system that allows pretty much anything you can think of. Games that had zero controller support for a decade just do now, no extra download, and the required configuration is often the single button press to select whatever configuration someone else made. Valve created an entirely new software platform for games that makes it so even games that are utterly broken on modern systems can work again, and it's just built in. If I buy a game today, I'm pretty confident I can play it in 20 years. An actual system for sharing digital games with other accounts, with large caveats.
Refunds, despite Valve only offering them because it's the law in several countries and they were losing court cases, are not a thing for physical game purchases here in the US. Once you take off the shrink wrap, you are fucked.
Steam has built in support for Beta branches and old game versions that the game dev can enable. Steam has built in support for DLC, and market systems for trading and selling digital "goods", not that I really think that's a good thing but some people seem to. Steam has fully built in support for cloud saves.
Steam has a fully integrated "friends" system, and that system is convenient for the end user and includes features like screen sharing and voice chat and gifting people games.
Steam offers fully integrated mod management for at least a large subset of all possible mods for any game.
Like I cannot stress enough how even if video games were 30% more expensive in steam (they aren't, devs distributing through steam are making a larger portion of the profit than they used to), retroactively adding functionality to games I bought a decade ago and producing a system that makes it very likely I can play these same games in 20 years is so worth it. Everything else is just a bonus. Their hardware also shows great value per dollar, so the "They are overcharging" narrative just doesn't track.
Meanwhile, steam avoids problems that plague other digital storefronts. Easy returns (again, forced on them), their launcher mostly respects my resources and doesn't destroy my computer every time there's an update, the way Valve negotiates terms they have a much better setup: Even if a publisher or developer pulls their game, as long as you bought it before then you can always install it and play it. Transformers Devastation was pulled from the store years ago and cannot be purchased by anyone I think anywhere, but I can still download and play it on a new machine because that's the contract Valve got Activision to sign. The game literally doesn't have a store page anymore.
Fuck Valve's child gambling profits and invention of loot boxes, but their distribution business is unambiguously the most respectful of the consumer and developer. Only GOG with their work towards preservation and lack of DRM comes close.
I own 4000 games on steam. That's about 3900 more than I would have ever bought in a world without Steam. Their wishlist system is a direct driver of sales that wouldn't happen otherwise. When the Epic Store launched, it didn't even have a damn shopping cart.
Steam can also take away things from games you "bought", like GTA getting replaced with a lower quality remaster and different sound track.
I think it's a bit disingenuous to blame Steam for a decision Rockstar made. The final decision lies with the publisher as to what game actually ships. If they want to remove their old listings and replace them with a worse offering, that's on them.
I'm happier to pay Valve's 30% than Apple's. With Valve you could always switch to Itch or something if you didn't want to pay, but with Apple you have no alternative. Valve gives you access to a huge player base and lots of useful marketing tools and such.
Ok!
Happier is a fine place to be. They are both still too high. Not everything has to be binary -- I can think Valve is offering some utility and also think that Valve is charging too much for that utility.
The fact that Gabe has a billion dollars worth of yachts probably suggests that maybe, just maaaaaybe, that 30% could be lower and Steam could still provide you the same level of marketing support and player base.
You can just not sell your game on steam if you dont agree.
The sales you will miss are what steam brings to the table
The only reason EpicGameStore was able to rise as a competitor to Steam was because of the Billions Fortnite was earning.
Pretty much. If it weren’t for free games and exclusives there would be no Epic Store to speak of.
I don't understand. You think Steam exists without Half Life and Counterstrike?
Nowadays? Yes
Of course now it does, but it was bootstrapped off the back of commercial success. The parent poster was suggesting Epic could only finance a game store off the commercial success of Fortnite. Which seemed to be the exact same path Valve took, so I was curious to explore why the parent felt they were different.
Difference is that Valve made a platform to support their own products. And run it fiscally responsibly from start. Where as well Epic is dumping. Trying to gain market share by giving out free stuff and possibly undercharging. Now thinking whole license model for their engine might also be harmful for any bigger competing engines...
I think while PC is a good example of epic struggling to compete with someone who took full advantage of being first mover, the apple appstore/google play mobile stores are also where they've put in significant financial/legal effort trying to create a more lucrative openings in that market as well.
It's like being a first party for a Video Game Console. Gabe Newell having a billion in Yachts, Bill Gates might have a billion dollars tied up in Real Estate. It has less to say about the personal greed of Gabe Newell and more to say about the relative size of the market.
That’s weird argument. How about letting man to enjoy the fruits of his work?
That's a weird structuring of the concern. How about letting all developers enjoy the fruits of their work?
they are free to do that - simply don't sell your game on steam
> The fact that Gabe has a billion dollars worth of yachts probably suggests that maybe
That is not a good argument though. Try building your own distribution and take some of those billions.
I think Gabe is doing a great job. If he wants to have a billion dollars worth of yachts, that's fine by me.
Gabe made his initial fortune working at Microsoft. He almost lost it all putting it into Valve/Steam. At one point they were close to not even being able to make payroll. He bet everything on the company.
You are welcome to start your own progressive game market place for PC. Go undercut him and charge 5% fees. You literally just need to dump game files on a CDN right? How hard can it be? /s
I do find it odd that this account is new and the type of posts it leaves. Seems almost like an LLM...
> They are both still too high.
You don't get to decide that. Apple's price is not set by free market competition, Valve's is.
Valve's price is still very strongly predicated on network effects which make it very hard to avoid.
They absolutely earn it though. Steam just works.
Heck, I've not bought games because they were not on Steam or required another launcher. Ubisoft and Rockstar are so bad that I held off on buying some games I really wanted to play; they're just that awful. EA's Origin was also pretty bad last time I checked.
I guess it's an actually hard problem to make a somewhat decent launcher in big companies with too many PMs playing turfwars, but still, almost everyone except Valve is shitting the bed so hard that as a consumer I'd happily pay quite the markup if it would allow me to avoid other launchers. They're that bad.
Indeed, when big publishers like EA and Ubisoft started leaving Steam they introduced a tiered pricing system which progressively reduces the cut to 25% or 20% after tens of millions of dollars in revenue, to lure those AAA juggernauts back. The price is now indirectly based on how much leverage you have over Valve - Ubisoft can get away with not releasing their games on Steam, so they pay 20%, while small-to-medium studios effectively have no choice, so they pay 30%.
It's especially backwards when you consider that those AAA games put far more strain on Steams infrastructure with their >150GB install sizes.
Almost like they make the best game distribution platform around for customers, and thus customers flock to it.
What? What network effects?
There are even games you can buy on one service and play multiplayer with people who buy it on steam! I chose to buy MSFS2020 through steam for example because the steam platform is dramatically better than the absurd way the Windows Store does anything, but we fly in the same skies!
There's no lock in or exclusivity. You can literally buy the same exact executable from multiple places, and the only change is the feature the store program supports. Buying a game through the Epic Store for example won't let you use steam input, but you can even then play it on the steam deck with some effort! I think you can even use Proton on executables you don't get through steam!
A dev can even make it so that, if you buy their game on steam, you do not have to have steam running or installed to play it. They have that freedom. They also have the freedom to mark a version of the game such that steam allows you to access that old version forever
If you are a dev who releases a game on steam, you can mint a bulk quantity of steam keys and sell or distribute those outside of steam!. Probably if you abused it, Valve would tighten it up or ban you, but why would you bite the hand that feeds you? It's how, for example, Humble Bundle initially worked.
That's right, you don't even need to buy your game from Valve to use all their features! A substantial portion of my library paid money to Amazon instead, through humble bundle.
People use Steam because it has 20 years of established trustworthiness in an industry otherwise made up entirely of assholes who hate you.
Meanwhile, in the place that Steam does poorly: Old games, GOG has much more of the market.
People actually are willing to pay for trust and care. Steam has repeatedly and regularly improved how their storefront displays information and informs consumers, because their primary problem is discoverability and wading through the mountains of games from people desperate to collect some of the money waterfall that Valve enables.
When you put a game on Steam, the contract ensures that anyone who purchases it cannot lose access without it being Valve's decision. Developers or publishers who do stupid things or pull games five years down the line cannot prevent you from playing a game you buy on steam if it isn't dependent on some server somewhere. None of the other storefronts have ANYTHING like this, mostly because they are run by the exact companies who WANT to be able to prevent you from ever playing an old game again, so they can sell the same thing to you in a new box.
Compare that to Apple's 30%, which similarly has lots of features their platform enables including unlocking significant consumer spending, but they do not give you any alternative. If you want even a single dollar from someone on an iPhone, you HAVE to pay apple 30%, and at least for a while they wanted that even to cover netflix subscriptions for example.
If you as a developer do not want to pay valve 30%, you are free to do like Notch did for Minecraft and distribute it yourself, and you are free to run into the same problem it had where my friend was unable to purchase minecraft for decades because his bank refused to send money to the Scandinavian bank involved, whereas even a literal child without a debit card can use birthday money to buy a steam gift card and purchase your game with no adult involvement. (maybe that's not a good thing for society, but it's great for game dev business).
Valve does not have a moat other than simply consumer trust. Minecraft sold a hundred million copies through a dude's website. There has literally never been a moat in computer game distribution. An entire industry of British children existed writing games and selling them in local stores. A moat has never been possible, because Valve cannot make your computer not run other software.
