Valve seems to be the only company on this capitalist world that actually understands that company profits cannot and should not grow exponentially forever without eventually destroying itself. All other companies don’t know or want to stop the greed ad are constantly pushing for more profits to see until where they can push the greed and milking without losing “too much” costumers. They even weight the amount of costumers lost vs the extra profits to see if its viable to lose those costumers and still profit, like Netflix. Valve does not work like this. Valve grew to a size, and that size is giving them stable and steady profit. And they are holding that size, slowly growing more here and there but nothing big. The biggest thing they did in like 10 years was the Steam Deck and they will not update it with a Deck 2 anytime soon. Valve plays the very slow, but steady profits game. This is how you win as a company. You try to keep yourself on a balance between good profits and good public perspective.
Mark my word, once Gabe pass it’s gonna be very very different. We have very different things to worried about, like climate change, but on software side and tech we shouldn’t rely on monopolies. Valve was kept in that state because all the competition didn’t actually put up a fight worth extra investment. The windows store pushed valve to develop SteamOS and Proton, they also back off on some revenue split policy because of EGS’s deals. (Let’s be honest, not all players care about which launcher they use, as long as they get better deals and can play the game they want.)
And to my experience, Steam’s recent years’ updates to store/client are not something I like as well.
- I don’t like the gamification of sales event etc.
- I don’t like the new unlimited scroll type, they backed off a bit and become like 3 pages long until you hit the top/popular/sales part.
- I also don’t like some of the UI changes(ie the downloads/library mixed together and not separate item)
- I hated the auto start live streaming thing, if there is option to turn off that please let me know.
For EGS,
- their search sucks
- library page sucks, you can’t really organize your free games/purchased games etc.
- auto updates are pretty on par so that’s okay.
- their friends/etc also sucks.(not that I care much but at least it’s far worse than steam one.)
- I like that they adopted Nintendo’s gold coin reward type to encourage consumer to purchase there.
- games from other big publisher usually do require install their clients as well, which sucks. (it’s similar on steam as well.)
I want to finish reading your post but now I’m just too sad about the thought of GabeN dieing
I will say one of the things i don’t like about egs is nothing similar to steamvr, I still highly enjoy my index and want that industry to do well and refuse to invest in a store with no skin in the vr game.
also, I’m finished with windows forever and steam has native Linux support while egs needs a weird combo of wine, bottles, and lutris to be able to achieve something somewhat similar
that’s right, Linux also have a worrisome spot as shown by RedHat, you can gain sort of dominating position and cut off the older GPL source access. And it would be very dangerous to have some popular distro slowly acquired and then merged into a single one. I am not active Linux user at home but like you I would probably peace out if Windows goes subscription model. (they current pricing I’d still willing to spend a couple hundred and let the OS updated for 10+ years. (windows 10 almost 10 years. )
Is Google destroying itself? Facebook? Amazon?
No dude. These companies are several decades old and continue to make money hand over fist by exploiting their customers. They do this shit because it makes them a fuckton of money, because their users have no fucking principles or backbone and just lick boots every time they’re stepped on.
I am not an optimistic person but literally the only explanation I have for this sort of thing is altruism. That Valve is a company that simply loves its’ community and doesn’t want to exploit their customers. Nothing else makes sense.
I’m not sure it’s entirely accurate to say these companies aren’t destroying themselves though. Are they just going to explode and die all at once? Probably not, but they will likely fade to obscurity like IBM or HP (two powerhouses of the last century). I agree that exploiting customers is how they make money hand over foot (and we just roll over for it) but the point is to make the largest possible short term gains, not to maximize profit. It’s important to maximize short term gains because it makes big shareholders happy, and the shareholders (e.g., the CEO and the board) want to enrich themselves. The issue with optimizing for short term gains is that you miss out on the dividends of long term effort, which is usually significantly greater.
Something I think about occasionally is how it is that a no-name startup beat the likes of Google, MS, Facebook, etc to chatgpt. Chatgpt is the single greatest innovation in search in almost 3 decades. Google’s whole business relies on users needing Google’s search platform to find information. Google gets to place ads here, and that makes up the largest part of their revenue, but chatgpt threatens to upend that whole business. There is the potential for a whole new generation of advertisement technology to be baked into chatgpt that delivers an unprecedented level of ad targeting. In case you need a translation, that is massive $$$$$$$$, because advertisers want their ads to be placed in front of people who will actually buy the product (and they will pay a premium for this!), not the spray and pray strategy you see today.
So yes, in a way, Google and other companies that rely on simply extracting wealth rather than innovating/building wealth risk losing billions of dollars and eventually fading to irrelevance. I really think Facebook has passed the point of no return already in this regard, and has allowed numerous social media sites to steal market share very easily.
Something I think about occasionally is how it is that a no-name startup beat the likes of Google, MS, Facebook, etc to chatgpt.
Which was immediately absorbed by the anti-consumer company MS for several tens of billions of dollars.
I really think Facebook has passed the point of no return already in this regard
How so? Literally half the planet still checks into Facebook on a monthly basis.
has allowed numerous social media sites to steal market share very easily.
They haven’t stolen market share, they’ve created it. Facebook didn’t lose any users and these other platforms still operate with a tiny fraction of Facebook’s users.
Microsoft didn’t “absorb” open ai, they have a partnership where Microsoft pays assloads of money to sustain openai so that Google doesn’t get it. Ironically, this might be considered “long term thinking” but I wonder how long shareholders will tolerate such a hit to the books. There is supposed to be a profit sharing model here eventually (up to a certain point) but Microsoft isn’t getting chatgpt, otherwise bing would have replaced chatgpt. I have to wonder if, by the time chatgpt is profitable, if there will already be better models produced by other groups (maybe even open source), especially given the pace of AI innovation. I would not be surprised if this was a net loss for MS. GPT is amazing but it has numerous drawbacks at the moment. I admit that, if they figure things out quickly, this could be a huge win for them. I would go so far as to say that this is not anti consumer at all and is exactly how the free market is supposed to work.
As for Facebook, the only data you need is that the younger generations think it’s for boomers and don’t use it. I’m a little older and (to your credit) I check in about once a month. I know that meta has a very powerful user data harvesting business (arguably more valuable than Facebook), but Facebook’s user engagement will continue to slide if they can’t capture younger users and keep millennials and gen x users on the platform. This devalues their ability to make money from ads directly, and again, they did this to themselves by destroying their reputation for short term gains. They will eventually become like Yahoo! or AOL, both of which have almost zero brand value.
As for Facebook, the only data you need is that the younger generations think it’s for boomers and don’t use it.
Not but they do very much use Instagram.
Coincidentally, I was just reading a news article about Chipotle doing exactly that - raising prices while losing customers.
Even companies that have seen customers pull back due to the higher prices reported higher sales, because those higher prices offset volume declines.
PepsiCo, for example, reported … sales rose nearly 7% to $23.45 billion. The … company said it increased prices globally by 11% on average… In that time, PepsiCo’s volume fell 2.5%.
Isn’t that just price discovery?
I suppose so, but if everyone does it at once within every market sector it seems to just become inflation.
