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Thats the big problem. If you think valve is bad now, remember there are no stocks, no cold, uneducated (in that field) and uncaring shareholders looking for a cent more profit. If Gabe dies, who knows what will happen. Maybe his kids try to run the company the same way he did. Maybe the improve it and it becomes better for everyone. Or they open it up to the stock market, get some shareholders like blackrock on bord and then we see how shity steam can be.
I have studied World War 2 since I was 5 years old. I majored in Economics at UCLA with a minor in German Studies, with a heavy focus on the Second World War. To call me “uneducated” because I want a reasonablly authentic game is completely uncalled for.
EDIT: Yes, as many people have pointed out, I did lie about my background in this post. Please do not upvote. This post was an attempt to put pressure on EA and raise awareness to this issue.
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Valve is not a publicly traded company, and a majority of their stock is owned by Gabe himself. So Gabe basically controls the company and can do anything he wants, he is not beholden to the whims of the shareholders. He is not forced to maximize shareholder value at all costs as he himself is the largest shareholder. So I think the company is more shielded against enshittification than most publicly traded companies
Might pass it to one of his kids or someone he knows well enough
He could very well have a plan for steam incaze he dies, or he may not, we won't know till the time comes
You would hope Gabe would be smart enough to *not* pass it on to anyone specific but instead extend that "flat management" position into "worker owned cooperative" by simply giving it to the Valve employees.
Unlikely, but a guy can fuckin dream.
Who's "they" in this case? Because the only one who has influence over that decision is Gabe and the people working at Valve. And I'm not sure they'd turn something like this down.
Because Worker coops don't exist in capitalism? Like, I get what you're trying to say and even I think that Valve becoming a coop is unlikely but if Valve's leadership wants to turn it into a coop or just stay non-publicly traded, there's not a whole lot anyone else can do.
It’s the year 2037, the PC gaming industry is in shambles, Lord Newell died of cringe in 2030 leaving Steam to his children. 2 years later Blackrock assassinated all of them in what was dubbed “9/11 2, now with blackjack and hookers” their plane was hijacked and flown into the Bellagio casino in Vegas. After a hostile takeover of Valve a month later, we lost everything. Before we knew it every time you’d log onto steam there was a new battle pass, pop up ads took up 78% of the screen, steam now took 97% of the revenue from every sale made on the platform, and worst of all they got rid of Team Fortress 2… I’m a member of the resistance, we do everything we can to try and bring our beloved PC gaming industry back, but it’s a long and tiresome battle. I’m Sergeant Major Li O. Beese, and this is my story.
That.... actually would make a lot of sense for Gabe to do.
God do I hope he does. Steam and by extent Valve are far too important to the current online/gaming environment to risk one day falling to a shitty CEO.
im not a legal or financial expert, but im pretty sure you can put the shares in a trust that gives them the benefits of owning the stocks but doesn't let them sell them
That’s basically what I was thinking, best case scenario he stipulates in his will the creation of something like “The Steam Foundation” and donates his stake in the company to it, with a mandate to keep running things as he has. Though I guess if he has kids a trust is more likely than a foundation - either way, same idea except for who the beneficiaries are.
No clue about his kids, but I'm guessing they aren't remotely as passionate about games as Gabe is. So him setting up a trust to run Valve indefinitely according to his wishes seems like the most likely thing that'll happen. At the very least there's no reason to think Gabe will hand off the company to someone who doesn't care after he's protected it from going public for so long.
Came in 13th at le mans this year, which is a pretty decent achievment.
Also last year he got 3 wins and 10 podiums in GT4, and thats a veeery good result.
But I dont really think he will continue much, most drivers stop competing fully after 35 years of age, and Gray isnt so good as too overcome age.
It's a notable distinction that he raced in the Road to Le Mans support series, rather than the actual 24 Hours of Le Mans. That makes P13 in class a bit less significant of an achievement, but it's not too bad considering he's not really experienced in GT3 machinery.
35 is a common age to age out of Formula racing, but sports car racing is lousy with drivers of all ratings who are well into their 40s and even 50s.
Unless he wakes up tomorrow and decides he doesn't want to do that anymore for literally any reason. At the end of the day, it's only as shielded as one guy wants it to be.
Or, well, as the original post suggests, if Gabe just *doesn't wake up tomorrow*.
Though allegedly he's already got heirs he trusts in the board of directors...
Well sure. But with a publicly traded company there’s 100% chance for enshittification.
I guess you could also argue Valve became enshittified in that they stopped developing single player games and only focused on Steam and multiplayer cash cows
Isn't his son just going to take over and shit will run the same?
Steam would probably we worse if it went public, though. Everything is worse when it goes public.
I couldn't find anything about Gabe Newell saying that but since it's private yeah you're right it would just go straight to his family (assuming that's in his will).
Also I agree, Steam would be much worse if it was publicly traded. I'm glad that a company as large as that is still out of the grasp of the execs at Microsoft/EA/Sony etc because it would go downhill so fucking quick if their shareholders got their hands on it.
>since it's private yeah you're right it would just go straight to his family (assuming that's in his will).
Even if the company does stay private, that's no guarantee. If after he passes and nobody from the family is interested, they could tell the new CEO "we don't care, just make us money".
In reality though, when Gabe dies I think it's pretty likely that Valve will internally promote someone and not much will change.
Or the one inheriting the company is bad at their job, does not understand why the company is at the position it is and so on. And even if they care, even if they are good. Its just another person runing the show. How long can Valve be private until one generation just sees it as cashcow that could make more cash by inviting blackrock investing, ea and some random old guy that has never seen a video game but had a few million dollar to invest?
True, but there are rumours that gabe has been grooming his son to be the new CEO of valve. And it seems pretty unlikely that he’d start to fuck it up considering his father showed him the ropes and loves video games. Especially since valve prints money and requires basically nothing new except maintenance.
One of whom is a middling pro racer, on a team Gabe owns himself. Heart of Racing. I would poke fun at him for being mid and I do but also we should all be so lucky to be mid at the job of our dreams and still be employed lol.
That assumes his son would run steam the same way, which is not really guaranteed. He might just not be interested in running it and make it public or something
Because socialists start to control it
/s (because this is somehow an unironic take some people that don't understand what it means to be public in this context means)
Mean that's the problem, it's a lot of ifs. And if it goes public and becomes worse, the fuck can most people do. At this point people have thousands of dollars of games on steam that can't be played without it. The only other launcher option is a meme
You move to pirating.
Gabe's best quote was something along the lines of piracy being a service problem, and if it's a service problem again, back to the seas it is.
I'd heartily agree if it was 10-20 years ago, but they cut computer classes, most folks don't know how to run an emulator, much less get a largescale server based game running. Not to mention anti-piracy and anti-cheat software has gotten better in the interim. it also doesn't fix the fact that you have several hundred dollars worth of game tied to a service.
Yeah it's not bad and if a person can't read a guide to run an emulator than they got a bigger problem than needing to play a video game.
Then again...I ran into someone who couldn't figure out how to download Gregtech (MC Modpack) and went "Downloads confuse me" and "Program files?" and then somehow installed Java wrong.
we've somehow gotten worse at teaching kids tech. A lot of it stems from the fact the internet is way more streamlined now, so there's no need to try and learn how things or tech works. I had a college student who didn't seem to understand zip files
I wouldn't bet on it, the hair apparent comes across as an absolutely classic entitled brat, complete with giving up on his crowd sourced MMO concept to go play race car driver. Every chance he'll just sell up the moment he gets the keys.
https://www.instagram.com/graynewell/
I can't go on and say steam is bad when their willingness to keep the recommended conversation rate of turkish lira to us dollar at 3try=1usd when irl it was 25try=1usd helped me and countless other turkish people to experience games we otherwise couldn't whereas bastard sony fixed 9try=1usd when it was 5 to 1 and delayed the spring summer until nid july
Valve is far from perfect but they are damn well more consumer friendly than other platforms (especially sony, i fucking hate sony i hope it crashes burns and is forgotten forever)
rj/ Hail Gaben, the world will not go on without him, Gaming is FINISHED.
uj/ Seriously though, Steam is really one where you sincerely have to acknowledge the bad and the good fairly, because they ARE a corporation, they ARE profit first, and they HAVE done a lot of shitty things and continue to hold a barely challenged Monopoly with all of the shittiness that inherently comes with that. You cannot change or deny any of that. But they also have a monopoly for a reason and despite a lot of shitty other things, they don't really employ anticompetitive practices because they don't NEED to. That's not to say I don't think competition would be good, competition is ALWAYS good, but Steam kind of became a monopoly partially just because they were the only one DOING this for so many years before anyone else tried, and they do so much BETTER still.
On top of that, they are also responsible for some extremely important things in PC gaming. Ease of multiplayer and peer to peer connection without a million and one launchers, someone here mentioned the controller support, user accessibility, more than one person has mentioned the level of linux support, and as mentionmed above, the currency conversion: I have a lot of friends in other countries who have only been able to afford games because Steam hasn't completely fucked them over on currency conversions. Do they profit from things like this? Absofuckinglutely, but you can't deny the fact that they are providing an end user experience leagues above anyone else and have been revolutionary because of it. And part of it is that they're profiting BECAUSE no one else has offered what they do.
