Valve seems to be the only company on this capitalist world that actually understands that company profits cannot and should not grow exponentially forever without eventually destroying itself. All other companies don't know or want to stop the greed ad are constantly pushing for more profits to see until where they can push the greed and milking without losing "too much" costumers. They even weight the amount of costumers lost vs the extra profits to see if its viable to lose those costumers and still profit, like Netflix. Valve does not work like this. Valve grew to a size, and that size is giving them stable and steady profit. And they are holding that size, slowly growing more here and there but nothing big. The biggest thing they did in like 10 years was the Steam Deck and they will not update it with a Deck 2 anytime soon. Valve plays the very slow, but steady profits game. This is how you win as a company. You try to keep yourself on a balance between good profits and good public perspective.
Being privately held helps a ton. Gabe is his own boss. Once a company's public they're beholden to the investors, and investors want big short term returns so they can dump their stock and move onto the next one.
Maybe that shouldn’t be possible.
Yep. Investing should tie you to a stock for at least a year - as soon as you decide to sell, the one-year timer starts.
Agree wholeheartedly, there should be risk.
Why is trading stocks even allowed? Seems like a net loss for basically everyone, except the ultra-wealthy.
Stocks = certificate of ownership in a fraction of a company. The basic principle is sound and goes back at least to the Renaissance, it's everything else around it that sucks and creates a plethora of perverse incentives that benefit the capital owners.
Company stocks are not unique there, it's the most common example but the principle extends to every commodity. You can buy virtual coal or gold right now if you want and sell later, without actually having coal delivered to your doorstep. This is actually a very important market mechanism when it works right because it allows the market to internalize external forces, reducing risk. European energy providers learned this the hard way when prices shot through the roof in 2022 and they were buying gas at "current prices", leading to funds drying up unexpectedly sometimes to the point of bankruptcy, rather than buying gas at "future prices", guaranteeing deliveries that were paid for months in advance. When it works well, speculation is actually an inescapable tool of complex modern economies. Without it you cannot maintain supply chains fit for the modern world, as speculation (when not abused) is the market's way of accounting and preparing for the expected future.
Even in a communist society, you'd need stocks: the disagreement then becomes whether the state should own (part of) the stocks, or if the workers should own all the stocks (legally equivalent to the means of production).
Oh huh, neat. Thanks for the write-up! Basically the only thing I know about stock trading comes from family members trying to convince others to buy meme stocks, so I don't really have a high opinion of the craft.
I truly fear the day Gabe passes on. Do we know who would own Valve if Gabe were to pass on today?
I think it is a little more complicated than that. You go to public markets to raise cash. Sometimes you can get the cash you want, sometimes not. The issue is when you are incentivized to make the stock price go up at all costs. If you don't need the cash, there is no point to having a higher stock price - lower is somewhat better.
Now, if you are a CEO, and you are paid in stock options, you are going to do whatever you can to maximize the stock price. Even if it is bad for thebling term health of the company. I don't think the public markets care either way.
Valve able to do that because they are private company, the exponential growth is only made mandatory because of the stakeholder. if the growth is stagnant(even with healthy profit), it's very unattractive to investor, hence growth is needed to keep the cog running.
I wonder, what actual benefits are there in publicly traded companies for society as whole? Benefits that are good for you, me and everyone else equally.
It's mostly the effect of expanding the company, like more job, better product, etc etc. sometime it help develop the society quicker because they get more capital to do bigger thing and put in research to do better thing or find new thing, but in return you have to promise growth and return to people giving you money to do that thing. i don't think it's meant to be altruistic cus it's not charity.
A bit like the difference between building bigger and unstable houses vs smaller and stable. No idea where you got the charity concept from, i dont think anyone has even mentioned it before.
Charity as in the purpose is purely for the good of society. Unless it's rhetorical, I merely answer your question.
Sorry, when word "charity" gets mentioned in this context tends to annoy me a lot as sentence "we are not a charity" seems to be like magic word to some that can be used to excuse any shitty behaviour by the company.
I haven't seen a better product from companies that grow big. I always see the quality go down and users stay because of lock-in.
Gets you something to add to your 401k portfolio. Which I don't think is a great argument; there are plenty of other ways to handle retirement even in a fundamentally capitalist system.
There's a theory out there that as SP500 indices for 401k's become the dominant investment, that will convince publicly traded companies to think long term. Those indices don't jump in and out of stocks. They want to add a stock and then keep it for decades. Companies would change their thinking to match.
I'm not convinced of that, though. Starting with the fact that 401k's started as a tax loophole that got mistaken for a good retirement plan, while traditional pensions and Social Security have been eroded away (to say the least). But it's a possible outcome.
I think the initial idea of like "I have a great idea but don't have the capital to get it off of the ground" is a decent argument for public companies, or in the case where employees are shareholders and thus reap reward when companies are successful, but I think these are both mostly antiquated notions and the ills of how public companies are today are a net-loss, and there are generally better ways to accomplish both of these things.
Especially in tech, it's entirely common to charge nothing, make no money and burn investment money until they end up either so dominant they essentially have monopoly power (think: Amazon) or that the business plan is reach critical mass and hopefully sell. And then the very notion that every business has to grow forever leads to rather perverse incentives. Again, especially if you look at tech, basically all of the FAANG companies used to be a lot better/nicer until some critical mass is hit and then they have to enshittify everything.
Mark my word, once Gabe pass it's gonna be very very different. We have very different things to worried about, like climate change, but on software side and tech we shouldn't rely on monopolies. Valve was kept in that state because all the competition didn't actually put up a fight worth extra investment. The windows store pushed valve to develop SteamOS and Proton, they also back off on some revenue split policy because of EGS's deals. (Let's be honest, not all players care about which launcher they use, as long as they get better deals and can play the game they want.)
And to my experience, Steam's recent years' updates to store/client are not something I like as well.
I don't like the gamification of sales event etc.
I don't like the new unlimited scroll type, they backed off a bit and become like 3 pages long until you hit the top/popular/sales part.
I also don't like some of the UI changes(ie the downloads/library mixed together and not separate item)
I hated the auto start live streaming thing, if there is option to turn off that please let me know.
For EGS,
their search sucks
library page sucks, you can't really organize your free games/purchased games etc.
auto updates are pretty on par so that's okay.
their friends/etc also sucks.(not that I care much but at least it's far worse than steam one.)
I like that they adopted Nintendo's gold coin reward type to encourage consumer to purchase there.
games from other big publisher usually do require install their clients as well, which sucks. (it's similar on steam as well.)
I hated the auto start live streaming thing, if there is option to turn off that please let me know.
There is an option in the settings to turn that off.
edit: Account details -> Store preferences -> Broadcast preferences (at the very bottom of that page)
thank you very much, for people who don't know it's "checked" to opt out/disable. (<-- this should be illegal. )
I was actually thinking about this the other day, will be a very sad day. Valve is the only company I genuinely can say I'm a fan of.
There is a downloads page, right click on "library" at the top and there is a downloads button that gives you a view of all pending/queued/current downloads etc.
The sales have become less fancy than they used to be? I have seen lots of complaints that the events have gotten worse.
okay, that makes sense now, I don't know what I did now it shows all the menu items when I hover over the big item. Which is good, hope it stays that way. :)
I used to need to click around to find the download page, or unless I have updated game queued up then it show up at bottom of the UI.
If by live streaming thing you mean the "broadcast" thing, you can turn it off on options.
Settings -> broadcast at bottom of list -> privacy settings -> broadcasting disabled
also, thank you very much, but this one seems to be your broadcasting preference, the other user's option path is correct.
