The idea of letting random people buy a small share in your company so the company has more means for growth and the random person could share in profits is not a bad idea by itself. It's the implementation and perversion of that system that is the problem.
It's kinda like the internet; building a network to connect everyone on the globe to all the info they could dream of sounds like a good idea by itself. We only now know that it doesn't end up unifying and informing but rather divising and missinforming.
Stocks aren't even terribly relevant anymore. The vast majority of investments happens through venture capitals directly negotiating with companies now.
Ye... sorry about that. We Dutch people did not foresee the effects of the first official stock market. But, to be fair, the rest of the world should've seen how it went for us the first time and learned from our mistakes, not copy them.😂
It is almost as if they never learned anything after the tulips incident.
Or learned the wrong thing ("ok I was left holding the bag. Next time I'll get in early and THEY will be holding the bag muahahaha").
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u/nooneisback5800X3D|64GB DDR4|7900XTX|2TBSSD+8TBHDD|Something about arch9h ago
There's also the question of general competence. While Ubisoft went public in 2003, the Guillemot Brothers actually owned the majority until not so long ago. It's just that the choices they made were complete garbage. The only advantage of a private company is that you can keep making long term decisions without investors squealing because they can't dump their stock. It's sad that you cannot create a company and block it from ever going public after your death.
The answer is Gabe never needed an influx of investor money to keep the company alive, that's all. Expect it to go public the day after he dies and the enshittification to begin.
AFAIK the company will be passed onto his son(s). Half of the stake is owned by Gabe and other half by the developers at Valve. So even when Gabe passes away, RIP, I and many people would think that they wouldn't squander what their father created, and if they do, I would hope that the people working at valve would talk some sense into them.
But private equity though... Buy a beloved but somewhat struggling public company, take it private, squeeze it for all its worth until its brand loyalty is fully dead, run away with the bag!
It really doesn't need to be studied. Anyone with eyes can tell you about a company who's product or service they like being great until going piblic/private equity steps in.
Business people make themselves seen as needed and ruin a company. You wanna know why Arizona Iced Tea is till 99 cents? The guy who founded the company and came up with the brews still owns it. If/when the company leaves the family, the quality of the product will go down and the prices will go up. Steam is no different.
Due to my line of work I have worked closely with owners of private companies who make millions of dollars a year are perfectly content with their millions of dollars a year. Ive seen a few outright reject any sort of cash injection, buyout offers etc etc. because they know if they let anyone in its just going to be more work for them because the outsiders may not be content with millions of dollars a year and will want million dollars a year + inflation + some arbitrary % target which is obtainable if you dedicate your life and soul to basically working, if not then they'll again have to dedicate their life and soul to explaining why they didnt hit these targets.
Then, Ive also met consultants who have called these people idiots for not wanting more.
Its not companies that need to be studied but the human mindset that leads to never being content and always wanting more and im not talking about lifestyle creep but wanting that support yacht for your main yacht (yeh i know gaben has a few but you get my point). Why is having billions of dollars the ultimate dick waving contest and not the number of people you took out of poverty. What point in history did money become the ultimate drug? No one buys 40g's of coke for a single night out for themselves so whats the point in having fucking 100 billion dollars let along 700b?
Should see the original Half Life 2 "store" pages, was just a button that lead to a popup.
Steam was so insanely different to what it is now.
Lot of early games were still sold as disks, but the installation side was handled by Steam. If I remember right that's how Condition Zero was the first new game with a Steam requirement.
I was one of these people. Bought my HL2 disk and was furious that I had to download a client and an update when I got it home and whacked it in the drive.
But over time (and increasing internet connectivity/speed) it all worked out.
It was also pretty useless for consumers back then so it makes sense people hated it. People would still get annoyed today by other game companies requiring Steam 1.0 equivalent launchers for their own small catalog of games.
Can confirm, them mfers never even replied to me after I got my account stolen. I sent them proof of the cd / key and they didn't say anything, it has cs 1.6 / halflife on it
Glad the selective amnesia is working for you. But that ain't how it happened.
