Everyone I know personally still loves steam. We hate more than a few banks and strongly dislike the visa/mastercard duopoly but steam is great. Guessing the game drought is causing some news publications to reach for a story.
It's more than love - I have friends who will actively refuse to buy games on other stores, even for significantly better prices.
(To be fair - I think some stores like the Epic Games store actively make playing games on them worse, e.g. I played Alan Wake 2 through Epic and the achievements notifications were massively distracting, ruining many scary and dramatic moments, and they turn themselves back on every time you launch the game...)
I bought a game on Epic over Steam for the better price once and I'll never do it again. Steam is just too good of a platform and Epic has a lot to work out. Valve has also earned my trust way more than Epic has. Epic comes off as a company of the people sometimes when they drop a suit against Apple or something, but they're exactly the same when it suits them (like their dark patterns for in-game purchases).
There have been timed exclusives on Epic that I just waited out, partially out of spite, and mostly because I just wouldn't want to own the game on something that wasn't Steam.
They try to play folk hero when it suits them, but someone who actually cared about individual well-being wouldn't lock Linux players out of their flagship games, or use dark patterns like artificial scarcity to get people to spend more time/money in their ecosystem.
Yes, if Epic is the cure it's worse than the disease. I do think Steam needs competition to keep them innovative/honest though that's why I try to buy stuff on GoG when possible.
I'm one of those. I have a few reasons. Initially it was just wanting to keep things in one place as much as possible, but as a Linux guy it's morphed into fierce platform loyalty as a way to support Linux gaming.
I think it's entirely fair though. Valve has put a lot of its money where its mouth is on this. I get that it started as a hegemony against Windows' store, but it's been great for the Linux community as a whole. By some metrics, desktop Linux is sitting around 6%, and I think that Valve is almost solely responsible (along with all wine devs) for at least a full 1% of that.
It's started to even draw a lot of attention from more general gaming and pc streamers. So many videos of different streamers trying Bazzite lately.
Next year might actually see a tipping point where there can be real pressure to gain support from the likes of Adobe. I expect MS might make some offline version or Office 365 + Electron at some point soon as well.
Same (excepting GOG, where I buy the game if they have it, but they usually don't). I'm so grateful to Steam for working on Linux that I actually feel good about buying games knowing it's a vote for Linux.
It definitely helps that it works (almost) flawlessly. If it stopped working well, I would stop using them, but with the current status quo it's a rare example of a company I transact with that I actually feel good about
Cloud saves that work reliably and games that support the steam workshop instead of 3rd party mod managers makes a huge difference to me. The reality of putting down a game on my desktop and then starting it up again in the same state on my laptop later that night without me having to do or think about anything across basically every game in their store is amazing. I can spend hours crafting my perfect Dwarf Fortress or RimWorld mod setup and it's just saved and available on every computer I play on.
People have now been successfully conditioned to not own anything.
Steam came out in 2003, in an era where PC gaming was still very much - go to the store and buy a physical CD. You owned the game.
I still feel uneasy about it, but Steam is the least evil (outside of GOG, but much smaller catalog). But our options for actually owning digital content have all evaporated, unless you sail the high seas.
The next evolution in our journey to non ownership will be game streaming, if latency can be solved to take the non-ownership a step further. We are halfway there with even single player games now requiring an always-on internet connection.
I wasn't a hater of Steam, but I did hate it being forced on the CS community as well as the news that it would be required for HL2.
At the time I had dialup. Patching on Valve's schedule simply did not work for me. Patching most games at that point was a multi-stage process involving resume-capable download managers and setting my PC to automatically get online and start downloading at night.
I will say that even those who had broadband did have legitimate grievances. Any kind of background process mattered a lot more back then, and Steam was not particularly light weight thanks in part to its use of a custom UI framework. I also don't recall it being particularly stable early on, nor the servers being able to hold up too well under load as demonstrated almost immediately by the HL2 launch. Neither insurmountable and both in fact surmounted within a few years, but again it was being forced on an existing community.
Had it been optional for CS it still would have had a rough start with HL2 and a lot of gripes from that community but I think it wouldn't have been hated as hard as what resulted from forcing it on CS players.
I love steam. A big part of my complaints 20 years ago was that I barely ran these games in the first place! Nowadays computers are a lot more powerful compared to games.
Proliferation of credit cards, increased internet stability/speed, and more powerful computers have taken the warts away. Steam has also repeatedly shown to be on the side of the consumer, and also very offline friendly.
I completely agree with you. 21 years ago when it was released it was simply “yet another competitor” to the sort of overlay systems that gamespy and the like were trying to implement. You installed it because Half-Life 2 (and the litany of mods that became empires into themselves) required it, but it took years for it to develop in a direction that pointed to where we are now.
The first time I did a rebuild and now no longer needed the installation media for games, or the license keys in the manual/game jacket, and I was fully sold.
I don’t fully grasp the hatred, because almost every aspect of it is a vast improvement over what existed 20 years ago. But fortunately there are alternatives.
>Steam has also repeatedly shown to be on the side of the consumer
Except when they only added any sort of return mechanism after violating consumer rights laws in all sorts of jurisdictions for like a decade.
Though that was significantly less painful back in the day when a steam sale was actually meaningful.
Steam's pro-consumer-ness is absurdly overblown, but the rest of consumer facing corporations are so fucking awful in comparison that they look like angels. They're also mostly just trying to keep anyone from looking at the closet full of profits explicitly from enabling underage gambling.
Not that I'm a hater, but people need to keep perspective. Valve is just a company that is slightly less abhorrent in it's practices.
Nowadays their return policy is really generous though. And it gets me to buy more games, a couple hours is long enough to figure out if a game works on my end.
Of course, I’d never use their generous only-superficial-questions-asked-if-you-don’t-play-much return policy to, basically, get a demo of a game. Because that isn’t what it is intended for. But, I wonder if that ability has gotten them more sales…
It used to be normal for steam sales to be somewhat rare and surprising, but the tradeoff was that it was the norm for big and popular games to have staggering discounts.
In 2012, Terraria went on sale for 25 cents. Valve sold the entire Half Life family for like two dollars. AAA and big name games would go for 80% off or more, back when that actually got you a full game without microtransactions or significant DLC to buy.
People got excited about the sales because you might wake up to find the game you really wanted for $60 was now a few dollars.
Objectively "Incredible" deals are a lot less common, and old stuff doesn't have massive discounts anymore, sticking with "just" very good discounts.
I still see some pretty staggering deals now and again, but maybe not to the extent you remember (I don't really remember that, but I was also primarily a WoW player back then, and didn't pay as much attention).
How much of that is to blame on steam vs. the publishers, though? I would imagine the publishers have much more control over (if not total control?) over pricing. So, unless I'm wrong, it seems misguided to put that at steam's feet.
I remember that when HL2 came out. At that time I think it was fully justified hate of what was essentially DRM bloatware, not yet tempered by many years of Valve/Steam earning a good reputation for doing things right.
It’s because steam is 100% an aberration in our modern world. The closest comparison is, maybe, Costco?
And we who are dependent on steam know how bad things would be if steam wasn’t this unicorn. Gaben is the rare feudal lord whose people show up to battle out because they know it’s good for them. All he had to do was not abuse his monopoly for the past 25 years, as the meme goes.
The “do nothing and win” strategy has served Valve well. The fact is every publisher wants their own launcher on start-up running all the time collecting data, updating all the time, throwing popups at the user.
The user on the other hand doesn’t want 8 different bloated game launchers slowing startup, siphoning bandwidth, constantly updating, using a bunch of memory, and each using 1-2% of CPU at idle doing who knows what.
I have Ubisoft Connect launching because one game (Trackmania). And it is most annoying piece of software on my computer. Popping up sometimes even in middle of gameplay... And it can not even correctly close itself, but instead threw an error...
I'm included in that. Steam is great, I've been using it for 21 years, and I don't need/want another launcher.
Occasionally I was forced into using others, when a game only released on Epic / Origin / Battle.net. But they all felt worse than Steam. So given a choice for the game, I'll buy it on Steam even at a higher price.
That's basically me. While Steam can always be improved (and has been), it has worked well and to me looks better than the alternatives. Additionally, I trust Valve and value it's products. So I don't mind paying more and it's also very convenient to use just Steam and not worry about anything else.
