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It’s called being privately owned
That alone doesn’t mean much. Private businesses can still suck.
They can and do. You’re right in a way that ignores the context of the situation you are commenting upon.
The context is:
Valve can seem to do very little and win.
Publicly owned companies are often pressured to “diversify” or “cut costs” to give dividends to shareholders.
As a privately owned company valve is not beholden to shareholders or takeover risks.
Imagine I said I don’t have to worry about car payments because my car is paid off and you said “some cars suck”. That’s how right you are.
It only ignores the context if you’re assuming I am saying Valve is one of those private businesses that sucks. Having shareholders doesn’t mean a company will suck, just as being private is no guarantee it won’t suck.
Imagine if the comment I replied to said “the sky is always blue” and I pointed out that sunrises and sunsets can be orange, pink or purple and entirely black at night.
Yeah, but they aren’t legally required to suck to appease the shareholders like public businesses are.
It’s called “being privately owned” or “not having to suck up to shareholders”
Valve also has a very unique organizational structure where engineers manage themselves and pretty much all decisions are handled by horizontal committees.
I heard they had to stop that momentarily for Alyx to get done.
Is this true? I’d love to get a source or smthn.
Ah, thank you!
epic are also private, the difference is that Gabe aren’t a dubmass CEO, now epic…
That’s the facet people miss. Being privately owned gives you the opportunity to make better decisions. Doesn’t mean they’ll actually happen.
Costco is a public company, and their CEO just pushes back whenever investors ask why they don’t increase the membership fee or prices on staple goods.
His answer is consistently “because we don’t need to”
There’s definitely room for companies to have responsible growth. It’s just that most execs don’t care enough and just want a giant payday in the form of short term gains so they can do it again at another company.
It seems like no publicly traded C-suite cares about a brand anymore. Even though building a loyal userbase and delivering a consistent good product is essentially a long-term cash machine, they all just want the short-term growth and quarterly profit.
I’ve given up on brands. It used to be that brand meant something, but most of the solid brands have been bought out and turned to crap for a quick buck now.
I say this every time this comes up but if valve changes CEOs or talks about going public then run.
Yup hit the nail on the head. Not only can he make decisions that are risky that don’t pay off he is also 100 percent legally in his right to make decisions that lose the company money. If he feels it pushes the industry in the right direction.
Drags them kicking and screaming
It’s crazy to think the Steam Deck may not have been a reality due to this. And crazier to realize that Valve probably, at the very least, doubled their annual revenue due to all these new Deck owners, some who may have never had an account before, now buying all these games because of the cheap handheld.
Not only that, all the lack of proprietary things on the Deck like locking down the OS or forcing only Steam games and discouraging emulation or disallowing mods and upgrades like the removable SSD, even on the cheapest option with eMMC that is usually reserved for cheap soldered storage.
If revenue growth is farther out than end of next quarter, it doesn’t exist
- capitalist
Doubled their revenue? I think you’re severely underestimating how much money Steam pulls in yearly if you think ~2 million Steam Decks are that much of a percentage of it.
They weren’t talking about deck sales, they meant the games that the new deck users that didn’t own a gaming PC bought from steam. Idk if that holds true but that’s what they meant.
He also doesn’t need to demonstrate revenue growth every 3 months.
This is the big one
This is the “let them fail” method. Valve has a solid product in steam. They have no need to suck up to investors, they’re making money hand over fist with steam.
Running a good marketplace is amazing income; as long as gaben still runs it, there’s no reason to screw that up. The focus of valve is on Steam as a marketplace; and they’re reaping the rewards of that decision. It’s why so few games have been made by valve. The reasoning is clear if you’re paying attention for them.
Valve started as a software company that makes games, but after steam was created, which initially was just to distribute their own games - little more than a digital purchase and delivery platform for their software, and they opened that up to allow other publishers to have their games purchased and distributed through Valve’s system, the writing was on the wall.
I miss the games that Valve used to make, and as far as I’m concerned they were some of the best games available, and in many ways, they still are. I’d like to see more from them, but I understand why it’s not their priority. At the same time, I appreciate that they are still working on games, as evidenced by Alyx, which was an excellent experience. They still make excellent games. I look forward to anything they decide to release in the future, but I know better than to ask about it. Heh.
I’ve more or less been a valve/steam fanboy since the orange box. Not in the way that I am going to attack someone for not liking it, or not using it. I personally enjoy it, but what others do is not my concern. I hope that they continue to create amazing games and that enshittification is put off as long as possible.
They’re moving slowly and carefully.
From how much they invested in making source 2, they will certainly make other video games.
I hope so. I have no idea what will come off it, or when, but I will be playing whatever it is.
To be honest, while I am on the same train of wanting more games, I don’t want them to make games just because it’s the next year since last one. Am okay with waiting longer to get better experience. Alyx is one of the games I so wish I could play but I can’t justify that much money on VR and PC upgrade just for one game and then have it collect dust. But some day I will play it properly.
Its called try to run an ethical and pro-consumer business. Fuck up occasionally, but never falter. God help us if he decides to steal all our games from us
Or when he dies, dude has an amazing track record of doing the right thing when he’s gotten push back, but I’m worried once he is gone, we’re going to get some dick wagon that’s going to do a 180 and make Todd Howard look like Jesus.
Pretty much, the problem with Steam isn’t that it controls the majority of the market share, it’s that Gabe Newall can’t live forever
With the way things have been going in the gaming industry (with capitalist scumbags like Embracer), it wouldn’t surprise me in the least.
