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ono ,

That leaked email conveniently assumes the owner of Valve would sell it. I can’t think of a reason for Gabe to do that.

boo OP ,
@boo@lemmy.one avatar

Right? Its like someone leering at you.

DrVortex ,

Valve was founded in 1996 by former Microsoft employees Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington.

You have no idea how this works.

LoafyLemon ,

Gabe Newell quit working for Microsoft before Windows 3.0 was released. Valve is an employee-owned private company, Gabe Newell ensured that even after his passing, Valve stays true to their roots as long as there's the majority of employees sharing his ideals.

rambaroo ,

No, that’s not how it works. You have no idea how valves shares are spread out and neither does anyone else outside the company. Just because Valve employees own shares does not mean their votes are all equal, in fact they almost certainly aren’t.

LoafyLemon ,

Their text book is publicly available, so I disagree.

Privatepower42 ,

@LoafyLemon @boo @ono @DrVortex @rambaroo what book?

LoafyLemon ,

https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/publications

TWeaK ,

Employee owned businesses are something else, Valve is just a regular privately owned business, one that the owner works for and takes a salary from.

Employee owned businesses are owned by all of the employees, collectively, with a slightly more democratic decision making process. The CEO still makes the decisions, but employees have a right to have their input heard as shareholders. With Valve, Gabe has the final say on everything.

Privatepower42 ,

@TWeaK @LoafyLemon it’s not a co-op. Still, that would be an interesting business model in the gaming space. I think people would be down to support something really alternative. I’m tired of MS and apple and all these business that are still stuck in old school business mindset.

TWeaK ,

Co-ops are owned by a community, eg customers can be members. Employee owned businesses are just owned by the employees. It’s a relatively new thing, however where it’s being implemented in the UK it’s more of a tax fiddle - the business owner gets their business to buy itself from themselves, then the owner gets zero capital gains tax. If you sell a business for £25 million, you save on a £5 million tax bill. It’s great for people looking to get their investment out of a cash-rich business.

It’s still a pretty good idea, but I’m not holding my breath to see the range of companies adopting Employee Owned practice actually pass on all of the benefits to their employees.

Either way though I’m fine with Valve being a private business, at the bare minimum it retains the opportunity of being better than a publicly traded company. Also, it’s not like video games are some essential service that really belongs under social ownership.

Privatepower42 ,

@TWeaK I’m a little confused about the overall post and the UK position since we are talking about an American company but yes, alternative business models are needed. Thank you for contributing.

TWeaK ,

The UK example was more about their method of transitioning from private ownership to employee ownership, basically me going on a tangent to say that it isn’t always all great. However the nature of the different types of business ownership is consistent everywhere, more or less.

  • Private ownership - the business works for the owner(s).
  • Employee ownership - the business works for the employee shareholders.
  • Co-op - the business works for the co-op member shareholders.
  • Publicly traded - the business works for the public shareholders. Additionally, the CEO is bound to this by law (both in US and UK, and most other places I imagine), not just their employment contract, and in practice this means the CEO must pursue profits because that’s always what the vast majority of the stock market wants.

Valve is up there at private ownership, not employee ownership. Arguably employee or co-op ownership might be better, but I’m just happy it’s not public.

Like you say, a co-op business in the game space would be interesting. Something like a mutual insurance company, where the customers also own shares in the business.

kadu ,
@kadu@lemmy.world avatar

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    •
    WarmSoda ,

    Other people work at Valve other than Gabe. It’s entirely possible there’s others in the top management team.

    kadu ,
    @kadu@lemmy.world avatar

    deleted_by_author

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    WarmSoda ,

    What I don’t believe is that you know exactly what the situation is or the people involved and what their plans are.

    kadu ,
    @kadu@lemmy.world avatar

    deleted_by_author

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    WarmSoda ,

    But his son is now focused on his own business and it’s got nothing to do with gaming. Once Gabe is gone, I doubt Valve will remain privately owned and by the same people.

    Ook

    kadu ,
    @kadu@lemmy.world avatar

    deleted_by_author

    •
    WarmSoda ,

    I just did, kid. I just did.

    kadu ,
    @kadu@lemmy.world avatar

    deleted_by_author

    •
    WarmSoda ,

    🙄

    Privatepower42 ,

    @WarmSoda @kadu it needs to be public domain or so that way anyone can get the rights to move forward with steam as the community demands it. An open source license will not go far enough.

    WarmSoda ,

    Yeah. What else would you like in your dream world?
    I would like to be able to fly.

    Privatepower42 ,

    @WarmSoda there’s nothing more powerful than imagination (and dreams).

    WarmSoda ,

    Food and money usually come in close

    A_Random_Idiot ,

    You don’t either. So stop acting like you do.

