Valve is an excellent example of a company that is privately owned, so they don’t have to satisfy shareholders with constant growth for growth’s sake. And yet they’re still growing and making a profit, because they make a good product.
Phil and Xbox don’t have that luxury because their masters sold out decades ago.
Valve is also a good example of platform monopoly. People need to stop treating valve like they aren’t also a big problem with the modern games industry. They are PC gaming’s landlord taking a 30% cut of every sale. You have to be smoking crack if you think that doesn’t hurt game developers.
They are a monopoly because they’ve had the best product on the market consistently for 15 years. There used to be huge resistance to them and their drm from gamers, but they have shown over many years that they are trustworthy, unlike others that have tried this.
This is not an Apple or Google store situation where proper competition could not exist. They were always up against giants like Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft or more recently Epic.
No they don’t, Steam barely ever gets updated, it’s not magically better than the others it’s just the one everyone uses.
Digital storefronts are natural monopolies. No one wants to use a different game launcher because it’s annoying to remember multiple passwords, to remember which game is where, to install and have multiple launchers running. None of that is Valve doing some amazing engineering that no one else has done, it’s just the natural state of game launcher / storefront economics. The only reason Steam is what people prefer is because it was the first one on the scene and has the lion share of users and games for sale.
We see the same thing happen with streaming platforms, the same thing happen with social networks. And Steam is also a social network which reinforces the monopoly. The other launches have friends and chat and shit but no one uses it because their friends are on steam or discord.
I don’t doubt that Steam being first to market is the biggest reason for their success, but you make it sound as if there’s some alternative store that is better for the consumer in some way. What’s the alternative? I have yet to see any other store/launcher come close to Steam in terms of features, even more so when it comes to Linux support, which Valve have turned into a viable gaming OS pretty much by themselves. In the end, even exclusivity and drastically lower fees for publishers didn’t make EGS the success that Tim Sweeney wishes it was and I think at that point being first to market can’t be the only explanation. They have to be doing something right.
Today, yes, I agree. It’s really hard to compete with them anymore. But 15 years ago when everyone was rushing to capture the market, there were many opportunities to do so. Steam and valve were never infallible, but at least they took feedback and stayed consistent, unlike their competitors.
Nothing stops you from busting your games on other platforms when available. I always choose GOG over steam personally. What cut they take from publishers isn’t consumers’ concern.
They could definitely treat developers better, but they’re an example of treating customers right. That’s why they’re the biggest platform, and that’s why they admittedly have something debatably close to a monopoly.
Bullshit. That 30% cut pays for all the features that make steam a better store than any other store. Those features are all free for the gamers, because they are essentially paid by the devs in that cut.
If that cut wasn’t worth it, I don’t think Microsoft, ea and others would have come back to steam after trying to make their own stores (and failing).
How can it be a monopoly when I can just download another store with a click of a button? Which I have also done, and even bought games from those said other stores, but the experience was just completely miserable compared to steam, up to the point I’ve considered rebuying those games on Steam.
I think the real problem is businesses have to grow. If most big companies weren’t publicly traded then just being profitable would be enough.
Imagine making enough money to pay you and everyone else in your company a great wage one year, but it being bad because it wasn’t more profit than last year.
Time will tell. I mean, he’s not wrong. I think it’s pretty clear that studios have to make profitable games at the cost of interesting games. But it’s not like msft or anyone else is going to change their behavior. They have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to profit as much as possible.
I can see why that would be a bummer. In my mind, the perfect video game-ceo position would be for a company that makes enough profit to pay its employees well and self sustains the business to keep making more games. Having to constantly report a higher user base and profitability growth year after year on a global scale would be a total drag.
Yeah, Gabe’s son is entirely focused on his own business, not related to gaming at all. Once Gabe is gone, his son will probably just sell it for an acceptable price and Steam will go public fairly soon after.
