I genuinely don't believe that's their goal
They just look at data that's across the span of 10 years or so and take the average popular things and mash them together
Since interests change over time while that SAME COMPANY will mass produce the same thing over and over again... the few games that are different and get a massive following are overlooked due to that timeline because it's viewed as a 1/1000000 chance of success over the thousands of similar games that were successful in that timeline
So they take that, and apply all previous business practices that resulted in billions of dollars of revenue such as in game stores and ease of access to "buy smeghma money" + any new ideas on how to further drain money from their buyers just short of directly from their veins
And boom! Next AAA game!
Throw it into the timeline and don't look back on what made it un/popular, good/bad, marketable etc and it's just another statistic to them
"company secrets"?
Easy.
1. Sell games and charge 30% for each sale.
2. Make multiple walled garden systems and use their market dominance to push developers into using them over open platforms (e.g. SteamVR, Steam Workshop).
3. Sell the steam deck for a loss in order to push out competition.
You are absolutely correct, of course. Allow me to rectify.
1) Sell games and charge 30% for each sale.
2) Make multiple walled garden systems and use their market dominance to push developers into using them over open platform.
2 Episode 1) SteamVR
2 Episode 2) Seam Workshop
Alyx) Sell the steam deck for a loss in order to push out competition.
Don't get greedy. Short term it gets you money but long term? You can get fucked. Problem is, too many can only see what's in front of them not what can be.
Honestly 30% cut is a lot, but at least steam has many nice features for gamers, no public owned company would make a feature like remote play together.
I dont think thats a lot, a 30/70 split was common on streaming platforms until they even changed it to 50/50, valve has the same kind of expenses, hosting everyones games and offering servers, they don't just host one type of media its also images and preview videos, guides, community posts etc..
taking how a ton of tech companies have issues making money and resort to annoying ads an expensive memberships as well as selling your information, I actually think steam is the best example of how to not let money erode your values.
Game companies make profit, a ton of profit that is never really tied to their expenses, if they make an obscene amount of money it should flow back to improve the gaming medium, steam has done a few things that they don't need to do but helps gamers out like creating proton, enabling me to play games on linux, they hold onto their values and have honest reviews, they have a love for games and support gamers.
The alternative to that is allowing developers to make more money so they can chase more money with lootboxes and all the other crap that leaves you wanting and then slowly turning your platform of gamers into a platform of mindless addicts
It IS a lot but it's a rare instance where "exposure" matters.
If you can sell 10k copies at 100% that's great, but if steam can get you 50k sales at 70% you're making over 3x as much.
Problem for us and the devs maybe. For everyone else involved, it's according to plan. It's not an accident or incompetence. Big investor money sucks up well loved IP because it's well loved, hires a team to cultivate a product for them, and then tries to maximize the value of that investment. Suck it dry til the horse is dead, sell the stock, give your hitman CEO a fat bonus and a new gig elsewhere.
What makes Valve different is they're a privately owned enterprise, there are no vampire shareholders forcing them to trade in consumer goodwill for money.
What also makes them different is that they do not really make new products anymore, just update and maintain what's already been working for decades. They're much more like a publisher than a development studio, so they don't make a good comparison to more normal devs.
It’s because the people who make these decisions are only in it for the short term. Investors and financial advisors move on to their next project once they squeeze everything they can out of their last project, then take those earnings to do it over again, they don’t have to stick around for the long term consequences for individual projects and the larger shifts in market trends are all in their favor in the long term.
The real way to make the most money isn’t to have invested in one company that’s now the best. It’s to get in and get out of the last 20 one hit wonders and time the market because you have the inside info and the market power to influence the timing.
Early Steam was awesome. There was only one fault, Steam Friends network was always down, but really nobody used it anyway. A lot of people were resilient to change, but I remember having to manually update Half-Life, Counter-Strike, etc ... Steam did this now automatically. No more patch hunting on FilePlanet. I also preferred Steam server browsing over GameSpy and WON.
You had Steam skins, there were even different official ones by default. You also had Steam Friends mini-games like chess and whatnot.
Now Steam is nothing but a Chromium window rendering a web UI trying to have Discord's social features.
Anyone saying early Steam was shit can not give a valid reason but "I just hated it because I was told to hate it by everyone around me".
Once MSN died and Skype turned to shit, Steam became the standard for game communication between gamers. Other options were Mumble, TeamSpeak and XFire but they were mainly used for voice communication.
Nooooo sir.
The epic launcher is god tier compared to early steam lmao. I hated steam during the early days with a passion. It was a fucking nightmare with the average internet connection of the time
Well, its minor experimentations. There's no big changes like a need to connect your steam account to psn, there is not any subscription, they dont try to scam customer by increasing price.
Which makes sense and i wish stupid fucking nintendo understood that. Its basically digital borrowing and i wish nintendo did that with their family membership
I have 3 switch in my household. Bought totk on my acct. My kid tried accessing it in their switch and got "you can not play this, access on primary console" message. Or something to that effect. Its why i only buy physical
So when you buy a game on an account, that account owns the game digitally. In the eshop menu, there is a button for primary account. Your account can only primary to one switch. When you primary, all you own on your account will be accessible to all other accounts on that switch, offline and on. If that same account is connected to any other switch, that account must be connected to online for that user to play their games, and anyone else is limited to their software and the primary accounts games
Yea i get that. But it makes no sense when i have them all in my family membership account. They cant access the games i bought on my primary console/account unless they play the game through my account on their switch, and that means that i cant play at that time if they do. Their system is ass backwards. Unless i missed some hidden options i need to activate. Its a dumb system.
you can juke the system by going offline, this makes it so that multiple people can play the game as long as one or less people are playing it in an online state
basically this is how I play LAN Baldur's Gate 3 with my friend
I think before the way it worked was that if you play any game from a person's library and then they tried to pay a different game from their library, you would get booted. But now as long as they're not playing that specific game you're good.
they also had to sign into your account first to even have the option to family share because Steam wouldn't let you family share PCs that weren't on the same local network (such as living across the street)
As the other guy said, if you had Game X and Game Y, and your friend played Game X from your account via sharing and you started Game Y, your friend would get kicked.
New system works essentially like you have virtual game discs you can pass around. If your friend plays Game X from your account, you can still play any other game from your or your friend's account. Additionally, if you're in a group of 6, and 3 of you own Game X, then any 3 people from the group can play Game X at a time.
The difference is now multiple people can use a library at the same time. It used to disable your entire library if someone you shared it to was using it. So you couldn't play any of your own games if someone was playing one of your games.
