But perhaps even more than we love the low, low prices, we love The Sale Event itself. We love the pre-sale videos that we carefully cut together to hype each other up for the imminent spending spree. We love the in-jokes and the memes , the constant banter about the bleeding wallets and the screaming, tortured credit cards that just can't take any more. But in the world of Good Guy Valve we give that marketing away, for free , to a billion-dollar corporation every year sometimes twice a year, if he asks nicely , doing our bit to help that corporation make more money during a sale event.
This is the terrifying power of Good Guy Valve. We do our part with the memes, the articles and the social media posts, and our good friend Valve does the rest. The rest meaning taking our money. And then, after all that, we don't even play the games. Back in , Good Guy Valve tore up the playbook again, showing us once and for all that they weren't an uncaring corporation — in fact they wanted nothing more than to open up their Steam Workshop and let us play around in their magical worlds of Dota 2 , Team Fortress 2 and, later, Counter-Strike GO.
And you can earn real money from it, they told us! Buy these items, and the 3D artists who made them will get 25 percent of the profits. We're all in this together! Talented 3D artists surged out of the woodwork, and the airwaves were saturated with feel-good stories of creators making very decent, livable wages off the sales of Demoman swords, machine gun skins and wacky couriers.
As far as Valve is concerned, it's a fantastic arrangement: You do all the hard work for free, knowing that you might never be paid, but hoping you will at some point. Valve sells your work to other people, and they take the overwhelming majority of the money from each transaction. Everyone's a winner Valve has lost nothing other than the sunk cost of the employee time spent maintaining the store, while gaining a lot of revenue.
The agreement itself states that you have no specific right to any payment, outside of the ability to upload the item. The specific Workshop agreement also forces you to keep the sales data itself confidential. Want to tell someone how well your items are selling? Too bad. Valve has just recently slashed royalties for Dota 2 creators to almost nothing , right on the eve of the next massive International tournament.
This artist has made tens of thousands of dollars from Steam Workshop item sales, and is still in love with the idea of content creation and modding, even if they're not overly optimistic about the future of the Steam Workshop. Or, to look at things in a more cynical light: Valve is eager to provide the tools that enable you to work for free It feels like many of Valve's decisions, really: short term profit for them, but it screws over the long term viability of everyone else.
Dota 2 continues to grow — not least of all because the prize money for the International tournaments is literally donated by us, the players, who purchase interactive Compendiums and Battle Passes to raise prize money for the competitors from which Valve takes 75 percent.
I'm sure you can do the math. The numbers have stopped adding up. Because they were going to come out on steam, then got snatched up by epic due to something that profits them but not the consumers at all, and they were exclusive. Sign in to contribute Email address Password Sign in Need an account? Register now. Comments Loading comments Cookies help us deliver our services. By using our services, you agree to our use of cookies.
More information OK. Navigation menu Personal tools English Create account Log in. Namespaces Page Discussion. Views Read View source View history. There are a lot of small moments that you could easily miss and it gives the impression that Valve really put a lot of thought and care into their games. Hated half life 1, But i love half life 2 and the episodes. For their time they were the bleeding edge in graphics e.
Half-Life 2 was in the same league as Battlefield 3. Plus they do their own thing without having to follow the instructions of a corporate publisher. Well i'd say tf2 is so popular because of how hard they marketed it. The constantly add new content years after release because they want people to be using their steam platform.
I'm a huge fan of all the modding that goes on with valve games. The original tf, cs, dod, etc took up a ton of my time and now its zombie panic, gmod, age of chivalry. Honestly i thought the single player in hl and hl2 was good but now amazing although that might be because i didn't play them until a few years after their releases.
Portal, on the other hand, is amazing and i don't get how you couldn't enjoy it. Because they push games in the right direction. You should play through Half Life 2, despite having come out 5 years ago, it's still incredibly well done in terms of story and scope.
For the people that don't like halflife, did you play it at release or years later? That game blew my mind when it came out, especially the AI of the commandos. Valve's a bit of an oddity and it's so late that I can't exactly put my thoughts into coherent use. Safe to say that they are dedicated to some of their games.
Actually, just one game: Team Fortress 2 actually, they're really just dedicated to the Source engine. I really only liked the original Half-Life and Portal from those guys, but they just make games that feel like they mean something and they seem to appear better looking back then they actually were. But it's true, it's kinda hard to explain. Also: more hats.
The games they make are fairly high quality. They have great support and give alot of free extra content PC versions. Their games probably spawned some of the most successful mods in gaming history.
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