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Valve good.
But valve company. Company bad.
But valve company do good thing.
But selfish reason.
But good outcome.
But what if no GabeN.
We pray.
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.
Valve is one of the few big companies that still knows money comes from users and users come from a good product
Hahaha thanks for this. I really find it fascinating how bad CEOs make lemmy think all companies are bad. It makes no sense.
Blame the system maybe, I get that. But good grief we are all trying to make a living. The only way to do it is to do business. Like any system, it will be exploited, but I’m not gonna shit on private companies especially who clearly have a vision and don’t need investor snobs to drive them to commit evil.
I meant it the other way around. No matter how benevolent a dictatorship is, eventually the dictator will change and you better hope there will be another benevolent one.
I personally don’t think the problem is doing business. I think the problem is businesses not being democratic.
Thats funny because shareholders are deeply involved in Valve, and those shareholders frequently decide which products get investment and which don’t.
Which stockholders? Valve does have some, but it doesn’t appear that they are published and are probably mostly employees since it’s not publicly traded. Maybe you’re saying that like game publisher stockholders from EA and such are involved in decision making at Valve? That seems plausible but it doesn’t seem like they’d have a ton of power over operations, more just some negotiating power.
If they ever went public & were legally bound to make profit for shareholders, there would be no good feelings anymore.
Private companies aren’t bound to make profit. I purposefully tanked my companies profit to literally 0 during the pandemic so I could keep my employee on at full wage while only open half time. A private company can make profit for shareholders, but it doesn’t have to. It can do whatever the shareholders want it to do, within the boundaries of the law.
Valve gud. EA bad. Why Valve gud? Because me am told Valve gud. Why EA bad? Because me an told EA bad. Fact that each is purely motivated by profit and that my sentiment is almost entirely a byproduct of effective Valve PR coupled with it being the defacto gaming marketplace for 20 years and that the only value I have to it is as a data point in a spreadsheet is lost on me.
The day Gaben resigns from Valve will be a terrible day. I hope he has his succession in order.
“Please pay this monthly access fee to maintain access to your account.”
that’s the day you download all your game catalog to disk and cancel your account, of course
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The “bluescreen” was actually a bunch of hints at Portal 2’s announcement at E3 later that year IIRC, but whatever.