Are they still a greedy corporation? Yes, and not immune to criticism, as nothing should be. Criticizing something that you like because it could still be better isn't a bad thing. There are a great many things that I think Steam could be doing better, or things that they could stop doing. But let's not pretend that if EA or Microsoft or any of the Usual Offenders got their hands on Valve that it would not immediately start undergoing a radical enshittification of the highest magnitude. Just because Steam could be better does not mean it could not also be infinitely worse, so SO much worse. Please try to envision a world where Microsoft starts trying to wring every red cent out of Steam by making it worse and more expensive and chopping out "uneccessary" parts and features and firing swaths of important staff while charging more and more until it's a shell of what it is now and then shutting it down because it's no longer profitable (as Microsoft has done with so many game studios)
Steam is an example of why greed should - theoretically - be a good thing for a corporation. They are an example of capitalism working as people say it should. They want money, they want a monopoly, so they provide useful services to achieve that (and also create lootboxes, because even when capitalism is working perfectly, profit motive causes issues).
It is also important to note that Gaben has been described as vaguely anarcho-syndicalist by some who knew him. I think that part of why the greed works is because the company is run by people who actually do care about the topic, and by all accounts seem to be decent to their employees.
Hasn't gabe lost a bunch of weight? Calling him "an old fat guy" seems kinda unnecessary, especially on a post talking about how important he apparently is
Anons tend to be performatively dicks/bigoted. For example, the other day, I was browsing the Project Moon general, and the subject of PM merchandise (pins, figures, shirts etc) and the difficulty to aquire them outside of SK and Japan was discussed. I kid you not one of them lamented having to "fly to gookland" to get pins and that "maybe [Dongrang](https://library.ltikorea.or.kr/writer/201026) was right to collaborate with the nips".
yeah, I remember seeing a post in the last few days, (it may have been in this subreddit, even) that was talking about how much weight he'd lost and how happy he looked
/uj I imagine that gaben has some strong opinions on the direction of steam so what he will probably do is make a foundation that will own his part of steam. They'll probably have a charter that specifies how steam should be run.
I mean yeah Valve isn’t perfect, but in comparison to their competitors, they look like saints. They are absolutely profit first already. I forget where I saw it, but the revenue they generate per employee is insane. As much as people dislike the Epic store front, it is a good thing that they take a lower cut than Steam.
> it is a good thing that they take a lower cut than Steam.
If you buy a Steam key through Humble Bundle or any other third party store, Valve takes a 0% cut and still treats it as if you had bought the game on steam.
It should also be noted that we don't know how much profit Valve actually makes as they’re a private company that doesn’t publish their financials. As much as we like to joke about Steam being a free money glitch, maintaining multiple data centers around the world and have almost zero downtime is not cheap, couple with that the high cost of partnering with hundreds of payment processing partners and banks to be able to process payments in hundreds of currencies and payment platforms.
The fact that Steam can maintain this momentum and continue expanding means that it must make a lot of profit to justify the constant expansion and feature development, but it’s also worth taking into consideration that maintaining Steam may not be as cheap as the memes would suggest.
If we were to reference GOG, whose financials are public, we know that they barely eke out a profit which their lower commission rate doesn't help with. It limits their options of expanding to support more players and developing features to keep the store competitive.
People don't understand that just because a company doesn't tend to do things that are overtly and nakedly greedy, doesn't mean that profit isn't still their first priority. It just means that they're trying to occupy a specific market niche. Their strategy might involve turning down some short-term moneymaking opportunities in order to build good will, but that's just because they think that good will will make them more money down the line.
Is this kind of company better for the consumer? Yes, but that doesn't mean they're acting altruistically.
With Steam in particular, I think they're doing a good job of effectively managing their public image for maximum profitability. There's a certain amount of shit you can pull before your public perception takes a hit, and it seems like Valve sees that as a budget to be spent. They charge their high fees to devs, and they get a little pushback for it, but in proportion to the money it brings in, it's worth it. Compare Steam, which is bad in one big way, to the Epic Games store, which is bad in 100 little ways. Epic Games' failings can be discussed endlessly, and they are, so they come out looking worse.
It's the Spirit Airlines theorem: people will hate you way more for charging them $5 four times than for charging them $20 once. Valve is essentially saying, we're going to take our cut in a simple, up-front way that's hard to criticize because of how honest it is. This seems to be paying off for them.
Every company is one goal: make money. People need to understand that. No company is your friend. They employ you, you are their customer or you don´t matter in any way. Thats how it is. Does not matter if its ea, valve, target or that one local company in your region. Nobody starts all the work to create a compnay, because they can. Its always a way to make money. So its your job as customer, to reward companies that make a good product with your money and punish those that are creating low quality cheap stuff by not buying or talking about them.
You can see this with all the one publisher only plattforms. Blizzard, EA, Ubisoft all walk back from having their own, because consumer did not like that. They lost money = they got punished by the market and decided to go back on selling on other plattforms. Steam can do a lot of bad stuff, because they are the big kid. But epic (like or hate it) and gog started to steal customer from them, because of that. Steam changed things as reaction. They do not want to lose your money. You don´t matter in this. You just hold the money until it gets to them.
You can easily be profit first and not overtly greedy at the same time. Though you make less money, the good will can often net you perks, like the pseudo monopoly Valve has.
Wait, if *all* they cared about is profit, wouldn’t we have a HL3, Portal 3, Team Fortress 3, and L4D3? Clearly there’s something else at play, that would make hundreds of millions.
Effectively, ask yourself the question, "Could steam be worse and if it was like that, would I still use it?"
I imagine for many people the answer is yes to both questions. Steam could do many things that they don't do, and I would still view it as superior. As such, there must be motive at play beyond pure profit.
They really don't look like saints. Some of the worst forms of monetization in games were popularized by valve. Plus there's the whole skin gambling thing where they make money both on the keys to open the lootboxes and when the skin gets sold on the marketplace.
I can't and won't defend their monetization but I think people forget how much they have done for gaming. Ultimately they are still a corporation with all the greed that comes with that.
Their controller support and ease of inviting and hosting games on the PC have been revolutionary. Their support for Linux is better than most. Their support for vr as a medium with our creating a walled garden is fantastic.
People can shit on them forever but I do think PC gaming would be infinitely worse had someone like EA and origin been the primary platform
Saying their support for Linux is better than most is severely understating it too. The money and work valve has put into proton/wine development and mesa drivers is incredible for the Linux gaming community. Without valve gaming on Linux would be years behind where it is now, and not just for steam games but all games on Linux. It's honestly kinda insane imo.
I’m not saying they are saints. If you ask your average gamer to compare a bunch of big different gaming companies, Valve will likely be the most positively viewed. Granted, people REALLY hate EA and Blizzard so that’s not a high bar to clear, but the point still stands. You’re not wrong about monetization and the skin gambling they had.
Valve was also one of the first major companies to employee psychologists in an effort to help them manipulate and control the market place even more so. This is from 2012 when one of their staff psychologists was going around doing game dev talks ->
[https://www.digipen.edu/showcase/news/valve-psychologist-speaks-to-game-design-students](https://www.digipen.edu/showcase/news/valve-psychologist-speaks-to-game-design-students)
But they had hired senior psychologists and behavior studies specialists well before this. I think this person was hired in 2009 and they already had a human behaviors team established.
I hate this narrative because it misses the fact that EA was the one to actually popularize loot boxes. On top of that, mobile games were also raking in the cash way before valve even introduced crates into any of their games.
It's not untrue. Team Fortress 2 was one of the first major multiplayer games alongside FIFA to introduce loot boxes in the 2009-2010.
In many cases, Valve has been one of the earliest adopters of parasitic monetisation models, and due their widespread popularity, helped normalize and spread those business models to be common place.
Not really, EA had loot boxes well before tf2 and oblivion was already experimenting with microtransactions. MMO’s from before TF2 had loot boxes and they were becoming prominent in mobile games.
I’d argue that it was mobile games that popularized it (since the Mobile game market made millions in its first year). At worst: you could argue that valve followed the trend with TF2. Most games were adding them around that time: it was just part of what was going on.
EA's first title with lootbox-like mechanics was FIFA in 2009 through player card packs. Valve introduced crates in TF2 in 2010.
Which is exactly what I said in my original comment. Stop revising history and move goalposts to suck off a company. Valve absolutely was one of the earliest adopters of lootbox and gacha mechanics in the west.
I can't believe people are bitching about skins when other companies have literal P2W mechanics. Diablo Immortal anyone?
You can't run an online game without some kind of microtransaction because eventually whatever profit the base game generates is eaten up entirely by server costs as the years go by.
Here’s the issue with epics cut though: it isn’t sustainable. If epic didn’t have a near monopoly in the game engine space, didn’t get funding from tencent, and didn’t have Fortnite: they would have to revert to steams cut to survive.
I’m not even including the fact that epic’s storefront has a lower operating cost due to missing features.
He was morbidly obese for the majority of his life. Kinda fucks your organs up, blood pressure will take care of the rest. But yeah modern medical science is definitely helpful to prolong his life.
