I remain baffled at how few studios sell their games directly on their own site.
The practical barriers are virtually nonexistent, so I’m assuming there’s some form of capitalist fuckery going on behind the scenes that makes it financially unviable?
santa, gaben has been good this year, give him another boat
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.
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.
Gabe’s strategy is public information at this point. He’s gone on record several times with the information.
The focus is on what gamers want first. Reduce barriers to entry. Simplify the process. That naturally attracts customers and the money making happens as a result.
Every single other company has this reversed.
Have they tried making a better product?
Or scratch that. Have they tried making a product that is as good?
Probably not. Even MS couldn’t do it and they owned the platform. Now Valve push Linux. No other store really runs on that, and certainly not in a way that lets you run games written for Windows.
Epic are closest to being a competitor, and they’re still just a free games platform that will only run until the Fortnite money stops coming in.
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.
Perhaps businesses should have a rule that investors can’t take money out for 10 years. Perhaps then they would actually engage in some long-term strategies.
Do they realize that what they really said was: having shareholders destroys businesses.
Anyone who isn’t head deep in Capitalism understands that, yeah.
shareholders in public companies dont care about the health of the business
I was thinking around the same, more specifically that what they’re saying is that “in the long run companies managed to produce value for shareholders actually produce less value that companies managed to produce value for a single private owner”.
This is actually pretty consistent with what we see in many industries with both kinds of companies and a pretty daming indictment of publicly traded companies as a mechanism for increasing value creation.
Note the exception to the rule is Private equity looking for a place to unload debt and need a fall guy
deleted by creator
Private companies have shareholders as well.
To answer your question. Not right now. The internet sort of fell into a handful of giants that were determined to be the gateways for whatever specific product. Google became the default search engine. Facebook because the default social media. Twitter was the… whatever you want to call that stupid shit.
Valve got pc gaming distribution. It had to happen this way because we got tired of having 23 different login accounts and having to remember your icq 45 digit code to talk to this friend but aim to talk to these 3.
The side effect is it created essentially monopolies and all these companies slid towards evil. Google is literally helping the government make kill bots not. That’s a thing. And anyone pretending valve isn’t a corpo monster with blood on its hands as they made their billions getting an entire generation of children addicted to gambling, you’re out of your mind. Gaben is smart to keep himself basically a positive game meme instead of pulling a musk and revealing to the world you’re a Nazi prick. But they’re all the same.
The reality though? It can all evaporate overnight. Facebook is still used plenty but it’s not the thing the kids are going to. They’ve shifted what they do and care about. The same could happen to valve anytime. Will it be epic that dethrones them? Probably not. But it could happen when the way people game fundamentally changes.
Huh. What an unexpectedly damning indictment of the extraction-oriented enshittification market aka capitalism
It’s not, really. Steam runs under capitalism. They’re just a super outlier in that they’re a billion dollar company that doesn’t have shareholders. They’re basically the wet dream that conservatives are trying to sell you but that just fails 99.9% of the time due to greed.
They’re basically the wet dream that conservatives are trying to sell you but that just fails 99.9% of the time due to greed.
I wonder what is the driving force for capitalism…
Is it the Singular pursiut of profit to enrich oneself?
Is there another wird for that?
Could that be the very motivation the system is build upon?
So the whole system doesnt Work how it is promoted, but is just a facade to keep the status quo and that means the rich stay rich and the poor stay barely not revolting.
So of course No Steam doesnt run under capitalism it crawls under capitalism. It works despite of capitalism.
You’re confused. Steam is an American company and America is (you may have noticed) a capitalist nation.
The point is that you can participate and thrive in capitalism without doing every resource extracting enshittification strategy in the book, which seems to be just Business 101 these days.
Is Steam perfect? Probably not. But most other major players in this space seem to leap at every chance to charge people more while worsening their product and then we get thought pieces wondering how Steam remains popular by virtue of not actively making things worse.
The point is that you can participate and thrive in capitalism without doing every resource extracting enshittification strategy in the book
The point is, that’s still capitalism.
When someone asserts ‘capitalism is intrinsically awful because it’s inseparable from x y and z’ they cannot then praise a successful company doing capitalism without x y or z. You’re supposed to experience this thing called cognitive dissonance. Contradictory ideas should not fit in your brain.
So you would disagree that the driving Factor of capitalism is Profit?
Because that is all i said factually. I said in a tone you dont like, but nonetheless.
What other economic system do you imagine Valve is operating under?
Didn’t say it wasn’t still Capitalism. But there is still nuance between one company doing everything it can to squeeze alout as much ‘potential profit’ possible at the expense of their products and the consumers v one that maintains the quality of product and service a the expense of ‘potential profit’.
Whatever Ism you prefer still requires people to set and maintain a standard. The lack of standards and accountability is how you get the race to the bottom.
You didn’t but the person they replied to did.
So of course No Steam doesnt run under capitalism
So of course No Steam doesnt run under capitalism it crawls under capitalism. It works despite of capitalism.
I really don’t know what you’re trying to say here. These terms are not mutually exclusive. It really just feels like you’re being pedantic.
To be honest to explain this to you is like explaining a fish what is Air or a blind Person the color yellow, so no worries.
Yeah I didn’t think so.
Comrade Gaben’s yacht is the people’s yacht, apparently.
The Point
Whoosh
Your Head
The support and research vessel https://aftermath.site/gabe-newell-steam-valve-yacht/
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.
Steam could be assholes.
They are not.
Best argument for no public trading of the company.
you do not want Gabe Newell answering to a bunch of cunts who want to enshittify for a quick buck.
including getting bought-out by a company that is (microsoft, ea, sony, etc)
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
People don’t want their library split on multiple stores. There’s always going to be a monopoly because of that,
Nah. We could introduce regulation mandating that libraries have to be interoperable.
They already could do it. They just do it in a very shitty way. What do you think EA launcher and Ubisoft game is doing on steam? They NEED their own launcher/store for the game to run when you purchase it FROM STEAM.
Going back to buying physical would put all the indies that can’t afford a publisher out of luck too (I know people like physical, but its important to note)
Netflix was doomed when content that was previously on the platform for removed from the platform.
This was never the case for dvds, but dvds weren’t as profitable…
maybe someone will REA steam and add that.
Gabe will eventually die and the MBA that takes over will see the quick paycheck.
Gabe will probably have it own by all of valve employees, so enshitification would be less likely.
Maybe I’m wrong but hey let me have some hope.
Owned by employees (continuously) vs shares given to current employees are two very different concepts.
But yeah, let us have some hope, otherwise it’s GoG or the high seas.
Any source for his intentions?
I personally think he might go with a trust that way it will still stay in the family
I can imagine a nightmare where they add a monthly subscription for something to get a foot in the door. “Just $1.99 for unlimited cloud saves! Storage isn’t free you’re supporting the devs!”
A lot of people will pay it because “gamers” are, famously, little better than children.
Then it’s downhill from there. More subscriptions. Free service thinned. Popularity gone.
It’s what always happens when that kind of person gets in.
What makes you think that? From what I’ve heard, management is already pretty separated from any of the actual devs at Valve. Orders come down from on high ( they’re not even in the same building) and the rest have to scramble to make it happen with their isolated “flat hierarchy” setup.
Fuck private equity
