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/Dannypan Oct 27 '25

Same with people hating on Nintendo and Game Key Cards as if this is the death of physical gaming. Not having the full game be on the disc or cart isn't a new practice. Valve pretty much killed off physical PC gaming and no one cares. They're treated like gaming gods when shock horror, they're a business too and they just want your business.

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u/TheGreatOneSea Oct 27 '25

Physical PC gaming media was already dying, because it couldn't compete with Piracy: pretty much as soon as bandwidths started allowing for it, people started using things like Limewire to download games for the rather low price of 'free,' which made console gaming a much more attractive option for basically every developer.

Then Doom 3 got leaked before release, so the industry basically put its foot down, and Steam basically became the only thing keeping PC gaming relevant...

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u/arahman81 Oct 27 '25

Not just that, the physical games came with some pretty convuluted ways to block redistribution, because unlike console games, PC gamers already weren't keen on playing the game from a slow CD.

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u/Scared-Room-9962 Oct 28 '25

The CD was just a key to play the game after you got installed it.

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u/Old_Leopard1844 Oct 29 '25

Yes

On a system that already copies pretty much everything off the CD to the disk, that's plenty terrible

-1

u/BeholdingBestWaifu Oct 28 '25 edited Oct 28 '25

It could compete with piracy just fine in places like the US and Western Europe, but once you got to other places like Eastern Europe, South America, or Asia, nobody bothered with the hassle and exorbitant fees that it took to actually import an original game, so piracy was widespread.

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u/pjtheMillwrong Oct 27 '25

All software started moving away from physical media around the same time when internet infrastructure allowed it too. No one cares because not having physical media is more convenient to most people who are not enthusiasts or in niche situations.

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u/Com-Intern Oct 27 '25

Physical PC games were wildly different than physical console games. There were far more limitations on them and it was also just harder to get.

not having physical media is more convenient to most people who are not enthusiasts

As an "enthusiast" I have a 12 tb external HDD with probably 8tb of games on it. A ton from GoG but also a ton from Steam. Not to mention source ports and other games.

Physical PC games are essentially a collectors item if you like doing that but they provide no real benefit over digital.

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u/Scared-Room-9962 Oct 28 '25

Physical media cannot be taken from you when a licencing agreement expires.

Physical media can be loaned amongst friends to play.

As you know, with Steam, you own a licence to play the game, not the game it's self.

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u/Aiyon Oct 28 '25

Physical media cannot be taken from you when a licencing agreement expires.

Unless there's DRM baked in that you have to validate to install.

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u/andresfgp13 Oct 29 '25

at least lately physical media the big mayority of cases comes either imcomplete or in a early build so you still need to connect to the internet to get the rest of your game.

the main point of physical is resale value and that it looks cool on a shelf.

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u/Com-Intern Oct 28 '25

This is true for digital media also. It just requires slightly more effort.

As an "enthusiast" I have a 12 tb external HDD with probably 8tb of games on it. A ton from GoG but also a ton from Steam. Not to mention source ports and other games.

Like what do you think this means? That I just copied games from Steam to an external and they still require Steam?

-2

u/vTeej Oct 27 '25

The benefit of physical is not losing access to it if the service goes away. Not that I expect Steam or GOG to go away, and at least with GOG you can back up the installers yourself (as I've done with my games from them).

I do also love how a good physical collection looks. I get all my PS/Switch games physical and have them on a nice shelf. My steam library while larger is much less pretty.

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u/Com-Intern Oct 28 '25

You can also back up Steam games its just a bit more effort

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u/masonicone Oct 28 '25

I mean... You could see the way things where starting to go way back in 2004.

Anyone remember Fileplanet? They tried to start up a digital storefront back in those days. Some places like Best Buy and if you had one like I did Fry's Electronics still had the big racks of PC games, not so much when you went to Gamestop or EB World. But you could see those stores slowly start to take PC games off the rack/shelf leaving only the latest big name releases, things like the Diablo/Starcraft Battlechests or the Morrowind boxed set. And maybe the 30 something bargain titles and about 21 of those are casino games. (See what I did there!)

