Do they realize that what they really said was: having shareholders destroys businesses.
Anyone who isn’t head deep in Capitalism understands that, yeah.
Lol, this is an unironically awesome takeaway.
shareholders in public companies dont care about the health of the business
The full quote in the context of the article makes it even worse:
“As long as Valve is independent and not a publicly traded company, they probably have a certain ambition, but not an extraordinary ambition,” Rosier says. “So I think they can still decide to make some decisions that are player-first, and that helps, right? To get the goodwill from the players.”
So, customers like using a product that focuses on the customers to create profits, rather than extracting profits by abusing the customer? How unambitious… /s
and that helps, right? To get the goodwill from the players
It helps?! It HELPS?!! That’s the fuckin customer base right there, that’s engagement, customer retention, customer satisfaction and THE top reason for sales.
“It helps” pffftt… it does not help, it’s the ENTIRE PRODUCT
The industry is unwilling to cope with this fact
This is what is endemic in our current shareholder first sustem, it’s not about profits, it’s about leveraging the stock, products, customers, image and every other tool at their disposal to manage the value that the shareholders control so they can game the stock market as they see fit. Everything else is secondary.
Private companies have shareholders as well.
That’s a new one for me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder
Both public companies and private corporation have shareholders.
But only for companies participating in the equity ownership, right? I’m not fully versed with that, so need to ask here. I don’t know how this works with Gabe and Valve. I think the important detail here is, that Valve is not publicly traded and can decide who buys shares from their company and could reject any money. I don’t think this is possible with publicly traded companies, right?
Yeah, often times if a company needs a loan then they open up a stake.
i think in private corporations only a very limited amount of shareholders can have shares
If they are shareholders, they hold at least one share. Every one of them. There’s no limit on number of shareholders or shares held. But those shares are not publicly traded.
There are limits on shareholders in private companies.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/5/500-shareholder-threshold.asp
Looks like the number is 2000, but that excludes employees. It used to be 500.
That’s only a (USA) reporting limit. A private company can still have more than 2000 shareholders, but it must then publicly report its finances like a public company would.
Fair… but why would any private company do that without going public? Do any?
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Huh. What an unexpectedly damning indictment of the extraction-oriented enshittification market aka capitalism
It’s not, really. Steam runs under capitalism. They’re just a super outlier in that they’re a billion dollar company that doesn’t have shareholders. They’re basically the wet dream that conservatives are trying to sell you but that just fails 99.9% of the time due to greed.
They’re basically the wet dream that conservatives are trying to sell you but that just fails 99.9% of the time due to greed.
I wonder what is the driving force for capitalism…
Is it the Singular pursiut of profit to enrich oneself?
Is there another wird for that?
Could that be the very motivation the system is build upon?
So the whole system doesnt Work how it is promoted, but is just a facade to keep the status quo and that means the rich stay rich and the poor stay barely not revolting.
So of course No Steam doesnt run under capitalism it crawls under capitalism. It works despite of capitalism.
You’re confused. Steam is an American company and America is (you may have noticed) a capitalist nation.
The point is that you can participate and thrive in capitalism without doing every resource extracting enshittification strategy in the book, which seems to be just Business 101 these days.
Is Steam perfect? Probably not. But most other major players in this space seem to leap at every chance to charge people more while worsening their product and then we get thought pieces wondering how Steam remains popular by virtue of not actively making things worse.
So of course No Steam doesnt run under capitalism it crawls under capitalism. It works despite of capitalism.
I really don’t know what you’re trying to say here. These terms are not mutually exclusive. It really just feels like you’re being pedantic.
To be honest to explain this to you is like explaining a fish what is Air or a blind Person the color yellow, so no worries.
Yeah I didn’t think so.
Capitalism SLAMMED by Steam Store market analysis. “Eat my shorts, jabronies” capitalism was heard saying in response.
Gabe will eventually die and the MBA that takes over will see the quick paycheck.
Gabe will probably have it own by all of valve employees, so enshitification would be less likely.
Maybe I’m wrong but hey let me have some hope.
turn it into a coop you say?
Owned by employees (continuously) vs shares given to current employees are two very different concepts.
But yeah, let us have some hope, otherwise it’s GoG or the high seas.
Any source for his intentions?