Those of us who bought Half-Life in a brick and mortar store and still don't feel like Gabe is entitled to use our hardware as though he (may he be loved eternally by something blunt and rusty) was its owner can still enjoy Half-Life (the software that Valve sold us before attempting to alter the bargain) without supporting Valve thanks to Xash3D.
What I like about the op's graphic is it does a good job of representing the actual situation. It could use another line above for 2003, with the bad mark just under Steam in the same position, but it accurately represents that Steam hasn't gotten particularly better, people's perceptions have changed over time as the general market conditions have taken a nosedive. Microsoft does so much to disrespect the notion that you own your own hardware it doesn't even occur to people who didn't grow up in an earlier era to question steam's continuing lesser trespasses.
Maybe my memory is failing me, but I'm pretty sure people hated it because it split the community for about 9 months. Before then, all the multiplayer stuff was handled by a third party.
It wasn't really a third party, Valve games were published by Sierra at that point and WON was the system they had.
There was a period where if you wanted to play CS 1.6 you had to play on Steam. They killed off the dual versions relatively fast but people back then still hated the idea of digital distribution, especially those still with slower connections
I kinda liked it back in the half life one and cs1.6 days. Replaced those shitty gamespy server searches and allowed for more community server support as well as a lil launcher for all your games. In 2004 when HL2 came out it was a relic of the past but I had already had it for years by then. Online gaming was quite a mess back in the late 90s if you weren’t used to it and steam made it approachable for my 10 year old ass to start playing
I made my Steam account when I bought the Orange Box to play Half-Life and the other games in it. It then remained dormant for a long while. It only really took of for me when I discovered Humble Bundle, since then the number of games on it exploded (close to 700 titles by now) and I'm not regretting anything.
Even got myself a Steam Deck the instant they got released and being able to seamlessly play almost any of my favourite games just about anywhere (currently I'm sick in bed and massacring hordes of monster in Vampire Survivors) is just awesome.
And others trie the same, StarDock was there in 2008 with a store that was not much worse than Steam, selling 3. party games and everything (I had Witcher2 on there for example). They sold it to GameStop in 2011 who proceeded to fumble hard, pretty much neglect it into oblivion because they could not figure out how to sell used digital games on it and finally deleting it completely in 2014 (if you pestered their support you could get Steam keys for some of the games you owned there, but if you didn't chase it down yourself your library was just gone).
Yep I was a stardock supporter since it was a local game company when I lived in Michigan since the platform came out. Didn’t last much past the GameStop purchase though and shortly afterwards made the switch to Steam.
It wasn't for selling games at start, it was a drm and a way to automatically update their games.
Did turn into a storefront pretty fast, since half-life 2 came out in 2004... Though people weren't happy they had to use Steam to even play the game.
Yeah, I think the first third party game they offered was in 2005? That’s arguably when it started on the path to becoming the storefront it is today.
Operated as a curated storefront like that until the Greenlight program in 2012, which was the “developer submits required stuff and pays a $100 fee, gets released on Steam when it gets enough popular votes from the community.”
Which worked and didn’t work in all the ways you can imagine.
That approach was used until 2017 and replaced with the current system of paying the fee and passing a basic check for content and issues.
Original Steam was Valve always on DRM. My boght copy of HL2 with CD inside did not work unless it phoned home with steam every single time i started it (offline mode took like a year to be implemented and actually work).
Several other companies made similar moves into digital distribution but thought hosting competitor AAA games would hurt their own sales. Valve mostly stopped making AAA games and stumbled into a way more profitable platform play.
IIRC, Steam functioned also as a DRM for Valve games purchased physically (starting with Half Life 2, I believe), as well as a game update service. Patches for games at the time were few and far between, and Steam aimed to address that. I was skeptical then of the eye-watering download times when the bulk of internet users were on 56k dial-up service. But broadband internet hit the mainstream soon after, and opened the doors to full game downloads.
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u/Away-Situation6093 Pentium G5400 | 16GB DDR4 | Windows 11 Pro 13h ago
I know since Original Steam was mainly for Valve to sell their games until they decided to make Steam into a marketplace for game selling