Valve seems to be the only company on this capitalist world that actually understands that company profits cannot and should not grow exponentially forever without eventually destroying itself. All other companies don’t know or want to stop the greed ad are constantly pushing for more profits to see until where they can push the greed and milking without losing “too much” costumers. They even weight the amount of costumers lost vs the extra profits to see if its viable to lose those costumers and still profit, like Netflix. Valve does not work like this. Valve grew to a size, and that size is giving them stable and steady profit. And they are holding that size, slowly growing more here and there but nothing big. The biggest thing they did in like 10 years was the Steam Deck and they will not update it with a Deck 2 anytime soon. Valve plays the very slow, but steady profits game. This is how you win as a company. You try to keep yourself on a balance between good profits and good public perspective.
Being privately held helps a ton. Gabe is his own boss. Once a company’s public they’re beholden to the investors, and investors want big short term returns so they can dump their stock and move onto the next one.
Maybe that shouldn’t be possible.
Yep. Investing should tie you to a stock for at least a year - as soon as you decide to sell, the one-year timer starts.
I really hope that Gabe has future-proofed valve. It really is a remarkable treasure and one of the most user-friendly platforms of all time. Especially in these days when we are seeing a corporate takeover of the internet, or realizing that we lost a long time ago when we put all of our eggs in the Google basket.
I could see so much potential for fuckery happening, can you imagine if steam was as fond of kicking people off the platform as Reddit is? Or if games were constantly being curated to make sure they check all the boxes like the YouTube algorithm does? Five Nights at Freddy’s would have never existed if steam played by those rules, same for every other surprise Indie hit
I do not consider steam user friendly
State your case
Sorry, old post. There’s hidden controls everywhere that just aren’t intuitive.
How do you throttle your downloads? A ton of my games that I know I own are missing from my library - where did they go? How do you get to the store page of a game in your library? If I take a screenshot with steam, where is it? My steam library is showing my games by month. But it was showing them by categories I set for them before. How do I get back to that?
I can do all of these things, but when I try, I might need to search around steam a bit to find it, and I might get stuck entirely and have to ask someone or ask google.
SideQuest VR went the exact opposite direction.
