“Don’t interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.”
Honestly, the secret is not being a publicly traded company. All the others have to make the shareholders happy while steam just does steam. If the line doesn’t have to constantly go up you can pretty much do whatever you want as long as you’re still making profit. And if what you’re doing is already working you don’t need to add gimmicks or advertisements to milk it as much as you can just to appease the shareholders.
Publicly traded companies mean that the people who invested get a say in how the business is run. Those same people are typically riding the success of other people’s decisions and have no idea how to not fuck up. So they demand the company make stupid fucking choices or the CEO will be replaced by someone who will listen.
The trick is to remove the power of the board to remove the CEO and keep them as advisors instead of drivers. The CEO should cook and if they drive the business into the ground, that’s what happens. Businesses need to fail because otherwise the wrong people end up leading.
Businesses need to fail because otherwise the wrong people end up leading.
When businesses fail, their competitors buy their assets, employees, customer bases, and get bigger. Keep playing that a few more rounds and you get a monopoly that can and will prevent or buy new entrants. Then anyone including the wrong people in the industry enter this one company because that’s the only company in this industry.
This isn’t an argument against letting businesses fail. It’s an argument to show that the game of competition doesn’t produce stable competitive environment in the long run. Instead it’s a temporary stage that some markets exist in on the way to consolidation. You can find countless examples for this around us. And therefore letting businesses fail through competition isn’t a long term solution to these problems.
And that’s why you have laws and agencies to prevent that like the German Bundeskartellamt.
I’m not familiar with the corporate landscape in Germany, but the US and Canada also have anti-trust law and competition agencies whose purpose is to prevent consolidation. Why hasn’t that prevented it?
Because you have an oligarchy
How does an oligarchy come into existence in a capitalist democracy that didn’t start with a monarchy? Can you see a relationship between the process of consolidation and the creation of this oligarchy, where the oligarchs are the people who accumulated wealth through this process, gradually using this wealth to capture the regulators, leading to more consolidation, more wealth and greater capture, and repeat? We didn’t wake up one day with an oligarchy that wasn’t there yesterday. It’s not like all of the current oligarchs can be traced back to an oligarchic family from the past.
I wouldn’t call whatever the US has or had real Democracy to begin with. You only have two viable parties and it’s so easy to abuse. Just look at the mess your electoral college ans gerrymandering is.
I’m not fully happy with the German system because we for example can’t directly elect our chancellor and president but there at least five parties who jump the 5% hurdle to enter the Bundestag and ten or so others you can directly vote for.
Because nobody enforces the law. There are so many mega corpos that needs to be broken up, but it doesn’t happen.
And also not be backed by venture capital firms expecting to make infinite profits. Private or Public, if the company shareholder’s only goal is to continue to receive 10% gains on their investment after already making back 20x their principal, they’ll squeeze the company for all it’s worth.
Honestly, the secret is not being a publicly traded company.
Valve fortune doesn’t come from not being traded publicly. They built a nearly monopoly on pc videogames with their walled garden proprietary third party launcher.
Valve isn’t a walled garden. They allow other apps to be launched through their app and devs can sell steams key on other platforms.
It is still a mega corp, but trying to attack it from the walled garden angle is pretty dumb.
Being a private company has allowed Valve to take some really big swings. Steam Deck is paying off handsomely, but it came after the relative failure of the Steam Controller, Steam Link and Steam Machines. With their software business stable, they can allow themselves to take big risks on the hardware side, learn what does and doesn’t work, then try again. At a publically traded company, CEO Gabe Newell probably gets forced out long before they get to the Steam Deck.
Unlike companies like Google or Microsoft, whose products are never disappointing!
Man Intel are so dumb for firing Pat. And they did it while seeing positive reviews for their second gen GPUs!
The GPUs aren’t even a drop in the bucket for Intel. While Gelsinger had the right ideas, he wanted everything all at once which just wasn’t doable.
When “everything is AI now” and your motion board/investors are watching nvidia nearing 1T, then they want you in the GPU business.
And now we’re back to the public companies are terrible at innovation argument. If the line can only go up, you can’t take risks and you have to hurt people to continue at some point.
