Steam is getting shit?

Had steam for along time but now its starting to feel like a money grabbing company. Mainely down to laziness Steam seems to be accepting any crap shovelware just to get paid. The sales aren't very good and the general prices of games just stay high instead of dropping as the game ages. Example WWE 2K17 is £39.99 and WWE 2K18 which is a month old is the same price....

The worst part is if you look on key sites like CDKey games are like half the price of steam. NieR:Automata is £25 but on steam £40... Resident Evil 7 £40 on steam you can pre-order the gold edition for £18.99 will all the DLC.

Wolfenstein II £19.99 but on Steam £39.99.

It takes 5 minutes to get your key and activate on steam to save 50% ...

Dishonored 2 £6.79 Steam £29.99.... so lazy Gabe what da fuk>?

Steam doesn't dictate prices, it's the publishers.

But is steam as great as it once was ? Of course not.

I'm 99% sure publishers set the prices. Steam simply takes a cut of the pie. Same with sales.

Idk, but I'm fairly sure Valve don't have direct control over their prices, it's down to the publishers. Console games are always expensive even on the PC. Even M$ do it, Forza games barely come down in price, they still remain high when a new one comes out.

As for other sites, I have no idea how they work.

Steam has no control over the prices of games. Those are entirely dictated by the publishers and developers. Steam is a distribution service.

Steam has always been merely "acceptable" to me, nothing more.

And even if Valve do control the prices on their store, their response to thePaid Mods fiasco have already made it clear that they don't like to tell publishers what to do.

Let's repeat how publisher's dictate the prices shall we? Never shall the first correct answer be the last!!! Next we should move the subject to debate the nostalgia of Steam's peak and their current descent until finally, in a few years from now, long after this thread is forgotten, a new thread emerges where we put Valve right up there with EA and vow to boycott them!

You act like it's Steam's fault. Publishers have always chosen the sale prices on Steam.

Steam is less and less important to me. After you do a couple Holiday sales and by 50+ games you'll never play, it become s a place to wait for pc games to go under $20 before you buy another game.

@Heil68: Pretty much how I feel. I have no excitement reserved for the coming sales... Each year I buy games I never even bother installing let alone playing. I usually buy my games from GMG.

So if its the "Publishers" fault how do other sites get away with cheaper prices. And at a huge cost reduction, i don't believe for one second 2K want to sell a year old game at the same price of their new released one.

Sites like CDKeys are Grey-Market, usually bought in different regions where pricing is better.

Here is a link detailing pricing.

Larger amount of users that steam has means that there are people that will just straight up buy it at that price point because they are either lazy or just straigt up don't care or don't know better. Most Key sellers besides the obvious legit ones( like Greenmangaming, humblebundle, Gamersgate, Amazon and so on) are either grey key sellers that take advantage of regional difference in price on keys or just plain illegal attained keys via creditcard theft.

so you're ragging on steam and parading around another site without knowing how either one works?

Pretty much yeah <3

@PCgameruk:

Well, Gabe Newell is one of the top 100 richest people on planet earth at ~5.5 billion dollars. You don't get that rich by being lazy, especially when you are self-made.

But with that said, Steam does not dictate the prices of games, as many others have said.

That's basically how I feel now. Buy too many goddamn games on sales and never bother to install them and half the time I keep forgetting I already got this game a long time ago!

If I see a deal I want, I won't hesitate to hit the button however.

I dont get all the drama over bad games. Its not that affecting you in any way. In fact ive played some great games thru Steam that otherwise i wouldnt even hear about them like anywhere. Yes some games shouldnt be up there but on the other hand because of this approach ive played great indie games the last 5 years.

Also about pricing ... dont forget that majority of 3rd parties Steam key sellers buying in bulk when games are on sales or having publishers deals. I mean you think a game that costs 39.99 on STEAM for the individual ( not on sale ) has the same price for the 3rd party seller when asking from STEAM 2000 keys or 10000 keys or something ?

Heh, let's just remember Steam is free to use(unlike PSN, Live and now Nintendo online), publishers set the prices/sales, and they still offer a better service than the paid console services.

That's inherently not true most of the time if you consider the region I'm at (SEA). Most of the time, the pricing here is at least 1/2 or somewhere around that price.

@AzatiS: Key Resellers would also buy the games from regions that had them cheaper, some use stolen credit cards to buy the keys and then cancel them so the devs doesn't even get any money and some even make bots to steal keys that are being given out for free.

You think all key resellers are like that ?

Why are you comparing a online store to an online service to play MP?

I can buy games (which is what the OP is talking about) using my silver account on Xbox Live so your argument fails, and fails hard.

Plus, Steam has a better "Refund" system then consoles do lol.

@Grey_Eyed_Elf said:

@pimphand_gamer said:

Let's repeat how publisher's dictate the prices shall we? Never shall the first correct answer be the last!!! Next we should move the subject to debate the nostalgia of Steam's peak and their current descent until finally, in a few years from now, long after this thread is forgotten, a new thread emerges where we put Valve right up there with EA and vow to boycott them!

+1 for Nightcrawler

It's a mess.

I hardly use Steam anymore.

