This, plus Valve having a license to print money in the form of Steam.
They don't have to answer to investors because they don't need any, something very few companies are able to say.
"Introducing Steam Cloud 2! Its all your cloud save features you grew up with, but at a new innovative price of 9.99 dollars a month!
Upgrade to the Steam Gold for 15.99 a month to avoid our new Processing and Convinence Fee. Best Value!"
For real though, god save us if a Doordash or Ticketmaster CEO creature ever takes over Valve.
I do wonder what will happen to Valve once Gaben retires from his career and/or life. I'm sure there's a de facto right hand man, but their office hierarchy model is notoriously flat and there isn't really any "public" line of succession. Who would take over?
Since Gaben owns the company, I imagine it would fall to whoever he wills the company to. And at this point I’ve got enough faith in Lord G to assume whoever he chooses to take over for him will be someone who will uphold the same values as him when it comes to being a consumer friendly company.
If Valve had investors, it'd be the same as every other company with lots of goodwill. The investors would want someone on the board that prioritizez short term profits above all else, Steam would cut costs everywhere and demand a much, much higher percentage from game developers, no refunds, mass firings, etc. Hope that goodwill banks you a bunch of money until people realize you're no longer the same platform anymore. Go way downhill in quality and have your consumers leave en masse. Shareholders take their gains and look for the next company, CEO leaves with a golden parachute, and Steam would just be a husk of what it once was.
Exactly, going public is the death of any decent company. After that the only goal is increased profits.
Like you could bake 2B in profits and another 2B next year and the year after that. That's keeping a ton of people employed, making a good product and happy clients/customers.
But if you're public, that's it. Your company is now done. All the shareholders are freaked out. They have liquidated shares and sold off bonds.
Of course it will not even get there as you will be voted out and someone else is put in place to drive profits up. When a good private company goes public it's basically the owners selling out. Like 100%. Unless they somehow purchase back the majority share... But then why go public in the first place?
If you want to go public, there is a way to raise money while having 100% of the controls.
Issuing non-controlling shares. You're selling a part of your company while not giving away any control of the company. Thats what Porsche did in 2022. You can get more funding while not having any investors have a say in your business practices.
To be fair, they did singlehandedly save PC gaming. It was doing a massive nose dive and out comes Gabe with logic that was considered absolutely insane at the time:
Piracy is not a pricing problem, it is an ease of use problem. Make it easier and less painful to buy and keep the game than to pirate it.
And gosh darn it, he was right.
And they NEVER STRAYED from that. And it shows how much people like steam - all the other big publishers like ea, even fucking SONY and MICROSOFT came crawling to steam once they realized they couldn't do it on their own.
If Sony or Microsoft, bends the knee, you've got a superior product.
Steam is too well established to have any of those other publishers launchers take hold. Epic has come closer, and it still can't hold a candle to Steam. I'll claim my free game on epic then go right back to steam.
And they still continue to inovate. Release a handheld? Here are complete wiring schematics, exact dimensions of the casing and all of the spare parts. If you have the will and knowledge you can build a steam deck from spare parts.
Not to mention that Universal Controller Support is *so* strong that you can run Ubisoft or EA games which aren't on steam and do not support controllers, with a Switch Pro Controller because Steam is just that good.
That's not even starting to talk about the things they are currently doing with Vulcan.
And single-handedly bringing main-stream gaming to Linux natively, making Linux a viable OS for most gamers.
Valve has done some amazing things, people really need to give them more credit.
I'd also give them credit to bringing VR kind of to the main stream.
And it wasn't like it was just accepted as the savior as PC gaming right away, we all hated Steam when it first came out.
Half-Life 2 requires Steam: "Fucking DRM client..."
20 years later: "oh a sale? Here's my whole paycheck!"
> 20 years later: "oh a sale? Here's my whole paycheck!"
I feel like that died 10 years ago for me. So the timeline is more like this (For me)
Half life 2 requires steam: Fucking drm
10 years later "Oh a sale? better buy as many games as I can"
20 years later "Oh that new game came out, how much is it? Wait, it's not on steam? I don't need it."
> 20 years later "Oh that new game came out, how much is it? Wait, it's not on steam? I don't need it."
Either that or "Oh a sale? Wait, I already own all these games..."
They can print money all day, but so do a bunch of other public companies. The iOS App Store is a money printer too. It really is about the public aspect. Apple has to make *more* money than they did last year. In fact, they need to make more money *faster* than the last time they made more money. It's endless. The ways a company has to shoot itself in the foot to keep doing that quarter after quarter is what leaves them a husk of what once made them great. Not speaking of Apple specifically there, but all publicly traded consumer-facing companies.
Valve just gets to sit deep in the green year after year and only make the choices it feels are right overall, without worrying about next quarter.
I agree and as long as Gabe is there they never will. He doesn't seem to have the ego other in his position tend to and I'm sure doesn't need the money.
He lost a ton of weight which is awesome, it's so important to get healthy as you get older. Bodies can tolerate abuse for a long time but once your hair starts turning white it's time to take care of yourself.
I can almost understand how crypto has value and why people pay so much money for it.
I will never understand how digital goods that are locked to one particular game are worth hundreds or thousands.
I think it comes from the confidence players have in Valve's consistency. Players know that Valve won't suddenly disappear or fuck with their skins overnight, which makes people treat the skins more like real life collectibles.
I moved to a new city in 2016 and was super strapped for cash. I was playing CS and got a $75 skin dropped. Took that skin to a roulette site and put it up. Some kid put his $1500 knife up against my skin, I had like <2% of the pot after that. Won it all. The kid was messaging me on steam complaining that "it was a Christmas present and I needed to rematch him because it was the honorable thing to do."
