<is billionaire <owns yatchs and subs People still wiping his ass with their noses?
He hasn’t enshittified anything yet, and it’s looking like he might not ever, which is why people respect him.
There’s valid criticisms, yes, but that meme is dead accurate. I don’t want to imagine what gaming would look like today if someone like EA the same vast influence over the industry instead of Valve.
Imagine if GabeN created some sort of co-op and left Steam to an employee-run board when he died.
That’s what I was going to say. Sure, Gabe might not be that bad, but what happens to Valve and Steam when he’s gone? Are we just hoping the next guy also isn’t evil?
I was pretty pro-Gabe until I saw some video detailing loot crates and how they targeted kids. There really is no such as thing an ethical billionaire.
As far as billionaires go, he’s the least shit of the bunch. No idea what his personal life is like, and I don’t want to know. Every billionaire that makes their personal life public so far has turned out to be a giant cunt.
I think the most cunty public thing he does is collect yachts.
Having even 1 big yatch is cunty but collecting them when people are poor and struggling is cuntyness manifest.
The bar is pretty low for billionaires. He’s not a pedo as far as anyone knows, so that puts him in rare company.
Private company with long-term strategy VS public company chasing short-term profits to pump stock prices for shareholders.
That’s the primary reason I abhor the stock market. It no longer works for the creator/owner or the customers at all. It simply feeds the greed of the wealthy (special call-out to private equity here).
Yeah, the flaw there is that money can flow into and out of the stock market basically instantly, so you always have to manage their expectations to make sure your price doesn’t crash.
You’d think it wouldn’t be that hard for publishers with billions of dollars to hire enough competent devs for enough time to make a halfway decent storefront, especially when they don’t even have to reinvent the wheel on a lot of UX and marketing research that’s already been done for them by Steam existing as long as it’s had.
That none of them have even come close to that is a monument to their incompetence.
Large companies do not generally innovate. Their internal inertia prevents them from successfully creating new things. Also the larger a company gets, the more layers of brainless MBA parasites latch on to suck them dry.
Large companies rely on purchasing innovation by buying up a never ending stream of smaller companies. They then take the ideas/products and launch them to a wider market.
Steam has remained small by rejecting massive buyout offers. This has allowed them to remain innovative.
“Don’t interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.”
Why does this photo looks like he’s doing a porno
His shirt does kinda look like a white bathrobe
You know sometimes I actually straight up FORGET that Steam is run by the same company that created Half-Life?
They:
- identified a gradient of human wants
(Video games exist; I want them on my computer) - Created a vector for that want to be satisfied
(Digital distribution that conveys the games I want to my computer) - Stayed the FUCK OUT OF THE WAY
When you do something well, people don’t notice you’ve done anything at all.
They simply did what everyone else refused to do, get out of their own way.
I think the key was that Steam wasn’t created to make money, but to solve problems they themselves had, like “How do we get new versions of Counter Strike out to all these players?”
Then as Valve wasn’t the only company having these problems, the solution could easily be sold to others.
If the other companies really wanted to crack Steam’s near-monopoly, the solution would be to tackle the problems associated with not having all your games on Steam. Work together on a open-source launcher supporting all stores, similar to GOG Galaxy. First make something useful that tackles an unsolved problem, then you can make money off it when it becomes successful.
Instead they go in just trying to make a buck, and end up just being worse versions of Steam.
That ended up being a bit of a rant, but I’m frustrated at their shortsighted market strategies :p
Oh indeed! And that’s why I love GOG! I actually try to check GOG first just in case I can buy a game I want there before I go through with buying it on steam. I would actually gladly pay MORE for the GOG version because it removes bullshit like DRM!
I used to do the same, but I lost a lot of confidence in GOG after they retroactively restricted their cloud saves to 200 MB.
My hundred-hour Witcher 3 save is exactly the kind of thing I want backed up, but that’s no longer possible. And the very low limit they set, and the urgency with which they started deleting the very data they were expected to keep safe, reeks of a desperation to save money that makes me hesitant to invest more in their ecosystem.
I really want them to succeed though, and I think they have the right idea with Galaxy. Even Epic giving me games for free doesn’t make me actually use their client or store.
But somehow the obvious idea of forming a consortium to develop open standards and implementations for game clients, doesn’t seem like something that will ever happen.
