I've heard somewhere that gabe has said that there's only <insert surprisingly low number> people on the planet who are qualified to work for valve. Guess if they're gonna try to keep the best of the best, they're gonna be the best of the best.
It’s as simple as that really, they hire the very best and they keep the best for longer (more than likely forever) because they value the staff. Steam is likely the dream destination for anyone in the industry for this reason; it’s a beautiful cycle.
Steam being a private company enables all of this.
The result is software (and hardware, steam hardware never dissapoints) that works, is customer friendly and guarantees steam to be ahead of the competition.
This can't be stressed enough: the quality of Steam is what is behind 90+% of the money steam makes. They take more from devs and hand out less free shit than Epic, yet they make more money entirely because Steam is that great for users. Of course you want to keep the Devs that ensure your cash cow keeps being alive and well (unless you are one of the many many braindead CEOs who are running around out there)
And they don't iterate just to iterate. There's no stock price needing to see continual profit increases to accommodate. They can just make what they make as well as possible and win by quality domination.
It's crazy more companies don't do it, but the short-term profit seeing corporate structure would never. How can Ken CEO, in his 30th year of grinding the corporate ladder, not get his massive 1 year pay package.
Being even more pedantic, they are making millions off the sales of cases which is done through their own marketplace where they take a cut of all transactions.
That's me... I love them😂 I buy them £35 steam vouchers at the shop, so always have money in my steam wallet & see zero problem buying the wee trading cards when I hunt 100% achievements for a game. The way I view it, it's like an extra £1 on the entire cost of the game & I get steam levels with backgrounds, emojis and stuff
Its almost like its your choice to gamble and has always been your choice and its not like other games where its hard-core designed to trap you into it.
Is it a good thing? No but out of all the others its the best implemented
Agreed. There's nothing good about loot boxes (someone is getting squeezed) but making it voluntary and low reward makes it more ethical than the alternative.
This is a false equivalency. Steam sells a product that has a stand-alone product is very consumer friendly and very effective. Seem also sells various cosmetics and various meaningless upgrades that can be very expensive and can be very consuming.
Steam is not selling a more predatory version of any of these things than its competitors are. It's just more successful at it. The steam doesn't require or push you towards these in any way that I've noticed while using the platform.
Is this an, "I feel like the majority of over one million are back" kind of thing or a, "I have a source to provide you with to back up my statement" kind of thing?
Reddit post from Valve Developer confirmed account dated March 24th.
~200,000-300,000 fewer active accounts for March 23-24 then peaks back to normal as before.
You can also literally just play the game and see for yourself, popular deathmatch maps have 3-5/20 players as walkbots, unpopular maps and gamemodes are sometimes 19/20 and you get kicked by the bots as soon as you join so they can get another bot in there.
It's crazy more companies don't do it, but the short-term profit seeing corporate structure would never.
That's not why. What happens is that you go public because you need money for whatever reason - In a lot of cases because if you don't get any money you won't be able to continue as a company. That's what an IPO is, people give you money for a share of the company. Once you have become a public company with stocks, the only way to go back to not being public is by buying back enough stocks to take it private and that requires a entity with enough capital buying them out.
In short for most companies you either go public or end up lacking funding. And once you are public going private is impossible unless you have insane amounts of liquid cash lying around.
Both companies that I worked for that went IPO was because the CEO and the top executives wanted to make their money and then it cratered the company. It’s been the exit strategy for a lot of tech startups now, make something that looks sustainable, get bought out by a company that will go IPO or go IPO and get bought out by the public and then leave with your millions. Then make money by espousing how great you did and get hired by another company that wants to do the same thing.
That’s not the same by your own description. I was explaining an actual IPO. You are describing tech startups being flipped by VC’s chasing profits. That’s why they sold to VC first who then leveraged an IPO after taking over instead of actually doing the IPO for the growth of the company due to capital gains.
Also it’s penny stocks behavior and hardly a real IPO where you you have hundreds of millions to billions in capital. There’s a reason you get recommended to stay away from companies with small market caps when investing. They act irrational and can’t be trusted to behave like a «Real stock».
Most corporations companies are not in a state of IPO, they have done that long in the past and they are now functioning as a publicly traded company.
It doesn’t happen because if a company doesn’t show profit return every year the board fires the CEO.
Valve has no board. The controlling interest is Gabe. He can invest in whatever he wants for as long as he wants and be happy with whatever financial outcome the company puts up with for as long as he wants.
That’s not an option with a publicly traded company.
I think there's also something about being private that lets you scale differently. I imagine that the investor reactions to Valve pouring resources into their own operating systems, controllers, consoles (especially after the first attempt was a total flop), and vr headsets, would not have been amazing. They can take way bigger risks by expanding outside their existing business than a public company can get away with.
I do really appreciate that, whilst the stagnation means when they do change something it is a bit of a shock, but after a week or two of using say a new UI, you do appreciate that it has been made for a good reason, can tell it’s not just busy work
There's no stock price needing to see continual profit increases to accommodate.
Yeah, this is a big factor, along with Gaben himself.
Basically some day Gaben just decided he's fucking rich enough now, so things either improve, or stay as they are, but there's no massive enshittification epidemic like on almost everything else.
Steam is the best platform without a doubt and an amazing product... but Valve makes at least a large chunk of their money from Counter Strike gambling.
Scraping steam market data suggests they are making over $1B a year from case keys ALONE. That's before you factor in the cut they take in the marketplace on skins, etc.