Apple's price definitely gets affected by competition.
https://9to5mac.com/2025/05/19/apple-may-lower-app-store-com...
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/apple-announces-app-s...
I didn't say "affected" though, I said set. Valve plays by common rules, Apple does not.
You are happy now and will probably be for as long as Gabe Newell is in charge of Valve. (He's 63, by the way; not quite elderly but not young either.) After he retires, well, Valve, as the dominant gatekeeper for PC gaming, has a lot of opportunities for cranking up monetization that investors would just love to get their hands on.
So it's either choosing to buy from a company that might become public after the owner dies which then succumbs to the rot that you admit is inevitable with public companies. Or choosing the companies that are already public that is already exploitative and only interested in short term gains?
That's actually a very easy choice to make.
Investors did not imply public. Enshittification is not limited to public companies. They did not say it was inevitable. Are GOG exploitative and only interested in short term gains?
> Valve gives you access to a huge player base and lots of useful marketing tools and such.
So does Apple. Despite this, they are both engaged in rent-seeking (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking), which has a harmful effect on everyone but them.
Imagine if roads weren't public, but were built by a single private company. You have a business that moves goods by truck. You can use the private company's roads, but only if you pay 30% of the profit of your goods to the company that owns the roads. It only takes 2% of the profit to maintain the roads; the other 28% is profit (rent) for the road-owning company.
You could choose not to use the roads. But then the only way to deliver the goods is by parachute (which may be possible, but isn't practical). So you use the roads. But this means you have to jack up your prices to make any profit for yourself. Competing is much harder (tighter margins), and your customers are paying more than necessary. Everyone's life is harder, except for the road company.
Except in this example, there is nothing preventing other companies from building new roads. And in fact other companies have attempted to build new roads, competing by lowering the 30% fee to 10%, and even paying trucking companies to start using their roads. Except their roads are so poorly maintained that trucking companies choose to continue using the existing roads despite the higher fee. Also EA made some roads that went directly into the ocean for some reason.
This doesn't match with the definition of rent-seeking at all, as described in your wikipedia link:
> Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth.
To my knowledge, Valve has not manipulated public policy or economic conditions to maintain Steam's dominance. Steam hasn't pushed for legislation to prevent competitors, it hasn't prevented developers from selling their games on other platforms, and it doesn't even prevent you from installing non-Steam games on Valve's own proprietary hardware and operating system.
>Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth
Would the PC video game market be bigger or smaller without steam?
I think it would be smaller.
While I hate always connected DRM, and lamented the death of physical media when steam got huge (and also refused to get a steam account for years for that reason), we would have multiple shitty stores if steam didn't exist, I think.
Look at epic and all the other distributors. Their stores are terrible and that's with the inherent competition of going against steam. Imagine if they were the only game in town. . .
Also looking at history. Download stores run by game stores. Or some startup. Some random extra DRM involved. Shut down in a few years without recourse... Just imagine that repeating every few years. Maybe fine for Linux and Mac users who expect no longevity from their purchases. But as PC user, no not acceptable.
Don't they have a disgusting most favored nations clause that prohibits you from pricing anywhere else lower (e.g. you can't raise price X by 42% and sell on your site for X)?
I think they're being sued over delisting someone for this last I checked, even if their public policy might not interpret their MFN that way
> They also have an internal culture that's been fairly regularly criticized as being pretty uncomfortable for women and minorities.
Source?
No, that's the game engine.
A couple sources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9aCwCKgkLo
https://medium.com/dunia-media/the-nightmare-of-valves-self-...
Not going to spend an hour watching a video.
The medium link says nothing about women and minorities specifically. It's a critique of flat management structures in general.
Another source from 6 years ago: https://youtu.be/41XgkLKYuic
It seems like the flat management structure allowed an ad-hoc hierarchy of cliques to form in the office anyway, pitting entrenched teams of old-timers against new hires, but implicitly. When you think of the lack of support for TF2 over the years, this is illuminating.
It's astounding that Valve/Steam are still as successful as they are in spite of this culture.
The second link is paywalled, but from the various sources I looked at, the diversity problems with Valve seem limited to "Valve refuses to spend company time/effort to support my cause". I have not seen any concrete claims of misbehavior, in direct contrast to some other video game companies.
Additionally, when I actually look into the alleged statistics of claims that "Valve is primarily white and male", the numbers ... don't actually look that bad? We shouldn't expect any company to fit national demographics exactly.
Additional allegations of discrimination: https://discriminationandsexualharassmentlawyers.com/valve-c...
Allegations of unpaid labor: https://web.archive.org/web/20160209211205/https://www.reddi...
Allegations of unpaid labor are for crowdsourced translations and have nothing to do with Valve as a workplace.
This controversy is known and there are a few translators on Steam/Valve that came from the community, but nowadays it is mostly outsourced, and they do a terrible job (they replaced gamers with people who can't even bother to download the game to check the context a string is applied to).
Did the plaintiff win that suit? (A quick Google didn't find the outcome.)
As for the second, I'm confused as to why anyone would provide unpaid labor to a large, profitable corporation.
I was a member of STS and I can say crowdsourced translations were a million times better than the now-paid translation teams Valve hires.
And yes, while it was mostly "unpaid", during my time there (2016-2020), we had a year-end rally every year which the "fastest" teams to complete translations would receive Steam wallet codes for their effort. I received up to $350 the first year of rally.
The next year they gave us Artifact keys...
and then the one Valve employee managing the server left Valve, and STS was slowly being replaced by Crowdin
they essentially killed crowdsourcing starting with Artifact. We (the STS members) had no access to new strings, then came Underlords, the new client... Only TF2 translations are crowdsourced to this day. The rest are done by their external teams.
Going by the short update on this page, no: https://kotaku.com/former-valve-employee-sues-for-3-1-millio...
How much money do they make through counter strike loot boxes and selling games etc?
Valve charges 30% for access to their marketplace, and allows you to sell Steam keys for your game at whatever price you want through your own sales channels, without paying Valve a cent.
I'm not sure how any of that is sketchy or gross. As far as marketplaces and platforms go, this is quite reasonable, and there are many successful games which are either not on Steam, or are cross-listed on multiple platforms, or are cross-listed on both Steam and the developer's own distribution channel.
I'll give you lootboxes, they are pretty shitty.
> but it's important to remember that ... as well
Hello LLM.
> They also take an absurd cut of developer income and saddle devs with costs that they don't always want.
Fun fact: Nintendo's revenue split on WiiWare was 60/40, and required minimum downloads to even get your revenue out of Big N.
I appreciate what you've posted here. Valve fanboyism is widespread (I'm guilty of it too) and while they are shoulders above the alternatives, it's a good reminder that no one's perfect and I'll be sure to take a closer look at the company in the future.
That's all I was saying. Valve is way ahead of most of the rest of everyone else. But they are still shady.
We should be ok with pointing at the shady parts of things we like and going, "It would be better if it were not so shady."
Valve is good in many ways! Valve would be better if it didn't profit from getting kids to gamble on skins!
> They also have an internal culture that's been fairly regularly criticized as being pretty uncomfortable for women and minorities.
If they don't like the culture, then they should work elsewhere.
I hear Google is hiring.
Nothing worse than joining a company you contributed zero to building from the ground up, then unilaterally deciding the culture needs to change according to your whims, right now.
You might feel uncomfortable working in a black barber shop. Or a cat cafe with pet allergies. You've contributed nothing to their business, they shouldn't have to change for you.
What nonsense. A decision about workplace should be a combination of factors -- workplace culture, products you can work on, compensation, skill fit, alignment with your interests, etc.
You should feel empowered to have a voice in the products of your labor. And you should feel empowered to have a voice in the culture that produces those products.
They're a game company. They're not feeding the poor.
Your employment is "at will".
You are not entitled to any item in your list of demands.
You are, however, free to leave at any time for something more suited to your tastes.
> You are not entitled to any item in your list of demands.
Can you point to the word entitled in my posts? Or are you putting words in my mouth?
Can you point to any demands? Or are you arguing against something I didn't say?
You seem to be misunderstanding how language works? Can you please explain why you think the literal word entitled had to be said by you here?
You listed a bunch of things which should be, an opinion, he says your not entitled to those things, a probable fact relevant to the likelihood of attaining your professed desires, and he then offers a solution if you are unhappy with not having the things you professed 'should' be afforded.
I don't think you understand how discourse works?
I made no demands and I made no assertions about entitlements. That reply to me was a strawman.
I made two statements: 1) I suggested people have multiple criteria for selecting a workplace, not just culture. 2) I suggested people should have the ability to voice their input over their work. (Note, that's a weaker claim than "people should have input over their work". Just that they should feel like they are able to voice their input.)
Neither of those two things are demands nor entitlements, and the latter I would assume would be pretty non-controversial unless you believe that bosses should have absolute and complete control over every facet of a worker's job. (I guess I work in tech, where it's pretty widely accepted that people have autonomy to make some decisions on their own about how and what work is achieved.)
I think employees are actually entitled to some of those things, like not being made uncomfortable purely because they are a minority or a female. I would find the opposite position to be an exceptionally strange take: that it is entitled to not want to work at a place that puts you in uncomfortable positions for your sex or your race.
