• Sonotsugipaa@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      8 months ago

      Nah, go public and commit to a restless chase that gets exponentially demanding and caters to a bunch of disinterested bottom-feeders rather than improving services and products for the customers

    • frezik@midwest.social
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      8 months ago

      This is a common thing to say, but I want to push back on it. There’s nothing magical about being a private company that means they’ll make better decisions. It merely removes one big thing that causes companies to make bad decisions. There’s still plenty of private companies run by shitbags.

      • laurelraven@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        8 months ago

        While this is true, the flip side of that is that being a publicly traded company all but guarantees they’ll be forced to make bad decisions. So, the original point still stands: more companies should do this. They may be shitty anyway, but at least they’ll be shitty on their own terms and have the best chance of not being shitty.

        • explodIng_lIme@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Every company has shareholders, public just means that shares can be traded publicly. A private shareholder does not need to be part of the company. If enough shareholders at Valve decide to make the royalty to be listed on Steam 50% instead of 30%, no one can stop them. Both public and private companies need to keep shareholders happy because they literally own the company. While that is easier with fewer shareholders, it is by no means a guarantee there won’t be trouble. Just like there are hundreds of public companies that operate without problems but you never hear about those because business as usual is boring af

  • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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    8 months ago

    It really is impressive. Steam is honestly a pretty shitty platform in a number of ways, but their competition just keeps managing to be worse.

      • RogueBanana@lemmy.zip
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        8 months ago

        I too would like to try it only if they have regional pricing and good Linux support. Maybe 1 day, hopefully within this decade.

      • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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        8 months ago

        I’m gonna guess you’re German? I believe I heard that German banks are gradually moving towards the international standard where debit/bank cards are indistinguishable from credit cards and so they’ll be supported by online platforms.

        • BlackRoseAmongThorns@slrpnk.net
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          8 months ago

          That’s a really wild guess lol, no, I’m Israeli. It’s most likely because I don’t use a normal credit card but something else that is anonymous and lower risk.

          • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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            8 months ago

            Haha the guess was just because I’ve seen users complain about how a website “doesn’t accept my bank card” many times before, and it’s almost always been German people. Over there, I believe, the most standard average person gets a card that isn’t compatible with most online payment systems.

            But yeah especially with a government as sketchy as that I can see why you’d want to use something with a bit more privacy.

      • voxel@sopuli.xyz
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        8 months ago

        I’d rather use gog but the prices are extremely high (like up to 3 times higher than on steam)

    • thepreciousboar@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      I mean what is really shitty apart from the high fees? The platform is good, the library is good, the services for gamers are unparalleled

      • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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        8 months ago

        I think they may have remedied this eventually, but for a long time they were in violation of consumer law. They went a long time misleadingly displaying prices to Australians in USD despite having Australia-specific prices, and once they finally fixed that they still continued imposing international transaction fees on purchases.

        I think they’ve mostly, if not completely, gotten rid of this recently, but they used to do some really gross exploitative psychological tactics during their sales. Then there’s the DRM inherent in the platform requiring you to run their client in order to play your game—yes, other platforms apart from GOG all do this too, but that’s the point: Steam is bad, but others are even worse. This becomes especially bad when you consider the risk of losing access to all your games just because Steam decides you should, or because you disagree with a changed terms of service.

        Then there’s just the ways that it’s bad for the gaming industry. Steam acts as a monopsony as game developers are basically doomed to fail if they’re not on Steam. Steam’s strong emphasis on its regular sales cycle might appear good to consumers at first, but like the net neutrality violations in “unlimited bandwidth to [our partner website]” coming from your ISP, this creates a short-term benefit to consumers in exchange for causing longer-term harm.

        Oh and also I’m salty about their recent in-game overlay redesign, and the fact that it took away the ability to “ctrl-f” to help me find the achievement I’m working on.

        • barsoap@lemm.ee
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          8 months ago

          Steam DRM is opt-in and even then rather trivial to circumvent, practically all it does is prevent things being as simple as copy+pasting files. GOG can go completely DRM-free because the bulk of their offering is stuff they hold the rights to, way fewer publishers would put games on Steam without that basic DRM being available. They’re not trying to defend against hardened pirates but opportunistic copying. If you want to ship a rootkit with your game you will have to include it yourself, Valve doesn’t offer that kind of thing.

