it’s called being a private company, more people should try it
This is a common thing to say, but I want to push back on it. There’s nothing magical about being a private company that means they’ll make better decisions. It merely removes one big thing that causes companies to make bad decisions. There’s still plenty of private companies run by shitbags.
While this is true, the flip side of that is that being a publicly traded company all but guarantees they’ll be forced to make bad decisions. So, the original point still stands: more companies should do this. They may be shitty anyway, but at least they’ll be shitty on their own terms and have the best chance of not being shitty.
Every company has shareholders, public just means that shares can be traded publicly. A private shareholder does not need to be part of the company. If enough shareholders at Valve decide to make the royalty to be listed on Steam 50% instead of 30%, no one can stop them. Both public and private companies need to keep shareholders happy because they literally own the company. While that is easier with fewer shareholders, it is by no means a guarantee there won’t be trouble. Just like there are hundreds of public companies that operate without problems but you never hear about those because business as usual is boring af
Nah, go public and commit to a restless chase that gets exponentially demanding and caters to a bunch of disinterested bottom-feeders rather than improving services and products for the customers
Purdue pharma is private
Ironic that Valve isn’t in there. They did $13B in revenue back in 2022.
Airbus be like:
I’m sure Airbus has just as many skeletons in the closet, the door just hasn’t fallen off its hinges yet.
Don’t gotta be perfect, just better than the other guy.
I disagree. The machine and its operators that stand between me and a 30000-foot fall better be fucking perfect.
Eh, nothing manmade is ever going to be perfect. You’re literally 100 times more likely to die in the Uber ride to the airport than on that plane (1.8 deaths per 100 million passenger miles vs 0.01). That kind of shit I don’t worry about.
That being said, if some sort of gross negligence is threatening to change those statistics, it’s definitely worth looking into.
Airplanes are the safest means of transportation on Earth.
Even more so when its not a Boeing.
No need to look into any closet. Supporting dictators to oppress the opposition, corruption all over the world, just what you’d expect from an arms manufacturer. Civil aviation seems to be clean, though, and those skeletons aren’t tech-related. Airlines are currently whinging about the prices Airbus demands for new planes but what do you expect, their order books are overflowing and where else are you going to go, Boeing?
Its funny because their backlog is for the next 13 years, they could easily have the EU give them money to fix it and nobody would complain.
more like air based (i have no idea if they’ve got problems like boeing)
It’s called “not being completely blinded by short-sighted greed”.
real
I thought abducting kids into gambling with lootboxes and mining all their data was one of the peak of greediness
But not short-sighted.
It’s called the “Free Rope and Tree” strategy.
Please put the circle I non transparent red
Sorry, it was late and I don’t often annotate photos on my phone. I’ll do better next time.
How’s this?
Thanks
Imo the yellow one already runs an otherwise beautiful picture. This I vote 10% transparency dark blue
Added
Perfection
Gabenomics
Gaben 2024
No, no more billionaire presidents please
DannyMac 2024
The strategy is called “Not beeing a publicly traded company”. Valve is a privately owned company.
Publicly traded companies need to increase value for their shareholders, which means they have to raise their quarterly profits at any cost.
Fun fact actually: GabeN owns exactly 50.1% of Valve so that he gets to be the final shot caller.
I really feel like this is the reason
Many private companies also need to increase profits at any cost as they have shareholders, they are just privately owned.
Valve might not be a publically traded company, but it sti has shareholders. Some of those shareholders still want Valve to increase value, etc.
The difference is that valve has a songle large share holder who seems to just not give a fuck about those pressures. While most (all) publically traded companies crumble and fall to that pressure.
That, plus the single large shareholder isn’t a dumbass looking for a quick buck
The thing about privately-held companies with not intention to go publoc is that the long-term viability of the company is more important than ever-increasing share value.
A public company can be the most profitable company in the world but still lose stock value if it isn’t more profitable than last quarter.
Can still be more profitable than last quarter, but less profitable than expected. Lost value.
But companies don’t always chase profit.
They can also chase growth and the appearance of a company that could or will make money one day. Ex Uber when it first came out and destroyed the taxi industry practically overnight.
Yes, but they chase it in different ways.