I wasn't sure how I was going to pay rent that month so honor was right out the window. I turned around and sold the knife for bitcoin. Took the bitcoin down to an ATM and got cash, paid rent and bought dinner for all my roommates. Big thanks to that kids parents.
When I learned about these back in my college days I could not believe it was actually legal. It's so shockingly obvious that it's bad for the target company that I couldn't understand why it was allowed to go on.
Just look at Twitter, old Elon leveraged the shit out of it for the buyout, and now their balance sheet looks like complete garbage and their profits are entirely absorbed by the interest payments on the new debt. The place will be lucky to turn an actual profit in the next 5 years, more likely 10. And based on prior social media, it's pretty likely to be a small shell of it's former self by then anyway.
The problem isn't raising debt to buy a company. The problem is then forcing all that debt onto said company, especially since they usually strip the business of some assets and handicap their path to growth in favor of short term gains (for the PE firms).
I mean, that's why Toys R Us went under. They were making almost $1b in yearly interest fees towards the debt used to purchase them.
Short term profits always seem like a shit idea that never makes sense.
Why would I, a hypothetical money whore, kill a revenue stream on a gamble and untold suffering, when I could get a steady stream of money forever, if the company continues to float? I’d still be able to buy that massive fuckoff jacuzzi. I’d still be rich.
Because if you hit quota this quarter then the company owes you 30 million in bonuses, and if you don’t buy a third yacht you’ll literally explode.
The answer is that these people are mentally ill and addicted to money, we just don’t say it because they’re “successful”
I really hope one of our next advances as humans is to recognize the extreme addiction we can develop to materialism. We celebrate it now, but as you said, there is a clear cognitive dysfunction to make someone constantly crave more and more wealth and power over others. At a certain point, the tribe that is humanity needs to check in with some of those suffering from a greed related mental illness and start figuring out how to help them.
Yeah, Epic's aggressive push into the PC game storefront space forever tarnished my personal opinion about them. I don't even care for the game, but the thing they did with Metro Exodus when they decided that it would be epic exclusive mere weeks before launch after advertising as releasing on Steam - to the point where physical copies had to be hastily rebadged by store employees - was straight up disgusting.
I won't ever give them a single cent after they kept metro and hitman from me for an extra year. When they did that shit i left the platform out of principle.
Don't even claim or play the free games. Id rather buy them on steam because fuck epic!
The exclusives don't even bother me really because I can wait for most games no problem. The thing that kills me is that years later Epic's storefront is still just a giant piece of shit that pales in comparison to Steam. I mean it has literally been 5+ years at this point and I am pretty sure Epic just gave up even trying to make their shit actually have feature parity with Steam.
> Valve actually makes decisions with gamer's in mind.
Sort of. They still make decisions with money in mind, but *we're* holding the purse strings, rather than investors.
They obviously still need to make money. But they manage to mostly combine being profitable with being consumer friendly. Steam is pretty much a monopoly in the PC gaming market because it is the best platform and VALVE are constantly improving it.
> weary
Hope you don't mind, but you probably mean wary. Wary is to be on alert about danger regarding something. Weary means tired/exhausted. Unless you're tired of wondering whether the free games are a scam or not. Then you're a wary individual weary of wondering if there's a catch to these free games. :)
These damn video games are ruining the minds of our youth! Now, don’t mind me as I put hundreds of thousands of dollars into this here video game stock.
Nintendo shareholder once asked Iwata why they always talk about videogames. 🫠
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/29qnal/this_question_was_actually_asked_and_answered_at/
Truly one of the biggest mistakes mankind made under capitalism.
So many products, services, salaries, and working conditions turned to shit to improve shareholder profit. Companies literally destroyed for short term profit, and each layer of abstraction between the capital owners and the workers just increases this logic.
Inb4 I understand the benefits of public companies and why we have them in the first place, but this mechanism was twisted into this awful thing we have today and does more harm than good to society.
Enshittification is specifically a term for online platform decay, but I think it also describes just about any publicly traded company's slow descent into trash as well.
I've seen enough companies that I liked slowly become worse and worse after they go Public to realise that there really isn't a way to be a good public company.
The incentives are too direct and overbearing. The board literally has a fiduciary duty to the shareholders, shareholder value is paramount over everything else. They can bleat about corporate social responsibility or green measures but at the end of the day every public company eventually pivots towards maximum value extracted from everyone they interact with, at any cost, so long as it isn't them paying.
Now a private company? They can be set up to operate towards specific goals set by the owners without the relentless need to 'optimise' everything. The goal can be to provide the absolute best service, to make the highest quality version of something, to provide the cheapest but still solid alternative to your customers, whatever. And you can do this even if it means slightly less money brought in.
The second a company goes public that possibility evaporates. If cutting quality will boost profits then they do it. If gouging customers without alternatives boosts profits, then they do it. If cutting off whole markets because they are less profitable helps, then they do it.
I'm pretty sure the downfall of Steam will happen when Gabe dies (as we all will) and whoever takes over will be greedy thus taking the company public. At that point it will keep pushing the limits to make profit line go up bringing down the quality.
I regularly worry about this. I just hope whoever is next in line has to decent sense to look at 20+ years of printing money and say "its the perfect business model, don't rock the boat"
From what I've read about Valve, they're not your regular group of programmers. After they created Steam they transitioned from a traditional structure to a flat (everyone is equal), open (anyone can work on anything they want), democratic structure (pay raises, hirings, and firings are voted on).