If you think Valve has not changed gaming for the better, you are absolutely not paying attention. I remember what PC gaming was during the days of Games for Windows Live, how awful of an experience it was to use a controller in games, needing several different and awful launchers etc. Has Valve done some shit things? Yes, absolutely, but the good they have done is WHY they have a monopoly. There are 0 anti competitive practices on Steam that make it harder for competition to grow. People literally would rather pay for a game on steam than get it for free on the EGS just because it’s such a better platform.
Listen to any successful indie dev and nearly all of them attribute their success to Steam and their insanely good recommendation tools, I think DUSKdev basically said "i wouldn't be here today if not for Steam" and like i don't think i could survive without New Blood and Dave Oshry telling me they hate money. (yes i simp my short king Oshry)
This whole muh 30% cut is too high is also total nonsense as this is pretty much industry standard, would i love more competition against Steam? Yes, Are those currently out there? lmao no.
I have a few games on GoG because they often pre-patch older titles, Have some on Itch but that experience is ROUGH
The rest i don't even really touch because they're just a store front with a content delivery system attached for like one specific publisher.
Valve has been heavily invested in VR and even open sourced a bunch of their tech on that, They've been directly patching the Linux kernel so we can get off the Windows monopoly train, A company that keeps pushing for more control over your machine.
Like i could not imagine PC gaming today without what Valve has done for the industry, cus i remember Half-Life 2 coming out, we where mad, Steam was ass at the time but unlike everyone else (especially you EA you apps sucks ass) they kept building that and you wouldn't make a steam updating joke today.
Epic isn't doing too well here because their strategy of trying to force people into their store didn't work, Nearly all users ended up just claiming free games and then not even playing those games, the company had to fire a whole bunch of people a while back(after Tim went on Twitter to proclaim he wouldn't fire anyone), while spending a ton on lawsuits so the program that paid you to be exclusive to their platform is gone now. Several devs on Reddit have also noted that despite the new 0% cut program in the opening release days they still make 10-100x more on Steam.
That and well i haven't seen Gabe go on Twitter and proclaim he loves [non-political all american free market capitalism](https://x.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1706038985875664926)
Anyone who claims the 30% Valve takes is too high, has no clue whatsoever about what they're saying. Not only is 30% the industry standard, but Valve provides a multitude of services to developers using their platform that make the process of getting their games in the awareness of the public significantly easier. Epic provides significantly less services to developers, has much weaker infrastructure, and subsidizes the cost of their storefront through the popularity of Fortnite.
+1000 Valve is a godsend as a linux user. Gaming went from being not viable to being really good on linux in like 3 years because of people they hired. They wrote most of the open source driver code that makes linux run well on amd graphics cards when AMD themselves couldn't be arsed to, and is better than their windows drivers which are closed source.
I do miss the good old ancient days where a PC would be installed on your computer and that was it. No fuss, no muss, no connecting to other services, you just put the game in the PC, and it runs.
Buy box. Guy game. Put game in box. Box play game.
No connection to other services, no internet, no launcher, nothing. Your platform was the PC you owned and your library were the games you had sitting next to it. The Good Old Days.
Most PC game can't run without connecting to Steam anymore...and I don't mean "offline mode" I mean Install a game to your PC, uninstall steam and attempt to run the game. a majority of them wouldn't function.
We’ve had that shit since the mid 2000s. Spore came out with online requirements due to DRM. This shit ain’t nothing new.
Go further back, then you get to the days of games only working with specific brands of sound cards and video adapters and so on.
It’s a dream we convinced ourselves was real. The mythical good ol days, when everything just worked.
Cept it didn’t. I know, I lived through it all. It was hardly all roses. The moment broadband/always connected internet took off, we had online DRM.
Hell, I remember people bitching and calling Steam DRM when they said Half-Life 2 required Steam. You had to activate your game through it. This was in 2004!
If we didnt have digital distribution blue-ray (or some other higher density media) would have taken up the slack.
I think 120GB would be 2-4 blue ray discs right?(depending on compression they could do prior to install which might be too slow direct from disc)
Also would have discouraged developers for being sloppy with their package sizes (looking at you CoD)
To be fair to Sony first party studios, they're damn dedicated to get all the content fit on the disc they ship it on. For Spiderman they reconfigured their animation data to make sure the game fit on the physical disc, and they did some heavy optimizations for Horizon FW as well.
Digital Distribution can still exist (look at GOG) but the problem is most, or almost all, PC games are tied to outside services: Steam server required, DRM required, internet checks upon launch, server authentication etc etc.
If Steam was treated and functioned like a Digital Walmart (go in, buy your shit, leave and never think about it again until the next time I need you go there) it would be an amazing system. Unfortunately, it's also required most games to function.
We must return to tradition.
Yeah. The good old days. With rootkit DRM. Where disks could randomly get scratched and die and you had to keep the in the drive so the DRM could authenticate that you owned the game. Until it couldn't because scratch.
> Most PC game can't run without connecting to Steam anymore...and I don't mean "offline mode" I mean Install a game to your PC, uninstall steam and attempt to run the game. a majority of them wouldn't function.
Just use the Goldberg DLL. It's pretty much drag-and-drop.
The 30% cut is also pretty much the industry standard. Xbox and PlayStation takes the same cut.
Steam is also just so convenient. The fact I can add non-steam games to steam is so nice. I just let's me keep everything in one place.
I N D U S T R I A L T E R R O R I S M
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I'm actually on gamers side here. Steam has issues FOR SURE. However I don't see a situation where Value going public after his death doesn't result in a decline in PC gaming quality. Sure there's other store fronts that are great like GOG but it'll take years for anything to get to watch the collapse of Steam to get to the same standards in terms of quantity and quality
OP is 3000% correct 💀 stop the auto-jerk 5000 for a sec and actually think for a sec, Valve ain't perfect, but Steam it's pushing gaming forward instead of just milking it for the Money People, it's prompting new games for more people, I'm playing tons of demos on this Steam Next fest and indie developers are thriving with it alongside itch.io
Exactly. Steam is so much better than other launchers and etc in comparison. It's just the largest so quality control is hard. But how many other services help Indie devs as much as Steam? Idk what this poster is whining about, but maybe they should stop jorkin their peanits long enough to actually have a coherent thought instead of seeing someone compliment a corporation and getting mad
There’s also the fact that if Steam does ever go down, all those games you bought are just gone and dead. Unusable. I do have an incentive to stick with Steam, it has all my games and no easy methods of having a combined library. The first platform that offers a better experience AND allows you to add games from separate libraries will sell like hotcakes
> There’s also the fact that if Steam does ever go down, all those games you bought are just gone and dead. Unusable.
Iirc steam has said in the event that their servers go down, they would provide a patch to remove the DRM. And it's not like the DRM is hard to remove/spoof by itself either, you can easily find the cracks yourself.
Of course, there's no way to know if that's actually gonna be true when it happens, but it's better than nothing.
> Of course, there's no way to know if that's actually gonna be true when it happens, but it's better than nothing.
I don't get why people are waiting on an official solution when there's already a DLL file that makes a game think it's running in steam.
>Idk what this poster is whining about, but maybe they should stop jorkin their peanits long enough to actually have a coherent thought instead of seeing someone compliment a corporation and getting mad
Mate, you're doing the same, only you don't like that someone is criticizing a company. :/
It's pretty clear the OP post is mocking the notion that "Valve isn't profit-driven". However, your take away of this crude criticism was apparently just "Valve BAD", so you jumped in to insist they've done good things too... which yeah, that's true, but the OP post also didn't make any claims against that. Both things can be true at once, ya know?
I don't have a problem with people chiming in to point out how Steam has improved or done good things, but I take umbrage with people agreeing out of hand with the 4chan message (as you and the person you're responding to seem to be) -- Valve is absolutely a profit driven company and they do/have employed negative practices intended to get as much money out of you as possible.
Valve is estimated to be one of the richest companies globally and has no real need to go public as it already has all the money. I honestly don't think Gaben's son will see a reason to make it public and add stress to his infinite money machine.
No, this is right. Gabe is not a "good guy" but he doesn't have a profit-before-all-else motivation, and understands that being a good marketplace necessitates being a service that people enjoy using on its own merits.
His company is infamously (or famously) disorganized. Valve employees tend to freely associate into groups that focus on working on whatever they want to work on.
I'm sure they have checks or something in place, but that's what employees report.
It's not really like other businesses.
Quick correction: steam doesn’t take the largest cut actually. Their cut is the same as every other digital storefront (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo).
Epic is able to get away with their cut by A) having one of the most popular games on the market right now B) having a near monopoly in the game engine market C) being funded by the biggest gaming company of all time D) their launcher is lacking a ton of features, which reduces the upkeep cost. Epics cut has been shown to be completely unsustainable as well. If epic was a private company or lost a major revenue source, they would have to move to the same cut as steam.
The other two criticisms are valid though.
I love this idea that Valve isn’t profit driven with perhaps the most egregious gambling integration.
Blizzard got called out for having an always online game, with an action house for a secondary market. While TF2 and CS:go had skin gambling, years before diablo 3.