There’s no public knowledge of his intentions. However Gabe speaks on how Valve operates plenty and in general, if the industry is doing one thing, they often explore doing the complete opposite.
Valve’s primary thesis is exceptionally talented people are most productive when they don’t need to think about money, are surrounded by other exceptionally talented people, and there’s minimal people telling those people what to do.
I doubt Gabe would want the soul of Valve to die with him so his succession plan will factor that in.
exceptionally talented people are most productive when they don’t need to think about money, are surrounded by other exceptionally talented people, and there’s minimal people telling those people what to do.
This all immediately goes out the window as soon as they go public
This is covered in the video I linked…
“Valve is not a publicly traded company. Being a publicly traded company adds a bunch of headaches and it [doesn’t] really solve any problems for us… It [would mean] that control around decision making now involved third parties… The whole point of being a privately held company is to eliminate another source of noise in the signal between the consumers and producers of a good.”
Valve are absurdly profitable. What purpose would being public serve? They don’t need to raise extra capital, they don’t have shareholders to provide liquidity to, they don’t need the brand recognition, they don’t need stock for acquisition currency, they don’t need it to attract or retain talent, Gabe doesn’t need an exit strategy when he’s already cash flush to be buying mega yachts.
For every reason companies go public, none of them would benefit Valve.
Exactly - which is why going public is generally not in the interests of any sustainable company or their customers.
It is, however, in the interests of (1) company insiders that want a huge payout, (2) companies that are not sustainable pre-IPO and need to transition their business model or practice and set the IPO as a ticking clock where they fund or fail, and (3) companies and CEOs who borrow cancer’s business model and are dissatisfied by anything except infinite expansion.
None of those benefit the customer and it makes it rational to expect an IPO to destroy what’s good about a company and its products.
I personally think he might go with a trust that way it will still stay in the family
Still a couple of decades tho
Gabe’s medical Half-Life (not the game) of his atoms decay slower than a normal human being.
I can imagine a nightmare where they add a monthly subscription for something to get a foot in the door. “Just $1.99 for unlimited cloud saves! Storage isn’t free you’re supporting the devs!”
A lot of people will pay it because “gamers” are, famously, little better than children.
Then it’s downhill from there. More subscriptions. Free service thinned. Popularity gone.
It’s what always happens when that kind of person gets in.
What makes you think that? From what I’ve heard, management is already pretty separated from any of the actual devs at Valve. Orders come down from on high ( they’re not even in the same building) and the rest have to scramble to make it happen with their isolated “flat hierarchy” setup.
These guys are so privileged they think they are entitled to success without innovation.
THERE WAS NOTHING LIKE STEAM AT THE TIME.
If they want what Gabe has they need to do what he did: INNOVATE.
I cannot emphasize this enough. This is the entire modus operandi when it comes to venture capital and “entrepreneurs” in industry.
They have a singular talent: exploitation. Be it a mineral rich vein under a mountain, an oil/gas field, middle-class folks with spending cash, gig workers, or information economy workers (e.g. programmers), it’s just one more resource to convert into wealth. Left unchecked, all the social evils we see from this thinking come into play: inequality, slavery, usury, fascism, and so on. The above even applies to their own employees, as there is no distinction in class of human being outside of the status of “owner”. There is no higher calling, no alternative focus. There are only resources and money.
The instant you make “keeping the company alive”, “make a product people actually want”, or even "employ people"a focus, the goal is no longer exploitative. It’s arguably more socialist, even if the overall goal is to continue to thrive as a for-profit business. As a result, it’s not useful to these jackals as-is. It must first be converted into parts to be exploited.
Such a thing is also a pariah in capitalist circles. They fucking hate it. The bigger Valve gets, the more hit-pieces we see in the media. Also, the more we see CEOs circle the wagons when the likes of Epic attempts to topple their market dominance somehow, and it always fails. Socialist corporate ju-jitsu appears to be a winning strategy, and thank goodness.
Also not be shitbag garbage monsters.
His innovation was to create the modern online verification bullshit that plagues the industry. Before Steam, you bought a game, put in the disc, and played it. If it HAD and online component, you may have had to type in a CD key.
