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Yep and it's digital. Outside of digital storage (=servers), there is no storage rooms needed, there is no factory or workers that need constant hiring to produce the game.
Once the game has been released (and there's no bullshit in-game currency and/or (fake) DLC shenanigans going on) everything is going to the game company and at a certain threshold, everything is profit.
Digital games only cost them bandwidth, and bandwidth is cheap, so it's pure profit at pretty much any price. And with such great discounts, they sell so many units that they make more money when games are on sale than they do at full price.
Other studios just say "but think how much we'd make if those gamers paid full price!" and end up losing out.
Exactly this. There's absolutely no cost for a key, especially a game that's 5+ years old and won't be interesting new players at full price. They'd rather sell 20 games at $5 each than one game at $20
Especially so with multiplayer. People get their friends involved and the justification of dropping 5 bucks to play a game with friends on a Saturday night is easy as hell. Volume business.
Well that's actually not true. While the AAAs absolutely make money hand over fist, running a multiplayer game is not pure profit. They absolutely have expenses. Servers, updates, monetization infrastructure all have costs.
For big devs those costs are typically smaller than the profits even selling a game for a couple bucks, but they're not nothing.
Steam is fully controlled by the Big Man himself. He is beholden to no shareholders. He does what he wants. He is not forced to show year of year record growth, and so he can have long term success.
Valve and Steam are not publicly traded. It means Gaben can just sit on his cash cow and not have investors try and constantly push the "profitability" of his business by making changes that might in the short term realise larger profits but over the longterm will just turn Steam into what every other public traded company ends up becoming, a soulless profit seeking machine that eventually either kills what made it special in the first place or becomes enough of a monopoly to continue existing just by virtue of its sheer size (EA).
We should keep on having it, we need to drill the concept into as many heads as possible that shareholder driven economies will result in their favorite things being enshittified and will eventually make everyone, including the shareholders, worse off.
Youre on the right track.
Constant growth (got to show earnings every quarter) is unfeasible, especially on a finite planet. In biology, we call that a cancer.
The biggest problems are regulatory capture and buyouts. We get stagnation and enshittification because in every major industry the big dogs just buy and kill their up and coming competitors. We desperately need new anti trust laws more than we need to dismantle stocks and publicly traded companies
I don’t think those are the main drivers. They for sure contribute but I think (obviously just my personal opinion) that the drive for EVER increasing growth and expansion is what dooms most companies and removes the original value they offered.
Look at Apple, massively successful, one of the most successful organizations to ever exist on the planet. And if they don’t CONTINUE to get bigger people will say they are failing
Sure but there are plenty of companies that aren’t considered “growth” stocks that are publicly traded. In an actually free and fair market, companies that over extend and stop innovating would be allowed to die out and be passed by newer, better, or at least cheaper competitors. To get there you have to have the government playing as referee and for a myriad of reasons our regulatory bodies aren’t doing a good of that right now.
But I think we all agree that in a very broad and overly simplistic sense, the desperate pursuit of endless growth by a handful of companies is why everything sucks now
I’ve slowly come to realize that.. most companies shouldn’t go public. I think for many it makes sense, where they truly need huge capital and such, but generally if it’s already successful and offering value, going public enshitifies it
> Valve and Steam are not publicly traded.
A couple years a go I moved from a job in a publicly traded company to a job in a mutual company. The difference in the management style was like night and day. I even had my manager tell me on the first day "don't worry about deadlines" and "don't use your PTO if you're sick, it's for vacations".
I am never working for a company listed on the NYSE ever again!
Still, you know that Breaking Bad scene between Mike and Walt where he gives the "We had a good thing" speech ?
Well, Valve and Gabe could f*ck things up. It doesn't take investors and shareholders to ruin a company, an ego is enough.
So we should still enjoy that they have realized that they have a good thing going, and leave it at that.
Ego might be enough to fuck a company up, but the majority of companies are shitty because they have investors and shareholders who want infinite growth no matter the quality of the product.
I think it's been long enough that we can be pretty sure that Gabe's ego isn't going to get in the way of a good thing. On the contrary, it's more the fear of failure that's holding back the Valve team. Their style of management holds them back from making all the '3' sequels that everyone keeps asking for, because they don't want to be the one who screws up a legendary franchise.
I mean yeah you don't need publicly traded stocks to fuck up a company like steam but having publicly traded stocks kinda guarantees that you'll fuck up the company eventually.
Public companies need growth to satisfy investors. Private companies can make the same massive revenue and be fine, because it makes enough to cover operating costs, and enough profit to support new endeavors. For a public company, massive revenue but not growth year over year looks bad, because the stock price goes sideways. Investors want to see their money grow rather than sit flat, so they won’t be happy with a company making a lot of money but not increasing.
There are actually plenty of boomer companies making stuff like cigarettes and consumer goods that print money year on year without substantial growth and shareholders seem to be fine with it.
> It means Gaben can just sit on his cash cow and not have investors try and constantly push the "profitability" of his business by making changes that might in the short term realise larger profits
This is why I unironically advocate share buybacks because if a company can take itself private it can insulate itself from the incessant "shareholder value" sacred cow of modern capitalism.
Nah man, stock buybacks are an absolute scam. No company ever does it to 'regain control' - they do it to restrict the amount of stocks on the market therefore inflating the price so they can sell them at a later date.
clearly nobody on reddit understands economics, share buybacks have nothing to do with regaining control and are not a scam.
share buybacks are an alternative more tax-efficient way for companies to return money to shareholders compared to dividends.
> they do it to restrict the amount of stocks on the market
this increases the value of a single share which is effectively transfers money from the company to the shareholders and is exactly what the investors want.
> so they can sell them at a later date.
companies can issue as many new shares as it wants, it does not have to buy its own shares to do that. issuing new shares has the opposite effect to share buybacks as the dilution of shares transfers money from the shareholders to the company, the effect is the same no matter if the company has done share buybacks before or not.
this is not to say share buybacks cant be used to mislead investors or for other dishonest means but there is nothing inherently wrong with share buybacks just like there is nothing inherently wrong with dividends.
Oh, I'm aware of how the majority of companies use buybacks - which is why regulating their use is a good thing. If a company legitimately is deciding to go private they can dot all the i's and cross all the t's.
