this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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This.
Valve doesn't release games, it releases ads for Steam.
Which is fine. It's great. Makes for great, cheap products and long-term strategies that aren't trying to shake all the money off of you.
But that's the end goal, still.
As a friendly reminder, Valve also universalized DRM, invented multiple new types of microtransactions and actually kinda invented NFTs for a little bit.
Invented the loot box y'all love so much. Tried to invent paid mods. Valve is still a Corpo and corpos gonna corpos
Honestly I'll defend TF2 loot boxes til I die. There are valid complaints as far as casual gamers go but as someone who played the game for thousands of hours the cosmetic system added a lot of longevity to the game. It was a fun ecosystem to engage with and compared to modern games where you spend $15-20 on a single cosmetic item it was an absolute bargain. If you got tired of an item you could trade it for something else too.
Idk maybe I just got indoctrinated but I have so many positive memories of that game and interacting with the cosmetic system. These days every game you play is shoving their store front in your face. Every cosmetic is $20 and if you don't buy it now it's lost forever. Don't want to spend money? Ok here's an "event" where you need to play the game 2 hours a day for a week to unlock some meh items and if you don't then fuck you those items are gone forever.
Sorry I'm ranting.
Agreed. It sounds weird saying, but I feel that Valve did these things right or at least fixed them quickly thereafter. I've never felt any sense of pay-to-win or being left out playing TF2. Quite the opposite. I'd get the new items quick enough, and if there was anything in there articular I'd want then there was a robust market willing to make it happen for cheaper than I thought. And "cheaper" referring to in-game items.
I actually agree that loot boxes aren't intrinsically bad.
I mean, I was buying Magic the Gathering cards before anybody got mad at making blind purchases. The entire field is called Gacha because it's modelled on analogue equivalents people don't mind at all.
But that's not what the community will tell you. Loot boxes are THE problem, if you ask this in a different context. Fundamentally predatory.
Unless you bring it up in this, and only this context. When Valve does it it's fine. Never mind that they had and actual gambling problem around their retradeable cosmetic loot box drops. Or that their implementation is indistinguishable from others. Or that they have a pattern of innovating in the monetization space not just with loot boxes but with battlepasses, cosmetics and other stuff people claim to not like when other people do it.
The shocker isn't the actual business practices, it's the realization that you can get so good at PR that you can't just get away with it, but have the exact same people that are out there asking for the government to intervene to stop those actively defend you against the mere suggestion that your business model is your actual business model.
Look, I was out there during the big loot box controversies that there were babies going out with thtat bathwater. I like me some Hearthstone and CCGs and other games that do those things. I like a bunch of free to play things. Got a TON of crap every time I even dared to float that online. UNLESS it comes up in a conversation about Valve. Then I get crap flung in the opposite direction.
I'm not saying you shouldn't like them, I'm saying that brief "maybe I'm indoctrinated" moment of realization should make you take a minute and reassess your relationships with brands and corporations. We are all subject to PR influence.
Your argument rests on the claim that Valve's implementation of these practices is indistinguishable from hated industry standards, but I disagree.
The "hated industry standards" are in many cases directly copied from the Valve implementations that predate them, so... yeah.
I mean, I haven't played CS2 yet, and definitely haven't played CS:GO in a while, but I may need you to point me at the timecode in this video where the superior free-range loot boxes are way better than in, say, Call of Duty, because I'm not sure I caught it the first time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJGY6RGPCnY
And again, I'm not against these on principle. I think unboxing videos are a bit weird and I don't see the appeal of opening tons of boxes in one sitting in real life, either... but this is the exact same implementation being criticized elsewhere.
Don't TF2 loot boxes contain weapons that alter the gameplay?
Playing a touch of devils advocate here but, how are patreon only mods any different than what valve was trying to do? It seems if mod makers wanna get paid for their work they should be able to monetize it in via any avenue that fits their fans abilities.
I've never heard of patreon only mods, tell me more
A lot of the stuff you'd find yourself in lovers lab for Skyrim has gone patreon only. As well as some rimworld mods. I also used to track a vr modder that released patreon exclusive builds (RDR2 was the primary one until R* DMCA'd them).
It's a good way to generate revenue for creators.
So access to the files in the first place is managed by Patreon, but the files are manually downloaded, belong to the users forever, and could theoretically be pirated if the users thought it was necessary?
Uh, paid mods were around in the 90s. Probably earlier but that's what I can testify to.
Maybe it's a good idea to pay modders for their work?
So the greed can take over?
Nah, give me amateurs making silly broken mods over corpo market researched boring ones any day of the week.
As a communist, I don't think we should pay anyone for their work.
Remember when parents raised their own kids, for free? I remember. These days it takes two incomes to raise a family, so the parents have to hire babysitters to watch the kids, so they can afford to have kids. That's fucked up. Putting capitalism in childcare just resulted in neglected kids and parents who don't get to see their families. I don't think we should pay people for raising kids.
I don't think we should pay people for any kind of work. I think we should do all kinds of work the same way we used to raise kids.