Alyx was incredible though! Way more than a tech demo (though I get the argument that it was a test to see if folks would pick up a VR Half-life 3). I played it on a cheap, used WMR headset and an old PC that could barely keep up, and it still stays in my top five videogaming experiences.
It’s a great example to bring up though, because I’d bet it wouldn’t have been made if the studio was only chasing money instead of trying to innovate.
It was absolutely a tech demo. All Valve games were tech demos of one sort or another. The problem with that model is, if Valve doesn’t have some new tech to show off, there’s no Half-Life sequel. I actually predicted the we would only get another Half-Life game when Valve finally decided to get into VR about two years before they did. What I didn’t predict was that it would be VR Only or that it would be a prequel that reconned the timeline.
Valve has a fuck around with money that they could just let the devs make games on their own schedule, but instead Marc Laidlaw left the company and the fans have had to pick up the story lines and world. Honestly, Entropy Zero is a better game then Half-Life 2. Really take a moment to think about the weapons and combat in HL2. The maps weren’t designed with the enemy AI in mind, so many encounters just have you and them shooting at each other in empty rooms and hallways. So much focus was on the Gravity Gun, so all the other weapons save the Crossbow and Rocket Launcher were boring. Hell, why did they get rid of the mode switch on the Rocket Launcher? You have to take fire to your face if you want to hit anything with it.
Considering that Entropy Zero came out about 13 years after Half Life 2, I would hope it was better. It doesn’t really seem fair to compare the two. They were developed in different times, with different tech, and different games to draw inspiration from. That’s not to mention that Entropy Zero is a mod built on top of Half Life 2, and requires HL2s code to even run in the first place.
Entropy Zero uses the same engine as HL2, which is why I used it as an example. I think HL1 is a better game then HL2 for the same reasons EZ is better then HL2. Better weapons and better enemy engagements. Whenever I do a franchise replay, the HL2 stuff is always a drag and I end up skipping the HL2 stuff eventually. Seriously, episode 2 has terrible driving in it. Other games had that figured out by then.
Juice is a nickname I go by and I was born in 1988. Also yes, this is a new account, I started looking for a Reddit alternative when they started public trading last week. Where are the nazi symbols? I’m Mexican and Native American.
Well then I’m old and unoriginal Mr Dragon type. My screen name is what it is. I gave you an explanation that I didn’t owe you in the first place and this is all the effort that I’m willing to put in. Have fun being weirdly paranoid over usernames I guess.
You sound like the kind of person who would just assume Hindu temples were made by Nazis because they contained swastikas. Just because some assholes used a symbol as a dogwhistle doesn’t mean that the rest of the world should stop using it.
Look, I definitely don’t hate you, and hate racists as much as anyone other upstanding citizen should. I honestly appreciate you looking out for them, and the username you called out could be seen as sus, for sure.
Just don’t let assholes steal the symbols for themselves, fuck them. Don’t disparage someone for not knowing about the dogwhistle and/or using a symbol non problematically. That was really my only gripe.
I’m internet poisoned as hell but I’m surprised that that’s not common knowledge. Its also often 1488 with the 14 referring to the 14 words of the following neo-nazi slogans:
“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”
“because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the Earth.”
I thought companies made money by selling a product to customers? Hmm, seems like there is some kind of contradiction here, perhaps Phil should look into that.
Investors don’t care about that anymore. Line must go up more and right now. If not, they will replace you with someone who promises to do that.
The best ways to raise stock prices include downsizing, jacking up prices, and cutting product quality to save cost. None of these are even remotely beneficial to the customers.
It’s not a contradiction at all. Yes CEOs are the main beneficiary of the system but they’re still accountable to shareholders who run on pure capitalism. There’s plenty of examples of CEOs trying to do the right thing only to get sued by the shareholders then kicked out of their jobs. Nothing about corporations inherently needs to be done in a capitalist way, except the fact that publicly traded companies are legally required by law to run as capitalistically as possible, and if you don’t accept Venture Capital or go public, good luck getting anywhere in this system.