Ah, you wanted it gone from the storepage. I have them disabled too and didn't remember they even exist there
Valve seems to be the only company on this capitalist world that actually understands that company profits cannot and should not grow exponentially forever without eventually destroying itself.
Nah, they are many of them, maybe even the majority of companies are like that (think SMBs). The peculiarity of Valve is that it also managed to become and stay the world leader in its domain, so every nerd knows about it.
Tons of SMEs are world leaders in their domain, you just never heard of them because they produce giant ship propellers, fire hose couplings, surgical instruments, whatnot, not exactly things people not using them ever think about. And of course you don't have to be a hidden champion to be a SME that owns their market, say, Herrenknecht. Who would be unknown if tunnel boring wasn't so cool and impactful that there's tons of documentaries about them doing it.
What is a SME or SMB in this context? Mentioning @oce@jlai.lu in case you're not sure what they meant by SMB either.
Coincidentally, I was just reading a news article about Chipotle doing exactly that - raising prices while losing customers.
Even companies that have seen customers pull back due to the higher prices reported higher sales, because those higher prices offset volume declines.
PepsiCo, for example, reported ... sales rose nearly 7% to $23.45 billion. The ... company said it increased prices globally by 11% on average... In that time, PepsiCo’s volume fell 2.5%.
Isn't that just price discovery?
I suppose so, but if everyone does it at once within every market sector it seems to just become inflation.
Nah, that's just actual inflation. You know the deficit that the government runs on now, and the bug private-sector and general-public bailouts of the last two decades?
Yeah, that's just printing money. Selling the overall value of the dollar to make ends meet today.
If companies are reporting larger profits after adjusting their prices for inflation then customers are met with inflation that is larger than the reported inflation rate.
Is Google destroying itself? Facebook? Amazon?
No dude. These companies are several decades old and continue to make money hand over fist by exploiting their customers. They do this shit because it makes them a fuckton of money, because their users have no fucking principles or backbone and just lick boots every time they're stepped on.
I am not an optimistic person but literally the only explanation I have for this sort of thing is altruism. That Valve is a company that simply loves its' community and doesn't want to exploit their customers. Nothing else makes sense.
I'm not sure it's entirely accurate to say these companies aren't destroying themselves though. Are they just going to explode and die all at once? Probably not, but they will likely fade to obscurity like IBM or HP (two powerhouses of the last century). I agree that exploiting customers is how they make money hand over foot (and we just roll over for it) but the point is to make the largest possible short term gains, not to maximize profit. It's important to maximize short term gains because it makes big shareholders happy, and the shareholders (e.g., the CEO and the board) want to enrich themselves. The issue with optimizing for short term gains is that you miss out on the dividends of long term effort, which is usually significantly greater.
Something I think about occasionally is how it is that a no-name startup beat the likes of Google, MS, Facebook, etc to chatgpt. Chatgpt is the single greatest innovation in search in almost 3 decades. Google's whole business relies on users needing Google's search platform to find information. Google gets to place ads here, and that makes up the largest part of their revenue, but chatgpt threatens to upend that whole business. There is the potential for a whole new generation of advertisement technology to be baked into chatgpt that delivers an unprecedented level of ad targeting. In case you need a translation, that is massive $$$$$$$$, because advertisers want their ads to be placed in front of people who will actually buy the product (and they will pay a premium for this!), not the spray and pray strategy you see today.
So yes, in a way, Google and other companies that rely on simply extracting wealth rather than innovating/building wealth risk losing billions of dollars and eventually fading to irrelevance. I really think Facebook has passed the point of no return already in this regard, and has allowed numerous social media sites to steal market share very easily.
Something I think about occasionally is how it is that a no-name startup beat the likes of Google, MS, Facebook, etc to chatgpt.
Which was immediately absorbed by the anti-consumer company MS for several tens of billions of dollars.
I really think Facebook has passed the point of no return already in this regard
How so? Literally half the planet still checks into Facebook on a monthly basis.
has allowed numerous social media sites to steal market share very easily.
They haven't stolen market share, they've created it. Facebook didn't lose any users and these other platforms still operate with a tiny fraction of Facebook's users.
Microsoft didn't "absorb" open ai, they have a partnership where Microsoft pays assloads of money to sustain openai so that Google doesn't get it. Ironically, this might be considered "long term thinking" but I wonder how long shareholders will tolerate such a hit to the books. There is supposed to be a profit sharing model here eventually (up to a certain point) but Microsoft isn't getting chatgpt, otherwise bing would have replaced chatgpt. I have to wonder if, by the time chatgpt is profitable, if there will already be better models produced by other groups (maybe even open source), especially given the pace of AI innovation. I would not be surprised if this was a net loss for MS. GPT is amazing but it has numerous drawbacks at the moment. I admit that, if they figure things out quickly, this could be a huge win for them. I would go so far as to say that this is not anti consumer at all and is exactly how the free market is supposed to work.
As for Facebook, the only data you need is that the younger generations think it's for boomers and don't use it. I'm a little older and (to your credit) I check in about once a month. I know that meta has a very powerful user data harvesting business (arguably more valuable than Facebook), but Facebook's user engagement will continue to slide if they can't capture younger users and keep millennials and gen x users on the platform. This devalues their ability to make money from ads directly, and again, they did this to themselves by destroying their reputation for short term gains. They will eventually become like Yahoo! or AOL, both of which have almost zero brand value.
As for Facebook, the only data you need is that the younger generations think it's for boomers and don't use it.
If you wonder why public companies with billions in revenue can't make a Steam competitor is because they can't think long term, being a private company allows Valve to just work on what they want and grow If they need to
Exactly this! I dread the day they go public :(
Reportedly Gaben has implemented safeguards to prevent Valve from getting public after his death. So at least we can hope Valve doesn't go public in our lifetimes.
Well they can, but only in one way:
Grow by selling at a loss to outcompete other and then make a profit.
Even if Valve was public, Steam makes so much goddamn money that putting ads on the platform would only cheapen it.
Good joke. Investors will see wasted financial potential and make valve do it.
When you have external money you now also have away part of a platform. And the investors don't care. Make number big fast. Nobody there is caring about long term
I'm not one that usually calls for the "Hail Corporate" BS where people lick the boots of big companies. In fact, I typically am very anti-corporate in every way, but Valve is one company I honestly have very little problem giving my money to. They very rarely have any anti-consumer things that crop up and every one to memory they've taken feedback and course corrected very rapidly. I'm afraid for the day Gabe Newell dies or retires, though. Whoever takes over Valve is going to have some big shoes to fill.
I'm mad HL2 ended on a cliff hanger and I'm really mad at how they handled TF2. Overall though yeah valve gud.
I think that's better than how other companies handle game sequels though
Just look at the state of the FIFA franchise
World of Warcraft is another example of corporate greed ruining a good product.
Command and Conquer PTSD intensive
About the worst criticism I've heard is around policies involving refunds (very short but charming games can be played quickly and then refunded) and shitware games clogging up search results (often Unity/Unreal Engine skeleton games with a new logo slapped on).
The first one discourages a subset of indy games, but ones that should be taken seriously.
The second, I think, is more of a problem for reviewers hunting for hidden gems than the public at large. Steam decided long ago to lean into Sturgeon's Law of letting almost everything go through and let the good stuff rise to the top. The other way to go is a curated list where you've already cleared out the garbage, but with the understanding that some hidden gems might be caught, too. If you go for letting through everything, then you should have mechanisms for highlighting quality. Steam is pretty good at that overall, but I see how it could be a problem for reviewers. After all, they're exactly the people who need to be trolling the depths and finding those hidden gems.
I don't think most people even notice those skeleton games all over Steam. I would never have seen them if not for J Steph Sterling pointing them out.
