Considering that I’ve seen conflation of revenue and profit from actual journalists, I stand by my previous statement.

Treat customers right and you get rewarded. They are the majority market shareholder because they have earned it, not through deceptive business practices but through being a great company.

If they were a monopoly they wouldn’t allow other game catalogs on their systems, yet I have GOG and Epic on my Steam Deck. In fact, there isn’t even a requirement for me to have Steam on my Steam Deck. Just because a company is the market leader doesn’t mean they got there through unethical means.

I know! There’s this great game called Fortnite that no one has ever heard of because you can’t get it on Steam. /s

Their lowest paid employees still very likely make 6 figures. Valve has historically taken very good care of their employees.

Not hard, if you don’t have 20k employees.

of the PC video game market, yes.

Go do your own game shop with the feature set of steam.
We have seen how well that was executed with Epic.

I wouldnt even call the GOG implementation bad but it obviously lacks the PR in comparison (+ games like CP2077 are also available on Steam)

You are equating “monopoly” with “abusive monopoly.”

Google got its monopoly in internet search by being better than the competition. It’s still a monopoly, even though it mostly plays by the rules.

Hey look, the contrarian is back! Wow! I thought you would take some time to reflect after your wack takes.

It’s not misleading, you’ve just purposely ignored the meaning of the words to instead imply your own.

It did well because EGS is so great /s It’s obviously the exception.

The research is mostly about overpaying, not high but equal pay for everyone doing the same job. It happens when people compare their effort to others’ and if they feel over-rewarded it can actually lead to two outcomes:

• Increasing effort to justify it, or
• reducing effort

And the evidence is actually mixed between the two outcomes, because different people respond differently to different incentives, like flexibility, holidays, etc.

Equity theory mostly applies only when the work is measurable and the teams/individuals compare themselves constantly.

IMO this can be solved by better management and equal pay for equal work/skillset.

There are also other incentives that can crowd out internal motivation, such as surveillance, pressure, inequality. But obviously management doesn’t want to talk about those, much more profitable to reduce the pay.

High pay alone doesn’t really trigger crowding out.

I still maintain my position that this is largely a management and greed issue. And high and equal pay alone doesn’t create a lazy, zombie workforce.

Here’s some studies and theories arguing the opposite:

Do financial incentives help or harm performance in interesting tasks? - PubMed

There continues to be disagreement about whether financial incentives help or harm performance, especially in interesting tasks. Although the Jenkins, Mitra, Gupta, and Shaw (1998) meta-analysis finds a positive effect of incentives, including in interesting tasks (reported ρ ^ = +.34; our computed …

PubMed (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

Efficiency wage - Wikipedia

(en.wikipedia.org)

https://wol.iza.org/uploads/articles/275/pdfs/efficiency-wages-variants-and-implications.pdf

I don‘t think it’s very contrarian or whack to acknowledge the fact that I may need to sell on the biggest platform if I want my game to do well.

I’m referring to your prior comments and history speaking in communities. The most recent one I remember involved Portal, Half-life, and counterstrike.

You’re not at Lembot_0005 level comments yet tho, so that’s good.

steam has a 75% marketshare of PC games distribution in the US. the 2nd biggest player, epic games, has a market share estimated from 3% to 7,5%. i can’t find data for steam’s market share outside the US, but i’d expect it to be even higher.

if google can be considered to have a monopoly on web browsers with 73% of the marketshare, even as alternatives (like safari, 13%) exist, i don’t see why steam wouldn’t count as well.

Doubt it. But, for what it’s worth, last I heard, valve was one of the most sought after employers in the business. Apparently the salaries are generous and you get to work on whatever you want, not on what a manager tells you to.

Then again, somehow I don’t expect Valve’s expenditures are that high, except download server costs.

Hey that’s not fair.

Gabe is also spending all that money on Aston Martins Valkyries to race around the world.

No, Google pays off other browsers to use Google as the default search engine, among many other actual monopolistic practices. Steam does none of that and simply provides a product.

Yes, harassing users without context based on previous comments in other threads is much more valuable for a community. I don’t even remember having contrarian opinions about Portal or Half-Life, they are my favourite series‘.