I really hope that Gabe has future-proofed valve. It really is a remarkable treasure and one of the most user-friendly platforms of all time. Especially in these days when we are seeing a corporate takeover of the internet, or realizing that we lost a long time ago when we put all of our eggs in the Google basket.
I could see so much potential for fuckery happening, can you imagine if steam was as fond of kicking people off the platform as Reddit is? Or if games were constantly being curated to make sure they check all the boxes like the YouTube algorithm does? Five Nights at Freddy’s would have never existed if steam played by those rules, same for every other surprise Indie hit
It’s private at least, a good first step
Not a guarantee, but apparently a necessary condition for consumer friendly practices.
Aren’t Google/YouTube, Amazon, Facebook/Meta also all private?
Edit: just realized you probably meant privately owned and also not publicly traded on a stock exchange
A successful gaming company going public ultimately leads to their IPs dying off thanks to executive meddling and the developers being sent to the mines to work on whatever is popular.
Thank God that the Sims appeals to such a wide casual audience and is one of the rare franchises in gaming with a higher female fanbase than a male one.
So much so that when the Sims 2 didn’t have a breast size slider for fear that perverts would take advantage of it, the decision proved to be unpopular because too many of the fan base was unable to make Sims that accurately looked like themselves.
Because if that wasn’t the case the life simulator genre would be pretty much dead, outside of promising looking indie games that try to replicate the experience, remain with a Steam page that says “Early Access” and a kickstarter that is ignoring all emails.
Even if every game after the Sims 2 was turned into a nickel and dime machine, and I say this as someone who not only has all of the DLC for The Sims 4, but also, remember the old days when people joked about The Sims 1 having an expansion pack for everything.
Incidentally I don’t think downloadable content and micro transactions are necessarily a bad thing, it’s certainly beats the alternative of going to the store and buying a new edition of the game that has like a couple of bug fixes and maybe one bonus dungeon at the end…
I just wish they were reigned in.
I’m all for private Enterprise being able to call its own shots as long as it isn’t price gouging and hoarding Necessities like medicine, food, or housing.
That said if legislation came out and penalized companies for openly basing their business model on FOMO it would be one of the first times I actually wanted the video game industry to come under Fire by the government.
It’s impossible to future-proof. You can’t for the rest of time have good leaders, inevitably someone will come and ruin it.
No but you can carefully vet a successor, in order to buy some time
Even if you carefully get a successor, they can still fuck up and ruin it. Or they just die/decide to move on 2 years in and you’re in similar shit Creek. Or hell, Gaben himself gets dementia and starts making shit decisions.
It’s impossible to control.
I do not consider steam user friendly
State your case
Sorry, old post. There’s hidden controls everywhere that just aren’t intuitive.
How do you throttle your downloads? A ton of my games that I know I own are missing from my library - where did they go? How do you get to the store page of a game in your library? If I take a screenshot with steam, where is it? My steam library is showing my games by month. But it was showing them by categories I set for them before. How do I get back to that?
I can do all of these things, but when I try, I might need to search around steam a bit to find it, and I might get stuck entirely and have to ask someone or ask google.
deleted by creator
If you wonder why public companies with billions in revenue can’t make a Steam competitor is because they can’t think long term, being a private company allows Valve to just work on what they want and grow If they need to
they can’t think long term
Well they can, but only in one way: Grow by selling at a loss to outcompete other and then make a profit.
Exactly this! I dread the day they go public :(
Even if Valve was public, Steam makes so much goddamn money that putting ads on the platform would only cheapen it.
Good joke. Investors will see wasted financial potential and make valve do it.
When you have external money you now also have away part of a platform. And the investors don’t care. Make number big fast. Nobody there is caring about long term
Gabes replacement will be the tell all. and as much as i want steam to exist over multiple generations…i dont think it can survive turnover, greed, opportunistic bastards.
I think this is the difference between private/public companies. They don’t have to deal with the “growth at all costs” mindset that plague public companies.
I really hope that he is planned out his successor meticulously,
Imagine if it was as Ban Happy as Reddit, Corporate as Youtube, or… owned by Elon Musk
I think it would be awesome if he turned it into a nonprofit with a healthy endowment. The charter could say that any profits above $X that can’t be invested into improving PC gaming must go to charities that promote indie dev. So the main goal would be to do things like the Steam Deck or build innovative games, and there would be little incentive to screw over customers. It could also be structured like a coop, so if employees didn’t like the CEO’s direction, they could vote to remove them.
