What will happen to the Steam Deck? Will they discontinue it and support for existing units, or replace the OS with Windows (causing degraded performance and exposing their users to Microsoft adtech enshittification)? The Steam Deck is a star product of theirs, which hopefully will count for something.
It’s important to remember though that the steam deck itself is not the end goal for them. It’s part of building a larger Linux gaming ecosystem and solidifying their hard-core followers. Last I checked it it only sold 2 or 3 million. That’s impressive, but if you’re thinking about it as a competitor to say, the switch (which you see it compared to all the time) it’s clearly not a massive money maker. So it’s not hard to imagine a short term thinking leadership ending it.
An Omdia report from April 2023 claims Valve sold 1.62 million units of the Steam Deck in 2022, which was expected to grow by 14 percent to 1.85 million units in 2023. If we assume the 14% growth continues, and those numbers are accurate, then Valve is closing in on 4½ million units sold.
Again that’s great and I want it to continue. Love my deck. But it’s not exactly selling like hot cakes
Ad Deck
For sure, valid to fear the enshittification of steam. But they aren’t killing proton. Maybe ignoring proton at worst. But Steam has profit motivations for not being reliant on Windows, which has actively been trying to supplant them with the Windows Store for years.
As another separate, profit-motivated company, with a gaming division and a lot to gain from eating Steam’s lunch, Microsoft is not Steam’s friend. Proton is a critical bargaining tool for them, and not having to include windows licenses for devices like the Steam Deck helps their costs too.
My fear is them going public or selling. If that happens, it’ll probably be Microsoft willing to spend any amount, and the government hasn’t really been in a “preventing monopolies” mood for a while now.
You can take away peoples home, food, and rights… Just don’t you dare touch their entertainment for the plebs might get antsy…
And you can’t take the sky from me.
Bread and circuses. They’re already giving us scraps.
Wish they were serious about Linux support.
Gaben’s last dying wish is to make every game work on Linux and donates $1 billion to making it happen.
gaben is a smart man, i doubt that he isn’t aware of his own mortality, and presumably has someone who he trusts, that he will appoint the position.
It would be beautiful if he just handed the keys over to a true believer when it’s time. Just a quality, stand up person who already has a pocket full of cash and just wants to help gamers get games and indie devs distribute them without squeezing every drop of profit they can at every step.
edit: it’d be even beautifuler if he turned it over to a trust managed by a panel of elected employee representatives
Can’t Gabe do what John Bogle did with Vanguard and transfer ownership to the employees and clients?
Valve is a whole company of people like Gaben.
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Yeah the scenario we’re being asked to consider is what if someone else gets control of the company, so whatever power employees nominally have now, they won’t if he dies without deeding the company to a collective.
Realistically, it’s only a matter of time until Steam becomes as enshittificated as any other services. There is profit to be made from Steam selling advertising space and customer data. They can either choose to capitalize on the profits that are in front of them, or allow another company to and take that capital from them. For a business it’s not a matter of what’s right and wrong anymore but consume or be consumed. If Steam isn’t willing to do that someone else will be willing to play the long game and do it. Then it’ll be only a matter of time until Steam gets acquired by another company and then it’s game over.
This doesn’t make any sense. The reason Valve hasn’t been acquired is because it’s privately owned and not up for sale, not because it doesn’t have “enough profit”. In fact it’s extremely profitable, for all we know.
Sure, another company could come along and build a competitor. It’s happened already multiple times, and Steam is doing just fine despite some major titles these days being exclusive to other platforms. Unless Steam major drops the ball on something, it’s unlikely that people will move to another platform en masse, especially one that is less focussed on consumer interests. No-one can just come in and “take capital away” from Steam, whatever that means, by building a competitor that sells advertising space and “monetizes user data” — they need users first.
… And then there’s the fact that Steam is already “selling advertiser space” today. Games don’t just get featured on their storefront because Gabe likes them. They make deals with publishers for this.
I don’t have the article on hand, but there is a publication from a steam store employee explaining exactly how to get your game onto the front page. The gist of it is that you don’t have to pay Valve. It’s about community engagement (your publisher, I guess).
