…Granted you can turn this off, but by default every time you start Steam an ad for a game flies up in your face.
I would also call every single store page on Steam a “sold ad.” Again, granted that it doesn’t seem you can pay to promote your game above anyone else’s and the search seems to be fairly straightforward and functional.
While I do feel there is definitely advertising that happens on Steam, I’m okay with the level of it. I can find products I want, and products I do not want are not mercilessly crammed down my throat.
Only if companies are paying more for what you’re seeing.
The classic example would be loosely related games showing at the top of search results because some paid for them to be sponsored posts. Or something like that
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
A successful gaming company going public ultimately leads to their IPs dying off thanks to executive meddling and the developers being sent to the mines to work on whatever is popular.
Thank God that the Sims appeals to such a wide casual audience and is one of the rare franchises in gaming with a higher female fanbase than a male one.
So much so that when the Sims 2 didn’t have a breast size slider for fear that perverts would take advantage of it, the decision proved to be unpopular because too many of the fan base was unable to make Sims that accurately looked like themselves.
Because if that wasn’t the case the life simulator genre would be pretty much dead, outside of promising looking indie games that try to replicate the experience, remain with a Steam page that says “Early Access” and a kickstarter that is ignoring all emails.
Even if every game after the Sims 2 was turned into a nickel and dime machine, and I say this as someone who not only has all of the DLC for The Sims 4, but also, remember the old days when people joked about The Sims 1 having an expansion pack for everything.
Incidentally I don’t think downloadable content and micro transactions are necessarily a bad thing, it’s certainly beats the alternative of going to the store and buying a new edition of the game that has like a couple of bug fixes and maybe one bonus dungeon at the end…
I just wish they were reigned in.
I’m all for private Enterprise being able to call its own shots as long as it isn’t price gouging and hoarding Necessities like medicine, food, or housing.
That said if legislation came out and penalized companies for openly basing their business model on FOMO it would be one of the first times I actually wanted the video game industry to come under Fire by the government.
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.
Even if you carefully get a successor, they can still fuck up and ruin it. Or they just die/decide to move on 2 years in and you’re in similar shit Creek. Or hell, Gaben himself gets dementia and starts making shit decisions.
Gabes replacement will be the tell all. and as much as i want steam to exist over multiple generations…i dont think it can survive turnover, greed, opportunistic bastards.
I think this is the difference between private/public companies. They don’t have to deal with the “growth at all costs” mindset that plague public companies.
I think it would be awesome if he turned it into a nonprofit with a healthy endowment. The charter could say that any profits above $X that can’t be invested into improving PC gaming must go to charities that promote indie dev. So the main goal would be to do things like the Steam Deck or build innovative games, and there would be little incentive to screw over customers. It could also be structured like a coop, so if employees didn’t like the CEO’s direction, they could vote to remove them.
That’s what I would do, but I’m obviously not GabeN.
If you wonder why public companies with billions in revenue can’t make a Steam competitor is because they can’t think long term, being a private company allows Valve to just work on what they want and grow If they need to
Reportedly Gaben has implemented safeguards to prevent Valve from getting public after his death. So at least we can hope Valve doesn’t go public in our lifetimes.
It nearly happened, but then we protested and tanked the stock price to fuck Spez for fucking us. Now most of the subs are poorly moderated by mods that don’t care about their community. Content is suffering and revenue is dropping. Spez pissed on his golden goose and we decided to speed the process up so he couldn’t sell before it drowned.
Good joke. Investors will see wasted financial potential and make valve do it.
When you have external money you now also have away part of a platform. And the investors don’t care. Make number big fast. Nobody there is caring about long term
I’m not one that usually calls for the “Hail Corporate” BS where people lick the boots of big companies. In fact, I typically am very anti-corporate in every way, but Valve is one company I honestly have very little problem giving my money to. They very rarely have any anti-consumer things that crop up and every one to memory they’ve taken feedback and course corrected very rapidly. I’m afraid for the day Gabe Newell dies or retires, though. Whoever takes over Valve is going to have some big shoes to fill.
About the worst criticism I’ve heard is around policies involving refunds (very short but charming games can be played quickly and then refunded) and shitware games clogging up search results (often Unity/Unreal Engine skeleton games with a new logo slapped on).
The first one discourages a subset of indy games, but ones that should be taken seriously.
The second, I think, is more of a problem for reviewers hunting for hidden gems than the public at large. Steam decided long ago to lean into Sturgeon’s Law of letting almost everything go through and let the good stuff rise to the top. The other way to go is a curated list where you’ve already cleared out the garbage, but with the understanding that some hidden gems might be caught, too. If you go for letting through everything, then you should have mechanisms for highlighting quality. Steam is pretty good at that overall, but I see how it could be a problem for reviewers. After all, they’re exactly the people who need to be trolling the depths and finding those hidden gems.