I know this is far from a hot take, but I really think people need to be more weary of what will happen with Valve once Gabe passes. No amount of profitability seems to stop people from demanding more even at the cost of longterm viability.
Imagine a world where a PE firm gets its hands on valve
Kind of a terrifying thought... Not familiar enough with Valve/Steam's corporate structure to know if they have a governance model in their founding documents to help prevent this.
Funny you mentioned Epic - I bought something there and played it for a while, until one day it just...refused to load
Ended up in a loop of support asking for logs ad infinitum, while ignoring the fact that when I installed the client and game on a separate computer it crashed at the same point. Chalked it up to experience and just decided to not give them any more of my money
Lord Gaben has almost a cult like following, so any missteps are going to be ignored. Steam is objectively great compared to other stores so it will barely see a problem. If the fact that children are gambling skins on the platform barely affects them, an issue they are in full control of, I doubt this controversy where they were pressured externally will cause any long lasting damage to them.
+1 - I used GOG for the first time the other week to get a copy of Morrowind so I could see how https://openmw.org/ was these days, and it was a really good experience.
I did have to use some obscure tool to extract it being on Linux but it's nice to know I won't have to purchase another copy again. There's a number of games I've had to repeat purchase (mostly from disk to digital), and with modding the forced auto updates on steam can also be a pain
For Linux desktop gaming, Steam bests GoG all day, everyday.
Before Valve sponsoring/partnering with Code Weavers on Proton, running anything-but-old-and-stable games via Wine was a fraught affair, now even games that update weekly/monthly run perfectly, without having to fiddle with config files or downloading specific DLLs. For the large and growing library of supported games, Steam made Linux gaming painless.
GOG is in bed with Amazon. I have over 130 games via GOG, only a handful I paid for -- right now I can only think of the Yakuza 0-6 collection that was priced so low I had to do it even though I played them all on a friend's xbox before. The rest are from Amazon's gifting of them to me via having a Prime account and Twitch account. Many are games I already bought and played on Steam, they're good games they're not just gifting trash. In any case, just like Epic and their mass of freely given games, it all but guarantees I never give those platforms a dime especially if I think a game will be gifted eventually. (It makes me hesitate sometimes on steam purchases too, which is probably part of the point, but I've got a giant backlog so buying can wait anyway, and it's a rare game that I want to buy and play right now.)
I'll continue supporting Steam over GOG for PC gaming, especially as a Linux user.
Honestly I find “they give away free games so I won’t use them” to be a weird take.
In any case, often with these free deals the developer is compensated according to how many installs the game gets. Number of installs during sales is also a metric that helps gain funding for future titles.
So if Epic/GOG give away a game you already have and like, taking the time to add it to your collection, installing and running it briefly may help the developer out.
This needs to be more widely known. As a consumer, I would care more about the developer experience with Steam if more stories were told about it vs. say Epic, but I understand if there are things like commercial-in-confidence, or NDA that prevent it.
As someone who’s using steam daily for probably 50-75% of their lifetime now: I don’t love them, but it’s the lesser evil for sure.
Sure, if GOG had even 20% of steams catalog and useability, it be no. 1 without question. But since we‘re sadly limited to this one reality, there is no alternative.
XBOX GamePass is a trap I expect to spring every day, Uplay and EA Origin are just a splash screen I see when starting a game in steam, and I almost forgot the epic store exists, despite their “free game”
Marketing campaign.
It’s not perfect, it’s anti-consumer way to often, and it’s for sure a monopoly’s, but steam is still my favorite poison
And yes, if they decide to disable me account and cut me off my pile of shame I will have an impact.
But owning games does not seem to be an option generally. Exceptions exist, ofc.
I’ll never get over the hypocrisy of people loving steam and its exclusives while hating EGS and its exclusives. I’ve never seen an almost purely tech-focused crowd pull so hard for a monopoly before.
Yeah, I can't think of any explicitly Steam-exclusive games off the top of my head, other than maybe Valve's own titles.
Given Steam's history and market position, they don't need exclusives at this point. I do remember the likes of Outer Wilds and Final Fantasy 7 Remake being EGS exclusives for the first year of their respective PC releases.
GOG is great but I'd like them even more if they did some of the wine/proton work that Steam does for Linux users. For the dosbox games at least it's not much to do (for them nor for myself to be fair.)
Steam is simultaneously hard to like, as a DRM service, but also hard to dislike as they put so much care into getting games running on Linux and have a very reasonable return policy, full refunds for the game not working makes it easy for Linux users especially.
To be clear, there are many games on Steam without DRM. It's up to the publisher whether Steam DRM is used or not (or if any other 3rd party DRM is used, for that matter).
I suspect almost all of the games on GoG, if they are also on Steam, also don't have DRM on Steam.
DRM and especially 3rd party launchers are both things that get me to skip games on Steam. I wish Steam made it simpler to just filter those games out of your store view.
I won’t complain about anyone investing into wine/proton. GOG/CDPR just seem less willing or less capable of spending that money.
Valve is essentially printing money. From sales, but also from other, morally less likeable sources like gambling. It’s nice to see them spending at least a tiny part of this in ways that serve the greater good (besides their own business).
Same point: it’s not good, but that’s reality for you.
I don’t. Slippery slope is always a fallacy until it affects something we want to conserve. There has been a huge push for an absolute lack of censorship in games, so it’s… pretty predictable that we’d see the pendulum swing back, I guess?
Interestingly Valve makes the most money per head compared to any other company. At $19m/head it's magnitudes above Meta and the average salary is $1.4m[0]!
I'm not trying to disparage steam, I actually really like them[1]. I'm pointing it out because it's a business strategy we don't see that often: loyalty. I mean what other billionaire do you know where there's tons of memes of but is also overwhelmingly seen in a positive light? Sure, he doesn't have Elon money but dude has $10bn, I don't think another $290bn is really going to make a big difference in his life[2]. He has way less controversy than Elon had even before all the political stuff. Steam is like Costco, except Gabe is a billionaire.
What I'm trying to say is that you can become a billionaire by building a quality product and through customer loyalty. These things don't have to be mutually exclusive. You can be fucking rich, your employees can be fucking rich, you can build a useful, AND a beloved product. In a time where we live in a Lemon Economy, where it is all about making the s̶h̶i̶t̶t̶i̶e̶s̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶u̶s̶e̶r̶s̶ ̶w̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶b̶u̶y̶ minimum viable product, where we rush for the newest feature and loudest bells and whistles (regardless of if they actually work), Steam stands out.
[1] Like another user pointed out, they won be over with Linux gaming. I've had a great experience with them, even from the early days. You could tell through github issues they cared. They wouldn't just dismiss things like "oh, we don't support that distro" and actually just figure out what's going on (because your distro doesn't actually matter). They were clearly nerds themselves and nerds that cared.
[2] You just can't spend that kind of money. Fucking MacKenzie Scott is trying to give her wealth away as fast as possible, has already given away half her wealth, but she has the same net worth as when she divorced Bezos. Compound interest is a crazy thing.
[3] P.S. Fuck Visa and Mastercard. Unless my transaction is illegal, you better fucking process it. Anything short of that is holding my own money hostage. That is fucking theft. You created the duopoly. Don't get greedy or you'll lose it.
Interesting add. I don't think I'd be surprised if there are even bigger profits per head considering that you can't measure what you can't measure, but I don't think Tether fulfills the other aspects. Though if I googled right, their CEO has a similar net worth. I'd wager it isn't nearly as liquid as Gabe's though.
Unfortunately by translating Windows games, Valve doesn't even manage to get game studios to port Android/Linux (NDK) into GNU/Linux, shows how much studios care.
I think this is ultimately a benefit. I've had too many proprietary native Linux games that slowly broke overtime as libraries they depended on changed or became deprecated. Hosting unmaintained proprietary software like this has always been difficult with Linux.
With Proton we basically have a common stable runtime that handles all the platform specific needs of a video game. It just so happens that runtime is largely binary-compatible with Windows. It's easier for devs to support when all they have to do is stick to a Proton-compatible subset of the Win32 API. Users get way more games. And anecdotally my experience as a user is generally better than with true native ports. It's a big net win.