That’s just what happens to CEOs of publicly traded companies when they have a bad year. And Intel had a really bad year in 2024. I’m certainly hoping that their GPUs become serious competition for AMD and Nvidia, because consumers win when there’s robust competition. I don’t think Pat’s ousting had anything to do with GPUs though. The vast majority of Intel’s revenue comes from CPU sales and the news there was mostly bad in 2024. The Arrow Lake launch was mostly a flop, there were all sorts of revelations about overvolting and corrosion issues in Raptor Lake (13th and 14th gen Intel Core) CPUs, broadly speaking Intel is getting spanked by AMD in the enthusiast market and AMD has also just recently taken the lead in datacenter CPU sales. Intel maintains a strong lead in corporate desktop and laptop sales, but the overall trend for their CPU business is quite negative.
One of Intel’s historical strength was their vertical integration, they designed and manufactured the CPUs. However Intel lost the tech lead to TSMC quite a while ago. One of Pat’s big early announcements was “IDM 2.0” (“Integrated Device Manufacturing 2.0”), which was supposed to address those problems and beef up Intel’s ability to keep pace with TSMC. It suffered a lot of delays, and Intel had to outsource all Arrow Lake manufacturing to TSMC in an effort to keep pace with AMD. I’d argue that’s the main reason Pat got turfed. He took a big swing to get Intel’s integrated design and manufacturing strategy back on track, and for the most part did not succeed.
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You are right, but let me add that Gabe knows that being tied to Windows is not a good idea, as he worked there and understood that they would block Steam if they could.
Valve supporting ‘their’ alternative OS, away from Microsoft (and Apple) or any other direct competitor in gaming is the only way to survive.
It’s not like they pour all that money into Linux from the goodness of their heart. They need their own OS just as much as the Linux desktop community needs some stable funding.
Given how Valve lets children gamble with skins, I’m not sure how moral that company really is.
man, i hope that Microshaft blocks steam. That would send so many people to lunix.
Linux was also the only way to make sure Valve was viable long term. Eventually Windows was going to have an Xbox store built in and would’ve basically been a monopoly on PC gaming, cutting out steam altogether. I think windows now sort of does have that, but it can’t compete with Steam quite yet.
Agreed, but if I’d had the money at the time, I absolutely would’ve jumped at the steam machine and steam controller. I want a modern one now more than ever. If it weren’t for parts getting shittier and pricier, I’d probably build one myself this spring/summer and figure out which distro would be best for it. My steam deck is great and I want basically the exact same thing but more powerful at the cost of not being a handheld. Bonus points if I can easily remote play that new steam machine through my steam deck, which I think is a reasonable expectation. And I’d love to run an HDMI out splitter to easily swap between using it as a PC at my desk or using it as a console from my couch.
and figure out which distro would be best for it. My steam deck is great and I want basically the exact same thing but more powerful at the cost of not being a handheld.
Bazzite might be your jam. They’re a sort-of competitor (?) to SteamOS, as in they have distros for handhelds in the same way Valve has with SteamOS (which they are now leasing out to manufacturers like lenovo). But they also have versions for laptops and desktop PCs.
I’ve been using their PC (nvidia) version for a week now, and it’s been wonderful. Of course I probably wouldn’t have made the switch if Valve hadn’t helped pave the way and made proton so powerful. Also I probably wouldn’t have switched if I hadn’t given up on LoL and Battlefield (kernel-level anticheat).
I don’t think I’ve even heard of that, so I’ll look into it a bit more. I was leaning more toward an AMD build since that tends to play nicely with Linux compared to Intel/Nvidia. And there were a couple of distros I was interested in trying on my old laptop to compare before committing.
I thoroughly enjoy the Steam controller and would’ve loved to try out one of the less conventional prototypes. I hope Valve can justify making another controller.
If you buy parts that are a couple of generations older there is absolutely a middle ground between the ridiculous new GPUs and the steam deck on performance, that you could probably build for a similar price to the deck. I would aim for an AM4 build to take advantage of how cheap ddr4 RAM is, with a 3xxx or 5xxx Ryzen CPU. Something like the 3080 is a great card for a cheap price but I personally would go for an AMD card. A few hundred extra (again in AUD) gets you a good 7800XT which is a pretty damn beefy card, but might be better to drop down a couple of models to save on power consumption.
Going even further, you can take someone’s ATX PC secondhand, swap out the motherboard for a smaller form factor and slap it in a little case.
As for OS, if you want it to be exactly like the deck you could run Bazzite, but SteamOS is either available, or about to be available.
