dsfgasfsaf
this post was submitted on 11 May 2024
481 points (99.2% liked)
Steam
10304 readers
3 users here now
Steam is a video game digital distribution service by Valve.
Steam News | Steam Beta Client news
Useful tools:
SteamDB
SteamCharts
Issue tracker for Linux version of Steam
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Valve support has historically been pretty awesome. They even replaced an index controller nearly a year out of warranty. Granted their controllers have a shit switch and they break after a few hundred hours, but good on support for being bros.
dsfgasfsaf
That is why Gaben must be protected at all costs.
What if we simply extended steam warranty and support to Gabe’s brain
Head jar like in Futurama it is.
Gaben has ensures that he has 51% of the company so he can veto anything including a leadership change. He would need to sell or die.
spoiler
,
(Top post on c/source_memes)
The "Gaben wins by doing nothing" strategy.
damn, Gaben looking real sexy in white.
Have you seen him lately, semaglutide has done wonders for him.
Which is good, as the gaming industry is officially dead once we lose Valve to corporate profit chasing as soon as he passes
The "don't be a soulless public traded company" strategy
This is the real answer.
Steam doing the right thing while Sony continues to be incredibly stupid.
The miracles you can perform when you don’t have shareholders.
It's not shareholders specifically, but management that doesn't give a shit about the company long term.
The business has a fiduciary duty to benefit the shareholders, but it doesn't have to be short term only, or at the cost of long term benefits.
Most publicly traded companies end up with leadership who are only interested in justifying their employment through the next earnings call or making sure the stock price has gone up between when they last got options and when they next vest.
Valve does good not because they don't have shareholders, but because their leadership is not gonna get fired for thinking about next year instead of next quarter. So they don't squeeze the consumers for every dime, so people stick with them, and developers stay even though their fee schedule is not the best because they have all the people.
This is kind of true. But the leadership often answers to the board of directors, which have often been shareholders that buy into control of the company after it goes public. At this point, you have shareholders who own no personal stake in a company. Often their only goal is to make a profit, sometimes they're "serial entrepreneurs" who make their millions getting on boards and "flipping" the company to make a huge profit in a short amount of time.
So it's kind of management, but it's also management brought on by the presence of public investment in a company.
Combine this with the fact that the law has come down more than once on the side of choosing options that make the company money over maintaining company policy and you get a really terrible culture of publicly traded companies gouging themselves for short term profit (or even long term profit done in a shitty way.)
Oh, I realize I repeated some of what you said. But you did say "it's not about shareholders" to be contrarian, then went on to explain (like I did) how it's actually exactly because of shareholders.
Edit: what the fuck I literally can't comment on the comment below.
I wasn't actually trying to be contrarian, but okay.
I'm pretty sure I didn't explain how it's actually shareholders, because the board of directors isn't "the shareholders", but leadership of the company.
Valve isn't publicly traded, but it's still a corporation with shareholders, a board of directors, and the usual trappings of corporate leadership. They tend to operate in a not shitty way because their leadership isn't interested in sacrificing greater long term profit for lesser short term profits.
A private, family owned partnership style business can operate with a focus on short term profits over long term profits.
The safest way to ensure that the leadership of both of those businesses out as much money in their pockets as possible is to continuously maximize short term profits. "The shareholders" aren't the cause for that mindset.
load more comments
(4 replies)
Sony really shooting themselves in the foot.
I love this green text because valve really just be doing the bare minimum most of the time but everyone else is just so shit in comparison
I feel like GOG deserves at least some respect. They don't have a perfect track record, by any means, but I find them at least reliable, decent sales, have gotten some fun freebies out of them in the past.
And, hey, shopping cart. Which shouldn't be a selling point, I'm fucking flabbergasted that it came to this on any platform, but that's another point above EPIC.
I agree although in some respects it feels like a dead app.
At least it's either optional or can use 3rd party app (Heroic for example)
I can't wait for the inevitable clusterfuck from Sony making PS+ sub mantatory to play their PC games online.
I don't think they're that dumb, I can see them making their own launcher with PS+ sub to get free games or something like gamepass, but locking online play behind a paywall on PC sounds too braindead even for them, it'd be an even worse PR suicide attempt than Epic's exclusivity shenanigans.
Sony has a long history of braindead decisions that have fucked over their user base.
thats how they get piracy
Sony: we make so much money selling these games to a giant pc audience;
Also Sony: what if we restricted them geographically a huge amount and require them to go through extra steps so we can (???) which allows us to (??? + Harvest data)?
"We're still learning"
Wait, Ghost of Tsushima is available for pc?
It is on the 16th, but you've been able to pre-order for a while. It's pre-order folks that are getting refunded.
Nice, been wanting to play that game for a while now.
Just note that a PS account is required to access the MULTIPLAYER section of the game but as far as everyone is concerned singleplayer doesn’t require one.
I don't think I ever used multi-player in that game back on ps4. I didn't even remember it had one.
It was apparently added in an update later on in the games life cycle.