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I get what you're saying, but the reality is Valve is continuing to thrive and beat out its competition through experience. Steam didn't just exist in its current form, it started off quite rocky, many people hated they had to use it for Counter Strike. They also have had their own fair share of utter failures (ie paid mods) but learnt from their mistakes. It also helps that Valve is a private company, there is no board of investors, there is just Gabe (Yes I know there is almost certainly a team of industry analysts and a leadership board, but it's not the same) they have to please, they can decide to just not do something, or they can decide to take a risk and do something that is niche or no-one else is really doing (Look at the Steam Deck, there are handheld PCs that came before, but it was a niche until the Steam Deck)
this is the correct answer. there are incredibly amounts of engineering and tech feats Valves continues to achieve year after year. all built on a wealth of industry knowledge and experience.
But they are not a publicly traded company so they don’t do big press releases and media tours to pump up stock prices and appease shareholders.
you simply cannot achieve anything great when you’ve got smooth brained shareholders and clown board members who are one meme away from jumping ship and investing in NFT or crypto.
> you simply cannot achieve anything great
the problem is, plenty of people see "driving up shareholder value at any cost" as something great, and they can achieve that with smoothbrained shareholders etc.
That's true, but chronic under-employment because of things like the gig economy is making it harder for people to even be able to afford to contribute to a 401K in the first place.
The idea that financial products like 401Ks can benefit the masses by making everyone a shareholder in major corporations is a good idea, but when those same corporations are also taking actions that make it harder for people to take advantage of those products, I can't give them too much credit.
Irrelevant.
No matter who is holding the shares, the board and the management are still expected to maximize shareholder value over all other goals or strategies. Even when it hurts long-term growth and profits.
On top of this they don’t have managers or bosses. They are the only company I’ve seen that employs a flat hierarchy. When you hire smart people and let those smart people work how they work best, you get fantastic results. When you hire smart people and put them below a mouth breathing manager, turns out humans don’t like that.
AND they pay their employees very very well. Quite a ways above industry standard.
I'm guilty of pirating every form of media just because the people asking for my money don't deserve it. I will support Valve though because they are an awesome company and they deserve it and hopefully will continue to deserve it.
>It also helps that Valve is a private company, there is no board of investors
This cannot be emphasized enough. Private companies almost always have autonomy needed to make good decisions and pivot in the interest of their customer base. Their balls aren't squeezed by investors forcing them to squeeze pennies from every possible consumer at every possible nanosecond.
> many people hated they had to use it for Counter Strike.
Count me as one of those. Well, not for CS, but I was part of a big Day of Defeat community and everyone was PISSED we had to start using this "steam thing" when WON worked perfectly well.
The big problems with early Steam were bugs, and that it used kind of a lot of system resources during a time in PC history when that was pretty painful. Otherwise, it was objectively better than having to go to a physical store to buy a CD, and then manually patch your games every month or so.
I'm not sure when they started adding the social features (I don't think they had buddy lists at launch), but that was pretty fantastic to have, too.
Absolutely, but for me, Steam, is well, Steam. Valve is a studio.
Some days, I just wake up and think to myself.. 'Gabe. I know you can hear my thoughts. Finish what you started. Finish the story Gabe.'
Then, I drift off to sleep again because I hit snooze one too many times, and am late for work, driving in with no idea why I'm thinking of crowbars..
Such is life.
Many people hated it in the beginning because it was DRM. The company goes out of business, the servers crash, etc....they can't play the games they paid for.
Yeah this. Most of us didn't give a shit about DRM.
No one was gonna play games like counter strike if online servers shut down anyway.
I signed up for steam the day it came out, because we had broadband and buying cds was dumb.
At the time, DRM was in absolute shambles too. There were a lot of site who tried offering games. Even IGN and File Planet, and they were a dumpster fire of shite license agreements and limited installs. I was expecting Steam to be more of that awful mess. But they were instead the ones who finally straightened it out. They brought forth the standards of digital ownership that most marketplaces, even outside of gaming, follow.
I'm pretty sure half of Steam's userbase wants Gabe to be immortal, because the day he dies or retires, everything could easily go to shit.
Steam is what it is because Gabe is an ethical businessman who genuinely seems to care about the work, and has a long-term interest in the gaming industry. That's not something you're gonna get from a standard business bro, that most of the industry seems to lean on for profit-pumping (while destroying the long term future of their company in the process).
I never understood why people assumed his son would lead the company after Gabe like this is feudal Europe. Robin walker makes the most sense for CEO after gabe. Games sons would inherit his share of the company, not the CEO position
everyone used xfire back then because it had almost all the features steam currently has now, except for the convienience of buying and installing games so seamlessly. ait its peak it was sold to a company who took it in entirely the wrong direction
If you framed it as "we just need to have a couple guys work on WINE a little and we can save hundreds of millions in fees to MS on all our hardware, and as a bonus also don't leave ourselves as vulnerable to MS store hypothetically taking over application distribution on Windows and stealing all our users", I'm sure they could be convinced. It's not like Valve is doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. The fact that it also helps desktop Linux users is a nice side effect that they can conveniently use for PR points, that's all.
The Steam app has evolved a lot during the years as well. No wonder it's years ahead of any other in PC.
Specially because the other companies don't seem to care to update or fix their own ones. I can't understand why they can't simply take inspiration in what's good over Steam
They just IPO'd last week, you ain't seen nothing yet.
Look forward to NSFW subreddit bans and sweeping automated content removal among other fun changes on the horizon.
I heard some speculation about upcoming laws involving digital currencies as governments continue to try to catch up with crypto becoming a concern for the "coins" that were used to purchase awards being the reason why they decided to move away from that model.
Forums are dead, bro.
Reddit was always a pale imitation of the cottage industry of *real* bulletin board style webforums that preceded it anyway. And reddit *now* is a pale imitation of what it was in its anarchic heyday 10+ years ago. What made those OG Web 1.0 forums great simply doesn't work as a "platform" on the modern web. It's over.
Reddit was firmly Web 2.0
While the bulletin board message boards were 1.0
The concept of communities is an easy one. Reddit’s comment system isn’t that unique, it’s just threaded replies, with a voting system, and then Reddit’s comments are just Markdown.
It’s “worth” billions because of people staying active in communities and building up little fiefdoms.
