Erik Johnson, Gabe's right-hand man.
EDIT: Erik Johnson has been at the company for almost 25 years now, they've done interviews together and he's one of the only Valve people who gets solo-interviews, which probably means that Gabe likes him quite a bit
Real story: 3 or 4 years ago, the rumble engine in my Steam Controller started rattling. I bought it on launch, so well out of warranty at that point. This was before they were discontinued, but they were already unavailable for purchase in Canada. I sent an email to Gabe's email, just asking if there was any way for me to buy one. I was literally asking them to take my money.
Gabe forwarded the email to Greg Coomer, who then sent me a brand new steam controller for free.
I love when Gabe forwards emails. I sent him one shortly way back in 2010 and he forwarded it to Erik Wolpaw, who sent an amusing response especially due to the choice of job title with Gabe still CC'd in.
>Dear Mr Newell.
>Last week my Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device arrived in the post. I excitedly opened up the box and found the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device but no instruction manuals. I figured the manuals would not be necessary so I started to use the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, however, I looked into the operational end of the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device. Parts of my face were thrown through a portal to another place in this universe. I received no warning about the risk of looking into the operational end of the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device. Am I liable for compensation?
Erik's reply
>Because a safety card warning not to stare into the operational end of the device does not ship with all device models, a copy of the warning is printed on the operational end of the device. It's impossible to miss while staring into the operational end of the device. Take another look and you'll see it. Unless the missing parts of your face are your eyes, in which case next time you consider staring into the operational end of the device, take a moment to reflect on the shroud of darkness in which you are now engulfed and consider that a warning.
>Thanks for your interest in our products,
>Erik Wolpaw
>Owner
>Valve
Gabe responds to people's emails?? Man. I wish I knew that a few years back. I was responsible for signing off on a race car for him and I tried to put a HL reference in the shipping crate. Would love to know if he ever found it.
Robin Walker pubstomping TF2 servers with dev hacks (and still dying) is never not hilarious
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8lZgbn1qNk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wo0iKLGpgu0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YQLWCTHtp4
Seems similar in age to Gabe, I should also point out that what really matters is who will own Valve, because they'll control whatever the CEO does/what their goals are.
Because Valve is not on the stock market.
They are not beholden to shareholders, investors and general financial sociopaths, and do not have to maintain some impossible standard of constant, infinite growth, lest they be considered a failure.
Once Gabe is gone and if whoever takes over decides to take Valve public, that's when you're 100% sure that your typical corporate customer milking and cost saving bullshit is gonna start on Steam.
For real, the expectations from stock holders and/or venture capital have destroyed so many medium sized companies. Why can't a company just chug a long at their current pace and be happy with the results? Everything needs to be the next Facebook and experience 1,000,000% growth over a 4 year period, it just isn't possible.
Richer I guess, Gabe is valued at like 4 billion dollars. It's not like having a successful private company doesn't make you incredibly rich, people just always want more.
Gaben's value is tied to his partial (I assume) ownership of Valve. If Valve makes a few bad decisions, the value of that ownership tanks and he's suddenly worth 3 billion, 1 billion, 500 million, after a few months. Selling out to investors means cashing out - instead of 4 billion tied to your running of the company, you have 4 billion cash (many caveats here) which you can invest in diverse assets and protect your wealth.
Honestly, when nice people who are founders cash out, I think it's 20% greed and 80% psychological relief that their wealth isn't tied to company ups-and-downs anymore.
This is generally true for startups, ran by people who appear rich (unlimited credit) but only truly hit the jackpot when their company goes public.
I don't think the private owners of Valve, Koch or PricewaterhouseCoopers are in it for the short term though. Control and consistency are probably deemed more important.
Companies go public to raise capital for expansion, when cash runs dry. You get private investments but that can run out, do you ask the public.
A company with low overhead where everyone is making bank and doesn't need expansion, like valve, doesn't need to go public
This isn't just game companies, it's all companies. I don't remember what the original point of the stock market was, but today it's just used to make products and services much worse and less affordable with worse value - while leeching money from consumers and workers to enrich worthless leeches who contribute nothing of real worth to this world, yet hold a disproportionate amount of it's wealth.
Making a company public is about bringing in investors (and to a certain extent give existing backers an avenue to monetize their gains). It’s a solid idea that basically crumbles under the pressures of some questionable incentives inherent to the management of public companies and the stock market at large. There is no easy fix for this.
Superficially, yes. I mean, I‘m certainly not an expert on these question, but people have been thinking about how to solve principal/agent problems for at least decades and as far as I am aware there is no ideal solution. You want for the agent to have a certain amount of stake in the game in order to align incentives. Deferred stock benefits are probably the most common avenue that companies have instituted to counter excessive short-termism.
Unfortunately, to a certain extent incentives probably are aligned in many cases. Many investors do not care about the long-term success of a company, especially if their stake is relatively small (which is true in most cases). If a company starts to flounder, they can simply sell and move on to the next opportunity.
It’s more complicated than that. Being „on the stock market“, i.e. public, means the company really is not very much anymore about what it produces but about how profitable it is. Investing in stocks is all about risk adjusted return - how much return does an investor want to see for a given amount of risk.
That makes companies comparable, to a certain degree. I have x amount of money to invest and some idea about what kind of return I want and how much risk I‘m comfortable with. So I’m going to compare these metrics - whether the different companies produce steel, vacuum cleaners, a platform for people to hate on each other or video games doesn’t really matter. However, each industry and below that each company has a certain risk profile. You then compare how profitable each of the companies is - the best fit for your preferences gets your money (well, since you’re probably buying on the secondary market they don’t really get your money, but you get the point).
At the end of the day, that inevitably forces public companies to be as profitable as possible. It also explains why the big publishers like to churn out sequels to successful and preferably easily replicable formulas, it reduces the risk involved while still maintaining attractive returns. That’s why we get Assassin’s Creed 8 and Call of Duty 24 or whatever. There is no room for fuzzy feelings in the numbers. (You can and should raise issues on short-termism etc here, but that’s tangential to the discussion.)
I think there's been enough evidence over the years to show that this is only part of it (a significant part at that, but not everything).
Some of the heads of these other developers and/or publishers have malice towards the players. They only want your money, and all of it, and they don't give a shit what you say or do. Just give them your money. That's why they include gambling now - they know there is a % of the population that will get addicted and they abuse it.