I don’t think most people even notice those skeleton games all over Steam. I would never have seen them if not for J Steph Sterling pointing them out.
Suffice it to say that if these are the biggest problems, they’re doing pretty well.
There is the unregulated gambling market running off Counterstrike and Dota etc items that valve technically doesn’t run, but does facilitate through its community market and does profit from. Probably the biggest problem I have with how the company operates.
Honestly, when I think of the word “corporate” with its negative baggage, the last entity I will think of is Valve. They’ve been consistent and good for the past decades thanks to Gabe Newell. If there is any rich tech mogul who should be celebrated more than Elon Musk or Bill Gates, it’s Gabe.
Not in the least because Elon Musk is a complete idiot that has only managed to whittle literal billions of dollars just by being himself.
Every good company he has touched was either built from the ground up by someone else, like Tesla & PayPal and remains profitable in spite of his existence, or was built from the ground up by someone else and was subsequently ran into the ground - See Twitter.
Also most of his reported wealth is tied up in dubious stocks and unprofitable companies, the value of which would fall faster than the speed of gravity if he suddenly needed to access a significant amount value without a stock backed loan…
It’s not a principled stance, it’s simple economics.
They already take 30 percent of sales.
It is a benefit to them to put whatever will guarantee more sales, and a couple cents from an ad impression is just going to get in the way of that goal.
You’re not thinking like a capitalist. That 30% of sales they’re going to get anyway because the games that will pop up at the storefront are games that are, relatively speaking, successful. What they’re not getting is the money other companies would pay them to advertise games nobody wants to see. From a capitalist point of view Valve is leaving money on the table by not selling ad space.
That assumes that the money from targeted/curated ads is less than the money from paid advertising fees + follow up sales. That may not actually be true. Generic ads are notoriously bad at converting views to clicks to sales. What steam is doing is basically targeted advertising which boosts their sales, where they make a guaranteed 30% return at a rate that’s probably much higher than the conversion rate for paid advertising.
Other sales platforms do the same thing. It’s not really any different from all the recommendation sections on Amazon. The idea that they’re doing it just to be nice is pretty ridiculous. Valve is still out to make money at the end of the day.
This is where your thinking doesn’t align with modern day Capitalists. You’re thinking about the scenario where it might not make a profit, but the capitalists think about the scenario where it could make a profit. It’s a question of potential. If there is potential to make even more money (and in this case there is) then that’s a business case that needs to be explored. It ultimately doesn’t matter if it actually makes them less money, the potential gains matter more.
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.
Stocks = certificate of ownership in a fraction of a company. The basic principle is sound and goes back at least to the Renaissance, it’s everything else around it that sucks and creates a plethora of perverse incentives that benefit the capital owners.
Company stocks are not unique there, it’s the most common example but the principle extends to every commodity. You can buy virtual coal or gold right now if you want and sell later, without actually having coal delivered to your doorstep. This is actually a very important market mechanism when it works right because it allows the market to internalize external forces, reducing risk. European energy providers learned this the hard way when prices shot through the roof in 2022 and they were buying gas at “current prices”, leading to funds drying up unexpectedly sometimes to the point of bankruptcy, rather than buying gas at “future prices”, guaranteeing deliveries that were paid for months in advance. When it works well, speculation is actually an inescapable tool of complex modern economies. Without it you cannot maintain supply chains fit for the modern world, as speculation (when not abused) is the market’s way of accounting and preparing for the expected future.
Even in a communist society, you’d need stocks: the disagreement then becomes whether the state should own (part of) the stocks, or if the workers should own all the stocks (legally equivalent to the means of production).
Oh huh, neat. Thanks for the write-up! Basically the only thing I know about stock trading comes from family members trying to convince others to buy meme stocks, so I don’t really have a high opinion of the craft.
I think it is a little more complicated than that. You go to public markets to raise cash. Sometimes you can get the cash you want, sometimes not. The issue is when you are incentivized to make the stock price go up at all costs. If you don’t need the cash, there is no point to having a higher stock price - lower is somewhat better.
Now, if you are a CEO, and you are paid in stock options, you are going to do whatever you can to maximize the stock price. Even if it is bad for thebling term health of the company. I don’t think the public markets care either way.
Coincidentally, I was just reading a news article about Chipotle doing exactly that - raising prices while losing customers.
Even companies that have seen customers pull back due to the higher prices reported higher sales, because those higher prices offset volume declines.
PepsiCo, for example, reported … sales rose nearly 7% to $23.45 billion. The … company said it increased prices globally by 11% on average… In that time, PepsiCo’s volume fell 2.5%.
Nah, that’s just actual inflation. You know the deficit that the government runs on now, and the bug private-sector and general-public bailouts of the last two decades?
Yeah, that’s just printing money. Selling the overall value of the dollar to make ends meet today.