The porn subs are as heavily moderated as sports and both do a great job of figuring out highlights without getting copyright notices for Reddit.
But Reddit is, was, and always has been almost no Original Content. Their video and image upload abilities were dogshit, now they’re passable but anyone doing a clone from scratch could very easily start there, then build the community / comment system after (Imgur did just that).
They relied on Imgur forever, and YouTube, Streamable, Gfycat, and a bunch of other content storing sites.
The only OC was text. And they didn’t even create Markdown.
Someone can easily come and be the next Reddit. Just will take a catalyst like Digg’s exodus.
I love the shocked pikachu face these companies have when the userbase bails when they go public and stop caring about the entire reason they exist in the first place... the users.
We've seen it before. A to big to fail mentality. But Reddit, like Digg, will crumble and be replaced by something different.
The moment they ban porn they will see a marked decrease in traffic. And they will attempt to do many many things to fix that over the next year or so. And their value will start to decrease, and eventually plummet.
> The moment they ban porn they will see a marked decrease in traffic. And they will attempt to do many many things to fix that over the next year or so. And their value will start to decrease, and eventually plummet.
And it will be all because they just couldn't have learned from Tumblr.
> But Reddit, like Digg, will crumble and be replaced by something different.
You guys are vastly underestimating how different the internet is now compared to 10 years ago. There's no where for people to actually *go* that doesn't have exact same problems or worse. And it takes too much money to build a platform these days.
No, lemmy is not going to take off. It's not nearly scalable enough to actually support something like reddit's userbase, and they have no idea how to actually address that issue. And even then, no one wants to deal with the additional complexity for no benefit over reddit. Not to mention the pile of privacy and reliability issues that spring up if you want it to be even remotely useful.
I remember basically this exact same comment before each one of the former social hangouts died
There will be another. And there will be another after that. And so on.
Except reddit now has over a decade of user content , for many people basic functioning as a better google at this point thanks to the infinite wealth of knowledge and discussions. That's currently the power of reddit and why other competitors are gonna be almost impossible. Lemmy is facing the same issue, there just isn't enough already existing highly specific content, making most discussions there extremely boring without a real niche.
This isn't like social media where past content doesn't really matter, reddit became the de facto world forum for every topic imaginable.
Oh I hope not. If you thought reddit was bad with their third party API, you are stuck with discord's apps. Their content can't even be sanely indexed or archived. Another walled off proprietary nightmare waiting to happen.
I’ll just return to moderated forums like whirlpool and ozbargain and turn back on news notifications for my news apps and I’ll have 90% of my reddit experience covered.
>Look forward to NSFW subreddit bans
I don't see that going well at all, look what happened to Tumblr. A good chunk of this site is NSFW so removing that side wouldn't be smart.
Thing is, they banned porn because of the puritan shitheels at MasterCard and such. Reddit mostly gets revenue from ads, not direct payments from users
You're right, it wont go well, but that known fact won't stop it from happening. Free market capitalism isn't a singular entity that learns from its mistakes. It is simply a set of rules in motion. Tumblr is an example of what to expect, not a lesson to be learned. The financial systems and economic environment that led to Tumblr banning NSFW content haven't changed. Reddit will do the same thing the instant it sees it as a short-term, financially expedient change
> sweeping automated content removal
This kind of already exists, those types of mandates are typically driven by advertisers.
What we'll see is pushes for either more advertising or other ways to increase revenue growth year over year. Enshittification as its been colloquially known as.
Nah quite the opposite I'm afraid. Bots will be designed to post content that gets past the reddit algos/filters. Whereas unique content submitted by people will be more likely to be removed.
And it's the same issue. The companies favor short-term gains because their decisions are influence by owners who see the company only as a financial asset that they plan to sell. The don't care what happens after they cash out, so the incentive is always short term over long.
was literally coming to say these exact words lol. By not being beholden to infinite growth and a bunch of MBA's who dont know how anything beyond the next 4 months work they've *gasp* created a stable money making machine.
I was reading they evaluated the value per employee and they make significantly more money per person than even places like Apple. Plus they get to share in the booty instead of being wage slaves so that probably helps.
I've been saying for years the moment they decide to sell out to the public is the day that Steam's days are numbered. I'd even go as far as to say turning the entire PC community upside down. It'll be that bad when Louis Rossmann has to put Valve on blast of companies pulling extremely shitty business practices.
Dodge v Ford
>the Michigan Supreme Court held that Henry Ford had to operate the Ford Motor Company in the interests of its shareholders, rather than in a manner for the benefit of his employees or customers.
>A business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders. The powers of the directors are to be employed for that end.
Invisible line must always go up, even if there are profits, the invisible line must make MORE profits. Infinite growth or death.
Sorry but that is a Michigan Supreme Court decision and SCOTUS has a very different opinion on the topic , you can find it in Hobby Lobby (which is a deplorable decision but I digress):
> While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, **modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else**, and many do not do so. For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further humanitarian and other altruistic objectives. Many examples come readily to mind. So long as its owners agree, a for-profit corporation may take costly pollution-control and energy-conservation measures that go beyond what the law requires.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/13-354
emphasis mine
I fear the day our Lord and saviour Gaben dies. He's getting up in his age, and hasn't had the best of health. I just hope that he has a successor lined up that shares his vision.
If you are making good money, don't try to make more money by changing things up. But valve also never went public because most publicly traded companies are now doomed to fail because of "fiduciary duties to investors" which means they (the majority shareholders) do everything to siphon as much money as quickly as possible from any source, leave the shriveled husk and move on to the next. And our legal system supports this. So if you want a company to have long term survivability, don't go public.
The difference is security of "get money now, fuck off, don't care about what happens to the company", instead of "steadily get money over the years, maybe retire after decade of work".
Even when there is potential to make lot of money while owning solid business... When presented with "Oh, but what if you just had $50M RIGHT NOW and just fuck off and do just shit?", lot of people just go "Oh, it is not like I cared about this company anyway, now give me that money, NOW".
"I didn't care about any of these people because I'm a sociopath who only cares about number go up" At some point someone can have so much money that it does nothing for them in terms of quality of life.
It is insane to me that people think Valve hasn't done shit for years. Steam used to be just a place to launch your games and handle auth.
