this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2024
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Also worth noting that most of Gabe's (and Valve's) value is not based on anyone at Valve's work, but instead based on taking a cut from every dev that sells on Steam. Valve is effectively a landlord renting out digital real estate. The fact that they're able to make obscene amounts of money suggests to me that maybe rents are too damn high.
That's a good point, it's an interesting social phenomenon that people tend to be fond of Valve in spite of this because they're seen as good stewards of the space. It's like having a landlord that takes good care of the property and makes regular improvements. The property relations are still exploitative, but they're doing better than most others would within that exploitative framework.
Also has to do with most of their competitors trying to come in immediately with anti-consumer practices or being a company already known for them.
Like as soon as I saw epic was paying game companies for exclusive access, I decided to skip whatever games actually went for it.
I don't trust a publically traded company to not enshitify by focusing on "more money" rather than setting up a sustainable business.
That's why I don't have issues with valve, even if their 30% cut is a bit high. Steam has been dominating its market for like 20 years now and the worst they've done that I know of is display some ads for games when you start up. But even that IMO could be used as an example of how to do ads right because a) they are relevant to the thing you're doing, b) don't rely on sharing of data between steam and who knows who else (not that I have any certainty there isn't any data sharing going on), c) the window can just be closed and doesn't try to fight for your attention. And I can't even recall seeing it much recently.
Plus I'd say that they provide value by dominating that space and being the standard that any new players need to compete with.