this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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[–] RQG@lemmy.world 195 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Valve good.

But valve company. Company bad.

But valve company do good thing.

But selfish reason.

But good outcome.

But what if no GabeN.

We pray.

[–] TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz 108 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Valve is motivated by money. But their strategy is to make excellent products, that put the customers first. A rare sight these days.

[–] julianh@lemm.ee 78 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think the the main reason is that they're private with no intention to go public. They're not beholden to random shareholders who know nothing about games and just want infinite growth, their decisions are actually made by people inside the company.

[–] thisisawayoflife@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I played a lot of Sierra games in the 80s. I grew away from computers for a while and at silver point in the 90s, Sierra sold out. They were basically drug through the mud, canned all its devs and became a brand rather than a software company. Sierra was also the first publisher of Half Life.

I was reading the history of Sierra there other night on Wikipedia and was sad because so many great games came out of that company and most were memorable. Hard to see that in any gaming these days

Back to my point, I started thinking that Valve saw what happened to Sierra and Newell decided fairly early on that they would be a software company and publisher and not sell out to a third party or take the company into the market. Pure speculation on my part, but they got their start sort of at the end of life of a bunch of 80s software companies. EA is certainly a shadow of what it was but it's still around at least as a brand.

[–] HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 50 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Valve's strategy is to maintain dominance of their software platform, Steam.

It has been pushing Linux as a viable computer platform as a counter to if/when Microsoft wanted to monetize PC gaming in direct competition to Steam, which seems to be a wise decision.

[–] KinglyWeevil@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As we get closer to Microsoft forcefully shoving windows 11 down our throats, more and more I consider switching to Linux as my daily driver for home.

[–] backhdlp@lemmy.blahaj.zone 46 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Valve is one of the few big companies that still knows money comes from users and users come from a good product

[–] 1847953620@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

sometimes users come from other users

[–] backhdlp@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's the advertisement part that I skipped because it doesn't fit so well, the users need to hear about the good product before becoming a user.

[–] crapwittyname@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Also, when a mummy user and a daddy user love each other very much, they go into a special private online matchmaking lobby and make little baby users.

[–] 1847953620@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

but if they turn out to be ms edge users, those get aborted out of the womb.

[–] vivadanang@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

verily, from their loins they cometh

[–] jelloeater85@lemmy.world 21 points 1 year ago

Gaben is fucking smart and gives a shit.

[–] Landmammals@lemmy.world 20 points 1 year ago

Not just money, they're motivated by a long-term success. A lot of these companies can't see past this quarter's profits and bring a lot of Goodwill trying to make the numbers go up forever.

[–] toastal@lemmy.ml 33 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If they ever went public & were legally bound to make profit for shareholders, there would be no good feelings anymore.

[–] RQG@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago

Going public is usually bad for product quality and consumer oriented business models.

[–] Tak@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Private companies still have shareholders who they are bound to make profit for. They're just shareholders not fixated on stock value as it's not publicly traded.

[–] Bartsbigbugbag@lemmy.ml 16 points 1 year ago

Private companies aren’t bound to make profit. I purposefully tanked my companies profit to literally 0 during the pandemic so I could keep my employee on at full wage while only open half time. A private company can make profit for shareholders, but it doesn’t have to. It can do whatever the shareholders want it to do, within the boundaries of the law.

[–] doofer_name@feddit.de 16 points 1 year ago
[–] soloner@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Hahaha thanks for this. I really find it fascinating how bad CEOs make lemmy think all companies are bad. It makes no sense.

Blame the system maybe, I get that. But good grief we are all trying to make a living. The only way to do it is to do business. Like any system, it will be exploited, but I'm not gonna shit on private companies especially who clearly have a vision and don't need investor snobs to drive them to commit evil.

[–] RQG@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago

I meant it the other way around. No matter how benevolent a dictatorship is, eventually the dictator will change and you better hope there will be another benevolent one.

I personally don't think the problem is doing business. I think the problem is businesses not being democratic.

[–] Franzia@lemmy.blahaj.zone -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thats funny because shareholders are deeply involved in Valve, and those shareholders frequently decide which products get investment and which don't.

[–] psivchaz@reddthat.com 3 points 1 year ago

Which stockholders? Valve does have some, but it doesn't appear that they are published and are probably mostly employees since it's not publicly traded. Maybe you're saying that like game publisher stockholders from EA and such are involved in decision making at Valve? That seems plausible but it doesn't seem like they'd have a ton of power over operations, more just some negotiating power.

[–] mojo@lemm.ee -3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's not their own opinion, they're just repeating what they learned online. There's multiple valve devs being "exploited" for $250k a year, it's really tragic. They even exploit their worker by having college classes on the top of their building for their employees.