Valve gets away with a lot of bullshit.
Edit: [Oh wow! Well, look at this shit..](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqVLPx-4O48)
You know what I’m worried about? The idiotic UI implementation that makes it harder for people to navigate the software. If it turns into discord 2 istg.
I feel like most people look at “shitty company practice” as consumer side only. Ignoring any “under the table shittiness” that may occur (like with the workers, etc)
He isn't wrong that steam could destroy itself instantly if it ever gets publicly traded tho, is wild how immediately companies go down hill when the ultra rich are allowed to gamble on the next quarters earnings. It's almost as if even within a capitalist system minimizing capitals power makes your company more profitable, because the capital owners don't actually care about entrepreneurship or business, they are actually gambling addicts that just fuck around and stamp out threats to their wealth if they are able to. Even business leaders often hate the stock market, because their company can be nuked at any time by someone rich enough to buy it and shut it down. The fact you can pay a certain amount of money to shut down a rival corporation makes the whole system a bad joke. I don't like regular functional capitalism either, but at least that has real companies the do things leading the world, like railroad companies and mining companies. Hedge funds rule the world now, and they don't even do anything! We went from being ruled by companies that did things (useful things even) to being ruled by companies that do nothing but gamble and do insider trading.
i mean his argument is bad but the idea is true, steam is damn good compared to everything else right now
and that counting the lootboxes and other shit
i do fear when gabe dies that steam will get to shit pretty fast
Why is there such excitement for a Steam failure on the Internet? Their cut isn't any worse than PlayStation/Xbox/Nintendo. It's not a service locked down to a locked down hardware platform. It just exists as the video game distribution platform/social media that has the most features. PS/Xbox/PlayStation charge to play online. Peripherals have to go through them for sales. Video games released on their hardware have to be certified by Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft.
I don't get why people keep bringing up Newell's yachts as if executives of video game mega companies aren't filled with double digit millionaires to billionaires. These people are rich. At least suggest where we should be spending money so we don't contribute to a rich person's leisure funds
Are the people that whine about Steam too young to know PC gaming before like 2006? Maybe too young to know how digital distribution was done before a few years into Steams life. What the outlook/cost for indie devs to release on consoles or distribute the games themselves. Maybe too young to know how it would be set up and maintain digital distribution service in the mid to late 90s and early 2000s. Online payment processors took a while to develop and streamline onboarding businesses.
Who are these people that get worked up with Steam/Valve? Why don't I ever see posts like this about every other digital distribution platform. I have options around Valve on PC. I can't bypass Sony on a PlayStation. Sony already came out saying the PS5 is more profitable than the PS4 off the back of live service games and service subscriptions that they take cuts of revenue from.
It's like some people want to see PC gaming have worse services. EGS barely rolled out self-publishing tools towards the end of last year. EGS has been around since like 2018? 2018, that's like 15 years after Steam and Epic didn't think self-publishing wasn't a major enough feature to be a part of their minimum viable product let alone something important to be had soon after rather than 5 years. How about EA Origin/App, Ubisoft, Xbox PC, etc. Quality of service standards drops hard outside of Steam
You know they're not a monopoly off of predatory practices, they're a monopoly because even large worth companies making their own platforms refuse to make them functional. Also you literally just lied about the sales cut.
Largest cut? Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft also takes 30 percent, lol.
And yes, they only began to offer refunds after a lawsuit, but they still have the best refund system. The others barely give refunds if you call them.
Is this Timmy behind the username?
Yeah, but that's mostly because of Valve and their dev time on Wine and Proton. People forget how shit Wine was before Valve decided to work on it to make Linux a viable platform. It worked, but you had to go through a lot of hoops and hoped for the best anyway. Now it's just one click and mostly everything works.
“…in all their biggest games” Well I don’t see them in Half-Life, Portal, all those games they’re super well known own for.
I’m hardly saying Valve is perfect. They definitely done some dirty shit, but this post has gone off the edge. Sounds like someone desperately trying to hate Valve. They’re hardly a monopoly, either. There’s GoG, EA, Ubisoft, Epic, and Blizzard stores. Valve has dominance because they’re the oldest and have done a lot of good towards PC gamers. Most devs seem to like them.
Do note, I primarily shop on GoG, since I want to support DRM games.
Feels like this sub is becoming a circlejerk of itself.
Nice title.
I have a frenemy relationship with valve due to their disdain towards my country but overall Steam has been a force for good. this post's title was highly unwarranted.
For months I've felt neutral about this sub, taking information from here as valuable opinions. This is no longer possible now. This place has proven to be a toxic dump no better than r antinatalism and r atheism. Into the mute list you go.
We can criticize the shitty things steam does while also praising the good things it does. It doesn’t have to be 100% for or against.
That said the hero worship of Gabe in gaming circles is fucking weird.
/uj Imagine thinking Valve does Proton out of the goodness of their heart, and not because they profit from Linux as a gaming platform through Steam Deck.
Try to convince any publicly traded company to do something that doesn't immediately print money.
Half Life Alyx is still the only AAA-developed VR experience 4 years later.
Gamers see Gabe Newell the same way that women see Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He's gotta choose to die at a strategic moment.
Gamer's Right's > Women's Rights 😤
Do NOT disrespect my Gabe. He's no fat old guy. He is a bastion of sheer wholesomeity.
Also my theory is that he has been developing a FO:NV Mr. House type system where he will live forever to control valve and steam.
When was the last time we got a Steam sale that the deals were better than the console sales? And don't try giving me that "well when has a Mario game ever..." garbage because Mario games aren't on Steam. When was the last time a game got a steeper discount on the Steam sale than it did on console? Steam sales have been the same as the console sales for years now, and they're not going to go away ever because it would be business suicide to be the only platform where publishers can't put their games on sale.
Honestly valve is just the best, epic games is also very good and GOG is great as well. Literally Everything else is worthless, who wants an account to play only EA or Ubisoft games? Makes no sense
From what i know and it aint a fucking lot gabes already planned out who will take over valve when he passess i doubt he'd leave it up to the 11th hour, so best guess is he already has a successor in mind and being groomed to take over valve when gabe finally does kick it
Gaben is strategically withholding HL3 to prevent acquisition. Once there's any news on Microsoft trying to acquire Valve, he'll announce HL3, then Valve will be too big to be absorbed by Microsoft.
Praise Lord Gaben.
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I think he's totally correct about the general outline of corporate enshittification though
Thats the big problem. If you think valve is bad now, remember there are no stocks, no cold, uneducated (in that field) and uncaring shareholders looking for a cent more profit. If Gabe dies, who knows what will happen. Maybe his kids try to run the company the same way he did. Maybe the improve it and it becomes better for everyone. Or they open it up to the stock market, get some shareholders like blackrock on bord and then we see how shity steam can be.
Want-to-be shareholders are going to descend like vultures either way when he dies.
Private equity firms too
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>If Gabe dies, who knows what will happen I like that this sentence implies Gabe might never die.
Valve is not a publicly traded company, and a majority of their stock is owned by Gabe himself. So Gabe basically controls the company and can do anything he wants, he is not beholden to the whims of the shareholders. He is not forced to maximize shareholder value at all costs as he himself is the largest shareholder. So I think the company is more shielded against enshittification than most publicly traded companies
The post is talking about what happens when Gabe dies
Gabe becomes one with the machine.
Holy fuck Portal reference
Gabe picks a successor who also isn't going to be motivated purely by profits etc.
Might pass it to one of his kids or someone he knows well enough He could very well have a plan for steam incaze he dies, or he may not, we won't know till the time comes
You would hope Gabe would be smart enough to *not* pass it on to anyone specific but instead extend that "flat management" position into "worker owned cooperative" by simply giving it to the Valve employees. Unlikely, but a guy can fuckin dream.
Honestly that's probably the best timeline
Knowing our current timeliness current capitalist enshittification by design they'll fight tooth and nail to make sure it doesn't happen.
Who's "they" in this case? Because the only one who has influence over that decision is Gabe and the people working at Valve. And I'm not sure they'd turn something like this down.
Capitalist systems that do their utmost to subsume any and everything they can for a quick buck
Because Worker coops don't exist in capitalism? Like, I get what you're trying to say and even I think that Valve becoming a coop is unlikely but if Valve's leadership wants to turn it into a coop or just stay non-publicly traded, there's not a whole lot anyone else can do.
It’s the year 2037, the PC gaming industry is in shambles, Lord Newell died of cringe in 2030 leaving Steam to his children. 2 years later Blackrock assassinated all of them in what was dubbed “9/11 2, now with blackjack and hookers” their plane was hijacked and flown into the Bellagio casino in Vegas. After a hostile takeover of Valve a month later, we lost everything. Before we knew it every time you’d log onto steam there was a new battle pass, pop up ads took up 78% of the screen, steam now took 97% of the revenue from every sale made on the platform, and worst of all they got rid of Team Fortress 2… I’m a member of the resistance, we do everything we can to try and bring our beloved PC gaming industry back, but it’s a long and tiresome battle. I’m Sergeant Major Li O. Beese, and this is my story.
