I absolutely hated Steam when I was first forced to use it.
But once I realized what it actually was selling me I flip-flopped. With Steam, every purchase I made going forward would be kept “forever.” I’ve lost many old-school games to media dying or becoming outdated.
I repurchased much of my old software I’d lost on Steam for a few bucks and no regrets.
Okay.
Ok all. I’m done with this one. Thank you for your support.
If OP hasn’t been on in a while, Steam is probably updating since the Obama administration. I find that discord tends to try to take over my machine more than steam does.
I am not a huge steam fan, but it is a fact of life for most of the games I play.
Or EA/ Origin eye twitch
To sum up:
Thanks for correcting my mistake. The other day somebody revoked steam keys that were sold in good numbers on another service. A lot of people found that a game that they’d bought in 2018, a legitimate copy from a legitimate seller as far as they could tell, was suddenly yoinked out of their library. That’s the kind of stuff I’m worried that steam can do, where I don’t worry about GOG.
Steam will have revoked them because they were stolen, ie bought with fraudulent credit and on-sold to a grey market vendor. The publisher receives no money from those sales, so it’s only right that Steam do that.
Whether GoG have a similar system for such cases I do not know.
Out of curiosity, how is there any money at all in legitimate sales of Steam keys through third-party vendors?
Once upon a time, I think the rationale was that if someone bought a key from Green Man Gaming and activated it on Steam, it was a"win" for Steam to bring more people into its ecosystem. At this point, with Steam’s level of penetration, I’m not sure how true that is but I think Valve needs to continue providing free key generation to avoid losing developers to other platforms. I believe they’re a little more limiting these days to avoid a developer making some low-effort game, getting a million keys and giving them all away.
As far as revocations go, it happens but it’s very, very rare. A few weeks ago, some small time developer revoked a bunch of keys from some six year old bundle by Indie Gala (or some other bundle site) claiming that they were never paid. However…
(a) This almost never sticks. The community gets all outraged, the developer realizes that they’re just tanking their reputation and, predictably, everyone got their keys restored
-and-
(b) We’re talking about some minor crappy game that no one would have noticed was gone if Steam didn’t give you a pop-up saying that a title had been revoked. I’ve never heard of a major title getting revoked except in targeted cases (some store glitched the game for free) and even minor indie titles very, very rarely get revoked due to (a)
There are more edge cases of “game tampering” like a game having some music files removed because licensing on an old title expired and, while I don’t like it, it’s also very rare in relation to the number of titles on Steam and I guess I don’t care enough about the music on a 12 year old game to consider not using Steam as a result.
Based on the posts here I believe OP is not particularly computer literate. I’ve been using Steam basically since it came out, early on it did have problems. Bricking hard drives was not one of them, from a technical standpoint that just isn’t a very realistic scenario. Steam does not use significant resources as a background process (the chat apps Discord and Slack, both of which I use, use 2-3x as much, as an example.)
I am naturally monopoly averse, and for that reason I also buy games through GOG, Epic etc just to vary it up, but unless OP is the first user to have discovered that Steam is running a weird program to automatically take screenshots for some nefarious purpose, I think it’s safe to conclude he hit a button he didn’t mean to and got confused, tying into lack of computer literacy. Note that what you actually saw was a notification that a screenshot was taken and uploaded, if Valve wanted to, Steam could take a screenshot and upload it without notfiying you, wouldn’t it stand to reason if they were doing it for nefarious purposes that is how it would work?
Anyway, OP is in the same vein as all those posters who insist using WinXP 10 years after it left support or trundling along on Netscape 4.5 in 2020 is reasonable/fine, I would not take this OP seriously based on the evidence provided.
I’m not doubting you, but I think I’m lacking some key background here. As I understand it, things normally go like this:
Is this right?
So then Green Man Gaming comes along. Do they buy Steam keys for $10? If so, how are they going to make any money off reselling them? Do they pay less than $10? If so, how does that benefit Steam or Podunk Games?
If I want GunBullet Delight, surely I’m gonna buy it directly from Steam unless GMG sells it for less than $10, right? Because going to a third party site to make the purchase and then coming back to Steam is just enough of a pain in the ass that I won’t do it unless there’s a benefit.
My understanding is that Podunk Games makes GunBullet Delight and arranges with Valve to sell on Steam. Valve both hosts the game files and will generate keys for Podunk Games. Podunk is free to take those keys and sell them to GMG or sell them to Humble Bundle or give them away as promotions or whatever. Valve makes money because the cost of hosting is fairly low and they take 30% of whatever Podunk sells the game at. Valve accepts third party keys because they bring people into Steam’s ecosystem where they presumably buy games direct from Steam. Perhaps more importantly these days, Podunk doesn’t instead sell GMG keys for Epic Game Store and make people wander away from Steam.
But, yes, Podunk makes the game as sells on Steam for $10 (with Valve taking 30%) and also sells Valve-generated Steam keys to GMG for $5 or $3 or whatever a wholesale Steam key goes for. I’d think they likely get the most direct cash per key from Steam purchases and purchases via other sites are more “we’ll make it up in quantity”
Steam also gets extra money from things like trading cards or tradable item drops, etc. While I assume most people don’t bother with that stuff, a very dedicated number of people do and that’s basically free money for Valve, taking a couple pennies each time people trade .jpg files. So even if they didn’t get money directly from the GMG purchase, they likely make something downline.
Green Man Gaming doesn’t pay for the keys up front, thats the big benefit of steam keys over other platforms. GMG and the developer can generate valid Steam keys because GMG is an approved Steam rretailer. (The sketchier sites actually buy a key elsewhere and then send it to you).
