Treating your customers decently can lead to profits in the long run. What an insight. They should teach that at business schools.
Valve has fundamentally different goals from Microsoft and Sony
Microsoft and Sony want to increase profit a couple percentage for the next quarter
Valve wants to be profitable 10, 20, 30 years into the future
Thing is, they have been doing this for over a decade. Publicly traded companies can’t compete long-term, if there’s a well funded provate competitor
Publicly traded companies can’t compete long-term, if there’s a well funded private competitor
That’s why these companies love the idea of purchasing half the industry or using their resources to operate at a loss and squeeze out private competitors.
If they can’t compete, they can consolidate.
Then trust busting needs to happen
Thing is, they have been doing this for over a decade. Publicly traded companies can’t compete long-term, if there’s a well funded provate competitor
Of course they can, they can use the same aim. Problem is it’s more profitable to grind a company down, let it bankrupt and do the same to the next company. Hence enshittification arrived, venture capital has a full playbook for dismantling companies from the inside.
There’s still a few old bastions wanting stability, Coca Cola Group is the most obvious example of this
its not actually more profitable though. its only more profitable today, at the expense of future profits. this is more a problem caused by personal gain being directly linked to short term corporate gain. its only rational behavior from the perspective of the individual executives benefitting from the crazy compensation packages for laying everyone off and enshittifying the product. literally everyone else loses unless they get lucky and bail at just the right moment.
That’s only true in an old model of individual investors who go to shareholder meetings and stay with a company forever. That’s not how the world has worked for decades and decades.
Most rich people don’t have investments in individual stock. They don’t give a fuck if a company goes bust or not. Their investments are in giving out loans, bonds, funds etc. They park their money in a family office, and their money moves around the world more than an air steward.
If a company’s stock goes down 1% they diversify into other stock. They sell to buy gold.
It really isn’t “worse in the long-term” for them. The wealthy. They are getting richer faster than any other period of history and you think they are dumb…? Not working in their own best interest? Even in the long-term…?
They pay people dozens of millions a year to make them the most money possible forever. People absurdly more intelligent than any of us here. People who would centuries ago be genius scientists.
I’m sure they know what they are doing. And they are winning and we are losing.
The big investors are earning money on it, the suits has done the calculations and they’re earning a few percentages more a year dismantling companies than they would, had they chosen stability
Parts of it is also how safe of a bet it is to dismantle, as big capital likes safe investments. Which is largely also why AAA isn’t innovative anymore, they consider it too big of a risk to invent a new wheel
Online subscription is a joke at this point
But what about number go up this quarter?
The gaming industry is fine. The “wall street gaming industry” is not.
It’s about time these corporate feral hogs start to feel the pain of the free market but they deserve much worse, bankruptcy. Xbox still exists, no leaders were laid off, their parent company still supports genocide, and this is all a problem.
Do you really want your games to pay for 8-10 figures a year for a hollow executive team’s risk free compensation? One where they have 0 liability, $0 of their own money on the line, literally not even gamers, to be the last word on what games make it into our hands and how they wring our wallets dry?
Reminds me of the film Air and the principle “If we do the right thing we’ll make money damn near automatic.”
But I need a return on my investment now! Short term profits! Short term profits! SHORT TERM PROFITS!
Best I can do is create shareholder value by making our product shittier and more expensive. Take it or leave it kid
maybe someone should tell them we’re leaving it. it doesnt seem like theyre noticing.
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One appears to actually like their customers and the other two are actively hostile towards them. I’m sure somebody at Microsoft/Sony are scratching their heads trying to figure out what’s wrong.
Sony’s disc move just screams of a corporate accountant trying to improve the financials and they pick one of the dumbest options to cut costs on. Retailers are obviously upset as digital download cards probably sell like crap compared to physical copies. Outside of gifts I have no idea why anybody would bother.
Also worth mentioning Sony’s CEO and CSO sold 56% and 18% of their shares 2 days after the disc announcement to the tune of millions.
Sony has a 457m lawsuit against them for antitrust issues which they’ve historically defended with…physical disc sales. So I’m happy to see that decision blowing up in their face and I’ll wait for the outcome on that.
That’s the point. It’s not about the disc. It’s about cutting out retailers.