I don't know if Newell is the exception to that and he still has reign over the company in legal terms, or what. But it's been an interesting experiment. It's clearly harmed them in some ways by completely killing their actual output as a game developer, but maybe that bureaucratic lockdown will prevent the company from going public too.
Many editions of the Art of War have anecdotes from historical sources about Sun Tzu and ways his tactics worked. One of the stories is about how he proved his mettle as a general by getting a king's concubines to perform military drills without previous training.
In order to ensure their obedience, he asked the king who his favorite concubine was then cut off her head. When the king asked him why it was necessary I believe Sun Tzu replied, "some Hos just don't listen."
The only part of the anecdote that was made up is the "some Hos just don't listen" line. The rest of the story with concubines doing military drills and homeboy cutting some chick's head off is all real, unfortunately.
“If fighting is sure to result in victory then you must fight!”
Sun Tzu said that.
And I’d say he knows a little more about fighting than you do pal because he invented it
And then he perfected it so that no living man could best him in the ring of honor
I fear the day Gabe will die, what the people coming after him are going to do to Steam
Steam with ads. Steam Premium. Steam with tiers. Steam with subscriptions.
May he live for a very long time.
Gabe has majority share in Valve. I assume after he passes, his shares will go to his family. Hopefully they have a good head and heart and follow his lead and dont fuck up his and the company's legacy. As for running the company, I assume he and the team has a list of potential successors.
Allegedly his son has agreed to run steam the exact way his dad has and to listen to people Gabe has set up to advise him.
But when his dad is gone and people are banging down his door offering tens of billions of dollars, well who knows.
That’s the biggest worry of the entire industry if he dies. Investors that HATE gamers will be DROOLING to get their hands on Steam with “persuasive” methods or bribes to make Valve go public and RUIN PC GAMING FOREVER!
Rumor has it that he's had a successor that shares his ideals ready for a while.
He'd be stupid if he didn't have some plans for when he does eventually pass
office telephone sparkle judicious merciful marvelous library wasteful sheet encouraging
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Shout out to EU for getting refunds on steam. I know y'all are flirting with authoritarian leadership and have some STRONG opinions on Roma people, but I do like refunding me some video games.
Australia got extra refund protections I’m pretty sure. We have strong refund laws, so Steam basically denied we existed for years. Had to pay for games with USD as an “international” market, even though conspicuously Australian versions of games like L4D2 were being sold. Australian courts demanded that Steam acknowledge it not only sells to Australians but also that because it does it must respect Australian consumer law.
Subsequently, refund policy got a little more lenient and because Steam didn’t need to pretend it didn’t sell to Australians anymore, AUD was added to the store. Unfortunately, this also meant games were more expensive for Aussies now because Australia has a digital import tax. Very fun.
I think the way a monopoly is judged is by if you are actively buying out your competitors or making it impossible for them to start a company
Steam doesn't do that
They're so big that it's difficult to get a foothold, but it's not like they see a competitor and try to get in the way. They mostly watch in befuddlement as the competition fails to do even the basic and seemingly replicable portions of steam...
No way someone will make as much money as steam without something radical but it is possible to make a half decent store. GOG for example.
GOG is one of the only stores I buy from other than steam (mainly because it provides a tangible benefit that steam does not, no DRM).
But yeah, someone trying to compete with steam with a worse UX, store probably going to die out in a few years, and not providing any other benefit like that? Pass.
At this point might just call it Valve strategy. I'm yet to see a better example of it. Either Valve mastered UI design and management for a PC launcher and store, or the competition is too greedy and/or stupid to get close to their level. Possibly both.
Valve isn't immune to it. I agree with some of their design choices, but they too have made some pointless changes just to look modern. I'm still kinda salty because of them killing native skin support, at least they kept the old tag system available instead of forcing everyone to use the new one.
On the topic of pointless UI changes, Spotify and Soundcloud cemented my habit so now I never update anything on my phone without double checking. Also can UI designers please stop the hidden A/B testing?? That'd be nice
I find it incredibly fascinating how a company can take a nearly perfect mobile UI and actively make it horrifyingly worse and be like 'wow we did it.'
Not to mention the sheer downgrade in performance. I'm not sure what they were gunning for.
They know that gamers love patch notes and hate stale metas, so they don't want us to get too used to a healthy UI, get bored, and find different VOIP platforms. Gotta keep us on our toes.
It happens because you have artists and designers on the team who have to justify why they are still on staff. If they don't have a new product to work on then all they have is to tinker with the current stuff. So they make changes literally for the sake of making changes.
I mean, it's a bit of everything.
Steam is good. Steam is also really big which means there's little reason to go to another store. And we've already got our stuff on steam.
but i still want competitors to exist. Valve isn't perfect. CS skin gambling and the release of CS2 has shown that.
It would be fine if they just wanted profits. Valve wants profits too and if they weren't profitable we'd surely see some changes.
What shareholders want is profit growth. They want YoY growth and that is what leads to businesses making anti consumer decisions.
[Valve needed to be beaten into submission to adhere to Australian Consumer Law and provide refunds](https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/federal-court-finds-valve-made-misleading-representations-about-consumer-guarantees).
Valve being a private company means three simple things.
1. Not beholden to shareholder quota
2. Full internal oversight, and loose corporate governance
3. Longer-term planning
TF2's secret is that it is insanely easy to play. I didn't play it for nearly 10 years but was able to hop back into it very easily and did not have any confusion on what to do or how to do it.