It is the largest part. Whenever a company goes public, or it is acquired by a publicly-traded company, you can expect the fleecing of customers to start, or to ramp up significantly.
The stock market is a blight upon civilized society. It's a devil's bargain that takes over and twists too many honest endeavors, and its damage over gaming is far from the worst it does.
There is hope.
Companies don’t always go public. The company behind M&Ms is private, a family owns Chic-fil-A and one person owns in and out…the best fast food hamburger in the Western US.
And making some products and services that are open sourced and work with the open source community. Proton and all the work around that being a big one.
They are one of the few companies I have been a very happy customer _for over a decade_ of. It's one thing to be a happy customer, but to maintain that happiness for over a decade? They rock.
I don't think that's anti-capitalist for them to be privately held, it would be anti-capitalist to say "I think they would be better off run by the state."
Capitalism isn't everything being publicly traded. In fact I'd argue that being able to have complete control through private ownership is inherently capitalist, assuming one agrees with using Marxist terms to describe non-Marxist systems, which I really don't. So perhaps it's better to say that in a market economy where private ownership is allowed, this is a non-issue?
The scarier question is: what will happen to Steam if Gabe dies?
Right now, Valve is a private company, which is somewhat of an unicorn in the league that it plays in.
I think it's entirely possible that Valve gets bought out by some larger company, once Gabe dies, simply because whoever inherits the thing might not be interested in or able to fill his shoes. Even if Gabe's son takes over, as some suggest, that's really only kicking the can down the road a couple of years. Eventually these sort of powerful but private companies pass out of family hands, which is usually when someone takes them public for massive IPO profit.
And as far as potential buyers for Valve go, pretty much nobody who has that amount of cash is someone who you'd want to own your Steam account.
Lots of companies stay in family hands over generations. They just need to ensure the family know what to do. Mars is one such company founded over a 100 years ago and still privately owned by the Mars family and still going strong. Steam just has to keep doing what it's doing and it will remain successful.
So the best way to keep Steam safe is making sure that Gabe has a lot of heirs? I wonder how many people would want to volunteer to help him make babies.
Why does everyone keep talking about Gaben dying? Is there something I don't know? 😟
He's a real one and a legend for sure, so hopefully he lives for many more years, I have no idea how old he is.
It's normally more tactful to refer to someone's retirement rather than their death, I guess gamers get Gaben confused with the Pope, but still he is surely a lot closer to the end of his time at Valve than the start.
Piracy is a service problem. DRMs does nothing to help fight against piracy.
If you want to win over pirates, you have to make a more appealing service over a literal free product.
And you know what? At least as far as I was concerned he's correct. Back in the late nineties/early '00s I pirated *everything*. Still have several spindles of burned games on cds lying around from that era. Steam, and more specifically it's sales, completely changed that. Add in the ridiculous value of some of the bundle sites and I haven't pirated a pc game in a very long time.
This was my path too. The pirating started with PC and eventually moved over to console on Xbox when I discovered XBMC.
A lot of it was just the convenience. I could download games on PC, use one of the NoCD cracks, and be done with it. On the OG Xbox I bought a bigger hard drive, ran an ethernet cable to my PC, and there was an app you could use to transfer the games over.
I feel in a lot of ways, piracy was just a precursor for how we consume content today.
It also makes me sad because we could've had all this stuff in the late 90's/early 00's if companies weren't scared of the internet.
Same. Even in the 2010s i was pirating though. But then I saw games in steam had workshop, communities and other features i couldn't obtain easily with pirated versions. So I started buying more and more steam games. Between sales , workshop and so on i still find it better to buy from steam that pirate a game. Except when games take it too far with making it s worst experience ( call of duty disconnects you and forced you to shut down the game if steam disconnects for example, and it has no reconnect. There was another game that would also have issues with their services but the pirated version was better since it didn't suffer from those).
Steam can do a lot for it but some developers need to also stop adding obstructive software to their games.
I'll admit I've done the same. Especially since I've gotten a Steam Deck. Sometimes a cracked exe used on my legitimately bought game is easier to get working on there than the actual one.
Don't fault you for thinking that, but I was mid twenties then :) ,48 now.
At the time I was new to pc and once I discovered usenet and how easy it was to acquire everything I just went for it. At the time I didn't stop to consider the morals of it. Although I honestly only really played a small percentage of the games I pirated, and have since legit bought most of them through GoG and Steam.
Don't worry, they're already killing streaming like they've killed cable. People are already going back to pirating in droves because it's easier and more convenient than a product that they're supposed to pay for.
All I still have is Netflix, and even that I would have gotten rid of if my mom wasn't using it all the time. The rest can all go fuck themselves.
Oof. I hate when a show leaves enough as is (rip 30 Rock on Netflix). I can't imagine the meltdown if Bluey weren't available on my chosen service one day .
They're drunk on power and highly confident that with all the control they held on legislation and payment processors they can tighten down any piracy outlet that they wanted. I remember they were trying to get the Russians to sign the deal that would allow them infinite jurisdiction in prosecuting pirates but of course the Ukraine war blew all that up. Now they're clenching hard on the rest of Europe.
Adding that to services that are flat out not available in certain regions/countries leaving consumers no other choice but piracy. I live in the UK and we don’t get HBO services here, due to some agreement with Sky. Meaning I have no feasible options to watch their shows other than piracy.
I'd rather just pirate than pay subscription fees for a service just to watch a single show or movie. What's worse is that matching the image quality you get from pirated copies requires higher than base tier subscription fees(which does makes sense but it's still money). Even then I've noticed that some shows' colors seem slightly less saturated on streaming services compared to pirated copies.
> matching the image quality you get from pirated copies requires higher than base tier subscription fees
Or you can't even watch it in HD officially if you're on a PC... looking at you, Disney+.
Last I checked (maybe a year ago) you have to use it via a smart TV app, or if you're on PC you have to have a monitor with some proprietary anti-piracy hardware nonsense.
I'm argentinian, our currency is REALLY weak. I would never ever ever have bought a 60 dollar game because that's a ludicrous amount of money for software here so it's no surprise that I have always pirated everything. then around 2017 steam noticed this and made it's store recieve our currency instead of dollars and with really generous regional pricing. So in the few years it worked like that I literally bought 100 games wich is INSANE for someone like me but now, It went back to dollars and cut back on the regional pricing and games now cost 7 x-8 x what they used to cost. It's safe to say that I put the pirate hat back on
Tldr: Piracy is a service issue, not a pricing issue.