Games sell at the same price or cheaper at the retailer as they do digitally, and the retailer takes a cut. Games sold through PSN or the Xbox store make Sony and Microsoft way more money.
And that’s before we get to used sales.
Don’t get me wrong - not to argue. Hate the fact that they’re doing this but asking this genuinely objective point of view.
Why should retailers’s business would be concern to Sony? Isn’t this similar if I was an iron supplier and decided to not sell my materials to one manufacturer that I’m not tied with an agreement, just because I’ve decided not to?
One could argue, with video games specifically, that they lose part of the market without the retailer.
A lot of games are played by kids, and parents, friends, and other family members still go into a store and buy a game to give as a gift.
Sony doesn’t want to come out and say “Best Buy can get fucked” because Best Buy still sells headphones, TVs, and other products Sony makes, including the Playstation itself. They need the retailers to sell their products.
But with digital goods, they can cut out the retailers retailers. The $10 bucks or whatever the retialer would get now goes to Sony.
Tell me again how many discs valve is selling? What happens to your steam account when you die?
I like valve, but don’t fool yourselves, Gabe N does not give a shit about the customers any more than Asha or Hideaki.
Well, that’s just objectively incorrect. Gabe at least recognizes that piracy is a service problem and being consumer friendly is more profitable in the long-term. People like Asha and Hideaki can’t seem to figure that one out no matter how much evidence is given to them.
i love steam but he does raise a good point. vavle explicitly said that steam acc is legally not transferable. there’s no second hand market and your library is legally gone for good when youre gone.
no matter how good valve is right now. the threat of enshittification is real, and will remain so until the discourse of the right of owning digital game is settled.
Oh yeah, Steam is not perfect by a long stretch. It mostly looks good by comparison with it’s competitors who appear to take being gently asked NOT to shit directly down their customers throats as basically a death threat. Was just pointing out that saying Gabe doesn’t give a shit is incorrect, as he does give a shit insofar as giving a shit has actually turned out to be the best long term strategy for Steam’s profits.
That said, Steam actually does have a history of honouring wills to transfer a dead persons library to someone else on death, despite that technically being disallowed by their ToS. So they aren’t bound to do it legally, but they do currently tend to. Which honestly might get them into some legal hot water if they ever try to enforce that term.
Why would I want more plastic crap? I have zero issue with this.
My account is my entertainment, I see no reason to have it after I die. My kids don’t want it, they have their own.
The savings and convenience far outweighs any second hand retail. I am glad I don’t have to burden my kids and family with even more physical crap they would have to toss out.
Valve is one of the few companies that has historically honored people’s bequests and allowed bequeathing their libraries to others after they die. Unlike say Apple who has outright said that your iTunes purchases disappear into the ether when you die.
Valve’s main advantage is they don’t have to make up heinous policies in the quarterly game of “tug off the shareholders”.
It’s all been fucked by AI RAM and SSD (and still GPU) prices. If anyone tries for a next gen £1000 console, they’ll be going the same way as Sega.
Now if only they can bring down the cost of the Steam Deck and Steam Machine
I have a theory.
The “casual” or “mainstream” crowd, the one that used to buy CoD, FIFA, Madden, Sims and such yearly like clockwork, has transitioned to phone apps, or sports betting/fantasy.
Their attention has been robbed from consoles.
Meanwhile, “games as art” gamers that treat them more like movies are less affected, especially with the state of smartphone app stores. That segment continues to grow on PC, and maybe even consoles, but the attrition of the first group masks that for the console crowd.
I’d postit that another factor is Steam’s rising market share coming at the expense of other PC gaming storefronts. For market purposes, it effectively is PC gaming now.
Then explain the worldwide sensation that is the Switch. Logically speaking, that thing, if you can even call it a thing, shouldn’t have worked, it made no sense financially nor economically.
It totally does. My sister got it to play Pokopia and Animal Crossing. I know of families that have gotten it for their kids, for similar reasons.
I’m not saying it’s a smart buy, but not everyone is a seasoned, mature gamer. If you have a decent budget, zero spare time, no experience with PCs, and your young kid is dying to play Pokopia like all their friends, a Switch 2 makes sense. As a plus, it’s not a tablet where you have to deal with straight up scam apps, nor a expensive PC where you need some technical know-how and a lot of oversight to make it safe for one’s kid.