Which is why de-monopolization of critical infrastructure such as payments is important for sovereignty.
Also which is why, I am happy to see V-pay and SEPA transfers in EU. Especially SEPA-direct transfers, allowing you to be free of CC-processing fees completely as they have been regulated to be free quite well...
If you don't like CC gatekeeping, you really won't like being dropped from your bank due to suspicious transactions. Financial institutions of various capacities are downstream from their chartering polities which seem very interested in holding sovereignty of geography over individuality.
"payment processors insist that if the product is legal, they do not tell vendors what they can or cannot sell"
Absolute lies. They require that transactions that may damage the goodwill of the Corporation or reflect negatively on the Marks are not to be submitted to the Interchange System. It is also their own sole discretion what does or doesn't hurt their Brand.
It's a stupid situation that banks and payment processors force their ethics upon while other companies take the blame (valve in this case). They should just dommoney transfers and as long as the transfer itself is legal should not have any opinion on the parties or product involved in the transaction.
First, the networks have brand protection stipulations for any partner that uses the network. None of them want to be known as the porn brand.
Second, porn (and other similar categories) have a different risk profile than other charges. Specifically chargeback risk goes through the roof. None of the members of the network want to deal with sales of things that spike chargebacks.
Third, the federal government and some states have outsourced enforcement of some laws to the banks and payment networks. It’s easier to ban things than to do this enforcement at times.
None of this is a ethics issue and none of this is about money transfers. It’s about extending credit, and there is no technical solution around credit extension with electronic payments.
It's probably true from the perspective of the credit card companies. For the activists it's about ethics and morality, but I think for the credit card corps it's about their fear of the reputational harm the activists might be able to inflict.
Considering the fact that these payment processors are still happily processing payments from PornHub, OnlyFans and other big real porn platforms, I don't think your explanation about the networks not wanting to be associated with porn holds any ground. They're targeting video games specifically.
The games they are targeting are primarily pornographic. It unfortunately was used to also cast a wider net. But at its core that is exactly the content that was being brought up.
A puritanical activist group circumvents the law/courts and successfully pressures the handful of companies that control the vast majority of transactions to remove content they find distasteful - content that is 100% legal - but this isn’t an ethics discussion?
But that’s exactly what it is. They are worried about the blowback from the very easy PR advantage groups like this have, all based on weaponizing how it is basically a PR slam dunk to paint these companies as “supporting disgusting pornography” and “exposing harmful content to minors.” As long as you can couch your points in that kind of rhetoric, you are virtually unbeatable in the US when it comes to messaging. No major company is going to stand in defense of pornography outside of Pornhub.
There’s a reason this hasn’t been taken to the courts and regardless of what you attribute the motivation to the outcome is the same. This is top to bottom an ethics discussion, and the banks are a part of it. By capitulating they have made a choice. They decided the public debate would be bad for business.
> They are worried about the blowback from the very easy PR advantage groups like this have, all based on weaponizing how it is basically a PR slam dunk to paint these companies as “supporting disgusting pornography” and “exposing harmful content to minors.”
They may be worried (slightly) but they also most likely simply don't want another headache.
A corporation is in business to make money and that means that they will do what makes the most money in the shortest amount of time as long as it's legal.
Getting entangled in a potential lawsuit that would take years to resolve and cost many millions of $ is a distraction that does not serve their interest. If you are Epic and it is in your interest to challenge Apple and if winning this lawsuit brings you potentially more revenue, then that is a different story entirely.
GP was right when he said this is a business decision. Porn has nothing to do with it. It could have been gambling and harry Potter books, the end result would have been the same.
To give you an example:
I have a small business with a very clear refund policy, yet every 6 months or so, someone will send me a message saying that they forgot that they have an active subscription and could I refund them the money or they will do a charge-back.
Please note before getting the pitchforks out, that my refund policy is very generous and that each customer gets an email before their subscription renews so there is nothing deceptive in my billing practices and also users have the ability to self refund their last payment in the app.
I am faced with the same question that Steam faced, what do I do? Do I fight the refund and eventually fight the charge-back costing me time and money when I could be doing other things or do I roll over and get it over with so that this headache goes away as soon as possible so that I can focus on my other customers?
That's how businesses see things. Opportunity cost. I understand that for some people (including you) this sort of decisions could be seen as some sort of morality judgement but IMHO it is not.
What does Steam have to gain from starting a fight with Visa or Mastercard? A better reputation with gamers? Will that help them increase their revenue in the short term or the long term? Will this make them liable for other things down the line like an angry parent suing them because their son or daughter bought a game with naked people in it and the kid was only 8 at the time?
This is the equation that I am sure many people at Steam ran and the they decided that it just wasn't adding up.
It sucks because from a personal point of view I agree with you, they should have thought harder but from a business point of view they simply followed what made most sense and decided that the risk wasn't worth the reward.
Does it mean Mastercard/Visa are right, absolutely not? This duopoly should be broken up but no politician in the west or elsewhere is going to go after them for the same reason that nobody went after the banks that brought the global economy to it's knees in 2008.
That phrasing makes it sound somehow illegal, but all the activists did was exercise their right to engage in political speech. I don't particularly agree with their cause, but there's nothing untoward about their methods.
The real problem for society isn't the fact that political groups can raise a ruckus about things we personally don't agree with, but rather the fact that payment processors are such a narrow choke point, ideal for putting up gates and thereby giving a small group of people way too much control. The solution is to address the choke point, not to play wack-a-mole trying to slap down activist groups whenever they vie for control of the choke point (which will inevitably continue to happen as long as the choke point exists.)
If you are taking electronic payments you are extending credit. The rails (currently) require it.
Cash by mail would be either the merchant extending credit to the purchaser if they allowed the game download before receipt or the purchaser extending credit if not.
You're speaking out of ignorance here. Steam has a long-term relationship with its customers. They can and will remove a title from a user's library if the payment is charged back, as well as placing restrictions on the account.
I'm a long term customer of Steam _and_ work in the payments industry. In the _easiest_ Steam payment there are 7 different parties extending or receiving credit from each other. Most of those counter parties have no relationship with each other at all (I certainly don't maintain close ties with the game publishers bank), do you?
The rules that are being invoked around porn exist to protect different parts of that chain, from each other.
The argument about Steams ability to revoke the good in question doesn't help with that. What it does is provide an alternate path if Steam wanted to extricate themselves from that chain of 7 counterparties. Steam could stop being involved with all those other players and become a payment network unto themselves. They could demand ach (or cash in the mail as the parent suggests). Give the game with the understanding they would rapidly revoke it for bad customers, and limit their exposure to the publisher by giving them very delayed payment terms. Of course, then the customer is taking on more risk and losing choice and Steam has to account for that in their sales numbers.
By this reasoning every transaction involves credit, since there's a time period between me swiping my card for the apples, and me walking out of the store with the apples, during which time you could tackle me and take my apples. And if it's a word that applies to every transaction, then it's meaningless.
Every transaction _does_ involve credit risk (specifically counter party or settlement risk) but the amount of it changes based on the difference in time between when payment happens and the transaction is completed. So for most purposes a cash transaction where I give you cash and you give me the goods is viewed as riskless (even though it's not as you point out).
But in your example, you don't need to invoke a security guard stealing your apples. There is a _ton_ of credit risk already just by the invocation of the electronic payment. Your funds will not hit the account of the merchant in question for _a long time_ (usually modeled as 1-3 days for risk purposes in the US). All kinds of things can happen in that time. The merchant has extended you credit and has taken on credit risk. They've done so because of the chain of credit and agreements that the banks, processors and networks have worked out.
If Mastercard gets a bunch of its transactions reversed because a Congressional panel gets huffy about pornography, that potentially blows up transactions for apples miles away. That's why this is mostly a conversation about risk management, not morals. To the apple vendor's bank, they largely don't care if you buy porn, they just don't want their settlements caught up in the blowback.
The monetary system is a public good and should be treated like one, with transparent upfront rules not arbitrary action that takes people by surprise.
I can understand banning bad actors that successfully or unsuccessfully perform fraud and other such direct acts against payment processors or merchants.
For pretty much anything else, nope only courts in jurisdiction should be able to act... If even then.