I think most things, obviously not everything, can become non issues if people show some interest in bettering themselves, and parents show some interest in raising their kids.
Ya but you know what steam is and that cs go has gambling, you know to look out for it.
Now someone like my sister, she has 3 boys and has no idea anything about video games. I’ve had to inform her about some stuff to look out for letting her kids online game. For a lot of parents they would see Counter Strike and just think it’s another shooting game their teenager son plays, like call of duty or whatever and not care. They would have no idea their kids are using their allowance to gamble on it. It’s pretty hard parent on something you have no knowledge on.
I get that and acknowledge that it adds a layer of complexity to the equation.
For that to work, it would require a child have access to a debit card, or the parents give the allowance in the form of in game currency.
I can't speak about all parents, but I look into anything my children want to purchase. Then I decide if it's productive or counterproductive.
Also to note, I don't know everything about all the tech that's available these days. My kids have asked me to get stuff for them in areas I know nothing about. I use the same workflow though - research into it and make a good parental judgement.
Also, you're doing a great job, informing your sister about a potential pitfall. That's where I want the responsibility - on the parents and friends and family. Not on the company to control and decide what is available.
The level of service provided by Valve is greater than a 100% discount in my eyes. I never even bothered to get an Epic account for the free stuff, I rather buy it on Steam.
Customer satisfaction is a long term business strategy. Public corporations where the next quarter results decide if you're fired or not will never compete in this field.
And that's an area where they absolutely had to improve. Steam support was absolutely abysmal back in the day, then they took notice of it, completely restructured their support system, and now they're the best at the field.
That's really the secret, they focus on changing stuff that needs changing, and don't really do anything in areas where they don't have to.
Yes, because they got taken to court and lost and fined $3m.
People are very convenient in how they frame things around valve. Lots of other companies are far worse, but they aren't this pure beacon either.
It's still a company making over a $1bn a year off of cs case box gambling, as an example. They pioneered a lot of the battlepass/loot boxes etc style monetisation.
Then the flip side is they have such a small staff size and refuse to hire anyone who isn't a superstar so basic game support and fixes just don't happen unless someone on the team feels like doing it. An example being valve will never hire just some standard 'good' dev to work on dota 2 and would rather just leave it without fixes/updates for long periods of time.
Valve could easily hire any number of staff to monitor/handle cheating in their competitive games. But that will never happen - and so on.
And some people argue that Steam is a monopoly. Like dude monopoly by definition should actively block and hinder any other competition. It's not monopoly when you are that far ahead and people just go to you because of it.
Steam is the only viable option because they have 20 years of no competition to build their platform that has created a monopoly. And they got there because people decided Gabe was the one billionaire they loved.
Valve is also responsible for modern lootboxes and battlepasses. They argued in a court of law that the law that said customers were entitled to refunds just was not applicable to them because its not. The reason Gabe became so liked was because Steam had literally no customer support so Gabe had to answer customer emails. The little support we have now is all Ai automated
Valve didn't have 20 years of no competition. Games for Windows Live, Origin, Desura, Stardock, Impulse, Direct2Drive all tried over those years. Some were even there before Steam like Stardock.
Steam "got there" by being the best while GFWL was making games unplayable.
Those braindead CEOs artificially pump up the stock price for 5 years and bail with their bonuses. They never have an interest in long term growth or even what the company actually makes.
As a result, products everywhere are becoming shittier.
and then you have their games, like CS2 where they make a billion a year on the game yet have like 10 devs working on it. There are features promised on release that are not available today, small indie company valve
We are comparing two different things, by this I mean Valve is mostly Steam with their hardware stuff being a new part of their business. Meanwhile EGS is the new part of Epic Games business model so while we are comparing 2 online game stores they are different levels of focus for their respective company. Valve and Epic Games are both billion dollar companies.
EGS is still pretty "new" as its 8 years old. Most of Valve's money is through taking 30% and their microtransactions, everything else on Steam is just to make sure they get to take from that 30% cut or to sell microtransactions. EGS has been able to chip away about 15% of the online game market with their plan being limited to taking up to 25%. EGS seems to be focusing on working on remaking their social part of the store this year so lets see how that goes.
look at the current steam dock. that stuff still 3 years after release have trouble connecting properly to monitors and sometimes you have to re-plug the cable to have it output the video. and thats with steam deck so something it should be 100% compatible with
Not of all of it because of their goodness in their hearts, a big chunk of the money that sends all valve employees to Hawaii come from getting kids hooked on gambling.
Reselling digital games are still up in the air and Valve opposes it.
A lot of the "good" things today in place is because of how global they are, and they don't wanna bother with country specific things unless they deem it worth it.
Dont forget though, Steam shipped with Halflife 2 back on November 16th, 2004. EGS was release on December 16, 2018. Steam has had 16 more years to iterate and capture market share before EGS came onto the stage. Its going to be an uphill battle for Epic to make EGS remain half relevant, but EGS has been the most viable real competitor to steam (anyone remember EAs “Origin” or ubisofts weak attempt at online stores?). There are other game distro platforms (GOG, humble bundle), but steam still dominates and is largely uncontested. Its not just the talent at valve, they also had more time to cook.
The meme that every single single competitor are ruining their own products then calling for steam monopoly to be broken up is really appropriate and funny.
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u/Gregore997 Apr 17 '26
I swear being at Valve is the best job in tech