A shareholder in a private company that’s profitable well isn’t losing money on the investment. A shareholder in a profitable publicly-held company might be losing money depending on when they bought in.
Additionally, the shareholders in the private company have to consider the future because they can’t dump their shares as easily. That promotes sustainable business practices instead of chasing short-term gains at the cost of long-term viability.
That makes no sense.
The only difference between a public company and a private company (in this sense) is how liquid the asset is, said another way, how easy it is to enter or exit the position, and how regularly the holdings value is recalculated.
I could buy 100k of valve stock of someone tomorrow, and then find myself wishing I’d bought NVIDIA. I could buy NVIDIA tomorrow, and it could crash and I could wish I’d bought in to Valve.
I’m sorry I think getting Windows games to run on Linux is not nothing. And coming up with custom hardware to run PC games and a handheld form that’s affordable is also not nothing. Also making industry standard of cloud saves is not nothing
and making the best open vr runtime is also not nothing i guess
“never interfere with the enemy while he is in the process of making a mistake.”- Napoleon allegedly
Huh. I thought that was Sun Tzu, but google says Napoleon. Thank you.
Winning?
Either luck or sabotage.
It really is impressive. Steam is honestly a pretty shitty platform in a number of ways, but their competition just keeps managing to be worse.
I mean what is really shitty apart from the high fees? The platform is good, the library is good, the services for gamers are unparalleled
The funny thing is, their fees aren’t high. You just got duped by Epic’s propaganda that 30% was high.
In fact, it’s vastly lower than the previous alternative, which was in store and took almost twice as much more of the cut.
Even today, 30% is standard for a digital eshop (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Apple), except Valve offers more services and benefits than all of them combined.
https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/steam
You don’t need a third party launcher to use software to begin with, the platform is proprietary and mines your data. Valve engage in criminal business practices such as abducting kids into gambling
I think they may have remedied this eventually, but for a long time they were in violation of consumer law. They went a long time misleadingly displaying prices to Australians in USD despite having Australia-specific prices, and once they finally fixed that they still continued imposing international transaction fees on purchases.
I think they’ve mostly, if not completely, gotten rid of this recently, but they used to do some really gross exploitative psychological tactics during their sales. Then there’s the DRM inherent in the platform requiring you to run their client in order to play your game—yes, other platforms apart from GOG all do this too, but that’s the point: Steam is bad, but others are even worse. This becomes especially bad when you consider the risk of losing access to all your games just because Steam decides you should, or because you disagree with a changed terms of service.
Then there’s just the ways that it’s bad for the gaming industry. Steam acts as a monopsony as game developers are basically doomed to fail if they’re not on Steam. Steam’s strong emphasis on its regular sales cycle might appear good to consumers at first, but like the net neutrality violations in “unlimited bandwidth to [our partner website]” coming from your ISP, this creates a short-term benefit to consumers in exchange for causing longer-term harm.
Oh and also I’m salty about their recent in-game overlay redesign, and the fact that it took away the ability to “ctrl-f” to help me find the achievement I’m working on.
Steam DRM is opt-in and even then rather trivial to circumvent, practically all it does is prevent things being as simple as copy+pasting files. GOG can go completely DRM-free because the bulk of their offering is stuff they hold the rights to, way fewer publishers would put games on Steam without that basic DRM being available. They’re not trying to defend against hardened pirates but opportunistic copying. If you want to ship a rootkit with your game you will have to include it yourself, Valve doesn’t offer that kind of thing.
Their monopoly position is an issue, yes, but also frankly speaking not their fault. Though things will get interesting once the EU vs. Valve case is through and they have to allow resales, it’s probably going to mean more than resales within Steam.
As to the cut they’re taking – meh. I think it’s too high, of course I think it’s too high because it’s money not landing in my pocket, but it’s also ballpark market standard. And much unlike other companies they actually spend the money they rake in on sensible stuff, like the work they do on proton.
but also frankly speaking not their fault
Oh yeah for sure. But it doesn’t really matter whose fault it is, what matters is that it’s bad for developers and consumers, and it’s a reason to want competitors to succeed, and to be frustrated that they’re not.
Just asking out of genuine curiosity, what do you mean by steam DRM being opt-in?
