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Reader Comments (95)

Posted: Oct 7th 2009 8:33PM (Unverified) said

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Hey, look. Penis-Face is back.
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 8:37PM TheDarkWayne said

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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 8:40PM Assmar said

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Alton just said "penis-face" and you posted a link. I'm definitely not clicking on it, and I suggest no one else does either. There could be ANYTHING waiting for us on the other side, and what is seen can never be unseen. That's the only warning you'll get!
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 8:41PM (Unverified) said

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I fucking love Seinfeld.
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 8:43PM Look At This Suit said

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It's The Dark Wayne. And It's "Instant Seinfeld". It's not like it says "Instant Goatse!".

I clicked. I'll click twice for you, Jose.
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 8:44PM (Unverified) said

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If someone says something bad about Seinfeld, I will sew their ass to their face!
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 9:00PM ArchiGamer said

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Thanks Tom, now I can't get that image out of my head. >:/
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 9:04PM sonicspike41 said

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I've only ever known one person to master the art of hiding a link as something else on Joystiq.

It may have been long after the fad had died, but I'll never forget the day Saria The Cat rick roll'd everyone on the 'stiq.
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 9:06PM TheDarkWayne said

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God dammit that was epic
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 9:07PM ArchiGamer said

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Oh God, I remember that.
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 9:10PM Look At This Suit said

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Almost everyone in this thread has fancy brackets and I want fancy brackets and I'm jealous :(
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 9:41PM (Unverified) said

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But... Your suit! Look at it!
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 9:47PM Sly C said

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oh my god. i really need to learn how to do that from her.
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 10:06PM sonicspike41 said

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I tried a few of the usual suspects:
a href=""
[url]
[url=]

None worked :(
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 8:33PM (Unverified) said

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Oh, this is not going to end well...
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 8:33PM (Unverified) said

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Blog Bait Detected!
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 10:37PM (Unverified) said

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Free marketing ahoy!
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 8:35PM The Pie Pieper said

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Whaaannnnn
I don't know about anyone else, but I've never been "Exploited" by Valve.
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 8:39PM Look At This Suit said

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Are you a developer?
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 8:40PM Sinkwater said

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Unless you're an independent developer, I don't think Pitchford is talking about you.
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 8:42PM Assmar said

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Gabe Newell once forced me to turn tricks while promoting Steam, back when no everyone hated it. It's a sad time in my life, suit, thanks.
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 8:48PM (Unverified) said

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In Soviet Russia, You exploit Valve!
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 8:50PM Assmar said

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I thought that was in Rand McNally...
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 8:36PM INNUENDO 64 said

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this just reminded me that i was going to reinstall steam the other day.

thanks
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 8:38PM PR0F3TA said

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So what? what does this mean for me... nothing. I have steam and it delivers.
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 8:42PM Look At This Suit said

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The point is that IF this is true, then it's bad for developers. If developers want to put their content on Steam, then Valve is going to take a cut of the money. Pitchford says that Valve is taking more than they should from those sales. In the long run, if that continues or it grows, then developers are going to stop putting their content on Steam, especially the small guys.

It's a paradox, in a way. Put your content on Steam, get your name out there, but have Valve take a cut, or leave it to its own devices, risk not having that exposure, and getting more of that sales money.
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 8:44PM Assmar said

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It's a riddle wrapped in a conundrum rolled in a Peach Optimo.
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 8:58PM MittenFace said

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I believe that if Valve notices that devs have a problem with it's cut, they'll relax their ratio a little.
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 9:52PM Durr Durrington said

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@ Look At This Suit

These are some quotes from an interview with Dylan Fitterer, the creator of Audiosurf which is one of the better selling indie games out there:

Q: Right now you're only on Steam. Do you feel like you missed out, not having a boxed version?

A: No, not at all. We're not exclusive on Steam. I mean, Steam's the only place to buy right now, but that's not the entire story. There's no contractual requirement or anything.

Q: But Steam's treating you well?

A: Oh yeah, I'm really happy with those guys, it couldn't be better.

Source: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/03/catching-waveforms-audiosurf-creator-dylan-speaks.ars

Now, unfortunately I can't find a link to confirm it but I remember hearing that Dylan made something like $4 million dollars through sales of Audiosurf. I want to say I saw that on G4 a while back (or possibly MTV). It was during a story about independent developers and I haven't been able to find any proof of that so it is nothing but a rumor.

I just have a hard time believing Pitchford since I hadn't heard anything negative about Steam from any of these small, indie developers before he mentioned it.
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Posted: Oct 8th 2009 3:44AM alinos said

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Haha steam increases the sales of titles in my view

Games stores around here are unwilling to stock much more that WoW cards and WoW itself and then the blizzard vaults of SC and diablo along with CoD as nothing else sells enough and they cant resell it as it cant be returned

ive bought games from steam because there here when im bored or because i think its sumthing ill get around to playing at some point(entire PoP SoT series the otherday)

i also brought all of the sam and max things and the tales of monkey island because they were there

steam may be taking a Cut but it provides marketing there saving money on the physical components required in a sale to the store and i couldnt see steam logically taking a whole lot more than a games store which in my area tend to buy 10 copies of a new game(NFS:Shift) and then just w8 till there returned and sell the trade ins out and rinse and repeat

Valve may be taking a cut but at least there not cutting the developer out of the loop entirely, and if there taking a bit more than D2D or whateva i dont blame them there service is leagues beyond D2D in my op
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Posted: Oct 8th 2009 10:54PM sigma8 said

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@JimboTJones: I think the concern is that once everyone throws their lots in with Steam, that Valve will have too much individual leverage, and may start taking advantage of customers and developers alike. If you want to see what can happen when there is only a single distributor for a platform, look at Sony and the PSPGo. Imagine a world where prices never drop and nothing goes on sale. Sure Steam does that now because it wants you to love it. But once you commit, it will rule you.