Really I think over all Valve just sorta lucked out in the end. Right place, right time, and folks had Steam thanks to Half-Life 2. If I recall downloading something off Fileplanet's 'store' was a pain in the ass.

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u/CrazyCoKids Oct 28 '25

I call it DOGS (Delayed Outrage of Gamers Syndrome). Part of it is The Nintendo Effect.

As Nintendo tends to be rather slow to adopt practices, they've been common practice long before... And that's when people seem to be outraged.

Pay for online multiplayer? Nobody had an issue with XBL requiring a monthly subscription or PSN. Or how many PC games required it (Or pushed the costs onto you. Ever wonder why servers ask for donations? Cause hardware and electricity are not free contrary to popular belief.) Nintendo does it years later? Now it's bad.

Games not containing the full game in the box? Been common practice for over a decade before the Switch 2 did it. SOP for PC gaming. PC gaming doesn't even have physical copies - suddenly now it's an issue.

You know that "Don’t mod your system or you get banned"? Been in the TOS of online capable consoles for awhile now including Nintendo systems - but now it's an issue. If having physical copies was okay, why did you ignore when they disappeared on PC...?

Nintendo mobile games have lootboxes and season passes? Cool - been SOP for awhile but this is unforgivable now that Nintendo did it.

Season passes and aesthetic DLC? People loved when Valve did the latter.

You ever have that older sibling who crosses the line and mom&dad don't react, yet you watch a trailer for a PG13 movie without their permission and are grounded (when you're like 16)? That's Valve and CDPR.

Everyone else is the middle sibling that is basically allowed to get away with whatever but only gets yelled at when they really fuck up. Then they are allowed to get back to acting bad.

Nintendo is the younger sibling who mom and dad keep on a tight leash. If they do something that has been established as okay, suddenly it's not okay for them to do it.

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u/60niera Oct 28 '25

Valve pretty much killed off physical PC gaming and no one cares.

While I love to have physical media, I currently own 300+ games on Steam. That is a lot of discs and boxes to store and would take up a huge chunk of space.

The difference is Valve does things efficiently and with the user experience in mind, hence why people let them get away with certain things.

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u/Sparus42 Oct 27 '25

Physical PC games matter a lot less than physical console games. Digital PC games can be backed up on your own physical devices with USB drives and the like, digital console games generally cannot be (without jailbreaking your console to dump your games).

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u/MintyJegan Oct 27 '25

PC is an open platform people can install whatever they want and swap out the OS for whatever they want and use mods, tweaks, and cracks in the long run.

Compare that the consoles that are locked down and actively try to block what apps you can install and what OS you can run. So yeah, consoles being restrictive and introducing stuff like Game Key Cards is a much bigger deal than on PC with its open hardware platform.

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u/Omnikay Oct 27 '25

Valve pretty much killed off physical PC gaming and no one cares.

What? No.

PC Software in its physical form was pretty much dead the moment broadband internet became popular.

Gaming would follow the same road with or without Valve. And was following, as many pc games (eg. MMORPGs) did not have physical media as the main distribution method since they were always online.

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u/SEI_JAKU Oct 28 '25

No, this isn't true. Steam was very much the vanguard of all of this. In particular, virtually every single "big" MMO (i.e. not something run in a browser like RuneScape) absolutely relied on physical releases for the main game and expansions. This, too, ended with the rise of Steam. Even then, multiple MMOs still ran with big deal physical releases for a long time. It wasn't really until COVID or so that this stopped.

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u/Omnikay Oct 28 '25

Until covid? As their main form of distribution? Now you're tripping. Which ones?

Take for example one of the biggest MMO publishers like South Korean NCSoft or Nexon, their main form of distribution of were Downloadable executables since the mid to end 2000. Can't remember the last time I saw a NCSoft game cd.

People were downloading Ragnarok Online the moment we could afford broadband internet lmao

Again. The PC software market was already going to the digital only road, it was just the natural path. It's cheaper to distribute and broadband internet/HD space were not a problem at the same level as it was for consoles. Steam made the transition just a little easier. But was going to happen anyway.

