Valve is motivated by money. But their strategy is to make excellent products, that put the customers first. A rare sight these days.
I think the the main reason is that they’re private with no intention to go public. They’re not beholden to random shareholders who know nothing about games and just want infinite growth, their decisions are actually made by people inside the company.
I played a lot of Sierra games in the 80s. I grew away from computers for a while and at some point in the 90s, Sierra sold out. They were basically drug through the mud, canned all its devs and became a brand rather than a software company. Sierra was also the first publisher of Half Life.
I was reading the history of Sierra there other night on Wikipedia and was sad because so many great games came out of that company and most were memorable. Hard to see that in any gaming these days
Back to my point, I started thinking that Valve saw what happened to Sierra and Newell decided fairly early on that they would be a software company and publisher and not sell out to a third party or take the company into the market. Pure speculation on my part, but they got their start sort of at the end of life of a bunch of 80s software companies. EA is certainly a shadow of what it was but it’s still around at least as a brand.
Valve’s strategy is to maintain dominance of their software platform, Steam.
It has been pushing Linux as a viable computer platform as a counter to if/when Microsoft wanted to monetize PC gaming in direct competition to Steam, which seems to be a wise decision.
As we get closer to Microsoft forcefully shoving windows 11 down our throats, more and more I consider switching to Linux as my daily driver for home.
I’m not saying Valve was wrong. However, I can see Valve trying to do the same with Linux.
Valve is one of the few big companies that still knows money comes from users and users come from a good product
That’s the advertisement part that I skipped because it doesn’t fit so well, the users need to hear about the good product before becoming a user.
