Valve is a whole company of people like Gaben.
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
Kinda sounds like how worker cooperatives work tbh, but with Gabe still technically being the owner.
I remember reading a news piece a while back about how the founder of a food company made sure to transfer ownership to the employees before leaving. While we’re talking about worst-case scenarios, let’s also hope for the best and hope that Gabe has a similar plan.
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. Personally I think the issues they bring up are valid, but figured I’d mention it.
A little unsure about the “peer based performance review”, sounds like bullying might somehow have to be kept in check. Otherwise this sounds awesome.
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
I don’t believe Valves claim of perfectly flat structure, Gabe is the owner, he if no one else is management and has the power. I’m willing to bet there’s a second level of reviewers for peers, if nothing else then it’s a second separate set of peers reviewing the first set’s reviews to watch for this problem.
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.
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.
This, and as long as the company is legally structured to prevent restructuring things will be fine.
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.
Apparently 50%+ of the company belongs to Gabe 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
I would hope he does something like the patagonia guy did.
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.
He could presumably just spilt his shares equally between all employees
Doesn’t really matter if none of those people have authority on the direction of the company, which they don’t.
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.
Also, the big tech bastards haven’t managed to kill off emulation, so that’s encouraging.
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 drops the ball on something big time, 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.
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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.
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 than 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
Gabe is helping, sure, but he isn’t holding up gaming. People were gaming on Linux before Proton even existed, myself included. Also, even if Valve went away completely, Proton is open-source and there are people like GloriousEggroll who work on Proton entirely as a community member. Proton will live on, specifically because it is open-source. All the progress made on Proton won’t suddenly disappear, all the games that were previously playable on Proton will still be playable on Proton.
It’s a somewhat reasonable fear but it’s not a realistic fear. Proton isn’t going anywhere.
Proton will live on, specifically because it is open-source.
Don’t just thank open source; thank copyleft for the fact that Valve couldn’t make a closed-source fork of it even if it wanted to.
Even if they want to open-source it, an issue is the amount of work of organizing the repository, making sure it’s properly organized and doesn’t have any files they don’t want to distribute, and then maintaining that with future versions.
What? Proton (i.e., WINE) has been LGPL Free Software since before Valve even touched it.
Sorry, what I mean is, if Valve wasn’t forced to keep it opensource, I think a big factor against would be the extra work
Additionally, if Steam would start to morph into what is posted here, it would simply be integrated into Heroic and / or lutris just as Epic is right now. There would be no need to actually launch steam anymore but just use it as a background service to pipe your games into something else.
Obviously his death will trigger a worldwide AR Easter egg hunt, where the Steam user worthy enough to find the three keys first will become the new Gaben and Master Of Steam.
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.
GOG.
We need to support GOG and it’s model as much as possible.<3
If only they would support Linux more.
Lutris > gog as source > set proton as a runner (or wine, or whatever else if specific games require it, like FFXIV)
GOG lazy asses never developed Galaxy because Linux nerds were going to do this anyways
I tried this for a while and it was incredibly janky. Heroic launcher is a night and day difference.
The ship has sailed about 4 times now, gog galaxy on Linux has constantly been at the top of requests but we made a stinky about the Witcher 2 so gog and epic will forever hold the community as not worth it. Now the community has done the leg work they have no reason to mess about with translating all those .net calls
They barely “support” Windows, they aren’t rally a software dev company, they are just sell you the actual game (unlike Valve etc).
And that is precious, the world needs companies that help restore some equality on the market.
And also what Nothing said.
they aren’t rally a software dev company
CD Projekt is very much a software dev. I’m not sure why you would think they are not.
Well, they’re a game developer. And they own GOG. GOG as a subsidiary is a digital distributor of prepackaged digital content. Developing a system that allows people to find a digital item, pay for it, and then download it, is hilariously, vastly different than developing a compatibility layer for games developed for one operating system to run on another. Like…the former is straight up just basic web development. The latter is hardcore systems programming. They are worlds apart.
1Yes, exactly. Two different things.
And both great at what they do.One can’t just equate devs.
Its like grandma wanting me to fix her computer because I ‘also have a computer at work’.
I used to support them but when they opened the floodgates to trash games I didn’t get much reason to stick around. I miss and crave curation over volume. If both stores have heaps of garbage and steam has far better Linux support with valve actively contributing to and improving the Linux ecosystem… I’m going steam most of the time now.
Sad as in theory I would support gog more but it seems like they’ve discarded what made them special.
Could you expand on that pls?
Im wondering how does the excess amount of games offered by a store affect your experience. How would you even notice that?