Yea, Steam prices absolute suck in the UK, went from £29.99/£34.99/£39.99/£44.99/£49.99 and now peaked with Konami attempting £54.99.

It's bullshit to be sure, and none of this" games use to be more expensive in the old days" bollocks make it ok, the kind of shit that's driving people to key sites.

Are you saying Steam isn't an online service that supports MP? Because if you are, you are a complete dumbass. Tons of games use Steamworks for multiplayer.

Steam's deals and prices have become mildly worse over the years. That's why I've started using other sites as well, like Humble Bundle and Greenmangaming.

completely aside from the prices and shovelware, the service hasn't been meaningfully updated in years. the voice chat is still terrible for instance

i'm not sure it deserves its status as the standard go-to service for PC gaming

I've been buying from key sites for years now, they have always been cheaper than Steam. I also buy the games I want when I want them and rarely pay any attention to their sales.

Steam has a voice chat service? I've been using Steam since day dot and I have never known that!

Steam has gone way down as far as how low the games drop in their sales. Also they have added a ton of unfinished indie games where before it was very seldom. This is not new though, this has been the case for at least the past two years.

I still like steam but obviously you can't buy anything outside of the seasonal steam sales. And you won't get savings as amazing anymore even when you do. I love it as my main place to have my main collection of games. I also have GOG, Amazon(older DRM free games) and Origin(strictly for EA Origin Exclusive titles).

Steam sales still beat the crap out of Xbox Gold Black Friday digital sales. Although the Gold sales are half way decent sometimes.

As other have already mentioned, if you use key sellers you might as well pirate the game and be done with it... it should be pretty common logic that if you can get a triple A game at release for 30$ at some random crap site, something is probably fishy...

yea its been around for ages but hasn't really ever been updated and is quite terrible. you were probably better off not knowing about it lol

I can see why Valve hasn't really bothered to updated it, what with Discord, Skype, Ventrilo, etc. all having the primary market share. To be honest, I'd much rather use discord, myself.

using these sites is not as bad as pirating the games.

how they work is they buy globally usable CD keys in countries where games are cheaper and resell them.

its certainly a grey area but its not really comparable to piracy. G2A might be the exception since this is a platform for random people to sell keys, and the keys may be stolen. I personally use CDKeys.com to buy games in cases where paying full price would prevent me from getting it at all. I'll happily pay full price if I think the developer/publisher is worth supporting

The only ambiguous thing that the majority of key re-sellers are doing is manipulating the EULA. Game CD keys are not for resale under the terms and conditions and that doesn't matter if it's a PC or a console game. However that is only enforceable once the key has been registered to an end user, so when you buy a key from one of these sites you and they have technically not broken any rules. There is a reason why Steam, Uplay, Origin, Battle.net and Rockstar Cafe all have an option to "add game key".

Ubisoft tried to shut this 'grey' market down a couple of years ago by banning all keys not bought directly from the Uplay store (I lost access to a couple of games for a couple of days), however they were forced to re-instate the keys once it was found that they had no legal right to ban them.

You do know that you don't buy a game you buy the right to use the software? So on that note, the console second hand market is actually completely breaking the EULA terms and conditions as game shops are re-selling keys which have been previously registered to an end user. In addition to this developers see absolutely no return on second hand games. The same can't be said about CD key sellers where the Developer/Publisher receives the same profit as they would from any game bought in region it originally came from. So which is actually worse?

By the way a lot of these game key sites are now selling console game keys as well.

I quit PC gaming because of Steam bs. That's right. I'm now Playstation fanboy thanks to Steam. Without all that Steam crap I would still be happily playing on PC rig...

Did you even read the OP? he's talking price and games, nothing about MP, nothing about consoles or their online stores. You're just a little upset someone is shitting on your precious Steam. So the only dumb arse here is you for trying to steer the conversation into a narrative that makes you feel better lol.

I'm with you bro, steam is just a hustle to use, thank god there are better alternatives available on console like this:

Gee, I didn't know I was being forced to talk exactly about what the OP is talking about. Nazi forums, I guess?

I was making a point. Steam is both an online store and a service, just like Xbox Live, and it's free.

Besides, it sounds like he's just complaining about the amount of games. The prices is whatever, and again, it's not Valve that's deciding the prices.

@GarGx1: You've summed it pretty much how it is.

If I can get the game cheaper elsewhere why not do it? Because poor publisher houses like EA or Bugthesda are going to get only 80% of what they could have gotten? Poor Todd Howard, he will have to stop eating caviar for a whole day :´(

If it's a dev I like or indie then I buy from Steam or GOG, but these AAA titles? convince me they are worth $60, not a chance.

Yeah, the front-page is shit. I've changed my settings a few times but nothing seems to work. Garbage indie games constantly flood the store. I remember the days when there wasn't so much shit, and it was easy and fun to navigate the store.

I don't think that was what happened, but rather they didn't want to bother with the upset people. If i remember correctly they were keys that had been purchased with stolen credit cards and then resold on G2A. Something similar happened with Sniper Elite 3, where someone stole a bunch of keys and then resold them to other distribution services, and the developer just had Steam revoke the keys

Xbox???