I don't have an opinion on Valve or allegations Valve is doing that. I just find it very strange to say it's entitled for a black to want to be treated as equally as a white.
Being uncomfortable has no equivalence to racism, which you are trying to assert.
Assume a white guy voluntarily takes a job working in a wig shop that only sells black women's hair care products. He's going to be uncomfortable at some point. Does he have a right to not be uncomfortable? Should the company culture change, should they stop selling wigs and ditch their customers until he becomes comfortable?
No. The easiest solution is he should work elsewhere. He took the job knowing exactly what was involved. So no, you are not entitled to not be culturally uncomfortable.
What kind of "uncomfortable for women and minorities" if not racism or sexism?
Also wait does this mean Valve is white males-oriented culture and that minorities/women should expect to be made uncomfortable by lieu of being hired there? I think that's an even weirder take!
10% if it’s a Linux copy ;)
> Valve is basically the only one that didn’t
They kind of did, with their sudden pivot from primarily making singleplayer games to almost exclusively making F2P GaaS titles the instant they got a taste of lootbox money. Half-Life 3 and Portal 3 will never happen because Valve makes 100x as much money with 1/100th of the effort by peddling Counter Strike skins.
HL3 kinda happened though, but it was called Half-Life Alyx. And while it wasn't a conventional FPS like HL1 and 2, there's absolutely no trace of GaaS in it.
Alyx is a bit of an edge case because they needed a VR showcase, and it's unlikely that a PC VR game (even a Valve one) could have sustained a healthy multiplayer population. Regardless of the reasons why it happened, it's the one and only singleplayer title they've released in the last 14 years, which neatly aligns with them discovering the joy of lootboxes 15 years ago.
To say Alyx was just an "VR demo" is pretty sad and reductive. Even today it's the one of the best VR games to be released in both fidelity and performance and as VR tech continues to improve its truly aged like fine wine
I called it a showcase, not a demo. I know it's a full-blown game in its own right.
What about Aperture Labs Desk Job as a demo for the deck? Full self contained single player story.
While it was more a tech demo than a full game, this one was a great game anyway.
Alyx is a great spinoff, a mindblowing tech demo, and a thrilling prequel. It is not Half-Life 3.
Allegedly HL3 is in active development.
No official announcement yet.
What does the G in GaaS mean?
Games (as a Service)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_service_game
HL3 is under active development though. If that's a success I'm sure they'd try a Portal 3 as well.
Didn't Valve just deliberately tank the Counter Strike cosmetics market?
They tanked ultra-high-value items, which were primarily traded off-the-books because their value exceeded the official Steam marketplaces $1800 price cap. Bringing those prices down is good for Valve because it means more trading activity will happen on the official market, where Valve gets a cut of every transaction, rather than on third-party exchanges, where Valve gets nothing.
Simply raising the $1800 transaction limit and $2000 balance limit would have been far less disruptive, but that may have put Valve in financial regulators crosshairs. There's surely a reason why they chose those numbers in particular.
Financially Valve exists in an incomparably different space compared to companies like Take Two that actually have to make games to make money.
And they were able to get there because they made good games.
I would rephrase this as they got there because they treat their customers with respect, they take feedback to improve their platform, they don't pack their launcher / store front with ads and trickery, and you can trust that your games will be there and not go away.
Yes, they are loot box whores but so is everyone else.
Steam is a community, social media, and a store. The community is what they built and that community is extremely loyal. That community is also what developers are paying for.
In Gaben, we trust. I have 20 years of experience saying Gabe won't fuck me over to increase EBIDA by .5%. Are they perfect? No, but they are lightyears better than most of their competitors except GOG in terms of putting consumers first.
This is what I always say about Valve. They are not morally unimpeachable, but at the end of the day I've been a regular customer for over 20 years and they've never fucked me over. I don't think I can say the same about any other software company.
And most importantly, the moment they show any indication of doing otherwise, I will happily drop them.
I keep giving Valve my money because they keep giving me good value for that money and a trustworthy environment to spend that money in. I have no loyalty. I also buy games from Humble Bundle and GOG.
I'm not excited about the prospect of losing my 4000 games but the literal only options available for consumers right now are "Pay money and get a game that we can take away at any time, fuck you over, do all sorts of bad things, and we demonstrably hate you", or "Pay money to get a game and a refund period and a bunch of features and maybe when Gabe dies we will do that other thing"
There is no alternative. GOG is run by the same people who released CyberPunk2077 as a bug ridden mess to please upper management, so they even have evidence of already straddling that line right now.
I am not sure why GOG is bad. Then again i am not sure why Cyberpunk is bad - i played it recently for the first time and its pretty fine game.
It’s an amazing game. They released buggy because of management pressure, but fixed it.
GOG is also amazing.
Going back further, the thing that enabled them to release their first game "when it's done" and set the ball rolling was being founded by two ex-Microsoft with piles of money, most studios don't have that luxury.
> Valve is basically the only one that didn’t…
Lol Valve is taking a cut of a ridiculous amount of video game sales while releasing no games.
I like some of their work on the linux support side, but they have sold out as much as Apple has if anything.
>Wish more people would resist the payday and keep what’s theirs.
Ah yeah unregulated illegal underage gambling, the great resistance. Gabe could shutdown the whole thing with 1 click, all the sites are using the Steam API, but they don't and you know why.
Valve did a lot of things good but they are also the original source of a lot of bad things from lootboxes to skin gambling to the FOMO battle pass cancer of modern gaming.
Its definitely the ones that sell. There are plenty of small studios run by founders, but often once they sell they start burning consumer trust and goodwill as if those things don't exist and have an actual cost
Once you have an IP that's massive and you know people will buy regardless of if you're a trash monster or not, there's zero incentive to do the right thing.
Until people stop buying games from these places nothing will change.
I wouldn't call this selling out, exactly. If the issue is endless crunch, its more a matter of having enough money to support it endlessly and an aging workforce that knows their worth and can push back.
The issue is trying to force (or likely, continue) bad practices when they're clearly not working and then lacking the leadership to realize that a retaliatory layoff is only going to make things worse.
Smaller studios can maintain a small team of highly passionate people that will happily work 60+ hours a week or achieve similar productivity. As a studio grows, this becomes harder to maintain. You're pressured to either become a slave driver or dilute your product and make more money through derivative content or micro transactions. For example, I heard that EA is actually a relatively chill company. What sometimes works at keeping employees and customers both happy is fostering a cult-like environment, but that can easily lead to exploitation.
Valve never sold out because they became the "out" other companies sell out to. They successfully built a revenue-capturing money-printer in the form of the Steam store and service and now they don't have to make games at all to keep their bottom line strong. Not to imply they shouldn't have; get that gold ring and all.
(But I may also argue the point they never sold out in terms of being a game studio as opposed to a publisher.... "So when's Half Life 3 releasing?")
Gabe is the Apple of PC gaming, taking a 30% tax on all transactions. It's not this particular kind of evil, but it is a different kind of evil.
There is nothing forcing developers to release on steam, they can sell directly through a website. It’s not Valve’s fault no other competitor has gotten close to the quality of Steam. Epic Games could have made a dent, but they decided to try to bribe customers instead of making a functioning store.
This made me laugh. I tried Epic because I got a free game that I was interested in, but could only play it on the Epic Game store. After a week, I was no longer able to login no matter what I tried. So anecdotally, your statement tracks with my experience.
>instead of making a functioning store.
For all intents and purposes it's "functioning" for me. You can search for a game, hit buy, put in your credit card number, then download/play it. I've seen some spurious arguments about how it lacks a cart or reviews, but it's a stretch to claim the lack of them makes them non "functioning". I never bulk buy games, and for reviews I can go to steam or metacritic.
In 2025 I expect an online store to have at least some cataloging option (like Steam's tags) and some user feedback (like Steam reviews or Steam community discussions). Yes, most of Steam's features are half-baked, and Valve doesn't really want to improve them (curators, user tags, guides etc.), but it's baffling that no other store gives at least the same amount of those features to you. Even though they could.
>In 2025 I expect an online store to have at least some cataloging option (like Steam's tags)
To be fair most online storefronts don't have that. Amazon/walmart at best have "categories", which epic also has. Even online content portals like spotify don't have tags, preferring something like "more like this".
> but it's baffling that no other store gives at least the same amount of those features to you. Even though they could.
The better question is why storefronts don't directly compete on price. We see with airlines that consumers are willing to put up with hellish conditions to save a few percent on airfare. Those features are definitely nice, it's just unclear how they can avoid the free-rider problem if there are competing storefronts.
> The better question is why storefronts don't directly compete on price.
The way I see it, it depends how you see who is who's customer. Is the gamer the customer of the store, or are they the customer of the developer/publisher who put out the game, and in turn is the developer/publisher the customer of the store. The store cut is the price to buy their services, and they can shop around to find different offerings at different prices, just as gamers might be able to shop around and decide what (platform features) matters to them with the options available.
Valve allows developers to generate activation keys for their games and sell them on other platforms, where Valve gets a 0% cut. This is how you're able to buy games from places like the Humble Store and activate them on Steam. Their agreement does technically require that you don't sell at a lower price on other platforms, but as far as I know it's never been enforced.
There's a lawsuit ongoing about Valve threatening developers with delisting if they sell non-Steam copies of games (that's NOT Steam keys, but, say, a version on the Epic store) on other stores.
