Even when Valve finally did get around to launching a refund program (a full two years after the supposedly evil EA did it!), many people quite accurately and angrily observed that the default refund option was in Steam credit, which means Valve wins either way. It's almost like Good Guy Valve just ... doesn't want you to have your money back.
Valve themselves eagerly trumpeted that they had paid more than $57 million to Steam Workshop creators over four years — an enormously impressive figure until you realize that it's only 25 percent of the sale price, which means Valve just made $171 million profit from ... setting up an online form where you can submit finished 3D models.
"Good Guy Valve was backed into a corner and hissed like a cat that doesn't want to go to the vet"
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. This is called “speculative work” in the industry and it's hugely frowned upon as exploitative and unjust.
Valve sells your work to other people, and they take the overwhelming majority of the money from each transaction. Everyone's a winner ... but Valve, whose running costs for the store are essentially zero, and who have just tricked you into joining their content farm, is the biggest winner. You’re putting up your time and effort, and those have a very real cost for you. Valve has lost nothing other than the sunk cost of the employee time spent maintaining the store, while gaining a lot of revenue.
“It's impossible for artists to live on the workshop alone anymore, something which Valve used to repeatedly brag about,” explained one prominent Workshop artist to me in an interview for this piece. Valve has just recently slashed royalties for Dota 2 creators to almost nothing, right on the eve of the next massive International tournament. According to this artist’s estimate, their share has gone down from 25 percent to more like to five percent or seven percent, and communication from Valve has been unclear or flat-out non-existent.
“Despite getting three times as many items in [to the latest Major], I'm getting a third less money,” they continue. “Things are effectively five times worse, and that's not factoring the fact that the sales themselves are worse.
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).
When you decide to support Dota 2, Good Guy Valve takes your money, puts 25 percent into the prize pool for the players and keeps the rest for himself, and even then the prize pool was nearly $20 million in 2016. I'm sure you can do the math.
It gets worse. Four years ago in the Dota 2 First Blood Update, Valve announced to the world that Steam Workshop items could now be re-sold on the Steam Community Market. Item creators would receive “a share of each resale of their item,” the splash page promised, and those creators were excited at the possibilities.
The item re-sales are in full swing today, but that promised share of the profits for creators is still undelivered and Valve refuses to answer questions about where their money is. We emailed Valve for a comment on this issue before publishing the story, and have yet to hear back. After all, if you don't say anything, you can't tell a lie to the internet, right?
