I can already hear my business administration professor scream that everyone in the free market tries to screw each other from that statement lol. Why yes of course, money. Planned obsolescence is the only logical choice, people! I bet nobody will source old, but durable products and repair them instead, no no. That’ll never happen!
I think Valve in on very early steps of enshittification. Maybe not everyone, but most companies started like that. I mean being nice to users. Counterargument to my claim is that they are already millionaires, which is true, but humans’ greed may be limitless.
Fortunately Gaben has only a minor interest in Volvo 😉.
But actually his son is involved in the games industry, and there’s plenty of other like-minded people at Valve. Hopefully the (far) future of Valve is as bright as its present.
To be clear, that gives them the opportunity to avoid enshittification. There’s plenty of private companies that are dogshit. Valve happens to be one of them that took the opportunity and ran with it.
When Gaben retires or dies, things could very easily change. But I don’t think it’ll happen before then.
When a company only has to please customers they are allowed to bend and in extreme cases break their own rules for a customer to be satisfied.
When you have to please share holders and customers. You as a laborer must decide to please the customer or the share holders. Sadly the longer you work somewhere the more like you are to please a customer if you work with them directly. The further you are from the customer the more likely you are to disagree with choosing customer satisfaction over shareholder satisfaction. Begin enshitirication.
That’s interesting. Are there other large non public gaming companies? I actually want to ask this outside of gaming, but don’t want to stray outside the community.
Epic Games*, Mihoyo**, IO Interactive, Bethesda/ZeniMax***, Deep Silver.
Epic games is 40% owned by a publicly-traded company, Tencent.
** Mihoyo filed for an IPO in 2017, but withdrew its application for unknown reasons.
*** ZeniMax Media was recently acquired by Microsoft, and is now a Microsoft subsidiary. I’m not sure if this makes it count as a ‘non-public gaming company’ by your definition.
Valve being a private company is probably the thing that allows them to focus on putting out good products w/o dealing with shareholders demanding more.
And they make a ton of money doing right by their core consumer base, I would be very surprised if we see any of that change.
If Valve were any other company they would have laid off half their staff and coasted on that 30% from Steam. They’re not perfect, but maybe the only company I feel good about giving money to, consistently.
If valve were public, and required to make a lot more money than the previous quarter, they would absolutely need (want?) to get the maximum amount of money from wherever they could. It’s what I think it’s happening with netflix & others. It doesn’t matter that (hypotetically) they make a billion dolars of revenue. They need to make more next quarter. So they need to raise prices, forbid account sharing, reduce content quarity, anything to earn as much money as possible for next quarter.
Volvo could earn a billion dollars, and if they don’t want to earn more, they could happily stay the same. They might even want to make moves thinking on the long term, such as keep customers happy and excited, or invest in new technologies like proton. Compared to netflix execs, who don’t care about the long term, they care about next quarter.
I don’t know a lot about the stock market, but it looks stupid to me to bet on infinite growth. If the company earns money, and I own shares, shouldn’t I earn money via dividends? It looks to me like the only way to make money is to buy low and sell high? Or is that just greed?
If the company earns money, and I own shares, shouldn’t I earn money via dividends?
You do. Companies give dividends all the time (well, every x months, usually at least yearly).
It looks to me like the only way to make money is to buy low and sell high? Or is that just greed?
Just greed… mostly. A lot of people want to “get rich quick”, and a bunch of already rich people like to gamble to get even richer, so a lot of market volatility comes from greed… but a share price with good growth expectations can make it attractive enough that the company may decide to give lower dividends (no need to attract people), so if you can “buy low, sell high”, you may still want to do it regardless.
You can still ride the market mostly on dividends by diversifying and investing into multiple companies whose share prices will average out in the long run (picking the right diversified portfolio, is an art on itself).
need to make more next quarter
That’s mostly an effect of tying C-suite compensations too closely to share prices, with no further checks in place. When the main driving force behind the decision makers is increasing share prices, they’ll happily burn down the whole company, cash out, and jump ship.
