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Valve Beats Google, Apple For Profits Per Employee
AndrewGOO9 writes "It should come with little surprise that Gabe Newell is well on his way to being one of the wealthiest men in gaming. In an age when console gamers would have many believe that the PC was on its way out the door, Newell and Valve's Steam stand as sentinels of the platform, offering a ridiculous amount of content to the 30 million users. With the lion's share of the downloadable market on the PC, it's no wonder that Steam has become the go-to for many and an incredible financial opportunity for Newell and Valve. According to Forbes, 'Newell says that, per employee, Valve is more profitable than Google and Apple. A potential buyer was rumored to have made an acquisition offer a few years back for the Steam piece only, but Newell supposedly refused to split the online storefront from Valve's game-publishing arm.'"
No point in having a Linux client when most people use Windows, and even a large section of Linux users dual-boot into Windows for gaming anyways. In the gaming market, Linux isn't profitable.
Yeah, but that's exactly why they *are* profitable. ;)
A Linux client sounds amazing! You'll be able to buy all of those Windows Only games, see your disk space drop slowly while they download, then realise that the "Platinum" rating they get for WINE is actually rubbish and you spent £25 on something you can't use.
Don't take this the wrong way; I gamed on Linux for over a year, fiddling with WINE config and game ini files to get the damn things to load, and it was Good. I learned a lot. However, much like you *can* run a diesel car on cooking oil, it's far more convenient to fill it up at a petrol station than to buy carton after carton of catering fat. Right now, it's more convenient to PC game on Windows than Linux, and Gabe knows this.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
[citation needed] and I don't know many Linux users who do.
What I think he meant was "it's the only option linux users have".
http://2dboy.com/2009/02/12/world-of-goo-linux-version-is-ready/
http://2dboy.com/2009/10/26/pay-what-you-want-birthday-sale-wrap-up/
To be fair those numbers were inflated by people who wanted to show that a game on linux can be profitable.
On my Mac (the horror! the horror!) I can log on, purchase and download the games that are released for Mac. I can even play them.
The trick is that once the Steam client has been ported, each individual game developer chooses whether to invest money in porting their awesome creation to OSX.
If Valve ported Steam to Linux, that would open a similar calculation for the developer. It would also mean that indie developers could develop on the Linux stack and sell their games to those who run Linux. Given careful selection of libraries, it's possible to run the same code on Linux, OSX and Windows. It would be sweet. But it depends on whether Valve thinks there would be enough money in the Linux market to pay for the development of a Linux client.
Stop the brainwash
Right now, it's more convenient to PC game on Windows than Linux, and Gabe is helping to perpetuate this.
FTFY..
I have seen comments to the effect that Valve bugfix their own games to run better on WINE, not sure how true it is though.
which is totally what she said
Which we would do why? It makes about as much sense as suggesting we limit the discussion to the number of African-American females (none), unless you're suggesting that Apple's retail employees work for free or apple should/could drop out of retail entirely.
You're missing something. In TFA, the $55 million profit is the 2005 value. As Valve is privately owned, it does not give any information regarding its profit to the public, which means that no-one really knows how much profit it did last year. But probably more than $55 million, if we do your math in reverse.
No, Apple may still very well lose that comparison, I actually don't give a shit as I don't hold any Apple stock(and obviously no share in Valve as its a privately held company), but if you are going to go and make claims like this then you should make the control variables be as close as possible.
Monstar L
Personally I am less annoyed by the performance and more annoyed with their shitty region-locking...
If you live in the US game X costs 19.99 USD.... ... wait for it.... 19.99 Euro...
If you live in Europe, the game costs
1 Euro = 1.3556 U.S. dollars (today's rate on google)
So, they want me to pay 27.10 USD for the same game due to the region I am in.
I am sorry Valve, but I'll be buying the game for 19.99 in another online store thankyouverymuch.
For years I have spent money on Steam buying my games but I now limit my buying to promotions that are actually cheaper than the competition.
Meh...
Erm... have you even USED Steam on any half-decent PC?
I'm an old DOS guy so anything over 2Mb is blasphemy for me, but Steam is currently sitting (on a machine that's been taken into and out of standby about 50 times since it was last booted about a month ago) at around 9.5Mb RAM usage according to Task Manager. It doesn't touch more than 1% CPU enough to register on any simple task list. Steam's been running ALL that time that the computer has been up, with 250+ games, and gets used every night to play a game (anything from L4D2 to Altitude to the original Counterstrike).
I don't have the overlay enabled. I do have Friends enabled. I don't have it in "large" mode. It has been running perfectly fine and doesn't interfere with *anything * do. It doesn't even allocate enough memory to worry about - my print spooler service occupies more memory.
There are network delays when I run a game as it is (I assume) authenticated, but it's the *game* and network that causes that, not CPU usage or memory allocation from Steam. Steam hardly does anything at all, whereas the initial load of something like L4D2 tries to read in 2Gb of data. Killing Floor is terrible in that respect and can take about 4-5 minutes to clean up after I come out of it. None of that is *Steam*, that's the game.