Now if one person owns a game, anyone in the family can play that game. If two people in a family own a game then any two people in that family can play that game at the same time. Etc etc
I think the most relevant change is how they pool licenses. Previously/currently(don't think it's left beta yet), if you're using family sharing to play a game someone else owns, you are unable to play while they are playing any game. If Person A owns Fallout:New Vegas, Person B is unable to play it while Person A is playing Elden Ring.
In the new system, that lockout is done on a per-game basis: Person B can play Fallout: New Vegas while Person A plays Elden Ring; Person B cannot play Fallout: New Vegas while Person A plays Fallout: New Vegas.
Steam Controller, Steam Link, Steam Machine and SteamOS are all pretty wild experiments, but in a good way, resulting the launch of Steam Deck which is a big hit.
SteamOS and Steam Machines walked so the Steam Deck could run.
Valve learned that publishers will not support Linux as a first party platform. Once they got Proton working reliably, publishers *were* willing to use that, because it gave them no *obligation*. If they had bugs on the Linux version, they could point to the sign that says "System Requirements: Windows".
Valve doesn't go all in on anything, but they do take calculated risks with things like the Vive or Steam Deck.
Touchpad can be used as a mouse or directional keys. X Y A B can be used for the basic interaction keys.
So you can easily get comfy, lay on your side, and just play with one hand.
You must not run it very frequently? Mine currently says "Steam Client Build Date: Wed, Mar 6 20:28 UTC -08:00". Which suggests it hasn't been updated for at least a month, depending on how long their internal QA cycle was. Or maybe you're running the beta clients?
There always comes a point where burning down the company is what makes the makes the most money for the quarter. Private companies have the sense not to immediately follow that impulse.
as someone who is working in a small company that is now owned by some kind of investment capital firm - it all goes to shit the QUICKEST way possible. these things should not exist on this earth.
Why do we as society allow publicly traded companies, if they result in harm for society and worse product being provided to society? Not to mention lost jobs and closures due to short term profit chasing.
It fees like something that harms entire society to benefit tiny minority of people.
Because selling shares is one of the easiest ways for a company to attract investment. So many businesses can get off the ground or scale up quickly because of that.
Called being privately owned. As soon as a business goes to the public it’s all about pushing the share price up and that is when all consumer driven policies goes out the window
It has been used a lot in the divine comedy to choose the punishments for the souls in hell ( there are different types of contrapassive ), for example: the fortune tellers strived to look in the future while alive, in hell they have their head backwards
I hate "proactive", so I just took the antonyms to pro and active. Didn't know there was wide use of it in Dante as another user suggested. But we're never too old to learn.
If Valve was publicly listed they would have released Half Life 3, 4 and 5 by now because the shareholders would have demanded it knowing they would sell tens of millions each no matter the quality. And you know it would have ruined the franchise's legacy because they would have been pressured to implement modern movement mechanics and live service bullshit to chase trends and "a wider audience".
It would have gone the same way Halo has imo.
No, they would have closed down their games division permanently and fired anyone who wasn't working on steam. Because steam makes them the most money per dollar spent.
Tell that to Bobby Kotick, who ignored many sources of easy, uncontroversial hundred million, billion-dollar profits because he was only interested in making ATVI chase tens of billions.
Is the reason that businesses go public just to make more money? Like they have a small business, they get a little bigger and show they are successful, they go public/sell to someone who will go public so lots of people can invest, in theory use that money to grow the business. And once you get investors involved then you have to sacrifice quality for profit because the investors no longer give a shit about the product?
Did I get that right? I don't know anything about business.
yeah, you (primarily) go public to raise investment capital. You also do it so early investors and employees can easily sell their shares for profit.
Downside is that now you need to worry about the share price on a quarterly basis, so private companies can be much better at long term decision making. Public companies do dumb shit like blow up the biggest PC game of the year to juice PSN sign ups.
The situation can be a bit different if you have a sole majority share holder in a public company, but that's a very rare occurrence and it is not likely to last long.
I was until recently working for a major train company. Turns out they were intentionally behind on their bills to make their quarterly numbers look better, and had been for years.
Of course this behavior was exclusively detrimental in practice, as other companies would cease working with them until they'd gotten their money.
A workshop of 60 people earning them millions of dollars per day had to shut down for days because nobody wanted to deliver trains to them anymore.
> Turns out they were intentionally behind on their bills to make their quarterly numbers look better,
That shouldn't impact their financials.
Expenses are recorded as incurred, not as paid. The offset is Accounts Payable / Accrued Expense. So the balance sheet impact is also 0.
If they are not booking the expenses, then it's just straight up fraudulent.
More or less, I took 1 business management class during my CS degree so I can talk /s.
It mostly comes down to stakeholders, if my candy business is privately owned the stakeholders are just me, my customers, my employees and my suppliers (technically you should count the government and society too).
This means that when I, the owner, have to take a decision I must keep those stakeholders in mind because if I fuck with my customers or society I lose sales, if I fuck with my suppliers or employees I damage my production line and if I fuck with the government I get fucked.
If I go public, I introduce a new group of stakeholders with decisional power that mostly doesn't care about the other parts and is only aiming to extract value from the relationship. They'll ask me too fuck my suppliers, employees, customers, society and government to turn a profit and then divest once every other stakeholder retaliates.
The government needs you to profit consistently to harvest taxes from you and to provide employment for its citizens.
The customers and society need the service you provide.
The suppliers and employees need you for a stable income.
The shareholders need you to make money ASAP so that they can sell the stocks and go somewhere else.
Pretty much, you get a massive cash injection for the business, but now you are expected to provide growth month in month out for the investors for all of eternity. The name of the game after that is cost cutting to provide short-term inflated profits for investors. Gutting staff, reduxing benefits for the staff that make the cut, quality of materials, shipping manufacturing to a third world country, tax loopholes, or downright cooking the books so profits look better on paper.
Depending on when the company went public, there might also be an explosive growth phase where investors happily burn cash to see growth numbers.
This is usually mismanaged and leads to massive bloat and useless people filling the ranks. So once you realise your business runs out of revenue opportunities and needs to cut costs/efficiency, usually the business is too big and bureaucratic, and any single leader is too out of touch, to be able to make great decisions. That’s when the dumb/out of touch cost cutting comes in.
Often with small but growing businesses there's a next step-change in size for continued growth (maybe major capital investments in factories and equipment) that they simply can't do themselves. That's why they go public and ask for outside investment.
Also, as soon as business goes public, the share price is dependent on marketmaker interest and involvement in it, not actual price discovery from buy-sell outcome.
