Valve is an online store first and foremost. Apples and oranges. The rest are playing catchup, as they've seen gabe get rich and fat, and they want in on that.
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2024
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they've seen gabe get rich and fat
Hey, that's not true! Gabe's lost a lot of weight in recent times.
Gaben made a deal with the devil, $10,000,000 for every pound lost! That's the real story here!
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Me and Gabe be like
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I think that is one reason why Valve has remained dominant in this space for over 20 years.
I suspect wolfire is a useful idiot with a larger company funding this lawsuit. Whether or not the antitrust case has legs, this will cost valve money which is a win for whoever they may be.
Just conjectue o course. I know though that if steam were destroyed tomorrow only terrible more expensive garbage would come in its place.
So go go gaben
If Wolfire kept up Humble Indie Bundle instead of it being sold to IGN and losing any semblance of "indie" I'd take the complaint more seriously
I do really like Lugaru, but still
Don't need that many employees to run a store, programmers/IT and marketing and you're good to go. Employees wouldn't count contractors either so they probably have a lot more "employees" than that.
Not only that, Valve has done a TON of work to outsource as much of the process of running Steam off to the users and developers. Self-publishing, a minimum of manual moderation, automated greenlight processes, automated ratings, database tags, controller configs...
Their entire business model is to make money with as little effort as possible. I've been saying for ages that people vastly underestimate how ruthlessly profitable their business is. We didn't have the numbers, but we roughly knew this is what was going on.
Gabe owns six yachts, people should always keep that in mind when praising him, he's not the friend of the average Joe, he just realized there's profit to be made by not pissing people off, but he's still making enough profit from us to be a billionaire while the majority of people live paycheck to paycheck.
he just realized there's profit to be made by not pissing people off
It's weird that I'm nostalgic for the good old days when the ultra rich understood that
he just realized there's profit to be made by not pissing people off
I'm okay with this. Same deal with Costco's founders and CEOs. It'd be nice if billionaires didn't exist, but they do, and most of them made their profits while pissing everyone off.
I'll praise the ones that at least try to do some "good" for people. Even if their "good" is "Let's make obscene amounts of money by charging affordable prices and being the 'good guy' in the industry".
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Holy shit Gabe Newell is a billionaire (it's just at the second paragraph). This does change my view of him and steam. So uncool.
The dude's the CEO of the most successful online gaming platform ever. Yeah, he's gonna be a billionaire.
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What did you expect? He owns Valve who has the place to buy video games on PC with Steam.
But you'll be hard pressed to find a store front that is not owned by a billionaire or some publicly traded corporation.
cough GoG cough
I'm agreeing with you, btw.
GoG
or some publicly traded corporation
CD Projekt is a publicly traded corporation.
Exactly. Even with their DRM-free practices and such and how people want to advertise so much for them here on Lemmy, they're still a publicly traded multibillion dollar company.
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Could use a few to develop a new linux distribution for entirely new markets and use cases, design and manufacture innovative cutting edge consumer hardware, and count to three.
I'm surprised they didn't really try to make Steam OS a real distro for regular PCs, but at the same time there's no real money to be made...
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And one of their employes doesn't have depth perception.
I'm sure that he can perceive the depth that the shaft of that valve is drilling into his eye socket when you turn it. That should count for something.
You legitimately don't need a lot of employees to make a good product or have a successful company.
I genuinely believe a lot of the bloat in modern companies comes from hiring people just to hire them, not because they add any significant value to either the company or customers.
I want to add to this that valve is also very clearly an anomaly in todays business environment. They are not striving for infinite growth but methodical, strategic steady growth.
That in my mind is how you grow a company, maximising returns for investors is a good idea only for the investors, it deviates the company from the objective which is providing a solution to a problem. It seems to me that Valve despite all the criticism it receives for the high fee on the sales of copies is doing a terrific job on resolving that problem. Also, extending the market to Linux is not a monetary driven decision at all, but it buys back the fidelity of many customers which gain a new feature without any repercussion on stock prices, which are non existent since there aren’t any investors to obey to. The hope is that Gabe will continue on this way and when the problem of passing the baton will present itself, it will be dealt with the future of the company and the industry at large in mind.
They're not beholden to investors, so the company can be exactly as big as Gabe thinks he can manage.
Prior to the mass layoffs of late, companies like Google and Facebook used to hire developers just so their competition could not.
The easiest way for a manager to justify a raise is to increase the headcount under them.
This is like comparing Spotify and Taylor Swift.
I personally think that if valve with their size managed to make a game and maintain their infrastructure for other publishers to use, wtf did the competitor do this whole time?
wtf did the competitor do this whole time?
It's definitely a cultural problem. Companies like EA are completely clueless on the needs or desires of the average gamer. Their idea is to shape those needs and desires how they see fit. It's why they spend so much on advertising and viral marketing rather than making good products.
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Well, they don't develop any games. You don't require a lot of people to run a store.
"Their" last game, Counter Strike Global Offensive, is 12 years old, and was developed by a contractor: Hidden Path Entertainment. Ony then Valve took over to maintain it. And anyone familiar with the current situation around the game (CS2) knows how much "development" is going on there.
ok well this is just wrong.
HLA definitely counts, and CS2 IS the current game their working on and making.
HLA was also an extrememly popular game.
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