The reason why Valve does all this cool shit is because it's a private company and not publicly traded. It owes nothing to no one.
As soon as a company goes public, it owes its shareholders its profits and has an obligation to make as much as possible and use whatever means it can to do so.
Gabe doesn't care. He does what he wants and he knows what his customers want.
This is super true in so many ways. I worked for a private company for several years and about 2 years ago they were bought out by a public company. Things changed real quick lol. The original owners swore they would never sell too. I til they did one day lol
Well, things change. With time I became more wary of people who claim they will "never" or "always" do something. It's not a realistic thing most of the time
Yeah I'd never trust those people.
Definitely, though when they inevitably change their mind, it stings like an implied promise broken.
Don't forget the part where they're able to do that because they basically own the Windows market so pursuing projects that won't see a RoI in the short term is possible for them but wouldn't be for others.
Private companies have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders just the same as public ones. The big difference is that they tend to have far fewer shareholders and they usually all have some personal relationship. So it's less likely to result in a lawsuit.
Gabe apparently owns 50.1% of Valve. I don't know who owns the rest (I'm reading some places that he got divorced, so possibly his ex-wife?), but if they're not happy with how it's being run they could certainly sue. That being said it seems like a money making machine at the moment, so why would you.
I generally avoid liking any companies or brands, but it’s difficult to not appreciate some of the things Valve does.
They do things for their own benefit, but it benefits everyone because they don’t try and lock things down quite like other companies.
Agreed! They make it very difficult to dislike them. I suspect a time will come when they start losing touch, and I've always wondered how much of their general direction is associated with Gabe specifically.
Having seen some of the things Gabe has done, like personally delivering the first Steam Decks and constantly speaking at gaming conferences and doing panels, etc, I think a lot of it is him. I do worry about whether he has a succession plan in place.
I've heard that the company internally functions a lot like a co-op. That's your succession plan right there. Mondragon lights the way.
Well there was the whole dollarization for less wealthy countries that made them a no-fly-zone. A friend of mine was recently telling me about how he bought Deep Rock Galactic for 600 pesos and since the dollarization the same game now equates to 30 thousand pesos.
Yeah, they've got a monopoly and it sucks, but they don't seem to have a desire to push it to the point of drawing attention. I know why Epic does what it does, because they have to compete with the near complete market dominance of Valve. However, it's not like Valve has used their position to increase prices or anything like that. They also invest in doing things that improve the experience rather than just trying to harm the competition.
I don't like the monopoly, but I do appreciate Valve as a company.
I keep seeing "Monopoly" repeated, but I'm having a hard time understanding the logic.
They haven't bought competitors. They don't do anything to hinder others progress in this market, sometime to the detriment of their customers (see: Steam launches another launcher, to launch the game). They haven't openly shown anything anti-competitive, in fact they have stuck to their guns (30% cut) when others have attempted to compete.
What they have done is cultivate the best platform that continues to evolve, add features, and maintain stability. Consumers continue to choose to use Steam overwhelmingly, but outside of Valve's own games, there is no threat of exclusivity or punishment.
It's the opposite of monopolistic behavior. Any company is free to compete, build their own platform, and offer software. It's expensive, and tricky to get right, but nothing is stopping them, Valve included.
For launchers there's Epic, GoG, Ubisoft, EA, Microsoft Gamepass, R*. If we're talking game sales there's a litany of other websites to purchase games from Humble Bundle, Fanatical, Itch.io, Green Man Gaming.
Players can buy directly from the publisher in most cases. For outside those, there are options of DRM free or whatever Epic supposedly has to offer.
Steam may have a dominant position, but I'm not entirely sure that's a monopoly. If we had no other options? Sure. We have multiple other options. Steam Keys are the most common for a number of the sites, but I'd also consider that none of these launchers have the set of features that Valve offers with theirs.
Does people choosing a better service make it a monopoly? I think if Steam didn't have even 1/3rd of what it offers then the other options would be more widely used. Rather, if the other options put as much effort into the quality of life of their launchers, they'd be more popular.
But personally I also think the Epic-backed Wolffire lawsuit claiming Valve has a monopoly is kind of BS, unless it comes out to be true that Steams market power forced developers to keep games off other stores and keep it on their own. If Valve were forcing its competitors to be shit, then sure it's a monopoly.
Up to this point, it seems to me that Steam has dominated the market because of reliability. The consistent sales, refunds are consistent, the program has a number of uses from communities to guides to per-game control schemes, to little things like the soundtracks of games being in one spot.
Is it a monopoly? Or is it the people's choice?
It's just a shame the competition kinda sucks. Epic is pulling some good moves with all the free games and some really competitive prices but their launcher sucks and GoG have an abysmal launcher while rarely having newer titles because of so many companies holding tight to DRM
Valve doesn't set prices on the store in the first place. They are giving more margin for big sellers now too.
They mainly have a monopoly because everyone else's attempt to compete sucks. I haven't seen any launcher that has half the features or conveniences steam has. Most of them are slower too.
Steam offers actual value. Other launchers just feel like a lazy way to add drm.
I would argue they do many things that are against their own benefit.
I was going to say something to the effect of "I'm thrilled for what they've done for the state of gaming in Linux, even if it is in self interest, but I wish they'd contribute their code upstream. ".
I did a little search and turns out a lot of it is, so that's cool. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Valve-Upstream-Everything-OSS
PC gaming on Microsoft Window's is Xbox gaming. It's baked into the OS and we're a generation away from MS charging is you want a "secure" OS.
Linux + Valve means PC gaming won't be behind a paywall anytime soon.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A talk this week at the Linux Foundation Europe's Open-Source Summit highlighted some of the great and ongoing contributions by Valve and their partners.
FFmpeg is widely-used throughout many industries for video transcoding and in today's many-core world this is a terrific improvement for this key open-source project.
This tool for interacting with the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) is extremely common with server administrators while now its development is in a temporary state of limbo due to GitHub.
This Rust-based version of cp, mv, and other core utilities is reaching closer to parity with the widely-used GNU upstream and becoming capable of taking on more real-world uses.
The Maintainer Of The NVIDIA Open-Source "Nouveau" Linux Kernel Driver Resigns Hours after posting a large patch series for enabling the Nouveau kernel driver to use NVIDIA's GSP for improving the support for RTX 20/30 series hardware and finally enabling accelerated graphics support on RTX 40 "Ada Lovelace" GPUs, the Red Hat maintainer has resigned from his duties.
Rocky Linux Shares How They May Continue To Obtain The RHEL Source Code Following Red Hat's decision earlier this month to limit access to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux source code and that leading to downstreams scrambling to figure out their paths forward to avoid tracking CentOS Stream instead and still aiming to offer 1:1 RHEL compatibility without being restricted by the Red Hat Customer Portal, the Rocky Linux distribution today expressed a few of the ideas they are considering.
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