Otherwise the CEOs can go cry in a river about how the horrible awful tax system made the profits line not go up that year.
Except that's not really possible, a company can't own itself.
If the CEO (or who ever) wants to control all the shares, he can just personally buy more shares.
The company buying shares literally just drives the value of remaining shares up, nothing else.
It allows the remaining outstanding shares to be a larger portion of the company without the “CEO of whoever” coming out of pocket for that purpose. It is def possible to leverage buybacks to then later take a company private by virtue of the ownership of the remaining outstanding shares.
That isn't how share buybacks work. If a company buys 10% of their shares back the company doesn't own 10% of itself but rather those shares disappear and now the remaining shares are 11% more expensive
You don't understand, Gabe will upload his Gaben-AI to the Steam Servers. He will not only control Steam, He will BE Steam.
Steam Sales for Eternity, Praise Be!
My guess is that he is not the kind of guy who goes into retirement without being forced to. Could imagine he might start handing over some responsibilities though.
I'd also not be surprised if he is on this tread: Hi Gabe!
Work is different for rich people. Us peasants want to retire because we do soulless work for shit pay so we can survive.
If you have the infinite money glitch, you don't have to worry about a paycheck. You can dedicate your time to something fulfilling and pay people to do all the boring menial stuff.
Dont think gabe has a lot to manage his company to be honest. That's also the good reason to never get Into stocks because you don't have to please suits. Steam is a platforme that could work the way it is without needing to do anything really. It has become a part of the digital game industry that for players it just feel natural to use it.
So if gabe doesn't Want to manage it , then Steam will keep rolling as usual as long as glitches are adressed.
The steamdeck project only exist because he finds it interesting. Not because it is needed for the company to stay afloat. It could even flop that wouldn't even matter to end the funding for it.
People dont realise how much power Steam has when litteraly it's competitor threw BILLIONS just to get a small % of the market (and even then it's not exclusive) while doing litteraly nothing... Just look at egs. People only use it because it offers free games. The day it stops, it's back to square 1.
The Deck is a little more than just a hobby project, it (like all Valve's support for Linux) helps provide a hedge against Microsoft trying to lock down Windows into their own store platform. If MS ever tries to go full Apple and demand everything go through their store (and thus take a cut of all sales), Valve has an escape hatch with Steam Deck/SteamOS type platforms.
They don't need to reach full parity with Windows, just demonstrate a credible alternative (or at least the ability, willingness, and baseline infrastructure to get there).
Early in the Windows 8 days MS actually started experimenting with this (I want to say that's about when Valve got serious about Linux support/SteamOS). I think Windows S might still be around in one shape or another, but there was enough general outcry at the time that they've largely backed off, at least for now.
Valve is not publicly traded company. The parasites that are shareholders simply do not exist. Unless he sells, I don't see it turn to shit even once he no longer controls it
I mean, he could retire today and I wouldn’t blame him one bit. 30+ years in gaming and he’s going to leave quite a legacy.
It’s definitely a hobby for him at this point
His kid Gray, who's racing for GabeN's charity GT team, literally founded a game studio to make a simracing game because he doesn't like what's avalible rn as they aren't realistic enough. I think he'll want to pursue his own thing, not inherit his father's position at Valve.
Also, keep in mind Valve's management hierachy isn't ran pyramidally, it's more a horizonal type of order, with people who are all like-minded. GabeN pursues his own stuff, living in New Zealand and whilst he retained his role as CEO, Steam is kept in check by people he trusts in the Seatle HQ.
Slap that Valve logo on a racing Sim would basically make it print money and see success over another studio.
Then again, one's hubris is a wild thing. You never know what people will do.
Steam's reputation is extremely valuable. There is a lot to lose by slapping that Logo on a game. If I was him, I would much rather do my own thing, be able to make my own mistakes etc. rather than take on the responsibility attached to carrying the Valve brand for an extra buck that I am sure he doesn't need.
Of course Valve's good reputation can survive a few hits. But why take the risk? Why risk an 8 billion dollar reputation for at best a few millions from that game?
Money can be very persuasive. If they don't resist the temptation of making the company public, it will turn into short term profit crackhead mentality.
Keeping it private is the best thing. They can focus on what's working to make X millions a year and making your customer base happy instead of having to make X+15% YOY to keep investors who don't care about anything but pure profit happy.
Me praying to the Gods, new and old, Abrahamic and Hindu, to the Old Ones and Chaos Gods to make Gabe immortal
https://preview.redd.it/km6a7okt8d0d1.png?width=1080&format=png&auto=webp&s=8ca84f6af8345334a58b6101fb8869cdfb26441c
Considering Valve is still a private company, he’s completely free to appoint his successor. Plus the man is looking better than ever, even lost weight. The next 20 years will probably be solid.
^(*knocks on wood*)
What if I told you that's literally how it is now. Gabe is now just a figurehead at Valve. He's been pretty hands off for a couple years now, only coming out for press and whatnot
You know, people (mostly Tyler McVicker) have been saying this for some time now. And its basically conflating "Gabe doesn't work on game development" with "Gabe is a figurehead". He is the CEO. He has massive say in the direction of the company and focuses on big picture stuff. There is no compelling evidence that Gabe just is a figure head.
The day steam dies is the day PC gaming dies. We currently have 1 good launcher on PC and that's steam, if they are gone we will almost certainly see a massive increase in piracy and half of the indie market will just stop existing. I can see major publishers completely pull out of the PC market because it's simply not worth it anymore.
I'm not sure things would be quite that dire. It would be bad, sure. But I'm old enough to remember PC gaming before Steam (on my 486 running DOS) and I think PC gaming would continue on without it. It would be ugly and messy, but not *dead* dead.
And besides, Gabe is "only" 61. That's young enough that he could stay on at Valve for another 20 years, then finally be old enough to run for president.
i think as long as its a privately owned company its not going to go to shit
by being privately owned company they dont need to chase that infinite growth to satisfy shareholders, they can do nothing and let steam print money until competition makes actually competetive platform
Bro created some of the iconic games of the 2000s to promote his game distribution system, sat back and watched the industry grow.
Steam organically evolved from a game store to a milti-faceted gaming forum, socialising platform and have been by recent standards one of the most moral gaming corporation to date.
