100% hard agree. Not launching an IPO is the single best thing Gaben has ever done. Letting in corporate executives would utterly destroy Valve and run them into the ground to fund their golden parachutes. It’s happened time and again. Professional “executives” do not run companies for the benefit of the customer they run them into the ground to make themselves richer. Kudos to Gaben for being intelligent enough to recognize this and keep Valve private.
Well that’s because pretty much all of the competition are terrible.
There hasn’t really been much innovation in digital market space since the concept arose. Valve started it and a few other companies over the years of tried, including Microsoft and all have failed.
I think valve succeeded because they weren’t trying to make a digital market place, it started out as just a distribution platform so not every decision was about how to make the most money out of the customer. You make the money on the games, not the platform and then you build up from there.
Yeah really is down to the only platform that isn’t repeatedly shooting itself in the foot is GoG and their no DRM policy has a lot of major publishers saying no deal.
In all other cases it’s less what Valve does right, and more what everyone around them is doing wrong.
I and I guess itch.io as well but that’s mostly because of how easy it is to get a game on the platform so it’s really good for small games and demos.
Gabe’s strategy is public information at this point. He’s gone on record several times with the information.
The focus is on what gamers want first. Reduce barriers to entry. Simplify the process. That naturally attracts customers and the money making happens as a result.
Every single other company has this reversed.
oblig
I mean both true but yeah
Steam could be assholes.
They are not.
Best argument for no public trading of the company.
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.
So you are saying that the devs don’t like using the steam platform?
They don’t like the largest expense on their books being Steam’s cut of the sales. After overhead, marketing, locensing, etc the actual dev teams making the games probably make less than Gabe personally does on the same game.
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.
Best argument for no public trading of most companies.
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)
Valve wanted to be assholes when it came to returns, but a court case forced them to be good. I am sure there are more examples.
- 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.
deleted by creator
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.
You can run proton without Steam.
More money now temporarily is better then always getting money forever.
Have they tried making a better product?
Or scratch that. Have they tried making a product that is as good?
Amazing what is possible when you’re not beholden to shareholders that only give a shit about quarterly profits at the expense of everything else, including the entire business.
Perhaps businesses should have a rule that investors can’t take money out for 10 years. Perhaps then they would actually engage in some long-term strategies.
There is already short term vs long term capital gains tax, but it’s only one year. Maybe they could tweak that a bit
People don’t want their library split on multiple stores. There’s always going to be a monopoly because of that, unless we start having multiple exclusives on different platforms. For videogames it’s accentuated by the fact that people want to be able to interact with friends, so they need to be on the same platform. Steam came first and had the best features, so they won.
Music? Spotify is in front of everything else
TV/Movies? This is the exception, as in this case there’s a lot of content that can be available on a platform and not the other. Netflix is still first, but if you look at the numbers the gap is lower.
I used to buy everything on gog, now with the steam deck I went back to steam. Yeah I know, I can use gog there too, but using steam is easier for sync etc. So, you see, steam made something amazing, the steam deck, and everybody copied it, but they were still the first.
If gog made a steam deck client with easy management I’d gladly go back to them. They still take a 30% cut but I’m happy to support DRM free games. Itch is also nice but they don’t have a lot of games (I do play 99% Indies).
IMHO there are no good or realistic solutions:
- lots of exclusives
- interoperability between stores, like the fediverse (this would actually be really cool)
- everybody sell games directly
- everybody goes back to buy physical
People don’t want their library split on multiple stores. There’s always going to be a monopoly because of that,
Nah. We could introduce regulation mandating that libraries have to be interoperable.
Telephones used to only talk to other phones on the same network. Could you imagine only being able to call people on the Tmobile network?
The fediverse is so cool in how people from mastodon can interact with us on lemmy. Its how it should be everywhere.
They already could do it. They just do it in a very shitty way. What do you think EA launcher and Ubisoft game is doing on steam? They NEED their own launcher/store for the game to run when you purchase it FROM STEAM.
Going back to buying physical would put all the indies that can’t afford a publisher out of luck too (I know people like physical, but its important to note)
Netflix was doomed when content that was previously on the platform for removed from the platform.
This was never the case for dvds, but dvds weren’t as profitable…
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.
Libraries should host the people’s digital storefront. These companies can compete on UI.
maybe someone will REA steam and add that.
Probably not. Even MS couldn’t do it and they owned the platform. Now Valve push Linux. No other store really runs on that, and certainly not in a way that lets you run games written for Windows.
Epic are closest to being a competitor, and they’re still just a free games platform that will only run until the Fortnite money stops coming in.