    WarmSoda ,

    When I act like I know you can say that to me.

    A_Random_Idiot ,

    So like…

    https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/41a41326-eb29-4b24-a243-386cbcd47654.png

    Now?

    WarmSoda , (edited )

    You’re pretty lost right now, aren’t you? That’s ok.

    I’m more concerned that you seem to think Gabe is the only employee that works at Valve. It’s an interesting theory, I’ll give you that.

    A_Random_Idiot ,

    Amazing how quickly you shift the goalposts and try to move the topic away from you.

    WarmSoda ,

    You’re trying way too hard

    A_Random_Idiot ,

    k

    TWeaK ,

    Dude, take your argumentative asshattery back to reddit, please.

    A_Random_Idiot ,

    k

    rambaroo ,

    Obviously other people work there, that doesn’t matter. What matters is who can make legal decisions about the company and I doubt that goes beyond Gabe. He’s a greedy bastard who really only cares about money. He’d make less in the long run if MS bought them out but that doesn’t mean the next person won’t take the payout.

    We’ve needed real alternatives to valve for a long time for this exact reason. They’re already a monopoly. If they get bought out they’ll abuse their status even more than they already have.

    TWeaK ,

    He’s a greedy bastard who really only cares about money.

    What makes you say this?

    Privatepower42 ,

    @TWeaK @rambaroo valve is currently fighting France for the right of consumers to share and resell games purchased on steam.

    TWeaK ,

    Not a surprising position for them to take, but yes that isn’t pro-consumer. I still don’t think that really backs up the statement “He’s a greedy bastard who really only cares about money.”

    jcit878 ,

    They’re already a monopoly

    but they arent. there are plenty of other storefronts out there, albeit many being publisher owned. steam continues to succeed not because it has cornered the market like some monopolies, but because it is pro consumer and actually embraced by its target audience

    ThisIsNotHim ,
    @ThisIsNotHim@sopuli.xyz avatar

    Valve doesn’t have a management team.

    Maybe they could transition to being a worker-owned collective when Gabe wants to retire. I’m not sure what else keeps Valve as we know it alive post Gabe.

    redcalcium ,

    Companies rise and die all the time. Let’s just hope when Valve dies, other (not shitty) company rises to replace it.

    JokeDeity ,

    If Valve dies and I lose thousands of dollars in games, there won’t be another company for me, pure piracy until I die.

    A_Random_Idiot ,

    Its gonna happen.

    Cause its already happened with other services, like Direct2Drive. Lost dozens of games from that being bought/sold/going under/rebranding whatever weird as fuck path its taken to be able to keep my money and not let me have any of the games I bought.

    Digital Distribution is a plague, and most people refuse to look past the tip of their instant gratification to realize it.

    WarmSoda ,

    I argue that digital is good as long as you make backups of your games.

    I have an external drive full of steam games that steam can’t touch. So I’ll always have those games. Barring I lose the drive or don’t transfer the files before it becomes unreadable.

    Another example where digital is good imo is the Switch. Those tiny game cards can suck my ass. If I drop one on my carpet it’ll be gone until next spring. Having multiple games saved on SD cards is the way to go.

    Other than that, I agree.

    A_Random_Idiot ,

    You’re backups wont work if valve ceases to exist, since you need to be logged into a steam account, that owns the games, to restore the backups.

    Same reason my D2D games ceased to work, cause D2D went away, along with their authentication servers.

    WarmSoda ,

    That hasn’t been true for like ten years now.
    Obviously anything that needs an internet connection will require steam. But pretty much almost all single player games do not need steam to run.

    A_Random_Idiot ,

    I didnt say to run the games. I said to unpack the backups.

    Womble ,

    No you dont? You can literally just copy files onto an external hard drive, there is no requirement to use steam to do that.

    TWeaK ,

    It varies a bit from game to game, but typically Steam games are intertwined with Steam in one way or another. You can move the files around, but you need Steam to verify and “fix” the files and their associations afterwards.

    It definitely does vary though. For example, with KSP I was able to just copy the install directory and have many different install folders for different instances of the game (great for version and mod control). For others, I was able to copy the files, but it didn’t run, not until I manually set up Steam to the install directory and did the verify integrity thing.

    A_Random_Idiot ,

    There is a distinct difference between copying the game folder to another drive, and a steam backup.

    uriel238 ,
    @uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

    Oh we did look. Gabe’s promise was to give us warning and an unlock on all our games so it could run without steam. There might be a jam in the rush to download and backup everything.

    I didn’t like digital distribution and have been burned by Stardock (for selling out to Gamestop) and then by Gamestop (for shutting down my account without cause or notice). But Steam is the least offensive of the DD offerings.