The Xbox and PlayStation, on the other hand, have lost that niche, as they aren’t strictly needed to play Fortnite or whatever media is en vogue these days. It’s not like when I was a kid and literally my whole grade had Xboxes to play CoD and Halo.
I never got a PlayStation but I was holding out for a PlayStation 6 once it finally got released. If there is no version for physical discs I will definitely not be getting one. Nothing worse then wanting to play a game you haven’t played in a while and then having to redownload it because you had to delete it to free up space for other games.
So much nicer just to be able to throw a disc in and go.
Or run into weird licensing issues you have no control over and the $80 game you bought no longer exists.
Or you still have the game but they just removed the sound track and changed some of the character’s faces.
Nothing worse then wanting to play a game you haven’t played in a while and then having to redownload it…
Not even Dermatobia hominis? Or anthropogenic climate change? Or like, genocide?
That’s funny because you describe the play station even when you have the physical disks.
I wanted to get a PS5 but since almost the only thing I’m actually interested in playing on it is Demon Souls I figured I’d wait until they got a lot cheaper before picking up a console exclusively to play like 2-3 games. Then AI drove the prices way up, Sony added 30 day online checks for their games, and now a digital only PS6 means I’ll probably not be getting anything from them for a long time.
Valvle is the only only one supporting Linux!. The rest are greedy fucks.
Being customer friendly. What a novel idea.
20 years ago, the exact opposite was said about Steam and they didn’t change much. People just got used to it.
Sure they didn’t change much if you ignored all the improvements they made to the platform.
If they didn’t the other competitors wouldn’t be irrelevant today.
They literally cornered the digital sales market from the very beginning with HL2. It has nothing to do with “improvements to the platform”. By the time other companies had the infrastructure to try to catch up it was far too late. If you wanted to sell a PC game digitally, you had to do it on steam.
So much ridiculous counterfactual revisionist history in this thread.
By the time other companies had the infrastructure to try to catch up
How many years did it take epic to implement a shopping cart for their store? It’s so horrible they’re scrapping it and rebuilding from scratch. Almost a decade and they couldn’t get the basics right.
They haven’t changed much? They have like literally a million more games available on their store now.
The basic principle is the same: a DRM-enabled online store, and more often than not the only source for certain games, a monopoly.
And with those resources they decided to make a huge long term investment in making PC gaming on windows optional, then even the worse experience. Don’t see that loser Tim sweeny doing anything of that value… It’s not exactly a monopoly either… You can install any other available store on your pc, unlike consoles. More competition would be great but steams market share was earned in an environment that wasn’t a walled garden.
DRM is not required by Steam. Developers choose to add it.
No difference from a customer perspective.
Thats like blaming the hotel because your vacation had bad weather.
More like blaming the traveling platform when all hotels use a crappy feature they provide and no one asked for.
No.
As a person who resisted hard 20 years ago, they earned it. I didn’t get used to it, I found value. In cloud saves, in steam sales, in no pushy advertising, and so on.
As a Linux user over 20 years they also did what nobody else really tried. That matters a lot.
My husband remembers buying The Ship in a store, and when he went to install it out said he had to install something called Steam for the multiplayer. He was baffled and annoyed.
Now all the games we have save a few from GOG are steam.
They failed at first attempt with steamOS, but they learned the lesson, and came back swinging with years of preparation.
Yeah the steam “sales” that cost more than used physical games because valve killed them. How generous of Gabe.
The steam cult among PC gamers is fucking absurd. Valve did more damage to PC gaming than any other company on the planet.
If it weren’t for national and local governments repeatedly suing them we wouldn’t even have their meager 2 hour refund policy.
I feel like this is not rocket science here, this is like business 101.
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Make the customer happy
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Enjoy increased sales and revenue
N,o, it is economics and at some point over the last decade or so companies decided that the customer should be subjected to a constant shift of quality until it arrives at a level where it is the worst they are possibly willing to accept. Quality down profits up. Welcome to our new world.
This is the new “the customer is always right” attitude.
The concept of “firing your customers” even became part of marketing strategy in the last decade. Amazing what kind of nonsense bubbles up out of the muck when markets see less competition.
profits down but stocks rise with increased investment.
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Are they? Their returns policy is crap compared to GOG. Not sure how its even legal for them to refuse refunds just because you used a product for over 2 hours.
