It’s called “being privately owned” or “not having to suck up to shareholders”
Yup hit the nail on the head. Not only can he make decisions that are risky that don’t pay off he is also 100 percent legally in his right to make decisions that lose the company money. If he feels it pushes the industry in the right direction.
Doubled their revenue? I think you’re severely underestimating how much money Steam pulls in yearly if you think ~2 million Steam Decks are that much of a percentage of it.
Valve also has a very unique organizational structure where engineers manage themselves and pretty much all decisions are handled by horizontal committees.
Costco is a public company, and their CEO just pushes back whenever investors ask why they don’t increase the membership fee or prices on staple goods.
His answer is consistently “because we don’t need to”
There’s definitely room for companies to have responsible growth. It’s just that most execs don’t care enough and just want a giant payday in the form of short term gains so they can do it again at another company.
It seems like no publicly traded C-suite cares about a brand anymore. Even though building a loyal userbase and delivering a consistent good product is essentially a long-term cash machine, they all just want the short-term growth and quarterly profit.
epic are also private, the difference is that Gabe aren’t a dubmass CEO, now epic…
Not being publically traded.
Exactly. Steam is a money-printings g machine, and since they’re not publicly traded the owners make money asong as they’re profitable.
With publicly-treaded companies, anyone who invests only makes money when the value of the stock goes up. Your company can make 5 billion dollars a second in profits, but still lose value to shareholders if the next quarter you aren’t making 6 billion a second.
That’s not true. There are also Dividends.
In fact the Majority of Stock are based on Dividends.
Dividends are typically an extremely low percentage and I wouldn’t be so bold as to say the majority of stocks pay out dividends. I have ~20 different tech companies (some large, some small) in my portfolio and only one of them pays out dividends, as an example.
Proton is not nothing :(
I’m 99% sure this is totally in regards to software/Steam. Valve’s HW/FW departments are 🔥
Even still, compare all of the features steam has and the tools they provide to developers for the platform vs. their competition.
Valve keeps improving regardless of the competition, but I think the idea was that Valve could do nothing for the next decade and probably still have the best storefront.
Steam already has a fair few shitty issues like its promotion of gambling.
Gabe will pass one day and the enshittification will happen, it’s not like Steam is immune at end of day. People need to stop glorifying companies.
No such thing as an ethical billionaire and everything. Steam just lost a class action antitrust lawsuit and will have to issue refunds to a bunch of developers and customers. Overall GabeN seems like a less-evil billionaire though and truly seems to enjoy games (and knives). Steam will definitely go downhill once he’s not leading it and we’ll all lose a great platform that’s defined PC gaming for a decade or three…
It’s a shame gaben.tv is no longer up, but it’s memory lives on
It is possible but for things like a steam deck you just move on to the next store or piracy. It’s so open you get trapped by convenience not by encryption or premium features.
You’re thinking of now not the future. It’s a great device at the moment. But it’ll become out dated with time and it’ll be easy for the next steam deck to be shit or for shitty practices to come into play.
And using the example of piracy/other stores means every device is fine. Just hack the device/remove the shitty practices and you’re good to go whether it’s a steam deck, Windows, Etc.
Devices will be outdated anyways. But the steam deck you don’t have to hack. You just enable things with touch buttons.
Valve learned from other consoles they get hacked anyways, so they enabled you to do all the mods - while at the same time you won’t have to fiddle with pirated games for a fee. Personally I don’t think this strategy will change - and if they release a more closed steam decknin the future piracy is an option again. On another device then.
Yup who’s ready for some “Steam Premium”. Only for 5 dollars a month! You get exclusive deals for games you don’t care about!
We’re also locking remote play behind Steam Premium. No wait, “Remote Play Max”! For only 10 dollars a month or the Steam Premium bundle deal for 9 dollars you can get up to 120 fps while playing with your friends!
Buddy it could be so much worse. Steam premium will be the ability to download all of the games you already own whenever you want
So true – It’s totally because Gabe rules as King and they don’t have ‘investors’ – One day they’ll sell or he’ll die and it will be turned over to the wolves just like everything else.
It’s telling how they have no real competition other than cash fire ad fueled investor snake oil a la epic ea ubisoft w/e – Is GOG still cool/unruined by short term anti user greed?
My wet dream is that when Gabe passes Valve is turned into a cooperative. It wouldn’t guarantee that Valve wouldn’t turn into a bad company, but it would mean the people at Valve want Valve to be shitty and I just don’t see that happening.
GOG is trucking along. They haven’t pulled any crap on my limited library with them. I only have around 25 games over there. Compared to the 140 I have on steam, mostly bought, and the 250 I have been given on Epic for free, none bought over there.
It’s still a thing, but it just gives you keys to use on other storefronts.
And it’s owned by IGN now.
It’s telling how they have no real competition other than cash fire ad fueled investor snake oil
Especially since Valve has never been aggressive or territorial.
You want to compete with us? OK, good luck. Competition can be good. You’re buying up exclusives and preventing games from selling through our store? Well, that’s shitty, but we’re not interested in joining an exclusivity war. Our product speaks for itself, and we’re just going to keep doing our thing.
Gabe should get a boy to shadow him like in the olden days. Then when Gabe moves on or dies there is an heir ready to go.