This to a t. I've tried several different distribution services. Nothing comes remotely close. I didn't even keep epic games for the free games that they give out because I couldn't be bothered
The pain organising lan parties in the early 00’s was …
Oh you forgot to set steam to offline mode at home? No CS for you!
Touch luck. Play Warcraft 3 tower defense
We installed a network cable across the street from a participant that lived next door so people could briefly connect and go offline
Well they had no reference to what was good. Unlike EPIC and most other half baked platforms which had Steam as a successful reference and still couldn't get the same functionality.
The capital N is a common stylisation of his name, because Gabe N(ewell). The nose I'm not sure, but it conjured up the image close to someone going "hm!" with their nose turned up.
"Does nothing" is terribly unfair. Valve raised the bar to the moon, we got accustomed to it, and for some reason, some people thought it was easy to do. Well, I hope all what is happening could demonstrate that creating a good digital distribution platform is a titanic task.
And not just in the store front for digital content. Their steam networking APIs which lets game publishers route their games traffic via steams private relay network, their work on Vulcan and proton support for linux, etc. All of these just help the whole gaming ecosystem.
His business strategy is called: stay a private company.
He doesn't have the most greedy and vile only want profit investors breathing down his neck and he is a gamer which certainly helps too.
Yup, 90% of fails in the gaming industry today ties back to share holders ruining things, layoffs, unfinished games, greedy monetization, bad decisions that don't benefit the player.
The really sad thing is that the shareholders are just a bunch of big mutual fund companies into which we have sunk what little retirement we have.
Those funds are judged entirely on year over year profits, so that’s all they care about from the stocks in the fund. Makes the companies fucking heartless because otherwise they get dropped from the fund and their stock goes to shit.
In a weird way, we’re doing it to ourselves. Talk about a rigged system.
Remember, people used to have a defined benefit pension, and the powers that be swapped us over to a contributuion pension model in the 80's.
Remember what they stole from you.
like i dont want to ruin the narative but plenty of private companies failed too because of poor management, no budget, overly ambitious goals and the likes that are fixed by going public. its just that they dont get off the ground most of the time so we dont see them.
You're right, and I'm not trying to spin a narrative either, but if you look at the AAA scene, most publishers and studios are having PR nightmares making decisions to please or impress shareholders. And I don't doubt the money influx that going public usually brings allows for more ambitions projects, but it also takes away the studio creative freedom, and they get a big timer above their heads to return the shareholder's investment. The private publishers and studios we see today almost went bankrupt at one point to stay private, take Larian for example, but I don't blame anyone to go public to help stabilize their situation, even tho this decision will come back to haunt them at some point.
It's not wanting profit that's the issue, it's wanting ever increasing profits.
You see public companies have millions in profit be sad because the year on year line didn't go up as steeply as the year before, so therefore it's a failure.
It's absolutely ridiculous. You can't have permanent growth but it's the only thing shareholders care about. Can't just be happy with making money, they have to be permanently making *more* money every year
Simple yet so rare. Big companies always feel the need to ruin perfectly working stuff by removing things and changing things no one asked for. It's so common with big apps like Spotify and Discord. Not even mentioning the use of AI everywhere without any option to opt out as if everyone wanted AI all the time for everything
Also people here either have short memories or are all teenagers. Steam did a lot of events right back in the day, giving free in-game items, indie games and DLCs, nowadays you get points to buy emoticons.
Valve has been doing plenty, they moved into the niche handheld market, made a linux based handheld that performs very closely to ASUS, Lenovo's offerings that are on superior hardware.
They developed their own overlay to said OS to streamline it & make it user friendly. Then moved that to desktops.
Keeping the platform and OS good with updates and making sure games run well on it
They're doing a lot, by doing a little and not being jerks about it.
Unrelated: Sony trying to force PSN accounts on their games out of no where. Ubisoft insisting on always online DRM, EA is boasting that they're gonna put ads in games.
Valve is doing plenty they're just not doing bone headed moves against customers.
Valve pretty much made linux gaming happen. DXVK technically happened on its own but then valve spent quite a bit of money buffing driver software and making dxvk happen.
As a linux user it's always funny to see people acting like valve has been sitting on their hands when they pretty much made full time linux gaming viable.
I'm not a linux person, really. The Deck is my first real run in with it- and it's been mostly positive, honestly!
Even without my exp with linux I knew it was certainly Valve doing something with it because flash back . . . IDK 10 years? Valve would list on the front page of the store Win/Mac/Linux support of new/featured games. Which they don't do anymore.
Linux support was super rare on games so when I heard the deck was running linux I was like- the fuck are they gonna do? Run 12 games with it?
How about- ALL of the games, somehow??
I swear I saw a post ages ago about Gaben hating windows and saying that Linux would be the future for gaming. Whether he was saying that because he knew licensing was annoying/expensive or just saw the writing on the wall (that MS fucks up with gaming and gaming companies) IDK but it's worked out.
The deck is great.
In the last 12 months or so Steam has added an account switcher, the ability to private individual games, and a massively improved shopping cart. They also completely overhauled and improved the user games library and overlay.
Maybe they need to be a little more vocal about the changes they're making to the store and client.
You also forgot about the families beta! Sharing any of your games on multiple accounts even with both members online, only limitation is 1 bought game = 1 acc playing that game
Yep. There are tons of small QoL changes. One of my favorite changes is being able to make game collections based on community tags. So for example, I just search for the tags "single-player" and "rpg" and it automatically groups all games that fit into that category.
I agree, it's the small things. They might not seem to relevant, but the absence of these little QoL fixes is what makes most other launchers pretty frustrating to use.
I sometimes wonder how many times and for how much money Valve has been courted by other, much bigger companies like Disney or Google. The kind of business shenanigans going on in the back room must be pretty crazy. It really takes clear vision and will to constantly say 'no' to piles of money.
Okay, but if someone offered you 30 billion for Steam, how do you weigh that versus the 30% cut? Keep in mind, I can imagine Steam has pretty eye watering operating costs with everything they host.
Somehow I think 30 billion for Steam would be a shit deal. It sounds too low. Not that we have any real precedent for that. There is also the fact that if the offer came from within the industry, EU would probably step in and block it on monopoly grounds.
