I’m actually pretty worried about him dying. Hopefully he has a chosen successor that he’s indoctrinated.
I would rather hope that he legalizes and codifies the “flat” management structure, disallowing any one figure head from taking over and fucking things up.
Valve annoys people because it can be slow to choose to do something, because everyone works on what they want to work on, but it means average workers have a lot more agency in how they’re involved in the company.
I’m sure there’s till unofficial cliques and leaders, but having it in legalese for the employees post-Gabe would be nice.
I would argue the flat management makes it hard for Valve to produce things and they should re-evaluate it, but you can do this while also not turning into a rank and yank shit out fortnite clones 420 69 flossing scheme to fuck over users and line their pockets.
I think that’s a valid take, and I think Valve has sort of re-evaluated it, because if I recall correctly, they kind of had to “put on hold” the “do whatever you want” bit to get Half Life: Alyx out of the door. So, imho, it seems like they’re capable of doing both. They managed to produce a high quality VR game by putting the “flat” on the backburner, and them coming back to it later.
Although, to be fair, I hadn’t heard anything similar about the SteamDeck or any Valve hardware, really. So if they can make a SteamDeck from scratch, an entire new product category, with the flat management structure, I bet it’s not holding them back half as much as some folks at GlassDoor seem to think.
Its really hard to get a look inside Valve, because I can’t confirm/deny the Steam Deck came about because of the flat management. I’ll be honest, my apprehension about their management stems from the many failed attempts to conclude the franchise they started in Half-Life and how 20 different projects died to get to Alyx. Would a change in leadership get us more of the same? Maybe. It would probably be a substandard product, and i’m still recovering from Starfield being mid.
Starfield was Bethesda, though. Eons of distance between those two studios.
The problem with that is that they’re a private company so that can just be undone by the largest share holder, unless that codification also splits up his equity across the employees.
Tbf as long as it doesn’t go public it will probably be fine regardless of who takes the job. It doesn’t take a genius to keep up the good work in a company that can afford to plan long time.
I guess you’ve never had a “new boss” come in, huh? Even in a private company?
Man, new bosses love to shake things up, to “make the workplace theirs.” It’s literally one of the most common things to happen when new bosses come, and very often it results in a deep change in company interpersonal politics.
Barry used to be your go-to guy, but the new boss has decided they just don’t like Barry. Why? They couldn’t tell you, but Barry gets under their skin, so it doesn’t matter how he’s the best guy on the team who can handle whatever is thrown at him, his role is going to be dilluted and minimized and he’s going to be pushed and prodded by negative management to try to get him to just quit. Eventually, Barry will just quit because who wants to work under those conditions. Barry found a better job, and now he’s replaced by your new bosses 20-something nephew who doesn’t know what the fuck he is doing at all and everyone can’t stand. He’s a fucking loser who keeps getting promoted by the new boss.
I’ve been through that too many times to pretend it’s just “that easy.” No, generally the kind of people drawn to that role are controlling dickheads who have their own dickhead “vision” of being the biggest dickhead to ever dickhead.
But how am I supposed to prove my exorbitant salary if I can’t prove I’m doing something. If I don’t change anything they’ll realize I don’t do anything and can’t do anything! As for my next idea, we need to put ads in steam because everybody is doing it. And people should watch a promo video before their game starts because look at how successful YouTube is! I’m a genius for doing this. YOU ALL JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND.
~ some manager, somewhere…probably
Hey, did you know your lemmy account is set to appear as a bot and some users may be filtering your comments as a result? You can change this in your lemmy profile settings.
Have seen it. Good managers walk in and watch their team for months to learn how things work before making changes. Bad managers walk in and change things before learning why they work the way they do. We saw that with Twitter/X.
I fucking hate your comment. Good work capturing the exact futile frustration you’re describing.
Unless they fuck it up somehow in recruiting a new CEO, Valve really wouldn’t find it hard to ask a new CEO “Here’s our revenue, and our expenses, our profits. How would you keep this in place without crashing our revenue stream and maybe doing new greenfield stuff?”
If their first words are: “Well, I like the idea of charging our customers an install fee…” you know to keep looking.
You are right in that Steam would probably continue on just fine on autopilot. You might not be right by assuming that the sort of person who would seek to and achieve such a position wouldn’t let their own ego dictate every decision–change for change’s sake so that they can point at how wonderful they are at the job.
