Have they tried making a better product?
Or scratch that. Have they tried making a product that is as good?
We only need one digital store front. The people should collectively own it.
Valves secret is that selling digital games is profitable 100% of the time, so they never needed to enshittify.
A lot of services are straight up unprofitable and need to go to extreme lengths of ruining the experience just to make a single positive dollar. Those lengths are also often poorly thought out or actively destructive to the platform. Valve just sells games with essentially 0 overhead past servers (insanely expensive, btw, but you know what i mean)
Turns out that the best business plan is a profitable one out of the gate with people who care about their work instead of vampires that bleed your customers dry
Yeah, but have you considered being an MBA demon and wanting even more money?
Investing into customers and their overall happiness and loyalty works out, go figure.
The King who has never seen grass will starve to death on an iron throne.
Even if I’m playing a game I bought from GoG, I still need Steam involved for its controller support or Proton if I’m on Linux.
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.
If EA, Ubisoft, Bethesda, Epic and the rest established single high quality store for all their games, they would be able to compete. But it will never happen.
Well I mean yeah, the public could, simply by not buying any more Steam games. But wait, that would mean missing out on new games. Activism and sticking it to The Man are great and all, but let’s not get crazy here!
- Provide a good and cheap service.
- Improve the service over time with some of the money you make.
- Make pro-consumer choices knowing full well you can afford it.
- ???
- Watch competition repeatedly shoot itself in the crotch.
- Profit.
When every competitions enshittifies themselves before they are even a valid competition, naturally there’d be no competition
Fuck private equity
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
GOG used to do GOG Connect where you could bring some games from steam to GOG. They did it in waves and it was available maybe a few times a year. I got at least 200 games on GOG that way and it got me to spend more with GOG. Wish they’d bring that back in some capacity.
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…
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.
Steam could be assholes.
They are not.
Best argument for no public trading of the company.
Best argument for no public trading of most companies.
Public trading results in short-sighted planning because investors can always buy/sell stocks and move on to whatever is profitable moment to moment. Private companies plan longer term because the investors benefit from the company’s long-term success. Their profits come from the company’s profits, not the value of the stock.
Make no mistake, Valve is in it for the money. They’re as greedy as anyone. But they operate under a corporate structure that values the long-term viability of its platform.
And they’re still assholes. They are all about lootboxes, DLC, etc. And they take a massive cut of sales. Do Sony and Microsoft and Nintendo do the same? Yeah - but they also provide the hardware platforms. Does Best Buy and Gamestop charge similar fees? Yeah - but they have the overhead of the retail locations. Steam makes stupid money off a download platform and game launcher.
Gabe is a billionaire yacht collector, not your friend. His greed just takes a longer view than that of someone looking to sell their shares from minute to minute.
The biggest thing these days is that they are not hostile towards their customers. The bar is that fucking low.
Their assholery isn’t customer-facing, but it ABSOLUTELY impacts customers.
Yeah they could be 10x cooler by just being slightly less greedy, but they want lots and lots of money, so
At this point in time I care way more about Valve’s investment in Linux gaming than I do about Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo working on their next closed proprietary PC with custom controllers.
So Gabe is a billionaire asshole who is not your friend. But unlike other billionaire assholes that aren’t your friend he doesn’t choose to go out of his way to fuck over his customers and his products for a few pennies more. There’s gotta be a term for that.
successful.
Public traded companies are short sighted because they give the CEO et al large amounts of stock, making them stock holders, aligning their interests with making the stock go up.
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)
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.
Generally you can tell when a company will end up on the downward spiral towards the customer and that is about 4 seconds after they IPO.
Do they realize that what they really said was: having shareholders destroys businesses.
The full quote in the context of the article makes it even worse:
“As long as Valve is independent and not a publicly traded company, they probably have a certain ambition, but not an extraordinary ambition,” Rosier says. “So I think they can still decide to make some decisions that are player-first, and that helps, right? To get the goodwill from the players.”
So, customers like using a product that focuses on the customers to create profits, rather than extracting profits by abusing the customer? How unambitious… /s
and that helps, right? To get the goodwill from the players
It helps?! It HELPS?!! That’s the fuckin customer base right there, that’s engagement, customer retention, customer satisfaction and THE top reason for sales.