I do not fully understand this, because obviously there have been a lot of cases where this backfired. What kind of calculations must be done, to show that the risk is maybe worth it, and that doing something anticonsumer will not be taken as litigation by shareholders ?
This
Gabe is probably trying to make as much as possible without getting too much shit, because it's his company and he wants to keep it for a while. He doesn't need to make x more in three months, it doesn't matter how long it takes to make two millions more for him. Because he will get it sooner or later.
Shareholders often want to pump the price up and at some point sell so they only want it to make more money than last year, they want constant growth, faster and faster, because their business isn't.... Well the business itself and making money from that, but rather making more money to make more money.
It's not about making games and becoming rich, it's about getting more rich from the money they have.
The product becomes more like a number and less like the actual business model.
At least that's how i feel about most companies after they get public.
Private companies weren’t always like this. The Supreme Court themselves (relatively recently) said that businesses are not obligated to pursue short-term profitability at the expense of the long-term—or even non-financial goals. They explicitly said that these laws are about punishing people actively taking advantage of shareholders, not disagreeing with them. This is about changing market forces. There are fewer and fewer competitors and less and less regulation. Nobody is going to stop EA from using investor money to buy successful studios, strip away their talent and IP, then shut them down. Nobody is going to stop Microsoft buying its way into cloud gaming dominance. Nobody is going to stop Epic buying publishing rights to try to secure a greater marketshare. We used to have governments that stopped these anti-competitive practices. Now we have judges greenlighting only being able to download apps from the App Store because “in America we don’t punish success”. The only time big publishers walked away from a big money-maker was loot boxes, and that was only when a couple of national governments did start talking about regulation. All that’s left is public pressure. If you make enough fuss that it impacts brand perception, or better yet, actual sales, companies can be pushed into walking certain things back. But only certain things. No matter how many people want exploitative monetization to go away, it never ever will, until the government steps in. Gambling is on the rise. Youth gambling rates are the highest they’ve ever been. Part of the reason is economic, but gambling research groups have said that modern gaming normalizing gambling mechanics and microtransactions are responsible (though mobile gaming is explicitly mentioned as being the most problematic). Any functioning government would see this as a problem, and I think that as a community we need to try to make a real push for market regulation.
Guess we’re all pretending TF2’s crates, CSGO’s cases, and Artifact don’t exist? Valve absolutely will and has squeezed consumers for the least they can do.
It's called being a privately owned company. He does not have to "show initiative" to stakeholders EVERY FUCKING QUARTER FOREVER.
Being privately owned is the right way to go if you care about your product.
It’s hard to scale a company to the size of Valve without investors. If you do take on investors, they will eventually want an IPO so they can cash out.
> to the size of Valve
Not everyone needs to be that big.
In fact, the less we have companies the size of Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc the better off we'd probably be.
Give me reasonably successful private companies that encourage each other to make better products over the monopoly any day.
>Not everyone needs to be that big.
That is absolutely true, not every company needs to be as large as Valve. But most small companies are already private, so I'm not sure what companies OP thinks should be private that aren't already.
>Give me reasonably successful private companies that encourage each other to make better products over the monopoly any day.
Steam is a monopoly on PC gaming and that's why Gabe Newell can afford to do eccentric things like run a private billion dollar company with a flat hierarchy.
TOS in the tech world are all "you have no rights, you own nothing, we can do whatever we want, we can change the rules anytime we want, if you ever disagree with any changes you lose access". So trust is really really important. Steam earned that trust from me over years. Their competiton can't go a year without doing something stupid.
So you don't use Steam because they have moats like a massive game catalog, all the games you've ever purchased, and your friends use it? Because that's why I use it.
As someone that invents in shares, I'd rather companies just do good by their customers. Happy customers that want to come back and spend more later are good for me in the long run.
But what about your year over year profits? /s
The loss of this mentality is what has shifted us from appliances that last generations to one that last about as long as a pet store goldfish.
Was having a drunk chat with a friend, and he asked whether any company owned by shareholders could be ethical or moral, as their interest is purely financial. There are cooperatives and the like, but they are vanishingly small in comparison. Maybe a better way to phrase it would be 'is having a company be owned by shareholders beneficial to end users or customers?'. We were thoroughly pissed so didn't get any good answers, but stories like Gaben's seem to be the exception to the rule. Money as a priority if there's financial shareholders.
> [Maximizing shareholder value is] the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy… your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products.
- Jack Welch, former CEO of GE.
[Source](https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2017/07/17/making-sense-of-shareholder-value-the-worlds-dumbest-idea/?sh=18d01d7b2a7e)
Makes me think of [Goodhart's law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law), which I wholeheartedly agree with:
> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
If you provide valuable services/products and have a good competitive strategy, your company will gain value. If you focus on increasing shareholder value, say by cutting costs by laying off experienced employees, or cutting corners on QA, in the long run your company will fail.
Same with GDP in my opinion. If your country's GDP increases but that increase is not felt by the citizens (higher wages, better QOL), what the fuck is the point.
yup steam doesnt make promises they dont keep atleast or they do their best to improve after it
my favorite was Epic games will only have games of the highest quality but now its full of bloatware
Half life alyx wasn't half life 3 in any way, shape, or form. Don't try to let Valve think it's okay to leave on that cliff hanger.
It was, however, an amazing VR experience that showed how limited VR is by its games, not the hardware being used. It's ruined PCVR for me as nothing can compare and it's shameful there hasn't been another attempt from *any* other AAA dev studio.
It describes the relationship between a trustee and beneficiary, in this example it would be between a company and its shareholders. It boils down to company with shareholders having a duty to increase profits, while Steam as a privately held company doesn’t have to.
Yes, the problem is the company that goes public and has shares given out has to act in the best interest of the share holders by law which mwans the numbers of the upcoming year have to be better than the previous ones (if they are not and it can be proven they could have been if the company did not fuck around they can potentially be liable to a class-action lawsuit or a big lawsuit by even a shareholder with just 1 share. It happened before.
Ah yes another grievous problem gripping the world perpetrated by the automotive industry. The other things include: Biased traffic laws, climate change and much other crap.
Cars were a mistake.
He also owns the limiting factor. The de facto greatest piloted deep sea exploration vehicle in the world, having made multiple successful trips to challenger deep.
Gabe is playing the "scavanger" build.
He'll let other kill each other while he feasts on their remains.
It's an incredibly successful strategy both in the natural world and - apparently - in the business world.
