"Valve is not your friend, and Steam is not healthy for gaming"

[Pemalite]

pokoko said:
None of which erases criticism. It doesn't work like that. Credit for the good things you do doesn't write over the bad things you do.

People do actually give CD Project Red and Valve a pass on allot of things because of all their banked goodwill.

Case in point: Valves shit customer support.

Or CD Project Reds bogus Cyberpunk trademark.

If it was any other company they would have been ridiculed... And often they have. Like EA being voted one of the worst companies of all time or the scrolls trademark fiasco.

pokoko said:
As for bringing the cost of PC gaming down, competition did that, though Steam eventually won against all the other digital distribution services that sprung up.

Valve didn't really compete against digital distribution at the time. It literally steamrolled them all.
Stardock Central? GamersGate? Direct2Drive? Were all pretty mediocre when compared to Steam.
Having one of the best games of all time that went on to sell 15+ million units on PC helped as well, Valves main competition was actually Physical media not Digital at the time.

But you also need to keep in mind that Valve is a privately held company, not a public traded company, so it doesn't have a room full of shareholders that it needs to answer to. Thus it's not beholding to driving up ever-increasing-profits for those very same people like EA, Activision, Ubisoft etc'.

No one can argue that Valve has done some amazing things for PC gaming and continue to do so, they transformed the entire platform for the better.

Cerebralbore101 said:

4. With digital the supply is borderline infinite.

Almost.

A developer/publisher will give Valve a finite amount of keys to sell, so once they run out the Developer/Publisher either hands more keys over or the game stops being sold.
A prime example of this is actually Fable 3. Once the keys ran out, Microsoft didn't bother to give Steam anymore.

mjk45 said:

Sales picking up is fine but how many are defered sales and what % of games go back to full price after the sale , my issue isn't so much that steam has sales ,everyone loves a bargain , my concern is these sales and the price points seem to be controled by the platform rathetr than  the developers.

I don't think it matters how many are deferred sales. Revenue and sales rate jumps significantly during and after a sale than prior to a sale, even decades after a games release. Steam is continuing to grow in users and thus potential customers. - It might even reach 200~ million this year.

Developers/Publishers don't actually have to sell on Steam if they don't enjoy the quartley sales.
They are more than welcomed to remove their games from Steam and sell them somewhere else. EA did it. Blizzard does it.
The PC isn't a closed ecosystem with only 1 store on propriety hardware with zero freedom.

Besides, Valve and Publishers/Developers likely have open lines of communication, Valve likely has to share statistical information anyway and Publishers/Developers likely get a degree of say on how heavily discounted their titles become. - It's also probably why some games are often more heavily discounted than others, especially older titles.

As for original base price points... That seems to be up to the Developer/Publisher. Some games have actually increased in price as time has gone on.
Publishers and Developers have sometimes sold a game in Australia with American pricing, then a few weeks or months later increased the price to match most Australian releases after people asked the publisher what was going on. (Civilization being a prime example.)
They even openly stated they made a mistake and will increase the price.