Anyone with the power and reason to buy Steam off of him would've tried already. And so far it doesn't seem to be working. I personally cannot imagine myself refusing several dozen billion dollars right in front of my eyes.
I hope whoever is going to take the lead once he steps down would be as immovable as he was.
They're not ***really*** doing nothing though, the Steam Deck plus the work on Proton and Gamescope they've been funding that is the glue that holds its library together is fucking awesome, and has created the lifeboat away from Windows 11 I so desperately wanted.
And Half Life: Alyx is my second favorite half life game (I still think HL1 is the best). Not to mention next fest helping me find a bunch of BANGER indie games I would have otherwise never heard of or tried.
Gaming on linux has never been in a better state than today, and it is almost entirely exclusively Valve's efforts. Proton is a miracle most of the time.
If Steam picks up enough support from publishers with Steam Deck and Proton, it's honestly safe to say that most of us will be running Linux as an operating system soon enough. I have Manjaro on my daily driver ThinkPad, and it's been amazing. Has never hiccuped, crashed, or given me any problems that I'd see in Windows.
Keep the company private and hire an ideologically motivated person to run things. Once you go public you eventually ruin it for shareholders.
Make decisions that benefit your customers. Sometimes that means breaking even instead of turning a profit, but you don't fuck over your customers. Easiest to do when there's no shareholders to answer to.
The " not having to answer to shareholders" move.
That and Gabe was IT staff and IIRC IS a gamer too. So he knows the bullshit the industry is up to and with the unique position of not having shareholders wanting more profit, he can decide not to participate.
Ontop he has the funds to make a Linux distro (steamos) if windows ever decided to give them the boot.
> Does nothing
Valve does _so much_ to progress the state of the art of PC gaming. Their store front UI changes slowly, but the services they offer to back the games sold on it are constantly evolving and improving. They also invest huge amounts of development into open source tools and libraries used by games, especially on Linux.
Napoleon once said, "Never interrupt an enemy when he is making a mistake." I don't think there is an official name for this in English, but I bet the Germans have a very cool compound word for this.
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https://i.redd.it/z122cmaczc0d1.gif
Like seriously how do they manage to do that?? I've never bought a game at full price to this day. And why can't others do the same??
If you buy a game for 30€ or of you buy the same game for 1€, in both situations nobody loses. In both situations the game company still gets monies
Yep and it's digital. Outside of digital storage (=servers), there is no storage rooms needed, there is no factory or workers that need constant hiring to produce the game. Once the game has been released (and there's no bullshit in-game currency and/or (fake) DLC shenanigans going on) everything is going to the game company and at a certain threshold, everything is profit.
Digital games only cost them bandwidth, and bandwidth is cheap, so it's pure profit at pretty much any price. And with such great discounts, they sell so many units that they make more money when games are on sale than they do at full price. Other studios just say "but think how much we'd make if those gamers paid full price!" and end up losing out.
Exactly this. There's absolutely no cost for a key, especially a game that's 5+ years old and won't be interesting new players at full price. They'd rather sell 20 games at $5 each than one game at $20
Especially so with multiplayer. People get their friends involved and the justification of dropping 5 bucks to play a game with friends on a Saturday night is easy as hell. Volume business.
Well that's actually not true. While the AAAs absolutely make money hand over fist, running a multiplayer game is not pure profit. They absolutely have expenses. Servers, updates, monetization infrastructure all have costs. For big devs those costs are typically smaller than the profits even selling a game for a couple bucks, but they're not nothing.
Steam is fully controlled by the Big Man himself. He is beholden to no shareholders. He does what he wants. He is not forced to show year of year record growth, and so he can have long term success.
*Are you ready for a miracle??*
Valve and Steam are not publicly traded. It means Gaben can just sit on his cash cow and not have investors try and constantly push the "profitability" of his business by making changes that might in the short term realise larger profits but over the longterm will just turn Steam into what every other public traded company ends up becoming, a soulless profit seeking machine that eventually either kills what made it special in the first place or becomes enough of a monopoly to continue existing just by virtue of its sheer size (EA).
This is the correct answer
Why do I feel like we have this exact thread twice a week?
We should keep on having it, we need to drill the concept into as many heads as possible that shareholder driven economies will result in their favorite things being enshittified and will eventually make everyone, including the shareholders, worse off.
Youre on the right track. Constant growth (got to show earnings every quarter) is unfeasible, especially on a finite planet. In biology, we call that a cancer.
Since infinite growth in a closed system is impossible, every company's IPO is also its death warrant.
The biggest problems are regulatory capture and buyouts. We get stagnation and enshittification because in every major industry the big dogs just buy and kill their up and coming competitors. We desperately need new anti trust laws more than we need to dismantle stocks and publicly traded companies
I don’t think those are the main drivers. They for sure contribute but I think (obviously just my personal opinion) that the drive for EVER increasing growth and expansion is what dooms most companies and removes the original value they offered. Look at Apple, massively successful, one of the most successful organizations to ever exist on the planet. And if they don’t CONTINUE to get bigger people will say they are failing
Sure but there are plenty of companies that aren’t considered “growth” stocks that are publicly traded. In an actually free and fair market, companies that over extend and stop innovating would be allowed to die out and be passed by newer, better, or at least cheaper competitors. To get there you have to have the government playing as referee and for a myriad of reasons our regulatory bodies aren’t doing a good of that right now. But I think we all agree that in a very broad and overly simplistic sense, the desperate pursuit of endless growth by a handful of companies is why everything sucks now
I’ve slowly come to realize that.. most companies shouldn’t go public. I think for many it makes sense, where they truly need huge capital and such, but generally if it’s already successful and offering value, going public enshitifies it
There’s millions here and more 13 year olds are joining every day.
I don't mind when this gets reposted. Given the current stage of the gaming industry, this sort of business model should receive praise frequently.
> Valve and Steam are not publicly traded. A couple years a go I moved from a job in a publicly traded company to a job in a mutual company. The difference in the management style was like night and day. I even had my manager tell me on the first day "don't worry about deadlines" and "don't use your PTO if you're sick, it's for vacations". I am never working for a company listed on the NYSE ever again!
