Nothing stops a private company from becoming shitty. They still enjoy profit. Valve isn’t your friend, despite whatever image they try to project.

Approaching this from a developer point of view, let’s talk about how Valve has changed and what they do.

Many people will point to how Steam removed Greenlight and made it easy for indie developer to just put out whatever they wanted. The problem is Valve tends to treat indie developers like the dirt on their shoe and let well known devs skate on their requirements and policies. A lot of people don’t know that one of Valve’s requirements for screenshots is that they be of actual gameplay. I can’t count the number of store pages I’ve seen for unreleased games from well known studios that contain screenshots, or are entirely made up of screenshots, that clearly aren’t gameplay. Things that are either cinematic shots, or simply from angles that wouldn’t allow any gameplay at all, etc.

Meanwhile indie devs get their pages and games rejected for absolutely trivial reasons. A couple of great things I can highlight is them rejecting some library assets because ‘the UI can be seen’. The library assets were generated from screenshots using Unreal’s Hires screenshot tool. It’s incapable of capturing the UI. That’s kind of its thing. Another rejection came from them saying ‘You claimed the game has full gamepad support, but when we tried it in local multiplayer the first player had to use the keyboard and mouse while the second player used a gamepad’. I sent them back a screenshot of the start button which had a checkbox beside it which said: “First player uses keyboard and mouse”, because I wanted people to be able to play local multiplayer even if they only had a single gamepad. I could give a dozen more examples of absolute nonsense from Steam support in getting that game released, but it was was all of that type. Their support is inconsistent and abysmal.

Most recently trying to get taxes figured out with them because I moved from one country to another. I went back and forth with them went through a bunch of steps only to be finally told ‘oh we can’t actually update your account fully to the new country, you’ll have to make a new account for the new country with the new business information’. So I did that, but oh… the only way to do that was to buy an app credit. And I’d already bought the app credit on the original account because it was supposed to work. Took 2 more days of back and forth before they’d let me transfer that to the other account.

Steams in-game purchase support is laughable. Yes they technically have it. But as a developer, it makes no sense to use it. They take 30% to do nothing more than maintain a transaction record. You still need to keep a server on your own that matches that transaction to unlocked content the user has. Looking at that, we questioned why even use Steam for that? We now have a system set up on our own website where players can purchase things, we use a payment processor that only costs like 3%, and now players have a completely portable DLC account. When we release on other platforms later, players can just use the same content they’ve already bought.

From a consumer point of view. There are things they do, that I don’t particularly like. The trashy meme ‘curators’ they tried to shove down our throat for the longest time. Trying to label any concentrated negative reviews a ‘review bomb’ regardless of whether or not it was related to legitimate criticism of the game, the march towards mediocrity with the sales.

But they gave us refunds! Only because it started as a legal issue in one place and it was just easier for them to just roll that out worldwide with the absolute bare minimum of effort.

There is no way you could look at the state of Valve sales in the early 2010s, compare them to now and think that they haven’t gotten shittier. They used to be an event. The flash sales kept people coming back all the time, they had things going on on the website, the scavenger hunts, the mini games, etc. But they can’t have refunds and flash sales at the same time! Sure they can. You’re entitled to a refund. There is no law requiring they sell you a game over and over again. Absolutely nothing prevents them from saying ‘If you refund a game during this sale, you can’t buy it again until the sale is over’.

People were engaged. now the Steam sale is just ‘meh’. This hurts developers as well. Especially smaller developers. People flood the website the first hour of the sale, check what’s on sale, and then put the sale out of their mind for the next 2 weeks until its over. Because it never changes. Smaller devs greatly benefited from the high engagement and the ‘event’ of the sale. Users kept coming back. The more they come back the greater the chance there was that some of them might come across your game.

Reposting things from reddit that have been posted there over 1000 times.

Well we’re a small indie studio, so it’s existed. We’re waiting for promotional rounds from the companies we’ve partnered with. The main thing is everything works. While we released through Steam this will be cross-platform. Epic games some time in the future and if things go well maybe a console or tablet launch. So we have all game system purchases set up through our website and they’re account based, rather than platform based. Buy it now while playing on Steam and if you get the tablet version later you can use all the same stuff.

It was good to have a small launch because we got to test that and makes sure that all the systems worked, which they did.

I use Drastic to emulate those games.

