Valve rocks

Then again, Valve gets 30% to 20% of the benefits from all sales from their platform. It's easier to be generous when everyone has to pay you to make cash.

This.
Valve doesn't release games, it releases ads for Steam.
Which is fine. It's great. Makes for great, cheap products and long-term strategies that aren't trying to shake all the money off of you.
But that's the end goal, still.
As a friendly reminder, Valve also universalized DRM, invented multiple new types of microtransactions and actually kinda invented NFTs for a little bit.
- Invented the loot box y'all love so much. Tried to invent paid mods. Valve is still a Corpo and corpos gonna corpos
- DOTA 2, Counter-Strike 2, TF 2 are all maintained and get updates or total overhauls.
  What’s their opinion on NFTs now?
That 20-30% tax also gives developers access to Valve's massive infrastructure (content delivery ain't easy or cheap) and Steam's audience, and that's something that can't be replicated with exclusivity deals.
- Oh, and they KNOW that, too. Valve's entire business model is making other people work for them. Their third party relations talks are less keynotes and more thinly veiled, very pleasant shakedowns.
I think you're missing the principle. They could still charge for it, they simply won't. Think of it this way, if it was EA in that situation would they give it away for free? Somehow I doubt it because EA does things for profit. This is a potential avenue for profit and which means not asking money for it would go against the goal of EA.
30% is the industry standard.
- Doesn't change that it's a lot lol they're also basically "the industry"
Well it's easier even to want more money, cooperations giving something away for free that could have earned them money is not that common.
- It is when it gets people on your platform, and more likely to spend money on other things on the platform. It's called a loss leader.
Is it though? The only reason other platforms take 15% is to try to break through valve's market. Once they make it (like Epic) you better trust they're going to take as much as they can.
Plus, it's apparently not easy to be generous, Apple and Google make far more money, where are they being generous? Gaben is a gem
(Google and apple also take 30% of transactions on their store). You get much more for you 30% to valve than 30 or 15% anywhere else.
Epic, Bethesda, Blizzard and others are not paying for those 30% to Valve. So what's their excuse? Bethesda resold Skyrim enough times to shame anyone. Blizzard remade Warcraft3 and we all know how that went. I for one am happy Valve did this. They gave an old game a new life for at least a short time by giving it for free to keep, added new multiplayer maps and added some servers. Let people have some fun at anniversary instead of being greedy.
Yeah, but it's still more profitable for indie game studios to put their game on steam, since they have a larger market to sell to, also valve doesn't just take the money and goes, they spend it to make really good products that aren't profitable and wouldn't be possible else like the steam deck and proton
- People behave as if Valve is holding a gun to indie dev's head and forcing them to pay those 30%. Steam has so many users for a reason. It's not a monopoly on a whim. They offer a huge benefit to their users at no charge and as little annoyance as possible. People who don't want to sell on Steam, don't have to. Easy as that. Sure Valve charges a lot, but they use that money to create a really good quality service that will give them the ability to charge that much without having to resort to timed exclusives and other vile tactics.
They take nothing if you sell your game via keys on other sites like itch.io
- Exactly. It's not like Valve is forcing people to sell their games on Steam. People simply like using Steam. End of story.
On the other hand they pay for all the liabilitys, server capacitys and everything regarding the store and let everyone put their games up i think its fair. Also steam is trusted by almost everyone to always be available and never loose your games. And it does advertising for the games as well.
Yeah, this is cool and all, but it's like Epic posting a game for free, which they do every week or so. People still complain about Epic being greedy or whatever though. I like the products Valve makes, but this isn't particularly amazing, just fairly nice to have.
- Epic paid people for exclusivity in an attempt to force the customer to use its shitty platform. The free games are just bribes to try to get us to use it. And it's still not working very well for them.
  Nobody would have complained (well ok, some would have, but few) if they just tried to make a better store than steam and get people to use it that way.
  They could still do the free games as a bribe, to get people to check out the store, but the store would actually need to not be garbage. The exclusivity payments really rankled people though.
The power of monopoly
- Blizzard, Bethesda, Epic and many others don't pay those 30% to Valve. So what's their excuse for not giving free games?
  Valve is also not holding a gun to developer's head and forcing them to pay those 30%. Valve takes that money and makes a great service that users want to use. That in turn gives them the right to charge that amount of money.
  When you look at all the features from cloud saves, chat and voice communication, simple networking without having to mess with routers, Proton, family sharing, streaming, card collecting, trading, achievements, huge sales, anti-cheat, workshop, communities with forums and bug reporting tools, lax refund policy, etc. When other companies start offering same value instead of forcing your hand with exclusives, then we can talk about monopoly

If only Valve could learn to count to three they'd be the perfect game studio.

they already did! the steamdeck was released with steam os 3.0 (in the meantime they reached 3.5)
They are trying.