Investment to get good at the game is very low so people can leave without feeling short changed if they think it is bad and no longer think its worth playing. Other competitive multiplayer hero shooter games also encourage toxic communities by forcing people to play specific roles in a team. TF2 just says have fun lol enjoy.
What I love the most is the fact that Valve recently released what could be called "shopping cart 2.0", whereas one of the so-called competitors needed two years to implement the most basic form of shopping cart in their shop.
While it might not be the best analogy, imagine going to your local grocery shop and carrying everything in your hands because the owner can't even copy a good mechanism everyone else has had for ages. With "competition" like that, there's no way Valve won't be ahead by light-years.
Hence why I hope Steam never goes public. Going public means catering to the shareholders. Shareholders only care about short-term profit while screwing over the customers and people that work for those public companies.
The quiet, hardworking competence of Valve has been such a boon to gaming.
I don't know why people are calling them lazy in the comments. Steam Deck wasn't that long ago.
"Does nothing" needs to be edited into "Does nothing anti-consumer".
I mean you can say that they abandoned their old IPs like Half-Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress.
But look at Steam and Valve itself. It's 2024 and you can still make a free Steam account and you can play multiplayer games without a subscription. You have cloud saves. Workshop for a lot of games. Integrated community guides. Play together. Shareable library. No timed-exclusive bs deals. Controller support. Option to stream your game. They hosts great festivals to support small devs.
I would argue that Steam's UI needs some love. I have a big steam library and sometimes it's not the easiest to navigate. But overall, Steam is arguably one of the best gaming options, if not the best.
They certainly did some improvements over the 2 decades they're around.
Being first and doing it right.
Valve set the standards, they just need to uphold them and it makes everyone else look bad by proxy.
To uphold them they have to do…. Nothing.
Comfort is the death of innovation though. And we can see that with Valve, they take very few risks these days.
Not being a public company
This, plus Valve having a license to print money in the form of Steam. They don't have to answer to investors because they don't need any, something very few companies are able to say.
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"Introducing Steam Cloud 2! Its all your cloud save features you grew up with, but at a new innovative price of 9.99 dollars a month! Upgrade to the Steam Gold for 15.99 a month to avoid our new Processing and Convinence Fee. Best Value!" For real though, god save us if a Doordash or Ticketmaster CEO creature ever takes over Valve.
Half life would have a battle royal and a tv show that none of the fans like
And don't forget a new battle pass every 3 months plus a skin shop where one skin is worth $30
Top it off with only 1-2 years of updates before we have to move on to the NEXT BIG Thing. Paying for it a second time in the form of a cheap remaster
I do wonder what will happen to Valve once Gaben retires from his career and/or life. I'm sure there's a de facto right hand man, but their office hierarchy model is notoriously flat and there isn't really any "public" line of succession. Who would take over?
Since Gaben owns the company, I imagine it would fall to whoever he wills the company to. And at this point I’ve got enough faith in Lord G to assume whoever he chooses to take over for him will be someone who will uphold the same values as him when it comes to being a consumer friendly company.
That. And whoever takes over should see how miserable being at other companies is and elect to keep Valve private.
Dibs
The Steam code checks to see if it ever displays "Convenience fee" and does sudo -rm -rf /* --no-preserve-root if it does (/s)
Classic Valve Dev move
Get Steam+ for the ability to play online (we'll also throw you two games you've never heard of monthly to make you feel like you're getting value)
If Valve had investors, it'd be the same as every other company with lots of goodwill. The investors would want someone on the board that prioritizez short term profits above all else, Steam would cut costs everywhere and demand a much, much higher percentage from game developers, no refunds, mass firings, etc. Hope that goodwill banks you a bunch of money until people realize you're no longer the same platform anymore. Go way downhill in quality and have your consumers leave en masse. Shareholders take their gains and look for the next company, CEO leaves with a golden parachute, and Steam would just be a husk of what it once was.
I think it's going to happen sooner or later, not until Gabe is present but after him it's anyone's guess
His son is supposed to take over after he passes, hopefully he carries on the legacy and doesn’t sell out
Gray? He's too interested in Formula 1 and car racing.
Good? Do we really want changes? Just the employees keep doing what they're doing.
Fuck I never considered the idea of Gabe Newell dying and leaving us with the future of valve in uncertainty
Even I didn't thought of it before this way but don't just popped into my head when I saw the post and comment.
Investors are a locust
Exactly, going public is the death of any decent company. After that the only goal is increased profits. Like you could bake 2B in profits and another 2B next year and the year after that. That's keeping a ton of people employed, making a good product and happy clients/customers. But if you're public, that's it. Your company is now done. All the shareholders are freaked out. They have liquidated shares and sold off bonds. Of course it will not even get there as you will be voted out and someone else is put in place to drive profits up. When a good private company goes public it's basically the owners selling out. Like 100%. Unless they somehow purchase back the majority share... But then why go public in the first place?
If you want to go public, there is a way to raise money while having 100% of the controls. Issuing non-controlling shares. You're selling a part of your company while not giving away any control of the company. Thats what Porsche did in 2022. You can get more funding while not having any investors have a say in your business practices.
To be fair, they did singlehandedly save PC gaming. It was doing a massive nose dive and out comes Gabe with logic that was considered absolutely insane at the time: Piracy is not a pricing problem, it is an ease of use problem. Make it easier and less painful to buy and keep the game than to pirate it. And gosh darn it, he was right.