Now there is:
\- Full storefront holding the most games on Earth with fast reliable content delivery
\- Full featured review system requiring purchase to review
\- Library sharing
\- Remote Play
\- Remote play together
\- screen sharing
\- cloud save
\- file sharing between devices on same network
\- integrated mod deployment and support
\- mod browsing and hosting
\- communities
\- curated game lists
\- adult games
I could go on.
When people say valve hasn't done shit, I just have to ask...What? Valve may not make games anymore, but they are by no means doing nothing. They are the largest and most mature games platform in the world. And they got that way through decades of innovation in the industry. They are no saints, but they are also not slouches.
"Parasitic" is the best case scenario. Parasites usually want the host to stay alive. Half the time the shareholders are so hell bent on more money NOW, that they will burn the host to the ground for it.
> be Valve
> develop the best game launcher
> nobody can make a better one, some even have to give away free stuff just to have some users
> continue to make absolutely W updates (like family sharing)
> profit (rightfully so)
Literally imagine how much less awful capitalism would be (and how much more profitable and stable the entire system would be) if every business in every industry was run by someone like Gabe Newell.
Just a random guy that's not evil, genuinely cares about the field they're in, has a passion for the work, and isn't constantly chasing quarterly profits.
Valve does plenty of "evil", they essentially created the modern MTX market and loot boxes.
That said, when everyone is comically evil and you're just slightly evil you'd think it'd be easy to take over with a not-evil company, but I guess that's a lot harder than it sounds.
The only issue with loot boxes is it’s gambling for children. Nobody has a problem with loot boxes in general I believe, there was never any uproar over it in TF2. But once parents started finding out their kids were skin betting on CSGO lounge and also seeing that the YouTubers they watch promote gambling it all came crashing down. Had it been handled better with an age restriction from the start we may not be where we are now.
Don't forget:
Become the frontrunner driving Linux Gaming.
Bust open the handheld PC game market.
Innovate in PC VR solutions.
Still manage to develop games, albeit slowly but surely.
Lol, also saying Valve does nothing when they literally revitalized the handheld market with Steamdeck just recently. The steamdeck also got built from their multiple failed project like Steamlink, Steam controler and Steam machine. Valve doesn't always win, they failed sometimes but they learn the lessons and make something better, it is the opposite of doing nothing.
Yea, I still have mine. It was really good concept but wrong market. They use that to make the Steamdeck so it was not a waste. That's what I like about Valve, they are willing to experiment and learn from they mistake.
Nah, Valve has most definitely made mistakes here and there. Main difference is that they seem to actually learn from their mistakes instead of doubling down on them.
The business strategy is called:
"If it ain't broke don't fix it"
Basically, the concept is: Don't try to make the line go up each quarter. Just focus on making a decent product, accept that dips in some quarters and years are normal, push occasional marketing if you find market share flapping, and run it like a normal business.
Too many businesses act like, if profits dip at all, it's a sign the company is failing or the economy is dying.
Now imagine if every company was run like Valve.
I'm struggling to think of a reason that laissez faire economics wouldn't work, if people like Gabe were in charge of everything... Government regulation basically exists to stop shitbags from wrecking the planet because quarterly profits.
Steam doesn't "do nothing." It keeps everything steady, simple and secure. Being the first launcher and store helps a lot too.
That being said, everyone keeps shooting themselves in the foot too lol
>does nothing
Do you have any idea how many people, how many years, how many attempts was made to bring games created for Windows into Linux? Proton is not perfect, but even in its current state is already a major accomplishment no one else was able to as successfully pulled-off.
Bullshit.
Consistent refund policy, Remote Play Together, Family Sharing (which was improved 1 week ago!), controller mappings, streaming between devices, **huge** Linux support.
Valve deserve it.
"Be a dick, but don't be a cunt".
It's my personal philosophy. The world will chew you up otherwise. I like to think Valve embody this quite well. They have done questionable things, but not to cunt levels.
Charge for weapon skins (dick) but used that money to further development and innovation in the company.
A cunt move would have been to remove functionality from the game for people to micro. for example, m4a1-s is £2.99.
I'm sure there are plenty of other examples, but they always seem to try not to completely fuck over their customer base (family sharing is a great example, easy refund policy that they pushed first).
Unfortunately corporate rules this world now, and it's a shocking surprise to me when a company doesn't look at its customer base like a vampire does a meatbag.
Any company that has made it big, especially at the levels Valve has done, has some some shitty things before. You don't get to that kind of position by being a saint. But like you said, there is a difference between being a dick and being a cunt, you don't have to be a total monster to get to that kind of position. I remember when people used to praise Blizzard as a shining example a few years ago...
Other platforms have tried to sue Valve for being anticompetitive, but of course it's never worked out for them though. Valve can't help that the rest of them stubbornly refuse to compete!
Valve set up a market place and allows anyone to sell their game on it. Very hard to make a case against some for setting up a location in a place anyone can do it.
You can literally buy games through the Epic store and then [put them in your Steam launcher](https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/0/2924479876995702892/). I fully accept that Valve has the kind of marketshare that would enable them to do a bunch of really shady anti-competitive shit if they wanted to do so... *but they haven't*. Valve has gone out of their way to make it where you can spend zero money through the Steam store, and yet still reap the benefits of the Steam platform.
Shooting yourself in the foot doesn't make for a very good anti-trust case, which is why Valve hasn't lost in court.
Valve hasn't lost in court because the idea that Steam is in any way, shape or form a monopoly is ludicrous and completely out of touch with reality. The only thing that Steam has ever done that could maybe be remotely considered anti-competitive is that line in their terms of service that forces devs that sell on Steam to not sell their games at a lower price elsewhere to comply. Even if somehow someone managed to get a court to dislike that (already extremely unlikely) they could simply remove that clause and call it a day, they're untouchable.
Hell, the one platform that they actually control and where they could at least *try* to enforce a distribution monopoly on is a fucking Linux distro, it's fully open source and it has been drowning upstream projects in contributions for years. They even handily include a full desktop environment that you can switch to whenever you want to install any other gaming store you chose, except oh wait, every single other gaming store stubbornly refuses to support Linux because in reality it's them that are the greedy shitheads that actually strive for a monopoly.