Ridiculous that a few large corporations get to decide this. The only people who have any business deciding what content is or isn't allowed on someone else's platform, are the People, or their representatives in government.
I can accept that some content goes too far and might have to be banned according to some people, but the only groups who should have the actual power to do that, should be the owner of the platform, the users of the platform, and the government, and definitely not some third party that might have completely different interests.
The only reason this is possible at all is that some of these payment providers are nearly monopolists. People should have about a dozen payment options to avoid this. Fortunately I do; Steam supports iDeal, which is not controlled by any payment provider. It just goes straight to my bank. If my bank were to try to ban certain types of legitimate payment, customers could simply switch to a different bank to avoid the ban.
The only kinds of payment that payment providers should ban, are those involving financial crimes, like money laundering, fraud and corruption.
Absolutely. That's the direction we need to go. And ideally, the rest of the world too. But having this EU-wide, will encourage more webshops outside the EU to also support it.
If valve can escape the Microsoft store, it can handle a few payment processors.
what would happen if Valve accepted Cryptocurrency?
in turn, what might happen if valve decided to become a cryptocurrency exchange exclusive to the gaming community?
EDIT: another solution is to use a load-wallet based system to shroud transactions from your financial nanny. money in, money out, no explicit evidence of a purchase.
Steam used to accept BTC payments in 2016 but they didn't want to deal with the probabilistic finality of bitcoin so they quickly removed the btc option. previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30478262
I think Valve will not accept crypto unless they run out of options. They don't accept any games that use NFT's on their platform and haven't added crypto top-ups to this day, even though it would be simple for them via providers like Stripe
Crypto is almost as bad as handing over your ID to see "adult" materials, because both require you to trust two parties (government ID stores and the general crypto community) that have shown themselves to not be trustworthy at all.
for the 1000th time. the blockchain with all transaction and wallets being viewable and traceable is not a issue of cryptocurrency itself but certain inferior and outdated coins like bitcoin.
monero has solved that issue and it does not matter if you see any "IDs"
A technological solution to a political problem. Visa/mastercard/banks will just censor the off ramps next.
> wallet based system
What does this accomplish? The same institutions will request proof that all transactions are compliant, which will most easily handled by simply banning the content.
Whose off ramps? Steam doesn’t need CCs for that. The more likely situation is them preventing payments through their system for Steam and Steam having to pick.
We were talking about steam transacting in crypto to avoid the censorship.
The people pressuring visa and Mastercard to drop porn/sex related services are not going to suddenly roll over when those services switch to crypto. They’ll simply go for the crypto off-ramps.
accepting cryptocurrency is depending on jurisdiction a legal liability
people already are trying to use all kind of vectors to launder money, including steam
and cryptocurrency systems in general don't do the legal due diligence of a payment processor/bank
so you now have the problem of being partially responsibility to do that legal due diligence yourself and make your service more attractive to be abused as in money laundering schemes
but if things get worse they could consider creating a payment processor sub company, the issue with that is I think there are a lot of way Visa can mess with them in the US and it seems not necessary in the EU (as due to side effects of pushing/forcing banking payment system improvements you technically have a wide choice of alternatives to PayPal or Credit Card payment for only payment, it's just many solutions are niche so most sides don't bother for now (but things are changing))
While all games delisted at MC/Visa demands were from the rape and/or incest nsfw genre (and that should've not been on Steam to begin with), it still set a dangerous precedent as the game selection criteria was ultimately subjective. Relatable, but subjective. Next time it will again be subjective, but not as clear cut, yet the precedent will already be in place.
When are they going to remove the murder genre? Including the game where you can murder a prostitute to get your payment back... it's very obscure, you might not have heard of it... it's called GTA V.
Point being that even though this time the takedown targets were reasonable, the next time they might not be, but the mechanism will be already in place.
Reasonable by your standard. As others noted not necessarily reasonable by theirs, especially when you contrast it with other games that remain available. It also flies in the face of research that shows that games probably prevent those fantasies from taking place in the real world which seems preferable.
Are you also in favor of prohibiting most booksellers from selling books which either contain scenes of or are exclusively about rape and/or incest? If not, why not?
In addition:
> (and that should've not been on Steam to begin with)
Where do you believe that they should have been sold? Are you proposing a separate "Steam: After Dark" store that only adult humans are permitted to browse and purchase from?
Indeed, PayPal is not gone for everyone, luckily. I am from Europe and can still buy games using PayPal, just did. This makes me happy, as I am trying for over two weeks now to buy credits on Open AI, just to be able to translate texts from the FastAPI docs to German. Open AI and others do not support PayPal and not even a prepaid credit card, which my local bank sold me as "works everywhere". It is frustrating.
PayPal is terrible for merchants, quite frankly, and often consumers at times. I don't understand why many people love them so much. There's a good reason many places don't accept PayPal nowadays.
That is good to hear, that would probably mean that they are accepted by Open AI (Though the Visa Logo is also on my Prepaid card and open AI does not accept it, whatever)
Everyone I know personally still loves steam. We hate more than a few banks and strongly dislike the visa/mastercard duopoly but steam is great. Guessing the game drought is causing some news publications to reach for a story.
It's more than love - I have friends who will actively refuse to buy games on other stores, even for significantly better prices.
(To be fair - I think some stores like the Epic Games store actively make playing games on them worse, e.g. I played Alan Wake 2 through Epic and the achievements notifications were massively distracting, ruining many scary and dramatic moments, and they turn themselves back on every time you launch the game...)
I bought a game on Epic over Steam for the better price once and I'll never do it again. Steam is just too good of a platform and Epic has a lot to work out. Valve has also earned my trust way more than Epic has. Epic comes off as a company of the people sometimes when they drop a suit against Apple or something, but they're exactly the same when it suits them (like their dark patterns for in-game purchases).
There have been timed exclusives on Epic that I just waited out, partially out of spite, and mostly because I just wouldn't want to own the game on something that wasn't Steam.
Epic is scummy as hell.
They try to play folk hero when it suits them, but someone who actually cared about individual well-being wouldn't lock Linux players out of their flagship games, or use dark patterns like artificial scarcity to get people to spend more time/money in their ecosystem.
Yes, if Epic is the cure it's worse than the disease. I do think Steam needs competition to keep them innovative/honest though that's why I try to buy stuff on GoG when possible.
Agreed.
Epic the past couple of years has been a great example of the "a broken clock is correct twice a day" idiom, at best.
I'm one of those. I have a few reasons. Initially it was just wanting to keep things in one place as much as possible, but as a Linux guy it's morphed into fierce platform loyalty as a way to support Linux gaming.
I think it's entirely fair though. Valve has put a lot of its money where its mouth is on this. I get that it started as a hegemony against Windows' store, but it's been great for the Linux community as a whole. By some metrics, desktop Linux is sitting around 6%, and I think that Valve is almost solely responsible (along with all wine devs) for at least a full 1% of that.
It's started to even draw a lot of attention from more general gaming and pc streamers. So many videos of different streamers trying Bazzite lately.
Next year might actually see a tipping point where there can be real pressure to gain support from the likes of Adobe. I expect MS might make some offline version or Office 365 + Electron at some point soon as well.
Same (excepting GOG, where I buy the game if they have it, but they usually don't). I'm so grateful to Steam for working on Linux that I actually feel good about buying games knowing it's a vote for Linux.
It definitely helps that it works (almost) flawlessly. If it stopped working well, I would stop using them, but with the current status quo it's a rare example of a company I transact with that I actually feel good about
Steam is just way better than other stores, because it's not just a store, it's got a bajillion features besides.
And now that I have a Steam Deck, this difference is even more stark.
Cloud saves that work reliably and games that support the steam workshop instead of 3rd party mod managers makes a huge difference to me. The reality of putting down a game on my desktop and then starting it up again in the same state on my laptop later that night without me having to do or think about anything across basically every game in their store is amazing. I can spend hours crafting my perfect Dwarf Fortress or RimWorld mod setup and it's just saved and available on every computer I play on.
Funny how we got here. Anyone with a 20 year badge remembers the hatred in the community over being forced to use it.
People have now been successfully conditioned to not own anything.
Steam came out in 2003, in an era where PC gaming was still very much - go to the store and buy a physical CD. You owned the game.