Sometimes it’s done on purpose, when some long-time investors grow tired and decide to cash out, maybe because they expect a change in the market and the company becoming less competitive or even obsolete. If the expected changes are big enough, it’s easier to start a new company from scratch, than to restructure an old behemoth with thousands of people used to doing things “like they’ve always been done”.
Didn't they change to torx and change the base they screw into metal?
The former is a mild annoyance, but they're a pretty standard bit now that anyone that does any electronic DIY has in their set. The latter is a huge improvement.
Must admit I didn't look too much into it though
but mostly seems positive.
Aha, OK. That's my bad. When I read it on the phone earlier, I read the four point list as something you thought they should be doing, and not what they were doing. As such, I thought you were ranting against them.
I’ve had so many Phillips screws going bad because of slipping screwdrivers. I’ve never had this problem with torx ones. They fit, or they don’t, there is no middle ground, if you catch my drift.
Yeah what Valve is doing is great. Hopefully they will become more mainstream in the future and become more known with the super casual crowd. Nintendo definitely needs more proper competition in the handheld market.
Also FYI it’s Phillips with double L, Philips with one L is the Dutch electronics company.
I mean… Phillips heads are hood for what they’re actually designed for, which is, uh, to strip really easily so they don’t get over-tightened. Which is irrelevant if your manufacturing is precise enough.
Yeah, the OG Steam Deck video before it even released made very clear that the original run was made with self-tapping screws, which meant that disassembly and re-assembly was always going to result in a less firm and tight re-assembly because the holes have already been tapped once.
It was honestly my personal biggest complaint considering it seemed otherwise like they were aiming to support self-repair. Very refreshing to see they changed tack to a costlier option for the sake of their customers. Very true, companies rarely do this out of the goodness of their hearts, and Valve is an unusual company.
I had to stop playing Half Life Alyx when it got to the dark flashlight bit with zombies jumping out at you. Nearly gave me a heart attack. Definitely couldn’t handle it IRL. edit: autocorrect
Yeah I definitely took breaks and actually just never went back after a certain point. Not because it was too intense directly, but one of my breaks, I just never went back.
But it only works as long as the replacement for Gabe Newell has the exact same ethos about the business. Changing hands always risks changing how things function at a company. Unless Newell has been practically grooming a successor for years, it’s very likely that a replacement will want to “shake things up.”
When Newell retires/passes, things will change. Time will tell if it will be for the better or the worse.
Well he’s 61, and the average life expectancy for males in the US is 73ish. He is well-to-do, so he likely has better access to healthcare than most, meaning he will be one of those who lives past 73. I’d suspect we have twenty years at best, but more likely about 10 years if he retires at a “reasonable” age.
Unfortunately gabe is also overweight and hence has the health risks associated with being overweight. So him only living till the average age has a higher possibility.
Not exactly. Of course Gabe could be replaced by some idiot who fucks everything up, but if Valve doesn’t become publicly traded it will continue to be in the best interest of whoever ends up owning it to continue doing things this way. Gabe doesn’t do good things just because. He does it because happy customers means more money in the long run.
Publicly traded companies on the other hand need to extract as much money as quickly as possible and have no regards to what will happen to it a few months later. So even if Gabe dies, all Valve needs is a leader interested in what’s best for itself.
Dear God. Because Nepotism has worked out so well so many times in the past. /s
Just shut down the company now, Gabe.
From an interview with his son:
“If it’s one thing I’d like to see Valve do, it’s push it with more their ideas,” he said. "The people there are the smartest I’ve ever met, the hardest working, the most inspiring. The culture at Valve is a very good one but they’ve kind of found this point where they’re a working machine. And that’s good, but I think they should reach out and do something scary. Do something that they don’t know what the outcome is going to be.
“They make incredibly smart decisions, but sometimes you have to do something stupid. Sometimes you have to have a stupid crazy idea and say ‘fuck it’, go with it. Valve has a mindbogglingly enormous amount of resources at their back, and I hope they find the courage to throw it at something new. I want to see them push the envelope again.”