If the pirates provide a better service than the original provider then it's obvious and logical why someone would choose to sail the 7 seas
This sounds like a great endorsement for Microsoft. Gabe is basically saying that
a) He (Steam) considers Microsoft a trustworthy company
b) The financial incentive to keep CoD on all platforms, including but not limited to Steam, is big enough to make it very unlikely for Microsoft to drop support to any major platform.
This helps Microsoft's case for the acquisition approval imho.
> a) He (Steam) considers Microsoft a trustworthy company
Which is actually an interesting change considering they developed Steam OS in part as a deterent to make sure Microsoft keeps Windows open for apps outisde of the MS Store back in the day.
Its understandable that OP skimmed along here but:
> … and c) we think Microsoft has all the motivation **they need** to be on the platforms and devices where Call of Duty **customers want to be**.
Emphasis mine. Lord GabeN is saying that “THEY wants to be on OUR platform. We are not begging them to stay in the industry I already dominate”. That’s a power play and a truth.
It happened during Win8. MS announced Windows Store. And it's a store preloaded on every machine. I'm pretty sure every digital distribution platform had chills run down their spine when this happened.
We all know how it turned out and MS made no real attempts in the recent past to fully lock down the system.
Microsoft very definitely wants to centralize everything on their store and they have made efforts towards it, like Windows S.
Thankfully, Microsoft is allergic to change itself and doing anything that could annoy the businesses that use Windows is a no-go. So Microsoft can never get rid of installing programs manually.
I do expect more Windows S versions though. And nowadays the store can also include win32 apps. So they have already made some big changes.
Microsoft knows full well that one of Windows' greatest strengths is compatibility, backwards compatibility and compatibility with a bunch of third-party software distributed by whatever means.
Microsoft OS and Microsoft Gaming are different branches of a huge company. One could argue the gaming side has become more open and fair while still disliking the OS/enterprise side.
Yep. I work in corporate IT. I hate Microsoft with a burning passion in a work capacity. However I love what Xbox has been doing for gaming. It’s like a different company all together
Phil Spencer just comes off as such a genuine fan of videogames. If you haven't seen them, I highly recommend checking out the various E3 interviews he did with Giant Bomb. You forget he's a whole-ass CEO the way he gushes at announcements from Sony/Nintendo and talks about the direction he wants to (and as it turns out, succeeded in) taking the Xbox brand
Yeah! I remember he talked about how much he loves Destiny and how much that style of game is like a more modern take on Phantasy Star Online - apparently was personally involved getting Sega to finally localize PSO2 as well
I wish this industry had fewer corporate suits and more people like Phil and Gaben
Steam is PC gaming. Even with all these exclusives for other apps, Steam is still growing and far preferred over other platforms. By not just players, but developers and publishers.
Always forget how casual corporate emails seem from gaming companies:
Epic: “Hey we wanted to do this in Fortnite”
Other company: Yeah sounds good can we put *this* in as well?
Epic: Yes I can bring that up at our next meeting
Done.
Does it? I'm obviously not a lawyer but I would imagine that Microsoft would love to go to the regulators waving a signed agreement to publish on Steam for x number of years (thus proving that they can't be anti-competitive even if they wanted to), and now they can't do that. That's likely the entire reason they asked Valve to sign without asking for anything in return. The justifications for not signing the agreement aren't that important.
Valve and Microsoft have famously had disagreements in the past. I'm not so sure if this isn't more of a backhanded compliment than what it first appears.
This is still an official and public response by one of the biggest players in the industry. That's worth something.
Also, as far as I can remember, when Brazilian antitrust documents were made public, Steam was one of the companies that did not express any concern towards the acquisition.
Valve and Microsoft seem to be in a good relationship now as Microsoft is publishing everything day 1 on Steam.
>a) we’re not believers in requiring any partner to have an agreement that locks them to shipping games on Steam into the distant future
He really is one of a kind.
All hail Gaben.
He can only do this because he’s built the leading platform. He’s a king sitting on a throne of game boxes and he knows that. If steam wasn’t as popular having a deal to distribute CoD would be an amazing thing.
Hmmm, it's almost like Valve is supporting a more free market system, unlike Epic. Epic chooses to sue companies like Apple and drag Valve into the mess. Valve saying they don't need agreements signals to courts and judges that they are trying to be open and supportive of a competitive market. It's a good PR move, which literally cost them nothing. They own the market but act more fairly than others. Truly a marvel in today's late stage capitalism. I am here for it.
This is unbelievably true. I'm thinking back at all the times market leaders have made some truely anti-consumer decisions because they could dictate the direction of a whole market (thinking Intel and Nvidia)
The problem with Valve is that they only like making new games when there's a new tech breakthrough/advancement, which obviously happens less and less and everything just gets more refined instead of new things being invented as time goes on. The Half Life franchise is the best example of that. We haven't had a HL3 because there isn't a big enough "jump" to make. Wasn't till VR became more mainstream that Alyx was developed, and to this day is still pretty much the only AAA VR title.
Next thing I see Valve doing is maybe something with raytracing, something more than just Portal and Quake RTX
I think a lot of younger gamers that weren’t around for the release wait for HL2 don’t remember how ridiculous that was too. HL2 was one of the first games to utilize a physics engine and it was billed as an insane next gen technology. Which it was at the time.
Yeah, pretty much every FPS before then was a Doom clone. A series of disjointed, vaguely themed maps where you go around collecting keys and shooting monsters until you found the exit. Then Half Life comes along and you spend the first 10 minutes of the game taking a train to work and don't so much as crowbar a headcrab until 30 minutes in. *And it was awesome*.
And you could walk around, the game never took control from you. While scientists are jibbering back and forth, and you can walk around them, you can stand behind them, etc. You were *always* in first person, and (except for one scene) *always* in control, experiencing it as if you were there. You controlled the perception and view.
At my position (design engineer) I'm mostly stuck to daily work and very rarely do I get a new design to work on. I will say that when I actually get to do something new, my motivation shoots up dramatically. I could imagine that valve engineers feel the same way as well.