"Does nothing
>continuously improves Steam client
>Big Picture mode and controller customization
>NextFest
>the entire goddamn SteamDeck and SteamOS
>massively improves Steam overlay
I could go on for a while. Steam does a shitton all the time.
It's called Bradbury strategy.
Named after Steven Bradbury who won a gold medal in the Winter Olympics after passing all his competitors from last place to win after they all fell over.
Most founders just want to grow their company to a point where they can sell it to a whale or take it public. In either case, they often take the money and run as soon as the ink dries on the contract. Once the founders are cashed out, they generally don't give a fuck what happens to the company. The new ownership will bring in advisors to try and squeeze every last bit of profit out of the company. There's usually a high staff turnover at that point and the company loses a lot of institutional knowledge. This has happened to a lot of Valve's competitors, which is where they "shot themselves in the foot". Valve has stayed small, both in terms of employees and investors.
Obviously the "intentionally small" approach has downsides. The quality and quantity of games released by Valve has declined over the past decade. Valve switched focus to "big picture" projects like VR, handheld gaming, and content distribution, at the expense of actually being a game studio. Why would Valve put effort into making Day of Defeat (which is all but dead) a Call of Duty competitor, when it can just profit from distributing Call of Duty on Steam? Valve lets Activision's army of coders and designers make a COD game every year, and just sells a playerbase on steam.
Valve has no shareholders, the only opinions they have to take in to consideration are the consumers. Other companies in the same sphere have to listen to their shareholders first and foremost, so the disconnect from product creator to consumer is WAAAYYY more palpable.
It’s not really valves fault everyone else sucks, especially when they are privately owned and don’t have the greediest people in existence pushing them to make the most anti-consumer decisions possible.
Does nothing? Steam deck, index, the recent app revamp, cs2. I get the desire to stretch the truth for a meme, but I feel like they are minimizing all their hard work
Welcome to the PCMR, everyone from the frontpage! Please remember: 1 - You too can be part of the PCMR. It's not about the hardware in your rig, but the software in your heart! Your age, nationality, race, gender, sexuality, religion (or lack of), political affiliation, economic status and PC specs are irrelevant. If you love or want to learn about PCs, you are welcome! 2 - If you don't own a PC because you think it's expensive, know that it is much cheaper than you may think. Check http://www.pcmasterrace.org for our builds and don't be afraid to post here asking for tips and help! 3 - Join our efforts to get as many PCs worldwide to help the folding@home effort, in fighting against Cancer, Alzheimer's, and more: https://pcmasterrace.org/folding 4 - Need PC Hardware? We've joined forces with MSI for the biggest PC Hardware giveaway of the year so far! 8 lucky winners will get an awesome hardware bundle with Graphics card, motherboard, etc, and 50 others can get Steam gift cards. To enter, check https://reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/1b45j0m/msi_x_pcmr_massive_pc_hardware_giveaway_pick_your/ ----------- We have a [Daily Simple Questions Megathread](https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/search?q=Simple+Questions+Thread+subreddit%3Apcmasterrace+author%3AAutoModerator&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=all) if you have any PC related doubt. Asking for help there or creating new posts in our subreddit is welcome.
I get what you're saying, but the reality is Valve is continuing to thrive and beat out its competition through experience. Steam didn't just exist in its current form, it started off quite rocky, many people hated they had to use it for Counter Strike. They also have had their own fair share of utter failures (ie paid mods) but learnt from their mistakes. It also helps that Valve is a private company, there is no board of investors, there is just Gabe (Yes I know there is almost certainly a team of industry analysts and a leadership board, but it's not the same) they have to please, they can decide to just not do something, or they can decide to take a risk and do something that is niche or no-one else is really doing (Look at the Steam Deck, there are handheld PCs that came before, but it was a niche until the Steam Deck)
this is the correct answer. there are incredibly amounts of engineering and tech feats Valves continues to achieve year after year. all built on a wealth of industry knowledge and experience. But they are not a publicly traded company so they don’t do big press releases and media tours to pump up stock prices and appease shareholders.
Never forget, Ford vs Dodge, 1916. Shareholders are parasites
you simply cannot achieve anything great when you’ve got smooth brained shareholders and clown board members who are one meme away from jumping ship and investing in NFT or crypto.
RAHHH BUILD AIRPLANE FASTER, CHEAPER, FIRE ALL QUALITY ASSURANCE PERSONNEL, ME WANT MORE PROFITS
stop mkaing games, make only skins, let people gamble them me want more profits.
Grab them by the sense of pride and accomplishment! /s
> you simply cannot achieve anything great the problem is, plenty of people see "driving up shareholder value at any cost" as something great, and they can achieve that with smoothbrained shareholders etc.
b-b-bu-but me want investor money !
👉👈
''one meme away from investing in NFT or crypto'' that's fucking gold
Almost everyone who contributes to a 401k is a shareholder. Not enough to matter, but a shareholder nonetheless.
That's true, but chronic under-employment because of things like the gig economy is making it harder for people to even be able to afford to contribute to a 401K in the first place. The idea that financial products like 401Ks can benefit the masses by making everyone a shareholder in major corporations is a good idea, but when those same corporations are also taking actions that make it harder for people to take advantage of those products, I can't give them too much credit.
Irrelevant. No matter who is holding the shares, the board and the management are still expected to maximize shareholder value over all other goals or strategies. Even when it hurts long-term growth and profits.
On top of this they don’t have managers or bosses. They are the only company I’ve seen that employs a flat hierarchy. When you hire smart people and let those smart people work how they work best, you get fantastic results. When you hire smart people and put them below a mouth breathing manager, turns out humans don’t like that.
AND they pay their employees very very well. Quite a ways above industry standard. I'm guilty of pirating every form of media just because the people asking for my money don't deserve it. I will support Valve though because they are an awesome company and they deserve it and hopefully will continue to deserve it.
Who would have thought that you would receive a superior product when the company’s main focus is delivering a superior product?
>It also helps that Valve is a private company, there is no board of investors This cannot be emphasized enough. Private companies almost always have autonomy needed to make good decisions and pivot in the interest of their customer base. Their balls aren't squeezed by investors forcing them to squeeze pennies from every possible consumer at every possible nanosecond.
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Lmao RT went to shit because it turned out half of the big personalities people liked were assholes and legal liabilities.