Suffice it to say that if these are the biggest problems, they're doing pretty well.
There is the unregulated gambling market running off Counterstrike and Dota etc items that valve technically doesn't run, but does facilitate through its community market and does profit from. Probably the biggest problem I have with how the company operates.
Google started out the same way. Hopefully this sticks
The advantage atm is that valves privately owned. The moment they go public, be very wary.
I think it will be fine as long as Gaben is there. I am afraid that after he retires or ascends into Godhood somehow John Riccitiello will get his ass into that seat.
It will never go public - they are making money over fist and have no reason to participate in public capital markets. They also aren't really interested in growing. The trade off is that not everyone will be able to get a job there.
The question is how long that mindset will survive once Gaben leaves. Or dies.
We need to upload him into a GabenOS of sorts. To preserve the Valve mindset, and also for science.
Some neurotoxin and mass murder would be a small price to pay.
To be a little more serious, I think there us a lot less risk that anything could happen. It is too profitable. I think of valve more like a company like Rolex, where they are crazy profitable and can do whatever they want.
No one can predict the future, and someone can always screw it all up with bad management. But I would predict that it is more likely that they would get bought out by Berkshire or something before going public or getting acquired by some VC firm.
Issue isn't now but the future. Gabe is content on what he and the company earned, he didn't feel the need to stuck an ever-growing tumor into his company. The story will be different when he's no longer the head of the company, unless Gabe made an unbreakable rule for the company to never go public, the chance of some next-in-line getting greedy on setting themselves and their next few descendant for life is pretty high.
But you can say that about anything. No one can predict the future.
Hopefully, if GabeN leaves, the next manager will be smart and manage steam well. Or they will be not smart and make bad decisions.
Emm yeah do you realise you're the one saying "they will never went public"?
I think it is very unlikely. But you are going "what about in the future?" Well, I still think it is unlikely. And then you can go "What about after that?" Well okay, I still think it is unlikely, even then. "How about after that though?"
Damn, okay, they are going to go public, all their developers will go on strike, make everyone buy all their steam library all over again and start selling GLaDOS NFTs. Is that what you want to hear? It's just a very funny comment. Yes, I don't think they will ever go public, till the end of time. The world will be a burnt out husk before Valve goes public.
Oof, you sound upset.
poke
poke
poke
Dude, stop poking me
poke
poke
Dude, fucking stop!
"Oof, you sound upset"
oof, we can't have a debate here now.
unless Gabe made an unbreakable rule for the company to never go public
Not exactly unprecedented, see e.g. Bosch, Zeiss, or, staying in the US, Mozilla.
Going public would mean gaben has sold out. Which would make sense for him at some point. If he's still working there he'll be stuck with the worst of both worlds.
Whoever comes in under him will want to make their pie and ready it too.
There’s no point in selling out when you make money hand over fist. All going public would do is make him lose total control of his company.
Not everyone is interested in total control. If Gaben decides he wants to retire on an even bigger pile of money or if his successor wants to cash in quick they could easily go public and reap a massive amount since Valve shares are sure to be high. I think the former is less likely than the latter, but Gabe is getting to retirement age, I expect to hear about a successor in the next 10-20 years
pretty sure he is already unimaginably rich
worth 4.3 Billion as of latest
A lot of people are unimaginably rich, but that doesn't stop them from coveting more wealth. Gaben seems to be happy where he is, thus why I think it's less likely he sells out than a successor takes over and sells out instead
Or died.
That's the biggest piece, smaller but worth mentioning is they make money off of our purchases directly unlike Google.
That's why they do promote say sales, because they still get the same cut and might see more revenue out of it. Selling general ads doesn't fit with what they're going for, but they do aggressively push ads.
Valve opened in the late 90s and is privately owned. Never say never where corporations and capitalism are concerned... But hopefully they wont take the evil google approach this late in the game. I think good will from their customers really sets them apart from competitors like Epic.
I feel like most of it is private ownership. The minute you enter the CEO/Board of Directors ecosystem with investors to pay and expectations of eternal growth, everything turns to shit.
Yup, can confirm. The company I work for is public, and we recently did layoffs despite being profitable, because we weren't as profitable as we projected. That's the kind of nonsense you get from public companies. I suppose it could happen with private companies as well, but my experience having worked for both doesn't fit with that.
Valve didn't suddenly get big, they've been dominating the PC space for many, many years.
And damn near every single Google effort into the games space has failed except for android games, which ride on the enormous platform install. Their latest effort was a joke - stadia was DOA.
I respect valve because they've provided indie game devs with the same distribution AAA studios get, they've never asked for exclusivity and did tons of uncompensated VR pioneering (remember Abrash and co were Valve before Oculus) and never once tried to 'own' vr. And they're a private company, so that means the decisions - and investments - they've made worked out enough to free them of a board dicking shit up.
Keep going, Valve. I don't like everything they do, but overall they're a gem in value added.
LOL Valve is not "starting out". They are about as old as Google.
I really hope that Gabe has future-proofed valve. It really is a remarkable treasure and one of the most user-friendly platforms of all time. Especially in these days when we are seeing a corporate takeover of the internet, or realizing that we lost a long time ago when we put all of our eggs in the Google basket.
I could see so much potential for fuckery happening, can you imagine if steam was as fond of kicking people off the platform as Reddit is? Or if games were constantly being curated to make sure they check all the boxes like the YouTube algorithm does? Five Nights at Freddy's would have never existed if steam played by those rules, same for every other surprise Indie hit
It's private at least, a good first step
Not a guarantee, but apparently a necessary condition for consumer friendly practices.
A successful gaming company going public ultimately leads to their IPs dying off thanks to executive meddling and the developers being sent to the mines to work on whatever is popular.
Thank God that the Sims appeals to such a wide casual audience and is one of the rare franchises in gaming with a higher female fanbase than a male one.
So much so that when the Sims 2 didn't have a breast size slider for fear that perverts would take advantage of it, the decision proved to be unpopular because too many of the fan base was unable to make Sims that accurately looked like themselves.
Because if that wasn't the case the life simulator genre would be pretty much dead, outside of promising looking indie games that try to replicate the experience, remain with a Steam page that says "Early Access" and a kickstarter that is ignoring all emails.
Even if every game after the Sims 2 was turned into a nickel and dime machine, and I say this as someone who not only has all of the DLC for The Sims 4, but also, remember the old days when people joked about The Sims 1 having an expansion pack for everything.
Incidentally I don't think downloadable content and micro transactions are necessarily a bad thing, it's certainly beats the alternative of going to the store and buying a new edition of the game that has like a couple of bug fixes and maybe one bonus dungeon at the end...
I just wish they were reigned in.
I'm all for private Enterprise being able to call its own shots as long as it isn't price gouging and hoarding Necessities like medicine, food, or housing.
That said if legislation came out and penalized companies for openly basing their business model on FOMO it would be one of the first times I actually wanted the video game industry to come under Fire by the government.
Aren't Google/YouTube, Amazon, Facebook/Meta also all private?
Edit: just realized you probably meant privately owned and also not publicly traded on a stock exchange
It's impossible to future-proof. You can't for the rest of time have good leaders, inevitably someone will come and ruin it.
No but you can carefully vet a successor, in order to buy some time
Even if you carefully get a successor, they can still fuck up and ruin it. Or they just die/decide to move on 2 years in and you're in similar shit Creek. Or hell, Gaben himself gets dementia and starts making shit decisions.
It's impossible to control.
I do not consider steam user friendly
State your case
Sorry, old post. There's hidden controls everywhere that just aren't intuitive.
How do you throttle your downloads?