And - that they were a more closed store was what made them special?
Then I think of GOG I think about licencing, how I actually own a game purchased, how I have a key for it, how I’ll still own that game even of GOG stops existing. Thats not true for any of the other stores (outside of physical copies if some sell them, idk).
I notice it because the signal drowns out the noise. It’s so hard to browse or find interesting new games made by passionate devs because so much low-effort barely-games and hentai visual novels flood it all out.
I’m all for adult sex games but jfc it’s just sad how awful and unending their presence is.
Oh … I never randomly browsed game stores for new games to try.
Whenever you are afraid of the negative impact on your life of a corporation’s possible failure, it means that you have become reliant on someone you can’t trust. You must act accordingly.
Reject modernity, move to the woods, return to monke.
Probably not a popular view here but I’ve found my hobbies more fulfilling since I started doing stuff other than gaming. Native plant/food gardening, reading books, working out… all of this stuff can be affected by capitalism too of course but I’m less beholden to it. I still game a bit now and then but much less than I used to.
Even when steam is gone, we’ll still have movies, books and music.
Because of the analogue hole we can capture these and store these as long as unlicensed hard drive possession is allowed.
Of course there are non-culture based activities but I think we shouldn’t tolerate regression from big tech and take steps to prevent them just out of shear principle.
These facilitator middlemen think they can dictate how to live our lives and I think we should make them regret this position severely.
Does this mean I should buy games from GOG? Or support physical media/indies?
Yes. GOG. itch.io. Direct from some other website. That’s right.
Steam is very good; but the hidden cost is that you depend on them maintaining their service. If they turn evil, you’re screwed. You either have to bend to their will, or you lose your library of games.
On the other hand, GOG and itch.io are arguably not as good as Steam right now, but they don’t have any kind of lock-in. So if they start to backslide, you can still walk away with your full library of games. I do think it’s a good idea to ‘not put all your eggs in one basket.’
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.
Yeah I do have a similar fear. Valve is something special. I tried to hate them, they’re filthy-rich corpos after all, but I can’t. Something of value will be lost when Valve finally succumbs to enshittification, which cannot be said of a lot of other big companies.
But my fear isn’t necessarily about Steam. I have like 20-30 games in my library. Steam is simply the least shit way to play games you have/want to pay for.
I love valve, I have 1000+ games in my library. I also have every crack for every game I could fine. For the rest, I have live virtual machine snapshot of the running game. Of course anythibg live service will not work without a server simulator. To do that we need to, for each games, using wireshark, record all server and peer traffic while also saving all privaye encryptions keys used in the session.
Once games start using TPM processor, they will become uncrackable. Make sure to use a compromised TPM in that case.
If you don’t expect enshitification these days you are dumb. Very rational fear
What many posters in this thread fail to realize is that there is a very good reason why steam hasn’t been hit by the enshittification that otherwise permeates human existence in 2024.
Of course, Gaben as their CEO has the last say in it. And he’s just a good guy. But wait, aren’t there other companies that have good guys as their CEO and yet the enshittification persists?
The profound reason is that Valve is not a publicly traded company. They have no obligation to any investors to make number go up. They are a private company, they can do whatever the fuck they want. If they stay flat and keep paying their employees, that’s totally fine, and there is 0 pressure on them to change anything. THAT‘s why Valve seems like such a different company compared to everything else that’s out there.
Of course it’s still a choice to go public or not, and they have made the right call (for us consumers).
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.
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.
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 don’t get hauled 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.
So yes, increasing shareholder value is enshrined in US law. Only private corporations can get around that rule.
This is true, with one exception.
There are non-profit corporations. They have to declare that they are non-profit at the time of foundation, though. They have to write that in the statute (idk what it’s called in English, it’s “Satzung” in German).
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.
I don’t want to quote dump multiple paragraphs, but Stout explicitly explains that’s not correct in the following paragraphs, citing relevant case law where appropriate.
I’m not a lawyer, but that article reads pretty clearly to me; I’d be interested to hear if you read it and get a different interpretation.
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 think this post massively overestimates the power a CEO has. The CEO is beholden to the shareholders. Valve is private,
soand its shareholders are its workers. It would be useful to know how many shares Gaben has of valve, but I still don’t think the next CEO would suddenly also be the majority owner.Also, I know things have changed a lot in the last 12 years, but 12 years ago regarding the total dissolution of Valve, Gaben said:
“It’s way more likely we would head in that direction than say, ‘Let’s find some giant company that wants to cash us out and wait two or three years to have our employment agreements terminate."