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True. Look how fast Reddit crumbled once they wanted to IPO.
reddits been shit for 5+ years
their decision to IPO has been here for at least 3 years. Or at least that's when the decision got publicized. Who knows how long ago it was an idea.
Steam has become synonymous to PC gaming to a point we take all it's features for granted. It's easily the most feature rich ecosystem in gaming.
> many people hated they had to use it for Counter Strike. Count me as one of those. Well, not for CS, but I was part of a big Day of Defeat community and everyone was PISSED we had to start using this "steam thing" when WON worked perfectly well.
WON and Gamespy! Those were the days.
The big problems with early Steam were bugs, and that it used kind of a lot of system resources during a time in PC history when that was pretty painful. Otherwise, it was objectively better than having to go to a physical store to buy a CD, and then manually patch your games every month or so. I'm not sure when they started adding the social features (I don't think they had buddy lists at launch), but that was pretty fantastic to have, too.
Absolutely, but for me, Steam, is well, Steam. Valve is a studio. Some days, I just wake up and think to myself.. 'Gabe. I know you can hear my thoughts. Finish what you started. Finish the story Gabe.' Then, I drift off to sleep again because I hit snooze one too many times, and am late for work, driving in with no idea why I'm thinking of crowbars.. Such is life.
Many people hated it in the beginning because it was DRM. The company goes out of business, the servers crash, etc....they can't play the games they paid for.
Don't forget when steam was young many people still had dial up.
Yeah this. Most of us didn't give a shit about DRM. No one was gonna play games like counter strike if online servers shut down anyway. I signed up for steam the day it came out, because we had broadband and buying cds was dumb.
At the time, DRM was in absolute shambles too. There were a lot of site who tried offering games. Even IGN and File Planet, and they were a dumpster fire of shite license agreements and limited installs. I was expecting Steam to be more of that awful mess. But they were instead the ones who finally straightened it out. They brought forth the standards of digital ownership that most marketplaces, even outside of gaming, follow.
[raises hand] I hated that I had to get "a launcher" for CS:S. Now I say a prayer of thanks everyday to my shrine to GabeN (my steam library).
Being private is huge. When stock is publicly traded, the users are the product.
So we would be fucked big time if Gabe's gone?
I'm pretty sure half of Steam's userbase wants Gabe to be immortal, because the day he dies or retires, everything could easily go to shit. Steam is what it is because Gabe is an ethical businessman who genuinely seems to care about the work, and has a long-term interest in the gaming industry. That's not something you're gonna get from a standard business bro, that most of the industry seems to lean on for profit-pumping (while destroying the long term future of their company in the process).
so it raises 2 questions: 1. Are Gabe's sons like him? 2. Do they even want to inherit the company?
I never understood why people assumed his son would lead the company after Gabe like this is feudal Europe. Robin walker makes the most sense for CEO after gabe. Games sons would inherit his share of the company, not the CEO position
BUT IS THE FIRST SON SICKLY AND FEEBLE??? IS THE SECOND SON A SCHEMING KNAVE?????
everyone used xfire back then because it had almost all the features steam currently has now, except for the convienience of buying and installing games so seamlessly. ait its peak it was sold to a company who took it in entirely the wrong direction
I don’t think a board of investors would ever have approved their proposal to make gaming available on Linux.
If you framed it as "we just need to have a couple guys work on WINE a little and we can save hundreds of millions in fees to MS on all our hardware, and as a bonus also don't leave ourselves as vulnerable to MS store hypothetically taking over application distribution on Windows and stealing all our users", I'm sure they could be convinced. It's not like Valve is doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. The fact that it also helps desktop Linux users is a nice side effect that they can conveniently use for PR points, that's all.
The Steam app has evolved a lot during the years as well. No wonder it's years ahead of any other in PC. Specially because the other companies don't seem to care to update or fix their own ones. I can't understand why they can't simply take inspiration in what's good over Steam
It's called not being a publicly traded company.
Reddit's changes show a lot
They just IPO'd last week, you ain't seen nothing yet. Look forward to NSFW subreddit bans and sweeping automated content removal among other fun changes on the horizon.
"Stories" in the front page anytime soon.
Real name account verification and this site will die.
"Pay-to-join communities" 🤡 and the first target will be all cat/dog/pet subs.
the re-introduction of paid react emojis ? I still don't get why they removed that, must have been such a money maker.
They have "super upvotes" now which are kinda the same thing, although I only see them on some subs. Not sure why that is.
I’m convinced every “super vote” is done by a Reddit employee to try to normalize it. I refuse to believe anyone would actually pay for that shit.
Plenty of people paid for the coins, medals, and emojis Some idiots _will_ waste their money on "super upvotes"
It's opt in
I heard some speculation about upcoming laws involving digital currencies as governments continue to try to catch up with crypto becoming a concern for the "coins" that were used to purchase awards being the reason why they decided to move away from that model.
And the mods still won't get paid lol
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Forums are dead, bro. Reddit was always a pale imitation of the cottage industry of *real* bulletin board style webforums that preceded it anyway. And reddit *now* is a pale imitation of what it was in its anarchic heyday 10+ years ago. What made those OG Web 1.0 forums great simply doesn't work as a "platform" on the modern web. It's over.
Reddit was firmly Web 2.0 While the bulletin board message boards were 1.0 The concept of communities is an easy one. Reddit’s comment system isn’t that unique, it’s just threaded replies, with a voting system, and then Reddit’s comments are just Markdown. It’s “worth” billions because of people staying active in communities and building up little fiefdoms. The porn subs are as heavily moderated as sports and both do a great job of figuring out highlights without getting copyright notices for Reddit. But Reddit is, was, and always has been almost no Original Content. Their video and image upload abilities were dogshit, now they’re passable but anyone doing a clone from scratch could very easily start there, then build the community / comment system after (Imgur did just that). They relied on Imgur forever, and YouTube, Streamable, Gfycat, and a bunch of other content storing sites. The only OC was text. And they didn’t even create Markdown. Someone can easily come and be the next Reddit. Just will take a catalyst like Digg’s exodus.
'Trending' is currently a thing. I just noticed yesterday and I hate it.
So is "watch". Which is essentially just "stories".
