I love Steam (have 2000 or so games on it) but I realize it is only a matter of time before it gets enshittified.
Maybe, but it’s still a private company.
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Well the thing is … yes Valve has shareholding investors… Only one that matter as far as anyone knows is Gabe Newell. Given it’s private corp, they don’t have to publicly tell what his exact ownership is and I think it is known it isn’t anymore 100% unlike at some point. However all “as far as we know” indications are, Gabe Newell maintains 50%+ controlling shareholding. Rest of the shareholders as people understand are employees and ex employees, who got private shares as part of compensation packages.
We don’t have actual look at the books, but Valve people have on multiple occasion said “Valve doesn’t have external investors”. Given it was public official comments by official people, I would think they wouldn’t lie about it. So there is no external VCs or share external investor investors.
Gabe pretty much has probably pretty universal control only limited by business regulation and maybe whatever clauses the corporate charter has. However since he was at one point sole owner, I doubt it contains anything too much curtailing him. Since the way any other people have gotten shares is by Gabe agreeing to give them or sell them to people in the first place.
As far as I understand at no point has Valve been cash strapped such as to need to ask for external investors. Since it is company founded by two early ex-Microsoft people who had made decently money at Microsoft already before Founding Valve. Gabe ended as sole owner as the other founding owner decided to leave the business and Gabe bought him out.
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I like to think Gabe knows all too well the importance of remaining a private business. Publicly traded businesses are the root cause of a lot of problems in the world.
I work for a company that has specifically stated it will never do that and has stuck to those guns for 50+ years
I would buy Valve as well, but that doesn’t change the fact they are not for sale.
That leaked email conveniently assumes the owner of Valve would sell it. I can’t think of a reason for Gabe to do that.
This is the biggest problem with Valve at the moment. They’re awesome, but only because of the current leadership. Once these guys retire or die, it’s very likely Valve will enshittify like every other business.
Valve needs to be hit by regulators at some point. They just have too much market power.
I wish the decent guys who started companies would leave a directive for the company that must be followed to prevent it from becoming just another shitty piece of garbage like everything else these days has become thanks to the geniuses with business degrees running the world.
But there’s no practical way you could hold the future owners of the business to that directive. If you own the business, you get to set the directives, including overwriting previous ones.
The only way to enforce it is to maintain controlling interest in the business. Or, at least spread the interest among multiple parties so no one person can dictate it.
The best way to do this would be to make the company Employee Owned
Even then though you could have employees voting to change the direction of the business. If someone offers to buy the business for billions, then it’s possible everyone would vote to accept the sale and change everything.
The business is always going to change over time.
Valve is not awesome at all. Ffs, they didn’t become a monopoly by accident. People need to stop worshipping this company just because they started packaging wine with their app.
This is the same company that literally started the trend of requiring storefronts and custom installers for their games with HL2… the exact same thing people whine about EA and Blizzard doing.
PC gaming will become a total shit show if Valve dies and they’ll be fully responsible for it.
just because they started packaging wine with their app
Even if that’s all they did, that is more than anyone else is doing. What they really did was make nearly every game they sell easily playable without requiring you to use Windows. As byproduct, DXVK (part of Valve’s Proton) provides greater compatibility and performance for Windows users as well (Intel ARC driver and DX9 game support for example). They have salaried employees working exclusively on making this work and their development is open source for anyone to use modify and share. Epic or any other store front could freely take advantage of this work and benefit why don’t they do that instead of whining?
Money? Remember when people thought that about Mojang?
Mojang, at least, was not founded by two guys who gave Microsoft the finger on their way out the door at their previous job.
Right? Its like someone leering at you.
Valve was founded in 1996 by former Microsoft employees Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington.
You have no idea how this works.
Gabe Newell quit working for Microsoft before Windows 3.0 was released. Valve is an employee-owned private company, Gabe Newell ensured that even after his passing, Valve stays true to their roots as long as there’s the majority of employees sharing his ideals.
Employee owned businesses are something else, Valve is just a regular privately owned business, one that the owner works for and takes a salary from.
Employee owned businesses are owned by all of the employees, collectively, with a slightly more democratic decision making process. The CEO still makes the decisions, but employees have a right to have their input heard as shareholders. With Valve, Gabe has the final say on everything.
@TWeaK @LoafyLemon it’s not a co-op. Still, that would be an interesting business model in the gaming space. I think people would be down to support something really alternative. I’m tired of MS and apple and all these business that are still stuck in old school business mindset.
Co-ops are owned by a community, eg customers can be members. Employee owned businesses are just owned by the employees. It’s a relatively new thing, however where it’s being implemented in the UK it’s more of a tax fiddle - the business owner gets their business to buy itself from themselves, then the owner gets zero capital gains tax. If you sell a business for £25 million, you save on a £5 million tax bill. It’s great for people looking to get their investment out of a cash-rich business.
It’s still a pretty good idea, but I’m not holding my breath to see the range of companies adopting Employee Owned practice actually pass on all of the benefits to their employees.