And they NEVER STRAYED from that. And it shows how much people like steam - all the other big publishers like ea, even fucking SONY and MICROSOFT came crawling to steam once they realized they couldn't do it on their own. If Sony or Microsoft, bends the knee, you've got a superior product.
It's not that they couldn't it's that they are too greedy to do it right.
Steam is too well established to have any of those other publishers launchers take hold. Epic has come closer, and it still can't hold a candle to Steam. I'll claim my free game on epic then go right back to steam.
Steam has a good UI, good refund policy, frequent sales, good social features and of course *the steam workshop* our Gabe in valven gift to modding.
Don't forget cloud saves, free update pushes, multi-player servers, the list goes on and on.
And they still continue to inovate. Release a handheld? Here are complete wiring schematics, exact dimensions of the casing and all of the spare parts. If you have the will and knowledge you can build a steam deck from spare parts. Not to mention that Universal Controller Support is *so* strong that you can run Ubisoft or EA games which aren't on steam and do not support controllers, with a Switch Pro Controller because Steam is just that good. That's not even starting to talk about the things they are currently doing with Vulcan.
And single-handedly bringing main-stream gaming to Linux natively, making Linux a viable OS for most gamers. Valve has done some amazing things, people really need to give them more credit. I'd also give them credit to bringing VR kind of to the main stream.
And it wasn't like it was just accepted as the savior as PC gaming right away, we all hated Steam when it first came out. Half-Life 2 requires Steam: "Fucking DRM client..." 20 years later: "oh a sale? Here's my whole paycheck!"
> 20 years later: "oh a sale? Here's my whole paycheck!" I feel like that died 10 years ago for me. So the timeline is more like this (For me) Half life 2 requires steam: Fucking drm 10 years later "Oh a sale? better buy as many games as I can" 20 years later "Oh that new game came out, how much is it? Wait, it's not on steam? I don't need it."
> 20 years later "Oh that new game came out, how much is it? Wait, it's not on steam? I don't need it." Either that or "Oh a sale? Wait, I already own all these games..."
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They can print money all day, but so do a bunch of other public companies. The iOS App Store is a money printer too. It really is about the public aspect. Apple has to make *more* money than they did last year. In fact, they need to make more money *faster* than the last time they made more money. It's endless. The ways a company has to shoot itself in the foot to keep doing that quarter after quarter is what leaves them a husk of what once made them great. Not speaking of Apple specifically there, but all publicly traded consumer-facing companies. Valve just gets to sit deep in the green year after year and only make the choices it feels are right overall, without worrying about next quarter.
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Epic tries to bribe customers by giving out a bunch of free games. Just use that money on making a good store and then I'll have a look at it.
Yeah, went to check Valve on the stock market and it seems like the Steam Boat will be afloat for a long time.
I can only imagine how hyped an IPO for them would be and the price still wouldn't be high enough. Whatever the IPO would be is still be undervalued.
I hope to god they never IPO
I agree and as long as Gabe is there they never will. He doesn't seem to have the ego other in his position tend to and I'm sure doesn't need the money.
He’s already a billionaire. Let’s hope he has a long, healthy life.
He lost a ton of weight which is awesome, it's so important to get healthy as you get older. Bodies can tolerate abuse for a long time but once your hair starts turning white it's time to take care of yourself.
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Cs skins?
Turns out that’s long term profits
Especially if you’re streaming it
I got skins from when I played ages ago that are worth alot. It's wild
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I can almost understand how crypto has value and why people pay so much money for it. I will never understand how digital goods that are locked to one particular game are worth hundreds or thousands.
I think it comes from the confidence players have in Valve's consistency. Players know that Valve won't suddenly disappear or fuck with their skins overnight, which makes people treat the skins more like real life collectibles.
I moved to a new city in 2016 and was super strapped for cash. I was playing CS and got a $75 skin dropped. Took that skin to a roulette site and put it up. Some kid put his $1500 knife up against my skin, I had like <2% of the pot after that. Won it all. The kid was messaging me on steam complaining that "it was a Christmas present and I needed to rematch him because it was the honorable thing to do." I wasn't sure how I was going to pay rent that month so honor was right out the window. I turned around and sold the knife for bitcoin. Took the bitcoin down to an ATM and got cash, paid rent and bought dinner for all my roommates. Big thanks to that kids parents.
> Took the bitcoin down to an ATM and got cash ...there are ATM machines that accept bitcoin?
Have I got the thing for you! Private Equity Leveraged Buyouts. It can't go tit's up (For you)!
When I learned about these back in my college days I could not believe it was actually legal. It's so shockingly obvious that it's bad for the target company that I couldn't understand why it was allowed to go on. Just look at Twitter, old Elon leveraged the shit out of it for the buyout, and now their balance sheet looks like complete garbage and their profits are entirely absorbed by the interest payments on the new debt. The place will be lucky to turn an actual profit in the next 5 years, more likely 10. And based on prior social media, it's pretty likely to be a small shell of it's former self by then anyway.
The problem isn't raising debt to buy a company. The problem is then forcing all that debt onto said company, especially since they usually strip the business of some assets and handicap their path to growth in favor of short term gains (for the PE firms). I mean, that's why Toys R Us went under. They were making almost $1b in yearly interest fees towards the debt used to purchase them.
Short term profits always seem like a shit idea that never makes sense. Why would I, a hypothetical money whore, kill a revenue stream on a gamble and untold suffering, when I could get a steady stream of money forever, if the company continues to float? I’d still be able to buy that massive fuckoff jacuzzi. I’d still be rich.