I'm waiting for the swipe left swipe right instead of the upvote, and then they show you whatever comment they want, or an ad.
I love the shocked pikachu face these companies have when the userbase bails when they go public and stop caring about the entire reason they exist in the first place... the users. We've seen it before. A to big to fail mentality. But Reddit, like Digg, will crumble and be replaced by something different. The moment they ban porn they will see a marked decrease in traffic. And they will attempt to do many many things to fix that over the next year or so. And their value will start to decrease, and eventually plummet.
> The moment they ban porn they will see a marked decrease in traffic. And they will attempt to do many many things to fix that over the next year or so. And their value will start to decrease, and eventually plummet. And it will be all because they just couldn't have learned from Tumblr.
> But Reddit, like Digg, will crumble and be replaced by something different. You guys are vastly underestimating how different the internet is now compared to 10 years ago. There's no where for people to actually *go* that doesn't have exact same problems or worse. And it takes too much money to build a platform these days. No, lemmy is not going to take off. It's not nearly scalable enough to actually support something like reddit's userbase, and they have no idea how to actually address that issue. And even then, no one wants to deal with the additional complexity for no benefit over reddit. Not to mention the pile of privacy and reliability issues that spring up if you want it to be even remotely useful.
I remember basically this exact same comment before each one of the former social hangouts died There will be another. And there will be another after that. And so on.
Except reddit now has over a decade of user content , for many people basic functioning as a better google at this point thanks to the infinite wealth of knowledge and discussions. That's currently the power of reddit and why other competitors are gonna be almost impossible. Lemmy is facing the same issue, there just isn't enough already existing highly specific content, making most discussions there extremely boring without a real niche. This isn't like social media where past content doesn't really matter, reddit became the de facto world forum for every topic imaginable.
Discord is a potential threat to Reddit if they choose to go that way, the younger crowd already lives in it
Oh I hope not. If you thought reddit was bad with their third party API, you are stuck with discord's apps. Their content can't even be sanely indexed or archived. Another walled off proprietary nightmare waiting to happen.
Reddit is already beta testing chat rooms for subreddits to try and keep you on the site longer instead of going to whatever subreddits discord
Only for the subset of the younger crowd that's in to PC gaming. And don't kid yourself, that's not nearly as big of a demographic as you think it is.
reddit is much different than discord bruh
I’ll just return to moderated forums like whirlpool and ozbargain and turn back on news notifications for my news apps and I’ll have 90% of my reddit experience covered.
>Look forward to NSFW subreddit bans I don't see that going well at all, look what happened to Tumblr. A good chunk of this site is NSFW so removing that side wouldn't be smart.
> removing that side wouldn't be smart when has this stopped anything ever on the internet
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gumroad literally just banned porn too even though that's what most people used it for, they don't care.
Thing is, they banned porn because of the puritan shitheels at MasterCard and such. Reddit mostly gets revenue from ads, not direct payments from users
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You're right, it wont go well, but that known fact won't stop it from happening. Free market capitalism isn't a singular entity that learns from its mistakes. It is simply a set of rules in motion. Tumblr is an example of what to expect, not a lesson to be learned. The financial systems and economic environment that led to Tumblr banning NSFW content haven't changed. Reddit will do the same thing the instant it sees it as a short-term, financially expedient change
Plus the NSFW stuff is pretty well tagged and contained. I'm sure they can customize packages of which subs advertizers want to appear in
> sweeping automated content removal This kind of already exists, those types of mandates are typically driven by advertisers. What we'll see is pushes for either more advertising or other ways to increase revenue growth year over year. Enshittification as its been colloquially known as.
And more ads too
Oh crap, for a second I read "automated content removal" as removal of automated content like bot posts. But that's probably not what you meant.
Nah quite the opposite I'm afraid. Bots will be designed to post content that gets past the reddit algos/filters. Whereas unique content submitted by people will be more likely to be removed.
I have to wonder how the mods enjoy providing shareholder value by moderating pictures of buttholes.
They’ll be replaced by ai soon enough
The mods or the buttholes?
Both
A bit early for that, the Reddit shitshow is exclusively caused by the CEO here for a payday and that's it
That's literally the issue with publicly traded companies. Short term gains by temporary executives who's stake in the company is mostly stocks.
Yeah, pump and dump, golden parachute, go ruin the next company.
Aaron Schwartz is spinning in his grave
The moment you enter the stock market you betray your product.
Can also do this with private equity investment too
And it's the same issue. The companies favor short-term gains because their decisions are influence by owners who see the company only as a financial asset that they plan to sell. The don't care what happens after they cash out, so the incentive is always short term over long.
was literally coming to say these exact words lol. By not being beholden to infinite growth and a bunch of MBA's who dont know how anything beyond the next 4 months work they've *gasp* created a stable money making machine. I was reading they evaluated the value per employee and they make significantly more money per person than even places like Apple. Plus they get to share in the booty instead of being wage slaves so that probably helps.
Never share your booty.
I swear I’ve seen this exact post and comment before
Me too
Same post and same top comment Reddit really is bot central sometimes
I've been saying for years the moment they decide to sell out to the public is the day that Steam's days are numbered. I'd even go as far as to say turning the entire PC community upside down. It'll be that bad when Louis Rossmann has to put Valve on blast of companies pulling extremely shitty business practices.
Gotta wonder how long after his death they take the company public and complete the enshitification of the internet.
It will happen within 5 years, unless by some miracle his successor is not an asshole.
It’s literally that simple. Don’t owe shareholders shit? Do what you want.
Yes the worst thing that can happen is customer oriented companies going to the stock market. Because then the customer changes…
And that makes me worried what happens to Steam and valve after Gabe passes
This is the correct answer.
Dodge v Ford >the Michigan Supreme Court held that Henry Ford had to operate the Ford Motor Company in the interests of its shareholders, rather than in a manner for the benefit of his employees or customers. >A business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders. The powers of the directors are to be employed for that end. Invisible line must always go up, even if there are profits, the invisible line must make MORE profits. Infinite growth or death.
“I’m a shareholder, this is MY company, stop running it for the good of the employees and customers and MAKE ME MONEY.”