- identified a gradient of human wants
Don’t ask TF2 player how they feel about this meme
TF2 released in 2007
I mean it’s true for TF2 also, overwatch killed itself lol
They did the bare minimum of banning bots so TF2 has been going pretty great recently. I think I’ve encountered 1 or 2 bots in the last 2 weeks and I’m pretty sure those were just blatant cheaters and not actually bots
Ultimately it’s a slow and steady strategy. There goal is long term profitability, not short term gains. In the long term, the best strategy is not to piss off your customers.
The advantage of this is that it can snowball to impressive levels. At least until a exec with more education than brains does a pump and run on it. A mistake steam seems to know to avoid.
I’m not looking forward to what happens to steam post-gaben. I expect a stupid successor to IPO and fuck it all up.
That makes me nervous as well. Hopefully, there are enough people involved to know not to kill the golden goose for a quick buck.
I’m not quite sure they have “done nothing”. They have made a digital storefront that other storefronts strive for, they have help with Linux compatibility with windows only games, have released a few bits of awesome hardware every now and then. I think this is what happens when you are not beholden to shareholders and the mantra “make line go up at all costs”
His plan isn’t based off trying to squeeze blood from stones, it’s to sell some video games. Not a very capitalist mindset, but there you have it.
Valve takes 30% from every sale on Steam, which is quite landlord-like. Although there are much worse practices in the market.
you gotta take into account the insanely good service both devs and players get in exchange for those 30% here is a list
EGS finally has a shopping cart now, so it’s basically equal now, right?
now it just needs to stop sucking
Oh no, a sales platform that takes a cut of revenue.
Valve isn’t a charity, and they provide very good services for what developers pay.
Devs don’t need to host download servers, they don’t need to staff customer service reps, they don’t have to set up banking infrastructure or worry at all about handling payments from hundreds of different banks across hundreds of countries.
It’s not like valve takes 30% and sits on it. They put that money to use.
Setting up an early monopoly while working to undermine brick and mortar stores?
I have a mixed feeling about Gabe and Valve.
While I am insanely grateful for proton (even if it was strategically important for them, they didn’t do it out of kindness of heart), some other stuff disturb me:
- Valve being so lenient on CS2 skin gambling, hurting the young people
- A steam account being un-inheritable, making you defacto a tenant of your games
- The 30% percent cut, stealing money from devs
- Gabe spending his money on multiple mega yachts, like every asshole billionaire, instead of making the world a better place
- Gabe claiming to be a libertarian, like Elon and other pieces of shit
I love Valve for a lot of things but I’ll never forget that they spearheaded some of the most predatory microtransactions in the industry (loot boxes and battle passes) and were happy to help Bethesda try to sell mods until players raised a huge stink.
The 30% percent cut, stealing money from devs
This is a pretty spicy take. Let’s consider two possibilities:
-
Game devs choose to distribute independently, and sell their game for $20. They sell 100,000 copies and make $2 million in revenue, and keep the entire $2 million.
-
Game devs choose to distribute via Steam, promote it with a 50% off sale, it goes to the Steam front page, sells 500,000 copies at only $10 each, for a total $5 million in revenue. Steam takes $1.5 million and the devs take $3.5 million.
In scenario 2 the devs make 75% more than in scenario 1. Did Valve steal from the game devs?
Obviously Valve and the developer collaborated to steal money from the consumers who wouldn’t have bought the game without the promotion.
to make sure: /s
-
Not to mention his insane Porsche collection, yeah he’s just another billionaire
Valve ruined my favourite game (dota) by flooding the game with ridiculous cosmetics that even change particle effects with no way to disable any of this
I didn’t knew about he claiming to be a libertarian. Rothbard must be turning over in his grave.
Here’s the thing - Theoretically we shouldn’t give a shit about his political leanings and we don’t have to, because he and his company deliver a good service. I can privately think he’s another asshole libertarian tech bro whose only guiding principle is “everyone should be able to do what I want, but only some people should have the money to do those things”, but it doesn’t change anything about Steam or Half-Life 3.
But this is a problem right ?
Because the libertarian view of the world DOES have an impact on Steam: they have so much inertia to fight against hate speech and extreme right, they do nothing against gambling, and so on. All under the pretense “free speech” which is so convenient.
IMO this is the view of the modern libertarian: all the money, none of the accountability.
It is a problem, you’re right. We shouldn’t have to rely on people with the motivation to do good. Capitalism is failing because without regulation, it motivates people to fuck each other over for an extra dime.