“It helps” pffftt… it does not help, it’s the ENTIRE PRODUCT
shareholders in public companies dont care about the health of the business
Lol, this is an unironically awesome takeaway.
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
Private companies have shareholders as well.
That’s a new one for me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder
Both public companies and private corporation have shareholders.
But only for companies participating in the equity ownership, right? I’m not fully versed with that, so need to ask here. I don’t know how this works with Gabe and Valve. I think the important detail here is, that Valve is not publicly traded and can decide who buys shares from their company and could reject any money. I don’t think this is possible with publicly traded companies, right?
Ownership of companies via shares is only for LLCs (which is a possibility but in practice uncommon) and Corporations and both Sole Proprietorships and Partnerships do not have shares.
That said, it is indeed possible for a company to have ownership by shares and not be publicly traded (i.e. not in the stock market) so for example a corporation with no traded shares would be a private corporation.~
This is what I found out for the US by searching for “types of companies” and “LLC shares”.
The countries I lived in and owned companies in Europe have similar things but with different names (for example what a Partnership in the US is roughly what’s called a “Society by quotas” in Portugal and is actually the most common kind of company).
In my experience people that never had their own registered business don’t usually know any of this because they have no need to look into it.
Yeah, often times if a company needs a loan then they open up a stake.
i think in private corporations only a very limited amount of shareholders can have shares
If they are shareholders, they hold at least one share. Every one of them. There’s no limit on number of shareholders or shares held. But those shares are not publicly traded.
There are limits on shareholders in private companies.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/5/500-shareholder-threshold.asp
Looks like the number is 2000, but that excludes employees. It used to be 500.
That’s only a (USA) reporting limit. A private company can still have more than 2000 shareholders, but it must then publicly report its finances like a public company would.
Fair… but why would any private company do that without going public? Do any?
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.
A lot of people don’t seem to understand that Steam is DRM.
No one wanted to use Steam when it was released and the only reason anyone did is vendor lock-in on copies of Half-Life that were purchased at retail with no mention of Steam until Valve altered the bargain.
Some “innovation” to force people to use your service to keep playing a game they already purchased.
I cannot emphasize this enough. This is the entire modus operandi when it comes to venture capital and “entrepreneurs” in industry.
They have a singular talent: exploitation. Be it a mineral rich vein under a mountain, an oil/gas field, middle-class folks with spending cash, gig workers, or information economy workers (e.g. programmers), it’s just one more resource to convert into wealth. Left unchecked, all the social evils we see from this thinking come into play: inequality, slavery, usury, fascism, and so on. The above even applies to their own employees, as there is no distinction in class of human being outside of the status of “owner”. There is no higher calling, no alternative focus. There are only resources and money.
The instant you make “keeping the company alive”, “make a product people actually want”, or even "employ people"a focus, the goal is no longer exploitative. It’s arguably more socialist, even if the overall goal is to continue to thrive as a for-profit business. As a result, it’s not useful to these jackals as-is. It must first be converted into parts to be exploited.
Such a thing is also a pariah in capitalist circles. They fucking hate it. The bigger Valve gets, the more hit-pieces we see in the media. Also, the more we see CEOs circle the wagons when the likes of Epic attempts to topple their market dominance somehow, and it always fails. Socialist corporate ju-jitsu appears to be a winning strategy, and thank goodness.
His innovation was to create the modern online verification bullshit that plagues the industry. Before Steam, you bought a game, put in the disc, and played it. If it HAD and online component, you may have had to type in a CD key.
No extra launcher to access your library. No having to reconnect to the internet to renew your license. I had a dedicated gaming PC that didn’t even have a modem. And no mandatory updates. It’s unacceptable that any time I want to play a single-player game I have to hope there hasn’t been some 140 gig patch that I have to install because the multi-player suite I’ll never open added a new $30 outfit to a character and they just make everyone reinstall everything.
If Half Life 2 had come out a year earlier, I wouldn’t have been able to play it because I didn’t have internet connected to my gaming PC until college.
