I have a mixed feeling about Gabe and Valve.
While I am insanely grateful for proton (even if it was strategically important for them, they didn’t do it out of kindness of heart), some other stuff disturb me:
- Valve being so lenient on CS2 skin gambling, hurting the young people
- A steam account being un-inheritable, making you defacto a tenant of your games
- The 30% percent cut, stealing money from devs
- Gabe spending his money on multiple mega yachts, like every asshole billionaire, instead of making the world a better place
- Gabe claiming to be a libertarian, like Elon and other pieces of shit
<is billionaire <owns yatchs and subs People still wiping his ass with their noses?
He hasn’t enshittified anything yet, and it’s looking like he might not ever, which is why people respect him.
There’s valid criticisms, yes, but that meme is dead accurate. I don’t want to imagine what gaming would look like today if someone like EA the same vast influence over the industry instead of Valve.
Imagine if GabeN created some sort of co-op and left Steam to an employee-run board when he died.
That’s what I was going to say. Sure, Gabe might not be that bad, but what happens to Valve and Steam when he’s gone? Are we just hoping the next guy also isn’t evil?
I was pretty pro-Gabe until I saw some video detailing loot crates and how they targeted kids. There really is no such as thing an ethical billionaire.
As far as billionaires go, he’s the least shit of the bunch. No idea what his personal life is like, and I don’t want to know. Every billionaire that makes their personal life public so far has turned out to be a giant cunt.
You know sometimes I actually straight up FORGET that Steam is run by the same company that created Half-Life?
They:
- identified a gradient of human wants
(Video games exist; I want them on my computer) - Created a vector for that want to be satisfied
(Digital distribution that conveys the games I want to my computer) - Stayed the FUCK OUT OF THE WAY
When you do something well, people don’t notice you’ve done anything at all.
- identified a gradient of human wants
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Just my two cents but as others have said, not being publically traded helps a lot. The focus on short term benefits that come with shareholders stops “master plans” when they come with mistakes. Learning from relative failures, like the steam controller and the like, ultimately contributes to major successes like the steam deck. Being able to stay committed to improving the software experience over time, instead of killing the product when it didn’t immediately succeed, is fairly rare in the tech industry. And in all honesty, it would be better if they released a polished profuct, but being committed to it made it a success.
I feel like the pressure to have a majorly successful product day one means that smaller companies can’t innovate the way they want to, so they have to find other ways to produce revenue. Huge companies, like Apple can afford to do both but still stumble, like with the vision pro. Maybe it’ll be a success, but for now its not great and iteration makes it more difficult to maintain the original vision.
Yeah, Apple was able to fall on their faces with the Lisa but still get to the Macintosh and greatness.
Does nothing? DOES NOTHING?! He spent the last few years ripping Microsoft a new a@@hole, rendering their operating system meaningless for gamers! …but nice meme
Gaben has done lots of awesome shit. I fear what valve will become when he’s gone.
I’m not actually too worried. He surrounds himself with champions.
they’ll fuck shit up. Look what happened to apple after Steve died.
So. Many. Dongles.
you know they developed the iPod touch in secrete because they feared that if Steve saw the ugly prototype, he’d shitcan the project?
And where’s the iPod now, eh?
In the iPhone?
Honestly, the secret is not being a publicly traded company. All the others have to make the shareholders happy while steam just does steam. If the line doesn’t have to constantly go up you can pretty much do whatever you want as long as you’re still making profit. And if what you’re doing is already working you don’t need to add gimmicks or advertisements to milk it as much as you can just to appease the shareholders.
Being a private company has allowed Valve to take some really big swings. Steam Deck is paying off handsomely, but it came after the relative failure of the Steam Controller, Steam Link and Steam Machines. With their software business stable, they can allow themselves to take big risks on the hardware side, learn what does and doesn’t work, then try again. At a publically traded company, CEO Gabe Newell probably gets forced out long before they get to the Steam Deck.