I was actually targeting a 7800XT on an AM4 build already lol!
Yeah, it’s just hard to justify the cost when I already have a PS5 and not a whole lot of free time. It makes more sense to wait until the next generation of consoles comes out and then get something that runs games at that time at 1440p, 60+fps. Right now I’d just be building a lateral system for no real reason, pretty late in the current gen lifecycle.
I’d argue you could sell the ps5 and the games and make enough money to mostly (possibly entirely) cover the cost of building a more versatile device, but it’s also a bit of effort when you already have a setup that works for you
Edit: also, the system we’re talking about should comfortably run 1440p60 for the foreseeable future. Newer flagship hardware is targeting higher resolution and much higher frame rates.
Give up haptics??
I have exactly this (AM4, 7800XT, 3440x1440 monitor) running bazzite. Almost every game I have maxes 165Hz, works great for LLM inference too, really the nutso expensive stuff is only necessary for 4K+, which I find diminishing returns at present, LLM training (rent a GPU instead), and probably modern VR. Just to let you know you’re barking up the right tree. :)
Oh, and the 7800XT idles / youtubes ~ 14-20W, 7 with the monitor off. I’m actually using it as a backup NAS / home server in down time, system pulls ~40-45W at the wall and I haven’t even gone deep into power saving as it’s a placeholder for a new homelab build that’s underway.
The steam controller didn’t really fail, but the patent fight was a mess that took way too long (much too late disqualified patent over paddle buttons). That sucked a lot of energy out of the project. Don’t forget the steam deck kept those touch pads (although with a different design)!
Steam Link IMHO also wasn’t bad, but there didn’t seem to be much interest in it then. (interestingly enough I think it could be recreated today in a Chromecast-like form factor)
Stream machines was definitely a big mess however, there just wasn’t enough interest, too limited compatibility, the machines just wasn’t versatile enough for average Joe to pay for one.
The problem with the Link is its wireless performance. It works perfectly with an Ethernet connection, but not many people have one of those by their TV, even today.
His plan isn’t based off trying to squeeze blood from stones, it’s to sell some video games. Not a very capitalist mindset, but there you have it.
Valve takes 30% from every sale on Steam, which is quite landlord-like. Although there are much worse practices in the market.
Oh no, a sales platform that takes a cut of revenue.
Valve isn’t a charity, and they provide very good services for what developers pay.
Devs don’t need to host download servers, they don’t need to staff customer service reps, they don’t have to set up banking infrastructure or worry at all about handling payments from hundreds of different banks across hundreds of countries.
It’s not like valve takes 30% and sits on it. They put that money to use.
I am not against it.
you gotta take into account the insanely good service both devs and players get in exchange for those 30% here is a list
EGS finally has a shopping cart now, so it’s basically equal now, right?
now it just needs to stop sucking
The “do nothing and win” strategy.
It was the first centralised gaming platform/hub/whatever on PC.
I remember having to search for matches on the All-Seeing Eye.
I lost my first Steam account. It would’ve been from September 2003, the same month Steam released. So apparently it would have had some real life value.
Tried restoring it once, but the email I had had on it was a service that no longer even existed so…
Anyways practical monopolies make money. Microsoft, Amazon, Google etc.
Steam isn’t really in any way anti-competitive unlike the other examples, though.
Dang! You got me beat. The account I still use is from 2004, when Half-Life 2 came out. I remember thinking it was bullshit that I had to sign up for something, and connect to the internet to install a physical game I bought.
Then about five years later, I stayed at my mom’s house for a couple nights, found myself bored, remembered I had my PC in her basement, and set it up. When I discovered that Steam remembered the three games I had, and let me download them (despite losing my HL2 disc years before), my head exploded. It’s wild what it is now and how normalized that is.
When I discovered that Steam remembered the three games I had, and let me download them (despite losing my HL2 disc years before),
I can imagine.
Absolutely thrilled.
t’s wild what it is now and how normalized that is.
Isn’t it. But it was like 20+ years ago so no wonder a few things gave changed lol
This is why Gabe is the goat
Don’t ask TF2 player how they feel about this meme
TF2 released in 2007
I mean it’s true for TF2 also, overwatch killed itself lol
They did the bare minimum of banning bots so TF2 has been going pretty great recently. I think I’ve encountered 1 or 2 bots in the last 2 weeks and I’m pretty sure those were just blatant cheaters and not actually bots
Taking a long term view rather than exclusively focusing on the next quarter’s numbers.