          Their monopoly position is an issue, yes, but also frankly speaking not their fault. Though things will get interesting once the EU vs. Valve case is through and they have to allow resales, it’s probably going to mean more than resales within Steam.

          As to the cut they’re taking – meh. I think it’s too high, of course I think it’s too high because it’s money not landing in my pocket, but it’s also ballpark market standard. And much unlike other companies they actually spend the money they rake in on sensible stuff, like the work they do on proton.

          • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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            8 months ago

            but also frankly speaking not their fault

            Oh yeah for sure. But it doesn’t really matter whose fault it is, what matters is that it’s bad for developers and consumers, and it’s a reason to want competitors to succeed, and to be frustrated that they’re not.

            • barsoap@lemm.ee
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              8 months ago

              The developers can choose. Many games are “DRM” in scare quotes, it’s not that developers are enabling this but they’re hooking into features such as cloud saves or the workshop and to get them running outside of steam you need to provide a steam.dll with stubs for some functions so the game doesn’t get confused.

              DRM, at least from a programmer’s perspective, only starts once you actually a) check for integrity of game files etc. and b) check for integrity of that integrity checking code. The bulk of steam games will throw some error when you try to run them outside of steam, but they’re not taking any measures to prevent you from making them think that steam is running.

              From a developer’s perspective – honestly, I don’t care. If a game gets published on multiple stores I’d generally try and make all of them the exact same version so the game will check whether steam.dll is available, use it if it’s there, and not if it’s not. If it’s only published on steam I may blindly assume that steam.dll is there and error out if it’s not because I didn’t bother to make a version of the main menu that doesn’t have a “workshop” menu item.

              I don’t really mind whether you pirate my game, unless you’re a millionaire that is at that point I will judge your character quite harshly. But I’m also not going to spend time and effort on making the game easier to pirate.

      • ysjet@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        The funny thing is, their fees aren’t high. You just got duped by Epic’s propaganda that 30% was high.

        In fact, it’s vastly lower than the previous alternative, which was in store and took almost twice as much more of the cut.

        Even today, 30% is standard for a digital eshop (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Apple), except Valve offers more services and benefits than all of them combined.

      • rtxn@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        It’s a DRM platform, it won’t let you play games unless you update them, it can unilaterally remove games you bought, and the desktop application is a shitty web app. Just from the top of my head. There is also a morally questionable gambling system with a huge secondary market that they refuse to acknowledge.

        That being said, I think its virtues outweigh its flaws. Games and their updates are deployed conveniently and with a great bandwidth, the refund policy is generous, and it gives indie developers a massive audience (as long as they make it out of the algorithmic hell). Then there’s also Proton, Valve’s massive conributions to Linux gaming, and the Steam Deck.

  • Kidplayer_666@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    “never interfere with the enemy while he is in the process of making a mistake.”- Napoleon allegedly

  • regdog@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    The strategy is called “Not beeing a publicly traded company”. Valve is a privately owned company.

    Publicly traded companies need to increase value for their shareholders, which means they have to raise their quarterly profits at any cost.

    • Goodie@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Valve might not be a publically traded company, but it sti has shareholders. Some of those shareholders still want Valve to increase value, etc.

      The difference is that valve has a songle large share holder who seems to just not give a fuck about those pressures. While most (all) publically traded companies crumble and fall to that pressure.

      • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        The thing about privately-held companies with not intention to go publoc is that the long-term viability of the company is more important than ever-increasing share value.

        A public company can be the most profitable company in the world but still lose stock value if it isn’t more profitable than last quarter.

        • Goodie@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          But companies don’t always chase profit.

          They can also chase growth and the appearance of a company that could or will make money one day. Ex Uber when it first came out and destroyed the taxi industry practically overnight.

          • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            Yes, but they chase it in different ways.

            A shareholder in a private company that’s profitable well isn’t losing money on the investment. A shareholder in a profitable publicly-held company might be losing money depending on when they bought in.

            Additionally, the shareholders in the private company have to consider the future because they can’t dump their shares as easily. That promotes sustainable business practices instead of chasing short-term gains at the cost of long-term viability.

            • Goodie@lemmy.world
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              8 months ago

              That makes no sense.

              The only difference between a public company and a private company (in this sense) is how liquid the asset is, said another way, how easy it is to enter or exit the position, and how regularly the holdings value is recalculated.

              I could buy 100k of valve stock of someone tomorrow, and then find myself wishing I’d bought NVIDIA. I could buy NVIDIA tomorrow, and it could crash and I could wish I’d bought in to Valve.

              • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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                8 months ago

                Exactly. When it’s more difficult to enter and exit a position you need to take a longer-term view.

    • Phegan@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Many private companies also need to increase profits at any cost as they have shareholders, they are just privately owned.

  • megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    8 months ago

    Others have pointed out there a private company, but to be more specific on what that means, they are not openly trading their shares. The majority of shares are all owned by a handful of people who care about the long term health of the business. A lot of companies that we see doing major face plants right now are publicly traded, so any big fund or individual with enough cash can swoop in and buy up enough shares to control leadership, then use that control to get the company to do stupid stuff generally or maximize short term profitability at the expense of long term health.

    A similar thing can happen if someone with a majority of shares choose to sell too a ghoul.

  • FakeGreekGirl@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    8 months ago

    It’s called “don’t be evil”.

    There used to be another prominent tech company that has that as their credo. Wonder what happened to them.

  • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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    8 months ago

    Valve is working really hard though?

    Their focus just isn’t on making new games, they’re almost entirely focused on the platform.

    Their games are now the side hustle.

    • Suppoze@beehaw.org
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      8 months ago

      It’s a company. They realized they make platforms even better than games and capitalized on that. I see no issue with that. Moreover, they were working on Source 2, HL: Alyx and Counter Strike 2 recently, which I would say is immense work for a company, even more so considering their very humble employee count (compared to direct competitors, e.g. Epic)

      • arefx@lemmy.ml
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        8 months ago

        They still put a lot of work into Dota and it’s surrounding events as well.

      • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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        8 months ago

        As a business strategy, moving away from Windows makes a lot of sense in the mid and long term, since you never know what new shenanigans Microsoft might try to pull.

        Steamdeck’s success is a good sign for consumers thus far.

      • skulblaka@startrek.website
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        8 months ago

        Once upon a time I would have agreed with you but nowadays I see a couple bullet holes in Nintendo’s feet as well. And Valve is a bit less quick on the draw with their lawyers it seems.

        • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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          8 months ago

          They are both working in the self interest of their platform, which is where they make their money.

          It just happens to be that Nintendo’s platform is tied to hardware while Valve’s platform isn’t.

      • halva@discuss.tchncs.de
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        8 months ago

        unlike nintendo they at least don’t say lawyers at literally anybody who happens to somehow think of their IPs in a way that slightly contradicts copyright

    • rtxn@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      I’m sure Airbus has just as many skeletons in the closet, the door just hasn’t fallen off its hinges yet.

        • rtxn@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          I disagree. The machine and its operators that stand between me and a 30000-foot fall better be fucking perfect.

          • Technus@lemmy.zip
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            8 months ago

            Eh, nothing manmade is ever going to be perfect. You’re literally 100 times more likely to die in the Uber ride to the airport than on that plane (1.8 deaths per 100 million passenger miles vs 0.01). That kind of shit I don’t worry about.

            That being said, if some sort of gross negligence is threatening to change those statistics, it’s definitely worth looking into.

      • barsoap@lemm.ee
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        No need to look into any closet. Supporting dictators to oppress the opposition, corruption all over the world, just what you’d expect from an arms manufacturer. Civil aviation seems to be clean, though, and those skeletons aren’t tech-related. Airlines are currently whinging about the prices Airbus demands for new planes but what do you expect, their order books are overflowing and where else are you going to go, Boeing?

        • kingthrillgore@lemmy.ml
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          8 months ago

          Its funny because their backlog is for the next 13 years, they could easily have the EU give them money to fix it and nobody would complain.

  • joe
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    8 months ago

    Slightly less corporate greed than everyone else

  • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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    8 months ago

    Valve also used equally awful tactics when they wanted to push Steam in the beginning.

    They sold physical games in stores where the only thing on the disk was a Steam installer and a code, forcing everyone to install their store in order to play the game.

    They aren’t much different from other companies, they can just afford to do nothing now because of their semi-monopoly.

    • thawed_caveman@lemmy.world
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      Oh my god, this is how 17yo me discovered what Steam is. I was forced to install it and i was SO mad.

      Still using Steam 13 years later.

    • OneWomanCreamTeam@sh.itjust.works
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      8 months ago

      I mean, most of the time when a company gets as much of the market share as steam, they start enshitifying to squeeze more pennies out of their user base until everything that made them good in the first place is tainted and worthless.