Steam is not healthy for gaming
&gt; <i>Valve themselves eagerly trumpeted that they had paid more than $57 million to Steam Workshop creators over four years — an enormously impressive figure until you realize that it&#x27;s only 25 percent of the sale price, which means Valve just made $171 million profit from ... setting up an online form where you can submit finished 3D models.</i><p>Yeah, come on, you guys! They barely did any of the work! They just set up a form! How dare they expect to be compensated for that? It&#x27;s not like there&#x27;s a huge infrastructure powering all of that, that not only required an initial investment of money, time and brainpower, but also requires ongoing maintenance!<p>The article does raise some good points, but the overall raise-the-pitchforks tone makes it seem less credible - especially when most of the complaints seem to be that <i>Valve is running a profitable business while delivering value to customers</i>. The author forgot what installing and playing games was like before Steam - better write down those CD keys somewhere safe, or never lose the cases - or the CDs themselves. (Or, god forbid, keep the manual around forever so you can refer to line 5 on page 17, and type in the third, seventh and eight word.)<p>And one of the reasons people hated EA was because EA abused its employees and developers, not because they had a shitty game client; if you want to compare someone to Uber&#x2F;Lyft&#x2F;AirBNB, they are a much closer candidate.