That’s what I would do, but I’m obviously not GabeN.
I hope Gaben outlives me.
Ok, get in — ⚰️.
Steam is a store.
Why would they try and sell you someone else’s goods?
LMAO.
Amazon is also a store, but they have sponsored listings that get preferential placement. Not technically ads, but very similar idea…
here’s the kicker: amazon sells their own product at the public market owned by amazon, undercutting any other seller on near-exact things.
imagine if valve made knockoffs of every famous game and just redirected every search to them.
I hate how easy it is to imagine a non-tangible variation of something they do in a tangible sense.
For anyone unfamiliar: They call this “enshittifcation”
Yeah, isn’t literally everything they have on steam and advertisement?
Only if companies are paying more for what you’re seeing.
The classic example would be loosely related games showing at the top of search results because some paid for them to be sponsored posts. Or something like that
all hail Lord GabeN
Giga chads
…for now.
I thought it was due to their poor grasp on mathematics and inability to count beyond two.
Valve seems to be the only company on this capitalist world that actually understands that company profits cannot and should not grow exponentially forever without eventually destroying itself. All other companies don’t know or want to stop the greed ad are constantly pushing for more profits to see until where they can push the greed and milking without losing “too much” costumers. They even weight the amount of costumers lost vs the extra profits to see if its viable to lose those costumers and still profit, like Netflix. Valve does not work like this. Valve grew to a size, and that size is giving them stable and steady profit. And they are holding that size, slowly growing more here and there but nothing big. The biggest thing they did in like 10 years was the Steam Deck and they will not update it with a Deck 2 anytime soon. Valve plays the very slow, but steady profits game. This is how you win as a company. You try to keep yourself on a balance between good profits and good public perspective.
Being privately held helps a ton. Gabe is his own boss. Once a company’s public they’re beholden to the investors, and investors want big short term returns so they can dump their stock and move onto the next one.
Maybe that shouldn’t be possible.
Yep. Investing should tie you to a stock for at least a year - as soon as you decide to sell, the one-year timer starts.
Lol. This is a cute idea but we all know it will go through enshittification with time. You are naive if you believe otherwise.
…Granted you can turn this off, but by default every time you start Steam an ad for a game flies up in your face.
I would also call every single store page on Steam a “sold ad.” Again, granted that it doesn’t seem you can pay to promote your game above anyone else’s and the search seems to be fairly straightforward and functional.
While I do feel there is definitely advertising that happens on Steam, I’m okay with the level of it. I can find products I want, and products I do not want are not mercilessly crammed down my throat.
If Steam isn’t pay to win, how do I earn the points used to buy the profile doodads (avatars, avatar bezels, backgrounds, banners, etc) without purchasing games? 🤔
I purchased enough stuff in past sales that when that feature released, which I ignored until I saw one of my rocket league friend do something fancy on their profile icon, I had all the credits to buy all the top animated ones. But being stingy with the virtual coins, I still only pick the one I want to use and only buy those. one boarder and one background to match. What about my other credits? well they can rot or whatever I don’t care.
It’s kind of odd, because it feels like they do sell promotion at the very least. For instance, Immortals of Aveum (the new EA game) is constantly shown on my store homepage, despite it being more or less a commercial flop. I know that page is customized, but I would have figured that game would be replaced by others now if the selection was fully organic. I had just assumed EA paid for some agreement that would promote the game on the main page for a set amount of time.
I’m sure it’s just coincidence, but their statement just surprised me since the store feels like it promotes specific games already.
They definitely give curated preference to companies that have had successful games on steam. I wouldn’t be surprised if they have something worked out with EA.
Honestly, I wouldn’t try to gotcha Valve on anything. They are a games distributor, and they will do and say anything to promote games that are selling well, and the developers and publishers behind them. They don’t give a crap about games or devs that aren’t selling. Nor would/should they.
It could be that part of their algorithm involves significantly weighting past sales by a publisher/development studio, especially early in the life cycle.
Based