Also, forcing users onto windows is THE way to kill valve’s profits. The whole point of the Linux push was a direct response to the windows store, and msft’s threat of forcing valve to give them a cut of purchase through steam. Msft will still do that the first chance it gets. So even the most profit-minded new leader wouldn’t make that choice, as it’s plainly shortsighted.
Shareholders is the owners and since they are private we don’t know who they are. Right now it could be all Gaben or it could be a mix but Gaben is majority resulting in the culture is what he wants. Private companies don’t have to be maximizing profits focused but will die if they don’t make money. When people die it is whoever inherits or has majority share that pushes what happens.
I had briefly searched to see if it was known how much ownership Gaben had. Did you find it somewhere, or are you just assuming he’s majority?
I do know the employees are compensated in shares of the company, but you’re right that I don’t know what proportion is owned by employees.
Below is what I can find it isn’t well sourced but ownership isn’t the same as shares. You can have profits shares without having any ownership stake.
Valve Corporation, the American video game developer and digital distributor company, is a private company with a secretive ownership structure. Gabe Newell, the company’s co-founder and CEO, is the majority shareholder, and his ownership stake is estimated to be over 50%. Other investors include Valve executives and employees, as well as major shareholders such as The Custody Bank of Japan, Ltd. and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation. Wikipedia Valve Corporation - Wikipedia Founders. Gabe Newell. Mike Harrington. Headquarters. Bellevue, Washington. , US. Key people. Gabe Newell (president) Scott Lynch (COO) Products. show. Video games. show. Hardware. show. Software. Total equity. US$10 billion (2019) Owner. Gabe Newell (>50%) Number of employees. ~360 (2016) Subsidiaries. Valve S.a.r.l. Valve GmbH. Campo Santo. ASN. 32590. Website. valvesoftware.com. Valve was founded in 1996 by the former Microsoft employees Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington. Their debut game, the first-person shooter (FPS) Half-Life (1998), was a critical and commercial success and had a lasting influence on the FPS genre. Harrington left in 2000. namria.gov.ph Which company owns Valve May 28, 2024 — Valve is a private company with a secretive ownership structure. Its investors include cofounder Gabe Newell and Valve executives and employees… In 2003, Valve moved to Bellevue, Washington, and reincorporated as Valve Corporation. namria.gov.ph How much of valve does Gabe own - NAMRIA May 24, 2024 — Valve is owned (mostly) owned by it’s CEO, Gabe Newell, one of the founders of the company. The only real connection with Tencent is their . Newell’s ownership stake isn’t disclosed and he’s attributed 50.1% of Valve in this analysis to reflect his control of the company and status as co-founder… NAMRIA Who is the majority shareholder of Valve - NAMRIA May 25, 2024 — Gabe Newell has led Valve Corp., which develops video games, since he cofounded it in 1998 with former Microsoft colleague Mike Harrington… Over the years, the ownership of Valve Corporation and Steam has remained primarily with the founders and major investors. Gabe Newell . Major Shareholders (Top 10) ; The Custody Bank of Japan, Ltd. 2,596, 2.88 ; Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, 2,553, 2.83 ; KITZ Corporation Employee Stock .” Valve ostentatiously makes little use of direct authority. majority shareholder, Gabe Newell) is used At the same time, contextual .
Valve Corporation is an American video game developer and digital distributor company in Bellevue, Washington. It was started in 1996 by Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington, two Microsoft employees in the past. steam.fandom.com Gabe Newell | SteamWiki | Fandom Gabe Newell, known online as Gaben, is the co-founder and majority shareholder of Valve Corporation. He attended Harvard University, but dropped out and worked at Microsoft until 1996, where he and co-worker Mike Harrington left to found Valve. Newell and former Microsoft colleague Mike Harrington founded Valve in 1996. Their first game, Half-Life, was released in 1998 and was a critical and commercial success. Harrington left the company in 2000, and Valve moved to Bellevue, Washington and reincorporated as Valve Corporation in 2003.
Highly recommend putting that in a quote and giving a source rather than copy pasting a wall in plain text. For all I know you just asked ChatGPT and this is what it spat out.
And in this context, just the part about Gabe being majority shareholder would have sufficed.
“Valve is private, so its shareholders are its workers.”
I don’t know who keeps telling you libs this, but they’re lying.
I don’t think that misunderstanding is limited to the libs.
It is because of a limited understanding of companies in the startup phase. At some point, there is enough cash flow to buy labour outright rather than giving up capital on each hire. This allows shareholders to captute all future capital created by future wagies.
Sorry, I forgot about the useful idiot breed of fascist, compared to the “lies as a strategy” breed.