A ton of my games that I know I own are missing from my library - where did they go?
How do you get to the store page of a game in your library?
If I take a screenshot with steam, where is it?
My steam library is showing my games by month. But it was showing them by categories I set for them before. How do I get back to that?
I can do all of these things, but when I try, I might need to search around steam a bit to find it, and I might get stuck entirely and have to ask someone or ask google.
Gabes replacement will be the tell all. and as much as i want steam to exist over multiple generations..i dont think it can survive turnover, greed, opportunistic bastards.
I think this is the difference between private/public companies. They don't have to deal with the "growth at all costs" mindset that plague public companies.
I really hope that he is planned out his successor meticulously,
Imagine if it was as Ban Happy as Reddit, Corporate as Youtube, or... owned by Elon Musk
I think it would be awesome if he turned it into a nonprofit with a healthy endowment. The charter could say that any profits above $X that can't be invested into improving PC gaming must go to charities that promote indie dev. So the main goal would be to do things like the Steam Deck or build innovative games, and there would be little incentive to screw over customers. It could also be structured like a coop, so if employees didn't like the CEO's direction, they could vote to remove them.
That's what I would do, but I'm obviously not GabeN.
It's kind of odd, because it feels like they do sell promotion at the very least. For instance, Immortals of Aveum (the new EA game) is constantly shown on my store homepage, despite it being more or less a commercial flop. I know that page is customized, but I would have figured that game would be replaced by others now if the selection was fully organic. I had just assumed EA paid for some agreement that would promote the game on the main page for a set amount of time.
I'm sure it's just coincidence, but their statement just surprised me since the store feels like it promotes specific games already.
Never seen that game in my homepage... You may have played similar games
Yeah, meanwhile the front page often shows me the forest, and have so for like the last few years lmao
Mostly because it's similar to other games I've played and is good, I'm sure. I just never bothered to really interact with the game in either direction.
It could be that part of their algorithm involves significantly weighting past sales by a publisher/development studio, especially early in the life cycle.
They definitely give curated preference to companies that have had successful games on steam. I wouldn't be surprised if they have something worked out with EA.
Honestly, I wouldn't try to gotcha Valve on anything. They are a games distributor, and they will do and say anything to promote games that are selling well, and the developers and publishers behind them. They don't give a crap about games or devs that aren't selling. Nor would/should they.
They also run huge banners at the top for new releases - currently it's Diablo 4.
I assume that's a paid spot.
They could be promoting it with the expectation that sales will benefit them through their share. A banner for Diablo 4 benefits Valve directly just by making people aware they can buy it through steam.
There was just an article about this. Its not paid - its curated. There is supposedly a soft revenue requirement for the studio/publisher to be considered.
Valve really has it made. They say, you can "buy" these spots by selling a lot of games, which they take 30% of. Idk why you would mess that up.
It's actually quite good, IMO, and I am doing a melee/bash run at the moment at the higher difficulty. That's from a player haven't re-run a game in almost a decade.(Last game I did a rerun is Zelda:The Wind Waker HD.) And the devs said they are going to release NG+ later.
Why am I considering it good?
no mtx at all
very light to no grinding mechanism(unless you are like me doing specialty runs at high difficulty, you don't have to grind at all)
the control is pretty tight, reminds me Q3A era control. You can't go crazy speed but you can do that initial strafe run jump thing to speed up quickly.
some late game enemy/encounter design is actually not bad. It's annoying/boring if you do the regular FPS peeking/kiting and beat them, but it's actually satisfying if you use the provided mechanisms to do beat the same encounter but more involved.
skill tree customization is actually quite interesting when combined with gear selection.
enemies design are actually quite fair, there are no "this is BS" enemy types, and the enemy progression is actually pretty gradual no sudden difficulty spikes here and there.
Any cons?
some mechanism aren't explained properly in game.
if anything I think they are tuned still a bit toward the easier end even on high difficulty. Might be too easy/boring for season FPS player.
some spells aren't really that useful to your play style, or have some design oddity that I don't really know it's "true" purpose. ie there is a spell that slows both you and enemy, I felt like wtf when I first acquired that and used it in a group fight.
default KBM bind are pretty bad, it's control is more focused for controller/console.
back tracking to open chest locked behind ability seems a bit boring
there could be maybe a couple more enemy types, I wish there are another 2 creature type enemy and maybe 3 more humanoid types to mix up the battle even more.
edit: forgot to mention Denuvo and EA account required.
Now graphics and system requirement. I have a 6800XT and mid range CPU 3900X, I pretty much run the default at 1440p upscale to 2160p and average around 75~85 fps for most part of the game. There are reports and whatever says "this game doesn't look that good compare to other non-UE5 games", why the spec requirement? Well, I guess that's very player specific judgement but unfortunately most people care about the fps number and be able to run all "ultra" with native pixels, instead of actually checking what's the core difference between UE5 vs older gen DX11 game engine results. Games developed with UE5 or modern tech will suffer from initial high spec requirement, but will age much much better later down the road. Some of the in game asset details are really unmatched by whatever I've seen so far even up close.
And, at recent sale price I think it's worth buying if you don't have a side game to play with.
edit: I just checked my steam store page, this game isn't even showing.(I purchased on EGS) So probably your game selection matches their suggestion algorithms. I checked:
landing page all the feature/recommended "slides"
recommended for you
top seller
Yeah, I thought the homepage and pop up every time you open it were ads
If you watch the video in question, they detail which parts of the store are algorithmic and which parts are "curated" by Valve. My guess is that falls into the latter.
Yeah, isn't literally everything they have on steam and advertisement?
Only if companies are paying more for what you're seeing.
The classic example would be loosely related games showing at the top of search results because some paid for them to be sponsored posts. Or something like that
It's not a principled stance, it's simple economics.
They already take 30 percent of sales.
It is a benefit to them to put whatever will guarantee more sales, and a couple cents from an ad impression is just going to get in the way of that goal.
You're not thinking like a capitalist. That 30% of sales they're going to get anyway because the games that will pop up at the storefront are games that are, relatively speaking, successful. What they're not getting is the money other companies would pay them to advertise games nobody wants to see. From a capitalist point of view Valve is leaving money on the table by not selling ad space.
That assumes that the money from targeted/curated ads is less than the money from paid advertising fees + follow up sales. That may not actually be true. Generic ads are notoriously bad at converting views to clicks to sales. What steam is doing is basically targeted advertising which boosts their sales, where they make a guaranteed 30% return at a rate that's probably much higher than the conversion rate for paid advertising.
Other sales platforms do the same thing. It's not really any different from all the recommendation sections on Amazon. The idea that they're doing it just to be nice is pretty ridiculous. Valve is still out to make money at the end of the day.
That may not actually be true.
This is where your thinking doesn't align with modern day Capitalists. You're thinking about the scenario where it might not make a profit, but the capitalists think about the scenario where it could make a profit. It's a question of potential. If there is potential to make even more money (and in this case there is) then that's a business case that needs to be explored. It ultimately doesn't matter if it actually makes them less money, the potential gains matter more.
If Steam isn't pay to win, how do I earn the points used to buy the profile doodads (avatars, avatar bezels, backgrounds, banners, etc) without purchasing games? 🤔
Do you consider it a win, if you have all the doodads?
Of course. And if I'm winning at Steam, I'm winning in real life! 🥲
I hate that I laughed about this.
I purchased enough stuff in past sales that when that feature released, which I ignored until I saw one of my rocket league friend do something fancy on their profile icon, I had all the credits to buy all the top animated ones. But being stingy with the virtual coins, I still only pick the one I want to use and only buy those. one boarder and one background to match. What about my other credits? well they can rot or whatever I don't care.
