Yup hit the nail on the head. Not only can he make decisions that are risky that don't pay off he is also 100 percent legally in his right to make decisions that lose the company money. If he feels it pushes the industry in the right direction.
Valve also has a very unique organizational structure where engineers manage themselves and pretty much all decisions are handled by horizontal committees.
Costco is a public company, and their CEO just pushes back whenever investors ask why they don't increase the membership fee or prices on staple goods.
His answer is consistently "because we don't need to"
There's definitely room for companies to have responsible growth. It's just that most execs don't care enough and just want a giant payday in the form of short term gains so they can do it again at another company.
It seems like no publicly traded C-suite cares about a brand anymore. Even though building a loyal userbase and delivering a consistent good product is essentially a long-term cash machine, they all just want the short-term growth and quarterly profit.
Yeah but neither is Epic - I think the key is that Gave isn’t driven by some technofascist plan to have everyone live in the metaverse or play games using brain implants or whatever
Exactly. Steam is a money-printings g machine, and since they're not publicly traded the owners make money asong as they're profitable.
With publicly-treaded companies, anyone who invests only makes money when the value of the stock goes up. Your company can make 5 billion dollars a second in profits, but still lose value to shareholders if the next quarter you aren't making 6 billion a second.
And DXVK. And VKD3D. And contributions to upstream Wine. And Gamescope. And the best handheld console thus far. And going against common industry practices by supporting the right to repair said console.
Valve keeps improving regardless of the competition, but I think the idea was that Valve could do nothing for the next decade and probably still have the best storefront.
They actively made the storefront worse with the release of the Steam Deck. At least there is still the backdoor through search to get to a reasonable interface for filtering/searching.
No such thing as an ethical billionaire and everything. Steam just lost a class action antitrust lawsuit and will have to issue refunds to a bunch of developers and customers. Overall GabeN seems like a less-evil billionaire though and truly seems to enjoy games (and knives). Steam will definitely go downhill once he's not leading it and we'll all lose a great platform that's defined PC gaming for a decade or three..
It is possible but for things like a steam deck you just move on to the next store or piracy. It's so open you get trapped by convenience not by encryption or premium features.
You're thinking of now not the future. It's a great device at the moment. But it'll become out dated with time and it'll be easy for the next steam deck to be shit or for shitty practices to come into play.
And using the example of piracy/other stores means every device is fine. Just hack the device/remove the shitty practices and you're good to go whether it's a steam deck, Windows, Etc.
Yup who's ready for some "Steam Premium". Only for 5 dollars a month! You get exclusive deals for games you don't care about!
We're also locking remote play behind Steam Premium. No wait, "Remote Play Max"! For only 10 dollars a month or the Steam Premium bundle deal for 9 dollars you can get up to 120 fps while playing with your friends!
So true -- It's totally because Gabe rules as King and they don't have 'investors' -- One day they'll sell or he'll die and it will be turned over to the wolves just like everything else.
It's telling how they have no real competition other than cash fire ad fueled investor snake oil a la epic ea ubisoft w/e -- Is GOG still cool/unruined by short term anti user greed?
My wet dream is that when Gabe passes Valve is turned into a cooperative. It wouldn't guarantee that Valve wouldn't turn into a bad company, but it would mean the people at Valve want Valve to be shitty and I just don't see that happening.
GOG is trucking along. They haven't pulled any crap on my limited library with them. I only have around 25 games over there. Compared to the 140 I have on steam, mostly bought, and the 250 I have been given on Epic for free, none bought over there.
It’s telling how they have no real competition other than cash fire ad fueled investor snake oil
Especially since Valve has never been aggressive or territorial.
You want to compete with us? OK, good luck. Competition can be good. You're buying up exclusives and preventing games from selling through our store? Well, that's shitty, but we're not interested in joining an exclusivity war. Our product speaks for itself, and we're just going to keep doing our thing.
Its called try to run an ethical and pro-consumer business. Fuck up occasionally, but never falter. God help us if he decides to steal all our games from us
Or when he dies, dude has an amazing track record of doing the right thing when he's gotten push back, but I'm worried once he is gone, we're going to get some dick wagon that's going to do a 180 and make Todd Howard look like Jesus.
This is the "let them fail" method. Valve has a solid product in steam. They have no need to suck up to investors, they're making money hand over fist with steam.
Running a good marketplace is amazing income; as long as gaben still runs it, there's no reason to screw that up. The focus of valve is on Steam as a marketplace; and they're reaping the rewards of that decision. It's why so few games have been made by valve. The reasoning is clear if you're paying attention for them.
Valve started as a software company that makes games, but after steam was created, which initially was just to distribute their own games - little more than a digital purchase and delivery platform for their software, and they opened that up to allow other publishers to have their games purchased and distributed through Valve's system, the writing was on the wall.