Can you provide a source for this? This is the first I've heard of anything like this and searching only gives results about the game delisting due to payment processor problems from a few months ago.
edit: after some additional search tweaking this is most likely in reference to Wolfire v. Valve, which is now a class-action suit.[0] The argument seems to be that Valve is engaging in anticompetitive behavior by disallowing developers from reselling Steam keys for their games for lower prices on other platforms, not selling the games themselves on other platforms. So this may or may not be what the parent post was referencing.
[0] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/wolfire-and-dark-catts-antitru...
This is in no way true because there is no requirement to use steam for PC releases.
Apple is a firm technical gatekeeper to their ecosystem. Steam is not at all analogous to that for PCs.
No requirement to use an apple phone either
Steam isn't even analogous to that on their own Steam Deck, where they absolutely could have been.
PCs are plenty accessible to developers without Steam.
Can a Steam Deck install games without using Steam? If so, big advantage over Google Play and the App Store.
Yes, I have plenty of games from, e.g. the Epic Game Store on my steam deck, even in the steam home page, seamlessly.
Gamescope is even fully open-source, so you could remove the steam deck UI, and still run any game with the same performance benefits of not running it inside KDE. Of course also, you could flash a new OS on the device itself if you wanted to entirely remove Valve’s presence.
Steam Deck desktop mode is full blown KDE desktop. The only nuance is that system updates are managed by A/B partition scheme, so root is readonly. Can be made writeable but it's an overlay, so changes get lost on system update and need to be reapplied.
It's more fiddly in that you need to swap to desktop mode to do the installs, but you can get it set up so that your "external" games from Epic or Itch or emulators or whatever show up in the standard Steam UI.
Yes, which is why nobody attacks them from that angle.
Sure, it is a Linux box after all
Are you of the opinion that these marketplaces shouldn’t exist, that they should take a smaller percentage, that they should be entirely ad-supported, or something else?
How can user have an optional one-stop-shop that is sustainable for the long-term while not being “evil”.
Plenty of companies have tried to compete with gabe, they’re all just terrible at it
No. First mover advantage is just that strong. How are the competitors to whatsapp or facebook doing? At best you have something like tiktok, which might be technically "social" media but is a totally different segment. You don't catch up with old high school buddies on tiktok, for instance.
- Facebook was not first. Before it was friendster and myspace.
- Tiktok was not first. Before it was vine and youtube.
- Google was not first. Before it was yahoo and altavista.
Plenty of todays big companies were not the first in their area.
All of the examples you gave, the challengers had some revolutionary idea/improvement on top. Tiktok had its recommendation algorithm and short videos. Google had pagerank. That's also the reason why whatsapp hasn't been supplanted. There's no room for innovation (or nobody bothered trying). The same is true for digital distribution. Every steam competitor is basically "steam but [publisher]" or in epic's case, "steam but with steam games".
That's what the person who started this comment chain said, though. Every Steam competitor has been "does the same thing as Steam, but worse" so why would anyone switch over?
There is some argument to be made that the cost benefit analysis for your average user doesn't make sense unless the platform is a significant improvement over steam. Having two fragmented systems is a huge inconvenience to users now almost to the point that I will outright refuse to play games that are not on Steam.
And for companies that shoehorn really bad launchers as an extra layer on steam like EA, you are doing the work of the devil himself
Some extremely popular games, like all the Hoyoverse stuff (Genshin/ZZZ/etc) or most of Blizzard's games, have their own launchers and aren't on Steam. So gamers are certainly willing to use non-Steam platforms and launchers if there's a reason.
That's not the same as "terrible" though? Signal is basically "whatsapp but not facebook", but you wouldn't say it's "terrible". Same with lyft (which came after uber), or ubereats (which came after many food delivery startups).
Right but if there were a better platform than Steam for buying games it'd win out in the marketplace. It's not like anyone is locked into Steam really.
Every online gaming platform other than Steam and GOG sucks. And in fact GOG competes very well with Steam precisely because it offers something Steam doesn't, which is DRM-free games. Steam didn't just beat the Epic Games Store and Origin and Games For Windows Live because it came first, it's just a better platform and the others offer nothing outside of exclusives which they paid for.
Lets not forget Ubisofts uPlay which was absolutely shambolic. Blizzard's / Activision launcher was alright though. It did the job but no where to the likes of Steam which is really feature rich.
> Blizzard's / Activision launcher was alright though.
I'd personally say it was better as a launcher. Launching Steam itself takes relatively long and when its just in the background its just there idling with ~400Mb of RAM (specifically its WebHelper), which aren't a problem with Battle.net since it idles at 170MB or you can just close it since it launches way faster.
Uhhh....
11 percent. That is the charge back rate in gaming. The "overall" stat for all transactions is something like 3 percent.
Card processing isnt free. There are fees, and supporting card processing still has more humans in the loop than one needs. Never mind all the technology that comes with running the dam platform.
Is 30 percent a lot. It sure is. Valve isnt a charity, this is how they chose to make money.
Meanwhile, AWS has a 30+ percent margin and I dont see CTO's lining up to run hardware...
There are many ways to get people to pay you 30%. Steam and AWS use different strategies. Also AWS's margin should be way higher than 30% if they're not lighting money on fire
Is AWS not being forced on CTO's? I don't see what AWS does that you can't self-host in an OVH container.
I would assume it's less than 11% for steam due to their incredibly consumer friendly refund policy.
>11 percent. That is the charge back rate in gaming. The "overall" stat for all transactions is something like 3 percent.
1. source?
2. How does that justify a 30% rate, when presumably it's clawed back from developers?
>Card processing isnt free. There are fees, and supporting card processing still has more humans in the loop than one needs. Never mind all the technology that comes with running the dam platform.
Again, nowhere near 30% though
>Meanwhile, AWS has a 30+ percent margin and I dont see CTO's lining up to run hardware...
30% margins on renting hardware is totally different than a 30% tax on transactions, and it's disingenuous to imply they're comparable. At the very least amazon needs to spend the other 70% on running servers and investing in datacenters, whereas valve doesn't. It's studios that are actually doing the development. Valve just is charging 30% on top of that. To take an extreme example, compare the 2-3% fees charged by visa vs the ~15% gross margins that car companies make. Even though that's 5x higher, I doubt many are outraged about car companies' profiteering.
I wonder then how you expect valve to operate profitably. Paying for the maintenance and upgrade of equipment, the developers to build the features and SRE to monitor the systems, designers, marketers, HR and lawyers.
For some reason, people in tech live under the illusion that everything nontangible should be literally free
>For some reason, people in tech live under the illusion that everything nontangible should be literally free
Strawman.
Valve also hosts and maintains the game files for consumers to download, and the bandwidth/hardware needed to serve hundreds of GBs for each game to millions of customers across the globe is not trivial.
And the minefield of user cloud storage; I'm amazed that they've managed to avoid basically any abuses of the service.
That is bullshit, you are not even locked to using Steam on the Steam Deck. 30% is completely fair for the amount of infrastructure Steam provides to your game.
Definitely not comparable to Apple, which is forcing all iPhone users to use their own app store.
But union "busting" isn't selling out, if anything it's keeping to their true cause. Companies don't function well with adversarial units within them, and companies don't start out with unions.
Case and point: Valve doesn't have a union.
> Companies don't function well with adversarial units within them
This isn't a given, this is just an opinion, and one you didn't bother trying to argue for.
Many systems do function much better with adversarial units in them. Governments have the adversarial units of checks and balances. Companies have the adversarial forces of the market. A news paper has the adversarial units of editors to their writers.
The phrase is "case in point", and unionized companies often do quite well.
It’s a privately owned company. This leads to an entirely different relationship between employees and the top layer of management.
You have to be very misguided to believe that the c suite in most companies is not engaged in n adversarial relationship with its employees, whether those employees are unionized or not.
They definitely get a free pass from people. Valve is plenty evil.
Very brave of them to speak out, but TBH I'm not sure I'd do it if I were worried about anonymity - their written English is flawless, which is very uncommon. Unless they took considerable care to imitate a different writing style, it's probably trivial to identify who wrote it.
In any case, a longtime friend of mine was senior graphics programmer on GTA5, and I was very close to interviewing with Rockstar in Edinburgh at his recommendation. But then I remembered how gamedev burnt me out at age 19 (my first job, at Lionhead), and how I've never been burnt out since, and decided against it. Been in offline rendering since then and never looked back.
> their written English is flawless, which is very uncommon. Unless they took considerable care to imitate a different writing style, it's probably trivial to identify who wrote it.
Rockstar North is based in Edinburgh as you say, why wouldn't English be at a high level?
Even discounting this, and despite everyone bleating on about its (very real) flaws, ChatGPT and other LLMs do quite a good job of proofreading and suggesting improvements to written English text[0]. I find it works best if you keep them on quite a tight leash but it's certainly within the compass of their capabilities to take badly written English and turn it into well written English, and even adopting a particular style to do so.
[0] Performance in other languages... well, I suspect it's still going to be quite variable, which is another valid criticism that has been levelled at the more popular mainstream models over the past year or two.
Right the fact you may not be able to understand some Scottish people because of their accent doesn't mean they're not competent English speakers, it just means the accent is difficult for you to understand, which isn't relevant when writing.
