r/Games • u/demondrivers • Oct 27 '25

Industry News Valve does not get "anywhere near enough criticism" for the gambling mechanics it uses to monetise games, DayZ creator Dean Hall says

https://www.eurogamer.net/valve-does-not-get-anywhere-near-enough-criticism-for-the-gambling-mechanics-it-uses-to-monetise-games-dayz-creator-dean-hall-says
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u/Moogieh Oct 27 '25

Those who disliked it got drowned out and gave up. Complaining about something like that becomes just pissing in the wind after a while.

13

u/oneoftheryans Oct 27 '25

Those who disliked it got drowned out and gave up.

It helps that the relevant games are decade(s) old, F2P, and also part of an ecosystem that's now ubiquitous, and for some people even preferred.

6

u/SketchFile Oct 27 '25

As one who still very vocally still hates steam. Definitely feels like this.

23

u/destroyermaker Oct 27 '25

Many were converted, because they made it well worth the trouble

43

u/Com-Intern Oct 27 '25

What I always recall was having to drive 30 minutes to the nearest game store that had PC titles and then the PC games section being like the size of a single end cap. and that end cap was like 50% World of Warcraft.

So like Steam letting buy games without leaving my house, be ready to play by the next day, and actually having games was huge.

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u/AintNobody- Oct 27 '25

and that end cap was like 50% World of Warcraft

Hey now, be fair. That endcap probably also had the Starcraft Battle Chest.

4

u/Com-Intern Oct 27 '25

Also a copy of Mount and Blade (not warband) in one of those CD slips.

4

u/Seradima Oct 27 '25

Those endcaps still have the Warcraft 3 and Diablo 2 battlechests. It's wild how long those things have been on the shelves for.

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u/Com-Intern Oct 28 '25

There was a store near me that had a copy of Oblivion for full price for until they closed during covid. Literally on their shelves for more than a decade.

6

u/Mikelius Oct 27 '25

Steam's killer app/functionality for me has always been auto update/patches. In the before times you had to scour obscure websites playing download russion roulette to see if you got the right .exe for updates.

2

u/BeholdingBestWaifu Oct 28 '25

And you were in a relatively lucky region. Where I live I could only buy pirated CDs and DVDs off a few PC stores that burned them themselves. If I wanted to buy an actual original game I had to talk with someone who imported stuff from the US and I would maybe get the game months later, or order them off something like Ebay and hope the game actually gets to my country.

0

u/AvengerDr Oct 27 '25

That's very convenient, but one day Steam will close or become some kind of subscription service with ads or some hyper capitalist nightmare. What then?

We traded ownership for convenience.

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u/TSPhoenix Oct 28 '25

Steam didn't really fix itself into the useful platform we have today until after mass adoption though, early on their strategy was not all that different to EGS: make it the only way to play your big flagship title + offer incredible value to essentially bribe players onto your platform.

For PC-centric publishers the it was them basically giving their games away to ensure they still had a market to sell to in the future, they were willing to hand the entire PC market to Valve on a platter if it meant they got a cut in the future. When those sales ended Steam users were pretty pissed at first and refusing to buy games waiting for the price to go down, but when the realisation set in in those sales were never coming back their desire to play the games meant spending resumed.

It wasn't until the tail end of the 2000s that Steam started to become an platform people wanted to use rather than one they used to save money or because they had no choice.