(Not the previous poster) The real issue is that pretty much as always when this comes up, nobody is really defending Gaben. But to some people, just pointing out that something isn’t quite logical or true, is the same as “giving them the benefit of the doubt”, because it’s doesn’t meet their sky high criteria of negativity for the subject.

The truth doesn’t matter to them, but how negative you are about it. If you’re not personally crafting the guillotine for Gaben, you are a fanboy. It’s frustrating, since I do think we all agree at the end of the day that Gabe should be held to high standards due to his wealth, and he should face incredibly scrutiny if he should tilt.

Holy shit dude, go to bed and dont text your ex.

You really need to take a good look in the mirror, because you are reading things that aren’t there and embarrassing yourself and the industry you claim to care about.

Unfortunately for your bad faith argument, I make games myself. And this kind of behaviour is absolutely detestable if you ask me. Engaging with people like this presenting yourself as someone in the industry is actively doing damage to game developers’ reputations. You aren’t automatically right for having been part in making a game once.

PC developers don’t work for Steam, they work for themselves or for a publisher. And the same massive studios that make games for consoles make them for PC too. Feel free to provide some actual stats that aren’t just your personal feeling on the topic rather than just saying “nuh-uh” while running off with the goalpost.

Challenging biased views, half truths, or having your own opinions isn’t kissing some billionaire’s ass. I don’t want billionaire’s to exist. Gabe shouldn’t need to be a billionaire. But all of this is absofuckinglutely irrelevant to whether or not Steam is a good platform, unless Gabe was wielding Steam in a way that would promote a billionaire class, which he isn’t.

Exactly. And unlike many other companies there isn’t even any indication they would want to enshittify anyways. Why would they destroy the foundation of their platform? They have actual paying customers paying the bills, not some force-feed ad slop machine.

Epic made it very clear from the start they were trying to undercut Steam, not by being better, but by paying out developers to create exclusive games for the Epic store, something extremely hated on PC. Even on Steam you can still sell your games elsewhere too.

Steam also controls the larger markets share of PC gaming. Of course they’re going to have to price themselves competitively. Because why would you pay more for a platform that has way less users and a bad reputation?

You can actually just pay an almost 0% cut by delivering directly to your customers, but that’s exactly why you use a storefront to sell your game. You go where the customers are, and they are at Steam.

BTW, Sony, MS and Nintendo all suck, but at least they create jobs for devs.

It doesn’t really seem to be publicly verifiable, but if this article is to be believed, then yes. Would be kind of weird if they wouldn’t either, since selling games is their business too, and they have to compete with Steam / PC.

This isn’t really a problem though, more a consideration or trade off. If Valve’s services are worth that 30% cut, because you reach more people or don’t have to make other costs that would dwarf the cut, it’s worth it. Nobody’s forcing companies to sign up with Steam, other than indirectly because it turns out doing so is a sensible deal.

Exactly, this is the clear sign that Steam is providing actual value to both developers and players. The PC ecosystem has always had the guaranteed threat of an open platform, so you could cut out any middleman. Which is why it’s such a hostile platform to predatory middlemen. The fact this isn’t being done to Steam demonstrates them as an example of a (relatively) good middleman.

Best example of Steam being left out and still succeeding on PC - Minecraft launched in a time when Steam was already around and just said “nah, we’re good” (citing the 30% cut and concerns over monopoly status) and just went it’s own way. There are still plenty of games being created on PC without Steam in the mix, itch.io, self publishing. Steam just makes it a lot easier so many people legitimately want to use them, others don’t and can do so. And that’s how it should be!

For a video serving platform in a vacuum, maybe it would be the best financing model. But Youtube doesn’t exist in a vacuum. And supporting them as it stands means rewarding them for their malicious practices, even if you yourself can work around them. Youtube isn’t going to magically become decent and friendly by getting more money. Rewarding them anyways is how you get companies that feel empowered to put their own profits before the common good and the good of the customers. It is enabling yourself and others to be squeezed hard should enough people pay for premium and they suddenly close down yt-dlp and free tier viewing in general. Youtube is a near monopoly already, and treating it as if it’s just some small company trying it’s best is extremely dangerous and objectionable. Again, not saying having premium is necessarily bad, but it very clearly is not a safe or recommendable deal that most people should take unless Youtube changes their tune drastically to show they can be trusted with more power than they already have.

You’re missing my point on the distribution of the donations. If 5 people watch the same 5 creators 20% of the time, then the outcome is the same if everyone pays a dollar to every creator, or if each person pays 5 dollar to one of the 5 creators. Online platforms operate at scale, not at the individual level, so having superfans that donate to you directly and are more likely to keep supporting you over longer periods is much better and financially secure than getting a few pennies from someone. It’s as you said, sometimes people provide way more value to you than your watch history would reveal, in which case a direct donation is superior to make sure they get what they deserve.

Let alone the massive backlog of previous generation games and emulators that you don’t need a top line PC for.

I mean, if you use yt-dlp, you kinda get why the premium ‘feature’ is a bit of a scam, right? Since yt-dlp actually gives you the video file, not a locked down version you can only play on the app or website (and only when you connected to the internet recently). So if youtube shut yt-dlp down, would you be happy paying for that ‘feature’ now that you can’t bypass it? Because yt-dlp is also just as against Youtube’s ToS as adblocking is, since you also avoid watching ads and Youtube’s DRM on the video. And they try plenty to shut yt-dlp down.

