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.
If you wonder why public companies with billions in revenue can’t make a Steam competitor is because they can’t think long term, being a private company allows Valve to just work on what they want and grow If they need to
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Has that happened yet? I thought it was supposed to have happened by now
It nearly happened, but then we protested and tanked the stock price to fuck Spez for fucking us. Now most of the subs are poorly moderated by mods that don’t care about their community. Content is suffering and revenue is dropping. Spez pissed on his golden goose and we decided to speed the process up so he couldn’t sell before it drowned.
It needs to be viable first, which obviously won’t happen when the management keeps stumbling into PR nightmares weekly.
Exactly this! I dread the day they go public :(
Reportedly Gaben has implemented safeguards to prevent Valve from getting public after his death. So at least we can hope Valve doesn’t go public in our lifetimes.
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Thank you armchair analyst
Google started out the same way. Hopefully this sticks
The advantage atm is that valves privately owned. The moment they go public, be very wary.
That’s the biggest piece, smaller but worth mentioning is they make money off of our purchases directly unlike Google.
LOL Valve is not “starting out”. They are about as old as Google.
Valve opened in the late 90s and is privately owned. Never say never where corporations and capitalism are concerned… But hopefully they wont take the evil google approach this late in the game. I think good will from their customers really sets them apart from competitors like Epic.
Valve didn’t suddenly get big, they’ve been dominating the PC space for many, many years.
And damn near every single Google effort into the games space has failed except for android games, which ride on the enormous platform install. Their latest effort was a joke - stadia was DOA.
I respect valve because they’ve provided indie game devs with the same distribution AAA studios get, they’ve never asked for exclusivity and did tons of uncompensated VR pioneering (remember Abrash and co were Valve before Oculus) and never once tried to ‘own’ vr. And they’re a private company, so that means the decisions - and investments - they’ve made worked out enough to free them of a board dicking shit up.
Keep going, Valve. I don’t like everything they do, but overall they’re a gem in value added.
I’m not one that usually calls for the “Hail Corporate” BS where people lick the boots of big companies. In fact, I typically am very anti-corporate in every way, but Valve is one company I honestly have very little problem giving my money to. They very rarely have any anti-consumer things that crop up and every one to memory they’ve taken feedback and course corrected very rapidly. I’m afraid for the day Gabe Newell dies or retires, though. Whoever takes over Valve is going to have some big shoes to fill.
I’m mad HL2 ended on a cliff hanger and I’m really mad at how they handled TF2. Overall though yeah valve gud.
I think that’s better than how other companies handle game sequels though Just look at the state of the FIFA franchise
Command and Conquer PTSD intensive
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A walking mascot that could, on a whim, fire anyone not complying with his vision.
About the worst criticism I’ve heard is around policies involving refunds (very short but charming games can be played quickly and then refunded) and shitware games clogging up search results (often Unity/Unreal Engine skeleton games with a new logo slapped on).
The first one discourages a subset of indy games, but ones that should be taken seriously.
The second, I think, is more of a problem for reviewers hunting for hidden gems than the public at large. Steam decided long ago to lean into Sturgeon’s Law of letting almost everything go through and let the good stuff rise to the top. The other way to go is a curated list where you’ve already cleared out the garbage, but with the understanding that some hidden gems might be caught, too. If you go for letting through everything, then you should have mechanisms for highlighting quality. Steam is pretty good at that overall, but I see how it could be a problem for reviewers. After all, they’re exactly the people who need to be trolling the depths and finding those hidden gems.
I don’t think most people even notice those skeleton games all over Steam. I would never have seen them if not for J Steph Sterling pointing them out.
Suffice it to say that if these are the biggest problems, they’re doing pretty well.
There is the unregulated gambling market running off Counterstrike and Dota etc items that valve technically doesn’t run, but does facilitate through its community market and does profit from. Probably the biggest problem I have with how the company operates.
That being said, generally I do agree.
Steam is a store.
Why would they try and sell you someone else’s goods?
LMAO.
Amazon is also a store, but they have sponsored listings that get preferential placement. Not technically ads, but very similar idea…
here’s the kicker: amazon sells their own product at the public market owned by amazon, undercutting any other seller on near-exact things.
imagine if valve made knockoffs of every famous game and just redirected every search to them.
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Yeah, isn’t literally everything they have on steam and advertisement?
Only if companies are paying more for what you’re seeing.
The classic example would be loosely related games showing at the top of search results because some paid for them to be sponsored posts. Or something like that
I really hope that Gabe has future-proofed valve. It really is a remarkable treasure and one of the most user-friendly platforms of all time. Especially in these days when we are seeing a corporate takeover of the internet, or realizing that we lost a long time ago when we put all of our eggs in the Google basket.
I could see so much potential for fuckery happening, can you imagine if steam was as fond of kicking people off the platform as Reddit is? Or if games were constantly being curated to make sure they check all the boxes like the YouTube algorithm does? Five Nights at Freddy’s would have never existed if steam played by those rules, same for every other surprise Indie hit
I do not consider steam user friendly
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State your case
Sorry, old post. There’s hidden controls everywhere that just aren’t intuitive.
How do you throttle your downloads? A ton of my games that I know I own are missing from my library - where did they go? How do you get to the store page of a game in your library? If I take a screenshot with steam, where is it? My steam library is showing my games by month. But it was showing them by categories I set for them before. How do I get back to that?
I can do all of these things, but when I try, I might need to search around steam a bit to find it, and I might get stuck entirely and have to ask someone or ask google.
It’s impossible to future-proof. You can’t for the rest of time have good leaders, inevitably someone will come and ruin it.
No but you can carefully vet a successor, in order to buy some time
Even if you carefully get a successor, they can still fuck up and ruin it. Or they just die/decide to move on 2 years in and you’re in similar shit Creek. Or hell, Gaben himself gets dementia and starts making shit decisions.
It’s impossible to control.
Gabes replacement will be the tell all. and as much as i want steam to exist over multiple generations…i dont think it can survive turnover, greed, opportunistic bastards.
I really hope that he is planned out his successor meticulously,
Imagine if it was as Ban Happy as Reddit, Corporate as Youtube, or… owned by Elon Musk
I think this is the difference between private/public companies. They don’t have to deal with the “growth at all costs” mindset that plague public companies.
I think it would be awesome if he turned it into a nonprofit with a healthy endowment. The charter could say that any profits above $X that can’t be invested into improving PC gaming must go to charities that promote indie dev. So the main goal would be to do things like the Steam Deck or build innovative games, and there would be little incentive to screw over customers. It could also be structured like a coop, so if employees didn’t like the CEO’s direction, they could vote to remove them.
That’s what I would do, but I’m obviously not GabeN.
SideQuest VR went the exact opposite direction.
Lol. This is a cute idea but we all know it will go through enshittification with time. You are naive if you believe otherwise.
…Granted you can turn this off, but by default every time you start Steam an ad for a game flies up in your face.
I would also call every single store page on Steam a “sold ad.” Again, granted that it doesn’t seem you can pay to promote your game above anyone else’s and the search seems to be fairly straightforward and functional.
While I do feel there is definitely advertising that happens on Steam, I’m okay with the level of it. I can find products I want, and products I do not want are not mercilessly crammed down my throat.
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all hail Lord GabeN