Yeah this chucklefuck is going to break shit day one, guaranteed.
Eh, it sounds more like he wants then to go back to the roots and developer a groundbreaking game, like Portal, or HL2, again. Which doesn’t sound like a bad thing. To do something groundbreaking it probably helps if you dare to do something that is scary.
They literally already did that with the SteamDeck, it’s absolutely groundbreaking. They created a whole new product category, but it took years of planning and patience and watching the market. It happened with prototypes like the Steam Controller, the Steam Link, and the original vision for Steam Boxes, as well as the nearly decade of work they’ve done on Proton to get Windows games to run well in Linux. It didn’t happen with a “stupid crazy idea” that they said “fuck it, go with it.” It started with a smart idea, well executed, over a long period of time, with many bumps in the road on the way to success.
Steam Boxes were originally announced in 2012, this is the result of a full decade of work.
And one hell of a lot of work, too! Reimplementing the Windows APIs that Wine didn't already have, and then optimizing those implementations enough to be not only sufficient for some of the most performance-sensitive software under the sun but faster than actual Windows, is no small feat.
I wonder how much of Newell’s past at Microsoft helped with that? He helped produce the first three versions of Windows.
While Windows works wildly differently these days and the last one he worked on was Windows 3.0 (maybe 3.1?) and a massive amount of stuff has changed in how Operating Systems work since then.
However, I do wonder if his familiarity with the old systems helped at all.
Yeah, you are correct, and that’s why I think he was talking about games specifically. That’s a grade A assumption from me though (and a bit of hopium?)
So SteamDeck, Valve Index and pushing back against the short-term money maker that was NFTs until half a year or so, among other things, aren’t scary enough projects when you’re “just” a game developer and distributor?
I love their approach to Hardware and Linux but have we collectively forgotten that Valve had a huge part in pushing loot boxes and underage gambling? Far from being the least evil company, but still a net win for consumers and I appreciate that they exist.
Almost definitely. When they did the initial release, it could have easily been a flop, and if it was a flop, it would have been pointless to have gone in planning to repair and sell refurbished units. Now that sales are showing its a hit, they are taking the time to invest in changes for more long-term support.
Self-tapping screws made sense for a product in an entirely new product category without knowledge if it would be successful or not. Torx screws that slide into metal threads makes a lot more sense for what is expected to be a product with long shelf-life.
The only thing is, the refurb market can’t be that great to pay for this change. You might not think it, but changing to better screws and adding the metal threads is crazy more expensive.
Crazy more expensive for raw profits - per unit, it’s basically negligible.
You could say this if s consumer focused effort to achieve market share or sell more games, but I choose to believe this if just what happens
Personally, I think this is just what happens when you have an employee run tech company. They lose out on like 0.05% profits, but more then make up for it through game sales and reputation
I mean realistically, this is probably a few cents a unit. Across hen million units, that’s real money. But quality pays over time. They lose out on quarterly profits, but they don’t worry about that bs - they’re not publicly traded, and they’ll make way more on a 5 year timespan
Fair point, although I’d argue that this is probably a cheap and standard extra step
Molds and turn around time are definitely expensive… But much cheaper if you wait until the next version that probably will have different mount points for the newer internals
I’m not saying this isn’t worth praising, I’m just saying this is exactly what integrity and giving your employees autonomy looks like. You come back for version 2, and you take your lessons learned, you explore the improvements that you thought up during the last version
It’s just basic craftsmanship, but that has unfortunately been smothered in most places these days. You have to be big enough for this to be an R&D effort you can afford to fail, but small enough no one has bought you up to wring you for value
That and they want as many Steam decks to be working as possible. They don’t make their money on Steam Deck’s as much as they make money on people buying games for them.
Nah, definition 1 right there isn’t inherently negative. It’s certainly more involved than otherwise necessary and seems somewhat driven by emotion, so while it skips the negative connotation I think this counts plenty well.
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