I’ve read that, IIRC. It was about getting featured organically though. Steam runs promotions for certain game series or even publisher catalogues frequently, with large custom graphics and usually a sale. Obviously I have no way to know for sure, but I can’t imagine that Valve doesn’t get itself paid for those.
The idea is less that someone makes a competitor and then they actually compete. The idea is that a competitor service is able to lock away one or several big titles, like, say, overwatch, league, fortnite, or whatever else, behind exterior launchers that are maybe more free to do data harvesting. Then, that competitor theoretically eats away more and more of the largest market share, and tries to drive those users from just using their platform for a single game, to maybe using multiple games, maybe with something like a games pass or with free weekend deals or whatever. Once they have that market share, they can give developers better margins, since they’ll be selling customer data at a profit and steam won’t be, maybe with some sort of exclusivity contract baked in, purposely undercutting steam. Then, steam’s been put on the back foot, and the rest is just kind of what has happened to streaming services.
It’s a market, markets trend towards short term gains strategies over long term gains strategies because having faster short term gains means you can more easily crush your competition. It’s like age of empires 2, the first couple minutes of the game is the part that matters the most. That being said, steam has been around for quite some time, and has a good amount of brand loyalty and goodwill built up, and that doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon as they keep one-upping their competition with actual improvements to their platform, like family sharing, screencasting, big picture mode, increased controller support and reassigning, and a full standalone version of linux, that basically all their competitors seem incapable of. So maybe steam has enough of a headstart that, even with a long term gains strategy, even with a, basically, non-evil mentality, they can stay afloat. Who can say.
You’re of course right with the exclusivity argument — that’s a very real possibility, and yet Microsoft has tried it with Call of Duty, one of the most popular franchises ever, and saw very little success with it, resulting in them putting it back on Steam years later. If I were to guess why attempts like this have failed in the past, I would say that Steam is so dominant over the PC gaming market today that not even large franchises going exclusive attract enough of a user base to offset the loss of customers that aren’t buying games only because they’re not on Steam. Add to this the additional overhead of developing and maintaining a competing store front, and the cost-benefit analysis leans clearly towards just being on Steam and accepting their cut of sales. The exclusivity tactic clearly failed even for big titles like CoD, so it definitely won’t work for smaller ones. And we’re not even talking about cutting into the indie game market, which would require making very attractive exclusivity offers to many smaller studios, all for acquiring exclusivity on titles in the hope that they’ll be the next big hit — a very high risk strategy that likely results in a lot of sunken cost short-term.
Once they have that market share, they can give developers better margins, since they’ll be selling customer data at a profit
When we talk about “selling customer data”, I think we need to look in more detail into what this would actually mean in practice. It’s very unlikely that any online storefront could legally literally “sell your personal data” like address etc. that you would enter presumably as part of the payment process to third parties. That’s just illegal almost everywhere in the world, and certainly in the largest PC gaming markets. It wouldn’t lead to significant revenue either, because raw data like that just isn’t very valuable. Instead, I suppose what people mean when they say this (in the context of companies like Google or Facebook) is just the practice of selling advertising services that use the data they have on people to advertisers, who can then target their ads at highly specific segments, improving their return on ad spend. The actual private data though stays with the entity that collected it — because it’s what actually gives them the edge on the market; it allows them to offer better ad targeting than competitors.
How would this apply to Steam or a potential competing storefront? Barely. I assume no-one is arguing that a steam competitor could launch a generic advertising network that could stand against Google or Facebook, so we’re probably talking about advertising within the storefront itself. Steam today already collects information on your interests and customizes the store based on that, plus presumably your location, age group etc. — so they’re pretty much already using your “personal information” to the extent possible in this context. How else could a competitor realistically monetize personal information?
It’s a market, markets trend towards short term gains strategies over long term gains strategies because having faster short term gains means you can more easily crush your competition.
I wouldn’t say that this is the case when we’re talking about trying to eat into the market share of a dominant entity like Steam. Sure, potential competitors can make short-term plays that cut away some market share, but such strategies are expensive, risky, and alone likely don’t lead towards a significantly improved position long-term (exhibit A, again: COD being exclusive to Battle.net).
