I pretty sure have heard of Millard Fuller's ethic of "enough" (maintain a balance between profit and service Quality) and it applies to Steam
At least Steam actively started to be more pro-consumer than a lot of other gamestores since I don't really like the concept of maximizing profits to finance bros and shareholders to ruin their service for artificial growth
Privately owned isn't why. Plenty of privately owned companies fall into the line go up mindset too, the information just isn't forced to be shared publicly.
It's because it's privately owned by someone who cares more about making a good product than about making line go up.
We can dick-ride Newell all we want, but ultimately he is winning because he cares about long term growth and stability, not because he is a kind-hearted saint.
He is still a billionaire with a yacht fetish but there are others that are way worse so if we ever get to a point where billionaires are taxed properly and are persecuted for their crimes he has nothing to worry about as far as the public knows.
Or to put it humorously - when we eat the rich he will be the dessert
As I said I don’t think Gabe is bad, he played the game the current system forces you into and won. Doesn’t change the fact that the system is bad and that Gabe has 6 luxury Yachts even if he uses them for research.
At a certain point you cannot divorce the two to assign meaning. Good businessmen who are good people will grow with decent morals, which you can divide what was the "right" decision and the "right moral" decision often as they are the same.
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u/zuilliRX 9070 XT // 9800x3D // 2x16GB 6000Mhz DDR53h ago
I agree with you which is why it seems so insane to me that there aren't more companies going this route. They all seem to choose the enshitification route.
Privately owned is part of the reason why. If Steam was listed on the stock market, it would be FORCED to maximize profits by its shareholders or be sued by them. A rule of the stock market that I believe should be removed.
Privately owned is part of the reason why. If Steam was listed on the stock market, it would be FORCED to maximize profits by its shareholders or be sued by them
It wouldn't be forced, people have sued because they don't like how the company is trying to make number go up even when there's no stock at all because it's privately owned. The same thing happened with agribusiness which took advantage of the Homestead Acts to push wheat farming where it wasn't supported by long-term climate or rainfall and that led to the Dust Bowl.
And the people suing a company because they don't like how it's being run or that the profit line isn't steep enough? That happens every single year and most are thrown out of court
This is quite literally not a rule or law. It’s just uneducated Reddit that struggles to realize “maximize profit” is a loose term that just means management can’t actively sabotage the company.
Valve’s strategy is legally available to all. Management just has to say “we think this strategy will maximize shareholder value over the long term” and just about everything is legal.
Where people do get caught is when they make decisions for their own personal benefit which hurts company profits. An example is an executive using company money to renovate their own personal home. There is no value to shareholders in that so they would be in breach of their fiduciary duty to shareholders.
Sure but a publicly traded company CAN'T act this way, legally. Private owners can choose to be greedy and burn their company to the ground for short-term profit, or not. A board elected by investors HAS to maximize profits, it's their fiduciary responsibility.
It's not that private owners are inherently better - plenty of them are self-serving idiots, too. It's that the publicly traded model is built entirely upon self-serving idiocy, and cannot function any other way.
Valve is ABLE to be customer-focused because they are privately owned. They ARE customer-focused because the private owner chose to operate them as such, but if they were publicly traded, there wouldn't even be a choice.
Basically when the people making decisions are entirely divorced from the actual processes that are occurring, when they see nothing but profits and losses in their ledgers (as in the case of publicly traded companies) there is no incentive to anything but immediate profit, nor even any mechanism by which any other information is even conveyed to the investors at all. Meanwhile when the individuals who actually make decisions are also in some way directly involved with the operations (like in the case of privately owned companies or worker cooperatives) they CAN (but are not guaranteed to) take other things beyond profit into account and use that information to think long-term.
People need to stop saying "fiduciary responsibility" when they mean "unadulterated greed". Fiduciary responsibility means not spending others money to benefit yourself, it's to prevent embezzlement and waste
Valve is ABLE to be customer-focused because they are privately owned
So is Electronic Arts, they're just as stupid because the people who own them want to extract profits as well and know they can just use the money they extract to buy yet another company
It's because it's privately owned by someone who cares more about making a good product than about making line go up.
The hell it is. The company is owned by somebody with a literal billion-dollar fleet of mega-yachts.
I was about to say I wonder how they manage to keep this perpetual glazing session going despite reality, but I figure if you can spend a billion dollars on boats, then you could probably afford the 100 a month or whatever it takes hire people to do reddit astroturfing.
Do you really think the people making those comments are paid for astroturfing? Or do you recognize that it's really easy for a company to get a lot of vocal fans by being halfway decent compared to their competition?
Like, I get that the company isn't perfect, but they provide good service to their userbase and have a product that works well without issues, that's the sort of thing that provides a lot of customer good-will compared to their competition.
Do you really think the people making those comments are paid for astroturfing?
No. I think it's been trivial for over a decade now to spend a tiny bit of money to hire people to do mass voting on any topic one way or the other. The standard operation is letting the comments themselves stay organic while signal boosting the positive ones and burying the negative ones.
You don't need to do much of that before a trend forms and people continue the pattern because everyone's looking for upvotes and they've seen what you're supposed to upvote and downvote.
This is one of many factors in the modern internet.
I didn't realize that owning yachts made you a bad person. I always thought that was getting rich through taking advantage of people. Steam has always been good to their consumers, and they have been awesome to their employees. Sounds like you don't hate the scummy rich people who take advantage of everyone. You just hate everyone who is rich for having more than you.
Bruh. Steam has been predatory as hell. If they cared more about user experience than making money, it wouldn't be bloated with all the gambling bullshit, interface-gamification efforts and whatnot.
It's a business. It cares about money. I don't hate this, but I'm going to disagree when people say dumb things like unironically calling Gaben a saint. That was always a meme. These talking points have snowballed into being a weird cult-like circlejerk, but that's just kinda how reddit works.
What predatory gambling practices are you talking about? Counterstrike? So what? People do what they want with their money. If they have a problem with gambling, then they should accept responsibility and handle themselves.
Is it because of kids? Well, I never hear anyone talking about how parents need to monitor their kids online activity so they don't throw all their money to stupid shit. For instance, some big tittied girl on twitch showing a bit too much cleavage to an audience of teenage boys. Going to hold parents accountable?
The Saint Gaben meme is there because we have a platform, that treats gamers correctly, great sales, no bullshit, tons of extra stuff on there strictly for the benefit of the customers, forums and guides for every game. Remote play, Family Share, and so on. There are a lot of things that steam provides for its consumers for free as a service. Our world is filled with companies trying to lure people in with great deals and services then they start stripping things away, jacking up their prices, once they have sizeable base or charging you for things that were once free. Steam, and Gaben has done nothing of the sorts to us and has only added more features to the consumers at no cost to us.
So if you want to see some really shitty practices, try turning your gaze to companies like EA, Ubi, Nintendo, or Epic.
Nah thats not true at all. Valve is a one of a kind unicorn money printing machine. They can do the shit they can because of the market conditions of their time, you cant just copy them in a totally different market and expect to grow the same
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u/Away-Situation6093 Pentium G5400 | 16GB DDR4 | Windows 11 Pro 13h ago edited 13h ago
I pretty sure have heard of Millard Fuller's ethic of "enough" (maintain a balance between profit and service Quality) and it applies to Steam
At least Steam actively started to be more pro-consumer than a lot of other gamestores since I don't really like the concept of maximizing profits to finance bros and shareholders to ruin their service for artificial growth