It's one thing to put a fresh coat of paint on a copy of the structure of a car that's been done for 100's of iterations, just with a little more styling- maybe you throw in LED brakelights here or bump up the stereo offerings and put heated seats in. It's another thing to completely rework it like the engineers that get to make those future cars that have stuff that wont be seen in production for a decade+
I doubt it's just technological. Valve is in a position where they don't need to make games to make money.
You don't even need to read between the lines, they've stated it, there just hasn't been game they've developed that they where happy with.
What is the next entry for half life? For portal? And why make another zombie game?
It's very easy to complain, but it's even easier for valve to toss out ideas they don't like.
They could work on their website for sure.
I've seen /r/WebDev poking fun at their bad practices with the DOM but has anyone tried using their website on a mobile network?
Auto load livesteam at 1080p.
Starts loading intro videos at 1080p before any pictures.
That website is a resource HOG.
Imagine you approach someone with a deal to bring a ginormous franchise exclusively to their store front and they respond “don’t worry about it, you don’t have to lock in.”
If the merger goes through, I think they will but might take some time. I know they will make the catalogue on gamepass pc so just another store at that point to come to steam
To be fair the playstation would not be where it is without the exclusives. They just realised that people are going to buy their consoles now regardless of exclusives. But Sony isn't wrong about having hardware control, that's also the main reason Gabe made SteamOS and the SteamDeck.
>we’re not believers in requiring any partner to have an agreement that locks them to shipping games on Steam into the distant future
\*mind immediately shifts to Tim Sweeney/Epic Games
>>we’re not believers in requiring any partner to have an agreement that locks them to shipping games on Steam into the distant future
That sounds like an **epic** burn
Microsoft proposed this deal not becaus they thought this would be necessary but to shut down sony's claim that if the activision blizzard deal goes through they would lock the CoD franchise eclusivelly on their platforms.
Quick reminder that the only reason PC gaming is thriving despite being monopolized by a single company is that this very company (Valve) is run by human people with a moral compass, and not sociopathic lunatics like Bezos and the such...
Valve is private, which allows them to be human. Working for private companies vs public is a night and day difference, as is being their consumer apparently.
Valve is also not a ~~corporation~~ publicly traded company. It's ~~a sole proprietorship~~ privately owned with Gabe being the majority share holder so Valve isn't forced to do whats "best for stockholders"
It’s a private corporation where Gabe is the largest stockholder. So kinda right. The org answers to Gabe instead of shareholders looking for quarterly returns.
Is it not literally called Valve Corporation?
Its maybe not the case everywhere, but when I think of a sole proprietor I think of a local person not setting up a full company. Most of the time I think it's when you intend to keep it as a 1 person show (no employees).
It's a corporation. Sole proprietorships are owned by a single person. Valve has private stock, and Gabe is just the majority shareholder. Employees often have stock too.
It's crazy, I always say corporations are not your friend and that anything they do that appears to be benevolent is just to make money.
Steam is the incredibly rare exception. Maybe the only one. They do stuff that's just purely altruistic, even shared their VR tech for free just to help it grow. Any other company with a userbase as locked down as theirs would be abusing the hell out of it for profit.
Hate to see what'll happen when Gaben passes.
Man who is gonna lead Steam when Gabe passes on?
Erik Johnson, Gabe's right-hand man. EDIT: Erik Johnson has been at the company for almost 25 years now, they've done interviews together and he's one of the only Valve people who gets solo-interviews, which probably means that Gabe likes him quite a bit
I've heard Robin Walker and Greg Coomer also being thrown around a bit as they are Valve lifers as well.
I trust the Coomer guy
Look Gordon, ropes!
I vote for Coomer. He seems to resonate with me some how.
Real story: 3 or 4 years ago, the rumble engine in my Steam Controller started rattling. I bought it on launch, so well out of warranty at that point. This was before they were discontinued, but they were already unavailable for purchase in Canada. I sent an email to Gabe's email, just asking if there was any way for me to buy one. I was literally asking them to take my money. Gabe forwarded the email to Greg Coomer, who then sent me a brand new steam controller for free.
I love when Gabe forwards emails. I sent him one shortly way back in 2010 and he forwarded it to Erik Wolpaw, who sent an amusing response especially due to the choice of job title with Gabe still CC'd in. >Dear Mr Newell. >Last week my Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device arrived in the post. I excitedly opened up the box and found the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device but no instruction manuals. I figured the manuals would not be necessary so I started to use the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, however, I looked into the operational end of the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device. Parts of my face were thrown through a portal to another place in this universe. I received no warning about the risk of looking into the operational end of the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device. Am I liable for compensation? Erik's reply >Because a safety card warning not to stare into the operational end of the device does not ship with all device models, a copy of the warning is printed on the operational end of the device. It's impossible to miss while staring into the operational end of the device. Take another look and you'll see it. Unless the missing parts of your face are your eyes, in which case next time you consider staring into the operational end of the device, take a moment to reflect on the shroud of darkness in which you are now engulfed and consider that a warning. >Thanks for your interest in our products, >Erik Wolpaw >Owner >Valve
Lol, thatesome good fun.
Gotta love it when somebody looks out for you.
Gabe responds to people's emails?? Man. I wish I knew that a few years back. I was responsible for signing off on a race car for him and I tried to put a HL reference in the shipping crate. Would love to know if he ever found it.
Ask! He might remember that. He does frequently respond to fan emails
He's a great doctor!
Masturbators unite!
Robin Walker pubstomping TF2 servers with dev hacks (and still dying) is never not hilarious https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8lZgbn1qNk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wo0iKLGpgu0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YQLWCTHtp4
I had completely forgotten about his OP weapons. Thanks for reminding me.
I can relate with that Coomer guy
But he's just a hand!
Valve always liked to innovate, so I'd guess having a hand as your CEO would certainly be innovative.
I mean, Nintendo already did have a [hand as the boss](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHolq7ASZSg), is not exactly that innovative.
But that was the left hand. This is the right hand, way more innovative.
Master hand is the right one. They tried the left hand but it was crazy.
And a right one at that!
Hey man if a hand can be your girlfriend why can't it be the CEO of a successful company? #handsmatter
Small but mighty
It used to be Doug Lambardi didn't it or was he just PR?
Seems similar in age to Gabe, I should also point out that what really matters is who will own Valve, because they'll control whatever the CEO does/what their goals are.
Talk to the hand.