I've been playing TH 1+2 offline with no connection for the past year. What are you talking about?

Adding a couple of maps to a 25 year old game isn't a remaster. Anyone here play Black Mesa? Now THAT's how you do a remaster.

That's a remake, not a remaster.
- Yes, I suppose you are correct.

Well, not every company is shitting money like Valve.

They can afford to do this because of their technical monopoly.

Blizzard, Bethesda, Epic, EA and many others have more money than Valve. So what's their excuse for not giving free games? Hell EA earned on micro-transactions for FIFA more than GDP of some countries.
- Activision Blizzard annual net income for 2022 was $1.513B
  In fiscal year 2022, EA posted GAAP net revenue of approximately $7 billion
  Epic Games revenue is $5.76 billion according to figures reported in 2021
  Valve generated around USD13 billion in total revenue in 2022
  Also,
  So what’s their excuse for not giving free games?
  Did you really ask this after including Epic?
  But these comparisons are ridiculous anyway. Neither of these companies are your friends, and trying to understand their behavior in terms of anything other than profit-seeking is only going to lead to you feeling betrayed. Gamers' obsession with defending Steam is so ridiculous that no one ever disputes the idea that Apple and Google are being abusive with their store policies, but calling out Steam for doing the exact same always brings dozens of people out of the woods who think it's a controversial claim.

I mean sure, but this is a great showcase of Source Engine 2 which is a product they will be selling

And yet there are companies like Bethesda that have re-released games dozens of times for full price.
- I mean don't get me wrong, I am all for Valve's overall values compared to EA, Sony, Microsoft, Bethesda, etc. glad they're staying private.
Honest to god I don't remember the last valve game I bought. CSGO 10+ years ago probably.
I would say it is great showcase of their new map compilers, but anyway

Just few weeks ago everyone complaining about CS2

Since CS2 came out a ton of new people have started playing and a bunch of old school players came back. I am one of them and easily spent $60 on buying skins. Valve understands how to get people to love their games and spend money on something that is free.

Dead space remake was great, wasnt it?

It was. And so was RE4.
But on the other hand, they're already remastering The Last of Us 2 for some reason.
- Gotta cash in on season 2 of the TV show
and at least they didn't remove the old one, even though that old one is $25 and gets put on sale less and less.

They can do that because you pay them when you buy other game remasters.

yes but so do other huge game companies on cosmetics, in game items, other spin offs. I agree it's not as easy but right now even doing this is unusual for most companies.
- Doesn’t Valve make most of it’s money off the virtual economies of tf2 and counter strike?
- Very few game companies actually make a lot of money from cosmetics and ingame items. Most don't.
  It's also stupid to think companies should do things for free. That's not the world we live in. It's an exception
Then why did Microsoft charge 60 dollars for the Halo remasters?

What game?

The og half-life

Best remake was AoE2 imo, the price is completely justified.

I know the documentary and the fact that game is free for now, but I am completelly out of the loop of what changed.

Did Valve upgraded graphics? Added new maps? I mean - for single player of original game? Someone please advise :)

they added a short bonus campaing for single player that was formaly on a demo disc that got lost to times. they added 4 new multiplayer maps they fixed graphic bugs and added widescreen support they dramatically improved controler support
so nothing game changing but nice nontheless
- oh and you can now invite friends through steam so they don't have to manually search the server you are on
I can't even figure out what game you're all talking about.
- Game: Half Life 1
  Get it here (currently free): https://store.steampowered.com/app/70/HalfLife/
  Documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbZ3HzvFEto
There are fixes with the graphics, new maps and there are new multiplayer servers being active right now. They also fixed a lot of things to make the game work and feel good on new hardware with new aspect ratios etc.
They for sure updated rad(or whatever algo they are using now)

Wow, I have been away and I did NOT anticipate such a interest in this topic by you guys!

I'd say other corpos change the game more than this re-release