From my understanding his son is set to take over when the time comes.
Because nepotism just works out gangbusters, every time. /s
Seriously, this is worse news than him not having a plan.
While nepotism is almost universally a bad thing, Gabe has shown that he does not subscribe to the “profit at any cost” school of business, but instead believes that if you provide a good service people will pay you for it. Hopefully he’s been able to pass those values on to his son.
My concern is his son despite having this shit DRILLED INTO HIS HEAD (which I can’t guarantee) will chase a cashout. That’s the one problem with nepos.
The other problem is if he’s qualified for the job. Which feeds into point 1.
Is there someone more likely to execute Gaben’s vision and follow in his footsteps?
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You know the Hedge Fund Fuckies are just fucking salivating at the thought of Valve being available to buy.
To implement NFT Microtransaction RNG lootboxes into their games while letting them rott?
CS2 already exists. You just need to add the Pay 2 Win to the crates.
HeadTrak AWP
“Can’t click heads? Don’t worry about it, because this AWP follows its namesake by finding clickable heads for you. Just aim down the sights and let the HeadTrak tech do the rest.”
Available in limited edition Season 7 Pass Lv.50, Lv.75, and Lv.100 Crates.
Oh shid and cume. Isn’t that sorta what the free loot cards are? The ones you get randomly for doing stuff in games. Iirc you can sell them on their marketplace for money. It isn’t unreasonable for a new dick head CEO to just overhaul that system into a more active gacha system for all their games.
I was making a joke about CS2, TF2 and Dota 2
Especially TF2 however since they show 0 care to that game but still milk it.
Oh, not just their games
They’ll ruin it just like they ruin everything in pursuit of profit.
I hope he has some sort of contingency plan. Perhaps he can find a successor.
It involves golden tickets and the unsolved disappearances of a handful of children.
Brutal, I know, but it’s the only way.
I selfishly wish he had a son or daughter to carry on his legacy lol
More generations deserve to know how good Valve is.
Son/daughter would be like “ugh, this is lame, I want to play real-world games with peoples’ lives. …like, corporate wars, or screw-the-smallguy.”
Kids never handle the inheritance right, and passing on the experiences they need in order to do so is hard as fuck.
Yeah but whales are gonna get all the tickets. There’s no IRL Charlie luck magic.
It really is.
If you’re reading this GabeN, make Valve a non-profit.
Worker co-op. Non-profits are pretty easy to rig for the benefit of the C-levels.
Easy-peasey to rig. Worker co-op isn’t a bad idea.
I vote that as a second to finding a successor, and giving the whole thing to them, sans whatever kickbacks to family etc that he wants.
Well I’m glad we’ve all found an equitable and legally binding way to divide Lord Gaben’s assets on his death!
And they say the Internet never solved anything.
He’s on 4chan last I heard
If a game is on GOG, I’d rather buy it there than on steam. Steam is great and they do a lot of great stuff, but you don’t own the game if you buy it through steam.
I’m very anti-DRM as well, but I’m willing to give Valve my money even if there’s a chance I lose my game down the line. Some of that money’s going towards Proton and making Linux more popular
Yeah. I now buy and play almost exclusively on Linux.
I do the same. Just because the platform is great does not mean it will be in the future.
Maybe we’ll get lucky and Gaben will leave ownership of the company collectively to it’s employees.
That would be the best outcome, legal framework for the “flat” management structure, making it an employee owned company.
That, sadly, is the future. Valve is one of those rare companies that put out something interesting then got out of the way so that others could put out their ideas. Steam and PAX are a fantastic way to enable the creativity of others. I will keep my fingers crossed that this all works out, but I am fully prepared to be sad between now and, say, 10 years in the future.
I buy my favorite games from GOG when they’re so that I can keep the install files forever.
If Steam turns to shit I’ll just pirate all my games again. I’ve already paid for them anyway.
Honestly, why ruin something already raking in money hand over fist? Valve is profitable, sustainable, and all around well executed.
Messing with it would cut profits!
The same reason countless studios have destroyed successful IPs (like EA). Sure it’s profitable but it could be MORE profitable. Sales were up last year? Cool story, have sales improved over that this year though??
It’s not just shareholders, I mean that’s a huge part why public corporations endlessly seek growth. But, even private corporations are beholden to capitalism’s inherent growth imperative.