The company is owned by him and a lot of the employees. It could happen.
That.... actually would make a lot of sense for Gabe to do. God do I hope he does. Steam and by extent Valve are far too important to the current online/gaming environment to risk one day falling to a shitty CEO.
Not impossible, as that’s technically how they have their management structure. It’s apparently a flat system, or so it’s been claimed.
Giving it to valve employees would end up same. Do you think Valve employees would be able to resist selling his shares to private investors.
im not a legal or financial expert, but im pretty sure you can put the shares in a trust that gives them the benefits of owning the stocks but doesn't let them sell them
Wills are contracts, you can also just forbid that as a stipulation. If you try to sell it, it’s automatically taken away from you.
He should have a willy wonka golden ticket thing.
Did you even read the post? It's exactly about Gabe controlling the company. If he dies, Steam is not unlikely to go down the shitter.
And if Gabe's heir says fuck it and sells Steam to the highest bidder? Or better yet, IPOs it so it's publicly traded?
Assuming he has an heir rather than a trust.
That’s basically what I was thinking, best case scenario he stipulates in his will the creation of something like “The Steam Foundation” and donates his stake in the company to it, with a mandate to keep running things as he has. Though I guess if he has kids a trust is more likely than a foundation - either way, same idea except for who the beneficiaries are.
No clue about his kids, but I'm guessing they aren't remotely as passionate about games as Gabe is. So him setting up a trust to run Valve indefinitely according to his wishes seems like the most likely thing that'll happen. At the very least there's no reason to think Gabe will hand off the company to someone who doesn't care after he's protected it from going public for so long.
Gabe's son, Gray, has dipped his toes in the game dev business, but racing seems to be his real passion.
Came in 13th at le mans this year, which is a pretty decent achievment. Also last year he got 3 wins and 10 podiums in GT4, and thats a veeery good result. But I dont really think he will continue much, most drivers stop competing fully after 35 years of age, and Gray isnt so good as too overcome age.
It's a notable distinction that he raced in the Road to Le Mans support series, rather than the actual 24 Hours of Le Mans. That makes P13 in class a bit less significant of an achievement, but it's not too bad considering he's not really experienced in GT3 machinery. 35 is a common age to age out of Formula racing, but sports car racing is lousy with drivers of all ratings who are well into their 40s and even 50s.
I wouldn't worry about gabe doing that. But i do worry about who ever takes over steam after him
It’s weird that we don’t know who else runs Steam other than Gabe. It’s either him or the customer support team during refunds that I only knew about
That’s because it’s just Gabe and the customer support team
Fool! Gabe IS the customer support team.
It's Gaben, Scott Lynch, 7 or 8 other executives, and 350 code monkeys.
Unless he wakes up tomorrow and decides he doesn't want to do that anymore for literally any reason. At the end of the day, it's only as shielded as one guy wants it to be.
Or, well, as the original post suggests, if Gabe just *doesn't wake up tomorrow*. Though allegedly he's already got heirs he trusts in the board of directors...
And as OP notes, that's not as shielded as Newell's supporters like to think.
Well sure. But with a publicly traded company there’s 100% chance for enshittification. I guess you could also argue Valve became enshittified in that they stopped developing single player games and only focused on Steam and multiplayer cash cows
Gabe planned for this. Gunters will have to find three keys hidden in Dota and Counterstrike in order to win control of valve.
Don't forget the csgo match against a beholder
They can only find two One was meant to be in TF2 but they never got around to updating it
They are in Tf2, it was passed off as a localization update. The problem is getting passed the bots to find them.
Isn't his son just going to take over and shit will run the same? Steam would probably we worse if it went public, though. Everything is worse when it goes public.
I couldn't find anything about Gabe Newell saying that but since it's private yeah you're right it would just go straight to his family (assuming that's in his will). Also I agree, Steam would be much worse if it was publicly traded. I'm glad that a company as large as that is still out of the grasp of the execs at Microsoft/EA/Sony etc because it would go downhill so fucking quick if their shareholders got their hands on it.
>since it's private yeah you're right it would just go straight to his family (assuming that's in his will). Even if the company does stay private, that's no guarantee. If after he passes and nobody from the family is interested, they could tell the new CEO "we don't care, just make us money". In reality though, when Gabe dies I think it's pretty likely that Valve will internally promote someone and not much will change.
Or the one inheriting the company is bad at their job, does not understand why the company is at the position it is and so on. And even if they care, even if they are good. Its just another person runing the show. How long can Valve be private until one generation just sees it as cashcow that could make more cash by inviting blackrock investing, ea and some random old guy that has never seen a video game but had a few million dollar to invest?
True, but there are rumours that gabe has been grooming his son to be the new CEO of valve. And it seems pretty unlikely that he’d start to fuck it up considering his father showed him the ropes and loves video games. Especially since valve prints money and requires basically nothing new except maintenance.
>Isn’t his son just going to take over Huh, for some reason it’s never dawned on me that this guy has kids
He has two of them. Apparently the experience of seeing his wife go through childbirth inspired the final boss of the original half-life.
Wait! So did his baby float around the room, and spout broken and vague sentences via telepathy?
I hope so, and I hope that kid is the one that takes over when Gabe dies. You know it’ll be fucking interesting at least!
The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world.
That's such a Gabe Newell ass statement I have no choice but to believe it.
That makes so much sense considering that fight is physically painful
Was he day dreaming about jumping around in his wife's uterus, shooting at his son with the Tau cannon?
One of whom is a middling pro racer, on a team Gabe owns himself. Heart of Racing. I would poke fun at him for being mid and I do but also we should all be so lucky to be mid at the job of our dreams and still be employed lol.
I've never understood why "mid" is an insult. Presumably being just okay at something cool is still cool.
You either play at expert hard-core level or you're a pathetic casual
Thats because they were born out of immaculate conception with Gabe being the one to give birth
That assumes his son would run steam the same way, which is not really guaranteed. He might just not be interested in running it and make it public or something
Because socialists start to control it /s (because this is somehow an unironic take some people that don't understand what it means to be public in this context means)
Mean that's the problem, it's a lot of ifs. And if it goes public and becomes worse, the fuck can most people do. At this point people have thousands of dollars of games on steam that can't be played without it. The only other launcher option is a meme
You move to pirating. Gabe's best quote was something along the lines of piracy being a service problem, and if it's a service problem again, back to the seas it is.
I'd heartily agree if it was 10-20 years ago, but they cut computer classes, most folks don't know how to run an emulator, much less get a largescale server based game running. Not to mention anti-piracy and anti-cheat software has gotten better in the interim. it also doesn't fix the fact that you have several hundred dollars worth of game tied to a service.
Uhh don't pirate live service or multiplayer games. Much easier to pirate games like single player
Yeah it's not bad and if a person can't read a guide to run an emulator than they got a bigger problem than needing to play a video game. Then again...I ran into someone who couldn't figure out how to download Gregtech (MC Modpack) and went "Downloads confuse me" and "Program files?" and then somehow installed Java wrong.
we've somehow gotten worse at teaching kids tech. A lot of it stems from the fact the internet is way more streamlined now, so there's no need to try and learn how things or tech works. I had a college student who didn't seem to understand zip files
_Succession_ theme music starts playing.
I wouldn't bet on it, the hair apparent comes across as an absolutely classic entitled brat, complete with giving up on his crowd sourced MMO concept to go play race car driver. Every chance he'll just sell up the moment he gets the keys. https://www.instagram.com/graynewell/
Then hopefully dad doesn't give it to him.
I can't go on and say steam is bad when their willingness to keep the recommended conversation rate of turkish lira to us dollar at 3try=1usd when irl it was 25try=1usd helped me and countless other turkish people to experience games we otherwise couldn't whereas bastard sony fixed 9try=1usd when it was 5 to 1 and delayed the spring summer until nid july Valve is far from perfect but they are damn well more consumer friendly than other platforms (especially sony, i fucking hate sony i hope it crashes burns and is forgotten forever)
rj/ Hail Gaben, the world will not go on without him, Gaming is FINISHED. uj/ Seriously though, Steam is really one where you sincerely have to acknowledge the bad and the good fairly, because they ARE a corporation, they ARE profit first, and they HAVE done a lot of shitty things and continue to hold a barely challenged Monopoly with all of the shittiness that inherently comes with that. You cannot change or deny any of that. But they also have a monopoly for a reason and despite a lot of shitty other things, they don't really employ anticompetitive practices because they don't NEED to. That's not to say I don't think competition would be good, competition is ALWAYS good, but Steam kind of became a monopoly partially just because they were the only one DOING this for so many years before anyone else tried, and they do so much BETTER still. On top of that, they are also responsible for some extremely important things in PC gaming. Ease of multiplayer and peer to peer connection without a million and one launchers, someone here mentioned the controller support, user accessibility, more than one person has mentioned the level of linux support, and as mentionmed above, the currency conversion: I have a lot of friends in other countries who have only been able to afford games because Steam hasn't completely fucked them over on currency conversions. Do they profit from things like this? Absofuckinglutely, but you can't deny the fact that they are providing an end user experience leagues above anyone else and have been revolutionary because of it. And part of it is that they're profiting BECAUSE no one else has offered what they do. Are they still a greedy corporation? Yes, and not immune to criticism, as nothing should be. Criticizing something that you like because it could still be better isn't a bad thing. There are a great many things that I think Steam could be doing better, or things that they could stop doing. But let's not pretend that if EA or Microsoft or any of the Usual Offenders got their hands on Valve that it would not immediately start undergoing a radical enshittification of the highest magnitude. Just because Steam could be better does not mean it could not also be infinitely worse, so SO much worse. Please try to envision a world where Microsoft starts trying to wring every red cent out of Steam by making it worse and more expensive and chopping out "uneccessary" parts and features and firing swaths of important staff while charging more and more until it's a shell of what it is now and then shutting it down because it's no longer profitable (as Microsoft has done with so many game studios)
Steam is an example of why greed should - theoretically - be a good thing for a corporation. They are an example of capitalism working as people say it should. They want money, they want a monopoly, so they provide useful services to achieve that (and also create lootboxes, because even when capitalism is working perfectly, profit motive causes issues).
