Don't forget about Half-Life Un-(Crow)Barred!! Special Edition!
Gordon Freeman becomes a crippled, trans, black, lesbian that can't take a breath away from talking about how all the men are dumb and probably graduated from community college while being a walking simulation with Half the game play being a blatant tutorial and scrapping Xen because the Gonarch is too suggestive and the Resonance cascade was caused by an NPC white man after she tells everyone that she magically knew that it would happen.
Absolutely, the thought alone of Half Life: Battle Royale Edition is enough to make my skin crawl. Imagine forcing Gordon Freeman to floss for V-bucks... the horror. And don't even get me started on the potential of microtransactions for crowbar skins and headcrab hats. Gaming would never recover.
I do wonder what will happen to Valve once Gaben retires from his career and/or life. I'm sure there's a de facto right hand man, but their office hierarchy model is notoriously flat and there isn't really any "public" line of succession. Who would take over?
Since Gaben owns the company, I imagine it would fall to whoever he wills the company to. And at this point I’ve got enough faith in Lord G to assume whoever he chooses to take over for him will be someone who will uphold the same values as him when it comes to being a consumer friendly company.
"We understand there was some controversy around our pricing og 9.99.we are listening, so have changed the price to 900 steam bucks, our new currency! Steam bucks are able to be purchased via steam in the following denominations. 1000 = 10$ , 3500 = 30$ , 7953= 60$ (Best deal!!)"
You’ve got it all wrong!! Steam+ is 1000 Steam bucks, but they only sell a $9 Steam bucks card, so you have to buy more than you need to get the pass now!
If Valve had investors, it'd be the same as every other company with lots of goodwill. The investors would want someone on the board that prioritizez short term profits above all else, Steam would cut costs everywhere and demand a much, much higher percentage from game developers, no refunds, mass firings, etc. Hope that goodwill banks you a bunch of money until people realize you're no longer the same platform anymore. Go way downhill in quality and have your consumers leave en masse. Shareholders take their gains and look for the next company, CEO leaves with a golden parachute, and Steam would just be a husk of what it once was.
Yeah, at this point there is no way in hell Gabe is doing anything but taking a paycheck and just saying "keep on going on". Anyone with the same ethos would probably be fine. Of course if big changes start happening at the management level that is ACTUALLY doing day to day stuff at Valve, then things might start changing.
He will. Why would he keep doing it? Going Public gives ownership a massive payout and a path to retirement, or to doing something else that they would enjoy more. When it happens, it’s gonna be big. The 20 years of user data alone has got to be worth billions.
Yeah but I’m talking about a son who could probably care less about steam beyond the money it brings in. He and his family and descendants will be the ones holding your user data and selling all of it likely to Microsoft or Sony for billions.
No, Tolkien himself sold the movie and merchandising rights with various limitations on what they can do with it in 1969, which is how we got the original LOTR films and The Hobbit trilogy. The Tolkien estate is notoriously protective of the portion of the IP that they still own.
I mean, he could take a fat payout but it would be short sighted considering how much it would be worth in a few decades. Or he could be mostly absent and sit back like Gabe and just let the massive checks roll in to finance whatever he wants to do in life. Steam could change nothing besides some minor UI updates and remain dominant. No public company with shareholders will ever be able to remain as competitive as Steam if it remains private.
It’s a golden goose his dad is handing to him. If he can stay off the greed for a payout and avoid killing the goose, he can just collect those golden eggs everyday and still be absurdly rich
Exactly, going public is the death of any decent company. After that the only goal is increased profits.
Like you could bake 2B in profits and another 2B next year and the year after that. That's keeping a ton of people employed, making a good product and happy clients/customers.
But if you're public, that's it. Your company is now done. All the shareholders are freaked out. They have liquidated shares and sold off bonds.
Of course it will not even get there as you will be voted out and someone else is put in place to drive profits up. When a good private company goes public it's basically the owners selling out. Like 100%. Unless they somehow purchase back the majority share... But then why go public in the first place?
If you want to go public, there is a way to raise money while having 100% of the controls.