There are a few famous movie scenes where somebody deliberately uses perfectly reasonable English sentences but with such a thick accent that most English users cannot understand it, but once you know what they said you can play that sound back and yeah, that's what they said, you just couldn't understand the accent e.g..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs-rgvkRfwc
Indeed the joke is that people keep repeating what the hard-to-understand bloke said even when it's perfectly obvious what he said, because if you can understand it then you can't tell whether it was hard to understand.
That's not even Scottish, the bloke in that scene is from Somerset, which is the far side of the country but exactly like Scotland most people in Somerset don't talk like that most of the time, but some of them do, some of the time and to them it's normal, that's just how you say words.
It was written English, not spoken. I think that's why I was confused by the statement it might give away who they are...
I know plenty of people from the area this forum post is about and everyone has a high standard of English... even the people with thick local accents and non-native English speaking Europeans.
Does Rockstar hire lots of non-European people to work in Edinburgh or something?
My stepdad is Glaswegian :) Funny that you immediately assume I'm having difficulty understanding the accent (I can do a pretty good Scottish accent, along with several others BTW!), and conflating that with the average level of English writing you see on the internet.
I'm going to get downvoted into a massive smoking hole in the ground for daring to state this opinion, but, as a lifelong enjoyer of the English language: native speakers butcher it the most.
This is true of many skills you grow up learning.
E.g. someone who grew up playing piano might be able to play at an incredibly advanced level, while also being terrible at reading or writing sheet music.
The science around skills acquired during childhood/adolescence vs. learned skills is interesting. For example, I would not be surprised if non-native speakers, on average, have a better handle of the difference between effect/affect, there/their, etc.
>I would not be surprised if non-native speakers, on average, have a better handle of the difference between effect/affect, there/their, etc.
That’s from training system rather than age.
You’ll rarely catch me mixing up there and their because I’ve learned those words reading them, and in written form they’re very distinguishable.
I couldn’t write a poem to save my life though, because I can’t tell which words in English rhyme - the written form of an English word isn’t trustable.
An interesting example is natives with different accents making different mistakes - Latino Spanish speakers for example commonly confuse c and s while writing, as it’s a similar sound.
Spain's dialect however pronounces those letters very distinctly (their famous “lisp”) so to Spaniards it’s obvious which one to use.
English is my 4th language, after German, Afrikaans and Indonesian. People get very angry about it when it's pointed out, and yes, "you just say Bingo" (non-native speakers tend to get idioms and certain turns of phrase wrong), but at least we get singular vs plural, past vs present vs future tense etc right. I'm not sure why but "most" (therein lies the thesis) native speakers struggle so much with that basic stuff, to say nothing of its vs it's, were vs we're vs where, maybe caring about much vs many, past perfect "had had 'had had', had had"...
Shoot the messenger if you want, but the evidence is literally ubiquitous.
Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.[1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
In much the same way chess grand masters make moves that don't make sense to the novice.
At a guess: polyglots try to raise the error floor of their languages / not make basic common mistakes, whereas monoglots have no concern with / perception of this all.
If they were careful, which I'm sure they were, the flawless English is the result of a round of LLM proofreading.
Yeah I was thinking about that, these days you just run whatever text you want to anonymise through an LLM with some instructions for style.
That's what I am thinking.
I'd use a local LLM too to make sure the original prompt does not leak and can't be connected to the published output.
> I've never been burnt out since
Why can't this style of management just take hold at a game company?
I suspect that hollywood has a pretty similar release cycle, and I've never heard of the dysfunctional management in that industry. (maybe it is normalized? maybe people don't expect a job after a movie is done?)
The crunch culture in the film industry is legendary, particularly in visual effects, where many studios go out of business. There has recently been mass layoffs in the industry and much of the employment is temporary from film to film.
Well, there goes GTA 6. Better for my wallet, I guess. Don't want to finance some thugs.
I think the offline gameplay of GTA is becoming dated. Playing GTAV just felt like cut scene, then chores, cut scene, then chores, rinse, repeat. To be fair, I don't understand the purpose of GTA online but it was wildly popular.
> the offline gameplay of GTA is becoming dated.
GTA V is dated. It's 12+ years old.
GTA 6 just slipped to late 2026. At least.[1]
[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/gta-6-delayed-once-again-to...
I’m also kind of concerned about the game itself suffering. If they’re shedding institutional knowledge to avoid unions we could end up with a vibe coded GTA 6.
Like imagine if MindsEye had thirteen years of anticipation before it came out.
I'll probably end up buying GTA 6, once it's on sale or something; good people worked on it too I would imagine, and helped make it a good game.
Also, with apologies for the whataboutism, we unfortunately finance thugs all day every day (my internet provider, German government and pension, Deutsche Bahn, etc are massive extortionists); it's not really black and white.
It’s so nice to be guilted into supporting awful people, because a bunch of nice people were abused by the awful people but at least the art will keep one entertained and the corpos keep on abusing.
It's so easy to forget or ignore the good people whose great work was overshadowed by random controversy out of their hands. It's not the fault of the programmers who wrote the animation systems, or the artists who styled the characters' hair, that some random dickface manager pulled a random dickface move.
I write this out of pure sympathy for the incredible work that I know gamedevs do, I'm not associated with Rockstar at all.
And this is why "vote with your wallet" does not work. As a consumer there's no way to decide who gets the money.
In fact, even the people who made the game (did the actual work, not managers, advertisers, etc.) don't get to decide.
Correct me if I am wrong but the programmers, designers, artists have already been paid and any money from sales goes to the company and its execs/shareholders.
(And yes, employees can also be shareholders but they almost always own such a tiny share it does not really matter. In a just world, ownership would be distributed automatically according to time_worked * skill_level.)
EDIT: I might have overstated by saying it doesn't work but it definitely doesn't have the same level of effect as people collectively saying "this behavior is wrong and you will be punished for it, regardless if I buy the product" (for example by editing laws). It also doesn't allow any control over how the money is distributed among those who worked on it (compared to for example adding a law that limits absolute/relative spending on marketing - whether you think it's a good idea or not).
Target's CEO saw a significant impact to their compensation, a change in role, and ~1800 layoffs occurred because of the Target boycott. Boycotts work. Voting with your wallet works.
https://rollingout.com/2025/05/07/target-ceo-salary-drop-ami...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/dougmelville/2025/08/21/the-qui...
> The Quiet Part Out Loud: Target Ditching DEI Cost The CEO His Job And Investors $12 Billion
So, it would not be hard to impair Rockstar with a coordinated, sustained economic retaliation campaign against them. If it kills the company, we help workers find other jobs and shareholders learn a lesson about capital allocation. Poorly run companies die all the time, some just need to be helped along.
See also Disney+ and Jimmy Kimmel. Something like 2 million subs were dropped.
Please don't try to spread the idea that it "does not work", it's incorrect and discourages one of the most effective non-violent mechanisms consumers have for driving change in market economies. It may not necessarily be sufficient (coordinated boycotts, for instance, are much more effective than individual decisions), it may not always be an option (particularly when there aren't viable alternatives), it may not work immediately, there may not be enough people who "vote" a certain way, and there may be insufficient information to make informed decisions--but consumers absolutely decide which products and companies live and die, and every single dollar you spend allocates power.
> and any money from sales goes to the company and its execs/shareholders
Some companies may share a profit. I heard that Activision used to pay some of the revenue from Call of Duty to the developers, although I can't confirm it. And it was a long time ago, not sure if they still do.
It would work if we dispensed with intellectual property and instead voted on what should be created rather than on what already has.
I hear this argument with some regularity and i don't think it would work the way you expect. Have you gamed it out in your head?
1) A lot of people would immediately stop contributing to open source. In fact i ahead have because ML is being used to launder my work to use it without resourcing my licenses. Same with any other area where people share their work for free. It would all be monetized by those with access to better advertising.
2) Anything published would be immediately scooped up by the big players. How would a small competitor like Nebula compete with YouTube if YouTube took all its content and offered it for free with ads?
3) How would you even know who the original creator was if those stealing the work stripped away attribution? They already do but at least you have some limited ways to fight them.
1) I contribute to open source because I want the thing to exist. I use open licenses because I don't want anybody to use the law to deny anybody else access to it. If we gut the parts of the law by which others would deny access, I no longer have to worry about licensing, but my original motivated is untouched.
2) what do you mean "scooped up"? What's to stop a small platform from providing the same content that a large platform does, if we've done away with intellectual property?
3) I'm confused. If you're paying somebody to create a proposed work, and then they create it and get paid for doing so, and then nobody is allowed to restrict access to it, where does the theft come in?
1) So you are perfectly happy with somebody else taking over, taking your code, giving it a different name, or not even that, spending a bit of money on advertisement to get more users than you, adding features to drag over your users, then taking development private and enshittifying it? EEE?
You have to understand in this world, advertising and network effects are much stronger than building a good product.
2) Again, advertising, cost of storage, having a better (meaning more addiction inducing) algorithm, etc.
3) You said it yourself, people have to create something first (which will be stolen or as you phrase it, unrestricted) so they can prove themselves so that anybody pays them to produce the next thing. Or would you pay a random guy with no credentials and no portfolio claiming he can create what you want?