I still feel uneasy about it, but Steam is the least evil (outside of GOG, but much smaller catalog). But our options for actually owning digital content have all evaporated, unless you sail the high seas.
The next evolution in our journey to non ownership will be game streaming, if latency can be solved to take the non-ownership a step further. We are halfway there with even single player games now requiring an always-on internet connection.
I miss the days of offline and physical media.
Don't forget, before Steam was the dominant game distribution method, game discs:
* Required you to type in a serial number (at best), or went online to actually download the game binary (at worst).
* Needed to stay in the CD drive in order to play
* Could not be copied as a backup if the disc ever got lost or damaged.
* Was a major cause of scarcity for a digital product.
The concept of ownership was already eroding before Steam was created.
I wasn't a hater of Steam, but I did hate it being forced on the CS community as well as the news that it would be required for HL2.
At the time I had dialup. Patching on Valve's schedule simply did not work for me. Patching most games at that point was a multi-stage process involving resume-capable download managers and setting my PC to automatically get online and start downloading at night.
I will say that even those who had broadband did have legitimate grievances. Any kind of background process mattered a lot more back then, and Steam was not particularly light weight thanks in part to its use of a custom UI framework. I also don't recall it being particularly stable early on, nor the servers being able to hold up too well under load as demonstrated almost immediately by the HL2 launch. Neither insurmountable and both in fact surmounted within a few years, but again it was being forced on an existing community.
Had it been optional for CS it still would have had a rough start with HL2 and a lot of gripes from that community but I think it wouldn't have been hated as hard as what resulted from forcing it on CS players.
Haha, remember when it was "the weird tray app for playing Counter Strike"?
I love steam. A big part of my complaints 20 years ago was that I barely ran these games in the first place! Nowadays computers are a lot more powerful compared to games.
Proliferation of credit cards, increased internet stability/speed, and more powerful computers have taken the warts away. Steam has also repeatedly shown to be on the side of the consumer, and also very offline friendly.
I completely agree with you. 21 years ago when it was released it was simply “yet another competitor” to the sort of overlay systems that gamespy and the like were trying to implement. You installed it because Half-Life 2 (and the litany of mods that became empires into themselves) required it, but it took years for it to develop in a direction that pointed to where we are now.
The first time I did a rebuild and now no longer needed the installation media for games, or the license keys in the manual/game jacket, and I was fully sold.
I don’t fully grasp the hatred, because almost every aspect of it is a vast improvement over what existed 20 years ago. But fortunately there are alternatives.
Also having to find and backup your save files if you wanted/needed to reinstall Windows.
>Steam has also repeatedly shown to be on the side of the consumer
Except when they only added any sort of return mechanism after violating consumer rights laws in all sorts of jurisdictions for like a decade.
Though that was significantly less painful back in the day when a steam sale was actually meaningful.
Steam's pro-consumer-ness is absurdly overblown, but the rest of consumer facing corporations are so fucking awful in comparison that they look like angels. They're also mostly just trying to keep anyone from looking at the closet full of profits explicitly from enabling underage gambling.
Not that I'm a hater, but people need to keep perspective. Valve is just a company that is slightly less abhorrent in it's practices.
Nowadays their return policy is really generous though. And it gets me to buy more games, a couple hours is long enough to figure out if a game works on my end.
Of course, I’d never use their generous only-superficial-questions-asked-if-you-don’t-play-much return policy to, basically, get a demo of a game. Because that isn’t what it is intended for. But, I wonder if that ability has gotten them more sales…
>back in the day when a steam sale was actually meaningful.
Curious what you mean by this?
It used to be normal for steam sales to be somewhat rare and surprising, but the tradeoff was that it was the norm for big and popular games to have staggering discounts.
In 2012, Terraria went on sale for 25 cents. Valve sold the entire Half Life family for like two dollars. AAA and big name games would go for 80% off or more, back when that actually got you a full game without microtransactions or significant DLC to buy.
People got excited about the sales because you might wake up to find the game you really wanted for $60 was now a few dollars.
Objectively "Incredible" deals are a lot less common, and old stuff doesn't have massive discounts anymore, sticking with "just" very good discounts.
I still see some pretty staggering deals now and again, but maybe not to the extent you remember (I don't really remember that, but I was also primarily a WoW player back then, and didn't pay as much attention).
How much of that is to blame on steam vs. the publishers, though? I would imagine the publishers have much more control over (if not total control?) over pricing. So, unless I'm wrong, it seems misguided to put that at steam's feet.
I have a six digit friend code and yeah, people were very annoyed by Steam and not being able to use, what was it, won.net anymore?
That's true, but Valve put in the work to make Steam really great.
I remember that when HL2 came out. At that time I think it was fully justified hate of what was essentially DRM bloatware, not yet tempered by many years of Valve/Steam earning a good reputation for doing things right.
It’s because steam is 100% an aberration in our modern world. The closest comparison is, maybe, Costco?
And we who are dependent on steam know how bad things would be if steam wasn’t this unicorn. Gaben is the rare feudal lord whose people show up to battle out because they know it’s good for them. All he had to do was not abuse his monopoly for the past 25 years, as the meme goes.
The “do nothing and win” strategy has served Valve well. The fact is every publisher wants their own launcher on start-up running all the time collecting data, updating all the time, throwing popups at the user.
The user on the other hand doesn’t want 8 different bloated game launchers slowing startup, siphoning bandwidth, constantly updating, using a bunch of memory, and each using 1-2% of CPU at idle doing who knows what.
I have Ubisoft Connect launching because one game (Trackmania). And it is most annoying piece of software on my computer. Popping up sometimes even in middle of gameplay... And it can not even correctly close itself, but instead threw an error...
These clients really have zero respect for users.
I'm included in that. Steam is great, I've been using it for 21 years, and I don't need/want another launcher.
Occasionally I was forced into using others, when a game only released on Epic / Origin / Battle.net. But they all felt worse than Steam. So given a choice for the game, I'll buy it on Steam even at a higher price.
That's basically me. While Steam can always be improved (and has been), it has worked well and to me looks better than the alternatives. Additionally, I trust Valve and value it's products. So I don't mind paying more and it's also very convenient to use just Steam and not worry about anything else.
I know this is far from a hot take, but I really think people need to be more weary of what will happen with Valve once Gabe passes. No amount of profitability seems to stop people from demanding more even at the cost of longterm viability.
Imagine a world where a PE firm gets its hands on valve
Kind of a terrifying thought... Not familiar enough with Valve/Steam's corporate structure to know if they have a governance model in their founding documents to help prevent this.
There isn’t a document in the world that can’t be overcome with enough cash incentive unfortunately lol
Funny you mentioned Epic - I bought something there and played it for a while, until one day it just...refused to load
Ended up in a loop of support asking for logs ad infinitum, while ignoring the fact that when I installed the client and game on a separate computer it crashed at the same point. Chalked it up to experience and just decided to not give them any more of my money
The only other game store I'll use is Gog (ok, and exceptionally itch.io)... Epic is unfortunately nowhere near good enough. The others are even worse
Same, Steam is my gateway, and I don't have any issues with them.
Lord Gaben has almost a cult like following, so any missteps are going to be ignored. Steam is objectively great compared to other stores so it will barely see a problem. If the fact that children are gambling skins on the platform barely affects them, an issue they are in full control of, I doubt this controversy where they were pressured externally will cause any long lasting damage to them.
For desktop gaming, GOG should be prioritized above Steam.
+1 - I used GOG for the first time the other week to get a copy of Morrowind so I could see how https://openmw.org/ was these days, and it was a really good experience.
I did have to use some obscure tool to extract it being on Linux but it's nice to know I won't have to purchase another copy again. There's a number of games I've had to repeat purchase (mostly from disk to digital), and with modding the forced auto updates on steam can also be a pain
For Linux desktop gaming, Steam bests GoG all day, everyday.
Before Valve sponsoring/partnering with Code Weavers on Proton, running anything-but-old-and-stable games via Wine was a fraught affair, now even games that update weekly/monthly run perfectly, without having to fiddle with config files or downloading specific DLLs. For the large and growing library of supported games, Steam made Linux gaming painless.