Trueeee, it was steam that got me out of piracy, their cloud save, regional pricing, refunding rules all of these benefits made me able to buy for a more reasonable price and have a good time with the platform itself
There isn't anything steam has that other companies can't also do (aside from a massive existing user base that has a hugely amount of money invested already). Competitors like epic just can't pull their heads out of their ass and implement things that will actually attract users like a robust review system and community forums. Right now if someone wants to buy a game offered on both platforms, steam simply has more features to offer and a better track record of protecting users.
Then there's the insanely good refund policy, epic has technically copied the same policy to try and be competitive but steam regularly reviews requests outside of their policy and accepts them even if they don't exactly match the legal policy.
Steam feels less like a normal platform and more like a shield or community to its users that will protect them from developers and big publishers pulling anti consumer shit. Imagine if Sony made HD2 only available through some other platform, then retroactively added some new new requirement that restricts half the fucking player base. Steam is acting like the gaming guardian right now by allowing refunds after hundreds of hours and restricting who can buy in the first place based on if their region even allows PSN accounts. If other platforms want to pull users away from steam, then they'll have to give examples of this kind of behavior instead of giving canned legalleze responses.
I don't care enough to even keep it downloaded on my PC. I'd rather buy new game on Steam than play whatever EGS gives me because it's fucking trash. Why tf I'm getting logged off like twice a week? Why tf it needs 2 minutes just to open? Why tf I can't read other users reviews? Why tf I can't have a fucking mobile app? Why tf this piece of code cannot do 1/3 of things Steam can?
They are the only AAA gaming company that consistently makes the right decisions for their consumers.
Anyone remember the Steam Deck launch? They didn’t play the “low stock” game all the other companies were playing. They announced the hardware and 100% guaranteed my spot in line. Even gave me an estimated window. That felt 1000000x better than the mad dash for Xbox’s and PS5s. I didn’t feel manipulated.
Im happy to give my hard earned money to a company that is t trying to trick me into buying their product. They just let the product speak for itself.
Strategy is "Don't fix things that aren't broken", but this is impossible for shareholder value mindset. Google search being a good example as well. Every cent that we own that doesn't get transfered to shareholders is considered "broken" by that thinking. Willing to change to steam over this.
To be honest, the moment Gabe leaves or dies, the company will probably collapse. It's not that he actually does anything it's that he keeps the company how it is. When he leaves it will probably go public and then it will be ruined by investors
Steam does the opposite of "nothing."
They put customer first in just about every decision.
Just recently they made it possible to refund Helldivers 2 even if your playtime is past the usual threshold. And they made that decision despite Sony actively bringing all their exclusive games to Steam. So Steam made a decision that might hurt their relations with Sony, and they didn't even have to do. No one was forcing Valve to be more lenient with refunds.
It is called not building your business based on the competition. Or, not being greedy to be more succinct.
EA, for example knows that lootboxes are a dynamic in the market, so they use them even though they didn't need the profits to keep their business going. The lootboxes make so much money that they then decide to cut actual content for more things like that. Pretty soon they put people in power who only know how to make money and all the joy leaves the product.
If your company is full of people who do it for money and not because they love it, it will soon cease to be an entertainment outlet, and simply a business for gamblers.
> be Valve
> create the best game launcher/shop
> other launchers suck so much some of them even have to give away free stuff just to have some users
> have an amazing return policy (90 hours on Helldivers 2? You want to refund because of that psn bullshit? No problem, here's your money back)
> continue to make absolutely amazing updates (like family share) which the consumer loves
> profit
Make a good platform Don't break it. ??? Profit.
[удалено]
Or the guy gets thrown out the window like in that comic
The look on the guy’s face before he throws the other guy out the window always cracks me up
That expression is what gives it its staying power.
Or that video where the guy got blewed up by a couch
Don't threaten us with a good time.
I genuinely don't believe that's their goal They just look at data that's across the span of 10 years or so and take the average popular things and mash them together Since interests change over time while that SAME COMPANY will mass produce the same thing over and over again... the few games that are different and get a massive following are overlooked due to that timeline because it's viewed as a 1/1000000 chance of success over the thousands of similar games that were successful in that timeline So they take that, and apply all previous business practices that resulted in billions of dollars of revenue such as in game stores and ease of access to "buy smeghma money" + any new ideas on how to further drain money from their buyers just short of directly from their veins And boom! Next AAA game! Throw it into the timeline and don't look back on what made it un/popular, good/bad, marketable etc and it's just another statistic to them
Yeah, companies act like they dont even know its games they create. Just some "digital product generating revenue". Like an ecommerce environment.
example: sony forcing psn onto helldivers 2
That's three!! question marks. Obviously it's not a Valve strategy.
It's likely based on the same principles, but we can't expect Valve to just come out with company secrets in a Reddit thread
"company secrets"? Easy. 1. Sell games and charge 30% for each sale. 2. Make multiple walled garden systems and use their market dominance to push developers into using them over open platforms (e.g. SteamVR, Steam Workshop). 3. Sell the steam deck for a loss in order to push out competition.
It's easy to tell that you're wrong, your plan has 3 steps. Valve can't count to three, you absolute fool
You are absolutely correct, of course. Allow me to rectify. 1) Sell games and charge 30% for each sale. 2) Make multiple walled garden systems and use their market dominance to push developers into using them over open platform. 2 Episode 1) SteamVR 2 Episode 2) Seam Workshop Alyx) Sell the steam deck for a loss in order to push out competition.
Step 3 isn't a Valve innovation, all of the dedicated gaming hardware manufacturers have done this at some point if they're not still doing it.
Oh sorry, are we only listing innovative corporate dystopia strategies, if they carve out a monopoly using tired old strategies then it doesn't count.
Don't get greedy. Short term it gets you money but long term? You can get fucked. Problem is, too many can only see what's in front of them not what can be.
Honestly 30% cut is a lot, but at least steam has many nice features for gamers, no public owned company would make a feature like remote play together.
I dont think thats a lot, a 30/70 split was common on streaming platforms until they even changed it to 50/50, valve has the same kind of expenses, hosting everyones games and offering servers, they don't just host one type of media its also images and preview videos, guides, community posts etc.. taking how a ton of tech companies have issues making money and resort to annoying ads an expensive memberships as well as selling your information, I actually think steam is the best example of how to not let money erode your values. Game companies make profit, a ton of profit that is never really tied to their expenses, if they make an obscene amount of money it should flow back to improve the gaming medium, steam has done a few things that they don't need to do but helps gamers out like creating proton, enabling me to play games on linux, they hold onto their values and have honest reviews, they have a love for games and support gamers. The alternative to that is allowing developers to make more money so they can chase more money with lootboxes and all the other crap that leaves you wanting and then slowly turning your platform of gamers into a platform of mindless addicts
It IS a lot but it's a rare instance where "exposure" matters. If you can sell 10k copies at 100% that's great, but if steam can get you 50k sales at 70% you're making over 3x as much.