No extra launcher to access your library. No having to reconnect to the internet to renew your license. I had a dedicated gaming PC that didn’t even have a modem. And no mandatory updates. It’s unacceptable that any time I want to play a single-player game I have to hope there hasn’t been some 140 gig patch that I have to install because the multi-player suite I’ll never open added a new $30 outfit to a character and they just make everyone reinstall everything.
If Half Life 2 had come out a year earlier, I wouldn’t have been able to play it because I didn’t have internet connected to my gaming PC until college.
All of those problems are easily avoided by not playing AAA slop
If you’re installing a game through Steam, you’re dealing with DRM, a third-party launcher, and online verification, and Steam is taking a 30% cut to insert those features into the process. It doesn’t matter how “indie” your game is.
Valve will take the cut from the sale no matter what of course, but the DRM and even the in-game Steamworks integration is actually optional. You can publish DRM-free files on Steam which do not require Steam to run at all if you want. People might get grouchy if you skip achievements and save sync or whatever, though.
ETA: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam
And to further clarify, you do not need to eschew achievements and that other stuff if you want your game to work without steam. You can make your game check to see if steamworks is working and then provide those services if if available.
I hardly deal with online verification. I travel a lot and have a laptop with singleplayer games I downloaded through Steam and play them with no internet connection whatsoever all the time
God I remember raging at having to go online and install this “Steam” bullshit thing just to play a game I bought from the brick and mortar store in my town.
If Valve just made using Steam as soul-crushingly painful as we imagine it must, we might have a chance! Imagine what could be if the wizards behind the Google Play Store took a shot at making Steam!
when it first release, steam was ASS
Steam was ass because it was just a an update platform, and most of us still had 56k or isdn as their means to the Internet and gaming. Yea it sucked when updates came out and you had to patch, it was a new thing to get patches like that vs buying a physical disk and the game just worked and didn’t require a day 1 update.
the game just worked
That’s not how I remember it. I remember plenty of games being buggy as hell, or outright not working. When a patch did come out to fix it, you had to find and download it from the developer’s website and manually install it. Then keep track of that patch file in case you wanted to reinstall and play again later.
Most games on PC worked first release, because most people didn’t have good enough Internet to get a patch. What games are you thinking about that were buggy or didn’t work pre-steam?
I can’t think of a game pre-steam that didn’t work or was so buggy it required a patch. They had to ship working products back then. There was no send it and patch it day one like there is today. Consoles %100 had to work day one.
It was also the first online DRM most gamers interfaced with.
Battle.NET and verifying Diablo II keys existed before that.
Then they listened to feedback and changed it to be the leading and most preferred pc gaming platform. How something originates isn’t a constant standard to judge them by. The fact that they were shit at first kind of shows why they are successful now, they accepted that they needed to improve due to customer feedback and did, they didn’t decide what their customers needed and try to force it to be like that, they listened to what their customers were wanting and made themselves into a better product.
True from what I’ve read, and honestly I never used it in that form. I was mostly gaming on consoles at that time.
I have a great idea! What if we censor every negative review! People would see all these
amazingshit games with amazing reviews and buy them!
A lot of people don’t seem to understand that Steam is DRM.
No one wanted to use Steam when it was released and the only reason anyone did is vendor lock-in on copies of Half-Life that were purchased at retail with no mention of Steam until Valve altered the bargain.
Some “innovation” to force people to use your service to keep playing a game they already purchased.
I’m surprised that people are so pro steam here. I guess more younger people than older people that remember how garbage it was. It was GameSpy arcade with extra steps. I’ll get down voted all day but this is how steam was looked at. No one wanted it and it was a complete disaster for a long time. Like let’s add a monstrous background task when everyone had single core cpus.
In some industries and markets, copycats can come along and undercut the original without actually improving things, but just offering a better price. For whatever reason, nobody else seems to be able to meaningfully compete with Steam on that front, either.
100% hard agree. Not launching an IPO is the single best thing Gaben has ever done. Letting in corporate executives would utterly destroy Valve and run them into the ground to fund their golden parachutes. It’s happened time and again. Professional “executives” do not run companies for the benefit of the customer they run them into the ground to make themselves richer. Kudos to Gaben for being intelligent enough to recognize this and keep Valve private.