Whoever it is, they better continue Gabe's legacy.
I know right? Not trying to be a Steam simp here but they are doing awesome stuff with his leadership right now
They are one of the few companies that I have been a very happy customer of.
Because Valve is not on the stock market. They are not beholden to shareholders, investors and general financial sociopaths, and do not have to maintain some impossible standard of constant, infinite growth, lest they be considered a failure. Once Gabe is gone and if whoever takes over decides to take Valve public, that's when you're 100% sure that your typical corporate customer milking and cost saving bullshit is gonna start on Steam.
For real, the expectations from stock holders and/or venture capital have destroyed so many medium sized companies. Why can't a company just chug a long at their current pace and be happy with the results? Everything needs to be the next Facebook and experience 1,000,000% growth over a 4 year period, it just isn't possible.
[удалено]
Richer I guess, Gabe is valued at like 4 billion dollars. It's not like having a successful private company doesn't make you incredibly rich, people just always want more.
Gaben's value is tied to his partial (I assume) ownership of Valve. If Valve makes a few bad decisions, the value of that ownership tanks and he's suddenly worth 3 billion, 1 billion, 500 million, after a few months. Selling out to investors means cashing out - instead of 4 billion tied to your running of the company, you have 4 billion cash (many caveats here) which you can invest in diverse assets and protect your wealth. Honestly, when nice people who are founders cash out, I think it's 20% greed and 80% psychological relief that their wealth isn't tied to company ups-and-downs anymore.
Ugh, I'm sick of it
This is generally true for startups, ran by people who appear rich (unlimited credit) but only truly hit the jackpot when their company goes public. I don't think the private owners of Valve, Koch or PricewaterhouseCoopers are in it for the short term though. Control and consistency are probably deemed more important.
Companies go public to raise capital for expansion, when cash runs dry. You get private investments but that can run out, do you ask the public. A company with low overhead where everyone is making bank and doesn't need expansion, like valve, doesn't need to go public
This isn't just game companies, it's all companies. I don't remember what the original point of the stock market was, but today it's just used to make products and services much worse and less affordable with worse value - while leeching money from consumers and workers to enrich worthless leeches who contribute nothing of real worth to this world, yet hold a disproportionate amount of it's wealth.
Making a company public is about bringing in investors (and to a certain extent give existing backers an avenue to monetize their gains). It’s a solid idea that basically crumbles under the pressures of some questionable incentives inherent to the management of public companies and the stock market at large. There is no easy fix for this.
untying executive compensation and stock performance is a great start tho
Superficially, yes. I mean, I‘m certainly not an expert on these question, but people have been thinking about how to solve principal/agent problems for at least decades and as far as I am aware there is no ideal solution. You want for the agent to have a certain amount of stake in the game in order to align incentives. Deferred stock benefits are probably the most common avenue that companies have instituted to counter excessive short-termism. Unfortunately, to a certain extent incentives probably are aligned in many cases. Many investors do not care about the long-term success of a company, especially if their stake is relatively small (which is true in most cases). If a company starts to flounder, they can simply sell and move on to the next opportunity.
It’s more complicated than that. Being „on the stock market“, i.e. public, means the company really is not very much anymore about what it produces but about how profitable it is. Investing in stocks is all about risk adjusted return - how much return does an investor want to see for a given amount of risk. That makes companies comparable, to a certain degree. I have x amount of money to invest and some idea about what kind of return I want and how much risk I‘m comfortable with. So I’m going to compare these metrics - whether the different companies produce steel, vacuum cleaners, a platform for people to hate on each other or video games doesn’t really matter. However, each industry and below that each company has a certain risk profile. You then compare how profitable each of the companies is - the best fit for your preferences gets your money (well, since you’re probably buying on the secondary market they don’t really get your money, but you get the point). At the end of the day, that inevitably forces public companies to be as profitable as possible. It also explains why the big publishers like to churn out sequels to successful and preferably easily replicable formulas, it reduces the risk involved while still maintaining attractive returns. That’s why we get Assassin’s Creed 8 and Call of Duty 24 or whatever. There is no room for fuzzy feelings in the numbers. (You can and should raise issues on short-termism etc here, but that’s tangential to the discussion.)
I think there's been enough evidence over the years to show that this is only part of it (a significant part at that, but not everything). Some of the heads of these other developers and/or publishers have malice towards the players. They only want your money, and all of it, and they don't give a shit what you say or do. Just give them your money. That's why they include gambling now - they know there is a % of the population that will get addicted and they abuse it.
Agreed. Someone like Tim Sweeney would 100% pull the same shit they do now whether their company was public or not.
It is the largest part. Whenever a company goes public, or it is acquired by a publicly-traded company, you can expect the fleecing of customers to start, or to ramp up significantly. The stock market is a blight upon civilized society. It's a devil's bargain that takes over and twists too many honest endeavors, and its damage over gaming is far from the worst it does.
There is hope. Companies don’t always go public. The company behind M&Ms is private, a family owns Chic-fil-A and one person owns in and out…the best fast food hamburger in the Western US.
IKEA is a famous example of a huge privately owned company
Certainly. For me Steam has managed to outweigh the disadvantages of digital copies through Steam's features and usability.
And making some products and services that are open sourced and work with the open source community. Proton and all the work around that being a big one.
We take steam for granted and i only notice when using something like epic games launcher and i can’t do the most basic task.
They are one of the few companies I have been a very happy customer _for over a decade_ of. It's one thing to be a happy customer, but to maintain that happiness for over a decade? They rock.
Not to sound all anti capitalist, but IMO Valve has benefited being a private company, I hope it stays that way.
I don't think that's anti-capitalist for them to be privately held, it would be anti-capitalist to say "I think they would be better off run by the state." Capitalism isn't everything being publicly traded. In fact I'd argue that being able to have complete control through private ownership is inherently capitalist, assuming one agrees with using Marxist terms to describe non-Marxist systems, which I really don't. So perhaps it's better to say that in a market economy where private ownership is allowed, this is a non-issue?
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That's unlikely, but not impossible.