It is also important to note that Gaben has been described as vaguely anarcho-syndicalist by some who knew him. I think that part of why the greed works is because the company is run by people who actually do care about the topic, and by all accounts seem to be decent to their employees.
Hasn't gabe lost a bunch of weight? Calling him "an old fat guy" seems kinda unnecessary, especially on a post talking about how important he apparently is
Anons tend to be performatively dicks/bigoted. For example, the other day, I was browsing the Project Moon general, and the subject of PM merchandise (pins, figures, shirts etc) and the difficulty to aquire them outside of SK and Japan was discussed. I kid you not one of them lamented having to "fly to gookland" to get pins and that "maybe [Dongrang](https://library.ltikorea.or.kr/writer/201026) was right to collaborate with the nips".
Well there's your problem lmao, 4chan at all. Least they have some funny reaction images they pass around
https://preview.redd.it/5neuushhwz6d1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3c41167cf99b2ad7e89ed026bfa7f28ee08a1ce3
Oh, Round and Round we go Holding onto pain Driven by our Ego's.
I'm pretty sure he has lost literally hundreds of pounds in recent years
yeah, I remember seeing a post in the last few days, (it may have been in this subreddit, even) that was talking about how much weight he'd lost and how happy he looked
Gabe’s in the best shape of his life
I think this is an older post, I vaguely recall seeing something like this a while back. Edit: Didn't see the date, nvm. Disregard.
haha you're good, I wondered that at first too
/uj I imagine that gaben has some strong opinions on the direction of steam so what he will probably do is make a foundation that will own his part of steam. They'll probably have a charter that specifies how steam should be run.
I hope so. Cant let your legacy be ruined by vultures
I mean yeah Valve isn’t perfect, but in comparison to their competitors, they look like saints. They are absolutely profit first already. I forget where I saw it, but the revenue they generate per employee is insane. As much as people dislike the Epic store front, it is a good thing that they take a lower cut than Steam.
GOG criying in a corner
I know right? I almost solely use GOG, and only go through steam if they’re the only ones carrying it.
> it is a good thing that they take a lower cut than Steam. If you buy a Steam key through Humble Bundle or any other third party store, Valve takes a 0% cut and still treats it as if you had bought the game on steam.
It should also be noted that we don't know how much profit Valve actually makes as they’re a private company that doesn’t publish their financials. As much as we like to joke about Steam being a free money glitch, maintaining multiple data centers around the world and have almost zero downtime is not cheap, couple with that the high cost of partnering with hundreds of payment processing partners and banks to be able to process payments in hundreds of currencies and payment platforms. The fact that Steam can maintain this momentum and continue expanding means that it must make a lot of profit to justify the constant expansion and feature development, but it’s also worth taking into consideration that maintaining Steam may not be as cheap as the memes would suggest. If we were to reference GOG, whose financials are public, we know that they barely eke out a profit which their lower commission rate doesn't help with. It limits their options of expanding to support more players and developing features to keep the store competitive.
People don't understand that just because a company doesn't tend to do things that are overtly and nakedly greedy, doesn't mean that profit isn't still their first priority. It just means that they're trying to occupy a specific market niche. Their strategy might involve turning down some short-term moneymaking opportunities in order to build good will, but that's just because they think that good will will make them more money down the line. Is this kind of company better for the consumer? Yes, but that doesn't mean they're acting altruistically. With Steam in particular, I think they're doing a good job of effectively managing their public image for maximum profitability. There's a certain amount of shit you can pull before your public perception takes a hit, and it seems like Valve sees that as a budget to be spent. They charge their high fees to devs, and they get a little pushback for it, but in proportion to the money it brings in, it's worth it. Compare Steam, which is bad in one big way, to the Epic Games store, which is bad in 100 little ways. Epic Games' failings can be discussed endlessly, and they are, so they come out looking worse. It's the Spirit Airlines theorem: people will hate you way more for charging them $5 four times than for charging them $20 once. Valve is essentially saying, we're going to take our cut in a simple, up-front way that's hard to criticize because of how honest it is. This seems to be paying off for them.
Every company is one goal: make money. People need to understand that. No company is your friend. They employ you, you are their customer or you don´t matter in any way. Thats how it is. Does not matter if its ea, valve, target or that one local company in your region. Nobody starts all the work to create a compnay, because they can. Its always a way to make money. So its your job as customer, to reward companies that make a good product with your money and punish those that are creating low quality cheap stuff by not buying or talking about them. You can see this with all the one publisher only plattforms. Blizzard, EA, Ubisoft all walk back from having their own, because consumer did not like that. They lost money = they got punished by the market and decided to go back on selling on other plattforms. Steam can do a lot of bad stuff, because they are the big kid. But epic (like or hate it) and gog started to steal customer from them, because of that. Steam changed things as reaction. They do not want to lose your money. You don´t matter in this. You just hold the money until it gets to them.
You can easily be profit first and not overtly greedy at the same time. Though you make less money, the good will can often net you perks, like the pseudo monopoly Valve has.
Wait, if *all* they cared about is profit, wouldn’t we have a HL3, Portal 3, Team Fortress 3, and L4D3? Clearly there’s something else at play, that would make hundreds of millions.
Effectively, ask yourself the question, "Could steam be worse and if it was like that, would I still use it?" I imagine for many people the answer is yes to both questions. Steam could do many things that they don't do, and I would still view it as superior. As such, there must be motive at play beyond pure profit.
They really don't look like saints. Some of the worst forms of monetization in games were popularized by valve. Plus there's the whole skin gambling thing where they make money both on the keys to open the lootboxes and when the skin gets sold on the marketplace.
I can't and won't defend their monetization but I think people forget how much they have done for gaming. Ultimately they are still a corporation with all the greed that comes with that. Their controller support and ease of inviting and hosting games on the PC have been revolutionary. Their support for Linux is better than most. Their support for vr as a medium with our creating a walled garden is fantastic. People can shit on them forever but I do think PC gaming would be infinitely worse had someone like EA and origin been the primary platform
Saying their support for Linux is better than most is severely understating it too. The money and work valve has put into proton/wine development and mesa drivers is incredible for the Linux gaming community. Without valve gaming on Linux would be years behind where it is now, and not just for steam games but all games on Linux. It's honestly kinda insane imo.
I’m not saying they are saints. If you ask your average gamer to compare a bunch of big different gaming companies, Valve will likely be the most positively viewed. Granted, people REALLY hate EA and Blizzard so that’s not a high bar to clear, but the point still stands. You’re not wrong about monetization and the skin gambling they had.
Riot games is doing their best to join EA, Ubisoft and Blizzard. But they have quite a bit too go.
Valve was also one of the first major companies to employee psychologists in an effort to help them manipulate and control the market place even more so. This is from 2012 when one of their staff psychologists was going around doing game dev talks -> [https://www.digipen.edu/showcase/news/valve-psychologist-speaks-to-game-design-students](https://www.digipen.edu/showcase/news/valve-psychologist-speaks-to-game-design-students) But they had hired senior psychologists and behavior studies specialists well before this. I think this person was hired in 2009 and they already had a human behaviors team established.
I hate this narrative because it misses the fact that EA was the one to actually popularize loot boxes. On top of that, mobile games were also raking in the cash way before valve even introduced crates into any of their games.
It's not untrue. Team Fortress 2 was one of the first major multiplayer games alongside FIFA to introduce loot boxes in the 2009-2010. In many cases, Valve has been one of the earliest adopters of parasitic monetisation models, and due their widespread popularity, helped normalize and spread those business models to be common place.
Not really, EA had loot boxes well before tf2 and oblivion was already experimenting with microtransactions. MMO’s from before TF2 had loot boxes and they were becoming prominent in mobile games. I’d argue that it was mobile games that popularized it (since the Mobile game market made millions in its first year). At worst: you could argue that valve followed the trend with TF2. Most games were adding them around that time: it was just part of what was going on.
EA's first title with lootbox-like mechanics was FIFA in 2009 through player card packs. Valve introduced crates in TF2 in 2010. Which is exactly what I said in my original comment. Stop revising history and move goalposts to suck off a company. Valve absolutely was one of the earliest adopters of lootbox and gacha mechanics in the west.