Or what if somebody creates something really good but it's a one off. He changes hobbies, has children, has to care for an elderly parent, ... and doesn't have time to create more. Should he not get paid for the value of his existing work?
Your take basically means people will only get paid as long as more value can be extracted from them and then they're no longer economically viable so screw them.
1&2) its not my code, its just code that I wrote. The enshittification problem goes away if anybody can fork it and make a less enshittified version. We could have--brace yourself for this radical concept--competition over who could make a better thing. All the bad things you're saying will happen if we don't assert ownership over data are in fact only happening because we assert ownership over data.
Somebody else owning the solution to our problems is why we tolerate such abuse. Otherwise we could cut out the abuse parts and solve the problem directly.
3) I was unspecific about how much money they'd get ahead of time versus upon completion because I figure that ought to be a case-by-case thing.
The idea that people should be able to live well based on having done good work in the past is a good one. Let's make that happen, but why should it have anything to do with property? If I build a particularly strong bridge which surpasses expectations re: longevity shouldn't I get the same retroactive compensation as somebody who wrote a particularly good book? If I publish freely the cure for a disease, should society not reward me to a greater extent than if I sold the patent to a company that will decline to act on the discovery because it's more profitable to treat that disease than to cure it?
The things you seem to want from intellectual property are important, but pushing the concept of property beyond what is natural for it is a harmful way to achieve them.
A) its not working particularly well for the artists
B) its not working at all for workers outside that domain
C) it has all kinds of really awful side effects which are far more harmful than whatever good we can reasonably expect it (property) to do.
When IP was invented to justify the church's right to prevent the wrong kind of bible from being printed we didn't have the ability to implement the alternatives that are available to us today. The best we could do is play-by-the-rules-or-we'll-take-your-printer. We have new capabilities now, let's solve these problems head on instead of leaning on ideas from the 1600's to do so.
1) Nobody can fork it if it gets closed source extensions, gains users, then becomes closed source. Please read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
Better product does not matter, advertising and network effects do.
Think about this: with IP you have strictly more options than without. You can literally release under public domain if you want to. People generally don't.
Having strictly more options is always better _by definition_. You're literally saying people will be better off if you take away their choice. Stop and think, man.
2) Don't ignore a point you don't like. Tell me how a small creator can compete with a big corporation. Take into account marketshare and network effects.
3) You were unspecific because you can't control it and you know it. With IP the artist can decide if the money offered is good enough for permission to use his work. Without IP you shift the decision how much to pay entirely to the people with money, artists have 0 say. They can only say "please" and "thank you".
A) How now? I don't see creators giving away their work for free under public domain, citing it's better for them.
B) Ok, let's come up with a system which rewards creators, builders, workers in other professions.
C) Like what?
So what are those alternatives except "give away your work for free and hope to get paid next time"? Because this one is already possible today and creators don't use it because it would suck for them.
> And this is why "vote with your wallet does not work". As a consumer there's no way to decide who gets the money.
Huh? That doesn't make any sense. "Vote your wallet" does not mean throw money on the ground haphazardly and pray that it finds its way to the appropriate home. It means hand the money directly to the person you want to have it. There is no way to avoid deciding who gets the money. That's the only choice you get to make.
Perhaps we can all hope one falls off the back of a truck for each of us.
HN is currently linking to the start of the forum thread, but here is a direct link to the Rockstar employe's reply: https://gtaforums.com/topic/1004182-rockstar-games-alleged-u...
(And, the very next post is the forum admin confirming that the poster is indeed a rockstar employee.)
This makes me sad, R* has made some of my most favorite games, especially Red Dead Redemption 2.
They make so much money, why can't they play nice and treat their employees like human beings?
I don't recall reports of Valve (Steam, also super profitable) stooping. Is Rockstar a genetic relative of GAFA, because this is more like what I've come to expect from Amazon.
Valve is a "flat" organization, where your compensation is determined based on peer review.
Rockstar, and owner Take-Two (largely owned by institutional investors--well known for their historical championing of workers rights and fondness of unions), both seem to have your typical corporate hierarchies, where executives are fairly and correctly compensated for being more productive than over 200 software engineers combined.
If you think one person can be as productive as 200, you're sniffing glue, my friend.
Executives make more money because they are the only ones with the power to set wages. Workers do not have the power to set wages.
Oh, I don't, I was being very sarcastic, but I appreciate that your response was so measured under the assumption that I was serious, haha.
Because no amount of profit is ever enough for the stock market, everything must perpetually grow.
That’s a very reductionist take on what happened here. I don’t think increased profit is likely to result from these firings. How would it?
It may sound simplistic but its the truth and there are plenty of other examples and history around this - Starbucks recently. 30 employees unionizing may not have any significant impact on their profits, but if they let that union grow it would have a lot more members demanding better working hours or wages over time. A strong union also generally leads to a loss of control by management where they have to negotiate more with workers which they don't like. Why do you think they were fired?
Firings in this case were for union busting. Illegal union busting is profitable - that's why business owners do it. Because it's illegal, they will make up a different excuse for why the workers were fired. They will never admit to illegal union busting. So you should not take their statements as good faith.
Profit = revenue - expenses.
Firings reduce expenses, the equation above explains the rest. Of course, that's only in the short term, but that's what exec bonuses are given out on!
This is also true if humans in general, at all stations in life, including union members and union leaders. Is there any offer a union would refuse on the grounds that’s too much?
People like getting more money, but they don't die without it. You can get a job that pays just enough to pay your bills and work at it until you die. Companies can't do that under capitalism. They take on debt and require growth to pay back their investors, or they don't take on debt and get undercut by a competitor who does.
Is that true? Feels like you are begging a huge question and also assuming everyone has to exist in a capitalist society forever.
It will still be true under not-capitalism. Perhaps it won’t be measured with money but it will exist.
And yet Costco still does just fine.
Costco might not be your intended example. It has amazing revenue growth:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/COST/costco/revenu...
While simultaneously growing profit margin:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/COST/costco/profit...
Hence growing annual net income from $2.3B to $8B in the last 10 years.
I imagine the GP was referring to the fact that Costco experiences that kind of growth while giving their employees excellent pay and benefits. Even low-level store employees typically make $20-30 an hour.
Correct
> They make so much money, why can't they play nice and treat their employees like human beings?
Because they can.
In the gaming industry the biggest studios get away with running sweat shops because there's endless hordes of brilliant engineers and artists who had always dreamed to make videogames and need a huge name on the CV to move to better places.
> They make so much money, why can't they play nice and treat their employees like human beings?
Because they want to make great games. It's sad but we've never figure out how to replicate the creative output that crunch and stress triggers. I don't understand it and frankly I couldn't stand it so I left the industry but I won't pretend that we have a solution too the problem.
>They make so much money
Their 10-Ks show they lost a lot of money.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TTWO/take-two-inte...
2025 $-4.479B
2024 $-3.744B
2023 $-1.125B
The meager earnings in years previous to that are beyond wiped out. In fact, expect a lot more squeeze if you work at Take Two or a lot more rent seeking if you are a customer, because based on the stock price movement, the market is expecting a lot more net income.
Edit: looks like they set a ton of money on fire by overpaying for Zynga a few years ago. Customers and employees are going to be paying for that bad decision for a long time.
It's true that Take Two lost money but it's also true that Rockstar makes them tremendous amounts of money. Lifetime revenues from GTA5 are estimated to be near or exceeding 10 billion USD.
Managing to lose money on those kinds of profits is arguably further evidence that leadership there is overpaid.
Businesses desire growth, not conservation or charity. And that desire is frequently achieved through illegal means. Wage theft for instance is a far greater sum than the total of robbery in the US. The criminality is rampant!
Meta is also in the news today for making 10% of its revenue from scams, as well as for having codified policy that scammers representing at least 0.15% of their revenue must be protected from any moderation.
Business thrives on illegality.
It's almost as if capitalism was a deeply messed up system that brings out and celebrates the very worst in humanity.
You think the administrators of a socialist, communist or other collectivist society would not face the same temptation and respond similarly?
At least under liberal capitalism I have the option of not buying games and of making my own.
Well you’re onto something re: authority and hierarchy…
Capitalism is based on/grew out of the Norman feudalism, where lords were foreign conquerors who cared nothing about the locals, local land, local societal norms. They only cared about rent extraction for themselves (todays C suit class) and to pay the nobles above them (the market). They simply removed themselves one step, created corporations to remove all personal liability, and ramped up the profit extraction to a global scale. Just look at the first large scale joint stock company, the East India Company. Could corporatism have had a worse/more evil progenitor?
Systems need to be managed. If you cook with high temperatures and let your attention wander then the food burns. If you drive fast with bald tires then you may fly off the road. We know that strong regulation on industry, especially monopolies, high taxes on the wealthy, and powerful unions can keep Capitalism in balance, but we have chosen not to use these mechanisms. Is that Capitalism being flawed or is it us as custodians failing in our basic duties?
Crony capitalism is capitalism. How do you know it can be kept in balance if it is not?
We've been through this before. As recently as the 1930s the Capitalist economy tried to eat itself and had to be stopped. That is historical and everything changes, but the basic principles are the same. Find out where things are going wrong and address that with some basic controls and limits.
If a system leads to catastrophic failure on a regular basis, maybe it's just a bad system? See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...
> They make so much money, why can't they play nice and treat their employees like human beings?
