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.
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.
Also not be shitbag garbage monsters.
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!
Can someone do it? Technically, yes.
You need a FUCKTON of funding. Hire a large team, build a competitor app from scratch.
You can’t just build a metropolis and it expect it to float. Undercut them on pricing. Provide strong publishing support and metrics out of the gate. Advertise partner games while on game load. Provide strong anti-cheat without kernel fuckery. Provide backend server support in the vein of roblox. Wire in clauses that server-based games either run on your backend, or escrow encrypted backend code to you. On long-term abandonment, you reserve the right to host or release the backend code. Players will come rally around you for supporting stop-killing games, and if you pull it off right, you might even make the creators happy.
The best they can do is drop the take to match your price and provide the same services you provide.
The tricky part: You need to keep them from buying you. Your venture needs to not GAF that it’s going to take forever to return on that investment. You can tit-for-tat features in an AI world, but staying a step ahead of them is going to require deep pockets that are just content to eat some of their pi and sustain.
I do think steam needs competition because a monopolistic marketplace always ends bad, but also fuck epic and their whinging. It just feels like they expected to enter into the digital gaming marketplace landscape and valve would just roll over and give up.
Make. A. Better. Product. you dolts, its that easy. If you want to disrupt valves monopoly in the marketplace, you have to make something disrupting. A storefront that has 10% of the features steam has then trying to snipe developers into exclusive deals by trying to offer them lower rates isnt going to do the trick.
It helps that the industry seems to always be inhabited by the greediest, most misanthropic companies on the planet.
Long live Steam
GOG might one day, but they need to step up their experience before that even becomes a possibility.
Maybe other competitors should start offering a better experience to compete instead of trying to shovel enshittified garbage onto everyone and then complain about other companies that don’t shit all over their customers (looking at you, Tim Sweeney, you turd of a CEO).
Maybe gog should send a few more accidental Nazi emails to really get the point across.
My steam account is 22 years old. I probably have 400+ games on there. I do believe in GOG and try to buy games there where I can, but if I have a choice between the major platforms, I will pretty much always choose steam. I bought a bunch of games on Xbox Live and my PS3 back in the 2000s that I no longer have access to. There’s a certain subset of gamers for whom Steam will always be the platform of choice.
Do they realize that what they really said was: having shareholders destroys businesses.
shareholders in public companies dont care about the health of the business
Lol, this is an unironically awesome takeaway.
Anyone who isn’t head deep in Capitalism understands that, yeah.
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?
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.
The government could pass a law (GASP!!!) requiring license agreements to be transferable. But capitalists aren’t actually interested in free markets, are they?
The freedom to buy competitors to shut them down and stifle innovation and competition. The freedom to grow exponentially and buy politicians. The freedom to literally get away with murder.
That’s the “free market” billionaires refer to, when they sarcastically use the term.
We are overdue for a digital bill of rights written by people that understand computers and the Internet aren’t magic.
Huh. What an unexpectedly damning indictment of the extraction-oriented enshittification market aka capitalism
It’s not, really. Steam runs under capitalism. They’re just a super outlier in that they’re a billion dollar company that doesn’t have shareholders. They’re basically the wet dream that conservatives are trying to sell you but that just fails 99.9% of the time due to greed.
They’re basically the wet dream that conservatives are trying to sell you but that just fails 99.9% of the time due to greed.
I wonder what is the driving force for capitalism…
Is it the Singular pursiut of profit to enrich oneself?
Is there another wird for that?
Could that be the very motivation the system is build upon?
So the whole system doesnt Work how it is promoted, but is just a facade to keep the status quo and that means the rich stay rich and the poor stay barely not revolting.
So of course No Steam doesnt run under capitalism it crawls under capitalism. It works despite of capitalism.
Comrade Gaben’s yacht is the people’s yacht, apparently.
You’re confused. Steam is an American company and America is (you may have noticed) a capitalist nation.
The point is that you can participate and thrive in capitalism without doing every resource extracting enshittification strategy in the book, which seems to be just Business 101 these days.
Is Steam perfect? Probably not. But most other major players in this space seem to leap at every chance to charge people more while worsening their product and then we get thought pieces wondering how Steam remains popular by virtue of not actively making things worse.
The point is that you can participate and thrive in capitalism without doing every resource extracting enshittification strategy in the book
The point is, that’s still capitalism.
When someone asserts ‘capitalism is intrinsically awful because it’s inseparable from x y and z’ they cannot then praise a successful company doing capitalism without x y or z. You’re supposed to experience this thing called cognitive dissonance. Contradictory ideas should not fit in your brain.
So of course No Steam doesnt run under capitalism it crawls under capitalism. It works despite of capitalism.
Capitalism SLAMMED by Steam Store market analysis. “Eat my shorts, jabronies” capitalism was heard saying in response.
Shocking, that when a company’s real purpose and focus is to make a product for customers, as opposed to making money for the investors, it is better for the customers…
Gabe dying is the major thing I fear in my life… It’s the last compamy I know about that’s not getting enshitiffied.