If companies are reporting larger profits after adjusting their prices for inflation then customers are met with inflation that is larger than the reported inflation rate.
Mark my word, once Gabe pass it’s gonna be very very different. We have very different things to worried about, like climate change, but on software side and tech we shouldn’t rely on monopolies. Valve was kept in that state because all the competition didn’t actually put up a fight worth extra investment. The windows store pushed valve to develop SteamOS and Proton, they also back off on some revenue split policy because of EGS’s deals. (Let’s be honest, not all players care about which launcher they use, as long as they get better deals and can play the game they want.)
And to my experience, Steam’s recent years’ updates to store/client are not something I like as well.
I don’t like the gamification of sales event etc.
I don’t like the new unlimited scroll type, they backed off a bit and become like 3 pages long until you hit the top/popular/sales part.
I also don’t like some of the UI changes(ie the downloads/library mixed together and not separate item)
I hated the auto start live streaming thing, if there is option to turn off that please let me know.
For EGS,
their search sucks
library page sucks, you can’t really organize your free games/purchased games etc.
auto updates are pretty on par so that’s okay.
their friends/etc also sucks.(not that I care much but at least it’s far worse than steam one.)
I like that they adopted Nintendo’s gold coin reward type to encourage consumer to purchase there.
games from other big publisher usually do require install their clients as well, which sucks. (it’s similar on steam as well.)
I want to finish reading your post but now I’m just too sad about the thought of GabeN dieing
I will say one of the things i don’t like about egs is nothing similar to steamvr, I still highly enjoy my index and want that industry to do well and refuse to invest in a store with no skin in the vr game.
also, I’m finished with windows forever and steam has native Linux support while egs needs a weird combo of wine, bottles, and lutris to be able to achieve something somewhat similar
that’s right, Linux also have a worrisome spot as shown by RedHat, you can gain sort of dominating position and cut off the older GPL source access. And it would be very dangerous to have some popular distro slowly acquired and then merged into a single one. I am not active Linux user at home but like you I would probably peace out if Windows goes subscription model. (they current pricing I’d still willing to spend a couple hundred and let the OS updated for 10+ years. (windows 10 almost 10 years. )
There is a downloads page, right click on “library” at the top and there is a downloads button that gives you a view of all pending/queued/current downloads etc.
The sales have become less fancy than they used to be? I have seen lots of complaints that the events have gotten worse.
okay, that makes sense now, I don’t know what I did now it shows all the menu items when I hover over the big item. Which is good, hope it stays that way. :)
I used to need to click around to find the download page, or unless I have updated game queued up then it show up at bottom of the UI.
Valve able to do that because they are private company, the exponential growth is only made mandatory because of the stakeholder. if the growth is stagnant(even with healthy profit), it’s very unattractive to investor, hence growth is needed to keep the cog running.
I wonder, what actual benefits are there in publicly traded companies for society as whole? Benefits that are good for you, me and everyone else equally.
It’s mostly the effect of expanding the company, like more job, better product, etc etc. sometime it help develop the society quicker because they get more capital to do bigger thing and put in research to do better thing or find new thing, but in return you have to promise growth and return to people giving you money to do that thing. i don’t think it’s meant to be altruistic cus it’s not charity.
A bit like the difference between building bigger and unstable houses vs smaller and stable. No idea where you got the charity concept from, i dont think anyone has even mentioned it before.
Sorry, when word “charity” gets mentioned in this context tends to annoy me a lot as sentence “we are not a charity” seems to be like magic word to some that can be used to excuse any shitty behaviour by the company.
Gets you something to add to your 401k portfolio. Which I don’t think is a great argument; there are plenty of other ways to handle retirement even in a fundamentally capitalist system.
There’s a theory out there that as SP500 indices for 401k’s become the dominant investment, that will convince publicly traded companies to think long term. Those indices don’t jump in and out of stocks. They want to add a stock and then keep it for decades. Companies would change their thinking to match.
I’m not convinced of that, though. Starting with the fact that 401k’s started as a tax loophole that got mistaken for a good retirement plan, while traditional pensions and Social Security have been eroded away (to say the least). But it’s a possible outcome.
I think the initial idea of like “I have a great idea but don’t have the capital to get it off of the ground” is a decent argument for public companies, or in the case where employees are shareholders and thus reap reward when companies are successful, but I think these are both mostly antiquated notions and the ills of how public companies are today are a net-loss, and there are generally better ways to accomplish both of these things.
Especially in tech, it’s entirely common to charge nothing, make no money and burn investment money until they end up either so dominant they essentially have monopoly power (think: Amazon) or that the business plan is reach critical mass and hopefully sell. And then the very notion that every business has to grow forever leads to rather perverse incentives. Again, especially if you look at tech, basically all of the FAANG companies used to be a lot better/nicer until some critical mass is hit and then they have to enshittify everything.
