"Don't get an abortion! Have that baby and dispose of it at your nearest "Leave your baby here for our coalition of friendly CEOs to take care of" location for a 25$ amazon gift card!"

Those shares are also generally for sale for a high enough price. Given the immense current value of the brand, when Gabe dies vultures of every variety will start circling. If they offer employees 2x their share price to sell, enough of them will do it to lose control to investors that just want to enshittify everything and milk it's brand for every last penny as they drive it into the ground.

My company is an ESOP and shares don't give us a voting rights or any actual control, it's just a monetary incentive. The C-suite/board still control everything and unilaterally makes all the executive decisions.

That's because they're a privately owned company. They can decide when to prioritize long term profits over short term profits.

Most of their competition are publicity traded companies that have no such luxury. They have to make next quarter's number higher no matter what.

All that's between you and success is a consistent and reasonable performance, but seemingly everyone else in the world is too greedy to pull this off.

succeeding by not actively running their platform into the ground

As someone who began to use Steam from 2007, and play their games since 2000 - they not only made their platform better over years, they also now branching out lately. Their hardware is either the best in price/performance or outright innovative.

They are not "succeeding by not actively running their platform into the ground", they succeeding in actually providing a good service and getting better the more time passes. All that while all competition does is to attempt to expand their user base without actually providing a good service.

Just thought that if not Valve, we'd be stuck in the same shithole streaming services been lately.

Nintendo has used up all there goodwill, for me personally. Sucks.

Depends on who gets the crown - or prices thereof - when Gabe passes. There are lots of cases where the beneficiary of an estate can't afford to keep the asset due to a lack of liquidity, and is forced to sell.

I have a pro-Valve bias because I do like them. But I still do want to make a fair argument and would like to be corrected if I fail to do so.

So, yes, Valve's refund policy in the past was bad, and yes, they were forced to change. But since then they have fixed their mistakes, and have arguably the most generous refund policy out there. Last time I bought digital content from Nintendo store I had to waive my refund rights.

They could have limited refunds to Australia but they didn't. This has to count for something, right? Valve is a for profit company in a capitalist system, and yes they have bad practices. But surely we can agree they are one of the better ones?

Thanks mate for adding the extra information, I had forgotten about the Australian ruling.

Thanks for the info and sources!

Gabe was already wealthy with Microsoft money when he founded Valve, so when his new private startup found success he didn't feel the pressure to go public, expand, dilute, and cash out. He made the judgement call that they already had enough talent internally to keep playing the hits while keeping all the profit for themselves, and he was right. I'm sure a little bit a business ideology reinforces Gabe's long-term outlook for Valve, but he's ultimately enabled by a happy intersection of pre-existing wealth, great timing, and careful hiring choices.

he’s not trying to leave his mark on history

He kind of is, but in the way old-school millionaires did - he has purchased a MASSIVE yacht and turned it into an ocean-floor research laboratory, either donated it to a university, or just allows researchers to use it.

I mean, he is developing the brain chip with his Starfish Neuroscience company but its supposed to be minimally invasive and let's be real if its between his and Elon Musks (which is NOT minimally invasive and requires surgical implantation) I'm definitely going with his.

I wouldn't say at this point its all about gaming though. Valve is, but not necessarily Gabe. Which I don't mind but I could understand how some people wouldn't like it.

How would you like to see it improved?

Which is not great, but is a lot better than actively destroying the fabric of the society, like all other billionaires are doing.

Lol everyone always gets mad that dude has yachts.

Do you think that the CEOs of Microsoft and Sony don't have yachts?

So that's something they have in common. But consumer good will and overall happiness with the service isn't. Only one of the companies have that distinction and you know which one it is.

Awesome, thanks for that info.

Never said it was locked. But being locked or unlocked doesn't change the motivation and is irrelevant to my point. The more people on the steam ecosystem, the better for them. It is far easier to use steam on the steam deck than any of the options you put forward. Even so, not preventing their use means people are more likely to buy the steam deck, which in turn means they are more likely to use steam as their primary store.

Epic, etc are not a default and at the beginning were not easy to get working.

Oh and you got it the wrong. Those things support the steam deck (usually via third party hacks), the steam deck doesn't support them, it you would be able to install them from the steam store with tight integration into the library by default. It just doesn't prevent them. That is a BIG difference. But yes, doing similar things on other hardware might not be possible or at least as easy. I'm grateful their are so many enthusiasts out there making such things possible.

My apologies, this community is generally memey/jokey in tone, and I was going with that. /gen

I’m also firing off dumb comments at like 2 am where I am, lol. Please do not take my short soundbites (text bites?) seriously.

On a more serious note, one billion dollars is a legitimately unfathomable amount of wealth and, by extension, unilateral power. That’s a dangerous thing for any one person to hold, regardless of how kind their heart is since it means the use of that power is dependent on the whims of one person.

Corporations are also, by their nature, driven by a profit motive. A corporation can do non-evil, customer-friendly things but that can also change very quickly. It’s important to differentiate between beneficial behavior and altruism.

Also, I typically don’t expect people to read my unsolicited soapboxing rants under a green text meme lol.

Also also, I am quite appreciative of the benefits of Valve’s efforts. I just don’t assume they’re purely doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. Nor do I expect/demand them to.

If Valve would want to do that, they could have done so years ago. To the contrary, there are more stores where you can buy games online then ever before (Epic, Windows Store, GOG, Itch.io, Fanatical, Humble and so on, with steam keys and without), and i haven't heard of a single aqcuisition by Valve yet.

What competition lol

Talks about AI bubble burst been there a long time. I sure hope it will happen tomorrow, but I really wouldn't put my bets on that happening any time soon.