They probably mean publishers can choose not to include DRM on Steam
The developers can choose. Many games are “DRM” in scare quotes, it’s not that developers are enabling this but they’re hooking into features such as cloud saves or the workshop and to get them running outside of steam you need to provide a
steam.dllwith stubs for some functions so the game doesn’t get confused.DRM, at least from a programmer’s perspective, only starts once you actually a) check for integrity of game files etc. and b) check for integrity of that integrity checking code. The bulk of steam games will throw some error when you try to run them outside of steam, but they’re not taking any measures to prevent you from making them think that steam is running.
From a developer’s perspective – honestly, I don’t care. If a game gets published on multiple stores I’d generally try and make all of them the exact same version so the game will check whether steam.dll is available, use it if it’s there, and not if it’s not. If it’s only published on steam I may blindly assume that steam.dll is there and error out if it’s not because I didn’t bother to make a version of the main menu that doesn’t have a “workshop” menu item.
I don’t really mind whether you pirate my game, unless you’re a millionaire that is at that point I will judge your character quite harshly. But I’m also not going to spend time and effort on making the game easier to pirate.
Agreed, I’d rather use GOG but they don’t accept my card :/
I’m gonna guess you’re German? I believe I heard that German banks are gradually moving towards the international standard where debit/bank cards are indistinguishable from credit cards and so they’ll be supported by online platforms.
That’s a really wild guess lol, no, I’m Israeli. It’s most likely because I don’t use a normal credit card but something else that is anonymous and lower risk.
Haha the guess was just because I’ve seen users complain about how a website “doesn’t accept my bank card” many times before, and it’s almost always been German people. Over there, I believe, the most standard average person gets a card that isn’t compatible with most online payment systems.
But yeah especially with a government as sketchy as that I can see why you’d want to use something with a bit more privacy.
I too would like to try it only if they have regional pricing and good Linux support. Maybe 1 day, hopefully within this decade.
Heroic works fine for gog
I’d rather use gog but the prices are extremely high (like up to 6 times higher than on steam)
Is that bc of like regional pricing or? At least for me the prices are around the same
maybe…?
(i’m from ukraine if that matters)That might be a reason. Most games in my region (Brazil) are similarly priced between the 2 platforms, with special email offers on GoG often being better than any Steam price.
How is Steam shitty?
It’s a DRM platform, it won’t let you play games unless you update them, it can unilaterally remove games you bought, and the desktop application is a shitty web app. Just from the top of my head. There is also a morally questionable gambling system with a huge secondary market that they refuse to acknowledge.
That being said, I think its virtues outweigh its flaws. Games and their updates are deployed conveniently and with a great bandwidth, the refund policy is generous, and it gives indie developers a massive audience (as long as they make it out of the algorithmic hell). Then there’s also Proton, Valve’s massive conributions to Linux gaming, and the Steam Deck.
It’s only DRM if publishers/devs choose so. BG3 for example is DRM free even on Steam. If you run the executable the Steam will not even attempt to launch and game will run just fine.
Common Larian W. I actually wasn’t aware of steam not having DRM on some titles and I’ve found this pcgamingwiki list that has more details. Pretty cool!
Others have pointed out there a private company, but to be more specific on what that means, they are not openly trading their shares. The majority of shares are all owned by a handful of people who care about the long term health of the business. A lot of companies that we see doing major face plants right now are publicly traded, so any big fund or individual with enough cash can swoop in and buy up enough shares to control leadership, then use that control to get the company to do stupid stuff generally or maximize short term profitability at the expense of long term health.
A similar thing can happen if someone with a majority of shares choose to sell too a ghoul.
it’s called being a monopoly.
It’s not a monopoly. Monopolies are when a single company controls a market AND prevents others from competing. Nothing stops EA or UbiSoft from supporting Linux or making their client not shit. Yet they don’t.
Yup. Epic tossed huge amounts of money into their Steam competitor, and it’s still flailing around. Valve’s market position is based on customer trust, and it took a long time to get there. There are a couple of other companies that could throw money at it like Epic did, but they can’t buy their way into customer trust.
and it took a long time to get there
True. I don’t think many people here had to deal with Steam pre 2010, when game updates could fail for no apparent reason, so you had to redownload everything.
Getting up every day and not doing something stupid is hard work.
Simple solution: stay in bed