Ehh, I’m a big fan of valve but their hands are not perfectly clean. They do run the gambling machine for a shitfuck ton of money, even putting aside the rest of steam.
Now ofc, that whole “the rest of steam” part is still there and is obviously their main income, I recognize. And MOST importantly, fuck Sweeny and that dogshit other place. I just think we do give valve maybe not enough discredit sometimes?
We have GOG too
I love GOG but I am concerned about their lack of transparency regarding AI slop.
At least you know they can never enshitify what you have already bought and downloaded.
The major thing? Not global thermonuclear war? Not global warming leading to massive political and economic instability? Not democratic backsliding?
I like my PC games as much as the next guy, but let’s be reasonable: It’s just a luxury good.
Did anyone see the prices for electronics? I’m looking in the low hundreds. Where did they go? I know we put them down here somewhere last modem. Sound cards were in that $30 bin over there! Where’s all the stuff?
Gabe will eventually die and the MBA that takes over will see the quick paycheck.
I can imagine a nightmare where they add a monthly subscription for something to get a foot in the door. “Just $1.99 for unlimited cloud saves! Storage isn’t free you’re supporting the devs!”
A lot of people will pay it because “gamers” are, famously, little better than children.
Then it’s downhill from there. More subscriptions. Free service thinned. Popularity gone.
It’s what always happens when that kind of person gets in.
What makes you think that? From what I’ve heard, management is already pretty separated from any of the actual devs at Valve. Orders come down from on high ( they’re not even in the same building) and the rest have to scramble to make it happen with their isolated “flat hierarchy” setup.
Gabe will probably have it own by all of valve employees, so enshitification would be less likely.
Maybe I’m wrong but hey let me have some hope.
Owned by employees (continuously) vs shares given to current employees are two very different concepts.
But yeah, let us have some hope, otherwise it’s GoG or the high seas.
turn it into a coop you say?
Exclusive image of Valve HQ
I personally think he might go with a trust that way it will still stay in the family
Any source for his intentions?
There’s no public knowledge of his intentions. However Gabe speaks on how Valve operates plenty and in general, if the industry is doing one thing, they often explore doing the complete opposite.
Valve’s primary thesis is exceptionally talented people are most productive when they don’t need to think about money, are surrounded by other exceptionally talented people, and there’s minimal people telling those people what to do.
I doubt Gabe would want the soul of Valve to die with him so his succession plan will factor that in.
exceptionally talented people are most productive when they don’t need to think about money, are surrounded by other exceptionally talented people, and there’s minimal people telling those people what to do.
This all immediately goes out the window as soon as they go public
This is covered in the video I linked…
“Valve is not a publicly traded company. Being a publicly traded company adds a bunch of headaches and it [doesn’t] really solve any problems for us… It [would mean] that control around decision making now involved third parties… The whole point of being a privately held company is to eliminate another source of noise in the signal between the consumers and producers of a good.”
Valve are absurdly profitable. What purpose would being public serve? They don’t need to raise extra capital, they don’t have shareholders to provide liquidity to, they don’t need the brand recognition, they don’t need stock for acquisition currency, they don’t need it to attract or retain talent, Gabe doesn’t need an exit strategy when he’s already cash flush to be buying mega yachts.
For every reason companies go public, none of them would benefit Valve.
Exactly - which is why going public is generally not in the interests of any sustainable company or their customers.
It is, however, in the interests of (1) company insiders that want a huge payout, (2) companies that are not sustainable pre-IPO and need to transition their business model or practice and set the IPO as a ticking clock where they fund or fail, and (3) companies and CEOs who borrow cancer’s business model and are dissatisfied by anything except infinite expansion.
None of those benefit the customer and it makes it rational to expect an IPO to destroy what’s good about a company and its products.
Still a couple of decades tho
Gabe’s medical Half-Life (not the game) of his atoms decay slower than a normal human being.
That’s why they have been trying to cripple it with other nefarious means under the pretence of “safety”.
That is a funny way of saying monopoly.
Swing and a miss
There is no debate that Steam is not a monopoly at this point.
I’ll debate. Put the definition of monopoly in your next reply and convince me steam fits the definition. I’ll wait.
Steam holds an estimated 75% share of the PC game distribution market.
U.S. antitrust law and jurisprudence, courts generally look for a minimum threshold of more than 50%, with many federal courts requiring 70%
Steam has engaged in several anti competitive price fixing schemes already.
https://tech-insider.org/valve-10-publishers-steam-price-fixing-lawsuit-2026/
This is one of many cases. The devil is in the details, if you read the filings and previous testimony it becomes clear that Steam is fucking lying through its teeth and most definitely have engaged in monopoly practices.
every single one of your competitors torches themselves in desperate anti consumer greed grabs
You: durr but it’s a monopoly
What do you think the word means.
What competitors? Epic, Gog!? Lol you are funny.
Steam holds an estimated 75% share of the PC game distribution market.
U.S. antitrust law and jurisprudence, courts generally look for a minimum threshold of more than 50%, with many federal courts requiring 70%