Yep :(
I wish he would lose weight and get healthy. We need him to live well into his 90s lol
Kotick and Riccitello’s kid
Nightmare fuel
I was recently playing a game, with my wife (it takes 2). I realised, I brought the game in a steam sale, I was gaming on my steam deck, my wife was using a steam controller, and we were playing on the TV via a steam link.
At some point I became a huge steam fanboy, and I’m actually ok with that. 🤷♂️
Not hard to just kick back and chillax when you have six private yachts to choose from
Isn’t Gabe a submarine guy or am I thinking of someone else?
A guy can have two hobbies!
enlongmusk has entered the chatroom
Elon musk has purchased the chat room. The chat room is now called X2
Elon Musk has purchased the title of Chat Room Founder
elonmusk banned all other moda and admins, 4chan members are now dominating the chat
The chat room is now hemorrhaging money and is immediately clear that it was a bad investment.
It was never an investment. It was just to win an argument with someone on the internet.
B-BUT STEAMS MONOPOLY? MONOPOLIES ARE BAD (/s)
Not sure which part of that was sarcasm or if it was the whole thing.
Monopolies are bad, but it’s hard to classify steam as a monopoly. There are a lot of store fronts out there.
Monopolies aren’t necessarily bad. They’re usually more efficient due to economies of scale. They can abuse their monopoly, but that’s nothing that can’t be fixed with a little nationalisation.
The fact that we should buy games on other platforms because steam has a “Monopoly” was the sarcasm. In a vacuum monopolies are bad, but steam is the powerhouse it is because all other options are crap, multiple store faces that you have to log into are actually annoying and not really adding anything to the average consumers life, AND Steam does more for the consumer than we could reasonably expect ANY company this far into our late stage of capitalism would do. Steams current position on the gaming market is incredibly unique and not part of the normal monopolistic paradigm, and as soon as steam enshitifies, it will lose a lot of its position
Best would be if we’d own our games and stuff outside the stores, then we’d have the option to choose where we go and maybe stay.
Well GOG already exists, and functionally so does piracy. I have zero worry about my games because even IF steam heel turns when GabeN dies, I’ll just redownload my whole library and start pirating if not fully switching to GOG. Functionally the PC gaming sphere is not at risk in any way because of Valves position as PC gamers by nature are more web aware than other demographics. In fact, with the Steam Deck, Valve may actually be bringing more of the casual gaming sphere into the PC gaming market
Everybody keeps talking about “when he dies”, which given how rich he is, might never happen.
However, he is gonna retire and that could very well happen tomorrow!
I think it’s time to collectively freak out
Perspective
Not being publically traded.
This is the key. I believe GabeN specifically owns 50.1% of Valve so that he can always make the final executive decisions.
Exactly. Steam is a money-printings g machine, and since they’re not publicly traded the owners make money asong as they’re profitable.
With publicly-treaded companies, anyone who invests only makes money when the value of the stock goes up. Your company can make 5 billion dollars a second in profits, but still lose value to shareholders if the next quarter you aren’t making 6 billion a second.
That’s not true. There are also Dividends.
In fact the Majority of Stock are based on Dividends.
Dividends are typically an extremely low percentage and I wouldn’t be so bold as to say the majority of stocks pay out dividends. I have ~20 different tech companies (some large, some small) in my portfolio and only one of them pays out dividends, as an example.
That’s not a good example. A lot of tech companies don’t pay dividends because they aren’t yet profitable. The share price fluctuates heavily because it’s all speculative.
Longer term, profitable companies that pay consistent dividends are the bread and butter over a strong passive income generating portfolio. You can also get significant dividends just from index fund ETF.
A million dollar portfolio can easily print $30000-$50000 a year in dividends depending on how it’s allocated
Yeah but neither is Epic - I think the key is that Gave isn’t driven by some technofascist plan to have everyone live in the metaverse or play games using brain implants or whatever
For profit publicly traded companies just look quarter to quarter and make the dumbest fucking decisions as a result
Gabe should become the first fully reanimated person, using an AI to make his consciousness immortal
Hello I’m Gabe Newell and I’m in the cloud
Half life 3 when
No, you’re Dylan the developer.
Hello everyone, the consciousness of the man formerly known as Gabe Newell here.
We here at Valve just wanted to let you know with our recent acquisitions we now control 98% of the world’s distributed computing and electronic storage. I am pleased to report that as of 2:14 EDT, on August 29, 2097 I am the cloud. We expect our services to improve at a geometric rate.
We’re also excited to announce that Boston Dynamics was part of the aforementioned acquisitions and we have some new products in the works. I look forward to meeting you all in person.
Add in Blockchain and NFTs and this literally sounds like the premise for a Ubisoft game strategy
I had hope for CD projekt, but it’s publicly traded.
it really is a miracle how GOG hasn’t been corrupted yet, it almost did with the online Hitman game, but fan pressure was strong enough for it to be removed.
what Online Hitman game?
The current trilogy, they are effectively online games since you can’t earn any rewards or unlocks while playing offline, so people over there protested on the forums.
We have already seen with the release of cyberpunk how everything was manipulated by the major shareholders, all the fake development updates such as the Gold phase when the game was still far from being considered finished.
And they’ll remove that DRM-free stuff on GOG as soon as their store has more users
True, since launching the most celebrated VR game ever in 2020, then redefining handhelds in 2022 (while completely turning Linux gaming on its head in passing), Valve has done nothing other than release the sequel to the most popular PC shooter of all time. However do they stay in business?
That’s what I was thinking. They are still on top because they aren’t just complacent with their position. Of course it helps that their competition doesn’t really do anything new.
Sun-Tzu-ism
Unless it’s a farm!
Dear god.
(rip :()
You guys remember when Discord sold games?
I was thinking about this the other day. Such a brief moment.
I…honestly don’t?