All of those problems are easily avoided by not playing AAA slop
If you’re installing a game through Steam, you’re dealing with DRM, a third-party launcher, and online verification, and Steam is taking a 30% cut to insert those features into the process. It doesn’t matter how “indie” your game is.
Valve will take the cut from the sale no matter what of course, but the DRM and even the in-game Steamworks integration is actually optional. You can publish DRM-free files on Steam which do not require Steam to run at all if you want. People might get grouchy if you skip achievements and save sync or whatever, though.
ETA: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam
And to further clarify, you do not need to eschew achievements and that other stuff if you want your game to work without steam. You can make your game check to see if steamworks is working and then provide those services if if available.
God I remember raging at having to go online and install this “Steam” bullshit thing just to play a game I bought from the brick and mortar store in my town.
Also not be shitbag garbage monsters.
In some industries and markets, copycats can come along and undercut the original without actually improving things, but just offering a better price. For whatever reason, nobody else seems to be able to meaningfully compete with Steam on that front, either.
If Valve just made using Steam as soul-crushingly painful as we imagine it must, we might have a chance! Imagine what could be if the wizards behind the Google Play Store took a shot at making Steam!
when it first release, steam was ASS
Then they listened to feedback and changed it to be the leading and most preferred pc gaming platform. How something originates isn’t a constant standard to judge them by. The fact that they were shit at first kind of shows why they are successful now, they accepted that they needed to improve due to customer feedback and did, they didn’t decide what their customers needed and try to force it to be like that, they listened to what their customers were wanting and made themselves into a better product.
Steam was ass because it was just a an update platform, and most of us still had 56k or isdn as their means to the Internet and gaming. Yea it sucked when updates came out and you had to patch, it was a new thing to get patches like that vs buying a physical disk and the game just worked and didn’t require a day 1 update.
the game just worked
That’s not how I remember it. I remember plenty of games being buggy as hell, or outright not working. When a patch did come out to fix it, you had to find and download it from the developer’s website and manually install it. Then keep track of that patch file in case you wanted to reinstall and play again later.
Most games on PC worked first release, because most people didn’t have good enough Internet to get a patch. What games are you thinking about that were buggy or didn’t work pre-steam?
I can’t think of a game pre-steam that didn’t work or was so buggy it required a patch. They had to ship working products back then. There was no send it and patch it day one like there is today. Consoles %100 had to work day one.
It was also the first online DRM most gamers interfaced with.
True from what I’ve read, and honestly I never used it in that form. I was mostly gaming on consoles at that time.
I have a great idea! What if we censor every negative review! People would see all these
amazingshit games with amazing reviews and buy them!
Microsoft GamePass was serious competition and they ruined it, for now. They had managed to build a system where there was no reason for folks not to buy in, people got nearly unlimited games and then often paid for DLC and cash shop items for games they didn’t even own. It was converting the average gaming market to an a la cart style cash shop which as much as 2010 me would consider this offensive, today it is often better for gamers without money.
The only other thing that would seriously compete with Steam would be a marketplace that had tradeable games but I think the game makers don’t want this so no developer would sign up for it.
Itch.io exists and it does a fantastic niche gaming distribution job so I don’t see how a new competitor can do better than what is already out there.
In the time Steam has been a thing, Microsoft has been three or four different revisions of how their game system works. I still have titles that try to use Windows Live logins.
Microsoft is brilliant at formulating decent ideas, fumbling it, then struggling to hold it together before they reformulate and start from ground one yet again. They keep hitting the reset and ruining nay decent moment they gain.
Microsoft GamePass was serious competition
It never was. There was no chance that a service like that would be profitable in the gaming world unless the monthly costs become astronomical per user which would automatically lose most subscribers.
The fact that they have made terrible business choices doesn’t mean it is impossible to make good one.
The subscription model is not for driving positive revenue it is to smooth out investor concerns. You have steady revenue streams to reassure that your market is stable so you don’t suffer as hard when you drop a Redfall.
The big issue is massive failure of handling day 1 releases. They made it TOO good of a deal. It probably is a corporate structure issue where the division owning game pass was able to sacrifice a neighboring divisions revenue so they could get good metrics.