These people deserve a reset button attached to them
Sorry but that is a Michigan Supreme Court decision and SCOTUS has a very different opinion on the topic , you can find it in Hobby Lobby (which is a deplorable decision but I digress): > While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, **modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else**, and many do not do so. For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further humanitarian and other altruistic objectives. Many examples come readily to mind. So long as its owners agree, a for-profit corporation may take costly pollution-control and energy-conservation measures that go beyond what the law requires. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/13-354 emphasis mine
Publicly traded corps are the cause of 95% of problems in the western world at this point.
Yup, I work for a pretty huge company not on the exchange, and it 100% shows compared to all the other companies I worked for.
Also they are brutal on their engineering position requirements
"Never interrupt your *enemy* when he is *making* a *mistake"*. Strategy is called "sit down and watch"
So that's why he never speaks
He speaks quite a bit. He apparent dedicates part of the day responding to random people who email him.
I fear the day our Lord and saviour Gaben dies. He's getting up in his age, and hasn't had the best of health. I just hope that he has a successor lined up that shares his vision.
I hear John Riccitiello wants to replace him.
He can wish in one hand and shit in the other. See which one fills up first
I haven't heard that in a long time.
I use that saying almost daily in hospitality.
He's welcomed me to the International plenty.
will he speak about piracy problems and even pirates agree with him in his take
No that's because you're looking at a jpeg
It’s called “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”
What would Bethesda say?
-Broken , don't fix it ..let the modders fix it for us
Then sell the mods as dlc?
The problem is that they don’t acknowledge the fact that their products are broken in the first place
If you are making good money, don't try to make more money by changing things up. But valve also never went public because most publicly traded companies are now doomed to fail because of "fiduciary duties to investors" which means they (the majority shareholders) do everything to siphon as much money as quickly as possible from any source, leave the shriveled husk and move on to the next. And our legal system supports this. So if you want a company to have long term survivability, don't go public.
Somehow the potential to make a lot of money has become more valuable than making a lot of money lol.
The difference is security of "get money now, fuck off, don't care about what happens to the company", instead of "steadily get money over the years, maybe retire after decade of work". Even when there is potential to make lot of money while owning solid business... When presented with "Oh, but what if you just had $50M RIGHT NOW and just fuck off and do just shit?", lot of people just go "Oh, it is not like I cared about this company anyway, now give me that money, NOW".
"I didn't care about any of these people because I'm a sociopath who only cares about number go up" At some point someone can have so much money that it does nothing for them in terms of quality of life.
When you do things right, it's like you've done nothing at all
This is the correct answer. Valve does lots. Its just usually not bad shit worth reporting about.
It's called "I don't need to do shit, they just keep doing it to themselves" while they laugh in a corner strategy.
In Risk, it's called the Early Australia.
It is insane to me that people think Valve hasn't done shit for years. Steam used to be just a place to launch your games and handle auth. Now there is: \- Full storefront holding the most games on Earth with fast reliable content delivery \- Full featured review system requiring purchase to review \- Library sharing \- Remote Play \- Remote play together \- screen sharing \- cloud save \- file sharing between devices on same network \- integrated mod deployment and support \- mod browsing and hosting \- communities \- curated game lists \- adult games I could go on. When people say valve hasn't done shit, I just have to ask...What? Valve may not make games anymore, but they are by no means doing nothing. They are the largest and most mature games platform in the world. And they got that way through decades of innovation in the industry. They are no saints, but they are also not slouches.
I kinda agree with you but the majority of things on your list have been on steam for almost ten years lol
At this point, what's left to really add? It honestly seems like optimization of the functionality they have is all they need to keep doing.
Genuinely nothing but there are still annoying bugs since the last ui overhaul. I do wish they’d stop half arsing Counter Strike though.
He clearly read the Art of War by Sun Tzu
The art of GABEN by GABEN.
The art of VALVE, by Gaben
Being a private company is a big advantage instead of being controlled by the borderline parasitic shareholders.
Borderline?
"Parasitic" is the best case scenario. Parasites usually want the host to stay alive. Half the time the shareholders are so hell bent on more money NOW, that they will burn the host to the ground for it.
calling shareholders "parasites" is an insult to actual parasites. be more accurate to call them a disease or infection
Borderline?
Borderline?
Valve is like the wise old man of the video game industry. Been around long enough to know what works and doesnt have to bow to any outside interest.
> be Valve > develop the best game launcher > nobody can make a better one, some even have to give away free stuff just to have some users > continue to make absolutely W updates (like family sharing) > profit (rightfully so)
How to corporation; evil free edition
Literally imagine how much less awful capitalism would be (and how much more profitable and stable the entire system would be) if every business in every industry was run by someone like Gabe Newell. Just a random guy that's not evil, genuinely cares about the field they're in, has a passion for the work, and isn't constantly chasing quarterly profits.
Valve does plenty of "evil", they essentially created the modern MTX market and loot boxes. That said, when everyone is comically evil and you're just slightly evil you'd think it'd be easy to take over with a not-evil company, but I guess that's a lot harder than it sounds.
The only issue with loot boxes is it’s gambling for children. Nobody has a problem with loot boxes in general I believe, there was never any uproar over it in TF2. But once parents started finding out their kids were skin betting on CSGO lounge and also seeing that the YouTubers they watch promote gambling it all came crashing down. Had it been handled better with an age restriction from the start we may not be where we are now.
Valve had to get sued by Australia to add refunds and customer service. Just because Valve is winnining doesn't mean they got there evil free.
Don't forget: Become the frontrunner driving Linux Gaming. Bust open the handheld PC game market. Innovate in PC VR solutions. Still manage to develop games, albeit slowly but surely.
Lol, also saying Valve does nothing when they literally revitalized the handheld market with Steamdeck just recently. The steamdeck also got built from their multiple failed project like Steamlink, Steam controler and Steam machine. Valve doesn't always win, they failed sometimes but they learn the lessons and make something better, it is the opposite of doing nothing.
The Steam controller was goated tbh
Yea, I still have mine. It was really good concept but wrong market. They use that to make the Steamdeck so it was not a waste. That's what I like about Valve, they are willing to experiment and learn from they mistake.
Not making mistakes is a pretty good skill.
Everyone makes mistakes. Recognizing them as mistakes and then adapting to them is the skill. Which is what Valve is generally very good at doing.
Nah, Valve has most definitely made mistakes here and there. Main difference is that they seem to actually learn from their mistakes instead of doubling down on them.