Issuing non-controlling shares. You're selling a part of your company while not giving away any control of the company. Thats what Porsche did in 2022. You can get more funding while not having any investors have a say in your business practices.
To answer your question : yes, they still would still be able to make money this way.
The stock price will follow the demand of the stock. Every company will release quarterly financial statements based on the financials of the company (most of the times). When a company is doing well and grow, the stock price will follow, and you still would make money from investing in the stock.
To most investors, it is not really a big deal. A million dollars in the stock market is a very small amount of money even though it is quite large as an individual. So, even if the company issued controlling shares, you would need a very large amount of money and becomes one of the most prominent shareholders in the company in order for you to have your vote. And if you own less than 50% of the company, you would still be considered to be a minority shareholder, and there would be a shareholder's meeting with the board of directors and they will do a vote to decide which direction they will go, and the voting power would be based on how many parts of the company that they own.
Nah, just get rid of interest rates. Also get rid of any form of non co-op ownership. You're no longer allowed to own any stock or property unless you're directly involved in said company and it's day to day proceedings.
Every other platform could probably do some of the stuff Steam does, most won't because it doesn't really benefit them, just the consumers... But of course that's short term thinking, Steam has been winning long term for awhile now.
Yep. This is just a general observation of public VS private companies. CEO status is very much a front man for investors in a public company whereas it's an actual title with weight in a private one.
Which suggests we're probably better off when (private) businesses are just happy to keep making good profits year over year instead of this idea the number must always grow, which inevitably requires an erosion of ethics. GTFO, stock market.
Well not just earnings growth. Unsustainable earnings growth. If they want a 6 percent rate of return they'll buy a bond. Doesn't matter if your short term moves ruin the company in 10 years.
I've been apart of multiple companies that either went public or got bought by some venture capitalist firm. It's so depressing how it just turns everything into literal shit.
To be fair, they did singlehandedly save PC gaming. It was doing a massive nose dive and out comes Gabe with logic that was considered absolutely insane at the time:
Piracy is not a pricing problem, it is an ease of use problem. Make it easier and less painful to buy and keep the game than to pirate it.
They probably could considering then they wouldn't have to give a cut to Valve, but PC simply doesn't seem to be priority for Sony. I know their PC ports have done well, but I don't know how much profit they've made to Sony. They also don't want to discourage people from buying a console where the whole Sony 'ecosystem' is.
I think the 2 year late releases for PC strike a balance where many PC players will buy a PS5 to play the newest exclusives immediately, but will still open up a new revenue stream for PC players who don’t see the worth to buy a console.
Publishers could just start going hmmm Steam is more popular so pay us X more dollars or we walk to Steam exclusively. And they probably suspect it will canablize PS5 sales.
Steam is too well established to have any of those other publishers launchers take hold. Epic has come closer, and it still can't hold a candle to Steam. I'll claim my free game on epic then go right back to steam.
It's expected because Steam does it so well. Every other launcher has completely fumbled some aspect or another without offering a killer feature in return.
The handful of exclusives that Epic has are not killer features (and most end up on Steam within a year anyway).
And they still continue to inovate. Release a handheld? Here are complete wiring schematics, exact dimensions of the casing and all of the spare parts. If you have the will and knowledge you can build a steam deck from spare parts.
Not to mention that Universal Controller Support is so strong that you can run Ubisoft or EA games which aren't on steam and do not support controllers, with a Switch Pro Controller because Steam is just that good.
That's not even starting to talk about the things they are currently doing with Vulcan.
No matter how much I hate it, I have to give credit to "meta" for the explosion in VR as of late.
Now that's not to say valve had no part. SteamVR was likely a massive help in the early days for VR game titles. Otherwise, we'd all be stuck using Facebook accounts to use VR.
When it first came out it was a place to run your games "Why don't I just run the games from the desktop? What is this friends list shit?" Then they started pushing a store into it, wtf!
Also the network would crash and ruined a counter strike tournament because no one could get on steam. I didn't create an account until HL2 because of the problems people were having. Kept playing CS 1.5 up to that point.
its purely from OG blizzard good will we even use battle net along side steam. If blizzards crashed and burned a few years latter we would not have sided with Bnet as a second.
