alt Hacker NewsSometimes I wonder what we did to deserve Valve and how long it can possibly last.
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We let kids gamble so much money in games that they don't have to nickel and dime the adults.
It's just due to one person (GabeN) holding majority of the stock and choosing to run the company this way. Gabe will retire or die at some point and then anything might happen.
If your “we” is Australia, you could have implemented consumer protections then sued Valve for ignoring them: https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/valve-to-pay-3-million...
> what we did to deserve Valve
Privately held company
> how long it can possibly last
Till VC's or IPO day
Valve is what our culture deserves from all corporations. The fact that it seems like such an outlier is an indictment.
Except for their strong arm tactics forcing software companies to not be able to sell their games cheaper on other platforms:
Dropping half life is the biggest sin, and I will never forgive them.
I just wish they made more games than they currently do. Their games are always nicely polished and unique / creative in their own respect.
Privately owned company, GabeN is getting on a bit now, he does have a son mind, we'll see what happens later on.
Probably more CEOs should go diving regularly. Valve will stay good as long as Gabe is president. I fear it'll go down the drain once he leaves.
Valve will only be good if it stays privately owned. Good things go to shit as soon as investors become involved
Don’t mention the cs case gambling
Really?
I mean are we forgetting about kids gambling lootboxes in CS and Valve doing nothing to regulate it?
I mean yes compared to the rest of the gaming companies that are long way gone like Blizzard etc, Valve seems to be the better, but its not like they are saints...
It always amazes me how us as people forget the past (which is not even far away).
I felt the same about early 00s Google. It will probably not last forever.
I'm optimistic provided they continue to be privately held and don't parachute in a professional executive to be CEO after Gabe departs.
venture capital are the real enemies here. valve has stayed out of that game which is why they've managed to focus on delivering value to their users. as soon as venture capital gets involved, investors are now the customer and the customers are effectivly the product.
They're a private company. Not all private companies are good, but all public ones inevitably turn terrible.
A triumph of private ownership and stewardship over publicly traded corporate governance.
~30% commission on each game
i hope i’m wrong, but probably as long as gabe does.
son of gaben may live upto the legend, otherwise it ends with him
Still essentially Steam is a DRM system + another invasive program running on your pc, that absolutely doesnt need to, in addition to the game you want.
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I vote with my wallet, I avoid buying anything from Steam. Gog and Itch.io are where I go out of my way to spend my money.
Itch.io is amazing! All the coolest games are there + the developer experience is about a million times better than Steam, just sensible and utilitarian. Steam dev experience is a kafkaesque nightmare.
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Back in 2000 because of these features Steam was the epitome of digital evil. it's just that all other tech companies (google, apple, MS, sony, samsung, etc.) have become so supremely evil over time, whereas Valve has remained at its year 2000 level of evil and so now seems positively angelic compared to its peers.
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I will also note that Valve probably are one of the biggest heralds of the year of the Linux desktop just by doing tonnes of work making games run in it well and hassle free. The biggest barrier to entry for Linux had long been that games dont work, thats basically solved now. So they get a bonus point for that.. Steam is still filth I dont want or need on my system tho.
I know. Long live Gabe.
I was recently saying to a friend and fellow fan (after getting a Steam Deck, for work purposes obviously) that the stuff Valve does is absolutely how “f#%k you” money should be used.
Valve practically has a monopoly on PC gaming, I think they're pretty fat and happy too ;D
I think many more companies would operate like this if acquisition and mergers were much more difficult.
That's what you get when a company is not public and makes more money than the owner(s) can spend.
*Owner must be a decent human being
It's the other way around.
Valve is the company where we spend a lot of money and they deserve it.
The rest is companies that trick people into giving them money (battlepass! lootboxes!) and they don't deserve it.
People often forget that consumers as a whole are the ones holding the power, and the sad part is that rewarding a company with a good product with your money stopped being the business model and it's now the exception.