PC Gaming

Do they realize that what they really said was: having shareholders destroys businesses.

Huh. What an unexpectedly damning indictment of the extraction-oriented enshittification market aka capitalism

Gabe will eventually die and the MBA that takes over will see the quick paycheck.

Shocking, that when a company's real purpose and focus is to make a product for customers, as opposed to making money for the investors, it is better for the customers...

Gabe dying is the major thing I fear in my life... It's the last compamy I know about that's not getting enshitiffied.

These guys are so privileged they think they are entitled to success without innovation.

THERE WAS NOTHING LIKE STEAM AT THE TIME.

If they want what Gabe has they need to do what he did: INNOVATE.

100% hard agree. Not launching an IPO is the single best thing Gaben has ever done. Letting in corporate executives would utterly destroy Valve and run them into the ground to fund their golden parachutes. It's happened time and again. Professional "executives" do not run companies for the benefit of the customer they run them into the ground to make themselves richer. Kudos to Gaben for being intelligent enough to recognize this and keep Valve private.

Steam could be assholes.

They are not.

Best argument for no public trading of the company.

My steam account is 22 years old. I probably have 400+ games on there. I do believe in GOG and try to buy games there where I can, but if I have a choice between the major platforms, I will pretty much always choose steam. I bought a bunch of games on Xbox Live and my PS3 back in the 2000s that I no longer have access to. There's a certain subset of gamers for whom Steam will always be the platform of choice.

Well that's because pretty much all of the competition are terrible.

There hasn't really been much innovation in digital market space since the concept arose. Valve started it and a few other companies over the years of tried, including Microsoft and all have failed.

I think valve succeeded because they weren't trying to make a digital market place, it started out as just a distribution platform so not every decision was about how to make the most money out of the customer. You make the money on the games, not the platform and then you build up from there.

1. Provide a good and cheap service.
2. Improve the service over time with some of the money you make.
3. Make pro-consumer choices knowing full well you can afford it.
4. ???
5. Watch competition repeatedly shoot itself in the crotch.
6. Profit.

It helps that the industry seems to always be inhabited by the greediest, most misanthropic companies on the planet.

You know how it usually is relatively straightforward to create the alternative to something that already exists and make it better, but the network effect is usually the reason why your alternative will fail?
well, with valve you don't just have the network effect, but also trying to replicate everything steam does is a giant undertaking. you'll be looking at several years of work (if you can get a couple dozen employees) just to catch up to where steam is now (or like 5 years ago I guess? :D). and then what? you have a fully functional empty store, congratz.
this is why alternative stores usually just narrowly focus on the store aspect. itch, GOG, and those big publisher launchers like ubi connect, are all basically just ways to buy games without getting valve involved. but their narrow focus also allows them to do something different without having to compete with steam.

I mean obvs there are things valve should improve that most likely aren't gonna happen without serious competition, but at the same time I don't think this is gonna happen unless a benevolent billionaire decides to throw their hat into the ring. sadly, benevolent billionaire is a oxymoron.

People don't want their library split on multiple stores. There's always going to be a monopoly because of that, unless we start having multiple exclusives on different platforms. For videogames it's accentuated by the fact that people want to be able to interact with friends, so they need to be on the same platform. Steam came first and had the best features, so they won.

Music? Spotify is in front of everything else

TV/Movies? This is the exception, as in this case there's a lot of content that can be available on a platform and not the other. Netflix is still first, but if you look at the numbers the gap is lower.

I used to buy everything on gog, now with the steam deck I went back to steam. Yeah I know, I can use gog there too, but using steam is easier for sync etc. So, you see, steam made something amazing, the steam deck, and everybody copied it, but they were still the first.

If gog made a steam deck client with easy management I'd gladly go back to them. They still take a 30% cut but I'm happy to support DRM free games. Itch is also nice but they don't have a lot of games (I do play 99% Indies).

IMHO there are no good or realistic solutions:

• lots of exclusives
• interoperability between stores, like the fediverse (this would actually be really cool)
• everybody sell games directly
• everybody goes back to buy physical

Have they tried making a better product?

Or scratch that. Have they tried making a product that is as good?

Steam is to convenient. I've stopped with trying to get games for cheap anywhere else. Because it's too simple to have them inside our steam library. Updates and Saves files are synced too with steam.

As long as they do what they have been doing, this deal will just go on. And they know it.

Let's hope the plans after Gabe's passing (if he is indeed a mortal human) is the same.

The government could pass a law (GASP!!!) requiring license agreements to be transferable. But capitalists aren't actually interested in free markets, are they?

oblig

Amazing what is possible when you're not beholden to shareholders that only give a shit about quarterly profits at the expense of everything else, including the entire business.

That's why they have been trying to cripple it with other nefarious means under the pretence of "safety".

I do think steam needs competition because a monopolistic marketplace always ends bad, but also fuck epic and their whinging. It just feels like they expected to enter into the digital gaming marketplace landscape and valve would just roll over and give up.

Make. A. Better. Product. you dolts, its that easy. If you want to disrupt valves monopoly in the marketplace, you have to make something disrupting. A storefront that has 10% of the features steam has then trying to snipe developers into exclusive deals by trying to offer them lower rates isnt going to do the trick.

That's an interesting rewording of "If you're a PLC, you can be harpooned at any time". It's almost like investors are useless.

Fuck private equity

They just need to continue to put out a product/service that makes customers feel like they are the priority as opposed to enterprise customers. Very few regular people focused companies these days. Another example would be Costco, which people also love despite being public, which makes them a super unicorn.

It's very rare these days for companies to put focus on regular people for money instead of knowing they can abuse them due to lack og options regular folk have. And the bar is so low that it is enough to have people content.