When you buy a game directly on Steam, Valve gets about 30% (Epic is 12% which is why they run all those free game deals. They take a smaller cut from the dev, so the dev agrees to give them free keys because they make more money on any DLC or future sales on Epic).
When you buy a game on GMG, Valve actually doesn’t get a cut. And if GMG wants to give you 30% off, they do it by cutting their own commission (and hoping you’ll buy other games).
[Quote]If I want GunBullet Delight, surely I’m gonna buy it directly from Steam unless GMG sells it for less than $10, right? Because going to a third party site to make the purchase and then coming back to Steam is just enough of a pain in the ass that I won’t do it unless there’s a benefit.
[/quote]
This is how Steam makes their money, I think. While I’ll buy full games elsewhere to get 10-25% off, I don’t find it worth the hassle of buying someplace other than Steam when it comes to DLC. For example, a Total War DLC may go for 8.99, and I generally wouldn’t bother going to GMG for 5-10% off that amount and jumping through the hoops of getting a key and entering it. Even with larger games, there have been times when I saw a game I’d been considering on sale for say 40% off, and my thought isn’t “ooh, let me get that!” - it’s “ooh, does Steam have the same sale?” (Which it often does for cuts larger than 30% since that requires the developer to take a price cut too, and they often put their games on sale on multiple platforms at once). Or, if it isn’t on sale on Steam, I’ll just wishlist it and wait for it to go 40% off or more on Steam itself.
Apparently, Valve says something like 75% of all sales of Steam keys are made on Steam itself, so I’m not alone in this.
Can they? I don’t think this is true (but have no direct experience). Sites like GMG run out of keys for popular games on sale and it’s often a day+ before they restock which doesn’t sound like GMG is making their own. I’m fairly sure that they need to wait for Valve to generate new keys.
That’s what Steam’s site says, although it also says they’ll manually review large transactions.
I’d be surprised that they don’t have a “we know you are legit” exception for, say, GMG - except not having that makes a ton of sense, because that way when the latest Game of the Decade drops for the third time this year, GMG will run out of keys and people will come to steam.
It also might be that GMG doesn’t generate the keys, the DEV does - and GMG is waiting on Bethesda or CDProjekt Red or whoever.
By the way - it ALSO says that if you offer a sale of steam keys or free steam keys on other sites, you must offer the same thing to Steam customers within a reasonable time frame. So that explains why I’ve never felt like I need to bother with sales off of steam, aside from Humble Bundle and similar.
Oh, right. I knew that the publisher could request them from Valve but mistook you as saying that GMG could generate their own keys in-house. All keys originate through Valve, as far as I’m aware.
“Based on the posts here I believe OP is not particularly computer literate.”
A brief, incomplete overview of my computer literacy:
1965-1966 Took a mail-order correspondence course in computer programming while in high school.
1967 While attending Drexel University was offered a job with a major computer company when a professor showed them a project I had written in class for a procedure that was supposed to be impossible on the IBM 360. I didn’t finish the degree; was literally taken in the back door to the basement and put to work in a small office; somebody put a sign on the door labeled “Impossible Projects Dept”. My job was to ‘make it fit’ in the days when memory was at an extreme premium. The guys doing floating point decimal stuff were the smartest people I’ve ever known.
Eventually one day I ran into a blue suit white shirt striped tie short-haired guy in the elevator (I wore jeans and t-shirt and had long hair) who said “I’ve seen you around here, young man. Do you work in the building?” I said “Yes.” He said “Where.” I said “Programming.” He puffed up and said “Is that so? Well, I happen to be the Director of Personnel and I want to see you in my office immediately.” It seems they had completely by-passed him when they hired me.
I walked in to the office and 50 or more clacking typists instantly became hushed, pin drop quiet at the sight of this interloper. The Director said I had to get a haircut and wear suitable clothes. I told him I would get a suit but I wasn’t getting a haircut. Going back and forth with higher-ups they offered me more money, a (much) better office, a company car, more vacation, tuition to finish my degree. Eventually I just quit and gave up programming.
Dabbled some with Sinclair other small computers just for fun.
1977 Got an Apple 2. Wrote Basic programs to test Blackjack card counting systems; they were too slow so I wrote machine language to speed it up. (Played BJ for a living for four years before getting banned.) Wrote a program to work out best strategy for Video Poker when those machines came out (Played Video Poker for a living for two years).
Also did machine language programming on Atari and Commodore.
When IBM compatibles came out I worked with all the versions of DOS and Windows up to Win10, always just writing my own programs to analyze casino games for profit.
Bah! Don’t know why I bothered. Just because you are so glaringly wrong, I guess.
I’m sorry I’m being dense–what is Steam’s involvement in the process, then, and why do they have this involvement? If I buy a Steam key from GMG, when I download the game, whose servers are involved? If Valve doesn’t get a cut, is it a straight loss for them (however small) when I buy from GMG, since it takes some amount of Valve resources to process the key? Is the idea that it acts as a small bit of marketing–i.e., for the cost of processing the key, they get my eyeballs back on the Steam app?
To activate the key, and download your game, you go to Steam. From GMG’s perspective, they don’t need expensive servers to let you download the game, play multi-player, validate your key, etc - that’s all taken care of by Valve, totally free of charge.
Valve benefits by getting you to put all of your games on Steam, and buy more games there because it’s easy. As noted, developers who coordinate with other sellers to make a sale or offer a game free must do the same thing for Steam customers too. So Steam is very “sticky”. And I have to admit, I often play my Steam games more than games I got on other platforms. For example, I own Total War: Troy on Epic, as it was free. I will probably get the new Mythos DLC, again on Epic, because I’m not going to have Epic automatically run all the time. If I want to play Troy, I have to launch (and likely update) Epic, then update the game.
All that results in lots and lots of Steam game sales.