The only way to maintain solvency is to grow. Without growth you can’t save, and if you can’t save, you can’t accumulate investment capital. Which basically means your corporation is stuck in stagnation and is being eaten alive by interest rates.
without growth you can’t save
What? Why? If I’m making a million dollars profit a year, why can’t I just put it in a bank account or ETFs or whatever every year?
If you aren’t investing back into your company as much as your competitors then they will eventually push you out of the market. It’s called the Growth imperative .
Putting back into your company is fine. It’s the endless profiteering that sucks, and that ultimately reduces customer experience. Steam keeps it’s niche specifically by producing a great customer experience, and getting out of the way.
Steam is also putting back into their company. But there’s no need for enshittification. That’s a publicly-traded-company, tragedy-of-the-commons thing.
Not true
It is to sustain an elite that takes the money in form of salary
Wtf are you babbling about? What salary man do you know that’s “elite”? They aren’t even petite bourgeoisie, they just think they are. The middle class is dead.
Why? Because the enshittification is based on short sighted greed over long sighted sustainable income.
This is what going public means. Now it is time to grind it to dust and snort it so the elite can have their fifth christmas bonus
Because MBA- and CEO-brains say that raking in money hand over fist doesn’t matter unless you can rake in consistently more and more money hand over fist. What normal people see as stable profits, they see as underperforming versus the bigger profits they see only in their head.
Greed and incompetence
But if we add a subscription required to access already bought game we would surely make more money this quarter. Or how about charging for online play.
In the end, the people who make these sorts of decisions will often bail out with their quarterly bonuses before the poo hits the fan. It’s everyone else who has to deal with the fallout.
Because enshitifying their service would earn them short term profits, which is the only thing corps/shareholders care about.
You clearly haven’t heard of private equity
If you’ve read/watched ready player one, that’s what likely to happen if the sixers won.
Yesterday I bought something on Steam for the first time in many years. (I have a large Steam library, but in recent years I’ve been getting games from gog and itch instead.)
Since I hadn’t bought from Steam in a long time I figured I should read the “Steam Subscriber agreement” that you have to click to accept when you buy something. Let me just say now, the agreement is a very very bad deal for customers.
It goes to great lengths to make it very clear that you don’t own anything. You aren’t buying anything, you have no essentially rights. You are simply paying for a license subscription to use software with various conditions. Valve is able to end your subscription with no refund if you break the agreement. And the best bit:
Furthermore, Valve may amend this Agreement (including any Subscription Terms or Rules of Use) unilaterally at any time in its sole discretion.
So by using Steam we’re putting a lot of trust in Valve; because the ‘agreement’ basically says they can do whatever they want, any time they want, for any reason they want.
Steam is quite good. I particularly appreciate their Linux support. But they are clearly using their position of dominance to make people agree to unfavourable terms. At the moment, things are fine. But make no mistake - when you use Steam, Valve has all the power. They can screw people over whenever they choose to.
With all that in mind, buying DRM free is better if you want to still have access to the software when a company decides to change direction for whatever reason.
Very good point. Just because Valve hasn’t screwed us over yet is no excuse for assuming they never will.
Steam effectively makes buying games itself count as MTX. They’re making your Steam library no different from your MMO inventory.
That said, I’m addicted.
It needs some legally bulletproof foundation structure to own the company and continue with his values. Not easy but possible.
Steve Jobs managed to do this picking Tim Cooke. Hopefully will be the same for valve
Hey now. A divorce could also sink things. He doesn’t have to die for things to go to shit.
(I know nothing of his personal life.)
Well his name didn’t show up in Epstein’s public records (unlike a certain CEO from a company Microsoft bought/CEO that founded/ran Microsoft) so we’re fine there.
And I did look. Extensively.
It’s a good sign because 1) He’s smart enough to not have a paper trail and/or 2) His hobbies are innocuous, like, I think he really only cares about submersibles and knives and he wasn’t stabbing people on some carbon fiber tube near the titanic so he’s not a dumbass either.
You know, I am glad you thought to check.
Do you know what the word shill means?
Baby, it means whatever you want it to mean.
That would require self awareness.
🏴☠️
I wish I could work for them with some sort of employee stock program. I’d be dumping literally every cent into the stock.
Valve is a company whose profit model is based on DRM. They were never your friend. Thanks for proton, though.
But this far they haven’t abused that like other organizations.