I bought my index the day they implemented that stuff.
I was so confused as to how I got so many… thing… points?
I’ve never done anything with them and that was many years ago. Maybe I should? I dunno.
Lol. This is a cute idea but we all know it will go through enshittification with time. You are naive if you believe otherwise.
I thought it was due to their poor grasp on mathematics and inability to count beyond two.
...Granted you can turn this off, but by default every time you start Steam an ad for a game flies up in your face.
I would also call every single store page on Steam a "sold ad." Again, granted that it doesn't seem you can pay to promote your game above anyone else's and the search seems to be fairly straightforward and functional.
While I do feel there is definitely advertising that happens on Steam, I'm okay with the level of it. I can find products I want, and products I do not want are not mercilessly crammed down my throat.
Valve seems to be the only company on this capitalist world that actually understands that company profits cannot and should not grow exponentially forever without eventually destroying itself. All other companies don't know or want to stop the greed ad are constantly pushing for more profits to see until where they can push the greed and milking without losing "too much" costumers. They even weight the amount of costumers lost vs the extra profits to see if its viable to lose those costumers and still profit, like Netflix. Valve does not work like this. Valve grew to a size, and that size is giving them stable and steady profit. And they are holding that size, slowly growing more here and there but nothing big. The biggest thing they did in like 10 years was the Steam Deck and they will not update it with a Deck 2 anytime soon. Valve plays the very slow, but steady profits game. This is how you win as a company. You try to keep yourself on a balance between good profits and good public perspective.
Being privately held helps a ton. Gabe is his own boss. Once a company's public they're beholden to the investors, and investors want big short term returns so they can dump their stock and move onto the next one.
Maybe that shouldn’t be possible.
Yep. Investing should tie you to a stock for at least a year - as soon as you decide to sell, the one-year timer starts.
Agree wholeheartedly, there should be risk.
Why is trading stocks even allowed? Seems like a net loss for basically everyone, except the ultra-wealthy.
Stocks = certificate of ownership in a fraction of a company. The basic principle is sound and goes back at least to the Renaissance, it's everything else around it that sucks and creates a plethora of perverse incentives that benefit the capital owners.
Company stocks are not unique there, it's the most common example but the principle extends to every commodity. You can buy virtual coal or gold right now if you want and sell later, without actually having coal delivered to your doorstep. This is actually a very important market mechanism when it works right because it allows the market to internalize external forces, reducing risk. European energy providers learned this the hard way when prices shot through the roof in 2022 and they were buying gas at "current prices", leading to funds drying up unexpectedly sometimes to the point of bankruptcy, rather than buying gas at "future prices", guaranteeing deliveries that were paid for months in advance. When it works well, speculation is actually an inescapable tool of complex modern economies. Without it you cannot maintain supply chains fit for the modern world, as speculation (when not abused) is the market's way of accounting and preparing for the expected future.
Even in a communist society, you'd need stocks: the disagreement then becomes whether the state should own (part of) the stocks, or if the workers should own all the stocks (legally equivalent to the means of production).
Oh huh, neat. Thanks for the write-up! Basically the only thing I know about stock trading comes from family members trying to convince others to buy meme stocks, so I don't really have a high opinion of the craft.
I truly fear the day Gabe passes on. Do we know who would own Valve if Gabe were to pass on today?
I think it is a little more complicated than that. You go to public markets to raise cash. Sometimes you can get the cash you want, sometimes not. The issue is when you are incentivized to make the stock price go up at all costs. If you don't need the cash, there is no point to having a higher stock price - lower is somewhat better.
Now, if you are a CEO, and you are paid in stock options, you are going to do whatever you can to maximize the stock price. Even if it is bad for thebling term health of the company. I don't think the public markets care either way.
Valve able to do that because they are private company, the exponential growth is only made mandatory because of the stakeholder. if the growth is stagnant(even with healthy profit), it's very unattractive to investor, hence growth is needed to keep the cog running.
I wonder, what actual benefits are there in publicly traded companies for society as whole? Benefits that are good for you, me and everyone else equally.
It's mostly the effect of expanding the company, like more job, better product, etc etc. sometime it help develop the society quicker because they get more capital to do bigger thing and put in research to do better thing or find new thing, but in return you have to promise growth and return to people giving you money to do that thing. i don't think it's meant to be altruistic cus it's not charity.
A bit like the difference between building bigger and unstable houses vs smaller and stable. No idea where you got the charity concept from, i dont think anyone has even mentioned it before.
Charity as in the purpose is purely for the good of society. Unless it's rhetorical, I merely answer your question.
Sorry, when word "charity" gets mentioned in this context tends to annoy me a lot as sentence "we are not a charity" seems to be like magic word to some that can be used to excuse any shitty behaviour by the company.
I haven't seen a better product from companies that grow big. I always see the quality go down and users stay because of lock-in.
Gets you something to add to your 401k portfolio. Which I don't think is a great argument; there are plenty of other ways to handle retirement even in a fundamentally capitalist system.
There's a theory out there that as SP500 indices for 401k's become the dominant investment, that will convince publicly traded companies to think long term. Those indices don't jump in and out of stocks. They want to add a stock and then keep it for decades. Companies would change their thinking to match.
I'm not convinced of that, though. Starting with the fact that 401k's started as a tax loophole that got mistaken for a good retirement plan, while traditional pensions and Social Security have been eroded away (to say the least). But it's a possible outcome.
I think the initial idea of like "I have a great idea but don't have the capital to get it off of the ground" is a decent argument for public companies, or in the case where employees are shareholders and thus reap reward when companies are successful, but I think these are both mostly antiquated notions and the ills of how public companies are today are a net-loss, and there are generally better ways to accomplish both of these things.
Especially in tech, it's entirely common to charge nothing, make no money and burn investment money until they end up either so dominant they essentially have monopoly power (think: Amazon) or that the business plan is reach critical mass and hopefully sell. And then the very notion that every business has to grow forever leads to rather perverse incentives. Again, especially if you look at tech, basically all of the FAANG companies used to be a lot better/nicer until some critical mass is hit and then they have to enshittify everything.
Mark my word, once Gabe pass it's gonna be very very different. We have very different things to worried about, like climate change, but on software side and tech we shouldn't rely on monopolies. Valve was kept in that state because all the competition didn't actually put up a fight worth extra investment. The windows store pushed valve to develop SteamOS and Proton, they also back off on some revenue split policy because of EGS's deals. (Let's be honest, not all players care about which launcher they use, as long as they get better deals and can play the game they want.)
And to my experience, Steam's recent years' updates to store/client are not something I like as well.
For EGS,
There is an option in the settings to turn that off.
edit: Account details -> Store preferences -> Broadcast preferences (at the very bottom of that page)
thank you very much, for people who don't know it's "checked" to opt out/disable. (<-- this should be illegal. )
I was actually thinking about this the other day, will be a very sad day. Valve is the only company I genuinely can say I'm a fan of.
There is a downloads page, right click on "library" at the top and there is a downloads button that gives you a view of all pending/queued/current downloads etc.
The sales have become less fancy than they used to be? I have seen lots of complaints that the events have gotten worse.
okay, that makes sense now, I don't know what I did now it shows all the menu items when I hover over the big item. Which is good, hope it stays that way. :)
I used to need to click around to find the download page, or unless I have updated game queued up then it show up at bottom of the UI.
If by live streaming thing you mean the "broadcast" thing, you can turn it off on options.
Settings -> broadcast at bottom of list -> privacy settings -> broadcasting disabled
also, thank you very much, but this one seems to be your broadcasting preference, the other user's option path is correct.