That's not how human nature works. Greed doesn't lead to idealism or altruism, it invariably leads to entitlement and more greed. The rich are never satisfied with hundreds of billions, they insist upon trillions.
People who are nice and treat their employees like human beings are not allowed to become CEOs.
This would be less of an issue if game companies operated as co-ops.
Isn't that what indy game developers are, why can't both exist? You don't have to play GTA.
> They make so much money, why can't they play nice and treat their employees like human beings
Because American unions usually don’t stop there. It’s the American winner-take all/scorched earth approach to everything.
That’s not a Union thing, that’s a system thing. Anyone fiercely on either extreme of the spectrum is missing the forest for the trees and proudly waving their willful ignorance of the dynamics of power.
In an ideal scenario, Unions and Shareholders would cooperate to achieve suitable outcomes for both parties; in reality, the amount of power needed to even get a Union off the ground and keep it sustained against the onslaught of Capital means those who wield said power are inclined to use it often. It’s why the (debatably) smarter gamble has been more workers forming anti-Capital institutions: cooperatives, union-first enterprises, sustainable corporations with stringent, anti-Capital bylaws. By removing Capital’s power early, those who do come to the table are more likely to negotiate in good faith rather than scorched-earth tactics.
Don’t slight unions as a whole just because power dynamics in a Capitalist society dictate everything be a zero-sum game. Instead, focus on building a better game and fairer set of rules, and recognize Unions are part of that.
Those power dynamics are part of the human psyche. The will persist and be present under any alternative you care to impose.
This is just a belief. A belief that allows you to do anything, and can absolve anyone of any evil.
Why stop there? Why have systems or government at all? Why even bother making murder illegal? After all, it's human nature. After all, it's just how life works. After all, the strong win, and the weak get eaten. Everyone knows that.
I'd strongly disagree, as there are examples of societies that don't exhibit these traits. See the Kogi from Colombia for example. A necessity environmental condition seems to be that social groups size stays within certain limits (around 120 as I remember).
> Instead, focus on building a better game and fairer set of rules, and recognize Unions are part of that.
I’d prefer a more European system. But faced with a choice between American-style unions with their mob roots and silicon valley, I’ll choose the latter.
The affected employees are in the UK and Canada branches, with their own local unions.
Wouldn't have happened under Dan Houser. R* made too much money for its own good.
On another note, heard on Bloomberg today that they've been working on GTA 6 for 10 years at this point. Considering the size of their development teams it's possible that more manhours may have gone into this single title than all video games that were made until the PS1 era combined.
I’m sure it’ll be as good as Duke Nukem Forever and Daikatana put together.
What makes you think Dan would've handled it any differently? Rockstars got a long well known track record of being in crunch mode with obscene hours, that didn't suddenly start after Dan left.
> On another note, heard on Bloomberg today that they've been working on GTA 6 for 10 years at this point.
It’s incredible to think about what else has happened during these past 10 years of development. Or think about other decade long stretches and what was accomplished.
Not cutting short what the undertaking of this is, just that the scale of this project spanning a decade is fascinating.
Is there a cut off? at some point the stuff they made / wrote when they started working must be becoming dated.
I'm an American who was retaliated against in the past for collective bargaining efforts. Luckily, that's illegal here as codified by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (it probably is in the UK too, I'm just not as familiar with their laws). I filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and eventually won my case, receiving compensation with interest; the Company also had to inform all employees of their collective bargaining rights digitally and physically.
Once the government shutdown ends, I highly recommend the affected American individuals file a complaint with the NLRB via their website: https://www.nlrb.gov/
For the full post, see here:
https://gtaforums.com/topic/1004182-rockstar-games-alleged-u...
Pretty sure this is illegal under UK employment law. I smell a very uncomfortable period for Rockstar's HR department
Definitely one for the courts
There is a fundraising for that organised by their union (IWGB Game Workers):
https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising/support-rockstar-worke...
(Employment Tribunal, but yes.) If even half the stuff in the posting is true, it should be an easy win. Unfortunately Legal Aid for Employment Tribunals has been cut to the bone, but their union should be able to help here by taking the case up on their behalf.
Every union I've been a part of has been more of a pain than its worth, or has tried to keep individuals from become any more successful that others. I don't understand the obsession with them on HN.
I work for a sector with a strong union and feel the benefits of collective bargaining every day. Higher wages, better job security, and many basic accomodations that are codified in an EBA that one might have to otherwise fight for (eg work from home at least two days a week is something that is protected in our eba thanks to our union).
Just because some unions aren’t as good as others is not a reason to dismiss unions.
Which unions have you been part of?
I used to work at a university that was NON-union, but basically ensured our benefits/raises were always at LEAST as good as the unionized university across town negotiated. THAT's a way to avoid unionizing efforts.
I have a teacher in the family - it's been an unequivocal necessity for them - otherwise the city / schoolboard would run roughshod over them - like 1% raises over 5 years, while their coffers are full.
And there's always a few (*&@#$ parents who think they're "all that" who would try to have individual teachers fired just because their 1st grader only got a "B" when they're clearly a generational prodigy... Unions really help with that.
I worked for Chance Coach and I don't remember the exact Union they were all a member of. I was worked as a contract employee for Volt Technical Services. I was told I was required to pay dues even though I wasn't a permanent employee, which was an absolute fabrication of a lie told to me by union leaders on the job site I later learned (I was swindled out of a few hundred bucks, but as a teenager I didn't really know any better).
They had several (4 I think?) union-mandated breaks during the day, which I got in trouble for not taking several times. The reason given was if I didn't take my breaks than they could disappear for everyone. I also was willing to do any job given to me, and given that I had some shop and machining experience, was happy to help with any task given, which made me an asset to management as they cold put me in anywhere as needed to help production along, but angered old crotchety employees that didn't want me in their space and were happy doing the absolute minimum to collect their wage.
So yeah, my experience with Unions is they breed mediocracy and pull everyone down that wants to set themselves apart to management. Wages were standardized rather than based on individual accomplishments so there was no incentive to excel.
I'm certainly not "anti-union" but my original comment is that HN thinks Unions are this utopia and in a sober reality they often aren't.
Former IBEW; I'm forever grateful for the paid training and industry experience.
Had I any dependants, I'd definitely stay (just for the benefits! which cost nothing-more for one dude or an entire family).
Started my own residential shop, now-retired; life probably would have been easier had I stuck with commercial, instead.
I'm guessing 90%+ of HN posters are not in a union. They idealize what it could be, not what it actually is.
I am an individual who doesn't like just being one of a group, so I have never joined a union, but I support some union actions at my employer and so I too go on strike (and thus don't get paid) if I agree with the cause of their action. It can be simultaneously true that unions aren't perfect and that unionisation is better than not.
Indeed that's par for the course, there's plenty to dislike about democracy, but the alternatives we've tried are worse for example.
Do you like not working on weekends?
Try to work at a place that has a union and decide to not be part of it... then you can see the true face of injustice. Don't want to be extorted out of union fees? Good luck, you are better off working somewhere else.
This is not representative of all unions, and the union fees are generally small compared to the higher wages that wouldn’t exist were there not a union in place. Mathematically you give a little to get a lot.
Having been a member of the Teamsters union, I completely agree.
It seems likely the vast majority of HN has never been a member of a union themselves given the audience, so the obsession feels like a savior complex IMO.
Yeah, unions accomplished a lot of good things many decades ago. But if you think they haven't morphed over those decades and are still automatically a net positive for all workers, I could probably sell you a bridge.
For my experience at Teamsters, there was zero incentive for employees to actually perform. Everything was done by senority across the board, and you're literally just aging and waiting your turn.
The insurance was good, the wages were average, and the incentive to do better was non-existent. And yes, firing people unless they did something egregious was much, much harder.
I just don't buy the narrative that if you don't threaten employee's and "whip them into shape" that then there's no incentive to do good. I refuse to believe that not firing people is, somehow, causing them to coast.
Pretty much everyone I know who works hard does so in spite of their circumstances. Not because of them.
Of the engineers I've worked with, the cooks I've worked with, the waiters I've worked with... the hard working ones don't win. They get taken advantage of and run into the ground. They perform, and perform more, and more, and that exclusively works against them.
And, as you go up the ladder, you can very clearly see the hard work and competence thin out more and more. The people who are successful aren't smart, or hard working, they're just good at maintaining a status quo.
These are not unionized places. So, maybe it's a capitalism thing.
If I was trying to astroturf anti union sentiments this is the sort of stuff I'd post
It's a luxury belief held by those who aren't personally affected by any drawbacks. Many such cases.
https://archive.is/bDc8R
Not that they did on purpose or anything, but the delay was at a very convenient time
* I want to keep liking GTA, and to keep giving Rockstar more money, for each new chapter and new console/device. If it turns out that Rockstar was union-busting and defaming, then I really hope that they soon have a we-messed-up moment, and genuine corrective action for whatever went wrong.
* Has anyone heard of game-buying consumers voting en masse with their pocketbooks over ethical/social concerns about a game/publisher/studio?
(I absolutely don't mean something like the Gamergate psychosis, though that was the first very loosely related event that came to mind. I mean respectable commercial boycotts, for admirable reasons.)
There was a big deal made over Blizzard's policy and behaviour.