As a general policy, I avoid buying any game that requires me to activate online, which includes (but is certainly not limited to) all Steam games.
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Posted: Oct 9th 2009 5:12PM Durr Durrington said

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@ Scott

So, what you are saying is that Pitchford is bitching about something that may or may not ever happen, correct?

In that case, I don't trust anything from Randy Pitchford or Gearbox because they could release a bad game in the future. Since it is possible that they could release a buggy POS, I'm going to boycott all of their games from here on out so that I never have to play a buggy POS from Gearbox. Who's with me?
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 8:39PM Sinkwater said

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"one of the most success digital distribution platform for PC games in existence" am I the only one who thinks that should be "successful?"
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 9:00PM R Planteer said

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Id call direct2drive successful as well.
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 8:39PM Assmar said

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Shoulda hear about it last week when it was reported by fucking BigDownload. Jesus guys, seriously, get with it. It feels like family news, where everybody knows what's going on except my brother and me. You guys should text each other more often, and have family dinners every friday; it's helped us!
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 10:15PM Courtney said

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So was MaximumPC also scooped...by themselves!!! The story just went up on their site today, even though the print edition came out a couple of weeks ago. It looks like Joystiq waited to run the story until the actual article was up on MaximumPC's site, so that all of their readers could go see these quotes in context if they want. That's pretty reasonable, and I would much rather have access to the source than just see a couple of quotes pulled out of an article I can't otherwise read.

You complain...a lot, about really pointless stuff.
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Posted: Oct 8th 2009 2:52AM Courtney said

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Sorry to disappoint you, but I'm a dude.
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Posted: Oct 8th 2009 6:33AM Kaminaaa said

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You're a dude, but your name is Courtney?
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Posted: Oct 8th 2009 11:22AM Courtney said

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Posted: Oct 8th 2009 11:26AM Assmar said

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But, the circumference of his neck > than that of his head. He might hurt me...
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 8:40PM Tre said

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Hoo boy. I'm off to go brace myself for the imminent heat that's gonna get sent to this guy.
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 8:45PM (Unverified) said

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I'm still having a hard time grasping his point. Yes, Gearbox is at a competitive disadvantage money-wise when a competing developer has, aside from successful games, a very successful digital distribution service. So first he said that he doesn't trust Valve because of this, which seems to be the incorrect choice of wording. He then states that Valve is exploiting a lot of people, which would make his comment about "trust" a little bit easier to understand. But he doesn't elaborate on what, exactly, Valve is doing that could be considered exploitative.

He will have likely gotten less flak for these comments than he's about to receive if he had actually elaborated on his opinions and accusations.
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 8:49PM Look At This Suit said

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His main point is pretty much right in the title of the article. Valve takes a cut of the Steam sales, and he thinks that that cut is larger than it should be.

Plus, I don't think Gearbox is going to be at a disadvantage much longer. I think Borderlands is going to blow up, and they're going to make a respectable amount of money off of it, especially if they decide to release some DLC.
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 9:05PM (Unverified) said

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My belief is that he should have gone into further detail about the "large share" that they supposedly make. It seems as though his argument is, "Valve is a videogame developer, but they also have a distribution model that allows them to take a cut off the sales of their competitor's games." But when you think about it, so does Microsoft. I mean, Microsoft Games Studios develops games that are sold for the Xbox 360. Microsoft Game Studio's competitors also make games for the Xbox 360, which Microsoft receives a portion of their sales for. The same also holds true for their Games on Demand service.

So if his argument is purely, "Valve asks for too much from their competitors", then he should have backed it up, in my opinion. From a distribution standpoint, Valve has several competitors (such as Direct2Drive), and one would assume that if things were truly unfair, then game developers would turn to these other distribution channels.
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 8:46PM Look At This Suit said

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Pitchford knows that Valve has three piles of money:

The Orange Box pile, the Steam pile, and the Everything Else pile. The Orange Box pile is large. Extremely large. Gabe Newell wears it as a fancy coat when out on the town. It's not hurting anyone if that Steam pile shrinks just a tiny bit.
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 8:48PM (Unverified) said

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After the Orange Box, it's hard not to trust Valve as a consumer. Best deal in gaming history.

I'm sure it hurts independent developers who don't have the power of suits behind them.

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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 8:50PM Saihna said

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The orange box deal was one of the best deals ever. I got gmod right after it. xD
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 8:50PM StrikeFear13 said

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Yes, Valve is just milking us for money by dropping the price to a fraction of what we'd be force to spend elsewhere. Cry me a digitally distributed river.
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Posted: Oct 7th 2009 8:51PM Look At This Suit said

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For Chrissakes man, it says right in the article that the consumer doesn't get hurt. It's the small developers being hurt.
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