Valve announced a replacement feature for both Family Sharing and Family View. Currently in beta.
Features:
- up to 5 members
- game sharing
- parental controls
- allow access to appropriate games
- restrict access to the Steam Store, Community or Friends Chat
- set playtime limits (hourly/daily)
- view playtime reports
- approve or deny requests from child accounts for additional playtime or feature access (temporary or permanent)
- recover a child’s account if they lost their password
- child purchase requests
I don’t think that’s the argument against it. Just that it’s inordinately high. But Valve is a corporation so not unexpected.
The 30% it’s always been the standard though, so not just Valve. That figure comes from retail, where 30-50% is still standard practice. You could argue that retail has higher costs, therefore needs the higher cut, but when Valve created Steam, they probably went with what worked.
What I really hate about Steam and all online shops, is that you can’t resell something you purchased second hand. If I can resell my physical copy of a game or movie, I should be able to do the same with the digital version. Also the fact that they can remove access to the product you bought whenever they want. In my opinion, we need a law that specifies that what you buy is yours, and you get to do whatever you want with it, even if the manufacturer doesn’t like it.
Valve is in a really dominant position and has almost always been, so they got a lot of sway on what the industry standard is. So can’t really blame other corporations here for the 30%.
That’s one way to say it. I think early on they had the cost advantage to retail and needed to convince people to buy digitally instead of traditionally, so lower cut. But of course they, as any company, would keep it near to as high as possible while being competitive. I’m not trying to shit on Valve by saying that, it’s just how it works for any company.
I think that was actually one usecase for NFTs or whatever. There was much talk about it a while back but after the whole jpeg fiasco and shitcoin stuff I think it was all killed off.
You realize there have been payment processors and retail stores long before valve existed right? And markups/cuts have always been commonplace.
Friend, I don’t know if you noticed but we’re talking specifically about game distribution platforms here. I really don’t know what you thought your comment would add to the discussion. What next, you’re going to tell me that money existed before Steam too lol.