this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
872 points (100.0% liked)
196
16224 readers
3935 users here now
Be sure to follow the rule before you head out.
Rule: You must post before you leave.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
it's called being a private company, more people should try it
Nah, go public and commit to a restless chase that gets exponentially demanding and caters to a bunch of disinterested bottom-feeders rather than improving services and products for the customers
load more comments
(3 replies)
This is a common thing to say, but I want to push back on it. There's nothing magical about being a private company that means they'll make better decisions. It merely removes one big thing that causes companies to make bad decisions. There's still plenty of private companies run by shitbags.
While this is true, the flip side of that is that being a publicly traded company all but guarantees they'll be forced to make bad decisions. So, the original point still stands: more companies should do this. They may be shitty anyway, but at least they'll be shitty on their own terms and have the best chance of not being shitty.
load more comments
(1 replies)
It's called "not being completely blinded by short-sighted greed".
I thought abducting kids into gambling with lootboxes and mining all their data was one of the peak of greediness
But not short-sighted.
load more comments
(1 replies)
It really is impressive. Steam is honestly a pretty shitty platform in a number of ways, but their competition just keeps managing to be worse.
Agreed, I'd rather use GOG but they don't accept my card :/
I too would like to try it only if they have regional pricing and good Linux support. Maybe 1 day, hopefully within this decade.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(7 replies)
I mean what is really shitty apart from the high fees? The platform is good, the library is good, the services for gamers are unparalleled
I think they may have remedied this eventually, but for a long time they were in violation of consumer law. They went a long time misleadingly displaying prices to Australians in USD despite having Australia-specific prices, and once they finally fixed that they still continued imposing international transaction fees on purchases.
I think they've mostly, if not completely, gotten rid of this recently, but they used to do some really gross exploitative psychological tactics during their sales. Then there's the DRM inherent in the platform requiring you to run their client in order to play your game—yes, other platforms apart from GOG all do this too, but that's the point: Steam is bad, but others are even worse. This becomes especially bad when you consider the risk of losing access to all your games just because Steam decides you should, or because you disagree with a changed terms of service.
Then there's just the ways that it's bad for the gaming industry. Steam acts as a monopsony as game developers are basically doomed to fail if they're not on Steam. Steam's strong emphasis on its regular sales cycle might appear good to consumers at first, but like the net neutrality violations in "unlimited bandwidth to [our partner website]" coming from your ISP, this creates a short-term benefit to consumers in exchange for causing longer-term harm.
Oh and also I'm salty about their recent in-game overlay redesign, and the fact that it took away the ability to "ctrl-f" to help me find the achievement I'm working on.
Steam DRM is opt-in and even then rather trivial to circumvent, practically all it does is prevent things being as simple as copy+pasting files. GOG can go completely DRM-free because the bulk of their offering is stuff they hold the rights to, way fewer publishers would put games on Steam without that basic DRM being available. They're not trying to defend against hardened pirates but opportunistic copying. If you want to ship a rootkit with your game you will have to include it yourself, Valve doesn't offer that kind of thing.
Their monopoly position is an issue, yes, but also frankly speaking not their fault. Though things will get interesting once the EU vs. Valve case is through and they have to allow resales, it's probably going to mean more than resales within Steam.
As to the cut they're taking -- meh. I think it's too high, of course I think it's too high because it's money not landing in my pocket, but it's also ballpark market standard. And much unlike other companies they actually spend the money they rake in on sensible stuff, like the work they do on proton.
load more comments
(4 replies)
https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/steam
You don't need a third party launcher to use software to begin with, the platform is proprietary and mines your data. Valve engage in criminal business practices such as abducting kids into gambling
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(4 replies)
Getting up every day and not doing something stupid is hard work.
Simple solution: stay in bed
“never interfere with the enemy while he is in the process of making a mistake.”- Napoleon allegedly
Huh. I thought that was Sun Tzu, but google says Napoleon. Thank you.
The strategy is called "Not beeing a publicly traded company". Valve is a privately owned company.
Publicly traded companies need to increase value for their shareholders, which means they have to raise their quarterly profits at any cost.
Valve might not be a publically traded company, but it sti has shareholders. Some of those shareholders still want Valve to increase value, etc.
The difference is that valve has a songle large share holder who seems to just not give a fuck about those pressures. While most (all) publically traded companies crumble and fall to that pressure.
The thing about privately-held companies with not intention to go publoc is that the long-term viability of the company is more important than ever-increasing share value.
A public company can be the most profitable company in the world but still lose stock value if it isn't more profitable than last quarter.
load more comments
(5 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
Fun fact actually: GabeN owns exactly 50.1% of Valve so that he gets to be the final shot caller.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Others have pointed out there a private company, but to be more specific on what that means, they are not openly trading their shares. The majority of shares are all owned by a handful of people who care about the long term health of the business. A lot of companies that we see doing major face plants right now are publicly traded, so any big fund or individual with enough cash can swoop in and buy up enough shares to control leadership, then use that control to get the company to do stupid stuff generally or maximize short term profitability at the expense of long term health.
A similar thing can happen if someone with a majority of shares choose to sell too a ghoul.
It's called "don't be evil".
There used to be another prominent tech company that has that as their credo. Wonder what happened to them.
Valve is working really hard though?
Their focus just isn't on making new games, they're almost entirely focused on the platform.
Their games are now the side hustle.
It's a company. They realized they make platforms even better than games and capitalized on that. I see no issue with that. Moreover, they were working on Source 2, HL: Alyx and Counter Strike 2 recently, which I would say is immense work for a company, even more so considering their very humble employee count (compared to direct competitors, e.g. Epic)
load more comments
(1 replies)
they're working on steamos and a new standalone vr headset as well. got some crazy new copium just a couple minutes ago
load more comments
(1 replies)
They now only make new games to demonstrate their newer hardware.
load more comments
(5 replies)
Airbus be like:
I'm sure Airbus has just as many skeletons in the closet, the door just hasn't fallen off its hinges yet.
Don't gotta be perfect, just better than the other guy.
I disagree. The machine and its operators that stand between me and a 30000-foot fall better be fucking perfect.
Eh, nothing manmade is ever going to be perfect. You're literally 100 times more likely to die in the Uber ride to the airport than on that plane (1.8 deaths per 100 million passenger miles vs 0.01). That kind of shit I don't worry about.
That being said, if some sort of gross negligence is threatening to change those statistics, it's definitely worth looking into.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
Slightly less corporate greed than everyone else
Valve also used equally awful tactics when they wanted to push Steam in the beginning.
They sold physical games in stores where the only thing on the disk was a Steam installer and a code, forcing everyone to install their store in order to play the game.
They aren't much different from other companies, they can just afford to do nothing now because of their semi-monopoly.
Oh my god, this is how 17yo me discovered what Steam is. I was forced to install it and i was SO mad.
Still using Steam 13 years later.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Winning?
I'm sorry I think getting Windows games to run on Linux is not nothing. And coming up with custom hardware to run PC games and a handheld form that's affordable is also not nothing. Also making industry standard of cloud saves is not nothing
load more comments
(1 replies)
view more: next ›