For better or worse (usually worse), toppling a near-monopoly like Steam is extremely hard for players with big cash, and practically impossible for independent competitors. This is especially true for products that are inherently sticky, like Steam, where people have curated large libraries over decades. The only reason Steam’s dominant position is not hurting the consumer is because their product works well and is in many ways very pro-consumer.
I’d drop Steam if that happened. There are other ways to get games and managers like Lutris make organizing them easy. I’m sure Valve knows this and with how long they’ve been successful, fucking with gamers would not make sense. Look how it’s working or for some of the bigger gaming companies recently.
Speaking in inevitability isn’t very realistic regardless of the outcome as inevitably the solar system will collapse and steam will surely be out of business then, right?
What we do know is that steam is exceptionally profitable, at least according to their own internal metrics, at nearly 800k per employee. So they have no need to pump more, except “because more” but all we can do is consider that they haven’t yet and hope it continues.
I personally think Steam’s timeline to replacement is 100% based on how long they can maintain a positive relationship with their audience. I don’t disagree that a replacement will come, but we have seen other publishers spin up stores and largely fail because of shitty patterns so for now we are back to the “wait and see”. Their replacement will be the result of their own failures to meet and maintain a very vocal customer base
Also, the big tech bastards haven’t managed to kill off emulation, so that’s encouraging.
Do you know everybody who works there and what their ambitions are?
Also, nothing is impossible when you can deploy thepower of acquisition lol i’m less worried about them internally polluting themselves and more about externally being destroyed. We’ve seen this over and over again.
50% of the company belongs to Gaben himself, presumably he would pass it on to some very trusted. That makes a hostile takeover pretty unlikely.
I really hope he is secretly investing in cloning so we can get Gaben (2) joining Valve soon. Or atleast invest some money in uploading his consciousness into a giant metal head 🗿
We’ll never have a gaben (3) 😭
We will if he’s not around to stop us
He could just turn it into a nonprofit at some point with some specific rules in place about how certain things are handled within the company.
I would hope he does something like the patagonia guy did.
Valve is a unique company with no traditional hierarchy. In business school, I read a very interesting Harvard Business Review article on the subject. Unfortunately it’s locked behind a paywall, but this is Google AI’s summary of the article which I confirm to be true from what I remember:
According to a Harvard Business Review article from 2013, Valve, the gaming company that created Half Life and Portal, has a unique organizational structure that includes a flat management system called “Flatland”. This structure eliminates traditional hierarchies and bosses, allowing employees to choose their own projects and have autonomy. Other features of Valve’s structure include:
- Self-allocated time: Employees have complete control over how they allocate their time
- No managers: There is no managerial oversight
- Fluid structure: Desks have wheels so employees can easily move between teams, or “cabals”
- Peer-based performance reviews: Employees evaluate each other’s performance and stack rank them
- Hiring: Valve has a unique hiring process that supports recruiting people with a variety of skills
This, and as long as the company is legally structured to prevent restructuring things will be fine.
A little unsure about the “peer based performance review”, sounds like bullying might somehow have to be kept in check. Otherwise this sounds awesome.
Fun fact: Former employees of Valve have said that is actually a huge problem in the organization and that its organizational structure seems to encourage bullying and high-school style “cliquishness” by design.
I mean it’s not as though that’s not a problem in normal companies. It’s just that normal companies can sort of use the guise of structure or professionalism to harangue whatever employees the clique ends up disliking. The cliques are baked in, in a normal company.
Exactly, in a normal structure the bullied employee would just be told they don’t fit the culture.
It can be a problem at other companies, but even worse than average at Valve by virtue of corporate structure. Both of these things can be true.
Lots of companies have peer based employee reviews, cliques have the capability to cause harm in these firms but normally the peers reviewing you are rotated each review period to minimalise that and any bad actors can normally seen by management’s review of the peer reviews.
But then remove the management oversight
Kinda sounds like a worker cooperative tbh, but with Gabe still technically being the owner.
Him being a pretty smart guy overall surely has at least some sort of continuity planned.
It would be best to convert it to full employee ownership if it isn’t yet. As long as a steady stream of good employees keeps revolving in it should be a stable company that provides for its employees and customers.