Ah, you wanted it gone from the storepage. I have them disabled too and didn't remember they even exist there
Nah, they are many of them, maybe even the majority of companies are like that (think SMBs). The peculiarity of Valve is that it also managed to become and stay the world leader in its domain, so every nerd knows about it.
Tons of SMEs are world leaders in their domain, you just never heard of them because they produce giant ship propellers, fire hose couplings, surgical instruments, whatnot, not exactly things people not using them ever think about. And of course you don't have to be a hidden champion to be a SME that owns their market, say, Herrenknecht. Who would be unknown if tunnel boring wasn't so cool and impactful that there's tons of documentaries about them doing it.
What is a SME or SMB in this context? Mentioning @oce@jlai.lu in case you're not sure what they meant by SMB either.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_and_medium-sized_enterprises / businesses
Thanks!
Small to medium business/enterprise.
Thanks!
Coincidentally, I was just reading a news article about Chipotle doing exactly that - raising prices while losing customers.
Isn't that just price discovery?
I suppose so, but if everyone does it at once within every market sector it seems to just become inflation.
Nah, that's just actual inflation. You know the deficit that the government runs on now, and the bug private-sector and general-public bailouts of the last two decades?
Yeah, that's just printing money. Selling the overall value of the dollar to make ends meet today.
If companies are reporting larger profits after adjusting their prices for inflation then customers are met with inflation that is larger than the reported inflation rate.
Is Google destroying itself? Facebook? Amazon?
No dude. These companies are several decades old and continue to make money hand over fist by exploiting their customers. They do this shit because it makes them a fuckton of money, because their users have no fucking principles or backbone and just lick boots every time they're stepped on.
I am not an optimistic person but literally the only explanation I have for this sort of thing is altruism. That Valve is a company that simply loves its' community and doesn't want to exploit their customers. Nothing else makes sense.
I'm not sure it's entirely accurate to say these companies aren't destroying themselves though. Are they just going to explode and die all at once? Probably not, but they will likely fade to obscurity like IBM or HP (two powerhouses of the last century). I agree that exploiting customers is how they make money hand over foot (and we just roll over for it) but the point is to make the largest possible short term gains, not to maximize profit. It's important to maximize short term gains because it makes big shareholders happy, and the shareholders (e.g., the CEO and the board) want to enrich themselves. The issue with optimizing for short term gains is that you miss out on the dividends of long term effort, which is usually significantly greater.
Something I think about occasionally is how it is that a no-name startup beat the likes of Google, MS, Facebook, etc to chatgpt. Chatgpt is the single greatest innovation in search in almost 3 decades. Google's whole business relies on users needing Google's search platform to find information. Google gets to place ads here, and that makes up the largest part of their revenue, but chatgpt threatens to upend that whole business. There is the potential for a whole new generation of advertisement technology to be baked into chatgpt that delivers an unprecedented level of ad targeting. In case you need a translation, that is massive $$$$$$$$, because advertisers want their ads to be placed in front of people who will actually buy the product (and they will pay a premium for this!), not the spray and pray strategy you see today.
So yes, in a way, Google and other companies that rely on simply extracting wealth rather than innovating/building wealth risk losing billions of dollars and eventually fading to irrelevance. I really think Facebook has passed the point of no return already in this regard, and has allowed numerous social media sites to steal market share very easily.
Which was immediately absorbed by the anti-consumer company MS for several tens of billions of dollars.
How so? Literally half the planet still checks into Facebook on a monthly basis.
They haven't stolen market share, they've created it. Facebook didn't lose any users and these other platforms still operate with a tiny fraction of Facebook's users.
Microsoft didn't "absorb" open ai, they have a partnership where Microsoft pays assloads of money to sustain openai so that Google doesn't get it. Ironically, this might be considered "long term thinking" but I wonder how long shareholders will tolerate such a hit to the books. There is supposed to be a profit sharing model here eventually (up to a certain point) but Microsoft isn't getting chatgpt, otherwise bing would have replaced chatgpt. I have to wonder if, by the time chatgpt is profitable, if there will already be better models produced by other groups (maybe even open source), especially given the pace of AI innovation. I would not be surprised if this was a net loss for MS. GPT is amazing but it has numerous drawbacks at the moment. I admit that, if they figure things out quickly, this could be a huge win for them. I would go so far as to say that this is not anti consumer at all and is exactly how the free market is supposed to work.
As for Facebook, the only data you need is that the younger generations think it's for boomers and don't use it. I'm a little older and (to your credit) I check in about once a month. I know that meta has a very powerful user data harvesting business (arguably more valuable than Facebook), but Facebook's user engagement will continue to slide if they can't capture younger users and keep millennials and gen x users on the platform. This devalues their ability to make money from ads directly, and again, they did this to themselves by destroying their reputation for short term gains. They will eventually become like Yahoo! or AOL, both of which have almost zero brand value.
Not but they do very much use Instagram.
If you wonder why public companies with billions in revenue can't make a Steam competitor is because they can't think long term, being a private company allows Valve to just work on what they want and grow If they need to
Exactly this! I dread the day they go public :(
Reportedly Gaben has implemented safeguards to prevent Valve from getting public after his death. So at least we can hope Valve doesn't go public in our lifetimes.
Well they can, but only in one way: Grow by selling at a loss to outcompete other and then make a profit.
Even if Valve was public, Steam makes so much goddamn money that putting ads on the platform would only cheapen it.
Good joke. Investors will see wasted financial potential and make valve do it.
When you have external money you now also have away part of a platform. And the investors don't care. Make number big fast. Nobody there is caring about long term
Thank you armchair analyst
I'm not one that usually calls for the "Hail Corporate" BS where people lick the boots of big companies. In fact, I typically am very anti-corporate in every way, but Valve is one company I honestly have very little problem giving my money to. They very rarely have any anti-consumer things that crop up and every one to memory they've taken feedback and course corrected very rapidly. I'm afraid for the day Gabe Newell dies or retires, though. Whoever takes over Valve is going to have some big shoes to fill.
I'm mad HL2 ended on a cliff hanger and I'm really mad at how they handled TF2. Overall though yeah valve gud.
I think that's better than how other companies handle game sequels though Just look at the state of the FIFA franchise
World of Warcraft is another example of corporate greed ruining a good product.
Command and Conquer PTSD intensive
About the worst criticism I've heard is around policies involving refunds (very short but charming games can be played quickly and then refunded) and shitware games clogging up search results (often Unity/Unreal Engine skeleton games with a new logo slapped on).
The first one discourages a subset of indy games, but ones that should be taken seriously.
The second, I think, is more of a problem for reviewers hunting for hidden gems than the public at large. Steam decided long ago to lean into Sturgeon's Law of letting almost everything go through and let the good stuff rise to the top. The other way to go is a curated list where you've already cleared out the garbage, but with the understanding that some hidden gems might be caught, too. If you go for letting through everything, then you should have mechanisms for highlighting quality. Steam is pretty good at that overall, but I see how it could be a problem for reviewers. After all, they're exactly the people who need to be trolling the depths and finding those hidden gems.
I don't think most people even notice those skeleton games all over Steam. I would never have seen them if not for J Steph Sterling pointing them out.
Suffice it to say that if these are the biggest problems, they're doing pretty well.
There is the unregulated gambling market running off Counterstrike and Dota etc items that valve technically doesn't run, but does facilitate through its community market and does profit from. Probably the biggest problem I have with how the company operates.
That being said, generally I do agree.
Google started out the same way. Hopefully this sticks
The advantage atm is that valves privately owned. The moment they go public, be very wary.
I think it will be fine as long as Gaben is there. I am afraid that after he retires or ascends into Godhood somehow John Riccitiello will get his ass into that seat.
