What many posters in this thread fail to realize is that there is a very good reason why steam hasn’t been hit by the enshittification that otherwise permeates human existence in 2024.
Of course, Gaben as their CEO has the last say in it. And he’s just a good guy. But wait, aren’t there other companies that have good guys as their CEO and yet the enshittification persists?
The profound reason is that Valve is not a publicly traded company. They have no obligation to any investors to make number go up. They are a private company, they can do whatever the fuck they want. If they stay flat and keep paying their employees, that’s totally fine, and there is 0 pressure on them to change anything. THAT‘s why Valve seems like such a different company compared to everything else that’s out there.
Of course it’s still a choice to go public or not, and they have made the right call (for us consumers).
Based take imo. I think many posters fail realize the insane amount of money steam makes Valve. Rough estimates are that Steam sold 400 million games last year. Average cost for a game is ~$15.5. Steam has a platform fee of 30%. That means that, roughly, Steam made Valve ~1.86 billion dollars just through the sell of games. Not considering microtransactions or hardware sells. Reportedly, Valve made 1 billion dollars just off cases from CS2 crate openings. Let’s just give Valve the benefit of the doubt and assume they made $5 billion dollars last year.
Impressive, but honestly not that impressive when you consider that Xbox brought in 18 billion and PlayStation brought in 30 billion last year. However, if you factor in that Xbox has a head count of ~$20,100 and Sony has one of ~12,700. While Valve has a head count of about ~400. We see that Xbox and Sony are bringing in about $900K and $2.4M per head respectively. Valve is bring in 12.5M per head. Plus Xbox and PlayStation have multiple studios and campuses. While I believe Valve only has the 1 or 2 campuses and they are their only studio.
My point being that, Valve has a ton of liquid cash for investment and growth opportunities. I’d wager Valve brought in more than 5 Billion last year, but with them being a private company, it’s hard to pin down what exactly they could’ve made.
there is a very good reason why steam hasn’t been hit by the enshittification that otherwise permeates human existence in 2024.
Come again? Steam is enshitifed af. from forcing CS:GO players to move to CS:2 to adding DRM left and right, they do it all. They even release remasters of old games that are essentially always broken one or another.
Steam doesn’t control the quality of remasters. That’s up to publishers. I’m not the most active gamer and might have missed something, but didn’t valve release a major revamp to the way the Library and Store were layed out in the past year or two? They also recently expanded family sharing and remote co-op. The only L I can remember in recent memory is the whole “You can’t leave your games to another person when you die”
Valve is a whole company of people like Gaben.
Valve is a unique company with no traditional hierarchy. In business school, I read a very interesting Harvard Business Review article on the subject. Unfortunately it’s locked behind a paywall, but this is Google AI’s summary of the article which I confirm to be true from what I remember:
According to a Harvard Business Review article from 2013, Valve, the gaming company that created Half Life and Portal, has a unique organizational structure that includes a flat management system called “Flatland”. This structure eliminates traditional hierarchies and bosses, allowing employees to choose their own projects and have autonomy. Other features of Valve’s structure include:
- Self-allocated time: Employees have complete control over how they allocate their time
- No managers: There is no managerial oversight
- Fluid structure: Desks have wheels so employees can easily move between teams, or “cabals”
- Peer-based performance reviews: Employees evaluate each other’s performance and stack rank them
- Hiring: Valve has a unique hiring process that supports recruiting people with a variety of skills
Kinda sounds like how worker cooperatives work tbh, but with Gabe still technically being the owner.
I remember reading a news piece a while back about how the founder of a food company made sure to transfer ownership to the employees before leaving. While we’re talking about worst-case scenarios, let’s also hope for the best and hope that Gabe has a similar plan.
Him being a pretty smart guy overall surely has at least some sort of continuity planned.
It would be best to convert it to full employee ownership if it isn’t yet. As long as a steady stream of good employees keeps revolving in it should be a stable company that provides for its employees and customers.