The actual *Steam* component does nothing to slow that down, but XP happens to be particularly crap at freeing memory when you've used enough to touch swap (it's XP swapping from the release of the game's 2Gb of memory that actually stops me doing anything for a little while with any program, not just Steam).
250 games and, once loaded in the file cache once, they just load barely touching the disk (I don't even notice the load times for the small indie games any more because it's instantaneous and silent because of my long "suspended" Windows session that keeps the file cache intact.
It's slow browsing the store in Steam, I give you that, but that's to be expected, especially when I'm used to Opera throwing pages on the screen faster than I can see them. And this is a laptop. In large mode, it hits 50Mb if I browse, but to be honest Opera or Firefox hit roughly the same when I browse the same websites in them. Even 200Mb is barely worth worrying about these days - I lose a Gig of my RAM just by not choosing to run a 64-bit OS.
You either have a horribly underpowered PC, not enough RAM and so are swapping WAY more than necessary, or you haven't actually LOOKED at the cause of your problem. The most I've ever seen Steam use is about 250Mb and 10% CPU averaged over a minute or so and that was just before they changed to the new integrated web browser.
I call crap on your assertions. Five years ago, yeah, maybe, they were bloating on older PC's that didn't need that kind of bloat. Now? They are smaller than my print spooler on a machine that can cope with just about anything I throw at it.
(P.S. WHOA! Memory usage just went up to 10Mb! And then strangely went back down to 7Mb when I actually brought it out of the taskbar to sit on "small mode" on the desktop).
Your comparing 2010 (2009?) Apple profit with Valve's 2005 profit, you need to read the article more carefully. Vavle is likely making in the $250m/750 range at present.
Apple made less than 2B in 2005 profit, so you're off by about 12-13B.
PocketPermissions Android Permission Guide
I didn't think VAC (the thing in Steam that monitors cheating) pulled the license on your games whatsoever, but rather flagged you as a cheater on $GAME, which in turn caused servers for $GAME that cared to not permit you to play. In general (as in, it can trivially be done in most games that allow play on user-run servers), it's both possible to have servers that neither use nor check VAC, and it's possible to still play your game after VAC has blacklisted you -- you just can't play it multiplayer on VAC enabled servers.
It could be possible you are referring to something else though?
I agree, but don't blame Valve for that. If HL2 is one price in Britain and another in France, okay then that's Valve's fault. But the prices of all of the non-Valve games are dictated by the publishers as well as the rights-holders of each individual country, not Valve.
I for one agree that region-locking is bullshit as well. Part of the appeal for PCs (to me) is that (in theory) you shouldn't be able to "region-lock" them, and then someone had to go and figure that shit out.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
From Games Radar:
Steam raked in nearly one billion dollars in 2010 (http://www.gamesradar.com/pc/call-of-duty-black-ops/news/steam-raked-in-nearly-one-billion-dollars-in-2010/a-2011020485712484007/g-20100430155446363032)
What are the sales figures for the whopping 2 games you linked?
I always love when people throw out strawmen.
5 casual games on Linux does not a market make. It would be *irresponsible* for any company who actually wants to make money to serve the Linux market for games.
It's true that many downloadable games are overpriced on Steam in certain regions. They're also overpriced compared to retail.
Solution: check prices and then if favourable, buy retail and activate on Steam.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
Then you are a poor soul. Lower my Karma, but I am never touching Windows again, unless I'm forced to do so in my job. It disgusts me to support and see other people support the tirany of Microsoft.
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
Now compare Steam with other similar services. Games for Windows Live for example. I shouldn't have to outline how inferior it is to Steam to anyone who has used both. Any program whose poor programming requires me to turn off my firewall to play any games tied to it can go screw itself.
I am utterly baffled by people who think porting Steam to Linux would be even slightly useful.
Steam is not a game. Valve porting it will not make any Steam game run on Linux.
Why on earth would Valve port Steam so that Linux users might purchase the $300 total worth of games that actually run on Linux that they sell?
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I don't know what's worse, that you believe Microsoft is tyrannous, or that you expect anyone to take your intelligence seriously when you can't spell tyranny.
Schnapple
The difference with the Mac, was that most Mac owners did not also run Windows for gaming. If you sold someone the Mac version, that was a new sale. According to the original poster's own argument, a sale of the Linux version is not a new sale - if there's no Linux version, he'll buy the Windows version instead. Even if the Linux version is just one hour of someone's time to do the recompile and a quick test, it's not worthwhile, because the company gets no more sales: they just trade a sale of the Windows version for a sale of the Linux version.
As long as Linux gamers are willing to buy the Windows version, there is no financial incentive to do a Linux port.
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Still nerdraging about that damn pay-for-perks TF2 store and the region lock disc scams.
In the gaming market, Linux isn't profitable.
http://2dboy.com/2009/02/12/world-of-goo-linux-version-is-ready/
http://2dboy.com/2009/10/26/pay-what-you-want-birthday-sale-wrap-up/
Funny thing about that example. In his 2009 IGS keynote 2DBoy's Ron Carmel, speaking about World of Goo specifically, indicated that Linux ports aren't actually profitable by themselves, but the Linux community is so vocal whenever a major game is released on Linux, it can significantly boost sales on profitable platforms like Mac and PC.
+0 Meh