Wartop, we just released it a couple weeks ago. Its’ a virtual tabletop made specifically for tabletop skirmish and war games. We’re not a sandbox though, we’ve got official partnerships with quite a few companies to make official versions of their tabletop games.

Beyond my own game, most of my pc playtime so far this year is on games like Rimworld, 7 Days to Die, Oxygen not included, Ark, and Men of War assault squad. I spent a couple weeks in Palworld. I also am playing Pokemon Black on an emulator on my phone.

This is what Steam takes 30% for. Legitimate indie companies submit games and some jobsworth continually rejects it because of incredibly asinine trivial stuff like a word being out of place or literally made up stuff that isn’t even real meanwhile companies like this just carry on.

Steam literally has a policy in place that once you pass approval, you can do whatever you want. Why even make them pass approval if they can immediately change it to something that violates their ‘standards’?

I found some size 23 shoes for sale locally. $600/pair. Absolutely no one but his own fault if he can’t afford those when he’s 22 especially in today’s booming economy.

There is a reason the original sub on reddit had the rules it did, it was to avoid posts like this.

Not the story but the world

Galaxies, on the other hand, is a more open-ended gaming world that lets you hunt Rancors, take bounty- hunter missions, craft hundreds of items. build factories, landscape cities, and par- ticipate in a player-run economy. Even if tending flora farms and building sofas aren’t emblematic Star Wars activities, they’re representative of the tremendous freedom you’re given to roleplay a virtual lifestyle of your own choosing.

That’s the part that added roleplaying. reality is something like dwarf fortress adventure mode, or any colony sim is far more of a roleplaying game than most ‘roleplaying’ games, especially at the time.

this has some description of player runs towns: https://www.mmorpg.com/guides/city-building-guide-2000116198

Thanks for posting that. I had thought about this article a few times over the years. I always thought he did a good job of explaining what made a roleplaying game a roleplaying game. It wasn’t that many years before this that ‘action RPG’ starting being used as a term and half the time ‘rpg’ was being used to mean nothing more than ‘we have levels’

It’s because the fanbase is a bit tired of the developers.

The developer already set the tone very early on by being a pompous prick over the whole ban nonsense. No one could prove it but it seemed like certain key remappers (like for joysticks and things like that) were causing the anti cheat to trip even if they weren’t being used, just running in the background. The CEO was a real jerk about it on twitter when people asked why there wouldn’t be any appeals.

That kind of arrogance and behaviour came out several times. There isn’t any reason for the community to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Big surprise that Crema has stepped in it again. They’ve been pretty awful since this game started. I can still remember when they first rolled out the bans and insisted their would be no appeal because their ban process was never wrong. The CEO aggressively defended it, and it wasn’t very long before community managers were walking that back admitting some people had to be unbanned.

Their discord was run by dictators as a meme that cropped up around a botched patch resulted in the mods going nuts and banning anyone who mentioned it, and the steam forums were the same. They had a gaggle of fanboys who’d attack anyone who said a bad word about the game, and if anyone talked back to them one of the developers would come along and ban them.

It was such a great idea ran by absolutely awful people.

If you sell steam keys through your site you can’t charge less than the steam price. In order to sell it cheaper on their site, it would have to be a non-steam version and they’d have to serve up the files themselves. If it’s a multiplayer game it wouldn’t be compatible, they’d need to switch to EOS or something else. realistically speak, developers could probably charge a bit less by providing that their own. it doesn’t cost 30% to serve up the files and process some payments.

Steams cut off that, at just the $3 million mark, is $450 million. This is $900,000 per game.

People wonder why other companies wanted to make their own launchers. They leave millions on the table by having steam ‘handle’ things.

This is also why Valve isn’t that inclined to pump out tons of new games.

A game like Palworld, which as of 3 weeks ago, has sold 12 million copies would end up making Valve somewhere in the neighbourhood of $72 million as of the end of January.

LGR hammering the buttons on a mouse that also doubles as a drinks cooler while looking on ebay for these…

No it doesn’t. Social media sites that have moderators really need to take a stand about clickbait garbage headlines like this. It’s like getting a free t-shirt with a car purchase and claiming that T-shirt costs $40,000. You’re buying coins which already cost that much, the coins with or without the mount cost that much. Currently you can buy those coins and get a free mount. Lots to be upset with Diablo and Blizzard, but this is just garbage.

This is wizards of the cost all over again. Unity learned nothing from them.