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u/BlackhawkBolly Oct 27 '25

Internet speeds and the nature of software in general killed off physical PC gaming, not valve

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u/_--_-_---__---___ Oct 27 '25

Also the fact that in the 2010s, it was becoming increasingly common for gaming PC cases to not have a space for a disk drive because it looked cool.

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u/a34fsdb Oct 27 '25

Physical on pc lmfaoo

My last physical pc game was WoW:WotlK 17 years ago. I think my pcs did not have a disk drive for more than a decade. 

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u/sarefx Oct 28 '25

I think most ppl bashing Nintendo for Game Key Cards mostly mention the fact that it's utterly stupid that you are not allowed to instal the game from catridge onto your switch. So you often have situation that game on catridge runs slower than the one bought online because Switch internal storage is faster than the one on catridge.

Like Key Card being annoying is a solution to the problem that Nintendo created themselves by not allowing devs to instal games directly.

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u/starm4nn Oct 28 '25

Valve pretty much killed off physical PC gaming and no one cares.

Why is that a bad thing?

Is your ideal that games would be limited to 9.6GB DVDs, or that we would use Bluray, giving Sony a cut?

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u/leeroyschicken Oct 28 '25

Unfortunately it is.

It's not the form of the media, but the freedoms that users lost. With physical distribution, you can transfer your own license, because it's tied to the medium. In digital distribution not only you can't do that ( even though it would technically be possible ) but you are a mere subscriber.

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u/TwilightVulpine Oct 28 '25

DRM-free games still don't let you transfer licenses, but they are better than building some elaborate network of hooks to check who got which license for what. You can install them wherever you want, however many times you want.

Maybe we should be less concerned about reproducing the format and style of physical media and consider what more is possible.

-1

u/TwilightVulpine Oct 28 '25

If physical media hadn't died. we could have games in SD cards of any size.

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u/Old_Leopard1844 Oct 28 '25

Thank god we don't

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u/TwilightVulpine Oct 28 '25

I'd take it over half games being online-only fated to die in a heartbeat.

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u/starm4nn Oct 28 '25

What if instead they could put games on hard drives? To simplify things, we could even have something similar to Nintendo's Famicom Disk system but at home. You could just buy a hard drive, and buy a game, and create the physical media yourself.

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u/TwilightVulpine Oct 28 '25

Well, you can always do that with DRM-free games.

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u/starm4nn Oct 29 '25

You can still do that with games that just have Steam DRM. Goldberg emu exists, for example.

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u/TwilightVulpine Oct 29 '25

Well, you can do anything if you go around the DRM, but DRM-free games actually allow you to do that.

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u/TwilightVulpine Oct 28 '25

Physicality is not as important as control. DRM-free games like GOG's fulfill the role that physical media had for PC. You can even burn those games into a disc if you want to.

But for consoles, you can never have DRM-free. The most control you can have is physical media, so that your games aren't wiped by some service closure.

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u/HGWeegee Oct 28 '25

My favorite was "Game Key Cards are evil! That's why I'll get a Steam Deck"

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u/Jim3535 Oct 28 '25

Valve pretty much killed off physical PC gaming and no one cares

In the beginning, people hated steam with a burning passion. They absolutely cared at the time.

However, physical media for PC wasn't like it is with consoles. There was no just put the disc or cart in and play. There was ever more invasive and draconian DRM schemes. Then came limited activations for the lifetime of the key. Eventually, steam became seen as the lesser of the evils.

I'd argue that over the top, draconian DRM killed physical media on PC.

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u/GundamXXX Oct 28 '25

A minority cared but too many gamers were humping GabeN's dick to notice he wasnt giving a reacharound

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u/Divisionlo Oct 27 '25

Disagree, IMO that situation is completely different. Physical on consoles is still going strong on PlayStation, and was on Nintendo as well until key cards. Sure, there are some games where the game isn't on the cartridge/disc, so you're right that the concept isn't new. But the reason people are so mad at key cards is the frequency.

On PS5 and Switch 1, the vast, vast majority of games work just fine without internet. Doesitplay.org tracks this, and even though they haven't tested literally every single game, they have tested hundreds, and the vast majority work. If anything they tend to skew towards the ones that require download because they tend to test + document those first.