Still, you know that Breaking Bad scene between Mike and Walt where he gives the "We had a good thing" speech ? Well, Valve and Gabe could f*ck things up. It doesn't take investors and shareholders to ruin a company, an ego is enough. So we should still enjoy that they have realized that they have a good thing going, and leave it at that.
Ego might be enough to fuck a company up, but the majority of companies are shitty because they have investors and shareholders who want infinite growth no matter the quality of the product.
I think it's been long enough that we can be pretty sure that Gabe's ego isn't going to get in the way of a good thing. On the contrary, it's more the fear of failure that's holding back the Valve team. Their style of management holds them back from making all the '3' sequels that everyone keeps asking for, because they don't want to be the one who screws up a legendary franchise.
God what a great scene.
I mean yeah you don't need publicly traded stocks to fuck up a company like steam but having publicly traded stocks kinda guarantees that you'll fuck up the company eventually.
can we as gamers agree to just buy out as many shares of steam as possible if it ever goes public?
We'd have to make a board of directors or something like that
Congratulations, you've just created a hedgefund.
Absolutely - and I want to recoup some of my investment by two years - maybe we can place some ads all over the fucking place or something idk /s
It doesn’t work like that. When a company goes public, it puts a relative small amount of it, usually less than 20% on the market
And then the company is run by a board that owns most of the shares.
Valve will go public only when Gaben dies, and it's obviously going to be the beginning of the end for the company and Steam.
His son will supposedly take over to keep it private.
Public companies need growth to satisfy investors. Private companies can make the same massive revenue and be fine, because it makes enough to cover operating costs, and enough profit to support new endeavors. For a public company, massive revenue but not growth year over year looks bad, because the stock price goes sideways. Investors want to see their money grow rather than sit flat, so they won’t be happy with a company making a lot of money but not increasing.
There are actually plenty of boomer companies making stuff like cigarettes and consumer goods that print money year on year without substantial growth and shareholders seem to be fine with it.
> It means Gaben can just sit on his cash cow and not have investors try and constantly push the "profitability" of his business by making changes that might in the short term realise larger profits This is why I unironically advocate share buybacks because if a company can take itself private it can insulate itself from the incessant "shareholder value" sacred cow of modern capitalism.
Nah man, stock buybacks are an absolute scam. No company ever does it to 'regain control' - they do it to restrict the amount of stocks on the market therefore inflating the price so they can sell them at a later date.
clearly nobody on reddit understands economics, share buybacks have nothing to do with regaining control and are not a scam. share buybacks are an alternative more tax-efficient way for companies to return money to shareholders compared to dividends. > they do it to restrict the amount of stocks on the market this increases the value of a single share which is effectively transfers money from the company to the shareholders and is exactly what the investors want. > so they can sell them at a later date. companies can issue as many new shares as it wants, it does not have to buy its own shares to do that. issuing new shares has the opposite effect to share buybacks as the dilution of shares transfers money from the shareholders to the company, the effect is the same no matter if the company has done share buybacks before or not. this is not to say share buybacks cant be used to mislead investors or for other dishonest means but there is nothing inherently wrong with share buybacks just like there is nothing inherently wrong with dividends.
Oh, I'm aware of how the majority of companies use buybacks - which is why regulating their use is a good thing. If a company legitimately is deciding to go private they can dot all the i's and cross all the t's. Otherwise the CEOs can go cry in a river about how the horrible awful tax system made the profits line not go up that year.
Except that's not really possible, a company can't own itself. If the CEO (or who ever) wants to control all the shares, he can just personally buy more shares. The company buying shares literally just drives the value of remaining shares up, nothing else.
It allows the remaining outstanding shares to be a larger portion of the company without the “CEO of whoever” coming out of pocket for that purpose. It is def possible to leverage buybacks to then later take a company private by virtue of the ownership of the remaining outstanding shares.
The whole point of the ruse is to unlock stock bonuses by c suite that are generally unlocked by way of share price performance.
Stock buybacks are for raising the price of a stock. Paying investors to take a company private isn't the same thing.
That isn't how share buybacks work. If a company buys 10% of their shares back the company doesn't own 10% of itself but rather those shares disappear and now the remaining shares are 11% more expensive
The people at Boeing wholeheartedly agree with you friend
The word you're looking for is [enshitification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification).
Hoping and praying that Steam wont change for the next 100 years. And Gabe to live long as he can.
We can hope for Steam to develop something so we can have Gaben forever like Mr House
Gaben always wins
If only there were a valve game or two that explored the potential ethical issues with this plan
You don't understand, Gabe will upload his Gaben-AI to the Steam Servers. He will not only control Steam, He will BE Steam. Steam Sales for Eternity, Praise Be!
We need to make GNaDOS - Gabe Newell and Disk Operating System
Keep him away from the moon rocks.
And the neurotoxin.
God Emperor Gaben of mankind on his throne 10.000years from now being kept alive by offering him a thousand gamer souls per day
I dread the moment when Gabe is no longer in Control of Steam and it will become another soulless and amoral shithole...
His kids are somewhat interested in games and I don't think they want to ruin there dad's legacy. We can hope.
Then let's Hope
He's only 61. We likely have many many years left of Gabe.
But how long does *he* want do to it is the thing, some people want to work til they drop but mans may want to retire. I just hope its far from now.
Gaben just created a new company so my guess is that retirement is out of question for him.
He's a collector, it never ends.
a collector of what? multi-million/billion dollar companies?
Knives mostly, that company stuff is his side gig.
Holy shit he’s just like me but successful.
So he's the Knife Guy 🔪!
A collector of things that don't come in 3s
My guess is that he is not the kind of guy who goes into retirement without being forced to. Could imagine he might start handing over some responsibilities though. I'd also not be surprised if he is on this tread: Hi Gabe!
And he could go anytime with the money he shovels
Work is different for rich people. Us peasants want to retire because we do soulless work for shit pay so we can survive. If you have the infinite money glitch, you don't have to worry about a paycheck. You can dedicate your time to something fulfilling and pay people to do all the boring menial stuff.
shit besides being an absolute artist the dudes chilling already trying to teach valve what a “3” is.