I’m not quite sure they have “done nothing”. They have made a digital storefront that other storefronts strive for, they have help with Linux compatibility with windows only games, have released a few bits of awesome hardware every now and then. I think this is what happens when you are not beholden to shareholders and the mantra “make line go up at all costs”
Being a private company, it’s what it is called
They were not liked at first, but they’ve spent enough time making money while not pissing people off that they are doing far better than every public company who must find a reason to piss people off to be more profitable.
They’ve been able to use that time to “cook”. Valve time has been known to be within its own dimension, but from that we got Linux to be just click start and play for 90% of games like Windows, and with the Steamdeck a powerful, comfortable, DIY-able handheld PC gaming device.
I can’t really get my head around why people dislike Gabe Newell. As best I can tell, he’s been a fantastic steward for Steam.
Gabe Newell has a net worth of $9.5 billion and there is no such thing as an ethical billionaire. Steam is great and as long as the company behaves well there’s no reason not to use it, but billionaires are not your friends.
Sort of agree but look how much he’s done for Linux gaming. Also the steam deck was well thought out and designed to be user serviceable.
Was that all Gabe? Or was that people at Valve who had the ideas and executed the ideas and Gabe is given credit for?
“yes”? He’s definitely not building any significant fraction himself, but if he didn’t care for these things he wouldn’t let the company put so much resources into them.
Credit for the things built goes to the people building them. Credit for it being possible to build goes to the people who founded and funded the teams
Sort of agree but look how much he’s done for Linux gaming.
Let’s not forget that Steam is a proprietary third party launcher that doesn’t share any values with linux. Valve built the apple store of videogames, while they are now moving in a better direction keep in mind that they are part of the problem.
Sort of agree still. Steam deck is a great example. They built it to be user serviceable, and you can literally switch to the Linux desktop and use root, and reinstall your OS if you want. It’s not locked down crazy like other systems. Remember the PS3 other os? Didn’t even get graphics drivers, then they ultimately removed it when it was used to jailbreak it.
They are some rare cases where someone becomes a billionaire because something suddenly took off.
Had she not went TERF, JK Rowling would be next to Gabe.
She would arguably be better, because she doesn’t provide gambling services to minors.
Eron Wolf might be one of these exceptions. FUTO is trying to support and make sustainable small software projects.
Even then, a person can survive just fine with $900 million dollars, and $100 million to the right charity can do a world changing amount of good.
There are no ethical billionaires.
Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
That statement is an absolute.
Yes, their profits.
Steam is selling lootbox and profiting from cs skins gambling. Pretty fucking scummy.
Just wait till he dies and the next person in charge decides to go public to make a quick buck. That’ll begin the immediate enshitification of Steam. How many years do we got till he croaks? Ten? Fifteen? Better hope we have a better alternative before then.
I’m not going to use something that’s shitty now in hopes it will be better later in order to avoid using something that’s better now out of fear it might become shitty later.
If Steam becomes shitty I have no issue dropping it and pirating my already paid for collection.
I’d like you to point to where I said you should use something shitty now.
doesnt gabe already do basically nothing though? afaik there are other people managing valve and he only acts as valve’s face
also theyd have to be extremely stupid to start enshittification when they already have the best ways to monetize games (skins in cs2, hats in tf2, etc)
im not saying its not possible, im just a very optimistic person
also theyd have to be extremely stupid to start enshittification when they already have the best ways to monetize games (skins in cs2, hats in tf2, etc)
Micro$oft also has the most dominant operating system in the market. Yet, with every update, I find an increase in “switched to GNU/Linux” and “Debloat Windows” stuff
Google once had the best search engine in the world, delivering the most relevant search results. Now it delivers the most relevant ads.
Mozilla was initially the innovator of the internet, seemingly destined to dominate the market. Then, it abandoned^(†) its main product, the browser, to pursue other endeavors that ultimately failed. The only reason that Firefox is relevant is due to the fact that even when stale, Firefox is much less enshittified than its competitors (and not dependent on Chromium).