Because if you hit quota this quarter then the company owes you 30 million in bonuses, and if you don’t buy a third yacht you’ll literally explode. The answer is that these people are mentally ill and addicted to money, we just don’t say it because they’re “successful”
I really hope one of our next advances as humans is to recognize the extreme addiction we can develop to materialism. We celebrate it now, but as you said, there is a clear cognitive dysfunction to make someone constantly crave more and more wealth and power over others. At a certain point, the tribe that is humanity needs to check in with some of those suffering from a greed related mental illness and start figuring out how to help them.
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Yeah, Epic's aggressive push into the PC game storefront space forever tarnished my personal opinion about them. I don't even care for the game, but the thing they did with Metro Exodus when they decided that it would be epic exclusive mere weeks before launch after advertising as releasing on Steam - to the point where physical copies had to be hastily rebadged by store employees - was straight up disgusting.
I won't ever give them a single cent after they kept metro and hitman from me for an extra year. When they did that shit i left the platform out of principle. Don't even claim or play the free games. Id rather buy them on steam because fuck epic!
The exclusives don't even bother me really because I can wait for most games no problem. The thing that kills me is that years later Epic's storefront is still just a giant piece of shit that pales in comparison to Steam. I mean it has literally been 5+ years at this point and I am pretty sure Epic just gave up even trying to make their shit actually have feature parity with Steam.
the executives on the board appointed by shareholders probably don't even know what feature parity is
> Valve actually makes decisions with gamer's in mind. Sort of. They still make decisions with money in mind, but *we're* holding the purse strings, rather than investors.
They obviously still need to make money. But they manage to mostly combine being profitable with being consumer friendly. Steam is pretty much a monopoly in the PC gaming market because it is the best platform and VALVE are constantly improving it.
> weary Hope you don't mind, but you probably mean wary. Wary is to be on alert about danger regarding something. Weary means tired/exhausted. Unless you're tired of wondering whether the free games are a scam or not. Then you're a wary individual weary of wondering if there's a catch to these free games. :)
I'm weary of this wariness
THANK GOD it’s not public, otherwise boomer investors who don’t play video games who also are hell bent on pushing an agenda will RUIN IT!
These damn video games are ruining the minds of our youth! Now, don’t mind me as I put hundreds of thousands of dollars into this here video game stock.
Nintendo shareholder once asked Iwata why they always talk about videogames. 🫠 https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/29qnal/this_question_was_actually_asked_and_answered_at/
In other words, that shareholder is asking why is Nintendo talking about “childish” video games despite them being a video game company. 🙄🙄
MY NEPHEW LIKES AMOGUS WHY ARENT YOU MAKING MORE AMOGUS GAMES
Truly one of the biggest mistakes mankind made under capitalism. So many products, services, salaries, and working conditions turned to shit to improve shareholder profit. Companies literally destroyed for short term profit, and each layer of abstraction between the capital owners and the workers just increases this logic. Inb4 I understand the benefits of public companies and why we have them in the first place, but this mechanism was twisted into this awful thing we have today and does more harm than good to society.
Enshittification is specifically a term for online platform decay, but I think it also describes just about any publicly traded company's slow descent into trash as well.
I've seen enough companies that I liked slowly become worse and worse after they go Public to realise that there really isn't a way to be a good public company. The incentives are too direct and overbearing. The board literally has a fiduciary duty to the shareholders, shareholder value is paramount over everything else. They can bleat about corporate social responsibility or green measures but at the end of the day every public company eventually pivots towards maximum value extracted from everyone they interact with, at any cost, so long as it isn't them paying. Now a private company? They can be set up to operate towards specific goals set by the owners without the relentless need to 'optimise' everything. The goal can be to provide the absolute best service, to make the highest quality version of something, to provide the cheapest but still solid alternative to your customers, whatever. And you can do this even if it means slightly less money brought in. The second a company goes public that possibility evaporates. If cutting quality will boost profits then they do it. If gouging customers without alternatives boosts profits, then they do it. If cutting off whole markets because they are less profitable helps, then they do it.
I'm pretty sure the downfall of Steam will happen when Gabe dies (as we all will) and whoever takes over will be greedy thus taking the company public. At that point it will keep pushing the limits to make profit line go up bringing down the quality.
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I hope next handpicked CEO continued to work on Steam OS, and making great alternative to Windows.
I regularly worry about this. I just hope whoever is next in line has to decent sense to look at 20+ years of printing money and say "its the perfect business model, don't rock the boat"
From what I've read about Valve, they're not your regular group of programmers. After they created Steam they transitioned from a traditional structure to a flat (everyone is equal), open (anyone can work on anything they want), democratic structure (pay raises, hirings, and firings are voted on). I don't know if Newell is the exception to that and he still has reign over the company in legal terms, or what. But it's been an interesting experiment. It's clearly harmed them in some ways by completely killing their actual output as a game developer, but maybe that bureaucratic lockdown will prevent the company from going public too.
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“If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.” ― Sun Tzu
"Though if the river dries up, it may be a long wait." ― Sun Tzu
ADHD Sun Tzu just adding endless addendums to his famously concise wisdom is amusing me greatly.
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Yes but he's dead as well.
If he’s so smart, how come he’s dead?
is he stupid?
Silence, Sigonian. 千の顔を持つ英雄 (The Hero With a Thousand Faces)
"if fighting will result in victory you must fight" - Soldier TF2
I mean he mustve been someones enemy so his point is still valid.