My steam account is 22 years old. I probably have 400+ games on there. I do believe in GOG and try to buy games there where I can, but if I have a choice between the major platforms, I will pretty much always choose steam. I bought a bunch of games on Xbox Live and my PS3 back in the 2000s that I no longer have access to. There’s a certain subset of gamers for whom Steam will always be the platform of choice.
- Provide a good and cheap service.
- Improve the service over time with some of the money you make.
- Make pro-consumer choices knowing full well you can afford it.
- ???
- Watch competition repeatedly shoot itself in the crotch.
- Profit.
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Yeah, but have you considered being an MBA demon and wanting even more money?
Investing into customers and their overall happiness and loyalty works out, go figure.
The King who has never seen grass will starve to death on an iron throne.
Even if I’m playing a game I bought from GoG, I still need Steam involved for its controller support or Proton if I’m on Linux.
You can run proton without Steam.
More money now temporarily is better then always getting money forever.
You know how it usually is relatively straightforward to create the alternative to something that already exists and make it better, but the network effect is usually the reason why your alternative will fail?
well, with valve you don’t just have the network effect, but also trying to replicate everything steam does is a giant undertaking. you’ll be looking at several years of work (if you can get a couple dozen employees) just to catch up to where steam is now (or like 5 years ago I guess? :D). and then what? you have a fully functional empty store, congratz.
this is why alternative stores usually just narrowly focus on the store aspect. itch, GOG, and those big publisher launchers like ubi connect, are all basically just ways to buy games without getting valve involved. but their narrow focus also allows them to do something different without having to compete with steam.I mean obvs there are things valve should improve that most likely aren’t gonna happen without serious competition, but at the same time I don’t think this is gonna happen unless a benevolent billionaire decides to throw their hat into the ring. sadly, benevolent billionaire is a oxymoron.
Tbh, a lot of people don’t bother with many of Steam’s additional social features. Some people actively hate those features, seeing them as bloat
Yeah, but there’s always that one feature that you love. For me, it’s the accessibility features that devs can list for their game. Makes my life soooo much easier for filtering out games I can’t play due to motor issues.
If a competitor doesn’t have that, I’m not even going to consider them at this point.
I would call store filters a store feature, not a social feature
Even without the social features there’s still so much you’d need to copy (I think the social stuff might even be the easiest stuff to copy and get right (or do better))
According to Epic you can just vibe-code a competitor now ;P
The fall of Epic and Tim are really sad, but at the same time also extremely hilarious to watch. He is so pro AI and yet so completely incapable of using AI to do anything right…
so completely incapable
of using AIto do anything right…Ftfy
Both GOG and Epic stores are quite full of games. Give developers the chance to sell things, and they’ll take it.
GOG doesn’t have everything since they require DRM-free, but I do most of my indie-game purchases on there. GOG have said in the past that their most-requested feature from developers is “can you make your achievements / social integration just basically exactly the same as Steam, so that it’s easier for us to integrate?”. Means game updates sometimes take longer to arrive, but hey.
Heroic launcher starts faster than Steam, so I’ll grab whatever’s free on Epic that week while waiting for it to load; but fuck giving Tim Sweeney any money obviously. Seems to have quite a variety of stuff, tho.
The problem with displacing a company with established network effects is that simply “just as good” isn’t enough - you need to be much better to start moving people over. And I’m not really clear what “much better than Steam” looks like. They have great Linux support, great workshop integration, regular sales, the forums are well-regulated, and so on.
You can’t compare alternative stores like GOG and Epic directly to Steam though, because of all the additional stuff Steam offers that GOG, Epic, and all those other indie stores can’t replicate.
That’s also why I don’t see those as competition to Steam, and more like enhancements. You can buy you DRM-free game on GOG and enjoy some of the benefits on Steam at the same time.
Thinking about it Epic might have the closest shot what with their whole Fortnite and UE stuff offering a lot of the backbone that Steam offers, but even they bungled it so hard they had to bribe devs for temporary exclusivity.
but also trying to replicate everything steam does is a giant undertaking
I don’t even use that many features of steam, so I don’t think replicating them all is required. Probably starting at the top few and prioritising by usage/request would be enough. Attracting devs and the up-front costs for not just dev but infra is probably the most prohibitive thing.