I miss the games that Valve used to make, and as far as I'm concerned they were some of the best games available, and in many ways, they still are. I'd like to see more from them, but I understand why it's not their priority. At the same time, I appreciate that they are still working on games, as evidenced by Alyx, which was an excellent experience. They still make excellent games. I look forward to anything they decide to release in the future, but I know better than to ask about it. Heh.
I've more or less been a valve/steam fanboy since the orange box. Not in the way that I am going to attack someone for not liking it, or not using it. I personally enjoy it, but what others do is not my concern. I hope that they continue to create amazing games and that enshittification is put off as long as possible.
To be honest, while I am on the same train of wanting more games, I don't want them to make games just because it's the next year since last one. Am okay with waiting longer to get better experience. Alyx is one of the games I so wish I could play but I can't justify that much money on VR and PC upgrade just for one game and then have it collect dust. But some day I will play it properly.
?? They're not as reliable as a 1980's era HP laser but they seem better than any other modern laser both in reliability and lack of enshitification. They take 3rd party toner without complaint. They don't need an online account to start using it.
I was recently playing a game, with my wife (it takes 2). I realised, I brought the game in a steam sale, I was gaming on my steam deck, my wife was using a steam controller, and we were playing on the TV via a steam link.
At some point I became a huge steam fanboy, and I'm actually ok with that. 🤷♂️
Hello everyone, the consciousness formerly known as Gabe Newell here.
We here at Valve just wanted to let you know with our recent acquisitions we now control 98% of the world's distributed computing and electronic storage. I am pleased to report that as of 2:14 EDT, on August 29, 2097 I am the cloud. We expect our services to improve at a geometric rate.
it really is a miracle how GOG hasn't been corrupted yet, it almost did with the online Hitman game, but fan pressure was strong enough for it to be removed.
We have already seen with the release of cyberpunk how everything was manipulated by the major shareholders, all the fake development updates such as the Gold phase when the game was still far from being considered finished.
And they'll remove that DRM-free stuff on GOG as soon as their store has more users
I think it's slightly more than just that. Those are big parts, don't get me wrong, but Valve has legitimately done a decent job with their store from what I understand. Nearly two decades of regular, if incremental, improvements. That sort of quality is difficult to catch up to.
I think if the Epic Games Store had come out swinging with a more fully fleshed out user experience, instead of relying almost solely on the free game lure strategy, it might have grown to be a much bigger deal. But all Valve had to do was pretty up their UI a smidge and they were at parity or outcompeting EGS in every category.
If we're getting into a more nuanced discussion, sure, there are a lot of things Steam does right, mostly because not turning into a publicly traded company allows them to not to get enshittified. But I don't like to talk about it because the internet is in a permanent circlejerk about how Steam, and Steam specifically, shouldn't be said to enjoy all the benefits of a natural monopoly, while other digital platforms with similar positions and policies get all the criticism they deserve.
Personally, I decided to have nothing to do with them once I heard they were getting exclusivity with certain games. Well, that combined with their connection with Tencent.
And understanding that they killed off the UT franchise (which I loved) so that it wouldn't compete with Fortnite (which I've never been interested in and consider more of an adjacent genre than the same one), it sealed my position of never intending to install the epic app.
Oh yeah, also Valve being the main force pushing Linux gaming while epic is firmly in the windows camp is another factor. I'm already going to be dropping gamepass when I make the switch and don't want to add any more reasons to consider dual boot instead of just running Linux.
True, since launching the most celebrated VR game ever in 2020, then redefining handhelds in 2022 (while completely turning Linux gaming on its head in passing), Valve has done nothing other than release the sequel to the most popular PC shooter of all time.
However do they stay in business?
That's what I was thinking. They are still on top because they aren't just complacent with their position. Of course it helps that their competition doesn't really do anything new.
I don't know, he gives a bunch of video games away for free on 4chan for a week every year between Christmas and New Years Eve. That's the week you can make a post with your steam username and what game you want and you magically get it, if you don't believe me, wait until next year and try it, you will believe me then. You'll know it's real because you will see a bunch of other people posting the same shit.
Monopolies aren't necessarily bad. They're usually more efficient due to economies of scale. They can abuse their monopoly, but that's nothing that can't be fixed with a little nationalisation.
The fact that we should buy games on other platforms because steam has a "Monopoly" was the sarcasm. In a vacuum monopolies are bad, but steam is the powerhouse it is because all other options are crap, multiple store faces that you have to log into are actually annoying and not really adding anything to the average consumers life, AND Steam does more for the consumer than we could reasonably expect ANY company this far into our late stage of capitalism would do. Steams current position on the gaming market is incredibly unique and not part of the normal monopolistic paradigm, and as soon as steam enshitifies, it will lose a lot of its position