Also, I may be misremembering, but there was something pertaining to esports supressing the hong Kong riots.
Thanks:
/r/gaming post that wasn't only about product: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/154ko01/why_is_bliz...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blizzard_Entertainment#Hearths...
Rockstar has historically always had anti-worker practices baked in, with crunch culture being the obvious one. They aren't your or their workers friend.
They're in it to make boatloads of cash and will do whatever to whoever is needed.
And no, consumers have never really cared in the gaming space. They won't do anything differently because of this.
> And no, consumers have never really cared in the gaming space. They won't do anything differently because of this.
Consumers almost never care outside of isolated causes du jour or when it directly affects someone they know. Look at all the self-proclaimed socialists and progressives walking around with iPhones manufactured by Foxconn, a company known for treating its employees so badly there were inquiries into the suicide rates of their workers at one point.
While I have my concerns about unions, they are absolutely necessary in many cases. Companies are not your friend, nor are your fellow consumers most of the time.
Yeah, I wanted to say that but figured someone would make a big stink about it.
It's the truth though. It doesn't matter if the product was produced as a result of slave labor, union-busting, corporate government coups, extensive pollution, monopolistic behavior, manipulation either of or from the government, theft of natural resources, etc.
People just go 'la la la I can't hear you' and buy whatever they want.
And to some extent I don't blame people for doing that. To really dig into the actions of even a single company could take months of careful research. And given how convoluted the ownership charts can be, you may end up finding that 3/4 or more of what you buy is from a company with despicable practices - I mean shoot look at what Nestle owns.
I don't know if there's a solution. Even if you got people to do all the hard work (ha!), it would be hard for people to get around it.
> To really dig into the actions of even a single company could take months of careful research.
That's a really good point. With the way modern supply chains work, it may not even be possible to really know if you're buying something that was ethically produced or not.
Didn't the gaming community essentially kill Star Wars Battlefront 2 for EA because of the microtransaction PR fumble?
They are going to get smacked down hard in the UK, if the post has the events described accurately.
What was done was blatantly illegal, EVEN IF the people weren't fired for union organizing, which Rockstar will have a hard time explaining away since they fired only people involved in union organizing.
The fired employees in the UK (not sure about Canada) will get back pay and penalties once the unavoidable legal process finishes.
I'm sure, however, Rockstar will consider all of the sanctions they'll receive as price of doing business.
Despicable.
This is but a small set back. I hope people recall what their ancestors did in the early days of unioning.
Could have kept the Rockstar Games in the title for clarity
Start your own company that supports unionization. Problem solved.
The accusations of "IP theft" are already flying. Creative people, technical people, and everyone must stop working for megacorps and form their own, civilized worker-owned co-ops. Corporations will never respect those who perform labor, and will never ensure sustainable work environments.
Good news is that, especially given the modern distribution methods, they are already very free to raise capital or take their life savings and make courageous bets on their creativity!
Given all the research that shows that unions actually depress wages and damage companies, it's incredible to see a few HN comments in support. It's okay to recognize that unions are bad and that the best companies, and their products, don't need to be held hostage by a very small number of grifters.
> ...research that shows that unions actually depress wages
Citation?
A rational person would agree that unions, like anything else, have pros and cons. They can do good, but also can do harm. It's the commenters here seem to fly off on emotional rants that derail the conversations. The thinking is capital takes less risk than labor; and that model of thinking makes it easy to ascribe faults to capital, but not to labor. You can't argue your way out of that. When you have to manage a bunch of employees and run payroll, bonuses, benefits, increments, that is when you'll know who takes more risk.
I'll believe you that capital is the bigger risk taker when limited liability is revoked.
or if we change bankruptcy such that labour is paid out rather than creditors.
laws are setup to reduce and limit the risk for capital, and capital can hedge its risks where labour cannot. Generally nobody is able to work to full time jobs
Um, Capital sits at the bottom of the payment waterfall, labor, suppliers, lenders, creditors all have priority claims. Capital returns are vastly more volatile than labor compensation. Most startups burn and die, but employees still get paid (keeping illegal practices aside). Capital bears most of the uncertainty that labor doesn't.
To argue your point, the strongest argument is that labor cannot easily diversify or easily re-train for new sectors. But there aren't entire job sectors being wiped out with any kind of regularity or high frequency. Mostly people take skills from one job into another.
And speaking more about the US, social safety nets (not arguing that they're perfect) have some role to play when labor faces downsides. There is no "unemployment" for a company (again I'm talking about average businesses without cherry picking the too big to fail examples - which are a tiny percentage when looking at the number of small/medium/large businesses that operate around the world).
Citations? I’m not aware of this strong a conclusion. In fact, my understanding is that generally wages go up.
Doing my own research, ChatGPT summarizes the state as generally unions improve wages and working conditions for employees much more than they pay in premiums. This has gone down since the 1970s but is still a noticeable effect. Indeed the 40 hour work week comes from unions. There is a negative effect on profitability, but that’s subject to interpretation:
> The negative effect on profitability from unionization may reflect that unions raise labour costs (via higher wages/benefits) and may impose work rules or other constraints that reduce flexibility. The classic model: higher labour cost → lower margins, unless offset by higher productivity or price increases. But the productivity and growth effects are less clear: many studies find little or no negative effect on productivity or capital structure, suggesting that unions may shift the distribution of returns (towards workers) rather than clearly kill growth.
So it may be worth revisiting the research you cited so decisively against unions as it likely contradicts your belief about them.
>Doing my own research, ChatGPT summarizes...
One of these things is not like the other.
No but one step further than OP went making unsubstantiated claims that actually contradicts the actual research that paints a much more complicated picture.
>... the actual research that paints a much more complicated picture.
Given that ChatGPT is still very much in a "trust, but verify" state (on a daily basis it confidently states falsehoods about subject matter I'm highly familiar with, for instance), I'm wondering if you followed up to confirm that the data at the sources provided by ChatGPT accurately reflected what it told you.
If you're going to insist that others revisit their research, I would hope that you're making a good faith effort towards doing the same.
I did actually check some of the sources and they seemed solid.
I believe you replied to the wrong comment
When your industry is notorious for insane hours, low pay, disgusting crunch, and covering up sexual abuse, a union seems reasonable.
Cherry picking examples to paint broad brush/strokes doesn't work. There are game companies all over the world, and have varying levels of work/life balance. Your crude caricature is just that; crude.
What's sad is that unionizing will accelerate whatever the decline of the company is causing the dissatisfaction. Wiser for employees to just jump ship or found a new game studio when this kind of decline happens.
The chances of a company turning around are super low, adding a union makes it harder. Just run.
The alternative to every company is to proactively repair the conditions incentivizing the formation of a union. It continues to amaze me that those in charge of making those decisions choose decline over alternatives.
Baseless claims can be dismissed without evidence. Happy employees are more efficient.
happy employees doesn't imply the need for a union
The thing holding back unions in the U.S is the unions themselves and the laws around them. Once a union forms, they have entirely too much power.
Next thing you know, people want to not work on weekends!
Russia defeated the Nazis, so everything they do and have done from that point is good right?
> The thing holding back unions in the U.S is the unions themselves and the laws around them. Once a union forms, they have entirely too much power.
This is a nice summary of the central issue with unions in the U.S. A rational person can quickly see why people are clamoring for unions in the U.S. and also why American companies are so resistant.
What power do they have too much of?
Besides a complete stranglehold on labor markets in a number of industries where the government is required to use union labor for infrastructure projects and they limit the number of laborers to drive up price. Or how about the Plumbers union that forced the city of Chicago to continue installing lead pipes until the federal government had to force them to stop. Beyond that, the power to promote good workers or make necessary changes across the org. For example, why doesn't Chicago have any driver-less trains and a conductor shortage? The unions are preventing both.
>For example, why doesn't Chicago have any driver-less trains and a conductor shortage? The unions are preventing both.
Most of your post was complete non-sense but this last line really does take the cake.
That’s a lot of words that don’t establish a connection to unions
> I am aware of one employee who had a panic attack at this moment, and HR hung up on them during this panic attack not caring at all about their wellbeing.
One can only hope this employee survived.
How many people die each year from panic attacks?
I love GTA/Red Dead but Rockstar really is just another monopoly (in terms of creativity) at this stage. More mid sized studios, like Rockstar when it started/midway, would be better.
Also the narrative and dialogue is ever so slightly overated in Rockstar games because the competition is quite nerdy/square in that department as are most of the audience. The ending of Red Dead II was actually quite trite, especially in terms of dialogue and narrative (in my opinion) even though the game is incredible overall. It is honestly still very far from a Tarantino script.
“Monopoly” has a particular meaning. Would you describe how Rockstar is one? Or is even one of a small list of “big dogs” / defacto choices in a specific industry?
Yes, that's vague. I specifically mean a creative monopoly. Compare the writing and dialogue of a Paul Thomas Anderson or Tarantino movie to Rockstar. Most of their games don't come close. Because it's a game the standard for storyline and dialogue is slightly lower because you are like "wow I am almost literally a cowboy/Nico". I wonder if we will see a mix of games with genuinely Tarantino style writing and narrative + technical / design implementation. Small studios doing this faster and more ethically would be better. People who quit Rockstar are very talented with something to prove too.
I genuinely cringed at the end of RDII due to the dialogue just feel the need to mention that again...