One of my favorite quotes about Epic (it may have been Tim Sweeney) was something like “people would rather pay for a game on Steam than get it for free on the Epic Store” and it’s true. Hell even games I’ve got for free on Epic I’ve still purchased (probably on sale) on Steam.
Epic are closest to being a competitor, and they’re still just a free games platform that will only run until the Fortnite money stops coming in.
Appreciate the reminder to play the games I need to on that platform
Fuck private equity
santa, gaben has been good this year, give him another boat
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.
I remain baffled at how few studios sell their games directly on their own site.
The practical barriers are virtually nonexistent, so I’m assuming there’s some form of capitalist fuckery going on behind the scenes that makes it financially unviable?
There are practical barriers still tho. You’ll have to either maintain or outsource maintaining:
- hosting infrastructure
- CDN
- Security (both frontend and backend)
- DRM (either serial numbering or yet another hosted verification services)
- user accounts and data handling
- payment processing
And that’s for a basic game, if you want feature parity with steam, add on top:
- version control and access (playtests, betas)
- version control for other platforms (Mac, Linux)
- hosting for savefile sync, achievements
- hosting for UGC (mods, screenshots, configs, recording)
- hosting and infrastructure for user livestreaming
- CDN for mods
- review (automated or manual) for mods or UGC
- legal protection and compliance against UGC
- multiplayer service infrastructure
- automated/manual moderation of game servers/lobbies
- anticheat system
- hosting for newsfeed (update announcements, news)
- and so on, you get the point…
By the time you implement the basic stuff and half of the extras, might as well pay the 30% commission and just focus on what you wanted to do: make games. Instead of having to cosplay as a sysadmin or orchestrate 15 different providers
The things on that list are all technically true but at the same time not really that big a deal? Certainly they’re all solved problems already. Making a good video game in the first place is harder than any of those things.
Yup, that’s my whole point. It leeches time and resources that might amount to more than what valve takes as commission
there’s some form of capitalist fuckery going on behind the scenes that makes it financially unviable?
Uhh. It’s that Steam is an effective monopoly?
They hold all the attention, all the recommendations, so if you aren’t on Steam you are practically invisible.
There are a few major games that only self publish. Starsector is one, of the top of my head. Hence it is practically invisible to most.
Ok but publishing yourself doesn’t block you from also listing on Steam, or does it?
It determines the price. If you “self-publish” on a web shop or something with DRM free downloads, you have to price it the same as on Steam, otherwise Steam may delist you. So devs can’t get around the 30% fee by offering a discount on their store.
And… practically, if the storefronts are the same price, most will just buy on Steam.
There can be other complications related to scammers, but that’s not Valve’s fault. Supporting both also takes more dev effort.
Rimworld took this route, at least for some time. It started only self published via the Ludeon Store yet ended up mostly on Steam because that’s where all the attention and mods went. I have the game bought both places, oddly enough.
Common misconception. You only have to price-match when selling Steam keys on another platform. If you sell a non-Steam copy of the game, you can price it however you want
also it didn’t particularly make sense on its own terms. Even if I am committed to pricing the same as on Steam, I still get to keep that extra 30% on the sales that I do make.
And it’s not as though the sum total of marketing you do for a game is stick it up on Steam and wait for the recommendations to pour in. But still most game promos and ads I see include a Steam link rather than one to the studio’s store.
There’s over 100,000 games on Steam now, so the notion that you’re relying them to market your game for you is highly suspect.
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.
I still can’t wrap my head around this. Steam is kinda ok and it works but the experience is not really good. So the bar isn’t that high. But the other stores are so ridiculously worse. They only need to do an ok-ish UI.
I’m amazed you’d say that honestly. What about Steam is not really good? Personally I love the meta-gaming of the platform itself - leveling up your profile, participating in events, earning digital collectibles you can showcase. I also love the fact that a game remains in your library even if it’s no longer available for sale. And it’s great to be able to go into airplane mode, and still have access to your library. What are they missing that would change it from “not really good” to “good” or even “great?”
Not the person you’re asking, but personally I don’t care for that. That’s basically bloat to me. The storefront itself is decently sluggish though it’s gotten better with the years, it’s not very easy to actually browse for things, finding less popular things that isn’t slop is a chore in and of itself. The client is also decently heavy.
I like Steam, but I see things worth improving on.
leveling up your profile, participating in events, earning digital collectibles you can showcase
YMMV.
This makes me feel icky just reading it. All that feels like spam to me.
And it’s great to be able to go into airplane mode, and still have access to your library.
Except not really, as it’s still locked by Steam DRM, and all sorts of factors can break it (like family sharing in my case).
GoG is what true offline gaming looks like, with all features enabled.
These companies are extremely predatory towards the consumers and to each other. The whole idea of cooperation is utterly alien to them