    Then again I’ve never been wronged by Steam and others have. Others have, amd I understand Steam support can be ruthlessly cold.

    I still have CD and DVD games I like with no DD alternative sources. (I’ll buy them from GOG when they’re on the cheap just for convenience.) Some of them have exceeded their official shelf lives, and would depend on finding a no-disc-check mod online.

    In this age, we should be able to download a game from any archive and just keep our licenses. But our society and the game industry only gets more and more resentful of its customer base.

    If Steam dies, I’ll likely just pirate relentlessly and only actually buy games whose dev teams I want to support. ( Terraria and DRG serve as good examples – games where lighting and mining are complex mechanics). And the industry will suffer every time a DD platforn enshittifies.

    Wooki ,

    Game only available through Microsoft Xbox online stadia

    redcalcium ,

    Valve did promise their customers will have a way to access their game if the company have to shutdown. But if the company got enshittified instead of dying, suck to the customers I guess.

    rambaroo ,

    I don’t know why people would trust Valve on that. They’ve blatantly lied a bunch of times yet for some reason people let them get away with it.

    xkforce ,

    Money? Remember when people thought that about Mojang?

    dual_sport_dork , (edited )
    @dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world avatar

    Mojang, at least, was not founded by two guys who gave Microsoft the finger on their way out the door at their previous job.

    just_another_person ,

    deleted_by_author

    •
    dual_sport_dork ,
    @dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world avatar

    ?

    Other than the part about tons of money, basically nothing you just said is actually true.

    I also think you’re conflating the person, Markus “Notch” Persson, with the company, Mojang. By the time Microsoft bought Mojang, and Minecraft, Notch had already left any kind of development role on Minecraft years before.

    Notch himself has made several small indie games after Minecraft, none of which were successes. Mojang also made another game after Minecraft, Scrolls (now “Caller’s Bane,” after they got sued by Bethesda over the name). It was also not a success. So much for “not creating anything since.”

    kboy101222 ,

    They’ve also made Minecraft Dungeons and Minecraft Legends. Both of which were meh successes.

    But honestly when you’ve got a cash cow eternity game like Minecraft, why TF would you need to make anything else?

    dual_sport_dork ,
    @dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world avatar

    Because no matter what you do or how well you do it, punters on the internet will act like you still owe them something.

    SkyeStarfall ,

    Gabe seems to be able to handle wealth much better than notch, at least. If he would have been susceptible to falling off the deep end like notch, he would have already done so.

    Privatepower42 ,

    @SkyeStarfall @xkforce how do you know this?

    SkyeStarfall ,

    Know what, that Gabe hasn’t fallen of the deep end like notch? Well, mostly by the lack of any controversy with him personally. Sure that’s not a perfect measure, but it still puts him above notch.

    gamer ,

    This is the biggest problem with Valve at the moment. They’re awesome, but only because of the current leadership. Once these guys retire or die, it’s very likely Valve will enshittify like every other business.

    Valve needs to be hit by regulators at some point. They just have too much market power.

    JokeDeity ,

    I wish the decent guys who started companies would leave a directive for the company that must be followed to prevent it from becoming just another shitty piece of garbage like everything else these days has become thanks to the geniuses with business degrees running the world.

    TWeaK ,

    But there’s no practical way you could hold the future owners of the business to that directive. If you own the business, you get to set the directives, including overwriting previous ones.

    The only way to enforce it is to maintain controlling interest in the business. Or, at least spread the interest among multiple parties so no one person can dictate it.

    strongarm ,

    The best way to do this would be to make the company Employee Owned

    TWeaK ,

    Even then though you could have employees voting to change the direction of the business. If someone offers to buy the business for billions, then it’s possible everyone would vote to accept the sale and change everything.

    The business is always going to change over time.

    rambaroo , (edited )

    Valve is not awesome at all. Ffs, they didn’t become a monopoly by accident. People need to stop worshipping this company just because they started packaging wine with their app.

    This is the same company that literally started the trend of requiring storefronts and custom installers for their games with HL2… the exact same thing people whine about EA and Blizzard doing.

    PC gaming will become a total shit show if Valve dies and they’ll be fully responsible for it.

    TWeaK ,

    This is the same company that literally started the trend of requiring storefronts and custom installers for their games with HL2… the exact same thing people whine about EA and Blizzard doing.

    But the thing is, Valve were never really dicks about it. They gave you a storefront, but it was actually useful. They collected user hardware data, but presented it aggregated to you and didn’t use it for marketing. Valve did many of the things gamers are rightly wary of, and did some of them first, but they rarely did it in a way that was predatory towards their users, like many other businesses do.

    shitescalates ,

    What valve does is so distinct from what most of the industry does the comparison is laughable. Valve is still a company and not our friend sure, but they are not openly anti-consumer like EA or Blizzard. And they don’t abuse their monopolies like Google or Microsoft.