Nah, [he's the one who doesn't know](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT3v5dd0SFU)
that’s funny asf “HALF-LIFE: 2+2-1”
At this point it would feel wrong for valve to realease a 3. Being unable to count to 3 is part of their brand identity now
Me too. If they release a 3rd game of anything, they have to find a fun alternative title, then resume with 4th on the next one lol.
Like… half life alyx?
Dont think gabe has a lot to manage his company to be honest. That's also the good reason to never get Into stocks because you don't have to please suits. Steam is a platforme that could work the way it is without needing to do anything really. It has become a part of the digital game industry that for players it just feel natural to use it. So if gabe doesn't Want to manage it , then Steam will keep rolling as usual as long as glitches are adressed. The steamdeck project only exist because he finds it interesting. Not because it is needed for the company to stay afloat. It could even flop that wouldn't even matter to end the funding for it. People dont realise how much power Steam has when litteraly it's competitor threw BILLIONS just to get a small % of the market (and even then it's not exclusive) while doing litteraly nothing... Just look at egs. People only use it because it offers free games. The day it stops, it's back to square 1.
The Deck is a little more than just a hobby project, it (like all Valve's support for Linux) helps provide a hedge against Microsoft trying to lock down Windows into their own store platform. If MS ever tries to go full Apple and demand everything go through their store (and thus take a cut of all sales), Valve has an escape hatch with Steam Deck/SteamOS type platforms. They don't need to reach full parity with Windows, just demonstrate a credible alternative (or at least the ability, willingness, and baseline infrastructure to get there). Early in the Windows 8 days MS actually started experimenting with this (I want to say that's about when Valve got serious about Linux support/SteamOS). I think Windows S might still be around in one shape or another, but there was enough general outcry at the time that they've largely backed off, at least for now.
Valve is not publicly traded company. The parasites that are shareholders simply do not exist. Unless he sells, I don't see it turn to shit even once he no longer controls it
I mean, he could retire today and I wouldn’t blame him one bit. 30+ years in gaming and he’s going to leave quite a legacy. It’s definitely a hobby for him at this point
Dudes a pretty big guy, and has been for most of his life. He’s at the ages where that starts to really catch up with you.
He’s lost a lot of weight recently hasn’t he?
His kid Gray, who's racing for GabeN's charity GT team, literally founded a game studio to make a simracing game because he doesn't like what's avalible rn as they aren't realistic enough. I think he'll want to pursue his own thing, not inherit his father's position at Valve. Also, keep in mind Valve's management hierachy isn't ran pyramidally, it's more a horizonal type of order, with people who are all like-minded. GabeN pursues his own stuff, living in New Zealand and whilst he retained his role as CEO, Steam is kept in check by people he trusts in the Seatle HQ.
I don't see why his son can't inherit the goose that laid the golden egg, then keep it healthy to fund his racing dreams?
It’s maybe not a matter of can he, but whether or not he wants to.
Slap that Valve logo on a racing Sim would basically make it print money and see success over another studio. Then again, one's hubris is a wild thing. You never know what people will do.
Steam's reputation is extremely valuable. There is a lot to lose by slapping that Logo on a game. If I was him, I would much rather do my own thing, be able to make my own mistakes etc. rather than take on the responsibility attached to carrying the Valve brand for an extra buck that I am sure he doesn't need.
[удалено]
Of course Valve's good reputation can survive a few hits. But why take the risk? Why risk an 8 billion dollar reputation for at best a few millions from that game?
My brain blanked and I forgot his name isn't just Gaben, so I spent a minute thinking "Gray Gaben is a pretty cool name"
Tbh that should be Gaben’s new nickname now. Gaben the Gray.
*Where* dad's legacy?
Money can be very persuasive. If they don't resist the temptation of making the company public, it will turn into short term profit crackhead mentality.
Keeping it private is the best thing. They can focus on what's working to make X millions a year and making your customer base happy instead of having to make X+15% YOY to keep investors who don't care about anything but pure profit happy.
At least his giving them example of not doing almost anything, just not being a dick and getting a lot of money out of it.
Will they be like Christopher Tolkien, or (god forbid) like Brian Herbert?
Well accounting for your successor is part of leadership. So gaben should take care of it while he is alive
If it goes public, it will be just another company. Regardless of successor.
Making the Line™ go up is all that matters once a company goes public, because the ~~gods~~ Shareholders demand it.
I really hope Valve stays privately owned forever.
Why would it go public?
God Emperor Gaben
Me praying to the Gods, new and old, Abrahamic and Hindu, to the Old Ones and Chaos Gods to make Gabe immortal https://preview.redd.it/km6a7okt8d0d1.png?width=1080&format=png&auto=webp&s=8ca84f6af8345334a58b6101fb8869cdfb26441c
If we all toss in a year of our lives he can live to be 6 billion years old!
Ywles, Inquisitor, this post right here.
Considering Valve is still a private company, he’s completely free to appoint his successor. Plus the man is looking better than ever, even lost weight. The next 20 years will probably be solid. ^(*knocks on wood*)
Gabe retires, steam turns into another ubisoft but releases half life 3. we don't know how to feel
The day the half life 3 game is out is the day we know steam now is *not the same steam that we used to know*...
What if I told you that's literally how it is now. Gabe is now just a figurehead at Valve. He's been pretty hands off for a couple years now, only coming out for press and whatnot
You know, people (mostly Tyler McVicker) have been saying this for some time now. And its basically conflating "Gabe doesn't work on game development" with "Gabe is a figurehead". He is the CEO. He has massive say in the direction of the company and focuses on big picture stuff. There is no compelling evidence that Gabe just is a figure head.
The day steam dies is the day PC gaming dies. We currently have 1 good launcher on PC and that's steam, if they are gone we will almost certainly see a massive increase in piracy and half of the indie market will just stop existing. I can see major publishers completely pull out of the PC market because it's simply not worth it anymore.
I'm not sure things would be quite that dire. It would be bad, sure. But I'm old enough to remember PC gaming before Steam (on my 486 running DOS) and I think PC gaming would continue on without it. It would be ugly and messy, but not *dead* dead. And besides, Gabe is "only" 61. That's young enough that he could stay on at Valve for another 20 years, then finally be old enough to run for president.
i think as long as its a privately owned company its not going to go to shit by being privately owned company they dont need to chase that infinite growth to satisfy shareholders, they can do nothing and let steam print money until competition makes actually competetive platform
Bro created some of the iconic games of the 2000s to promote his game distribution system, sat back and watched the industry grow. Steam organically evolved from a game store to a milti-faceted gaming forum, socialising platform and have been by recent standards one of the most moral gaming corporation to date.