You might not use that many features, but you can’t know what other users and developers might need. For some, the built in multiplayer and voice system might be a make or break feature, and for others it might be remote play together.
With how many users, developers, and features there are, it’s not enough to start replicating a couple features and promising more later. When is the last time you bought into a promise and weren’t disappointed? If you want to be serious competition, you better give it your all.I can’t know, of course, but it is possible to start in one area to an MVP to a good chunk of people and add features by requested priority. Trying to do all of it all at once so feels like the wrong approach (with 20 years of software engineering and some project management experience)
I mean we are talking about trying to overthrow THE gaming giant. Smol MVP and expanding from there might be the right approach most of the time, but in this case you run the risk of becoming Epic 2, the store that took several years to add a shopping cart. And in that time where you’re expanding you’re in that awkward space where people would have to use both Steam and your system.
So I think it’s better to come out of the gate swinging. Obvs you should run lots and lots of internal tests, but as soon as you release to the public, you should be able to replace Steam for lots of people.
I could be wrong, but I rarely am :)
People don’t want their library split on multiple stores. There’s always going to be a monopoly because of that, unless we start having multiple exclusives on different platforms. For videogames it’s accentuated by the fact that people want to be able to interact with friends, so they need to be on the same platform. Steam came first and had the best features, so they won.
Music? Spotify is in front of everything else
TV/Movies? This is the exception, as in this case there’s a lot of content that can be available on a platform and not the other. Netflix is still first, but if you look at the numbers the gap is lower.
I used to buy everything on gog, now with the steam deck I went back to steam. Yeah I know, I can use gog there too, but using steam is easier for sync etc. So, you see, steam made something amazing, the steam deck, and everybody copied it, but they were still the first.
If gog made a steam deck client with easy management I’d gladly go back to them. They still take a 30% cut but I’m happy to support DRM free games. Itch is also nice but they don’t have a lot of games (I do play 99% Indies).
IMHO there are no good or realistic solutions:
- lots of exclusives
- interoperability between stores, like the fediverse (this would actually be really cool)
- everybody sell games directly
- everybody goes back to buy physical
People don’t want their library split on multiple stores. There’s always going to be a monopoly because of that,
Nah. We could introduce regulation mandating that libraries have to be interoperable.
Telephones used to only talk to other phones on the same network. Could you imagine only being able to call people on the Tmobile network?
The fediverse is so cool in how people from mastodon can interact with us on lemmy. Its how it should be everywhere.
They already could do it. They just do it in a very shitty way. What do you think EA launcher and Ubisoft game is doing on steam? They NEED their own launcher/store for the game to run when you purchase it FROM STEAM.
Going back to buying physical would put all the indies that can’t afford a publisher out of luck too (I know people like physical, but its important to note)
Netflix was doomed when content that was previously on the platform for removed from the platform.
This was never the case for dvds, but dvds weren’t as profitable…
GOG used to do GOG Connect where you could bring some games from steam to GOG. They did it in waves and it was available maybe a few times a year. I got at least 200 games on GOG that way and it got me to spend more with GOG. Wish they’d bring that back in some capacity.
maybe someone will REA steam and add that.
Libraries should host the people’s digital storefront. These companies can compete on UI.
Have they tried making a better product?
Or scratch that. Have they tried making a product that is as good?
oblig
I mean both true but yeah
Steam is to convenient. I’ve stopped with trying to get games for cheap anywhere else. Because it’s too simple to have them inside our steam library. Updates and Saves files are synced too with steam.
As long as they do what they have been doing, this deal will just go on. And they know it.
Let’s hope the plans after Gabe’s passing (if he is indeed a mortal human) is the same.
Amazing what is possible when you’re not beholden to shareholders that only give a shit about quarterly profits at the expense of everything else, including the entire business.
The government could pass a law (GASP!!!) requiring license agreements to be transferable. But capitalists aren’t actually interested in free markets, are they?
We are overdue for a digital bill of rights written by people that understand computers and the Internet aren’t magic.
i just dont see that happening. the venn overlap of the people who understand computers and who politic/wtite bills is too small
The freedom to buy competitors to shut them down and stifle innovation and competition. The freedom to grow exponentially and buy politicians. The freedom to literally get away with murder.
That’s the “free market” billionaires refer to, when they sarcastically use the term.