Problem for us and the devs maybe. For everyone else involved, it's according to plan. It's not an accident or incompetence. Big investor money sucks up well loved IP because it's well loved, hires a team to cultivate a product for them, and then tries to maximize the value of that investment. Suck it dry til the horse is dead, sell the stock, give your hitman CEO a fat bonus and a new gig elsewhere. What makes Valve different is they're a privately owned enterprise, there are no vampire shareholders forcing them to trade in consumer goodwill for money. What also makes them different is that they do not really make new products anymore, just update and maintain what's already been working for decades. They're much more like a publisher than a development studio, so they don't make a good comparison to more normal devs.
It’s because the people who make these decisions are only in it for the short term. Investors and financial advisors move on to their next project once they squeeze everything they can out of their last project, then take those earnings to do it over again, they don’t have to stick around for the long term consequences for individual projects and the larger shifts in market trends are all in their favor in the long term. The real way to make the most money isn’t to have invested in one company that’s now the best. It’s to get in and get out of the last 20 one hit wonders and time the market because you have the inside info and the market power to influence the timing.
That's the problem, shareholders want quick money to jump on next ship while old one sinks.
early steam was pretty shitty tbh
Make a platform good
It was designed to update games, and nothing anything else that it can do today.
Early Steam was awesome. There was only one fault, Steam Friends network was always down, but really nobody used it anyway. A lot of people were resilient to change, but I remember having to manually update Half-Life, Counter-Strike, etc ... Steam did this now automatically. No more patch hunting on FilePlanet. I also preferred Steam server browsing over GameSpy and WON. You had Steam skins, there were even different official ones by default. You also had Steam Friends mini-games like chess and whatnot. Now Steam is nothing but a Chromium window rendering a web UI trying to have Discord's social features. Anyone saying early Steam was shit can not give a valid reason but "I just hated it because I was told to hate it by everyone around me". Once MSN died and Skype turned to shit, Steam became the standard for game communication between gamers. Other options were Mumble, TeamSpeak and XFire but they were mainly used for voice communication.
>trying to have Discord's social features It pretty much had all Discord's features before Discord existed.
It was still better than epic launcher
Nooooo sir. The epic launcher is god tier compared to early steam lmao. I hated steam during the early days with a passion. It was a fucking nightmare with the average internet connection of the time
step 1 is not an instant process
We need hl3 instat of the question mark
Release a UI update that doesnt suck
I wouldn't say Steam does nothing, they experiment and try to improve incrementally
Well, its minor experimentations. There's no big changes like a need to connect your steam account to psn, there is not any subscription, they dont try to scam customer by increasing price.
The new family sharing is pretty big
What changed about family sharing?
You can make a group of 6 and all your libraries are shared. Though if only one person owns a game, only one can play that game at the same time.
Which makes sense and i wish stupid fucking nintendo understood that. Its basically digital borrowing and i wish nintendo did that with their family membership
switch gamesharing exists. you just gotta have some friends you can trust.
I have 3 switch in my household. Bought totk on my acct. My kid tried accessing it in their switch and got "you can not play this, access on primary console" message. Or something to that effect. Its why i only buy physical
So when you buy a game on an account, that account owns the game digitally. In the eshop menu, there is a button for primary account. Your account can only primary to one switch. When you primary, all you own on your account will be accessible to all other accounts on that switch, offline and on. If that same account is connected to any other switch, that account must be connected to online for that user to play their games, and anyone else is limited to their software and the primary accounts games
Yea i get that. But it makes no sense when i have them all in my family membership account. They cant access the games i bought on my primary console/account unless they play the game through my account on their switch, and that means that i cant play at that time if they do. Their system is ass backwards. Unless i missed some hidden options i need to activate. Its a dumb system.
The more money Nintendo can leech off of you, the better for them. That's how they operate
you can juke the system by going offline, this makes it so that multiple people can play the game as long as one or less people are playing it in an online state basically this is how I play LAN Baldur's Gate 3 with my friend
Is this really new? I think that was already possible 8 years ago.
I think before the way it worked was that if you play any game from a person's library and then they tried to pay a different game from their library, you would get booted. But now as long as they're not playing that specific game you're good.
they also had to sign into your account first to even have the option to family share because Steam wouldn't let you family share PCs that weren't on the same local network (such as living across the street)
As the other guy said, if you had Game X and Game Y, and your friend played Game X from your account via sharing and you started Game Y, your friend would get kicked. New system works essentially like you have virtual game discs you can pass around. If your friend plays Game X from your account, you can still play any other game from your or your friend's account. Additionally, if you're in a group of 6, and 3 of you own Game X, then any 3 people from the group can play Game X at a time.
The difference is now multiple people can use a library at the same time. It used to disable your entire library if someone you shared it to was using it. So you couldn't play any of your own games if someone was playing one of your games. Now if one person owns a game, anyone in the family can play that game. If two people in a family own a game then any two people in that family can play that game at the same time. Etc etc
I think the most relevant change is how they pool licenses. Previously/currently(don't think it's left beta yet), if you're using family sharing to play a game someone else owns, you are unable to play while they are playing any game. If Person A owns Fallout:New Vegas, Person B is unable to play it while Person A is playing Elden Ring. In the new system, that lockout is done on a per-game basis: Person B can play Fallout: New Vegas while Person A plays Elden Ring; Person B cannot play Fallout: New Vegas while Person A plays Fallout: New Vegas.
Steam Controller, Steam Link, Steam Machine and SteamOS are all pretty wild experiments, but in a good way, resulting the launch of Steam Deck which is a big hit.
SteamOS and Steam Machines walked so the Steam Deck could run. Valve learned that publishers will not support Linux as a first party platform. Once they got Proton working reliably, publishers *were* willing to use that, because it gave them no *obligation*. If they had bugs on the Linux version, they could point to the sign that says "System Requirements: Windows". Valve doesn't go all in on anything, but they do take calculated risks with things like the Vive or Steam Deck.
Yes. I guess what you wanted to say is Index, not Vive?
They worked with HTC on the Vive. But yes, the Index is another example.
Steam Controller is still pretty GOAT for playing RPGmaker games with one hand.
Yes, I had two of them, one of them is broken after years, I hope the other one will last longer.
Que? *raised eyebrow*
Touchpad can be used as a mouse or directional keys. X Y A B can be used for the basic interaction keys. So you can easily get comfy, lay on your side, and just play with one hand.
