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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/
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).
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?
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 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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