PeopleMakeGames has a two part series on Valve that’s pretty interesting. The second part (here) dives into the structure of the company. It does have a bit of an angle, fwiw, so if you’d prefer something more objective, it might not be a great watch. Personally I think the issues they bring up are valid, but figured I’d mention it.
A little unsure about the “peer based performance review”, sounds like bullying might somehow have to be kept in check. Otherwise this sounds awesome.
Lots of companies have peer based employee reviews, cliques have the capability to cause harm in these firms but normally the peers reviewing you are rotated each review period to minimalise that and any bad actors can normally seen by management’s review of the peer reviews.
But then remove the management oversight
I don’t believe Valves claim of perfectly flat structure, Gabe is the owner, he if no one else is management and has the power. I’m willing to bet there’s a second level of reviewers for peers, if nothing else then it’s a second separate set of peers reviewing the first set’s reviews to watch for this problem.
Fun fact: Former employees of Valve have said that is actually a huge problem in the organization and that its organizational structure seems to encourage bullying and high-school style “cliquishness” by design.
I mean it’s not as though that’s not a problem in normal companies. It’s just that normal companies can sort of use the guise of structure or professionalism to harangue whatever employees the clique ends up disliking. The cliques are baked in, in a normal company.
It can be a problem at other companies, but even worse than average at Valve by virtue of corporate structure. Both of these things can be true.
Do you know everybody who works there and what their ambitions are?
Also, nothing is impossible when you can deploy thepower of acquisition lol i’m less worried about them internally polluting themselves and more about externally being destroyed. We’ve seen this over and over again.
Apparently 50%+ of the company belongs to Gabe himself, presumably he would pass it on to some very trusted. That makes a hostile takeover pretty unlikely.
I really hope he is secretly investing in cloning so we can get Gaben (2) joining Valve soon. Or atleast invest some money in uploading his consciousness into a giant metal head 🗿
We’ll never have a gaben (3) 😭
Realistically, it’s only a matter of time until Steam becomes as enshittificated as any other services. There is profit to be made from Steam selling advertising space and customer data. They can either choose to capitalize on the profits that are in front of them, or allow another company to and take that capital from them. For a business it’s not a matter of what’s right and wrong anymore but consume or be consumed. If Steam isn’t willing to do that someone else will be willing to play the long game and do it. Then it’ll be only a matter of time until Steam gets acquired by another company and then it’s game over.
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This doesn’t make any sense. The reason Valve hasn’t been acquired is because it’s privately owned and not up for sale, not because it doesn’t have “enough profit”. In fact it’s extremely profitable, for all we know.
Sure, another company could come along and build a competitor. It’s happened already multiple times, and Steam is doing just fine despite some major titles these days being exclusive to other platforms. Unless Steam drops the ball on something big time, it’s unlikely that people will move to another platform en masse, especially one that is less focussed on consumer interests. No-one can just come in and “take capital away” from Steam, whatever that means, by building a competitor that sells advertising space and “monetizes user data” — they need users first.
… And then there’s the fact that Steam is already “selling advertiser space” today. Games don’t just get featured on their storefront because Gabe likes them. They make deals with publishers for this.
Obviously his death will trigger a worldwide AR Easter egg hunt, where the Steam user worthy enough to find the three keys first will become the new Gaben and Master Of Steam.
Must drive backwards…
Or talk to a girl!
I cringe just remembering that movie.
I haven’t seen it, is it even worse than the book ?
I looked at the movie as a fun romp that’s a bit inspired by the book and that makes it bearable. The movie took the nerdiness down in a way that was very unrealistic, but understandable to the general public. Anyone actually in the nerd community knows that people find shortcuts and glitches, and do speedrun records competitively; but they removed the entire part about the first key being in the school area (where it would be attainable by all for free) and instead make it “Oh, I was supposed to drive backwards in this race that I need a very expensive car/weapons for”
It’s a very pretty movie with a lot of fun Easter Eggs, but you’ve gotta separate and realize it wasn’t made for them to enjoy it.
What movie/book?
Ready Player One
Categorically wrong since Gaben lost weight.
