this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2026
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Public trading results in short-sighted planning because investors can always buy/sell stocks and move on to whatever is profitable moment to moment. Private companies plan longer term because the investors benefit from the company's long-term success. Their profits come from the company's profits, not the value of the stock.
Make no mistake, Valve is in it for the money. They're as greedy as anyone. But they operate under a corporate structure that values the long-term viability of its platform.
And they're still assholes. They are all about lootboxes, DLC, etc. And they take a massive cut of sales. Do Sony and Microsoft and Nintendo do the same? Yeah - but they also provide the hardware platforms. Does Best Buy and Gamestop charge similar fees? Yeah - but they have the overhead of the retail locations. Steam makes stupid money off a download platform and game launcher.
Gabe is a billionaire yacht collector, not your friend. His greed just takes a longer view than that of someone looking to sell their shares from minute to minute.
The biggest thing these days is that they are not hostile towards their customers. The bar is that fucking low.
Their assholery isn't customer-facing, but it ABSOLUTELY impacts customers.
So you are saying that the devs don't like using the steam platform?
They don't like the largest expense on their books being Steam's cut of the sales. After overhead, marketing, locensing, etc the actual dev teams making the games probably make less than Gabe personally does on the same game.
Yeah they could be 10x cooler by just being slightly less greedy, but they want lots and lots of money, so
At this point in time I care way more about Valve's investment in Linux gaming than I do about Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo working on their next closed proprietary PC with custom controllers.
So Gabe is a billionaire asshole who is not your friend. But unlike other billionaire assholes that aren't your friend he doesn't choose to go out of his way to fuck over his customers and his products for a few pennies more. There's gotta be a term for that.
successful.
Public traded companies are short sighted because they give the CEO et al large amounts of stock, making them stock holders, aligning their interests with making the stock go up.