Oh whoops, I thought you were trying to be taken seriously. My bad.
Your boos mean nothing, you don’t even know what a lib is either.
They were so close…
You are most definitely right that the major shareholders aren’t the workers. The major shareholders are Gabe Newell, and some bankers in Japan.
Still, it is known that Valve employees are partially compensated with stock for working in the company, so most of the employees are still shareholders. They just aren’t the major ones.
Sure, but that’s not what makes it a private company.
Ahh I get your point now, sorry I missed it. Yea, if people think that private company = employee shareholders, they are very wrong.
Sorry, the way i phrased that does sound causal. It should say “and”.
Any real lib knows, public or private, there’s no way out of our capitalist downfall.
Employees are stakeholder, not necessarily shareholder. Management, likely. The grunts, I think not so much.
How are you differentiating stakeholder and shareholder? The employees are certainly shareholders.
Valve doesn’t really hire “grunts”. The people who are actually considered employees of valve are very few and highly skilled. The number of Wikipedia from 2016 is very out of date and estimates 360. But valve’s LinkedIn still says “over 300”.
there are common definitions for both terms. the employees aren’t shareholders as long as they don’t own a part of the company, but they are stakeholders since they have something to do with the company. their partners, publishers, etc. are stakeholders too
Yes, I was making sure that was the distinction you were making, because I’m trying to disambiguate for you: the employees of valve are both shareholders and stakeholders.
Also Valve isn’t the charity they believe it is. It’s a de-facto monopoly, and it has serious moderation issues (basically if you bought enough games, they will less likely ban you for hatespeech and such).
Valve isn’t pulling any anticompetitive moves though. They just try to secure profits by being the best instead of destroying everyone else that dares to compete with them.
Beeing not assholes against their own users are basically anticompetitive these days. ;)
Valve isn’t pulling any anticompetitive moves though.
Well, they are allegedly forcing price parity on publishers, so they can’t sell cheaper on their own website or some other storefront that takes smaller cuts. That’s anticompetitive as shit, and they are being sued over it.
That parity thing was debunked 2 years ago when a similar lawsuit against Valve was dismissed, their parity thing is for resold Steam keys, which Valve issues with no profit margin. Milberg London are trolls that tried to do the same lawsuit against Sony and PlayStation last year. Also got nowhere.
They’re not a defacto monopoly? There’s many different ways to buy games online and valve does not have anti-consumer practices like exclusivity deals. I have not heard anything about them not banning for hate speech? Every time I’ve ever reported something its been taken down within 48hrs
…you can load right to library?
Edit: holy crap you can, all these years…
… You can disable that advert window?
I think we’re failing at life bro
That window is the only ad I purposely allow in my life. I know I can disable it but it sometimes informs me of games I want
Yeah I don’t keep track of new releases so scrolling a curated list of them for 10 seconds when I open Steam is actually useful
for some reason that window eats 2gb of ram on my pc.
I actually don’t mind the advertising. Good way to know what games are popping off or are just released. I’m not great about keeping up with everything coming out every month, so it’s honestly one of my number one ways of knowing what’s being talked about/releasing besides specific reccs from friends and forums.
I also find it’s a great way to know that a game I used to play a lot dropped some beefy DLC. It’s not like we all keep tabs on every game we’ve put down thinking that we might return to it.
Steam is so funny.
Buying there instead of pirating is a joy, the ads actually feel like a benefit instead of a punishment, the analytics seem to be aimed at saving me time by highlighting stuff I’ll like instead of gaslighting me into emptying my wallet…
The result is:
I buy lots of games, watch lots of ads — share ads with friends even — go out of my way to give them more analytics data points, and trust their recommendations enough to shell out $2.99 for something on sale after only 10 seconds of research.
Why are other companies not able to follow Steam’s approach?
My guess? MBAs.
Shit you’re right. I just realized that now. I used to sail the high seas too but now I just buy from steam.
Preach
One bonus is that the ad isn’t an auto loading video WHICH I DETEST.
I have tried and failed to find the option to disable this. Does anyone know what it’s called?
So it’s Steam > Interface > startup location to open in library, and then uncheck “notify me about additions, changes, new releases,” etc. to kill the popup.
THANK YOU!
Considering how much money they make with gambling, I think Valve is not as saint-like as people think it is.
They’re far from perfect, I’d be the first person to tell you.
But they’re still light-years ahead of anyone else, because they’re perfectly happy just making tons of money instead of trying to squeeze every last cent out of the storefront at our expense.
They’re getting sued often because they’re greedy sloths suffering the ego trip just like epic did when Fortnite was on the top of the world second only to Minecraft of course.