Of course creators want to diversify, even if YouTube was perfect they don’t want to be dependent on one revenue stream.

Yes, but there is a distinct difference between diversifying and cutting off an unreliable partner. One is built on entrepreneurship, the other on broken trust. And for smaller creators, those often are much more tied to Youtube and have no real reason to diversify yet at their growth. Yet they still pretty much have to do it, since they cannot rely on Youtube to help them if things go south. Something that would not happen if Youtube was a ‘good’ host.

About payments: Square charges 30c fixed fee per payment (+%). PayPal charges 49c. Stripe 30c. Ayden 37c. Klarna 30c. Please enlighten me how flat fees are not a thing.

These are payment processors, not the donation platforms people use (which would be the stand in for Youtube’s 45% cut), like Ko-fi. If that’s what you meant, fair enough, yes for those flat fees still exist without any exception afaik, and indeed if you use the wrong one the fees might be too much for a monthly payment. But that’s hardly the case everywhere. Where I live, the payment processor takes much, much less than Stripe and Paypal, max a cent or two.

But even with that cut, that doesn’t change a lot though, it’s just a matter of making payments efficiently. Like paying yearly or making a large single donation. Premium might be less payment to processors overall, but 45% is such a large cut that it’s hard to overcome that. And youtube being an unreliable partner, there is also an invisible cut on every payment that makes you less able to detach from them.

With yearly donations, the math still doesn’t really cut it:

But more realistically, you might send 30 dollars to your top 5 creators for a year, which is 150 dollars a year, and at those amounts the % cut overtakes the flat cut by a long shot.

Nobody denies Youtube provides value. It’s the most used video platform in the world. Hence why they called them semi-parastic.

But the tooling gets neglected. The legal protection at times screws over the very creators you say you stand by. Some premium features are literal scams (eg. downloading videos). Some ads they allow on their platform promote literal scams. They censor comments, videos, and dislikes, often in deceitful ways like pretending nothing is being blocked to the poster. I could go on.

For a multi-billion dollar company, they provide ample enough reasons to cut them out of the equation as a form of economic protest, and their disloyalty to their creators in many of their decisions is a forever stain on their trust relationship with the public and creators. Which is why Youtube creators routinely try to detach themselves, like streaming on other sites, and why many of them ask you to donate directly instead, so that if Youtube should screw them over (which they have done many times), they can still afford to pay rent.

Plus donating to 50+ creators would be more money in payment fees alone than what I pay for YouTube.

That’s just wrong. Flat fees aren’t really a thing anymore. Different donation systems have different fees and most charge a percentage of 5% to 12% compared to the 45% of Youtube. But donating to 50 people would be hard on it’s own. Hence why most of us just donate bigger or more frequently to specific creators we want to support more, and over a large amount of people, that somewhat evens out across creators.

Look, nobody is saying that it’s bad to have Youtube Premium, but it’s not exactly good either. I used to have it for years, until I found out they were scamming me on a feature I found important. If none of those things are a concern to you, then go ahead. Just don’t deny the rest of us our grievances.

That’s kind of half the picture though. Adblocking and piracy are not done in a vacuum. You typically block ads in response to the unethical practice of hostile design and the abuse of human psychology to be conditioned positively to something through exposure rather than just making a good product. Piracy is often in response to unethical business practices as well.

If none of those unethical forces existed, you can be sure there would be a lot less pirates and adblockers. But in our current world piracy and adblocking are often straight up ethical in relative terms.

AFAIK this just isn’t actually what his wife looks like.

I never mentioned premium, because yes it works like that for premium. But even for that paying them directly is better, as it avoids youtube’s cut completely.

While this is technically true, this only works because of the scale. Each individual user contributes less than pennies.

If you really want to support a creator, donate 5 dollars to them every year and you will be more valuable than any ad viewer.

Wow, you’re telling me blocking off your API causes insistent actors to masquarade as real users? Shocked I tell you, shocked.

Tja, deels eens. Maar ze is uiteindelijk in een zelfde soort positie als Rutte hiermee. Ze is uiteindelijk een diplomaat (en oud VN gezant voor het midden oosten en gaza), waar ze gestopt was omdat ze vanuit die functie er niet genoeg aan kon doen om vrede te bevorderen

Als Trump je de kans geeft om zijn kwaad te dempen, dan heb ik liever haar daar dan een of andere MAGA maloot die “platbombarderen” als enige optie aanraad.

Het ligt er allemaal een beetje aan of je gelooft of ze haar missie serieus neemt. Ze had ook kunnen wegstappen van de knoppen en het kwaad laten gebeuren zonder dat ze er deel van is, maar het lijkt er op dat ze probeert toch nog binnen dat kader het kwaad te verminderen.

Verraad vind ik daar een te sterk woord voor, militair ingrijpen om de VS en Israel dwingen te stoppen met hun genocide is niet bepaald praktisch ongeacht hoe moreel juist het zou zijn, zeker niet voor een alleenstaande diplomaat. Dus dan paden bewandelen die het kwaad verminderen zie ik zeker niet als dat kwaad helpen zonder concrete daden. Er waren in de tijd van de nazi’s ook saboteurs en dubbel agenten die voor de nazi’s werkten.