That's not what I'm saying. We live in a capitalist society, so people need to be paid
The appropriate response to capitalism's existence is not to do more capitalism. We did parenting for free for a long time during capitalism. We did mods for free for a long time during capitalism. We should be working to create anarchic structures like the family or the modding community to de-capitalise our lives.
Invented but never abused. Remember who the abusers are. I don't mind loot boxes in TF2 or CS. I simply don't have to open them or buy them. There's no pay to win there. And with paid mods they said it clearly, they underestimated their audience and returned the money. You think Bethesda has done such a thing or Blizzard?
DOTA 2, Counter-Strike 2, TF 2 are all maintained and get updates or total overhauls.
What’s their opinion on NFTs now?
That was slightly facetious. I just spent the entirety of the NFT bubble reminding people that tradeable tokens attached to JPGs is something that Valve invented to do with their dumb trading cards when they introduced those and we all saw in real time that all of them trend to zero value immediately.
I kept asking cryptobros to explain why their new tokenized JPGs were gonna behave any differently and it turns out there really wasn't a particularly good answer to that one.
For the record, those get updated and get total overhauls because they are driven by cosmetics MTX and/or battlepasses, both of which Valve straight-up invented in their modern form.
So I guess yeah, they either make cutting edge innovations in monetization design for games-as-service things or they put out ads for Steam. I think the larger point holds.
I don’t understand your point. It’s bad that they give out free games and constantly update them because they make money on cosmetics? That’s somehow worse or as bad as companies that make the same game every year, charge an arm and a leg for it and then have micro transactions on top of it? Or they’re bad because they innovate and then other companies take their ideas and make them shittier? What’s your point, exactly?
No, they don't make them shittier. My point is that they're in it for the money, the money just flows in different ways. Their battlepasses weren't any better or worse than anybody else's, and neither are their cosmetics.
They just get a pass because their brand is rock solid and they run very quiet and very cheap with a very long term view enabled by being a private company. That's not good or bad, it's a corporation out to make corporation things and doing them very well.
Their cosmetics are miles better because you can resell them on a market that they maintain. You really don’t know what you’re talking about.
No dog, you just really like the thing they’re talking about and it’s coloring your reaction. The points they’re making are actually very reasonable, but your responses read like they’re just criticizing Valve as a matter of opinion rather than practice.
To be clear, it's not even criticism. I don't mind Valve making money or being great at PR and branding or using MTX. I am way more chill with those things than the average gamer.
If there's anything here that rubs me the wrong way is objectively identical practices being assessed in entirely opposite ways by the community based on who is doing them. And it doesn't even bother me because I think the practices are bad or because I don't recognize that Valve absolutely worked on positioning that exact way.
Mostly it just gives me a bit of anxiety to realize that you can get away with that and somehow nobody else seems able to do it.
Honestly, if I had to guess why I'd say it's down to Valve being a private company. They genuinely can just never tell anybody what they're doing or what their plans and make long term investments. But man, the outcome is kinda scary.
I mean, they are. Most of what they've said is demonstrably untrue.
That is a hilarious statement for reasons I won't get into here.
But also, it's a concerning statement because... yeah, no, that makes them arguably more predatory. I mean, they didn't have to attempt to dismantle an entire grey market of gambling built around their weird NFT-ish resell mechanics because it's such a fair environment.
So no, I don't love NFTs and I certainly don't think Valve inventing the entire concept around trading cards and in-game cosmetics way back when was a step in the right direction. That whole ecosystem was always a mess and it only got better because they started siloing the really bad chunks and the rest of it just quietly died down.
It makes them more predatory that I can sell cosmetics for games I no longer play to recoup that investment to use it on games I do play?
K
I mean... yeah? A whole bunch of gross crap triggers when people can use in-game stuff as real world currency.
Valve didn't pioneer TFA because they are infosec nerds, they did it because their userbase was being actively targeted. It was them and WoW early on. And again, there's the whole black market gambling ring. That made actual headlines, which is rare from Valve. I had to lock down my account and hide my inventory because at some point I got a pretty rare TF2 drop and I started being targeted by both scams and legit trade offers to the point where the spam made it hard to use the service.
And for every one of those transactions, legitimate or illegitimate, Valve gets a cut. That's their entire business model: whatever anybody in their system is doing, user or creator, they're just sitting by and getting a cut.
I'm not even mad about it, but it's certainly not better than everybody else who is doing MTX and loot boxes and cosmetics and stuff. Half of those practices are copy-pasted from stuff Valve invented.
This is an angle that often goes unconsidered. As someone with a valuable inventory, the social aspect of the service has been made all but completely unusable for me.
The profits made from the ingame markets aren’t that scuzzy until you realize they’re primarily making those profits from their f2p, in house developed games (tf2, cs, and dota). At the end of the day, Valve wants to make money. If all of their money comes from virtual items, the primary thing that will see any real dev time/effort is gonna be those virtual items. It’s profitable stagnation, and it’s bad for consumers.
except they aren't, but you don't understand enough about this to be able to conceptualize reality.
Image tokening was around before valve trading cards and the cards don't use blockchain verification (they never did). We've been embedding symbols as vectors for DECADES. It started as payment card technology.