GOG is in bed with Amazon. I have over 130 games via GOG, only a handful I paid for -- right now I can only think of the Yakuza 0-6 collection that was priced so low I had to do it even though I played them all on a friend's xbox before. The rest are from Amazon's gifting of them to me via having a Prime account and Twitch account. Many are games I already bought and played on Steam, they're good games they're not just gifting trash. In any case, just like Epic and their mass of freely given games, it all but guarantees I never give those platforms a dime especially if I think a game will be gifted eventually. (It makes me hesitate sometimes on steam purchases too, which is probably part of the point, but I've got a giant backlog so buying can wait anyway, and it's a rare game that I want to buy and play right now.)
I'll continue supporting Steam over GOG for PC gaming, especially as a Linux user.
I'm not fond of Amazon either, but I surely hate DRM more, and games from GOG aren't crippled by that.
Honestly I find “they give away free games so I won’t use them” to be a weird take.
In any case, often with these free deals the developer is compensated according to how many installs the game gets. Number of installs during sales is also a metric that helps gain funding for future titles.
So if Epic/GOG give away a game you already have and like, taking the time to add it to your collection, installing and running it briefly may help the developer out.
The customer side of Steam is great but I think their partner program is even more impressive.
The quality of support I've received as a developer on Steam makes Apple's App Store ecosystem look like joke.
This needs to be more widely known. As a consumer, I would care more about the developer experience with Steam if more stories were told about it vs. say Epic, but I understand if there are things like commercial-in-confidence, or NDA that prevent it.
As someone who’s using steam daily for probably 50-75% of their lifetime now: I don’t love them, but it’s the lesser evil for sure.
Sure, if GOG had even 20% of steams catalog and useability, it be no. 1 without question. But since we‘re sadly limited to this one reality, there is no alternative.
XBOX GamePass is a trap I expect to spring every day, Uplay and EA Origin are just a splash screen I see when starting a game in steam, and I almost forgot the epic store exists, despite their “free game” Marketing campaign.
It’s not perfect, it’s anti-consumer way to often, and it’s for sure a monopoly’s, but steam is still my favorite poison And yes, if they decide to disable me account and cut me off my pile of shame I will have an impact.
But owning games does not seem to be an option generally. Exceptions exist, ofc.
I’ll never get over the hypocrisy of people loving steam and its exclusives while hating EGS and its exclusives. I’ve never seen an almost purely tech-focused crowd pull so hard for a monopoly before.
Does Steam push big titles to be exclusive, or are games exclusive to steam because they don't have a market need to also be on EGS?
To the second line, systems with a network effect tend to clump people together.
Yeah, I can't think of any explicitly Steam-exclusive games off the top of my head, other than maybe Valve's own titles.
Given Steam's history and market position, they don't need exclusives at this point. I do remember the likes of Outer Wilds and Final Fantasy 7 Remake being EGS exclusives for the first year of their respective PC releases.
GOG is great but I'd like them even more if they did some of the wine/proton work that Steam does for Linux users. For the dosbox games at least it's not much to do (for them nor for myself to be fair.)
Steam is simultaneously hard to like, as a DRM service, but also hard to dislike as they put so much care into getting games running on Linux and have a very reasonable return policy, full refunds for the game not working makes it easy for Linux users especially.
To be clear, there are many games on Steam without DRM. It's up to the publisher whether Steam DRM is used or not (or if any other 3rd party DRM is used, for that matter).
I suspect almost all of the games on GoG, if they are also on Steam, also don't have DRM on Steam.
DRM and especially 3rd party launchers are both things that get me to skip games on Steam. I wish Steam made it simpler to just filter those games out of your store view.
I won’t complain about anyone investing into wine/proton. GOG/CDPR just seem less willing or less capable of spending that money. Valve is essentially printing money. From sales, but also from other, morally less likeable sources like gambling. It’s nice to see them spending at least a tiny part of this in ways that serve the greater good (besides their own business).
Same point: it’s not good, but that’s reality for you.
Yes we all pray to Gaben that this crisis will pass. I am honored to pay more in His name.
After using steam for over 20 years I'd say I feel quite neutral about steam, but actively disdainful toward the alternatives.
> Guessing the game drought is causing some news publications to reach for a story.
Curious. You don't think that this slippery slope we're on is worth reporting on?
Yes I do. Already discussed. This article adds nothing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44713414
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44783566
I don’t. Slippery slope is always a fallacy until it affects something we want to conserve. There has been a huge push for an absolute lack of censorship in games, so it’s… pretty predictable that we’d see the pendulum swing back, I guess?
Interestingly Valve makes the most money per head compared to any other company. At $19m/head it's magnitudes above Meta and the average salary is $1.4m[0]!
I'm not trying to disparage steam, I actually really like them[1]. I'm pointing it out because it's a business strategy we don't see that often: loyalty. I mean what other billionaire do you know where there's tons of memes of but is also overwhelmingly seen in a positive light? Sure, he doesn't have Elon money but dude has $10bn, I don't think another $290bn is really going to make a big difference in his life[2]. He has way less controversy than Elon had even before all the political stuff. Steam is like Costco, except Gabe is a billionaire.
What I'm trying to say is that you can become a billionaire by building a quality product and through customer loyalty. These things don't have to be mutually exclusive. You can be fucking rich, your employees can be fucking rich, you can build a useful, AND a beloved product. In a time where we live in a Lemon Economy, where it is all about making the s̶h̶i̶t̶t̶i̶e̶s̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶u̶s̶e̶r̶s̶ ̶w̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶b̶u̶y̶ minimum viable product, where we rush for the newest feature and loudest bells and whistles (regardless of if they actually work), Steam stands out.
I want more companies like Valve/Steam.
[0] https://upptic.com/valve-structure-employment-numbers-revenu...
[1] Like another user pointed out, they won be over with Linux gaming. I've had a great experience with them, even from the early days. You could tell through github issues they cared. They wouldn't just dismiss things like "oh, we don't support that distro" and actually just figure out what's going on (because your distro doesn't actually matter). They were clearly nerds themselves and nerds that cared.
[2] You just can't spend that kind of money. Fucking MacKenzie Scott is trying to give her wealth away as fast as possible, has already given away half her wealth, but she has the same net worth as when she divorced Bezos. Compound interest is a crazy thing.
[3] P.S. Fuck Visa and Mastercard. Unless my transaction is illegal, you better fucking process it. Anything short of that is holding my own money hostage. That is fucking theft. You created the duopoly. Don't get greedy or you'll lose it.
The estimates are that Tether makes more per employee than any other company, at somewhere in the hundreds of millions.
Interesting add. I don't think I'd be surprised if there are even bigger profits per head considering that you can't measure what you can't measure, but I don't think Tether fulfills the other aspects. Though if I googled right, their CEO has a similar net worth. I'd wager it isn't nearly as liquid as Gabe's though.
Steam is great at turning a blind eye to underage gambling
I never installed, nor plan to.
OS specific stores, consoles, and retrogaming already have more games than I am able to play the rest of my life.
If they were like Loki in the Linux gamming efforts, I would be willing to kind of sponsor it, for Proton I already have Windows at home.
> OS specific stores
Other than my phone, I would never purchase software from an OS-specific store. Why would you ever choose to do that?
Why not?
It is already there, has enough choice to keep me entertained, I don't suffer from FOMO.
I try to avoid vendor lock-in when I can.
I'm a Windows user. I don't want to lose my apps if (really, when) I eventually switch to Linux.
Buying my games on Steam means I can play my games anywhere.
Valve/Steam is the reason gaming on Linux is even viable today
Unfortunately by translating Windows games, Valve doesn't even manage to get game studios to port Android/Linux (NDK) into GNU/Linux, shows how much studios care.
Better keep targeting Windows.
I think this is ultimately a benefit. I've had too many proprietary native Linux games that slowly broke overtime as libraries they depended on changed or became deprecated. Hosting unmaintained proprietary software like this has always been difficult with Linux.
With Proton we basically have a common stable runtime that handles all the platform specific needs of a video game. It just so happens that runtime is largely binary-compatible with Windows. It's easier for devs to support when all they have to do is stick to a Proton-compatible subset of the Win32 API. Users get way more games. And anecdotally my experience as a user is generally better than with true native ports. It's a big net win.