Hell, basically the entire premise of syndicalism is to put workers in control of the workplace and let things naturally evolve from there. Once you remove the core pillar holding capitalism up, everything will fall down one by one like dominos. If you want to see a fraction of how that works just look at places with high unionization compared to ones without and it’s like a completely different world.
You make money by both selling more and spending less.
Think about it, you can have none money left over at the end of the month by working extra hours at your job or by spending less money on something - but what if you can’t work extra hours because there’s none available? And what if you need that extra cash at the end of the month? The only thing you can do is spend less.
Phil is kind of saying the same thing you’re saying here, but it’s not easy to just “sell more”, not when everyone else is struggling to have that extra cash to spend.
The games industry right now, as a whole, isn’t growing. That means companies are selling less. Phil end everyone else would love to sell more, by all means if you’ve got some solid ideas on how to do that then every games industry veteran out there will happily listen to you, but the sad and shitty reality is that sales are down and when you’re a business, if you can’t increase sales you’ve got to cut costs.
And that means job losses. It fucking sucks and we can have debates all day long about the merits of capitalism and all that, but that’s the reality of today. That’s the game. Phil is being honest and up front here, it’s a shitty game but he’s playing it and if he wasn’t playing it, someone else would.
Profit, selling games, and maximizing value for shareholders are all fully correlated, to the point of being the same thing at different stages of the process.
Modern capitalism moves away from all three by focusing instead on current-quarter profit.
The perception of profit is a more powerful force than actual profit.
Markets select for profit by simply trimming away the things that don’t make profit.
Boards of directors select for the perception of profit by firing CEOs who don’t provide them with that perception.
These systems are both operating. The companies that don’t make a profit will still die. It’s just that under this system, a company that’s on track to making profit can be redirected by a Board onto a path where they aren’t, because of that second mechanism.
And I get that the business maybe “has” to be run that way, because of the way it exists in the economic system it exists in, but I’m definitely taking issue with the language he’s employed here. He’s not a prisoner being forced to run things this way.
Yes, but can you roll a platform of the distribution, breadth, depth and persistence over good and bad cycles of the scale of Xbox or PlayStation while being a private company? A few have tried.
No, there are plenty of independent private game developers (Stardew Valley, Baldur’s gate etc come to mind) I was just taking Phil Spencer’s perspective, which I imagine is a platform level one.
you get a lot of publicly traded companies that are in the industry that have to show their investors growth—because why else does somebody own a share of someone’s stock if it’s not going to grow?
I thought the way it was supposed to work was, a company starts out investing in its growth and during this period shareholders get gains from the price of the stock going up, and then when it has maxed out just switch to shoveling the profits into dividends instead? If the industry has stopped growing, I don’t see why there isn’t a path to acknowledging that to investors, what am I missing?
Shouldn’t that depend on the dollar amounts? Why would $X of dividends be worse than $X of stock growth? And if growth just isn’t in the cards anymore, it would be in reality a worse bet as the companies pour resources into a black hole of false hope and self sabotage seeking something that isn’t actually going to happen.
Growth stocks rise more because they carry more risk than steady dividend payouts. In a perfect dividend world, dividends would match growth, but because there is inherent risk in growth stocks there is a larger upswing
There are competing schools of thought in the investment world, and Growth has solidly beaten Dividend investing. Even better, going for a market-weighted global index fund is best.
You don’t pay tax on growth, you do on dividends. For large shareholders a high dividend can be a problem. Even for me, a very small time retail investor, I have to keep a balance of growth (like Apple) and dividend (I tend to use a dividend ETF so I can fairly reliably estimate my dividends) so I can avoid paying tax on the dividends.
I get the feeling the part of capitalism Phil Spencer hates is the part where consumers can take their business elsewhere if they don’t like the product.
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