I came here to say this but I see my arch nemesis made it firrrrrst
Flies away
Proton is open source. Anyone can pull it together and integrate it. Gog have been doing DRM free games for a while, they’ll be quite keen to fill this niche. Epic probably won’t care. If none do, someone will want to.
What are you smoking? GOG Galaxy doesn’t even have a Linux client. In fact it has been one of the most requested features for years and nothing has happened.
Edit: it’s also the reason I stopped buying from them when I got my Steam Deck.
They do provide Linux support in other ways though. They even troubleshoot me once with a game I tried to play on Linux and offered a refund.
Gog Galaxy not on Linux is a shame, yes, but its DRM-Free and Linux installers are enough for me to continue to buy from them.
Edit: Heroic Launcher makes a great replacement of Gog Galaxy, maybe even better than the Windows client, from what I’d tried. No multiplayer though.
Valve is a private company whereas GOG belongs to CDProject - a publicly traded company. GOG might want to fill the void but they’re more likely to do dumb, shortsighted decisions in contrast to Valve.
Maybe, but DRM free content isn’t exactly shareholder value…
It’s better shepherded than Epic. They probably don’t fill the space because Steam do it better, but you invest more if the return is higher.
The case I’m referring to is in the future if Steam badly enshittified.
Gog have been doing DRM free games for a while
As far as I know GOG also sells drm content and Steam also sells drm-free content. So what’s the point
they’ll be quite keen to fill this niche
I also don’t remember them doing anything for Linux apart from releasing a broken port then badmouthing people who complained that the game they bought is broken.
Isint Steam a form of DRM? You effectively cant play your games if you dont have an account I thought
No, you can for the games that don’t have drm, just launch the executable. Steam itself doesn’t require any drm. Even the games that use Steam services can be drm-free. Here’s the list of some drm-free Steam games
Gabe is helping, sure, but he isn’t holding up gaming. People were gaming on Linux before Proton even existed, myself included. Also, even if Valve went away completely, Proton is open-source and there are people like GloriousEggroll who work on Proton entirely as a community member. Proton will live on, specifically because it is open-source. All the progress made on Proton won’t suddenly disappear, all the games that were previously playable on Proton will still be playable on Proton.
It’s a somewhat reasonable fear but it’s not a realistic fear. Proton isn’t going anywhere.
Proton will live on, specifically because it is open-source.
Don’t just thank open source; thank copyleft for the fact that Valve couldn’t make a closed-source fork of it even if it wanted to.
Even if they want to open-source it, an issue is the amount of work of organizing the repository, making sure it’s properly organized and doesn’t have any files they don’t want to distribute, and then maintaining that with future versions.
Additionally, if Steam would start to morph into what is posted here, it would simply be integrated into Heroic and / or lutris just as Epic is right now. There would be no need to actually launch steam anymore but just use it as a background service to pipe your games into something else.
Anyone who thinks their steam libraries will be safe forever is delusional.
Eventually a for-profit motivated individual will gain control and they will use all their MBA learnings to maximize subscriptions, per play revenue, per download revenue and overall provide a cheaper platform.
There isn’t an mba on the planet that doesn’t recognize that advertising is highly lucrative and being the company that sells the most pc games means you have metrics no one else has. They’ll instantly monetize advertising and the popups we get when we log in today will turn into mandatory non-skippable ads on the free tier to start a game, and they’ll add their wrapper on top of games in their store, especially games that do not currently need steam to play today.
It’ll only get way worse. Expect everything to be pay to play… once gaben is gone. They have a monopoly and any leader would think they are too big to fail. No one can just take their games elsewhere… we’re locked in. We’re committed. We can’t escape. They’ve got us by the balls.
We can switch to piracy. I don’t only because of the benefits steam offers. If that ever changes in a way that tips the scale I’ll never buy a game from them again and I’d never need to. Even if they start making all new games online only in a way that can’t be circumvented there’s a big enough backlog of games to keep me going the rest of my life.