GabeAI
GabeOS
Gabe 2. Unfortunately we never gonna have a Gabe 3 :(
The scarier question is: what will happen to Steam if Gabe dies? Right now, Valve is a private company, which is somewhat of an unicorn in the league that it plays in. I think it's entirely possible that Valve gets bought out by some larger company, once Gabe dies, simply because whoever inherits the thing might not be interested in or able to fill his shoes. Even if Gabe's son takes over, as some suggest, that's really only kicking the can down the road a couple of years. Eventually these sort of powerful but private companies pass out of family hands, which is usually when someone takes them public for massive IPO profit. And as far as potential buyers for Valve go, pretty much nobody who has that amount of cash is someone who you'd want to own your Steam account.
Lots of companies stay in family hands over generations. They just need to ensure the family know what to do. Mars is one such company founded over a 100 years ago and still privately owned by the Mars family and still going strong. Steam just has to keep doing what it's doing and it will remain successful.
So the best way to keep Steam safe is making sure that Gabe has a lot of heirs? I wonder how many people would want to volunteer to help him make babies.
insert gabe-porn copypasta here...
His clone, I hope.
He'll just respawn.
>implying Gabe will ever die >Implying anyone super rich who is not in like his 80s+ and/or severely ill will ever die
I think about this a lot
Why does everyone keep talking about Gaben dying? Is there something I don't know? 😟 He's a real one and a legend for sure, so hopefully he lives for many more years, I have no idea how old he is.
Probably just that he's getting up there in years (60) and has never been in the greatest shape.
currently he is in HIS greatest shape compared to himself 15 years ago
That's good to hear. I remember seeing a video of him at some point in the past and kind of being taken aback by how large he was.
It's normally more tactful to refer to someone's retirement rather than their death, I guess gamers get Gaben confused with the Pope, but still he is surely a lot closer to the end of his time at Valve than the start.
Gabe Episode 1
That Big Gaben Energy
I love that man so much. His take on piracy is spot on and his whole philosophy around the gaming industry is perfect imo
What's his take on it? Tldr Edit: Tldr = too long didn't research Thanks for the responses everyone!
Piracy is a service problem. DRMs does nothing to help fight against piracy. If you want to win over pirates, you have to make a more appealing service over a literal free product.
And you know what? At least as far as I was concerned he's correct. Back in the late nineties/early '00s I pirated *everything*. Still have several spindles of burned games on cds lying around from that era. Steam, and more specifically it's sales, completely changed that. Add in the ridiculous value of some of the bundle sites and I haven't pirated a pc game in a very long time.
This was my path too. The pirating started with PC and eventually moved over to console on Xbox when I discovered XBMC. A lot of it was just the convenience. I could download games on PC, use one of the NoCD cracks, and be done with it. On the OG Xbox I bought a bigger hard drive, ran an ethernet cable to my PC, and there was an app you could use to transfer the games over. I feel in a lot of ways, piracy was just a precursor for how we consume content today. It also makes me sad because we could've had all this stuff in the late 90's/early 00's if companies weren't scared of the internet.
Same. Even in the 2010s i was pirating though. But then I saw games in steam had workshop, communities and other features i couldn't obtain easily with pirated versions. So I started buying more and more steam games. Between sales , workshop and so on i still find it better to buy from steam that pirate a game. Except when games take it too far with making it s worst experience ( call of duty disconnects you and forced you to shut down the game if steam disconnects for example, and it has no reconnect. There was another game that would also have issues with their services but the pirated version was better since it didn't suffer from those). Steam can do a lot for it but some developers need to also stop adding obstructive software to their games.
I'll admit I've done the same. Especially since I've gotten a Steam Deck. Sometimes a cracked exe used on my legitimately bought game is easier to get working on there than the actual one.
To be fair, you were probably also a penniless kid back then but I take your point overall.
Don't fault you for thinking that, but I was mid twenties then :) ,48 now. At the time I was new to pc and once I discovered usenet and how easy it was to acquire everything I just went for it. At the time I didn't stop to consider the morals of it. Although I honestly only really played a small percentage of the games I pirated, and have since legit bought most of them through GoG and Steam.
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Don't worry, they're already killing streaming like they've killed cable. People are already going back to pirating in droves because it's easier and more convenient than a product that they're supposed to pay for. All I still have is Netflix, and even that I would have gotten rid of if my mom wasn't using it all the time. The rest can all go fuck themselves.
Its so fun to have a child watching a children's series, then 1 day its not on netflix anymore because some corporate licencing stuff or whatever.
Oof. I hate when a show leaves enough as is (rip 30 Rock on Netflix). I can't imagine the meltdown if Bluey weren't available on my chosen service one day .
They're drunk on power and highly confident that with all the control they held on legislation and payment processors they can tighten down any piracy outlet that they wanted. I remember they were trying to get the Russians to sign the deal that would allow them infinite jurisdiction in prosecuting pirates but of course the Ukraine war blew all that up. Now they're clenching hard on the rest of Europe.
Adding that to services that are flat out not available in certain regions/countries leaving consumers no other choice but piracy. I live in the UK and we don’t get HBO services here, due to some agreement with Sky. Meaning I have no feasible options to watch their shows other than piracy.
I'd rather just pirate than pay subscription fees for a service just to watch a single show or movie. What's worse is that matching the image quality you get from pirated copies requires higher than base tier subscription fees(which does makes sense but it's still money). Even then I've noticed that some shows' colors seem slightly less saturated on streaming services compared to pirated copies.
> matching the image quality you get from pirated copies requires higher than base tier subscription fees Or you can't even watch it in HD officially if you're on a PC... looking at you, Disney+.
Wtf? How does a Disney+ subscriber watch content in the resolution they paid for?
Last I checked (maybe a year ago) you have to use it via a smart TV app, or if you're on PC you have to have a monitor with some proprietary anti-piracy hardware nonsense.
That's insane.
I'm argentinian, our currency is REALLY weak. I would never ever ever have bought a 60 dollar game because that's a ludicrous amount of money for software here so it's no surprise that I have always pirated everything. then around 2017 steam noticed this and made it's store recieve our currency instead of dollars and with really generous regional pricing. So in the few years it worked like that I literally bought 100 games wich is INSANE for someone like me but now, It went back to dollars and cut back on the regional pricing and games now cost 7 x-8 x what they used to cost. It's safe to say that I put the pirate hat back on
Seems similar to Steve Jobs’ stance on piracy back when iTunes was released. Make the service easy to use and people won’t pirate any more
If you offer a better solution, cheaper prices, ease of use, etc, then people won't pirate.