No dude. These companies are several decades old and continue to make money hand over fist by exploiting their customers. They do this shit because it makes them a fuckton of money, because their users have no fucking principles or backbone and just lick boots every time they’re stepped on.
I am not an optimistic person but literally the only explanation I have for this sort of thing is altruism. That Valve is a company that simply loves its’ community and doesn’t want to exploit their customers. Nothing else makes sense.
I’m not sure it’s entirely accurate to say these companies aren’t destroying themselves though. Are they just going to explode and die all at once? Probably not, but they will likely fade to obscurity like IBM or HP (two powerhouses of the last century). I agree that exploiting customers is how they make money hand over foot (and we just roll over for it) but the point is to make the largest possible short term gains, not to maximize profit. It’s important to maximize short term gains because it makes big shareholders happy, and the shareholders (e.g., the CEO and the board) want to enrich themselves. The issue with optimizing for short term gains is that you miss out on the dividends of long term effort, which is usually significantly greater.
Something I think about occasionally is how it is that a no-name startup beat the likes of Google, MS, Facebook, etc to chatgpt. Chatgpt is the single greatest innovation in search in almost 3 decades. Google’s whole business relies on users needing Google’s search platform to find information. Google gets to place ads here, and that makes up the largest part of their revenue, but chatgpt threatens to upend that whole business. There is the potential for a whole new generation of advertisement technology to be baked into chatgpt that delivers an unprecedented level of ad targeting. In case you need a translation, that is massive $$$$$$$$, because advertisers want their ads to be placed in front of people who will actually buy the product (and they will pay a premium for this!), not the spray and pray strategy you see today.
So yes, in a way, Google and other companies that rely on simply extracting wealth rather than innovating/building wealth risk losing billions of dollars and eventually fading to irrelevance. I really think Facebook has passed the point of no return already in this regard, and has allowed numerous social media sites to steal market share very easily.
Something I think about occasionally is how it is that a no-name startup beat the likes of Google, MS, Facebook, etc to chatgpt.
Which was immediately absorbed by the anti-consumer company MS for several tens of billions of dollars.
I really think Facebook has passed the point of no return already in this regard
How so? Literally half the planet still checks into Facebook on a monthly basis.
has allowed numerous social media sites to steal market share very easily.
They haven’t stolen market share, they’ve created it. Facebook didn’t lose any users and these other platforms still operate with a tiny fraction of Facebook’s users.
Microsoft didn’t “absorb” open ai, they have a partnership where Microsoft pays assloads of money to sustain openai so that Google doesn’t get it. Ironically, this might be considered “long term thinking” but I wonder how long shareholders will tolerate such a hit to the books. There is supposed to be a profit sharing model here eventually (up to a certain point) but Microsoft isn’t getting chatgpt, otherwise bing would have replaced chatgpt. I have to wonder if, by the time chatgpt is profitable, if there will already be better models produced by other groups (maybe even open source), especially given the pace of AI innovation. I would not be surprised if this was a net loss for MS. GPT is amazing but it has numerous drawbacks at the moment. I admit that, if they figure things out quickly, this could be a huge win for them. I would go so far as to say that this is not anti consumer at all and is exactly how the free market is supposed to work.
As for Facebook, the only data you need is that the younger generations think it’s for boomers and don’t use it. I’m a little older and (to your credit) I check in about once a month. I know that meta has a very powerful user data harvesting business (arguably more valuable than Facebook), but Facebook’s user engagement will continue to slide if they can’t capture younger users and keep millennials and gen x users on the platform. This devalues their ability to make money from ads directly, and again, they did this to themselves by destroying their reputation for short term gains. They will eventually become like Yahoo! or AOL, both of which have almost zero brand value.
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.
Nah, they are many of them, maybe even the majority of companies are like that (think SMBs). The peculiarity of Valve is that it also managed to become and stay the world leader in its domain, so every nerd knows about it.
Tons of SMEs are world leaders in their domain, you just never heard of them because they produce giant ship propellers, fire hose couplings, surgical instruments, whatnot, not exactly things people not using them ever think about. And of course you don’t have to be a hidden champion to be a SME that owns their market, say, Herrenknecht. Who would be unknown if tunnel boring wasn’t so cool and impactful that there’s tons of documentaries about them doing it.
If Steam isn’t pay to win, how do I earn the points used to buy the profile doodads (avatars, avatar bezels, backgrounds, banners, etc) without purchasing games? 🤔
I purchased enough stuff in past sales that when that feature released, which I ignored until I saw one of my rocket league friend do something fancy on their profile icon, I had all the credits to buy all the top animated ones. But being stingy with the virtual coins, I still only pick the one I want to use and only buy those. one boarder and one background to match. What about my other credits? well they can rot or whatever I don’t care.
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