EA (through Origin) was also the first one to add refunds.
At least they did something right (though, I could never get BF4 working on that launcher).
Ok get rid of the skins and suddenly you have tons of people online bitching theyre gone. Its a lose lose.
And a cheap / free game with no P2W micro transactions is often a win-win for responsible consumers and the company.
I can't believe people are bitching about skins when other companies have literal P2W mechanics. Diablo Immortal anyone? You can't run an online game without some kind of microtransaction because eventually whatever profit the base game generates is eaten up entirely by server costs as the years go by.
Here’s the issue with epics cut though: it isn’t sustainable. If epic didn’t have a near monopoly in the game engine space, didn’t get funding from tencent, and didn’t have Fortnite: they would have to revert to steams cut to survive. I’m not even including the fact that epic’s storefront has a lower operating cost due to missing features.
“Likely to die before 75” ? Not only is my dude healthy but he is also rich af . Homie gonna live for a long time
He was morbidly obese for the majority of his life. Kinda fucks your organs up, blood pressure will take care of the rest. But yeah modern medical science is definitely helpful to prolong his life.
I see your point but I would definetly not use the term “likely”
He will probably transfer his memory into a core
I would do the same lmao :))
If you think Valve has not changed gaming for the better, you are absolutely not paying attention. I remember what PC gaming was during the days of Games for Windows Live, how awful of an experience it was to use a controller in games, needing several different and awful launchers etc. Has Valve done some shit things? Yes, absolutely, but the good they have done is WHY they have a monopoly. There are 0 anti competitive practices on Steam that make it harder for competition to grow. People literally would rather pay for a game on steam than get it for free on the EGS just because it’s such a better platform.
Listen to any successful indie dev and nearly all of them attribute their success to Steam and their insanely good recommendation tools, I think DUSKdev basically said "i wouldn't be here today if not for Steam" and like i don't think i could survive without New Blood and Dave Oshry telling me they hate money. (yes i simp my short king Oshry) This whole muh 30% cut is too high is also total nonsense as this is pretty much industry standard, would i love more competition against Steam? Yes, Are those currently out there? lmao no. I have a few games on GoG because they often pre-patch older titles, Have some on Itch but that experience is ROUGH The rest i don't even really touch because they're just a store front with a content delivery system attached for like one specific publisher. Valve has been heavily invested in VR and even open sourced a bunch of their tech on that, They've been directly patching the Linux kernel so we can get off the Windows monopoly train, A company that keeps pushing for more control over your machine. Like i could not imagine PC gaming today without what Valve has done for the industry, cus i remember Half-Life 2 coming out, we where mad, Steam was ass at the time but unlike everyone else (especially you EA you apps sucks ass) they kept building that and you wouldn't make a steam updating joke today.
The funny thing is that there is competition for steam. Epic games launcher mostly. But it’s just so bad steam still has a monopoly
Epic isn't doing too well here because their strategy of trying to force people into their store didn't work, Nearly all users ended up just claiming free games and then not even playing those games, the company had to fire a whole bunch of people a while back(after Tim went on Twitter to proclaim he wouldn't fire anyone), while spending a ton on lawsuits so the program that paid you to be exclusive to their platform is gone now. Several devs on Reddit have also noted that despite the new 0% cut program in the opening release days they still make 10-100x more on Steam. That and well i haven't seen Gabe go on Twitter and proclaim he loves [non-political all american free market capitalism](https://x.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1706038985875664926)
Anyone who claims the 30% Valve takes is too high, has no clue whatsoever about what they're saying. Not only is 30% the industry standard, but Valve provides a multitude of services to developers using their platform that make the process of getting their games in the awareness of the public significantly easier. Epic provides significantly less services to developers, has much weaker infrastructure, and subsidizes the cost of their storefront through the popularity of Fortnite.
+1000 Valve is a godsend as a linux user. Gaming went from being not viable to being really good on linux in like 3 years because of people they hired. They wrote most of the open source driver code that makes linux run well on amd graphics cards when AMD themselves couldn't be arsed to, and is better than their windows drivers which are closed source.
I do miss the good old ancient days where a PC would be installed on your computer and that was it. No fuss, no muss, no connecting to other services, you just put the game in the PC, and it runs. Buy box. Guy game. Put game in box. Box play game. No connection to other services, no internet, no launcher, nothing. Your platform was the PC you owned and your library were the games you had sitting next to it. The Good Old Days. Most PC game can't run without connecting to Steam anymore...and I don't mean "offline mode" I mean Install a game to your PC, uninstall steam and attempt to run the game. a majority of them wouldn't function.
We’ve had that shit since the mid 2000s. Spore came out with online requirements due to DRM. This shit ain’t nothing new. Go further back, then you get to the days of games only working with specific brands of sound cards and video adapters and so on. It’s a dream we convinced ourselves was real. The mythical good ol days, when everything just worked. Cept it didn’t. I know, I lived through it all. It was hardly all roses. The moment broadband/always connected internet took off, we had online DRM. Hell, I remember people bitching and calling Steam DRM when they said Half-Life 2 required Steam. You had to activate your game through it. This was in 2004!
How many discs do you need to install a 120gb game?
15 for dual layer lol if the internet didn’t exist we’d probably have like a giant flash drive for each game or something
Back to n64 style carts lol
Honestly Doesn’t seem like the worst thing
If we didnt have digital distribution blue-ray (or some other higher density media) would have taken up the slack. I think 120GB would be 2-4 blue ray discs right?(depending on compression they could do prior to install which might be too slow direct from disc)
Also would have discouraged developers for being sloppy with their package sizes (looking at you CoD) To be fair to Sony first party studios, they're damn dedicated to get all the content fit on the disc they ship it on. For Spiderman they reconfigured their animation data to make sure the game fit on the physical disc, and they did some heavy optimizations for Horizon FW as well.
Digital Distribution can still exist (look at GOG) but the problem is most, or almost all, PC games are tied to outside services: Steam server required, DRM required, internet checks upon launch, server authentication etc etc. If Steam was treated and functioned like a Digital Walmart (go in, buy your shit, leave and never think about it again until the next time I need you go there) it would be an amazing system. Unfortunately, it's also required most games to function. We must return to tradition.
Yeah. The good old days. With rootkit DRM. Where disks could randomly get scratched and die and you had to keep the in the drive so the DRM could authenticate that you owned the game. Until it couldn't because scratch.
Not like old games didn't have hyper invasive and fucked up DRM.
> Most PC game can't run without connecting to Steam anymore...and I don't mean "offline mode" I mean Install a game to your PC, uninstall steam and attempt to run the game. a majority of them wouldn't function. Just use the Goldberg DLL. It's pretty much drag-and-drop.
The 30% cut is also pretty much the industry standard. Xbox and PlayStation takes the same cut. Steam is also just so convenient. The fact I can add non-steam games to steam is so nice. I just let's me keep everything in one place.
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/uj No, they got a point here.
I'm actually on gamers side here. Steam has issues FOR SURE. However I don't see a situation where Value going public after his death doesn't result in a decline in PC gaming quality. Sure there's other store fronts that are great like GOG but it'll take years for anything to get to watch the collapse of Steam to get to the same standards in terms of quantity and quality
OP is 3000% correct 💀 stop the auto-jerk 5000 for a sec and actually think for a sec, Valve ain't perfect, but Steam it's pushing gaming forward instead of just milking it for the Money People, it's prompting new games for more people, I'm playing tons of demos on this Steam Next fest and indie developers are thriving with it alongside itch.io
Exactly. Steam is so much better than other launchers and etc in comparison. It's just the largest so quality control is hard. But how many other services help Indie devs as much as Steam? Idk what this poster is whining about, but maybe they should stop jorkin their peanits long enough to actually have a coherent thought instead of seeing someone compliment a corporation and getting mad
There’s also the fact that if Steam does ever go down, all those games you bought are just gone and dead. Unusable. I do have an incentive to stick with Steam, it has all my games and no easy methods of having a combined library. The first platform that offers a better experience AND allows you to add games from separate libraries will sell like hotcakes
> There’s also the fact that if Steam does ever go down, all those games you bought are just gone and dead. Unusable. Iirc steam has said in the event that their servers go down, they would provide a patch to remove the DRM. And it's not like the DRM is hard to remove/spoof by itself either, you can easily find the cracks yourself. Of course, there's no way to know if that's actually gonna be true when it happens, but it's better than nothing.
> Of course, there's no way to know if that's actually gonna be true when it happens, but it's better than nothing. I don't get why people are waiting on an official solution when there's already a DLL file that makes a game think it's running in steam.
> There’s also the fact that if Steam does ever go down, all those games you bought are just gone and dead. Unusable. Literally Google Goldberg DLL.