PeopleMakeGames has a two part series on Valve that’s pretty interesting. The second part (here) dives into the structure of the company. It does have a bit of an angle, fwiw, so if you’d prefer something more objective, it might not be a great watch.
Stack ranking is toxic and removes individuality from a given employees expectations in my opinion.
People should be qualified to give proper unbiased reviews. Just because someone is an excellent engineer does not mean they are good at understanding other people’s expectations and work outputs.
I worked at a company that had no ‘managers’ just the owner, and everyone else. I hated that I had no real way to settle disputes and every single disagreement has to ultimately be resolved by the literal one person who was in charge.
I think there is merit to flat structures, but I don’t think the extreme is always the way to go.
How does more boring tasks like accounting, legal or facilities work?
They just get ignored, like TF2.
Proton is open source. Anyone can pull it together and integrate it. Gog have been doing DRM free games for a while, they’ll be quite keen to fill this niche. Epic probably won’t care. If none do, someone will want to.
What are you smoking? GOG Galaxy doesn’t even have a Linux client. In fact it has been one of the most requested features for years and nothing has happened.
Edit: it’s also the reason I stopped buying from them when I got my Steam Deck.
They do provide Linux support in other ways though. They even troubleshoot me once with a game I tried to play on Linux and offered a refund.
Gog Galaxy not on Linux is a shame, yes, but its DRM-Free and Linux installers are enough for me to continue to buy from them.
Edit: Heroic Launcher makes a great replacement of Gog Galaxy, maybe even better to the Windows client, from what I’d tried. No multiplayer though.
So you’re saying if Valve enshittified, they wouldn’t fork and try to capitilise on that market?
They probably do not see the point right now as Valve have it sewn up. Lemmy grew when Reddit scored own goals. When Valve do, opportunities are there and would be taken.
Valve is a private company whereas GOG belongs to CDProject - a publicly traded company. GOG might want to fill the void but they’re more likely to do dumb, shortsighted decisions in contrast to Valve.
Maybe, but DRM free content isn’t exactly shareholder value…
It’s better shepherded than Epic. They probably don’t fill the space because Steam do it better, but you invest more if the return is higher.
The case I’m referring to is in the future if Steam badly enshittified.
Gog have been doing DRM free games for a while
As far as I know GOG also sells drm content and Steam also sells drm-free content. So what’s the point
they’ll be quite keen to fill this niche
I also don’t remember them doing anything for Linux apart from releasing a broken port then badmouthing people who complained that the game they bought is broken.
Isint Steam a form of DRM? You effectively cant play your games if you dont have an account I thought
No, you can for the games that don’t have drm, just launch the executable. Steam itself doesn’t require any drm. Even the games that use Steam services can be drm-free. Here’s the list of some drm-free Steam games
I kind of hope gaben has set up something smart for his death. Eg Valve is owned by a trust.
I think anon has it 100% correct. The instant Gabe is out of the picture, I expect to hear talk about how “you don’t understand, we have to fuck out users, won’t someone please think of the IPO?!”
Who’d have thought not actually owning the games you purchase was a bad idea?
Even if you buy them on gog you don’t own them. Download and keep - sure, but you could do that with many games on steam too (also you could download torrent versions which wouldn’t be different from buying on gog). The point is about actually keeping these copies alive, properly updated and working, for which these services exist.
So, I think owning a disc is also risky, that means your copy can degrade. Owning games in this context have lost its meaning for me.
When you own the game you have the choice whether to back up the game and whether to keep a computer that can run it.
I think there are important considerations to keep in mind.
First and foremost, Valve is not a public company. I don’t know if it has investors, but it is not driven by profits like many typical public companies are. These companies tend to allow themselves longer investments without any clear visibility of immediate profits. They also do things for the greater good, even though it does not bring profits.
But also, I think the whole of valve is a set of gamers and people who genuinely care about the gaming business and making great products. I think they all share Gabe’s values and goals. It’s not like Gabe is the only one holding everything together or else it would instantly crash into the profit driven company it could be.