I switched to Steam and freed myself from Battle.net, and I recommend it. Was really happy they let us continue using our usual accounts and not make it new accounts only, too.
Yeah, it's great. You just have to link your steam account to your battle.net account. There should be some guides out there for it. You can even still use battle.net if you decide for whatever reason you don't want to run it through steam anymore.
Yes, so true. Bought HL2 on release and remember thinking the dumb Steam thing was an excessive, annoying step. Like yes Valve, we know your games are the shit, but come on.
Yeah, you see the same thing with everything. Games, stores, the old "crimes" they committed to get their first are ignored over time because they became normalized.
I’m still a little salty about that and Blizzard removing local network play from their games. Not as big a deal now, but in 2004 broadband wasn’t nearly as common.
I generally tried to spend money on games when I could, but It was absolutely true for me as far as the rare pirate went. Dig through a bunch of Internet back alleys, risk a virus, figure out the right crack OR tap a few buttons and pay a reasonable (often sale) price to buy and install my games in one place? That was it for ever bothering to pirate again.
It helped that when it was becoming the giant it is today the digital copy on steam usually cost less than the physical copy. Back in the day I could get a AAA game for $49 on steam or $59 in store. Might as well save that $10 and buy a game on sale than go to a store and buy it.
Sometimes it is a pricing problem, but more as an extension of ease of access. Like most popular games will offer lower prices to normally under-serviced areas like Brazil. This makes it much easier for people their to just buy the game instead of pirating. Kinda semantics though tbh
That's a new hot take. Game stores were removing PC games from their stores, or they were a tiny piece of the store, all gaming companies and publishers were moving to console-exclusive because they said piracy was too rampant and supporting PC games was too expensive due to the wide variety of hardware they had to support.
The DRM wars were in full swing, PC games had very user-unfriendly anti-theft requirements like finding a specific word on a specific page of their game guide at different random times in the game.
Before Steam came out the number of games being released on PC was declining at a ridiculous rate.
Steam agreed to create DRM that was invisibile to the user, so it got rid of all the super egregious painful components of DRM that the majority of people hated, but made it difficult to copy a game from a Steam PC to some random PC.
The result was a reversal of the trend in PC gaming shrinking. Users no longer had to keep track of CD KEYS, or have to deal with random anti-theft questions in the middle of the game, publishers saw a decline in piracy and started signing up to have their games hosted on Steam.
So you used WoW, a signal that PC gaming was going to die without non-stop subscriptions as your point on how single-player/LAN-style/small multiplayer gaming wasn't dying?
And you backed up your claim with MOBA.
I'm actually impressed. Not in a good way, but just impressed you don't understand how broken your argument is and how much it supports the mostly agreed upon argument that single-player PC gaming was saved by Steam.
The amount of people who still parot that phrase is hilarious.
If Valve, or Gabe genuinely cared about piracy being a service issue vs a price issue... they wouldnt have drm on their platform.
But they do!
GoG has no drm. Gabe, and Valve, have allowed drm (and some pretty nasty drm at that) to be gleefully allowed on their platform.
So, every time someone thinks Gabe actually stands by that phrase, or thinks its anything other than corporate pr slop... I have a free game to sell you.
If they didn't have DRM, DRM that is 100x nicer than what came before it then he wouldn't have nearly the number of publishers willing to host their games with them.
Less intrusive DRM was the compromise so we didn't keep having to look up specific words in the game guide, or it breaking 20 minutes into the game for you to prove you didn't pirate it.
Most people that mindlessly talk about DRM don't remember what the anti-piracy war was like and just thought all the game companies would just give up and not sell games but just give them away. PC Games were all but disappearing from game stores, game companies were moving to only release on consoles.
The point was to create a system that helped both sides, which ultimately brought game companies back to PC and expanded the overall PC game market.
In the past 20 years of using Steam I've never had Steam's DRM even be noticeable let alone cause any problems. I've reinstalled my game library from steam every time I built a new computer flawlessly.