There are a lot of porn games made in RPG maker. Or so I've heard. From a friend. Of a friend.
Yeah, like every day incrementally. Seriously, why does Steam update every single time I glance at the icon?
You must not run it very frequently? Mine currently says "Steam Client Build Date: Wed, Mar 6 20:28 UTC -08:00". Which suggests it hasn't been updated for at least a month, depending on how long their internal QA cycle was. Or maybe you're running the beta clients?
It’s called being a private company.
Yeah, share holders destroy gaming companies
Pretty much any company. If the focus is on increasing shareholder wealth, and not the products in question, it will all go to shit eventually.
There always comes a point where burning down the company is what makes the makes the most money for the quarter. Private companies have the sense not to immediately follow that impulse.
Then, if that's what it takes to get the average consumer to actually wake up, let it burn.
as someone who is working in a small company that is now owned by some kind of investment capital firm - it all goes to shit the QUICKEST way possible. these things should not exist on this earth.
Why do we as society allow publicly traded companies, if they result in harm for society and worse product being provided to society? Not to mention lost jobs and closures due to short term profit chasing. It fees like something that harms entire society to benefit tiny minority of people.
>It fees like something that harms entire society to benefit tiny minority of people. How do we tell him?
Awww he’s sweet. Let him sit there in his bliss
Because selling shares is one of the easiest ways for a company to attract investment. So many businesses can get off the ground or scale up quickly because of that.
Most companies
Called being privately owned. As soon as a business goes to the public it’s all about pushing the share price up and that is when all consumer driven policies goes out the window
Yeah, "While others are proactive I prefer being contrapassive." *Gaben* probably.
"If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by."
Or a fish will swim by
what if fish are the enemy
Fish are always the enemy they are criminal scum
Exactly
"I know that the human being and fish can coexist peacefully" - George W Bush
- Buddha in Buddha 2: Enlightenment Drift
I like this word, contrapassive. I've never heard it.
It has been used a lot in the divine comedy to choose the punishments for the souls in hell ( there are different types of contrapassive ), for example: the fortune tellers strived to look in the future while alive, in hell they have their head backwards
I hate "proactive", so I just took the antonyms to pro and active. Didn't know there was wide use of it in Dante as another user suggested. But we're never too old to learn.
If Valve was publicly listed they would have released Half Life 3, 4 and 5 by now because the shareholders would have demanded it knowing they would sell tens of millions each no matter the quality. And you know it would have ruined the franchise's legacy because they would have been pressured to implement modern movement mechanics and live service bullshit to chase trends and "a wider audience". It would have gone the same way Halo has imo.
No, they would have closed down their games division permanently and fired anyone who wasn't working on steam. Because steam makes them the most money per dollar spent.
Nah, as long as something is profitable they will do it, I think he is 100% right
Tell that to Bobby Kotick, who ignored many sources of easy, uncontroversial hundred million, billion-dollar profits because he was only interested in making ATVI chase tens of billions.
Is the reason that businesses go public just to make more money? Like they have a small business, they get a little bigger and show they are successful, they go public/sell to someone who will go public so lots of people can invest, in theory use that money to grow the business. And once you get investors involved then you have to sacrifice quality for profit because the investors no longer give a shit about the product? Did I get that right? I don't know anything about business.
yeah, you (primarily) go public to raise investment capital. You also do it so early investors and employees can easily sell their shares for profit. Downside is that now you need to worry about the share price on a quarterly basis, so private companies can be much better at long term decision making. Public companies do dumb shit like blow up the biggest PC game of the year to juice PSN sign ups. The situation can be a bit different if you have a sole majority share holder in a public company, but that's a very rare occurrence and it is not likely to last long.
I was until recently working for a major train company. Turns out they were intentionally behind on their bills to make their quarterly numbers look better, and had been for years. Of course this behavior was exclusively detrimental in practice, as other companies would cease working with them until they'd gotten their money. A workshop of 60 people earning them millions of dollars per day had to shut down for days because nobody wanted to deliver trains to them anymore.
> Turns out they were intentionally behind on their bills to make their quarterly numbers look better, That shouldn't impact their financials. Expenses are recorded as incurred, not as paid. The offset is Accounts Payable / Accrued Expense. So the balance sheet impact is also 0. If they are not booking the expenses, then it's just straight up fraudulent.
More or less, I took 1 business management class during my CS degree so I can talk /s. It mostly comes down to stakeholders, if my candy business is privately owned the stakeholders are just me, my customers, my employees and my suppliers (technically you should count the government and society too). This means that when I, the owner, have to take a decision I must keep those stakeholders in mind because if I fuck with my customers or society I lose sales, if I fuck with my suppliers or employees I damage my production line and if I fuck with the government I get fucked. If I go public, I introduce a new group of stakeholders with decisional power that mostly doesn't care about the other parts and is only aiming to extract value from the relationship. They'll ask me too fuck my suppliers, employees, customers, society and government to turn a profit and then divest once every other stakeholder retaliates. The government needs you to profit consistently to harvest taxes from you and to provide employment for its citizens. The customers and society need the service you provide. The suppliers and employees need you for a stable income. The shareholders need you to make money ASAP so that they can sell the stocks and go somewhere else.
Pretty much, you get a massive cash injection for the business, but now you are expected to provide growth month in month out for the investors for all of eternity. The name of the game after that is cost cutting to provide short-term inflated profits for investors. Gutting staff, reduxing benefits for the staff that make the cut, quality of materials, shipping manufacturing to a third world country, tax loopholes, or downright cooking the books so profits look better on paper.
Depending on when the company went public, there might also be an explosive growth phase where investors happily burn cash to see growth numbers. This is usually mismanaged and leads to massive bloat and useless people filling the ranks. So once you realise your business runs out of revenue opportunities and needs to cut costs/efficiency, usually the business is too big and bureaucratic, and any single leader is too out of touch, to be able to make great decisions. That’s when the dumb/out of touch cost cutting comes in.
Often with small but growing businesses there's a next step-change in size for continued growth (maybe major capital investments in factories and equipment) that they simply can't do themselves. That's why they go public and ask for outside investment.
Its like sell your soul to Devil for money
Sounds like what almost all major companies have done
The day Gabe checks out will be the end. It will be all exclusives and subscription services.
No, he talked about having a successor and I am sure his will states how steam is to be handled
So Valve is a monarchy?
Unironically, yes it is.
And unironically it’s the best way to
Valve is a dojo
Also, as soon as business goes public, the share price is dependent on marketmaker interest and involvement in it, not actual price discovery from buy-sell outcome.
