alt Hacker NewsIt'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.
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Valve uses battlepasses and lootboxes (i.e. gambling for minors) as much as the worst in the industry. They are far from a good corporation.
Gabe is just better at PR than the competition and gamers are irrationally tribal and will defend whatever they consider to be part of while ignoring all the bad parts.
GOG is pretty good too. I just wish they had better native Linux support.
VALVe are the original lootbox hawkers
Yes, true. Same thing with most software companies - they forget 100% of their value logs off at 5pm.
If you're a software CEO reading this, your company value doesn't come from your customers, clients or contracts. It's the people doing the work.
I'd like to have an honest conversation about this, but imo Valve is no better than the iOS app store: it aggressively rent seeks and has essentially destroyed the shareware model (which was the best way to discover software in the 80s-90s). It has also willingly been complicit in underage gambling via loot boxes for more than a decade now.
I think Gabe Newell is a visionary for building Steam in 2003, way before Jobs had the same idea, but absolutely everyone and their mother hated Steam back then. I remember the memes on IRC and various forums (and I've been on Steam for a very[1] long time, the first or second day it came out I think). Two decades later, props to them and their useful acolytes for gaslighting the entire gaming community. No idea how Gaben is regarded as some sort of Christlike figure these days, but here we are.
Maybe it's just a "lesser of two evils" thing, as companies/platforms like EA and Ubisoft are the absolute scum of the earth.
> The rest is companies that trick people into giving them money (battlepass! lootboxes!) and they don't deserve it.
It's really funny to read this given that Valve largely invented loot boxes!
I don't disagree with most of your statement, but Valve has and continues to make lots of money from loot boxes in both CS and TF2. Just want to point out that they do do stuff like that too.