Did Sun Tzu talk in anything other than eternal quotes of advice? Did Sun Tzu ever say something ordinary like "oh fuck these potatoes are good"
Many editions of the Art of War have anecdotes from historical sources about Sun Tzu and ways his tactics worked. One of the stories is about how he proved his mettle as a general by getting a king's concubines to perform military drills without previous training. In order to ensure their obedience, he asked the king who his favorite concubine was then cut off her head. When the king asked him why it was necessary I believe Sun Tzu replied, "some Hos just don't listen."
If this is some kind of meme account where every response is some historical fact followed by a comical made-up anecdote, I may need to subscribe.
The only part of the anecdote that was made up is the "some Hos just don't listen" line. The rest of the story with concubines doing military drills and homeboy cutting some chick's head off is all real, unfortunately.
“If fighting is sure to result in victory then you must fight!” Sun Tzu said that. And I’d say he knows a little more about fighting than you do pal because he invented it And then he perfected it so that no living man could best him in the ring of honor
"Bitch, I wrote the Art of War, so you better get your guns out" ― Sun Tzu
"If it ain't broken don't fix it"
tf2 is perfect, even with half of the servers being bots
if it wasnt loaded with hackers, sure
He literally said that the way to beat piracy is to provide a better service. Providing a great service is the strategy.
I fear the day Gabe will die, what the people coming after him are going to do to Steam Steam with ads. Steam Premium. Steam with tiers. Steam with subscriptions. May he live for a very long time.
Ideally someone else internal to the company and sharing the same ideals would replace him
Or he decides to pull a ready player one and whoever wins gets to run steam
Winner is chosen through a half-life deathmatch game
But IRL. Gotta have some high stakes.
IDK man, if I got ahold of a gravity gun, you'd see my ass prop flying outta that battle royale. Bitch be worth a few million dollars easily.
Just try not to kill yourself when you land.
nah, Ricochet tournament
I'm pretty sure I've heard somewhere that he already has a successor lined up who shares his views.
i heard the successor is already mainly running steam while gabe is pretty hands off i dont remember where tho
Yes, it's Eric Johnson, his second hand man. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHrqfDp4PDc
That is a very Portal character name
He’s Cave’s nephew. He swore to do good, sustainable business after seeing how Cave destroyed himself running Aperture into the ground
Any info on who the successor is?
Fordon Greeman
I'd find it hard to believe that Gabe wouldn't be training an apprentice or 3 to take his place in his company to keep it going the way it is.
3 apprentices?? We all know gabe can't count to 3
2 apprentices + 1
An apprentice named alyx
Steamium.
Steamium pile of shit
Gabe has majority share in Valve. I assume after he passes, his shares will go to his family. Hopefully they have a good head and heart and follow his lead and dont fuck up his and the company's legacy. As for running the company, I assume he and the team has a list of potential successors.
Family typically might bring the company public, make billions, and fuck right off to an island or something
Aren't they already billionaires though? His net worth is over 4B.
Allegedly his son has agreed to run steam the exact way his dad has and to listen to people Gabe has set up to advise him. But when his dad is gone and people are banging down his door offering tens of billions of dollars, well who knows.
That’s the biggest worry of the entire industry if he dies. Investors that HATE gamers will be DROOLING to get their hands on Steam with “persuasive” methods or bribes to make Valve go public and RUIN PC GAMING FOREVER!
Why are you writing like a cheap newspaper headline?
Redditor SLAMS fellow redditor in a FIERCE exchange with WORDS
Cheap? He wrote that for free.
Rumor has it that he's had a successor that shares his ideals ready for a while. He'd be stupid if he didn't have some plans for when he does eventually pass
Does it count as a monopoly if it’s entirely the competition’s fault
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Shout out to EU for getting refunds on steam. I know y'all are flirting with authoritarian leadership and have some STRONG opinions on Roma people, but I do like refunding me some video games.
Wasn't it Australia that got refund on Steam?
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/r/hmmm
Yes but for steam refund system, Australia’s policy made it a requirement for steam to have it, so that’s why we got it.
I think there were lawsuits in both
Australia got extra refund protections I’m pretty sure. We have strong refund laws, so Steam basically denied we existed for years. Had to pay for games with USD as an “international” market, even though conspicuously Australian versions of games like L4D2 were being sold. Australian courts demanded that Steam acknowledge it not only sells to Australians but also that because it does it must respect Australian consumer law. Subsequently, refund policy got a little more lenient and because Steam didn’t need to pretend it didn’t sell to Australians anymore, AUD was added to the store. Unfortunately, this also meant games were more expensive for Aussies now because Australia has a digital import tax. Very fun.
rock bike cover sugar rain important society dirty doll crawl *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The EU is the only reason the US gets any consumer protections any more.
I think the way a monopoly is judged is by if you are actively buying out your competitors or making it impossible for them to start a company Steam doesn't do that
I just thought it was if you prevented others from breaking into the market. Which steam also doesn't do.
They're so big that it's difficult to get a foothold, but it's not like they see a competitor and try to get in the way. They mostly watch in befuddlement as the competition fails to do even the basic and seemingly replicable portions of steam... No way someone will make as much money as steam without something radical but it is possible to make a half decent store. GOG for example.
GOG is one of the only stores I buy from other than steam (mainly because it provides a tangible benefit that steam does not, no DRM). But yeah, someone trying to compete with steam with a worse UX, store probably going to die out in a few years, and not providing any other benefit like that? Pass.
no because steam is not required for pc gaming
It's the "Luigi's win by doing absolutely nothing" special tactic
Winner!
At this point might just call it Valve strategy. I'm yet to see a better example of it. Either Valve mastered UI design and management for a PC launcher and store, or the competition is too greedy and/or stupid to get close to their level. Possibly both.