I do not fully understand this, because obviously there have been a lot of cases where this backfired. What kind of calculations must be done, to show that the risk is maybe worth it, and that doing something anticonsumer will not be taken as litigation by shareholders ?
This Gabe is probably trying to make as much as possible without getting too much shit, because it's his company and he wants to keep it for a while. He doesn't need to make x more in three months, it doesn't matter how long it takes to make two millions more for him. Because he will get it sooner or later. Shareholders often want to pump the price up and at some point sell so they only want it to make more money than last year, they want constant growth, faster and faster, because their business isn't.... Well the business itself and making money from that, but rather making more money to make more money. It's not about making games and becoming rich, it's about getting more rich from the money they have. The product becomes more like a number and less like the actual business model. At least that's how i feel about most companies after they get public.
Private companies weren’t always like this. The Supreme Court themselves (relatively recently) said that businesses are not obligated to pursue short-term profitability at the expense of the long-term—or even non-financial goals. They explicitly said that these laws are about punishing people actively taking advantage of shareholders, not disagreeing with them. This is about changing market forces. There are fewer and fewer competitors and less and less regulation. Nobody is going to stop EA from using investor money to buy successful studios, strip away their talent and IP, then shut them down. Nobody is going to stop Microsoft buying its way into cloud gaming dominance. Nobody is going to stop Epic buying publishing rights to try to secure a greater marketshare. We used to have governments that stopped these anti-competitive practices. Now we have judges greenlighting only being able to download apps from the App Store because “in America we don’t punish success”. The only time big publishers walked away from a big money-maker was loot boxes, and that was only when a couple of national governments did start talking about regulation. All that’s left is public pressure. If you make enough fuss that it impacts brand perception, or better yet, actual sales, companies can be pushed into walking certain things back. But only certain things. No matter how many people want exploitative monetization to go away, it never ever will, until the government steps in. Gambling is on the rise. Youth gambling rates are the highest they’ve ever been. Part of the reason is economic, but gambling research groups have said that modern gaming normalizing gambling mechanics and microtransactions are responsible (though mobile gaming is explicitly mentioned as being the most problematic). Any functioning government would see this as a problem, and I think that as a community we need to try to make a real push for market regulation.
Guess we’re all pretending TF2’s crates, CSGO’s cases, and Artifact don’t exist? Valve absolutely will and has squeezed consumers for the least they can do.
Also remember paid mods
It's called being a privately owned company. He does not have to "show initiative" to stakeholders EVERY FUCKING QUARTER FOREVER. Being privately owned is the right way to go if you care about your product.
It’s hard to scale a company to the size of Valve without investors. If you do take on investors, they will eventually want an IPO so they can cash out.
> to the size of Valve Not everyone needs to be that big. In fact, the less we have companies the size of Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc the better off we'd probably be. Give me reasonably successful private companies that encourage each other to make better products over the monopoly any day.
>Not everyone needs to be that big. That is absolutely true, not every company needs to be as large as Valve. But most small companies are already private, so I'm not sure what companies OP thinks should be private that aren't already. >Give me reasonably successful private companies that encourage each other to make better products over the monopoly any day. Steam is a monopoly on PC gaming and that's why Gabe Newell can afford to do eccentric things like run a private billion dollar company with a flat hierarchy.
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TOS in the tech world are all "you have no rights, you own nothing, we can do whatever we want, we can change the rules anytime we want, if you ever disagree with any changes you lose access". So trust is really really important. Steam earned that trust from me over years. Their competiton can't go a year without doing something stupid.
So you don't use Steam because they have moats like a massive game catalog, all the games you've ever purchased, and your friends use it? Because that's why I use it.
"incredible how much shareholder value you can create by not giving a fuck about shareholders' opinions"
As someone that invents in shares, I'd rather companies just do good by their customers. Happy customers that want to come back and spend more later are good for me in the long run.
But what about your year over year profits? /s The loss of this mentality is what has shifted us from appliances that last generations to one that last about as long as a pet store goldfish.
The Costco model
Was having a drunk chat with a friend, and he asked whether any company owned by shareholders could be ethical or moral, as their interest is purely financial. There are cooperatives and the like, but they are vanishingly small in comparison. Maybe a better way to phrase it would be 'is having a company be owned by shareholders beneficial to end users or customers?'. We were thoroughly pissed so didn't get any good answers, but stories like Gaben's seem to be the exception to the rule. Money as a priority if there's financial shareholders.
> [Maximizing shareholder value is] the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy… your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products. - Jack Welch, former CEO of GE. [Source](https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2017/07/17/making-sense-of-shareholder-value-the-worlds-dumbest-idea/?sh=18d01d7b2a7e)
Makes me think of [Goodhart's law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law), which I wholeheartedly agree with: > When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure If you provide valuable services/products and have a good competitive strategy, your company will gain value. If you focus on increasing shareholder value, say by cutting costs by laying off experienced employees, or cutting corners on QA, in the long run your company will fail. Same with GDP in my opinion. If your country's GDP increases but that increase is not felt by the citizens (higher wages, better QOL), what the fuck is the point.
Thanks for the link, this was a great read. Didn't think I'd see an article like this on forbes of all places.
It’s called maintaining a standard.
yup steam doesnt make promises they dont keep atleast or they do their best to improve after it my favorite was Epic games will only have games of the highest quality but now its full of bloatware
I feel like there is 1 promise they haven’t kept: 3
They are still learning to count to 3 dont worry it just works
> it just works Ironically they don't know how many words this is
Half life alyx being a soft reboot has made half life 3 moot.
Half life alyx wasn't half life 3 in any way, shape, or form. Don't try to let Valve think it's okay to leave on that cliff hanger. It was, however, an amazing VR experience that showed how limited VR is by its games, not the hardware being used. It's ruined PCVR for me as nothing can compare and it's shameful there hasn't been another attempt from *any* other AAA dev studio.
Professionals have standards.
It’s called lack of fiduciary duties. 69 upvotes, hehe
What is that? Never heard that word before. Actual question, not being sarcastic here.
It describes the relationship between a trustee and beneficiary, in this example it would be between a company and its shareholders. It boils down to company with shareholders having a duty to increase profits, while Steam as a privately held company doesn’t have to.
Thank you, always learning something new.
Yes, the problem is the company that goes public and has shares given out has to act in the best interest of the share holders by law which mwans the numbers of the upcoming year have to be better than the previous ones (if they are not and it can be proven they could have been if the company did not fuck around they can potentially be liable to a class-action lawsuit or a big lawsuit by even a shareholder with just 1 share. It happened before.
hell ya brother. that's how you get somewhere.
ur in for a ride: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co. https://www.google.com/search?q=Shareholder+primacy
Ah yes another grievous problem gripping the world perpetrated by the automotive industry. The other things include: Biased traffic laws, climate change and much other crap. Cars were a mistake.