This so much. The thing for me is, pirated I get everything from my library back FOR FREE. So there is no loss money wise for changing things up for me. Without the convenience and fairness there is nothing holding me there. at all.
Valve doesn’t need infinite growth to survive wallstreet. Proton is open source and very popular.
That post is pure hysteria. First no one knows when Gabe is going to die, and even if he live very long he may step down due to old age still.
- also worrying so much about something that may happen 14 years later according to op is unnecessary and distorted thinking.
- why assume there is going to be a power vacuum? can’t he and his leadership make pans of succession?
- then believing a whole made-up story going down the rabbit hole of the worst case scenario is again unnecessary and distorted thinking. Is okay to think of worst case scenarios but to take them as if they were real is gifting ourselves anxiety for free.
- in any case, the mental exercise of thinking of some undesirable possibilities allow us to take precautions and prepare to the extend that is appropriate and reachable. Which would be the most efficient behavior that thwarts “actual fear” as OP writes it.
if steam dies we need to support GOGS
Or just buy games on GoG.com now to ensure they’ll be there in the future. Why wait?
Because they refuse to suport linux with their launcher. The moment they do that ill start buying more games from them…
Yeah, I had many games on GOG, still have, and after I did full switch to linux using Proton is such great experience. I have Steam Deck too and it’s just more convenient to get stuff on Steam, sadly. I’ve already finished Cyberpunk 2077 on Windows two years ago and I’ve recently wanted to play Phantom Liberty DLC. I’ve tried to install it through Heroic, Bottles and directly through Steam and experience to setup GOG Galaxy to maintain cloud saves and achievements is frustrating at best, but I’ve also noticed some lags and micro-stutters when using GOG client.
I think Gabe has been getting healthy lately. Last picture I saw of him he was looking like he lost a lot of weight. Maybe repost this in 10 years and then we can panic.
No no…it’s going to be much worse than that.
It’ll be a subscription just to play the game you already own.
For sure, valid to fear the enshittification of steam. But they aren’t killing proton. Maybe ignoring proton at worst. But Steam has profit motivations for not being reliant on Windows, which has actively been trying to supplant them with the Windows Store for years.
As another separate, profit-motivated company, with a gaming division and a lot to gain from eating Steam’s lunch, Microsoft is not Steam’s friend. Proton is a critical bargaining tool for them, and not having to include windows licenses for devices like the Steam Deck helps their costs too.
Wish they were serious about Linux support.
Aside from valve probably having a hit by bus plan, I’m pretty sure ownership of valve is actually split pretty evenly so it will likely fall to another senior dev who understands what to do.
I’ve heard they’ve hidden three immeasurably invaluable CS:Go Knife skins throughout the platform, and the first person to find all three will unlock Half-Life 3 and annoint the winner as Gaben 2, God Emperor of Valve and owner of Steam. Also, they get a chocolate factory.
Oompa loompa, doompadee doo, We’ve got a perfect riddle for you, Oompa loompa, doompadee dee, If you are wise, you’ll listen to me.
Three precious knives, in Counter-Strike they hide, Find them all to claim your prize worldwide, The first to collect, in triumph shall stand, To unlock Half-Life 3, the game so grand.
Oompa loompa, doompadee doo, Follow the clues and you’ll be through, Oompa loompa, doompadee dee, Just one more knife, and then you’ll see.
A crown awaits, a throne so high, Steam’s vast empire, you’ll rule the sky, With Half-Life 3, your reign begins, All hail the gamer who truly wins.
Oompa loompa, doompadee doo, The ultimate prize belongs to you, Oompa loompa, doompadee dee, Gaben 2, you shall always be.
I hope it pleases you to know I sang this entire song to myself
The fact that people non ironically visit 4chan in 2024 kind of worries me
I have heard for years and years that “the other parts of 4chan” than /b are good, but I’ve never seen it myself.
I used to go on 4chan, on a variety of boards, every day for 10 years (06-16) some boards are better than others, and /b/ is definitely the worst by a lot, but they’re all terrible.