Either way though I’m fine with Valve being a private business, at the bare minimum it retains the opportunity of being better than a publicly traded company. Also, it’s not like video games are some essential service that really belongs under social ownership.
@TWeaK I’m a little confused about the overall post and the UK position since we are talking about an American company but yes, alternative business models are needed. Thank you for contributing.
The UK example was more about their method of transitioning from private ownership to employee ownership, basically me going on a tangent to say that it isn’t always all great. However the nature of the different types of business ownership is consistent everywhere, more or less.
- Private ownership - the business works for the owner(s).
- Employee ownership - the business works for the employee shareholders.
- Co-op - the business works for the co-op member shareholders.
- Publicly traded - the business works for the public shareholders. Additionally, the CEO is bound to this by law (both in US and UK, and most other places I imagine), not just their employment contract, and in practice this means the CEO must pursue profits because that’s always what the vast majority of the stock market wants.
Valve is up there at private ownership, not employee ownership. Arguably employee or co-op ownership might be better, but I’m just happy it’s not public.
Like you say, a co-op business in the game space would be interesting. Something like a mutual insurance company, where the customers also own shares in the business.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish moment
Day 1 of suddenly having the urge to keep an offline and DRM free copy of all my steam games.
Yeah for a while now I’m been buying games on GOG where possible and keeping an archive of them, because I know at some point every company will eventually let you down.
@festus @headmetwall how do you make sure that when you load up a gog game that it does not launch the gog launcher? What are the steps?
The GOG launcher is optional (I don’t use it). On their website you can download offline installers for every game you own, and these installers don’t require the GOG launcher or any account authentication.
Did everyone conveniently forget that Steam DRM is the reason why Steam came to prominence, and why it was ever used by any devs in the first place. Yes it’s easily cracked and barely an anti-piracy measure, even admitted by Valve, but it is still DRM.
@XenoStare @headmetwall that’s right. Steam is a business. They are not really for open source. Open source, is still a business model. It’s not public domain or libre software. Then can always make their stuff closed source at anytime. Just need to gather free work from the community and to elevate its private business. Still, there are articles detailing Valve as anti-consumer. It’s a search bar away.
When one company in an industry has nearly endless cash, as Microsoft and Apple do, it is natural that everyone else would be seen as acquisition targets
The difference is Valve is completely privately owned, Microsoft cannot force a sale.
With a publicly traded business, the business must be run in the interests of the shareholders, ie it must pursue profits above all else. Thus a buyer can effectively present “an offer you can’t refuse”, at least the business can’t refuse on behalf of shareholders (maybe the shareholders could vote and refuse). With a private business the owner generally has free reign to run the business as they see fit, they could run it into the ground if they so desired.
So it doesn’t matter how much cash Microsoft or whoever have, so long as Gabe doesn’t want to sell.
So long as Gabe doesn’t like die or have a personality changing stroke. Not sure what Valve’s plans are for his retirement
Selling to Microsoft would be a good retirement plan
According to Forbes, as of today, his net worth is apparently $4.3 billion. That man could quit now and live a very comfortable life until he dies.
The thought of another company buying Valve, especially one like Microsoft, makes me actually sick. I have spent so much fucking money on my Steam library at this point. If my Steam library gets jacked by some billionaire dickheads it’s all over, I’m never paying for anything again.
Yargghh?! Seriously though, I was furious when they bought Mojang and partially enshittified Minecraft.
bad news my friend. Valve is owned by a billionaire dickhead.
Billionaire, yes. Dickhead? That’s subjective. I’m not gonna worship the man but his actions point to him being among the most pro-consumer of CEOs out there, so I wouldn’t say he’s a dickhead.
I’m not super informed on the man I guess, please enlighten me.
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What if you got Half Life 3?
They’d probably contract Bethesda to develop it and make another soulless open world grindfest on an engine that’s about as overdue for retirement as Mitch McConnell
Xbox fans will say this is good.
I’m an Xbox fan but I’m first a Linux fan and PC gaming fan. This is bad. Valve needs to stay private.
Gaben already refused to sell to EA and made it abundantly clear that we would rather let valve die than go public.
Microsoft also just recently said they’d buy Nintendo if they could.
All this means is that Microsoft is filthy rich and still doesn’t know how to make an original quality game studio. They seem to overly rely on buying out studios and IPs that are successful to rake in more money.
spoiler
All of which reeks of an oligigopoly and reminds me of even worse companies like Oracle and AT&T
This would be a nightmare
Gaben is one of the few people in tech I trust to resist the money MSFT would be willing to throw at something as successful as valve. I mean - they’re the closest thing to a trustworthy company as you can find these days.
Valve is not worthy of your trust. Gabe won’t sell to MS because Valve is an absolute gold mine and it’s extremely unlikely even MS could make him an offer that actually makes more money for him in the long run.
Guess WE should buy it. Ensure 51% of the shares are locked up tight. It is a private company, so Valve would have to be cool with it. Otherwise, the wrong person getting a divorce, dividing assets in half, and it is all over.
MSFT is full of misfits.