A steam account being un-inheritable, making you defacto a tenant of your games
Can’t you just give your kids your steam password ? How would they notice ?
Yes you can workaround it. But this is still a society right they forbid you. And who can say that in 2100 they won’t implement a cleanup job that lock all accounts that are over 100 years old ? 🤪
I’m not sure about that either - unless you really want your real name on a Steam account, you just change the password and the payment method and you should be fine, right?
You can’t change the login username. That’s about it. You can change the profile link, profile name, avatar and other cosmetics, and edit payment methods.
- The 30% percent cut, stealing money from devs
Sigh. Here we go again. I’ll just copy one of my older comments about that attitude.
Steam is not a parasitic middle man, it is a collection of services that would have to be provisioned and operated by the developer otherwise. The 30% cut pays for:
- A massive infrastructure to store and deliver the game and its updates, worldwide, and at an acceptable bandwidth that Valve operates
- A storefront that enables monetizing the game
- The audience and discoverability that would not exist otherwise
- The Steam API, achievements, cloud saves
- The client itself, content management, validation, and Linux compatibility tools
- Network and operational security
- Also keep in mind that Steam and its services are operated by experts. A game developer would have to hire the experts or get training.
If the revenue from the cut exceeds the operational costs: it’s called profitability, not theft. The world doesn’t run on good vibes.
Yeah you’re of course right, they are not a charity and shouldn’t have to provide their service for free.
I expressed myself too quickly (the rage!). What I meant is the this cut of 30% is fucking predatory, mafia or middle-age money lender style. You get one third of the rewards of your efforts just for delivering my product? And don’t talk about promotion because this store is now stuffed with too many games for visibility.
You can argue “but this is it the standard rate of the industry”. Well it is predatory everywhere else and I hate Google and Apple as much for it.
A cut of 10% would be more humane. This is something EGS got right, even if I dislike them for many other things (Epic and Tim Sweeney).
You get one third of the rewards of my efforts just for delivering my product
you have not read the comment you responded to.
and forgot or ignored that it often is not the dev who gets most of the money at all but publishers like ea and ubisoft. why should customers act in defense of those companies who actively try and make gaming worse for everyone?
an indie dev paying 30% is expensive but steam is really a premium platform for distributing games. it would be nice if it were cheaper but I don‘t really understand the outrage here
predatory, mafia or middle-age money lender style.
Your words have lots of sentiments, but present no facts. I know that Wolfire and Sweeney are independently throwing a tantrum, and we all hate taxes, but I don’t see public exposés showing game developers who went hungry because they couldn’t afford the 70-30 split.
I’ll also remind you that the EGS (12%) is barely profitable, and operated for years at a loss, only sustained by Fortnite (which used dark patterns to extract money from kids, in case you want to see something actually predatory).
A steam account being un-inheritable, making you defacto a tenant of your games
This is unenforceable under US Law
Well I am European 😂
don’t you guys have better consumer protections?
Maybe, maybe not.
Frankly I don’t even know if this clause can be enforced in Europa. I wanted to point out that we shouldn’t rely on the customer protection laws of each country to address that: this clause shouldn’t exist in the first place.
But to be frank, it most likely doesn’t come from Valve and rather from the games company themselves.
This is why Gabe is the goat
Just my two cents but as others have said, not being publically traded helps a lot. The focus on short term benefits that come with shareholders stops “master plans” when they come with mistakes. Learning from relative failures, like the steam controller and the like, ultimately contributes to major successes like the steam deck. Being able to stay committed to improving the software experience over time, instead of killing the product when it didn’t immediately succeed, is fairly rare in the tech industry. And in all honesty, it would be better if they released a polished profuct, but being committed to it made it a success.
I feel like the pressure to have a majorly successful product day one means that smaller companies can’t innovate the way they want to, so they have to find other ways to produce revenue. Huge companies, like Apple can afford to do both but still stumble, like with the vision pro. Maybe it’ll be a success, but for now its not great and iteration makes it more difficult to maintain the original vision.
eh, kinda think strapping a monitor to your face just isn’t the future movies seem to think it should be
Yeah, Apple was able to fall on their faces with the Lisa but still get to the Macintosh and greatness.
You can either be publicly traded and let greedy shareholders sell things for parts or you can have private ownership and pray to God that they’re benevolent. There has to be another option, surely. Maybe one where Valve becomes employee-owned with a trust/foundation backing it once Gabe dies?
