3 points

Valve is a whole company of people like Gaben.

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-1 points

Realistically, it’s only a matter of time until Steam becomes as enshittificated as any other services. There is profit to be made from Steam selling advertising space and customer data. They can either choose to capitalize on the profits that are in front of them, or allow another company to and take that capital from them. For a business it’s not a matter of what’s right and wrong anymore but consume or be consumed. If Steam isn’t willing to do that someone else will be willing to play the long game and do it. Then it’ll be only a matter of time until Steam gets acquired by another company and then it’s game over.

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4 points

Valve is a unique company with no traditional hierarchy. In business school, I read a very interesting Harvard Business Review article on the subject. Unfortunately it’s locked behind a paywall, but this is Google AI’s summary of the article which I confirm to be true from what I remember:

According to a Harvard Business Review article from 2013, Valve, the gaming company that created Half Life and Portal, has a unique organizational structure that includes a flat management system called “Flatland”. This structure eliminates traditional hierarchies and bosses, allowing employees to choose their own projects and have autonomy. Other features of Valve’s structure include:

  • Self-allocated time: Employees have complete control over how they allocate their time
  • No managers: There is no managerial oversight
  • Fluid structure: Desks have wheels so employees can easily move between teams, or “cabals”
  • Peer-based performance reviews: Employees evaluate each other’s performance and stack rank them
  • Hiring: Valve has a unique hiring process that supports recruiting people with a variety of skills
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1 point
*

Kinda sounds like how worker cooperatives work tbh, but with Gabe still technically being the owner.

I remember reading a news piece a while back about how the founder of a food company made sure to transfer ownership to the employees before leaving. While we’re talking about worst-case scenarios, let’s also hope for the best and hope that Gabe has a similar plan.

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1 point

Him being a pretty smart guy overall surely has at least some sort of continuity planned.

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1 point
*

PeopleMakeGames has a two part series on Valve that’s pretty interesting. The second part (here) dives into the structure of the company. It does have a bit of an angle, fwiw, so if you’d prefer something more objective, it might not be a great watch. Personally I think the issues they bring up are valid, but figured I’d mention it.

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0 points
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A little unsure about the “peer based performance review”, sounds like bullying might somehow have to be kept in check. Otherwise this sounds awesome.

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-2 points

Fun fact: Former employees of Valve have said that is actually a huge problem in the organization and that its organizational structure seems to encourage bullying and high-school style “cliquishness” by design.

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4 points

Proton is open source. Anyone can pull it together and integrate it. Gog have been doing DRM free games for a while, they’ll be quite keen to fill this niche. Epic probably won’t care. If none do, someone will want to.

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1 point

Valve is a private company whereas GOG belongs to CDProject - a publicly traded company. GOG might want to fill the void but they’re more likely to do dumb, shortsighted decisions in contrast to Valve.

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1 point

Maybe, but DRM free content isn’t exactly shareholder value…

It’s better shepherded than Epic. They probably don’t fill the space because Steam do it better, but you invest more if the return is higher.

The case I’m referring to is in the future if Steam badly enshittified.

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2 points
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What are you smoking? GOG Galaxy doesn’t even have a Linux client. In fact it has been one of the most requested features for years and nothing has happened.

Edit: it’s also the reason I stopped buying from them when I got my Steam Deck.

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0 points

Gog have been doing DRM free games for a while

As far as I know GOG also sells drm content and Steam also sells drm-free content. So what’s the point

they’ll be quite keen to fill this niche

I also don’t remember them doing anything for Linux apart from releasing a broken port then badmouthing people who complained that the game they bought is broken.

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0 points

Isint Steam a form of DRM? You effectively cant play your games if you dont have an account I thought

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-1 points

No, you can for the games that don’t have drm, just launch the executable. Steam itself doesn’t require any drm. Even the games that use Steam services can be drm-free. Here’s the list of some drm-free Steam games

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0 points
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…you can load right to library?

Edit: holy crap you can, all these years…

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0 points

… You can disable that advert window?

I think we’re failing at life bro

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0 points

That window is the only ad I purposely allow in my life. I know I can disable it but it sometimes informs me of games I want

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0 points

PC gaming is not here to stay. One day, someone, will finally do a cloud /saas streaming solution which works, which solves the latency and fidelity issues and which will be accepted and trusted by the masses.

Hopefully that will be a Valve solution. Not Nvidia, MS, Google or Sony.

From that moment on the client will not matter anymore and you will just stream it to your device and from there cast it to your big screen.

Hopefully I’m full of shit and this will never happen. But I’m afraid I’m not.

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0 points

Unless you change physics the latency will never be solved.

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0 points

Latency is a non issue if you make the service even remotely decentralised. One server per EU country is enough to push the latency below 50ms, which is more than playable, even for shooters and MOBAs.

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0 points

I think Gabe has been getting healthy lately. Last picture I saw of him he was looking like he lost a lot of weight. Maybe repost this in 10 years and then we can panic.

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1 point

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