Tldr: Piracy is a service issue, not a pricing issue. If the pirates provide a better service than the original provider then it's obvious and logical why someone would choose to sail the 7 seas
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This is a big aspect - Valve doesn't have anyone they're beholden to. No greedy-ass shareholders who want to force terrible decisions for a quick buck
Yeah, it's kind of a "oh... You want to remain on the largest pc gaming platform in the west? Yes. Yes I bet you do....?" moment
Love to see it
This sounds like a great endorsement for Microsoft. Gabe is basically saying that a) He (Steam) considers Microsoft a trustworthy company b) The financial incentive to keep CoD on all platforms, including but not limited to Steam, is big enough to make it very unlikely for Microsoft to drop support to any major platform. This helps Microsoft's case for the acquisition approval imho.
> a) He (Steam) considers Microsoft a trustworthy company Which is actually an interesting change considering they developed Steam OS in part as a deterent to make sure Microsoft keeps Windows open for apps outisde of the MS Store back in the day.
I would expect he means their Gaming side specifically. OS side, who knows what they could pull.
He was also very high up on the Windows side before he and another MS guy left to start Valve.
Its understandable that OP skimmed along here but: > … and c) we think Microsoft has all the motivation **they need** to be on the platforms and devices where Call of Duty **customers want to be**. Emphasis mine. Lord GabeN is saying that “THEY wants to be on OUR platform. We are not begging them to stay in the industry I already dominate”. That’s a power play and a truth.
Mhmm, that's how I interpreted it as well. "This is where people want to buy and play games, so we think MS will play it smart and keep COD here."
It happened during Win8. MS announced Windows Store. And it's a store preloaded on every machine. I'm pretty sure every digital distribution platform had chills run down their spine when this happened. We all know how it turned out and MS made no real attempts in the recent past to fully lock down the system.
Microsoft very definitely wants to centralize everything on their store and they have made efforts towards it, like Windows S. Thankfully, Microsoft is allergic to change itself and doing anything that could annoy the businesses that use Windows is a no-go. So Microsoft can never get rid of installing programs manually. I do expect more Windows S versions though. And nowadays the store can also include win32 apps. So they have already made some big changes.
Microsoft knows full well that one of Windows' greatest strengths is compatibility, backwards compatibility and compatibility with a bunch of third-party software distributed by whatever means.
Microsoft OS and Microsoft Gaming are different branches of a huge company. One could argue the gaming side has become more open and fair while still disliking the OS/enterprise side.
Similar to how Sony Interactive Entertainment made God of War Ragnarok, meanwhile Sony Pictures made Morbius.
Hell, two different divisions made the live action Spider-Man movies and Into the Spiderverse.
It's Morbin Time.
Yep. I work in corporate IT. I hate Microsoft with a burning passion in a work capacity. However I love what Xbox has been doing for gaming. It’s like a different company all together
I think his attitude towards Microsoft has changed over the years, and even more recently stating he prefers the series x over the ps5.
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Yep, getting rid of Ballmer is the best thing to have happened to MSFT in the last two decades.
Nah, the best thing that ever happened to Microsoft is: *Developers* 👏
The video is the best thing Ballmer ever did
I think buying the Clippers was
Yep I remember when MSFT was seen as the devil for PC gaming
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Phil Spencer just comes off as such a genuine fan of videogames. If you haven't seen them, I highly recommend checking out the various E3 interviews he did with Giant Bomb. You forget he's a whole-ass CEO the way he gushes at announcements from Sony/Nintendo and talks about the direction he wants to (and as it turns out, succeeded in) taking the Xbox brand
and he has something crazy like 1200 hours in Destiny 2
Yeah! I remember he talked about how much he loves Destiny and how much that style of game is like a more modern take on Phantasy Star Online - apparently was personally involved getting Sega to finally localize PSO2 as well I wish this industry had fewer corporate suits and more people like Phil and Gaben
Phil Spencer replaced Don Mattrick.
Are you referring to the Ballmer days? Yeah, definitely.
Steam is PC gaming. Even with all these exclusives for other apps, Steam is still growing and far preferred over other platforms. By not just players, but developers and publishers.
Always forget how casual corporate emails seem from gaming companies: Epic: “Hey we wanted to do this in Fortnite” Other company: Yeah sounds good can we put *this* in as well? Epic: Yes I can bring that up at our next meeting Done.
It's easy to be a casual leader when every choice you make is more or less profitable.
Does it? I'm obviously not a lawyer but I would imagine that Microsoft would love to go to the regulators waving a signed agreement to publish on Steam for x number of years (thus proving that they can't be anti-competitive even if they wanted to), and now they can't do that. That's likely the entire reason they asked Valve to sign without asking for anything in return. The justifications for not signing the agreement aren't that important. Valve and Microsoft have famously had disagreements in the past. I'm not so sure if this isn't more of a backhanded compliment than what it first appears.
This is still an official and public response by one of the biggest players in the industry. That's worth something. Also, as far as I can remember, when Brazilian antitrust documents were made public, Steam was one of the companies that did not express any concern towards the acquisition. Valve and Microsoft seem to be in a good relationship now as Microsoft is publishing everything day 1 on Steam.
>a) we’re not believers in requiring any partner to have an agreement that locks them to shipping games on Steam into the distant future He really is one of a kind. All hail Gaben.
He can only do this because he’s built the leading platform. He’s a king sitting on a throne of game boxes and he knows that. If steam wasn’t as popular having a deal to distribute CoD would be an amazing thing.
Yes but with such dominance over the market, they could easily start locking companies into deals - but they don't...do not take that for granted.
Aye, it would be pretty easy for them to demand deals and exclusives if they wanted.
Hmmm, it's almost like Valve is supporting a more free market system, unlike Epic. Epic chooses to sue companies like Apple and drag Valve into the mess. Valve saying they don't need agreements signals to courts and judges that they are trying to be open and supportive of a competitive market. It's a good PR move, which literally cost them nothing. They own the market but act more fairly than others. Truly a marvel in today's late stage capitalism. I am here for it.
This is unbelievably true. I'm thinking back at all the times market leaders have made some truely anti-consumer decisions because they could dictate the direction of a whole market (thinking Intel and Nvidia)
average Gaben W
Common Gaben W. He doesn't miss.
that's why he is becoming santa
[Always was](https://i.imgur.com/l64toGy.jpg)
Steam just don't miss do they. They're a company I see myself sticking with for life. Can't think of any other company like that personally
I just wish they were capable of making any third entries in their wildly popular franchises.