Its clear that PC is the future console. I’ve been buying in GOG primarily, and Steam only when it is not available there and has no chance of ever being there. Even your Android TV can play light games with GameNative installed
I hear this every time: CEOs and Exec management of companies telling their employees that costs of production or whatever have gone up, there is need for layoffs in order for the company to stay afloat. At the end of the fiscal year: champagne bottles popping because record profits have been made… and we all play along in this circus show
It is theft. Just plain theft. They don’t know jack about running they’re companies so they resort to just running it into the ground and then running away with the cash.
Executives have obligation to the board of directors and shareholders to constantly bring record profits. Technically they are doing exactly what they are paid to do.
Until that changes, every large corporations will continue to enshittifiy everything for profits.
No mention of Nintendo.
Fuck yeah, love you Valve.
Love your contributions to Linux more though.
Gaben-kun will notice you
Maybe he’ll even send me a Steam Frame! Or a yacht! I heard he has a bunch of those.
Ew. That’s a corporation. Stop.
If a corporation does something good, it’s OK to say, “Hey, good job. I love that!”
If a corporation does something legitimately shitty, it’s definitely OK to criticize them mercilessly too (I do it all the time, would recommend).
What’s not OK is trying to tell me people what they can or can’t praise/criticize.
You said “Fuck yeah, love you Valve.” Loving a corporation is weird. Loving the actions is less-so.
Maybe you’ve have enough Internet for today but before you go, allow me to explain:
When someone says something like that, they don’t literally mean it.
“I love tacos” does not actually mean that I have genuine feelings of love for them (even if they are delicious).
It’s just a phrase.
Ah, so I guess I shouldn’t take it as “Valve is a good actor” at all? That’s just the wrong interpretation or something? Valve is not an actor. It cannot be a good one. For profit corporations are, by definition, not aiming for net positivity.
Tacos are not actors. No one says “I love tacos” because they witnessed tacos acting in a behavior they deemed ‘good’. They say “I love tacos” because it gives them satisfaction when they eat them. No one says “I love Meta” in the same way people say “I love Tacos” because they think Facebook is a good actor for doing some open source stuff. No one says “I love Meta” because “I love Meta” is “just a phrase” as you put it. That makes no sense.
Tacos are not actors.
I’m taking this out of context and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Good lord you people are so gross. It’s actually more than OK for me to tell you that worshiping some greedy billionaire is an insane and unhealthy thing to do.
Go touch grass, Gabe doesn’t give sit about anything except making huge gobs of money. Steam fanboys are a bunch of weirdos.
Holy shit who said anything about worshiping? Unhinged response. Follow your own advice and touch some grass buddy.
The echo chamber on this platform is spacious.
I dunno, even if it results in billions or even trillions of humans deaths, I’d rather corpo die than let one thrive. The best form of economics that is not only financially but morally sounds is that of anarchy
You probably should stop having your own opinions, you really suck at them.
You’d rather the entire human race be wiped out than a corporation do well?
Steam sales.
Are poop now.
The key is being consistent and transparent. We got gut punched by the Steam Machine price, but it was an expected and transparent outcome. XBOX and Sony are so volatile that it’s making Steam look like a saint. From laying people off, to constant price increases, to the disc situation. Both these companies need to chill tf out.
Add to this MS buying up all of these game studios to do nothing with them and then kill them because they’re so inept.
Their actions look like a typical monopoly. Buy competition to destroy it later so you’re the only one in business.
Microsoft, monday morning: “how the fuck do we buy Linux?”
That is the entire content of the Microsoft’s Guide to Business Practices.
One page, one sentence.
Embrace, Extended, Extinguish.
The only issue is that Trump can cut you off from your steam library if his regime targets you with arbitrary sanctions.
That is bad but so far Players in sanctioned countries can still play on Steam, just not make purchases. Countries like Russia and Iran still have Steam players as long as their governments aren’t blocking external internet.
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People use steam outside of the USA
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The federal government can prevent an American firm from serving a foreign customer.
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I agree there are workarounds. But it would be a massive heartbreak to lose the game collection that took years to build.
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Valve corporation is an American company. America has used visa and mastercard to target ICC judges who also live outside the US. If the government wants they can try and strongarm Valve to do their bidding
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