It will never go public - they are making money over fist and have no reason to participate in public capital markets. They also aren't really interested in growing. The trade off is that not everyone will be able to get a job there.
The question is how long that mindset will survive once Gaben leaves. Or dies.
We need to upload him into a GabenOS of sorts. To preserve the Valve mindset, and also for science.
Some neurotoxin and mass murder would be a small price to pay.
To be a little more serious, I think there us a lot less risk that anything could happen. It is too profitable. I think of valve more like a company like Rolex, where they are crazy profitable and can do whatever they want.
No one can predict the future, and someone can always screw it all up with bad management. But I would predict that it is more likely that they would get bought out by Berkshire or something before going public or getting acquired by some VC firm.
Issue isn't now but the future. Gabe is content on what he and the company earned, he didn't feel the need to stuck an ever-growing tumor into his company. The story will be different when he's no longer the head of the company, unless Gabe made an unbreakable rule for the company to never go public, the chance of some next-in-line getting greedy on setting themselves and their next few descendant for life is pretty high.
But you can say that about anything. No one can predict the future.
Hopefully, if GabeN leaves, the next manager will be smart and manage steam well. Or they will be not smart and make bad decisions.
Emm yeah do you realise you're the one saying "they will never went public"?
I think it is very unlikely. But you are going "what about in the future?" Well, I still think it is unlikely. And then you can go "What about after that?" Well okay, I still think it is unlikely, even then. "How about after that though?"
Damn, okay, they are going to go public, all their developers will go on strike, make everyone buy all their steam library all over again and start selling GLaDOS NFTs. Is that what you want to hear? It's just a very funny comment. Yes, I don't think they will ever go public, till the end of time. The world will be a burnt out husk before Valve goes public.
Oof, you sound upset.
poke
poke
poke
Dude, stop poking me
poke
poke
Dude, fucking stop!
"Oof, you sound upset"
oof, we can't have a debate here now.
Not exactly unprecedented, see e.g. Bosch, Zeiss, or, staying in the US, Mozilla.
Going public would mean gaben has sold out. Which would make sense for him at some point. If he's still working there he'll be stuck with the worst of both worlds.
Whoever comes in under him will want to make their pie and ready it too.
There’s no point in selling out when you make money hand over fist. All going public would do is make him lose total control of his company.
Not everyone is interested in total control. If Gaben decides he wants to retire on an even bigger pile of money or if his successor wants to cash in quick they could easily go public and reap a massive amount since Valve shares are sure to be high. I think the former is less likely than the latter, but Gabe is getting to retirement age, I expect to hear about a successor in the next 10-20 years
pretty sure he is already unimaginably rich
worth 4.3 Billion as of latest
A lot of people are unimaginably rich, but that doesn't stop them from coveting more wealth. Gaben seems to be happy where he is, thus why I think it's less likely he sells out than a successor takes over and sells out instead
Or died.
That's the biggest piece, smaller but worth mentioning is they make money off of our purchases directly unlike Google.
That's why they do promote say sales, because they still get the same cut and might see more revenue out of it. Selling general ads doesn't fit with what they're going for, but they do aggressively push ads.
Valve opened in the late 90s and is privately owned. Never say never where corporations and capitalism are concerned... But hopefully they wont take the evil google approach this late in the game. I think good will from their customers really sets them apart from competitors like Epic.
I feel like most of it is private ownership. The minute you enter the CEO/Board of Directors ecosystem with investors to pay and expectations of eternal growth, everything turns to shit.
Yup, can confirm. The company I work for is public, and we recently did layoffs despite being profitable, because we weren't as profitable as we projected. That's the kind of nonsense you get from public companies. I suppose it could happen with private companies as well, but my experience having worked for both doesn't fit with that.
Valve didn't suddenly get big, they've been dominating the PC space for many, many years.
And damn near every single Google effort into the games space has failed except for android games, which ride on the enormous platform install. Their latest effort was a joke - stadia was DOA.
I respect valve because they've provided indie game devs with the same distribution AAA studios get, they've never asked for exclusivity and did tons of uncompensated VR pioneering (remember Abrash and co were Valve before Oculus) and never once tried to 'own' vr. And they're a private company, so that means the decisions - and investments - they've made worked out enough to free them of a board dicking shit up.
Keep going, Valve. I don't like everything they do, but overall they're a gem in value added.
LOL Valve is not "starting out". They are about as old as Google.
I really hope that Gabe has future-proofed valve. It really is a remarkable treasure and one of the most user-friendly platforms of all time. Especially in these days when we are seeing a corporate takeover of the internet, or realizing that we lost a long time ago when we put all of our eggs in the Google basket.
I could see so much potential for fuckery happening, can you imagine if steam was as fond of kicking people off the platform as Reddit is? Or if games were constantly being curated to make sure they check all the boxes like the YouTube algorithm does? Five Nights at Freddy's would have never existed if steam played by those rules, same for every other surprise Indie hit
It's private at least, a good first step
Not a guarantee, but apparently a necessary condition for consumer friendly practices.
A successful gaming company going public ultimately leads to their IPs dying off thanks to executive meddling and the developers being sent to the mines to work on whatever is popular.
Thank God that the Sims appeals to such a wide casual audience and is one of the rare franchises in gaming with a higher female fanbase than a male one.
So much so that when the Sims 2 didn't have a breast size slider for fear that perverts would take advantage of it, the decision proved to be unpopular because too many of the fan base was unable to make Sims that accurately looked like themselves.
Because if that wasn't the case the life simulator genre would be pretty much dead, outside of promising looking indie games that try to replicate the experience, remain with a Steam page that says "Early Access" and a kickstarter that is ignoring all emails.
Even if every game after the Sims 2 was turned into a nickel and dime machine, and I say this as someone who not only has all of the DLC for The Sims 4, but also, remember the old days when people joked about The Sims 1 having an expansion pack for everything.
Incidentally I don't think downloadable content and micro transactions are necessarily a bad thing, it's certainly beats the alternative of going to the store and buying a new edition of the game that has like a couple of bug fixes and maybe one bonus dungeon at the end...
I just wish they were reigned in.
I'm all for private Enterprise being able to call its own shots as long as it isn't price gouging and hoarding Necessities like medicine, food, or housing.
That said if legislation came out and penalized companies for openly basing their business model on FOMO it would be one of the first times I actually wanted the video game industry to come under Fire by the government.
Aren't Google/YouTube, Amazon, Facebook/Meta also all private?
Edit: just realized you probably meant privately owned and also not publicly traded on a stock exchange
It's impossible to future-proof. You can't for the rest of time have good leaders, inevitably someone will come and ruin it.
No but you can carefully vet a successor, in order to buy some time
Even if you carefully get a successor, they can still fuck up and ruin it. Or they just die/decide to move on 2 years in and you're in similar shit Creek. Or hell, Gaben himself gets dementia and starts making shit decisions.
It's impossible to control.
I do not consider steam user friendly
State your case
Sorry, old post. There's hidden controls everywhere that just aren't intuitive.
How do you throttle your downloads? A ton of my games that I know I own are missing from my library - where did they go? How do you get to the store page of a game in your library? If I take a screenshot with steam, where is it? My steam library is showing my games by month. But it was showing them by categories I set for them before. How do I get back to that?
I can do all of these things, but when I try, I might need to search around steam a bit to find it, and I might get stuck entirely and have to ask someone or ask google.
Gabes replacement will be the tell all. and as much as i want steam to exist over multiple generations..i dont think it can survive turnover, greed, opportunistic bastards.