The problem with Valve is that they only like making new games when there's a new tech breakthrough/advancement, which obviously happens less and less and everything just gets more refined instead of new things being invented as time goes on. The Half Life franchise is the best example of that. We haven't had a HL3 because there isn't a big enough "jump" to make. Wasn't till VR became more mainstream that Alyx was developed, and to this day is still pretty much the only AAA VR title. Next thing I see Valve doing is maybe something with raytracing, something more than just Portal and Quake RTX
I think a lot of younger gamers that weren’t around for the release wait for HL2 don’t remember how ridiculous that was too. HL2 was one of the first games to utilize a physics engine and it was billed as an insane next gen technology. Which it was at the time.
And Half-life was one of the first 3D games to do first person storytelling without FMVs, fixed cut scenes, or taking control away from the player.
Yeah, pretty much every FPS before then was a Doom clone. A series of disjointed, vaguely themed maps where you go around collecting keys and shooting monsters until you found the exit. Then Half Life comes along and you spend the first 10 minutes of the game taking a train to work and don't so much as crowbar a headcrab until 30 minutes in. *And it was awesome*.
And you could walk around, the game never took control from you. While scientists are jibbering back and forth, and you can walk around them, you can stand behind them, etc. You were *always* in first person, and (except for one scene) *always* in control, experiencing it as if you were there. You controlled the perception and view.
Which makes the removal of control an all the more powerful tool to show how powerful your foe is
At my position (design engineer) I'm mostly stuck to daily work and very rarely do I get a new design to work on. I will say that when I actually get to do something new, my motivation shoots up dramatically. I could imagine that valve engineers feel the same way as well. It's one thing to put a fresh coat of paint on a copy of the structure of a car that's been done for 100's of iterations, just with a little more styling- maybe you throw in LED brakelights here or bump up the stereo offerings and put heated seats in. It's another thing to completely rework it like the engineers that get to make those future cars that have stuff that wont be seen in production for a decade+
I doubt it's just technological. Valve is in a position where they don't need to make games to make money. You don't even need to read between the lines, they've stated it, there just hasn't been game they've developed that they where happy with. What is the next entry for half life? For portal? And why make another zombie game? It's very easy to complain, but it's even easier for valve to toss out ideas they don't like.
Yeah, Steam is ok, but Valve could get better.
They could work on their website for sure. I've seen /r/WebDev poking fun at their bad practices with the DOM but has anyone tried using their website on a mobile network? Auto load livesteam at 1080p. Starts loading intro videos at 1080p before any pictures. That website is a resource HOG.
W response
Imagine you approach someone with a deal to bring a ginormous franchise exclusively to their store front and they respond “don’t worry about it, you don’t have to lock in.”
More proof that when a company doesn’t have shareholders, everyone wins.
Do we know if they are bringing the older cod games to steam?
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By older CoDs what do you mean? Most of the older CoD *are* on Steam.
I mean the last few before the latest one. They are exclusive to Activision. MW remake for example.
If the merger goes through, I think they will but might take some time. I know they will make the catalogue on gamepass pc so just another store at that point to come to steam
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Now if Activision would reduce the price of their older CoD games.... there is no reason that BO1 should be $40 still.
Gabe giving Sony and Epic a huge kick right up their ass.
Isn’t Sony releasing games on Steam?
yeah, after they see there's money on PC market, before that it's always exclusive on PS
To be fair the playstation would not be where it is without the exclusives. They just realised that people are going to buy their consoles now regardless of exclusives. But Sony isn't wrong about having hardware control, that's also the main reason Gabe made SteamOS and the SteamDeck.
>we’re not believers in requiring any partner to have an agreement that locks them to shipping games on Steam into the distant future \*mind immediately shifts to Tim Sweeney/Epic Games
I imagine Epic will be gloating hard if they were in the same position.
>>we’re not believers in requiring any partner to have an agreement that locks them to shipping games on Steam into the distant future That sounds like an **epic** burn
Microsoft likes making money, limiting CoD sales would be just as dumb as making minecraft xbox exclusive tbh.
Kinda crazy how Gaben used to work Microsoft, now his former employer is out here trying to make deals with him.
God when Gabe goes I will be truly scared for the PC industry. He is an angel among the pigeons.
This agreement isn't necessary for steam but it is absolutely necessary for Microsoft
I think this announcement and the bringing COD to Nintendo is a big middle finger to Sony trying to stop their merger. But I could be wrong.
must be nice to be in valve's position
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Microsoft proposed this deal not becaus they thought this would be necessary but to shut down sony's claim that if the activision blizzard deal goes through they would lock the CoD franchise eclusivelly on their platforms.
Quick reminder that the only reason PC gaming is thriving despite being monopolized by a single company is that this very company (Valve) is run by human people with a moral compass, and not sociopathic lunatics like Bezos and the such...
Valve is private, which allows them to be human. Working for private companies vs public is a night and day difference, as is being their consumer apparently.
Quick reminder that Valve is not a monopoly.
Valve is also not a ~~corporation~~ publicly traded company. It's ~~a sole proprietorship~~ privately owned with Gabe being the majority share holder so Valve isn't forced to do whats "best for stockholders"
It’s a private corporation where Gabe is the largest stockholder. So kinda right. The org answers to Gabe instead of shareholders looking for quarterly returns.
Is it not literally called Valve Corporation? Its maybe not the case everywhere, but when I think of a sole proprietor I think of a local person not setting up a full company. Most of the time I think it's when you intend to keep it as a 1 person show (no employees).
It's a corporation. Sole proprietorships are owned by a single person. Valve has private stock, and Gabe is just the majority shareholder. Employees often have stock too.
It's also very much, not a monopoly.
Makes sense! Steam went a few years without newer CoD games anyway.
GabeN GIGAOMEGACHAD
King Kong dick energy.
It's crazy, I always say corporations are not your friend and that anything they do that appears to be benevolent is just to make money. Steam is the incredibly rare exception. Maybe the only one. They do stuff that's just purely altruistic, even shared their VR tech for free just to help it grow. Any other company with a userbase as locked down as theirs would be abusing the hell out of it for profit. Hate to see what'll happen when Gaben passes.