Which is why de-monopolization of critical infrastructure such as payments is important for sovereignty.
Also which is why, I am happy to see V-pay and SEPA transfers in EU. Especially SEPA-direct transfers, allowing you to be free of CC-processing fees completely as they have been regulated to be free quite well...
If you don't like CC gatekeeping, you really won't like being dropped from your bank due to suspicious transactions. Financial institutions of various capacities are downstream from their chartering polities which seem very interested in holding sovereignty of geography over individuality.
"payment processors insist that if the product is legal, they do not tell vendors what they can or cannot sell"
Absolute lies. They require that transactions that may damage the goodwill of the Corporation or reflect negatively on the Marks are not to be submitted to the Interchange System. It is also their own sole discretion what does or doesn't hurt their Brand.
It's a stupid situation that banks and payment processors force their ethics upon while other companies take the blame (valve in this case). They should just dommoney transfers and as long as the transfer itself is legal should not have any opinion on the parties or product involved in the transaction.
There are 3 issues being commingled within this.
First, the networks have brand protection stipulations for any partner that uses the network. None of them want to be known as the porn brand.
Second, porn (and other similar categories) have a different risk profile than other charges. Specifically chargeback risk goes through the roof. None of the members of the network want to deal with sales of things that spike chargebacks.
Third, the federal government and some states have outsourced enforcement of some laws to the banks and payment networks. It’s easier to ban things than to do this enforcement at times.
None of this is a ethics issue and none of this is about money transfers. It’s about extending credit, and there is no technical solution around credit extension with electronic payments.
This is not true. Here's a page from Collective Shout, the group mentioned in the article:
https://www.collectiveshout.org/steam_campaign_history
It's probably true from the perspective of the credit card companies. For the activists it's about ethics and morality, but I think for the credit card corps it's about their fear of the reputational harm the activists might be able to inflict.
Considering the fact that these payment processors are still happily processing payments from PornHub, OnlyFans and other big real porn platforms, I don't think your explanation about the networks not wanting to be associated with porn holds any ground. They're targeting video games specifically.
The games they are targeting are primarily pornographic. It unfortunately was used to also cast a wider net. But at its core that is exactly the content that was being brought up.
> none of this is an ethics issue
A puritanical activist group circumvents the law/courts and successfully pressures the handful of companies that control the vast majority of transactions to remove content they find distasteful - content that is 100% legal - but this isn’t an ethics discussion?
It’s not an ethics issue _for the bank_. It’s purely a business decision.
Mentally modeling this as “this bank doesn’t like porn” is incorrect in ways that will cause you to make incorrect downstream inferences.
But that’s exactly what it is. They are worried about the blowback from the very easy PR advantage groups like this have, all based on weaponizing how it is basically a PR slam dunk to paint these companies as “supporting disgusting pornography” and “exposing harmful content to minors.” As long as you can couch your points in that kind of rhetoric, you are virtually unbeatable in the US when it comes to messaging. No major company is going to stand in defense of pornography outside of Pornhub.
There’s a reason this hasn’t been taken to the courts and regardless of what you attribute the motivation to the outcome is the same. This is top to bottom an ethics discussion, and the banks are a part of it. By capitulating they have made a choice. They decided the public debate would be bad for business.
> They are worried about the blowback from the very easy PR advantage groups like this have, all based on weaponizing how it is basically a PR slam dunk to paint these companies as “supporting disgusting pornography” and “exposing harmful content to minors.”
They may be worried (slightly) but they also most likely simply don't want another headache.
A corporation is in business to make money and that means that they will do what makes the most money in the shortest amount of time as long as it's legal.
Getting entangled in a potential lawsuit that would take years to resolve and cost many millions of $ is a distraction that does not serve their interest. If you are Epic and it is in your interest to challenge Apple and if winning this lawsuit brings you potentially more revenue, then that is a different story entirely.
GP was right when he said this is a business decision. Porn has nothing to do with it. It could have been gambling and harry Potter books, the end result would have been the same.
To give you an example:
I have a small business with a very clear refund policy, yet every 6 months or so, someone will send me a message saying that they forgot that they have an active subscription and could I refund them the money or they will do a charge-back.
Please note before getting the pitchforks out, that my refund policy is very generous and that each customer gets an email before their subscription renews so there is nothing deceptive in my billing practices and also users have the ability to self refund their last payment in the app.
I am faced with the same question that Steam faced, what do I do? Do I fight the refund and eventually fight the charge-back costing me time and money when I could be doing other things or do I roll over and get it over with so that this headache goes away as soon as possible so that I can focus on my other customers?
That's how businesses see things. Opportunity cost. I understand that for some people (including you) this sort of decisions could be seen as some sort of morality judgement but IMHO it is not.
What does Steam have to gain from starting a fight with Visa or Mastercard? A better reputation with gamers? Will that help them increase their revenue in the short term or the long term? Will this make them liable for other things down the line like an angry parent suing them because their son or daughter bought a game with naked people in it and the kid was only 8 at the time?
This is the equation that I am sure many people at Steam ran and the they decided that it just wasn't adding up.
It sucks because from a personal point of view I agree with you, they should have thought harder but from a business point of view they simply followed what made most sense and decided that the risk wasn't worth the reward.
Does it mean Mastercard/Visa are right, absolutely not? This duopoly should be broken up but no politician in the west or elsewhere is going to go after them for the same reason that nobody went after the banks that brought the global economy to it's knees in 2008.
> circumvents the law/courts
That phrasing makes it sound somehow illegal, but all the activists did was exercise their right to engage in political speech. I don't particularly agree with their cause, but there's nothing untoward about their methods.
The real problem for society isn't the fact that political groups can raise a ruckus about things we personally don't agree with, but rather the fact that payment processors are such a narrow choke point, ideal for putting up gates and thereby giving a small group of people way too much control. The solution is to address the choke point, not to play wack-a-mole trying to slap down activist groups whenever they vie for control of the choke point (which will inevitably continue to happen as long as the choke point exists.)
None of this has to be about extending credit. People are trying to buy games with money they have. Why do you say credit has to be involved?
They could try cash-by-mail, like Mullvad.
If you are taking electronic payments you are extending credit. The rails (currently) require it.
Cash by mail would be either the merchant extending credit to the purchaser if they allowed the game download before receipt or the purchaser extending credit if not.
You're speaking out of ignorance here. Steam has a long-term relationship with its customers. They can and will remove a title from a user's library if the payment is charged back, as well as placing restrictions on the account.
I'm a long term customer of Steam _and_ work in the payments industry. In the _easiest_ Steam payment there are 7 different parties extending or receiving credit from each other. Most of those counter parties have no relationship with each other at all (I certainly don't maintain close ties with the game publishers bank), do you?
The rules that are being invoked around porn exist to protect different parts of that chain, from each other.
The argument about Steams ability to revoke the good in question doesn't help with that. What it does is provide an alternate path if Steam wanted to extricate themselves from that chain of 7 counterparties. Steam could stop being involved with all those other players and become a payment network unto themselves. They could demand ach (or cash in the mail as the parent suggests). Give the game with the understanding they would rapidly revoke it for bad customers, and limit their exposure to the publisher by giving them very delayed payment terms. Of course, then the customer is taking on more risk and losing choice and Steam has to account for that in their sales numbers.
How is sending cash in the mail equivalent to the purchaser extending credit?
Cash has left their account but goods have not been received. Anytime there is a mismatch between those 2 there is credit risk.
By this reasoning every transaction involves credit, since there's a time period between me swiping my card for the apples, and me walking out of the store with the apples, during which time you could tackle me and take my apples. And if it's a word that applies to every transaction, then it's meaningless.
Every transaction _does_ involve credit risk (specifically counter party or settlement risk) but the amount of it changes based on the difference in time between when payment happens and the transaction is completed. So for most purposes a cash transaction where I give you cash and you give me the goods is viewed as riskless (even though it's not as you point out).
But in your example, you don't need to invoke a security guard stealing your apples. There is a _ton_ of credit risk already just by the invocation of the electronic payment. Your funds will not hit the account of the merchant in question for _a long time_ (usually modeled as 1-3 days for risk purposes in the US). All kinds of things can happen in that time. The merchant has extended you credit and has taken on credit risk. They've done so because of the chain of credit and agreements that the banks, processors and networks have worked out.