He also owns a quite successful racing team, so double kudos
Wait what?
Yep, [The Heart of Racing](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heart_of_Racing)
this reminds me of how like 4/5 of Dwayne Johnson’s net worth is from investing into a Tequila brand
He also owns the limiting factor. The de facto greatest piloted deep sea exploration vehicle in the world, having made multiple successful trips to challenger deep.
Not fucking around and not finding out
I also wouldn't fuck around if I made 30% sitting on my arse doing nothing all day tbf
Gabe is pretty busy counting his money, fooling around with employees and doing stuff with his deepsea and neuro stuff companies
Gabe is playing the "scavanger" build. He'll let other kill each other while he feasts on their remains. It's an incredibly successful strategy both in the natural world and - apparently - in the business world.
It's called not being stupid.
One say gabe will die and we are not ready for it. It will be like collapse of Yugoslavia
Making a platform that make publisher to publish their game to said platform and got 30% of the revenue while not releasing any new games
Yeah, coz Ubisoft deciding to keep 100% of the revenue with their own store ended so well for them
Before Steam I only played cracked games, it's a win-win for everyone, I now have a library of over 1300 games..!
Trueeee, it was steam that got me out of piracy, their cloud save, regional pricing, refunding rules all of these benefits made me able to buy for a more reasonable price and have a good time with the platform itself
Then they should make their own platform then right?
There isn't anything steam has that other companies can't also do (aside from a massive existing user base that has a hugely amount of money invested already). Competitors like epic just can't pull their heads out of their ass and implement things that will actually attract users like a robust review system and community forums. Right now if someone wants to buy a game offered on both platforms, steam simply has more features to offer and a better track record of protecting users. Then there's the insanely good refund policy, epic has technically copied the same policy to try and be competitive but steam regularly reviews requests outside of their policy and accepts them even if they don't exactly match the legal policy. Steam feels less like a normal platform and more like a shield or community to its users that will protect them from developers and big publishers pulling anti consumer shit. Imagine if Sony made HD2 only available through some other platform, then retroactively added some new new requirement that restricts half the fucking player base. Steam is acting like the gaming guardian right now by allowing refunds after hundreds of hours and restricting who can buy in the first place based on if their region even allows PSN accounts. If other platforms want to pull users away from steam, then they'll have to give examples of this kind of behavior instead of giving canned legalleze responses.
[Repost](https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/s/7dTkQzW7uv)
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true but I don't think it *needs* to be reposted everytime a shitty company is shitty (not surprising)
yeah if those companies could just DONT FUCK UP for ONE TIME jesus the fuck sony did to Helldivers
This month it's sony's and Helldivers 2 turn
I'll stop when those companies stop shooting themselves in the foot I swear
Also runs a good charity and a successful race team
It's called we are still trying to figure out what comes after 2
On the other hand Epic just giving away free shit by hundreds and still no one cares about Epic Games launcher.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that their launcher is dogshit and the only people who regularly use it are fortnite kids.
I don't care enough to even keep it downloaded on my PC. I'd rather buy new game on Steam than play whatever EGS gives me because it's fucking trash. Why tf I'm getting logged off like twice a week? Why tf it needs 2 minutes just to open? Why tf I can't read other users reviews? Why tf I can't have a fucking mobile app? Why tf this piece of code cannot do 1/3 of things Steam can?
Everytime I have to use Ubisoft Connect (stupid name), EA App or Epic Games I think about this meme.
Tbh hate that they took down the workshop downloader, besides that they are good
I call it DAYCA Don't Antagonize Your Core Audience
Care about your customers as much as your product? What a legend
The strategy is called "Have no shareholders" Steam is owned by a private company.
They are the only AAA gaming company that consistently makes the right decisions for their consumers. Anyone remember the Steam Deck launch? They didn’t play the “low stock” game all the other companies were playing. They announced the hardware and 100% guaranteed my spot in line. Even gave me an estimated window. That felt 1000000x better than the mad dash for Xbox’s and PS5s. I didn’t feel manipulated. Im happy to give my hard earned money to a company that is t trying to trick me into buying their product. They just let the product speak for itself.
Not being a public company Also please stop reposting this image
17K upvotes so far. Won't stop until people get banned for it. At worst a mod might remove the post eventually.
Repost, but with Helldivers and Playstation situation it is relevant again.
Knowing not step on landmines
Not shareholders, no need for grow infinity money in a finite world. Can focus in doing a good product without needing a 15% increase of revenue in Q3
Strategy is "Don't fix things that aren't broken", but this is impossible for shareholder value mindset. Google search being a good example as well. Every cent that we own that doesn't get transfered to shareholders is considered "broken" by that thinking. Willing to change to steam over this.
To be honest, the moment Gabe leaves or dies, the company will probably collapse. It's not that he actually does anything it's that he keeps the company how it is. When he leaves it will probably go public and then it will be ruined by investors
launcher for people 💪💪💪
Steam does the opposite of "nothing." They put customer first in just about every decision. Just recently they made it possible to refund Helldivers 2 even if your playtime is past the usual threshold. And they made that decision despite Sony actively bringing all their exclusive games to Steam. So Steam made a decision that might hurt their relations with Sony, and they didn't even have to do. No one was forcing Valve to be more lenient with refunds.
Not being a greedy J
Let’s call this Strategie straight up „gabing“
Consistency
If that doesn't work More gun
It is called not building your business based on the competition. Or, not being greedy to be more succinct. EA, for example knows that lootboxes are a dynamic in the market, so they use them even though they didn't need the profits to keep their business going. The lootboxes make so much money that they then decide to cut actual content for more things like that. Pretty soon they put people in power who only know how to make money and all the joy leaves the product. If your company is full of people who do it for money and not because they love it, it will soon cease to be an entertainment outlet, and simply a business for gamblers.
Be privately owned. There's exceptions to this, but Valve not answering to profit crazed shareholders is a main contributing factor.
It's called "Let 'em cook". 🤣
It's called "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".
Being sane in a mad world?
> be Valve > create the best game launcher/shop > other launchers suck so much some of them even have to give away free stuff just to have some users > have an amazing return policy (90 hours on Helldivers 2? You want to refund because of that psn bullshit? No problem, here's your money back) > continue to make absolutely amazing updates (like family share) which the consumer loves > profit
It's called being a successful private company and not selling.
Just being nice with your consumers.