Both of these scenarios keep me hopeful that this is a longer lasting stance and doesn’t hinge on just one person. It’s not a proof it will never be a typical profit company but these are barriers which are not typically present. Let’s hope for the best and keep rewarding them for their contributions to gaming, open source and for their good actions.
More important than who works there is who inherits Gabe’s ownership of the company. A new owner can completely change a company and drive out or fire anyone who doesn’t go along with the new direction. Look at what happened with twitter when Musk took over. Or his inheritors could take Valve public and introduce all the issues with that.
It would be so awesome if they went employee owned. I get the impression the employees are people who are passionate about video games. I feel that they would choose leadership that is both good for the community and good for the long-term health of the company.
I don’t understand where this myth came from that if a company is a public that they aren’t potentially ruthlessly profit driven.
Valve is not special. Gabe is to a certain degree (though I would also caution people from deifying anybody period). We can never take for granted that the valve and steam experience we largely enjoy today will be there tomorrow. That’s a simple fact.
It’s not that they can’t still be profit driven, it’s that they can’t be sued by investors for not being ruthlessly profit driven. Private just means that they have the choice at all
Publicly traded companies are, by law, driven to make as much money as possible for shareholders. Privately held companies are not held to this same limitation. So while a company like Valve could be highly profit-driven (let’s be honest, all for-profit companies in a capitalist system are driven by this motivation), it doesn’t seem to be driven to maximize profits in the short term. This means that they can focus on things other than profit if they so choose.
There is a common belief that corporate directors have a legal duty to maximize corporate profits and “shareholder value” even if this means skirting ethical rules, damaging the environment or harming employees. But this belief is utterly false. To quote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the recent Hobby Lobby case: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.”
– Lynn Stout, professor of corporate and business law, Cornell University
For-profit vs. Non-profit is an entirely different distinction under US law, with specific legal definitions for each. This is entirely separate under US law from publicly traded vs. privately owned, which has separate specific legal definitions.
Valve is a for-profit privately owned company. That is what allows it to not maximize shareholder value, and is the unstated distinction that allows your quote to be true.
For-profit publicly traded companies do have a legal responsibility for such.
In the US, there are multiple Supreme Court precedent cases that force profit-maximizing. Shareholders can sue the CEO and board to maximize profit seeking.
So yes, increasing shareholder value is enshrined in US law. Only private corporations can get around that rule. Also, a corporation cannot be forced to break the law to maximize profits, that’s just something most CEO’s are willing to do for fun.
I didn’t say people don’t redline publicly traded companies. I’m saying not being public doesn’t mean leadership won’t. I’ve personally seen it plenty of times.
Also, “fiduciary duty” (the “Supreme Court cases” I’m assuming you’re vaguely referring to) does not mean a CEO needs to always slam the gas at all times to maximize every single red cent at the cost of all medium and longterm considerations. This is a commonly parroted assertion by people online without a basis. “Fiduciary duty” and other obligations to the shareholders simply mean they can’t make obviously bad decisions that will hurt the shareholders. They do t get bailed off by the Investor Police if they make a single longterm decision at the expense of a little short term profit.
All of this isn’t to say we don’t see it happen all the time anyway. But if it was so strict we’d see more CEO’s hauled off, not golden parachutes everywhere as they break their companies apart.
I think your original comment has a typo on “isn’t”, hence the confusion.
if a company is a public that they aren’t potentially ruthlessly profit driven.
Sucks being old.
Is it just prejudice? Stereotype? Laziness?
You see this happen to everything. It all gets enshittified. These corps that started out for the end user all end up selling out for profits.
It’s not a secret, not a revelation, nothing new.
I don’t know why Gabe Newell would die before 75
Cryogenic suicide to preserve his brain for a robotic body?
It’s inevitable.
But if steam becomes enshittified I’ll move onto something else and use torrent sites to download the older games I care about that I’ve bought on steam. It wouldn’t really be pirating them, since I’ve bought them already.
For now steam is fine, and I appreciate the work they’ve done on supporting Linux, so I’ll keep on using it to buy games.
I think Gabe has been getting healthy lately. Last picture I saw of him he was looking like he lost a lot of weight. Maybe repost this in 10 years and then we can panic.