If Mastercard gets a bunch of its transactions reversed because a Congressional panel gets huffy about pornography, that potentially blows up transactions for apples miles away. That's why this is mostly a conversation about risk management, not morals. To the apple vendor's bank, they largely don't care if you buy porn, they just don't want their settlements caught up in the blowback.
What exactly do you think "credit card" means?
Why do you think that buying games necessarily involves a credit card?
The monetary system is a public good and should be treated like one, with transparent upfront rules not arbitrary action that takes people by surprise.
I can understand banning bad actors that successfully or unsuccessfully perform fraud and other such direct acts against payment processors or merchants.
For pretty much anything else, nope only courts in jurisdiction should be able to act... If even then.
Ridiculous that a few large corporations get to decide this. The only people who have any business deciding what content is or isn't allowed on someone else's platform, are the People, or their representatives in government.
I can accept that some content goes too far and might have to be banned according to some people, but the only groups who should have the actual power to do that, should be the owner of the platform, the users of the platform, and the government, and definitely not some third party that might have completely different interests.
The only reason this is possible at all is that some of these payment providers are nearly monopolists. People should have about a dozen payment options to avoid this. Fortunately I do; Steam supports iDeal, which is not controlled by any payment provider. It just goes straight to my bank. If my bank were to try to ban certain types of legitimate payment, customers could simply switch to a different bank to avoid the ban.
The only kinds of payment that payment providers should ban, are those involving financial crimes, like money laundering, fraud and corruption.
i hope that situation (with iDeal) will soon apply to the entirety of europe. Wero rolling out this system to all countries in the EU.
Absolutely. That's the direction we need to go. And ideally, the rest of the world too. But having this EU-wide, will encourage more webshops outside the EU to also support it.
If valve can escape the Microsoft store, it can handle a few payment processors.
what would happen if Valve accepted Cryptocurrency?
in turn, what might happen if valve decided to become a cryptocurrency exchange exclusive to the gaming community?
EDIT: another solution is to use a load-wallet based system to shroud transactions from your financial nanny. money in, money out, no explicit evidence of a purchase.
Steam used to accept BTC payments in 2016 but they didn't want to deal with the probabilistic finality of bitcoin so they quickly removed the btc option. previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30478262
In 2016 this wasn't a solved problem but today it is
I think Valve will not accept crypto unless they run out of options. They don't accept any games that use NFT's on their platform and haven't added crypto top-ups to this day, even though it would be simple for them via providers like Stripe
Steam used to support Bitcoin to add money to your Steam account. To my knowledge, they removed it due to issues with fees and other stuff.
Load-wallet would probably be better.
Crypto is almost as bad as handing over your ID to see "adult" materials, because both require you to trust two parties (government ID stores and the general crypto community) that have shown themselves to not be trustworthy at all.
for the 1000th time. the blockchain with all transaction and wallets being viewable and traceable is not a issue of cryptocurrency itself but certain inferior and outdated coins like bitcoin.
monero has solved that issue and it does not matter if you see any "IDs"
nobody would be able to see what you bought with the coins, only that you sent them to steam
I'm not seeing how the "general crypto community" can be compared to a "government ID store".
I can count on people in the government to abuse having my ID linked to my online activity.
I can count on people in the crypto community to do unsavory things with my money to my financial detriment.
> cryptocurrency
A technological solution to a political problem. Visa/mastercard/banks will just censor the off ramps next.
> wallet based system
What does this accomplish? The same institutions will request proof that all transactions are compliant, which will most easily handled by simply banning the content.
Whose off ramps? Steam doesn’t need CCs for that. The more likely situation is them preventing payments through their system for Steam and Steam having to pick.
We were talking about steam transacting in crypto to avoid the censorship.
The people pressuring visa and Mastercard to drop porn/sex related services are not going to suddenly roll over when those services switch to crypto. They’ll simply go for the crypto off-ramps.
accepting cryptocurrency is depending on jurisdiction a legal liability
people already are trying to use all kind of vectors to launder money, including steam
and cryptocurrency systems in general don't do the legal due diligence of a payment processor/bank
so you now have the problem of being partially responsibility to do that legal due diligence yourself and make your service more attractive to be abused as in money laundering schemes
but if things get worse they could consider creating a payment processor sub company, the issue with that is I think there are a lot of way Visa can mess with them in the US and it seems not necessary in the EU (as due to side effects of pushing/forcing banking payment system improvements you technically have a wide choice of alternatives to PayPal or Credit Card payment for only payment, it's just many solutions are niche so most sides don't bother for now (but things are changing))
Piracy gained two more pluses in the past few weeks: no age verification and no payment blockage.
It bears repeating -
While all games delisted at MC/Visa demands were from the rape and/or incest nsfw genre (and that should've not been on Steam to begin with), it still set a dangerous precedent as the game selection criteria was ultimately subjective. Relatable, but subjective. Next time it will again be subjective, but not as clear cut, yet the precedent will already be in place.
When are they going to remove the murder genre? Including the game where you can murder a prostitute to get your payment back... it's very obscure, you might not have heard of it... it's called GTA V.
Americans seem to think murder is A-OKAY (as long as you don't murder an unborn fetus, or show a nipple while murdering).
Well yeah.
It's a video game, nobody actually dies.
If you show a nipple, somebody actually sees a nipple.
I genuinely can't tell if this is a joke.
If this is not a joke, please elaborate on the difference between "seeing a murder" and "seeing a nipple".
half-joke.
The difference is that it's not "seeing" a murder. It's committing a murder vs watching pornography.
Killing somebody in a video game isn't real murder. Seeing a nude character is still pornography.
No they don't see a nipple? They see just pixels on some screen, not a nipple.
Oh ye. And where you also collect people in busses and bring them to factories to make hot dogs out of them.
I seriously don't think we have the 'margin' to excuse GTA anymore. It is not the 90s and way to many people are on the brink of going mad.
Why shouldn't they have been on steam? There are plenty of movies we can all go buy/rent/watch on amazon right now that have that content.
There are better arguments to make than this one.
Every law, order, rule, and regulation is captured by this argument. It needs to provide a scissor to be meaningful.
Point being that even though this time the takedown targets were reasonable, the next time they might not be, but the mechanism will be already in place.
Reasonable by your standard. As others noted not necessarily reasonable by theirs, especially when you contrast it with other games that remain available. It also flies in the face of research that shows that games probably prevent those fantasies from taking place in the real world which seems preferable.
> research that shows ...
Hit us with the source. Would love to see the methodology used in it.
What evidence would you accept? What would the methodology and conclusions look like for a study that would be convincing?
Are you also in favor of prohibiting most booksellers from selling books which either contain scenes of or are exclusively about rape and/or incest? If not, why not?
In addition:
> (and that should've not been on Steam to begin with)
Where do you believe that they should have been sold? Are you proposing a separate "Steam: After Dark" store that only adult humans are permitted to browse and purchase from?
Indeed, PayPal is not gone for everyone, luckily. I am from Europe and can still buy games using PayPal, just did. This makes me happy, as I am trying for over two weeks now to buy credits on Open AI, just to be able to translate texts from the FastAPI docs to German. Open AI and others do not support PayPal and not even a prepaid credit card, which my local bank sold me as "works everywhere". It is frustrating.
PayPal is terrible for merchants, quite frankly, and often consumers at times. I don't understand why many people love them so much. There's a good reason many places don't accept PayPal nowadays.
I can confirm that PayPal is terrible. But that Open AI does not even accept a Prepaid Credit card from the second-largest German bank, that sucks.
Maybe N26 / Revolut would work in your case?
Those banks also use Visa / Mastercard for payments.
That is good to hear, that would probably mean that they are accepted by Open AI (Though the Visa Logo is also on my Prepaid card and open AI does not accept it, whatever)
Thanks for this tip, I will check this out. Edit: Just contacted N26
I definitely became an advocate for some serious laws regarding payment processors being unable to disagree using some payment systems
They are probably drying their tears with stacks of 1000 bucks
Yeah, that's right, we play the ideology card, the moral card, but still, we don't want to lose too much money.
So no $, €, and so on...
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