^(†) Mozilla basically stopped innovating with Firefox until recently. On desktop Firefox, vertical tabs are absent; only recently, in nightly versions, have they been implemented. On Android, Firefox still lacks cross-site isolation, which has been in Chromium for basically forever now.
and steam is the largest game store, but that’s not what i was talking about.
microsoft’s money doesn’t come just from windows, and from seeing how shitty it has (and will) become, they want to get more money from it than they already have. that could be because windows doesnt produce enough money for microsoft or for other reasons.
google’s money comes from advertisements. as google grew to be used everywhere, there needed to be a better way to get money from it, so they started doing more advertising.
just like google’s search engine, firefox doesn’t produce money by itself. but mozilla didn’t have any other means of producing money, so they had to do something else for that, even if it didn’t work.
valve’s money comes from the games and items sold in steam. people aren’t going to stop producing or buying games and in-game items any time soon.
all of the other companies had to change their main way to produce money, because that wasn’t producing enough money. but if valve changes anything they’ll just be shooting themselves in the foot, because steam already produces an almost ulimited amount of money for valve.
A very typical arc for innovation is that the first organizational goal is getting people to buy it, then the next goal is getting them to keep buying it again and again. The original visionaries who were trying to solve a problem tend to lose interest by then and drop out, and the money weasels completely take over. New versions are released on a marketing schedule regardless of whether they’re necessary, and the thing begins to suck progressively more and more until some new player shows up to solve that problem.
Rinse and repeat.
A massive, massive astroturfing campaign Epic Games paid for in hopes of tarnishing Valve and Gabe Newell’s reputation to try and bolster their failure of a shop ecosystem.
Unfortunately, it worked, because there are people on the net who don’t remember the and days before steam, or even the initial versions of steam that people had Actual problems with, and not just made up ones.
We are on lemmy, a decentralized and open source platform. Steam is closed as much as reddit is.
Promoting gambling to kids and use the profits to buy multiple mega yachts is peak scum.
Ah, so that’s who this guy is. Thanks! Tbh I had no clue and thought it might be George R. R. Martin.
Some people hate all rich people regardless of what they have gotten due to their work.
You can’t become a billionaire ethically. Steam has a pretty big market for lootboxes and cs skins gambling is pretty widespread.
‘Not sucking’
Guy owns how many yachts? I think Gabe sucks personally.
Eh. He’s a human being. I hadn’t heard about his fleet.
https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/gabe-newell-luxury-yachts.php
It seems nearly impossible for a person to be billionaire loaded and not make some irresponsible purchases. Is there anyone with that kind of money we should be highlighting as a role model instead?
I’m of the opinion that billionaire is a pathology personally.
There are some very rare exceptions where someone just happened to make the best thing out there at the time. Minecraft is a good example. Those people move on and live their lives rather than exploit.
Minecraft is yet another example of no expections. Minecraft is proprietary and they never lowered the price even after making millions, they actually increased it. It was sold to one of the worst company in the world for even more money.
After making millions a normal person would have make the game publicly available or at last free and they wouldhave never sell it to microsoft.
the idea of earning billions of dollars is a fallacy, it requires an amount exploitation plain and simple. Steam has a great product that works really well. But they also are basically the seed crystal for a whole ecosystem of gambling with the CS loot boxes that preys on addicts and children.
Isn’t there a billionaire who was in the news during CoVid because he gave his employees a living wage during lockdown by not paying himself anything for that time? He’s still a billionaire, BTW, he owns assets that he can liquidate whenever he wants
Steve Jobs also famously only made one dollar a year. Because normal income is taxed much more than giving yourself stock and calling it unrealized gains. You cannot be a billionaire without being a parasite.
Does nothing? DOES NOTHING?! He spent the last few years ripping Microsoft a new a@@hole, rendering their operating system meaningless for gamers! …but nice meme
Gaben has done lots of awesome shit. I fear what valve will become when he’s gone.
I’m not actually too worried. He surrounds himself with champions.
they’ll fuck shit up. Look what happened to apple after Steve died.
So. Many. Dongles.
you know they developed the iPod touch in secrete because they feared that if Steve saw the ugly prototype, he’d shitcan the project?
And where’s the iPod now, eh?
In the iPhone?
Same
Fun fact many don’t know, Gabe helped create the first versions of Windows and claims he learned more at Microsoft than he ever did elsewhere (at the time). So in a way, he’s transcended Windows, vs ripping it apart.
Fabianism