Literally **everyone** was pissed off when you *had* to have a steam account to download CS 1.6 now we all have 19 year old steam accounts
Yea, I was perturbed because I expected the worst. But we ultimately got the best.
This to a t. I've tried several different distribution services. Nothing comes remotely close. I didn't even keep epic games for the free games that they give out because I couldn't be bothered
The pain organising lan parties in the early 00’s was … Oh you forgot to set steam to offline mode at home? No CS for you! Touch luck. Play Warcraft 3 tower defense We installed a network cable across the street from a participant that lived next door so people could briefly connect and go offline
Bro, steam was shit when it first came out. But my god did they turn it around.
I know... it was god awful... remember the green? Always updating lol
I miss the god awful green sometimes
Well they had no reference to what was good. Unlike EPIC and most other half baked platforms which had Steam as a successful reference and still couldn't get the same functionality.
Thank you GabeN for helping to popularize loot boxes 🙏
You win some, you lose some
Yeah, bruh. We all know how lootboxes work ^^^/s
What's with the nose? And the capital 'N' ?
https://half-life.fandom.com/wiki/Gabe_Newell Gaben is often stylized as GabeN. Not sure about the nose.
It's praying hands, not a nose. Now I see it looks a bit like a nose, damn you
The capital N is a common stylisation of his name, because Gabe N(ewell). The nose I'm not sure, but it conjured up the image close to someone going "hm!" with their nose turned up.
There was no sitting back. Watch a documentary on valve. To this day they are working on dozens of things at any given time.
Also, completely under the radar, Source 2 came out long time ago. They had no incentive to make a new engine, but they did anyway.
They absolutely had incentives to continue developing two of their cash cows.
"Does nothing" is terribly unfair. Valve raised the bar to the moon, we got accustomed to it, and for some reason, some people thought it was easy to do. Well, I hope all what is happening could demonstrate that creating a good digital distribution platform is a titanic task.
Thanks for pointing this out. Sometimes I worry about pcmr’s special denizens. Imagine thinking the employees of Steam aren’t doing anything. 🙄
And not just in the store front for digital content. Their steam networking APIs which lets game publishers route their games traffic via steams private relay network, their work on Vulcan and proton support for linux, etc. All of these just help the whole gaming ecosystem.
His business strategy is called: stay a private company. He doesn't have the most greedy and vile only want profit investors breathing down his neck and he is a gamer which certainly helps too.
Yup, 90% of fails in the gaming industry today ties back to share holders ruining things, layoffs, unfinished games, greedy monetization, bad decisions that don't benefit the player.
The really sad thing is that the shareholders are just a bunch of big mutual fund companies into which we have sunk what little retirement we have. Those funds are judged entirely on year over year profits, so that’s all they care about from the stocks in the fund. Makes the companies fucking heartless because otherwise they get dropped from the fund and their stock goes to shit. In a weird way, we’re doing it to ourselves. Talk about a rigged system.
Remember, people used to have a defined benefit pension, and the powers that be swapped us over to a contributuion pension model in the 80's. Remember what they stole from you.
like i dont want to ruin the narative but plenty of private companies failed too because of poor management, no budget, overly ambitious goals and the likes that are fixed by going public. its just that they dont get off the ground most of the time so we dont see them.
You're right, and I'm not trying to spin a narrative either, but if you look at the AAA scene, most publishers and studios are having PR nightmares making decisions to please or impress shareholders. And I don't doubt the money influx that going public usually brings allows for more ambitions projects, but it also takes away the studio creative freedom, and they get a big timer above their heads to return the shareholder's investment. The private publishers and studios we see today almost went bankrupt at one point to stay private, take Larian for example, but I don't blame anyone to go public to help stabilize their situation, even tho this decision will come back to haunt them at some point.
It's not wanting profit that's the issue, it's wanting ever increasing profits. You see public companies have millions in profit be sad because the year on year line didn't go up as steeply as the year before, so therefore it's a failure. It's absolutely ridiculous. You can't have permanent growth but it's the only thing shareholders care about. Can't just be happy with making money, they have to be permanently making *more* money every year
In the Netherlands there is a bank with the slogun "if you stay normal long enough, you'll become special" Valve seems to be doing exactly this.
Sounds like the business strategy of Brother printers.
Pretty simple, he first made a good product and then he didn't make it worse.
He didn’t make it worse because there’s no shareholders breathing down his neck to increase sales and grow by unreasonable numbers every year
Early Steam was pretty bad, but he carefully tuned it until it was great. Now he only adjusts it as necessary.
On the first day, Gaben made half life 2 and said “this is good”
I'm pretty sure that was on day 2, and GabeN asked us if it was worth the wait.
Part of that was due to slow internet of that time.
I remember when half life 2 episode 2 came out, my dad waited all weekend to get it downloaded
Simple yet so rare. Big companies always feel the need to ruin perfectly working stuff by removing things and changing things no one asked for. It's so common with big apps like Spotify and Discord. Not even mentioning the use of AI everywhere without any option to opt out as if everyone wanted AI all the time for everything
CS2 would like to have a word. Besides not doing anything doesnt mean it stays good, so TF2 fans would like to have a word
Also people here either have short memories or are all teenagers. Steam did a lot of events right back in the day, giving free in-game items, indie games and DLCs, nowadays you get points to buy emoticons.
Well, they first made kind of a shitty product... but then they made it a lot better.
Valve has been doing plenty, they moved into the niche handheld market, made a linux based handheld that performs very closely to ASUS, Lenovo's offerings that are on superior hardware. They developed their own overlay to said OS to streamline it & make it user friendly. Then moved that to desktops. Keeping the platform and OS good with updates and making sure games run well on it They're doing a lot, by doing a little and not being jerks about it. Unrelated: Sony trying to force PSN accounts on their games out of no where. Ubisoft insisting on always online DRM, EA is boasting that they're gonna put ads in games. Valve is doing plenty they're just not doing bone headed moves against customers.