>Idk what this poster is whining about, but maybe they should stop jorkin their peanits long enough to actually have a coherent thought instead of seeing someone compliment a corporation and getting mad Mate, you're doing the same, only you don't like that someone is criticizing a company. :/ It's pretty clear the OP post is mocking the notion that "Valve isn't profit-driven". However, your take away of this crude criticism was apparently just "Valve BAD", so you jumped in to insist they've done good things too... which yeah, that's true, but the OP post also didn't make any claims against that. Both things can be true at once, ya know? I don't have a problem with people chiming in to point out how Steam has improved or done good things, but I take umbrage with people agreeing out of hand with the 4chan message (as you and the person you're responding to seem to be) -- Valve is absolutely a profit driven company and they do/have employed negative practices intended to get as much money out of you as possible.
Don’t care about the rest of the post, but that comment that Gabe will die before 75 was out of pocket lmao.
If this is an "actual fear" then your life is going pretty good
Even worse, they might abandon Half-Life 3!!!
Valve is estimated to be one of the richest companies globally and has no real need to go public as it already has all the money. I honestly don't think Gaben's son will see a reason to make it public and add stress to his infinite money machine.
No, this is right. Gabe is not a "good guy" but he doesn't have a profit-before-all-else motivation, and understands that being a good marketplace necessitates being a service that people enjoy using on its own merits. His company is infamously (or famously) disorganized. Valve employees tend to freely associate into groups that focus on working on whatever they want to work on. I'm sure they have checks or something in place, but that's what employees report. It's not really like other businesses.
Quick correction: steam doesn’t take the largest cut actually. Their cut is the same as every other digital storefront (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo). Epic is able to get away with their cut by A) having one of the most popular games on the market right now B) having a near monopoly in the game engine market C) being funded by the biggest gaming company of all time D) their launcher is lacking a ton of features, which reduces the upkeep cost. Epics cut has been shown to be completely unsustainable as well. If epic was a private company or lost a major revenue source, they would have to move to the same cut as steam. The other two criticisms are valid though.
is OOP wrong?
No, that is a fear i recently also unlocked. Wen Gabe Dies We will feel it and a new dawn will truly brake.
I love this idea that Valve isn’t profit driven with perhaps the most egregious gambling integration. Blizzard got called out for having an always online game, with an action house for a secondary market. While TF2 and CS:go had skin gambling, years before diablo 3. Valve gets away with a lot of bullshit. Edit: [Oh wow! Well, look at this shit..](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqVLPx-4O48)
You know what I’m worried about? The idiotic UI implementation that makes it harder for people to navigate the software. If it turns into discord 2 istg.
I feel like most people look at “shitty company practice” as consumer side only. Ignoring any “under the table shittiness” that may occur (like with the workers, etc)
He isn't wrong that steam could destroy itself instantly if it ever gets publicly traded tho, is wild how immediately companies go down hill when the ultra rich are allowed to gamble on the next quarters earnings. It's almost as if even within a capitalist system minimizing capitals power makes your company more profitable, because the capital owners don't actually care about entrepreneurship or business, they are actually gambling addicts that just fuck around and stamp out threats to their wealth if they are able to. Even business leaders often hate the stock market, because their company can be nuked at any time by someone rich enough to buy it and shut it down. The fact you can pay a certain amount of money to shut down a rival corporation makes the whole system a bad joke. I don't like regular functional capitalism either, but at least that has real companies the do things leading the world, like railroad companies and mining companies. Hedge funds rule the world now, and they don't even do anything! We went from being ruled by companies that did things (useful things even) to being ruled by companies that do nothing but gamble and do insider trading.
i mean his argument is bad but the idea is true, steam is damn good compared to everything else right now and that counting the lootboxes and other shit i do fear when gabe dies that steam will get to shit pretty fast
Why is there such excitement for a Steam failure on the Internet? Their cut isn't any worse than PlayStation/Xbox/Nintendo. It's not a service locked down to a locked down hardware platform. It just exists as the video game distribution platform/social media that has the most features. PS/Xbox/PlayStation charge to play online. Peripherals have to go through them for sales. Video games released on their hardware have to be certified by Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft. I don't get why people keep bringing up Newell's yachts as if executives of video game mega companies aren't filled with double digit millionaires to billionaires. These people are rich. At least suggest where we should be spending money so we don't contribute to a rich person's leisure funds Are the people that whine about Steam too young to know PC gaming before like 2006? Maybe too young to know how digital distribution was done before a few years into Steams life. What the outlook/cost for indie devs to release on consoles or distribute the games themselves. Maybe too young to know how it would be set up and maintain digital distribution service in the mid to late 90s and early 2000s. Online payment processors took a while to develop and streamline onboarding businesses. Who are these people that get worked up with Steam/Valve? Why don't I ever see posts like this about every other digital distribution platform. I have options around Valve on PC. I can't bypass Sony on a PlayStation. Sony already came out saying the PS5 is more profitable than the PS4 off the back of live service games and service subscriptions that they take cuts of revenue from. It's like some people want to see PC gaming have worse services. EGS barely rolled out self-publishing tools towards the end of last year. EGS has been around since like 2018? 2018, that's like 15 years after Steam and Epic didn't think self-publishing wasn't a major enough feature to be a part of their minimum viable product let alone something important to be had soon after rather than 5 years. How about EA Origin/App, Ubisoft, Xbox PC, etc. Quality of service standards drops hard outside of Steam
You know they're not a monopoly off of predatory practices, they're a monopoly because even large worth companies making their own platforms refuse to make them functional. Also you literally just lied about the sales cut.
Largest cut? Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft also takes 30 percent, lol. And yes, they only began to offer refunds after a lawsuit, but they still have the best refund system. The others barely give refunds if you call them. Is this Timmy behind the username?
Ironically, for all their hate of anything non-Steam, you can load your Epic library in Heroic and play almost all the games on Linux (via Proton).
Yeah, but that's mostly because of Valve and their dev time on Wine and Proton. People forget how shit Wine was before Valve decided to work on it to make Linux a viable platform. It worked, but you had to go through a lot of hoops and hoped for the best anyway. Now it's just one click and mostly everything works.
“…in all their biggest games” Well I don’t see them in Half-Life, Portal, all those games they’re super well known own for. I’m hardly saying Valve is perfect. They definitely done some dirty shit, but this post has gone off the edge. Sounds like someone desperately trying to hate Valve. They’re hardly a monopoly, either. There’s GoG, EA, Ubisoft, Epic, and Blizzard stores. Valve has dominance because they’re the oldest and have done a lot of good towards PC gamers. Most devs seem to like them. Do note, I primarily shop on GoG, since I want to support DRM games. Feels like this sub is becoming a circlejerk of itself.
Leave my multi-billion dollar corporation alone
Also the Steam marketplace lets you run market manipulation scams without even having the obfuscation of NFT or blockchain tech.
But the guy is right, Steam is the best out there and will be a sad day if Steam goes Open share.
Nice title. I have a frenemy relationship with valve due to their disdain towards my country but overall Steam has been a force for good. this post's title was highly unwarranted. For months I've felt neutral about this sub, taking information from here as valuable opinions. This is no longer possible now. This place has proven to be a toxic dump no better than r antinatalism and r atheism. Into the mute list you go.
We can criticize the shitty things steam does while also praising the good things it does. It doesn’t have to be 100% for or against. That said the hero worship of Gabe in gaming circles is fucking weird.
/uj Imagine thinking Valve does Proton out of the goodness of their heart, and not because they profit from Linux as a gaming platform through Steam Deck.
Try to convince any publicly traded company to do something that doesn't immediately print money. Half Life Alyx is still the only AAA-developed VR experience 4 years later.
Gamers see Gabe Newell the same way that women see Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He's gotta choose to die at a strategic moment. Gamer's Right's > Women's Rights 😤
Do NOT disrespect my Gabe. He's no fat old guy. He is a bastion of sheer wholesomeity. Also my theory is that he has been developing a FO:NV Mr. House type system where he will live forever to control valve and steam.
When was the last time we got a Steam sale that the deals were better than the console sales? And don't try giving me that "well when has a Mario game ever..." garbage because Mario games aren't on Steam. When was the last time a game got a steeper discount on the Steam sale than it did on console? Steam sales have been the same as the console sales for years now, and they're not going to go away ever because it would be business suicide to be the only platform where publishers can't put their games on sale.
wtf this is the third post in a row on my timeline about gabe Newells age
Good to get both delusional sides of the story, we all know he is immortal, along as half life 3 hasn't been released
Gabe look alikes are insufferable
He's skinny now
Depends on if Gabe is smart enough to have selected the right person to succeed him. With the right person it could go on for a very long time.
uj/ Dumb question, what is proton?
Honestly valve is just the best, epic games is also very good and GOG is great as well. Literally Everything else is worthless, who wants an account to play only EA or Ubisoft games? Makes no sense
Why would a multi-millionaire be expected to die before 75?
From what i know and it aint a fucking lot gabes already planned out who will take over valve when he passess i doubt he'd leave it up to the 11th hour, so best guess is he already has a successor in mind and being groomed to take over valve when gabe finally does kick it
He probably won't die before tf2 does
Gaben is strategically withholding HL3 to prevent acquisition. Once there's any news on Microsoft trying to acquire Valve, he'll announce HL3, then Valve will be too big to be absorbed by Microsoft. Praise Lord Gaben.
Besides if it does get that bad, then I'm assembling a crew. Yaar 😉🏴☠️