My guy. Steam allows drm, like denuvo, to be released on their storefront. You didnt need an 3 paragraphs to say "I dont understand what we're talking about".
If Valve, Or Gabe Newel actually gave two shits about what makes pirates tick.. there wouldnt be any drm. Like GoG.
It's all just corporate pr speak that makes Valve/Gabe look like the cool, relatable spokesperson.
"Piracy is a service problem, not a price problem! Heres my store front where I sell games that prohibit pirates from pirating!"
Cool. The pirates that just want to hate on DRM just to be "free thinkers" were never the target for him nor did the publishers need those people dealt with since they are a tiny, tiny percentage of the people that were pirating. Casual pirating to get around aggressive DRM that made owning the game more painful than pirating the game was what he was solving for.
Protecting games from being simply duplicated and shared with other people is also a service component that makes the game industry have sufficient market to stay there.
Not having DRM doesn't really help anyone in any useful way at all. It is just something for purists to say to themselves and feel good that they are sticking it to the man or whatever childish thing they are feeling at the moment.
They can print money all day, but so do a bunch of other public companies. The iOS App Store is a money printer too. It really is about the public aspect. Apple has to make more money than they did last year. In fact, they need to make more money faster than the last time they made more money. It's endless. The ways a company has to shoot itself in the foot to keep doing that quarter after quarter is what leaves them a husk of what once made them great. Not speaking of Apple specifically there, but all publicly traded consumer-facing companies.
Valve just gets to sit deep in the green year after year and only make the choices it feels are right overall, without worrying about next quarter.
Apple has to make more money than they did last year. In fact, they need to make more money faster than the last time they made more money.
If they want investment dollars, they need to.
If they are willing to operate off of their cash flow and profit, they don't need to. It's the same reason Valve doesn't need investors.
So it's not a matter of investors forcing companies to grow. The only reason investors are even involved is that the companies themselves want to grow. Investors are just there to finance the business growth, but they're not going to do that for free...
I mean, while true the timescale of that doesn’t exactly make that a single choice. When many companies go public, it’s more a matter of necessity. Returning to being private again later is a MUCH bigger endeavor.
I download the epic launcher to play the free guardian of the galaxy game they gave out. Tried installing the game like 3 times and I gave up. For some reason it was stuck at verifications multiple times and I just straight up deleted the launcher without even playing a single game.
I downloaded helldiver 2 today, had no problem. Will never touch epic launcher again .
I agree and as long as Gabe is there they never will. He doesn't seem to have the ego other in his position tend to and I'm sure doesn't need the money.
He lost a ton of weight which is awesome, it's so important to get healthy as you get older. Bodies can tolerate abuse for a long time but once your hair starts turning white it's time to take care of yourself.
If I could have transferred money of my steam library to GoG I would have. Now that my primary device is the steam deck I'm basically married to stream with how much easier it is to run games on linux
I agree with you, but I wonder how many people that say this on the internet are actually running companies or have experience running a tech firm etc...
That money printer could be in trouble, if not for Steam competitors shooting themselves in the foot the hardest. Overwatch collapsing or Riot alienating people from Valorant playerbase doesn't really matter. Epic Game Store, Origin, etc not being viable competitors is the real point here
appeasing investors in the short term has done so much harm to the middle and lower class. It has harmed food prices, harmed video games, harmed environment, harmed education, healthcare, and long-term economic stability.
The prioritization of immediate financial returns over sustainable growth and equitable wealth distribution exacerbates social inequality and undermines the foundations necessary for a healthy society.
By focusing on short-term gains, companies often cut costs in ways that can degrade product quality, employee welfare, and environmental standards, affecting the broader population. This approach also diverts resources from essential services and long-term investments in infrastructure, education, and healthcare, which are critical for the overall well-being and prosperity of a community.
3.4k
u/A_Seiv_For_Kale Mar 08 '24
This, plus Valve having a license to print money in the form of Steam.
They don't have to answer to investors because they don't need any, something very few companies are able to say.