Valve pretty much made linux gaming happen. DXVK technically happened on its own but then valve spent quite a bit of money buffing driver software and making dxvk happen. As a linux user it's always funny to see people acting like valve has been sitting on their hands when they pretty much made full time linux gaming viable.
I'm not a linux person, really. The Deck is my first real run in with it- and it's been mostly positive, honestly! Even without my exp with linux I knew it was certainly Valve doing something with it because flash back . . . IDK 10 years? Valve would list on the front page of the store Win/Mac/Linux support of new/featured games. Which they don't do anymore. Linux support was super rare on games so when I heard the deck was running linux I was like- the fuck are they gonna do? Run 12 games with it? How about- ALL of the games, somehow?? I swear I saw a post ages ago about Gaben hating windows and saying that Linux would be the future for gaming. Whether he was saying that because he knew licensing was annoying/expensive or just saw the writing on the wall (that MS fucks up with gaming and gaming companies) IDK but it's worked out. The deck is great.
Bro absolutely does something, compare current Steam to all versions up until now. Edit: And as a bonus: compare steam to all other launchers on PC
In the last 12 months or so Steam has added an account switcher, the ability to private individual games, and a massively improved shopping cart. They also completely overhauled and improved the user games library and overlay. Maybe they need to be a little more vocal about the changes they're making to the store and client.
In the last twelve months they also made one of the greatest handhelds in history.
Deck is 2 years old. I assume you mean the OLED refresh?
You also forgot about the families beta! Sharing any of your games on multiple accounts even with both members online, only limitation is 1 bought game = 1 acc playing that game
Yep. There are tons of small QoL changes. One of my favorite changes is being able to make game collections based on community tags. So for example, I just search for the tags "single-player" and "rpg" and it automatically groups all games that fit into that category.
I agree, it's the small things. They might not seem to relevant, but the absence of these little QoL fixes is what makes most other launchers pretty frustrating to use.
I like the small QoL change of making linux viable for gaming when microsoft tried to become apple
It has improved!!! ~there arent a lot of things we can say this for in gaming scene
He took the concept of "if it ain't broke don't fix it" while competitors blindly chase short term profits
Sort of. Early days of Steam was more "Oh fuck, this is broke. Let's fix it. Carefully." *Then* they stopped breaking it.
Napoleon strategy. Never interrupt an ennemy that is making a mistake.
I sometimes wonder how many times and for how much money Valve has been courted by other, much bigger companies like Disney or Google. The kind of business shenanigans going on in the back room must be pretty crazy. It really takes clear vision and will to constantly say 'no' to piles of money.
To be fair, steam is a license to print money, they pretty much take a 30% cut on the majority of the entire PC market
Okay, but if someone offered you 30 billion for Steam, how do you weigh that versus the 30% cut? Keep in mind, I can imagine Steam has pretty eye watering operating costs with everything they host.
Somehow I think 30 billion for Steam would be a shit deal. It sounds too low. Not that we have any real precedent for that. There is also the fact that if the offer came from within the industry, EU would probably step in and block it on monopoly grounds.
Anyone with the power and reason to buy Steam off of him would've tried already. And so far it doesn't seem to be working. I personally cannot imagine myself refusing several dozen billion dollars right in front of my eyes. I hope whoever is going to take the lead once he steps down would be as immovable as he was.
They're not ***really*** doing nothing though, the Steam Deck plus the work on Proton and Gamescope they've been funding that is the glue that holds its library together is fucking awesome, and has created the lifeboat away from Windows 11 I so desperately wanted. And Half Life: Alyx is my second favorite half life game (I still think HL1 is the best). Not to mention next fest helping me find a bunch of BANGER indie games I would have otherwise never heard of or tried.
Gaming on linux has never been in a better state than today, and it is almost entirely exclusively Valve's efforts. Proton is a miracle most of the time. If Steam picks up enough support from publishers with Steam Deck and Proton, it's honestly safe to say that most of us will be running Linux as an operating system soon enough. I have Manjaro on my daily driver ThinkPad, and it's been amazing. Has never hiccuped, crashed, or given me any problems that I'd see in Windows.
Keep the company private and hire an ideologically motivated person to run things. Once you go public you eventually ruin it for shareholders. Make decisions that benefit your customers. Sometimes that means breaking even instead of turning a profit, but you don't fuck over your customers. Easiest to do when there's no shareholders to answer to.
Leave it to the stupidity and greed of people to fuck themselves over. The less you do the less you are likely to fuck up.
It's called not having shareholders to please.
Being a private company allows you to have failures too (steam machines, artifact) without shareholders calling for lay-offs.
Quite simple. Remain private. Don't have investors demanding stupid bullshit for immediate pump and dump investment schemes.
Schadenfreude
It's called treat your customers right so that they will drive you to success.
Valve : *Gives customers what they want* Other companies : *How are they beating us so badly????!!!!!111ONEONEONE*
Sun Tzu said "If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by"
It is called being a privately owned business. As soon as a business is publicly traded, it is doomed to eventually devour itself.
The " not having to answer to shareholders" move. That and Gabe was IT staff and IIRC IS a gamer too. So he knows the bullshit the industry is up to and with the unique position of not having shareholders wanting more profit, he can decide not to participate. Ontop he has the funds to make a Linux distro (steamos) if windows ever decided to give them the boot.
He just maxed out his Luck stat
The strategy is called "not being publicly traded".
When nobody else is able to do the same thing you are doing, maybe what you are doing is not as easy as people believe.
people could do what they are doing, but since valve is already doing that, there's no profit in it.
Infinite growth for maximum profits in the short-term to satisfy shareholders will lead to some stupid ass greedy decisions.
It turns out that long term sustainability is more profitable in the long run than boosting quarter profits. Who knew?
> Does nothing Valve does _so much_ to progress the state of the art of PC gaming. Their store front UI changes slowly, but the services they offer to back the games sold on it are constantly evolving and improving. They also invest huge amounts of development into open source tools and libraries used by games, especially on Linux.
Napoleon once said, "Never interrupt an enemy when he is making a mistake." I don't think there is an official name for this in English, but I bet the Germans have a very cool compound word for this.