I think this is the difference between private/public companies. They don't have to deal with the "growth at all costs" mindset that plague public companies.
I really hope that he is planned out his successor meticulously,
Imagine if it was as Ban Happy as Reddit, Corporate as Youtube, or... owned by Elon Musk
I think it would be awesome if he turned it into a nonprofit with a healthy endowment. The charter could say that any profits above $X that can't be invested into improving PC gaming must go to charities that promote indie dev. So the main goal would be to do things like the Steam Deck or build innovative games, and there would be little incentive to screw over customers. It could also be structured like a coop, so if employees didn't like the CEO's direction, they could vote to remove them.
That's what I would do, but I'm obviously not GabeN.
It's kind of odd, because it feels like they do sell promotion at the very least. For instance, Immortals of Aveum (the new EA game) is constantly shown on my store homepage, despite it being more or less a commercial flop. I know that page is customized, but I would have figured that game would be replaced by others now if the selection was fully organic. I had just assumed EA paid for some agreement that would promote the game on the main page for a set amount of time.
I'm sure it's just coincidence, but their statement just surprised me since the store feels like it promotes specific games already.
Never seen that game in my homepage... You may have played similar games
Yeah, meanwhile the front page often shows me the forest, and have so for like the last few years lmao
Mostly because it's similar to other games I've played and is good, I'm sure. I just never bothered to really interact with the game in either direction.
It could be that part of their algorithm involves significantly weighting past sales by a publisher/development studio, especially early in the life cycle.
They definitely give curated preference to companies that have had successful games on steam. I wouldn't be surprised if they have something worked out with EA.
Honestly, I wouldn't try to gotcha Valve on anything. They are a games distributor, and they will do and say anything to promote games that are selling well, and the developers and publishers behind them. They don't give a crap about games or devs that aren't selling. Nor would/should they.
They also run huge banners at the top for new releases - currently it's Diablo 4.
I assume that's a paid spot.
They could be promoting it with the expectation that sales will benefit them through their share. A banner for Diablo 4 benefits Valve directly just by making people aware they can buy it through steam.
There was just an article about this. Its not paid - its curated. There is supposedly a soft revenue requirement for the studio/publisher to be considered.
Valve really has it made. They say, you can "buy" these spots by selling a lot of games, which they take 30% of. Idk why you would mess that up.
It's actually quite good, IMO, and I am doing a melee/bash run at the moment at the higher difficulty. That's from a player haven't re-run a game in almost a decade.(Last game I did a rerun is Zelda:The Wind Waker HD.) And the devs said they are going to release NG+ later.
Why am I considering it good?
no mtx at all
very light to no grinding mechanism(unless you are like me doing specialty runs at high difficulty, you don't have to grind at all)
the control is pretty tight, reminds me Q3A era control. You can't go crazy speed but you can do that initial strafe run jump thing to speed up quickly.
some late game enemy/encounter design is actually not bad. It's annoying/boring if you do the regular FPS peeking/kiting and beat them, but it's actually satisfying if you use the provided mechanisms to do beat the same encounter but more involved.
skill tree customization is actually quite interesting when combined with gear selection.
enemies design are actually quite fair, there are no "this is BS" enemy types, and the enemy progression is actually pretty gradual no sudden difficulty spikes here and there.
Any cons?
Now graphics and system requirement. I have a 6800XT and mid range CPU 3900X, I pretty much run the default at 1440p upscale to 2160p and average around 75~85 fps for most part of the game. There are reports and whatever says "this game doesn't look that good compare to other non-UE5 games", why the spec requirement? Well, I guess that's very player specific judgement but unfortunately most people care about the fps number and be able to run all "ultra" with native pixels, instead of actually checking what's the core difference between UE5 vs older gen DX11 game engine results. Games developed with UE5 or modern tech will suffer from initial high spec requirement, but will age much much better later down the road. Some of the in game asset details are really unmatched by whatever I've seen so far even up close.
And, at recent sale price I think it's worth buying if you don't have a side game to play with. edit: I just checked my steam store page, this game isn't even showing.(I purchased on EGS) So probably your game selection matches their suggestion algorithms. I checked:
Yeah, I thought the homepage and pop up every time you open it were ads
If you watch the video in question, they detail which parts of the store are algorithmic and which parts are "curated" by Valve. My guess is that falls into the latter.
I hope Gaben outlives me.
Ok, get in — ⚰️.
Steam is a store.
Why would they try and sell you someone else's goods?
LMAO.
Amazon is also a store, but they have sponsored listings that get preferential placement. Not technically ads, but very similar idea...
here's the kicker: amazon sells their own product at the public market owned by amazon, undercutting any other seller on near-exact things.
imagine if valve made knockoffs of every famous game and just redirected every search to them.
Yeah, isn't literally everything they have on steam and advertisement?
Only if companies are paying more for what you're seeing.
The classic example would be loosely related games showing at the top of search results because some paid for them to be sponsored posts. Or something like that
all hail Lord GabeN
SideQuest VR went the exact opposite direction.
Giga chads
Based
It's not a principled stance, it's simple economics.
They already take 30 percent of sales.
It is a benefit to them to put whatever will guarantee more sales, and a couple cents from an ad impression is just going to get in the way of that goal.
You're not thinking like a capitalist. That 30% of sales they're going to get anyway because the games that will pop up at the storefront are games that are, relatively speaking, successful. What they're not getting is the money other companies would pay them to advertise games nobody wants to see. From a capitalist point of view Valve is leaving money on the table by not selling ad space.
That assumes that the money from targeted/curated ads is less than the money from paid advertising fees + follow up sales. That may not actually be true. Generic ads are notoriously bad at converting views to clicks to sales. What steam is doing is basically targeted advertising which boosts their sales, where they make a guaranteed 30% return at a rate that's probably much higher than the conversion rate for paid advertising.
Other sales platforms do the same thing. It's not really any different from all the recommendation sections on Amazon. The idea that they're doing it just to be nice is pretty ridiculous. Valve is still out to make money at the end of the day.
This is where your thinking doesn't align with modern day Capitalists. You're thinking about the scenario where it might not make a profit, but the capitalists think about the scenario where it could make a profit. It's a question of potential. If there is potential to make even more money (and in this case there is) then that's a business case that needs to be explored. It ultimately doesn't matter if it actually makes them less money, the potential gains matter more.
If Steam isn't pay to win, how do I earn the points used to buy the profile doodads (avatars, avatar bezels, backgrounds, banners, etc) without purchasing games? 🤔
Do you consider it a win, if you have all the doodads?
Of course. And if I'm winning at Steam, I'm winning in real life! 🥲
I hate that I laughed about this.
I purchased enough stuff in past sales that when that feature released, which I ignored until I saw one of my rocket league friend do something fancy on their profile icon, I had all the credits to buy all the top animated ones. But being stingy with the virtual coins, I still only pick the one I want to use and only buy those. one boarder and one background to match. What about my other credits? well they can rot or whatever I don't care.
I bought my index the day they implemented that stuff.
I was so confused as to how I got so many… thing… points?
I’ve never done anything with them and that was many years ago. Maybe I should? I dunno.
Lol. This is a cute idea but we all know it will go through enshittification with time. You are naive if you believe otherwise.
I thought it was due to their poor grasp on mathematics and inability to count beyond two.
...Granted you can turn this off, but by default every time you start Steam an ad for a game flies up in your face.
I would also call every single store page on Steam a "sold ad." Again, granted that it doesn't seem you can pay to promote your game above anyone else's and the search seems to be fairly straightforward and functional.
While I do feel there is definitely advertising that happens on Steam, I'm okay with the level of it. I can find products I want, and products I do not want are not mercilessly crammed down my throat.