Comment by thetanil
5 years ago
I think it's also probably easy to do this with stadia since it's effectively 0 users. What would he say if steam treated devs like google does?
5 years ago
I think it's also probably easy to do this with stadia since it's effectively 0 users. What would he say if steam treated devs like google does?
If Valve treated game developers like Google does, Steam would have followed the path of Stadia which is failing despite being technically a good product.
That's my personal take on the current situation: despite owning one of the largest digital store, Google sucks at being a publisher. The actual automated ban is mostly inconsequential. Every large publishers have technical issue from time to time. What's unique to Google is that you can't effectively contact anyone to have them sorted out.
If you are an indie dev with a track record and works with Steam, XBLA, Epic or Nintendo, you will be in touch with a company representative.
> If you are an indie dev with a track record and works with Steam, XBLA, Epic or Nintendo, you will be in touch with a company representative.
Yep. I worked for a small video game publisher with only four people in the entire company and we had a designated account representative at Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft we could (and did) contact when we had issues.
Might be harder as an indie dev, but if you have any track record, like you said, I'm sure they know someone they can contact.
We were a really low volume AWS customer. We had an account representative.
> technically a good product.
Do you mean with technology or something like "technically it could have worked in the market"? Because if its the latter then I disagree. Its a service on which my entire library can disappear, I have to pay full price + subscription price and maybe buy new hardware (to play on TVs). I have no idea who this is for.
> Do you mean with technology or something like "technically it could have worked in the market"?
Yes, I mean the technology. I played cyberpunk on it. It worked really well (better than I expected a streaming service to work).
> I have to pay full price + subscription price and maybe buy new hardware (to play on TVs).
You just need to pay the game to play in 1080p. The pro tier is if you want 4k and comes with free games. You can actually play free to play games like Destiny 2 for free on Stadia.
I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't know however. Google marketing was terrible.
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> I have no idea who this is for.
It's for Google, trying out rent-seeking in a consumer channel with high fixed costs
Valve does treat game developers poorly, and it can’t be fixed because their no-internal-structure setup means nobody can actually change anything at the company. They’re bad at dealing with Japanese content, if you get a reviewer who decides it’s “more gross anime shit” (as millenials like to do) they ban your game sight unseen with no appeal. Kind of a problem when the newer younger people into anime aesthetic are also the ones making all the LGBT content.
> Valve does treat game developers poorly
Valve definitely doesn't treat developers poorly (well their commission is too big but they are quite reasonable in how they interact with developers).
> They’re bad at dealing with Japanese content, if you get a reviewer who decides it’s “more gross anime shit” (as millenials like to do) they ban your game sight unseen with no appeal.
No, they don't do that. They ban games involving sexualisation of minors (e.g. your Twitter links below). Also I don't think there is a millennial conspiracy regarding Japanese content. I'm French I have literally been raised on Japanese import and the content you are linking seriously creeps me out.
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As an indie dev I disagree very heavily with this. Games like Hentai Nazi (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1183970/Hentai_Nazi/) are allowed to be on the store because they're generally very permissive, as long as you're following the laws that they have to follow because they're in America. If you're making games with sexual content and characters of questionable age (as many of these banned anime games do), then it's reasonable that some of them will get banned, since Valve has to obey the law.
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Many smaller devs have pivoted to leverage alternative platforms like Itch, Epic Games Store, Game Pass, etc alongside Steam for monetization, and some have ditched Steam entirely based on complaints with Valve's developer relations and pricing. Valve seems unlikely to ever make any concessions to win back the hearts of smaller developers, but they did panic once Epic Games Store and other storefronts started capturing exclusives for large titles by offering big studios a reduced cut (20-25% in some cases) to keep them around.
Another way to look at this: Valve's treatment of developers (not nearly as bad as Google, to be clear) is mostly tolerated because of Steam's inertia and market share. Google is acting like Stadia has inertia and market share when it has neither.
His post implies he's dropping support for all Google platforms, presumably including Android, where Terraria is consistently one of the top selling games. That seems like a much more difficult decision.
It's interesting you don't consider Android one of Google's platforms.