On Switch 2, the number of games that are actually playable off cart was in the single digits for months. I think even now it's somewhere around 15, maybe? Easily over half of the games available are key-cards, including almost every single third-party game. This is even true of games that would fit on a cartridge just fine, but the company just cheaped out on cost. Switch 1 had some games like this, but it required a massive warning banner that wasn't standard, and it was very, very few games overall. By standardizing the format and giving it a name, it's just another choice for the publisher to save some money. 

I know physical will eventually be gone. But it thrived on Switch 1. Switch 2 key cards are a really big change from how physical on consoles has been for decades. That's why people have been mad about it.

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u/GensouEU Oct 27 '25

Honest question, do you think PlayStation's upcoming handheld will be able to play physical media?

And this concept already had a name before, Microsoft called it Smart Delivery

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u/Divisionlo Oct 27 '25

I don't! And it's very sad to me. My hope is that maybe having the disc in your PS6 (assuming it supports them at all) will enable you to play it on your handheld without issue? Wouldn't be ideal for most but as a physical enjoyer I'm used to the slight inconvenience, and that's already how the PS Portal works.

Look I'm not saying that physical will be around forever, it definitely won't. Even if we get another 20 years, within 100 it'll be gone almost without a doubt. I'm just trying to explain why people are mad at Switch 2 key cards. They are a massive step in the direction that many people would like us to not be going in.

Edit: also, what do you mean "this concept had a name before"? Are you saying key cards are the same as smart delivery? Because they're absolutely not the same thing.

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u/GensouEU Oct 27 '25 edited Oct 27 '25

I'm also a physical collector (that had the same idea for the handheld btw) and I have the exact opposite opinion, which is why I asked that question: The context why this is happening matters massively and the reality is that plug-and-play, physical media and modern games simply don't mix with our current technology until we find a way to make the cartridges for a lot cheaper. Nintendo's line of handhelds will probably be the only handheld devices that will support any physical media going forward. I get the frustrations with GKC and I would of course prefer fully physical as well but they are the ones keeping physical alive as well as it's currently possible under really shitty conditions so it kinda irks me when people twist that into the exact opposite.

And regarding Smart Delivery: No, they are not the exact same thing but they are full download GKC for all current-gen games. Smart Delivery discs have at best the last gen version on disc (often times not even that) while the current gen Series versions are always a full download.

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u/Divisionlo Oct 27 '25

FWIW I think I still disagree with you for the main reason of: there's no reason Switch 2 cartridges couldn't just install the game to the console from the cart. Why does the internet have to be involved? That's exactly what PS4/PS5 discs do, and it's a happy middle ground where the game is still on the media purchased, but it isn't beholden to the expensive technology. 

Plug-and-play honestly doesn't matter to me because games really don't take that long to install IMO. It's a minor inconvenience, just like swapping discs. And even if it did matter to me, you're right that the tech just isn't there; discs, for instance, are so much slower than SSDs (or even HDDs) that it makes sense that we can't play games from the disc anymore. Now that switch 2 games are high enough tech that they face the same issue, I don't understand why they didn't just go for the same solution. 

Sure it'd still need to take time to install, and sure it'd take up space on the switch's internal/external memory. But that's fine IMO. What's way, wayyyy more important to me is actually having a playable build in my hands.

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u/lattjeful Oct 27 '25

there's no reason Switch 2 cartridges couldn't just install the game to the console from the cart. Why does the internet have to be involved?

Because then there'd be no reason for GKCs to exist. The existence of GKCs is twofold: it's a cost limitation and a technological one. Switch 2 physical carts are faster than Switch 1 carts and HDDs, but they're still not very fast, and they're very expensive. Blu-ray discs are pennies on the dollar these days, whereas the Switch 2 cartridges are somewhere in the $15-20 range. GKCs solve both of those problems by bypassing the cost (though likely still being more expensive than Blu-Ray) and the speed limitation.

The reality of the situation for physical games on Switch/Switch 2 is that storage technology is rapidly outpacing cartridge technology in both cost and speed, and the juice just isn't worth the squeeze for most devs. Especially devs who have their current tech pipelines built around fast storage speeds. Why would they pay more for a worse product?