PC Gaming

Do they realize that what they really said was: having shareholders destroys businesses.

100% hard agree. Not launching an IPO is the single best thing Gaben has ever done. Letting in corporate executives would utterly destroy Valve and run them into the ground to fund their golden parachutes. It's happened time and again. Professional "executives" do not run companies for the benefit of the customer they run them into the ground to make themselves richer. Kudos to Gaben for being intelligent enough to recognize this and keep Valve private.

oblig

Well that's because pretty much all of the competition are terrible.

There hasn't really been much innovation in digital market space since the concept arose. Valve started it and a few other companies over the years of tried, including Microsoft and all have failed.

I think valve succeeded because they weren't trying to make a digital market place, it started out as just a distribution platform so not every decision was about how to make the most money out of the customer. You make the money on the games, not the platform and then you build up from there.

Huh. What an unexpectedly damning indictment of the extraction-oriented enshittification market aka capitalism

Gabe will eventually die and the MBA that takes over will see the quick paycheck.

Shocking, that when a company's real purpose and focus is to make a product for customers, as opposed to making money for the investors, it is better for the customers...

Gabe dying is the major thing I fear in my life... It's the last compamy I know about that's not getting enshitiffied.

Have they tried making a better product?

Or scratch that. Have they tried making a product that is as good?

These guys are so privileged they think they are entitled to success without innovation.

THERE WAS NOTHING LIKE STEAM AT THE TIME.

If they want what Gabe has they need to do what he did: INNOVATE.

Steam could be assholes.

They are not.

Best argument for no public trading of the company.

1. Provide a good and cheap service.
2. Improve the service over time with some of the money you make.
3. Make pro-consumer choices knowing full well you can afford it.
4. ???
5. Watch competition repeatedly shoot itself in the crotch.
6. Profit.

My steam account is 22 years old. I probably have 400+ games on there. I do believe in GOG and try to buy games there where I can, but if I have a choice between the major platforms, I will pretty much always choose steam. I bought a bunch of games on Xbox Live and my PS3 back in the 2000s that I no longer have access to. There's a certain subset of gamers for whom Steam will always be the platform of choice.

Amazing what is possible when you're not beholden to shareholders that only give a shit about quarterly profits at the expense of everything else, including the entire business.

As long as they don't need EGS money, DEI hires, HR ladies and stakeholders ideas and they keep focusing in customer satisfaction over quarter results and last trends, Steam will be fine.

I remain baffled at how few studios sell their games directly on their own site.

The practical barriers are virtually nonexistent, so I’m assuming there’s some form of capitalist fuckery going on behind the scenes that makes it financially unviable?

Probably not. Even MS couldn't do it and they owned the platform. Now Valve push Linux. No other store really runs on that, and certainly not in a way that lets you run games written for Windows.

Epic are closest to being a competitor, and they're still just a free games platform that will only run until the Fortnite money stops coming in.

People don't want their library split on multiple stores. There's always going to be a monopoly because of that, unless we start having multiple exclusives on different platforms. For videogames it's accentuated by the fact that people want to be able to interact with friends, so they need to be on the same platform. Steam came first and had the best features, so they won.

Music? Spotify is in front of everything else

TV/Movies? This is the exception, as in this case there's a lot of content that can be available on a platform and not the other. Netflix is still first, but if you look at the numbers the gap is lower.

I used to buy everything on gog, now with the steam deck I went back to steam. Yeah I know, I can use gog there too, but using steam is easier for sync etc. So, you see, steam made something amazing, the steam deck, and everybody copied it, but they were still the first.

If gog made a steam deck client with easy management I'd gladly go back to them. They still take a 30% cut but I'm happy to support DRM free games. Itch is also nice but they don't have a lot of games (I do play 99% Indies).

IMHO there are no good or realistic solutions:

• lots of exclusives
• interoperability between stores, like the fediverse (this would actually be really cool)
• everybody sell games directly
• everybody goes back to buy physical

It helps that the industry seems to always be inhabited by the greediest, most misanthropic companies on the planet.