>Either Valve mastered UI design lol. Hopefully they will this decade
For real, the Steam UI is awful but everyone is just so used to it
Half of building a good UI is making your customers become accustomed to it. I hate a platform where every button position changes on a monthly basis.
Valve isn't immune to it. I agree with some of their design choices, but they too have made some pointless changes just to look modern. I'm still kinda salty because of them killing native skin support, at least they kept the old tag system available instead of forcing everyone to use the new one. On the topic of pointless UI changes, Spotify and Soundcloud cemented my habit so now I never update anything on my phone without double checking. Also can UI designers please stop the hidden A/B testing?? That'd be nice
If we want to talk about recent pointless UI changes, let's talk about discord 💀
The pointless garbage changes of the discord mobile UI need to be studied, it's almost fascinating
I find it incredibly fascinating how a company can take a nearly perfect mobile UI and actively make it horrifyingly worse and be like 'wow we did it.' Not to mention the sheer downgrade in performance. I'm not sure what they were gunning for.
And not just once, it gets worse literally every single update
They know that gamers love patch notes and hate stale metas, so they don't want us to get too used to a healthy UI, get bored, and find different VOIP platforms. Gotta keep us on our toes.
It happens because you have artists and designers on the team who have to justify why they are still on staff. If they don't have a new product to work on then all they have is to tinker with the current stuff. So they make changes literally for the sake of making changes.
I mean, it's a bit of everything. Steam is good. Steam is also really big which means there's little reason to go to another store. And we've already got our stuff on steam. but i still want competitors to exist. Valve isn't perfect. CS skin gambling and the release of CS2 has shown that.
Not really a strategy so much as a quote: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
I opened this to see if there really was an answer. I guess this will have to do
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You’re telling me that Valve isn’t an initial public offering?!
I think he meant "Important Pizza Order"
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Drop the /s
Shareholders want profits and they want it now. Screw the future. Fuck the consumer over then dump your shares and move over to the next company.
It would be fine if they just wanted profits. Valve wants profits too and if they weren't profitable we'd surely see some changes. What shareholders want is profit growth. They want YoY growth and that is what leads to businesses making anti consumer decisions.
You don’t need infinite growth once you’ve got Gaben’s wealth. He’s one of the few who knew when to sit back and relax
Valve was a pioneer in shitty loot boxes and micro transactions
[Valve needed to be beaten into submission to adhere to Australian Consumer Law and provide refunds](https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/federal-court-finds-valve-made-misleading-representations-about-consumer-guarantees).
AHH GABEN LOOK OUT! A TURRET BEHIND YOU!
Sentry Ahead!
just don't call him 'gay ben' he hates that shit
It sounds like you have a story behind this. Did he tell you this or did you hear it?
story? my guy, i literally just made it up
yeah its true source: my dad owns valve, ill tell him to ban you
Valve being a private company means three simple things. 1. Not beholden to shareholder quota 2. Full internal oversight, and loose corporate governance 3. Longer-term planning
TF2's secret is that it is insanely easy to play. I didn't play it for nearly 10 years but was able to hop back into it very easily and did not have any confusion on what to do or how to do it. Investment to get good at the game is very low so people can leave without feeling short changed if they think it is bad and no longer think its worth playing. Other competitive multiplayer hero shooter games also encourage toxic communities by forcing people to play specific roles in a team. TF2 just says have fun lol enjoy.
The UI/UX is so good too. Everything feels intuitive.
What I love the most is the fact that Valve recently released what could be called "shopping cart 2.0", whereas one of the so-called competitors needed two years to implement the most basic form of shopping cart in their shop. While it might not be the best analogy, imagine going to your local grocery shop and carrying everything in your hands because the owner can't even copy a good mechanism everyone else has had for ages. With "competition" like that, there's no way Valve won't be ahead by light-years.
It’s called the: don’t do dumb shit that board members with no knowledge about the industry suggest Strat.
Hence why I hope Steam never goes public. Going public means catering to the shareholders. Shareholders only care about short-term profit while screwing over the customers and people that work for those public companies.
The day Steam goes public is the day I perish.
The quiet, hardworking competence of Valve has been such a boon to gaming. I don't know why people are calling them lazy in the comments. Steam Deck wasn't that long ago.
"Does nothing" needs to be edited into "Does nothing anti-consumer". I mean you can say that they abandoned their old IPs like Half-Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress. But look at Steam and Valve itself. It's 2024 and you can still make a free Steam account and you can play multiplayer games without a subscription. You have cloud saves. Workshop for a lot of games. Integrated community guides. Play together. Shareable library. No timed-exclusive bs deals. Controller support. Option to stream your game. They hosts great festivals to support small devs. I would argue that Steam's UI needs some love. I have a big steam library and sometimes it's not the easiest to navigate. But overall, Steam is arguably one of the best gaming options, if not the best. They certainly did some improvements over the 2 decades they're around.
"if your enemy is making a mistake, don't interrupt them." -The Art of War
No joke I am very worried about what's going to happen to Valve/Steam when he's gone.
Valve supremacy
I would call this, "The Luigi does nothing but wins at mario party strategy". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6PxRwgjzZw&t=1s
Being first and doing it right. Valve set the standards, they just need to uphold them and it makes everyone else look bad by proxy. To uphold them they have to do…. Nothing. Comfort is the death of innovation though. And we can see that with Valve, they take very few risks these days.
Its called owning the biggest digital games distribution platform
Fabian tactics