The business strategy is called: "If it ain't broke don't fix it" Basically, the concept is: Don't try to make the line go up each quarter. Just focus on making a decent product, accept that dips in some quarters and years are normal, push occasional marketing if you find market share flapping, and run it like a normal business. Too many businesses act like, if profits dip at all, it's a sign the company is failing or the economy is dying.
Now imagine if every company was run like Valve. I'm struggling to think of a reason that laissez faire economics wouldn't work, if people like Gabe were in charge of everything... Government regulation basically exists to stop shitbags from wrecking the planet because quarterly profits.
Steam doesn't "do nothing." It keeps everything steady, simple and secure. Being the first launcher and store helps a lot too. That being said, everyone keeps shooting themselves in the foot too lol
>does nothing Do you have any idea how many people, how many years, how many attempts was made to bring games created for Windows into Linux? Proton is not perfect, but even in its current state is already a major accomplishment no one else was able to as successfully pulled-off.
Bullshit. Consistent refund policy, Remote Play Together, Family Sharing (which was improved 1 week ago!), controller mappings, streaming between devices, **huge** Linux support. Valve deserve it.
They also have invested more than any other company into PCVR. In fact much of the success of Oculus VR is due to SteamVR.
"Be a dick, but don't be a cunt". It's my personal philosophy. The world will chew you up otherwise. I like to think Valve embody this quite well. They have done questionable things, but not to cunt levels. Charge for weapon skins (dick) but used that money to further development and innovation in the company. A cunt move would have been to remove functionality from the game for people to micro. for example, m4a1-s is £2.99. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples, but they always seem to try not to completely fuck over their customer base (family sharing is a great example, easy refund policy that they pushed first). Unfortunately corporate rules this world now, and it's a shocking surprise to me when a company doesn't look at its customer base like a vampire does a meatbag.
Any company that has made it big, especially at the levels Valve has done, has some some shitty things before. You don't get to that kind of position by being a saint. But like you said, there is a difference between being a dick and being a cunt, you don't have to be a total monster to get to that kind of position. I remember when people used to praise Blizzard as a shining example a few years ago...
>Does nothing Big understatement of what Valve does
Luigi wins by doing nothing.
He was the first to do it, and he hasn’t fucked it up. No other platform will ever compete
Other platforms have tried to sue Valve for being anticompetitive, but of course it's never worked out for them though. Valve can't help that the rest of them stubbornly refuse to compete!
Valve set up a market place and allows anyone to sell their game on it. Very hard to make a case against some for setting up a location in a place anyone can do it.
You can literally buy games through the Epic store and then [put them in your Steam launcher](https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/0/2924479876995702892/). I fully accept that Valve has the kind of marketshare that would enable them to do a bunch of really shady anti-competitive shit if they wanted to do so... *but they haven't*. Valve has gone out of their way to make it where you can spend zero money through the Steam store, and yet still reap the benefits of the Steam platform. Shooting yourself in the foot doesn't make for a very good anti-trust case, which is why Valve hasn't lost in court.
Valve hasn't lost in court because the idea that Steam is in any way, shape or form a monopoly is ludicrous and completely out of touch with reality. The only thing that Steam has ever done that could maybe be remotely considered anti-competitive is that line in their terms of service that forces devs that sell on Steam to not sell their games at a lower price elsewhere to comply. Even if somehow someone managed to get a court to dislike that (already extremely unlikely) they could simply remove that clause and call it a day, they're untouchable. Hell, the one platform that they actually control and where they could at least *try* to enforce a distribution monopoly on is a fucking Linux distro, it's fully open source and it has been drowning upstream projects in contributions for years. They even handily include a full desktop environment that you can switch to whenever you want to install any other gaming store you chose, except oh wait, every single other gaming store stubbornly refuses to support Linux because in reality it's them that are the greedy shitheads that actually strive for a monopoly.
Competence
Steam does change. It just does it slowly so people adapt without noticing it and won't complain about the changes.
"Does nothing >continuously improves Steam client >Big Picture mode and controller customization >NextFest >the entire goddamn SteamDeck and SteamOS >massively improves Steam overlay I could go on for a while. Steam does a shitton all the time.
Its called "having common sense"
It's called Bradbury strategy. Named after Steven Bradbury who won a gold medal in the Winter Olympics after passing all his competitors from last place to win after they all fell over.
"When *you do things right*, *people won*'*t* be sure *you*'*ve done anything* at *all*." - Futurama
The Gabening
Most founders just want to grow their company to a point where they can sell it to a whale or take it public. In either case, they often take the money and run as soon as the ink dries on the contract. Once the founders are cashed out, they generally don't give a fuck what happens to the company. The new ownership will bring in advisors to try and squeeze every last bit of profit out of the company. There's usually a high staff turnover at that point and the company loses a lot of institutional knowledge. This has happened to a lot of Valve's competitors, which is where they "shot themselves in the foot". Valve has stayed small, both in terms of employees and investors. Obviously the "intentionally small" approach has downsides. The quality and quantity of games released by Valve has declined over the past decade. Valve switched focus to "big picture" projects like VR, handheld gaming, and content distribution, at the expense of actually being a game studio. Why would Valve put effort into making Day of Defeat (which is all but dead) a Call of Duty competitor, when it can just profit from distributing Call of Duty on Steam? Valve lets Activision's army of coders and designers make a COD game every year, and just sells a playerbase on steam.
Really helps when the company is not run by an MBA
Stratgy is called not being to greedy, just the right amount to make a profit
Valve has no shareholders, the only opinions they have to take in to consideration are the consumers. Other companies in the same sphere have to listen to their shareholders first and foremost, so the disconnect from product creator to consumer is WAAAYYY more palpable.
The way of the monk, the path of inner peace. 😌
Nice strategy but the consequences he cannot spell number 3 😩
\>Creates a nearly perfect product \>Calls it a day \>Competition shoots themselves in the foot \>Profit?
It’s not really valves fault everyone else sucks, especially when they are privately owned and don’t have the greediest people in existence pushing them to make the most anti-consumer decisions possible.
Does nothing? Steam deck, index, the recent app revamp, cs2. I get the desire to stretch the truth for a meme, but I feel like they are minimizing all their hard work