    FreeLikeGNU ,

    just because they started packaging wine with their app

    Even if that’s all they did, that is more than anyone else is doing. What they really did was make nearly every game they sell easily playable without requiring you to use Windows. As byproduct, DXVK (part of Valve’s Proton) provides greater compatibility and performance for Windows users as well (Intel ARC driver and DX9 game support for example). They have salaried employees working exclusively on making this work and their development is open source for anyone to use modify and share. Epic or any other store front could freely take advantage of this work and benefit why don’t they do that instead of whining?

    mlg ,
    @mlg@lemmy.world avatar

    Gaben already refused to sell to EA and made it abundantly clear that we would rather let valve die than go public.

    Microsoft also just recently said they’d buy Nintendo if they could.

    All this means is that Microsoft is filthy rich and still doesn’t know how to make an original quality game studio. They seem to overly rely on buying out studios and IPs that are successful to rake in more money.

    spoilerAll of which reeks of an oligigopoly and reminds me of even worse companies like Oracle and AT&T

    agent_flounder ,
    @agent_flounder@lemmy.one avatar

    Yeah where’s our antitrust enforcement?

    The oligopoly thing has definitely been fucking everything up for decades.

    SkyeStarfall ,

    The funny thing about selling valve, what would it even give for Gabe? He’s already filthy rich. What more could one want with more money?

    Saying no to selling only makes sense in his position, in my opinion. At least I personally would think so. Because then you still keep what is effectively your creation, and can use it to shape the world.

    At some point you really do just have enough money.

    Cethin ,

    Well, the idea is you can do something else with the money instead of it being tied up with that company. You could start another venture if you want to. I’m pretty sure Valve is what he wants to be doing though, so starting a different company isn’t really something he’d want to do.

    greenskye ,

    Even if he doesn’t want to run it, doesn’t mean it has to be sold to another company. It can just keep on being a private company with a new handpicked leader. There’s no upside to selling for Gabe. After he passes however… all bets are off.

    jcit878 ,

    depends who he passes ownership to. it could be a bunch of inheriters who have no interest in owning/running it and it will be forced to sell off to split shares out. or maybe he gifts it to a single person he sees as a successor. who knows, i dont know shit about his family so have no idea

    OldQWERTYbastard ,

    I would trust Gabe’s judgement 100%. Dude runs one of the most pro-consumer companies in history. In doing so, he has built a fiercely loyal fan base by simply being good to his customers; not trying to squeeze them for every single cent.

    Gabe is a rarity; part of a bygone era of business owners and software engineers who truly care about their projects and want to build things that they themselves want to use and play. He’s a smart man and Valve has been his baby since he left Microsoft. He’ll make sure it’s in good hands when and if retirement comes calling.

    variaatio ,

    third option is he sets up some kind of foundation or trust arrangement and testaments his shares to that trust, which is then run by board of trustees as per trust charter. Usually meaning “well board of trustees is entrusted to see to the continued profitable management of the company by selecting suitable new management as comes necessary” combined with possible whatever extra instructions there is as to how to and underwhat principles the company is to be run.

    Be it either private trust to benefit the descendants/described beneficiaries or a charitable trust with funds to be used for charitable causes.

    Family trusts aren’t that unheard of to exactly avoid the splintering of the ownership and thus risk take over bit by bit.

    variaatio ,

    At some point you really do just have enough money.

    Well there is people to whom no amount of money is enough money. Not that it is at that point about, what you can do with that money. Rather by then the amount of money is a leader board and score board all to it’s own. The desire to be Forbes number 1 and then to be forbes number 1 with ever increasing lead to the number 2.

    However all indications are, Gabe Newell isn’t one of those people. He would have had plenty of opportunities to cash out and then do some other business dealings to get ever bigger score card number. Don’t really know exactly what else it would tell of him or his character, but the one thing we can pretty confidently tell is “it seems he isn’t about just singularly amassing ever growing pile of wealth as large as possible”. He would have had plenty opportunity to enrich himself way more aggressively and he didn’t.

    JokeDeity ,

    The thought of another company buying Valve, especially one like Microsoft, makes me actually sick. I have spent so much fucking money on my Steam library at this point. If my Steam library gets jacked by some billionaire dickheads it’s all over, I’m never paying for anything again.

    MonkCanatella ,

    bad news my friend. Valve is owned by a billionaire dickhead.

    JokeDeity ,

    I’m not super informed on the man I guess, please enlighten me.

    SwingingKoala ,
    @SwingingKoala@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

    To some people every billionaire deserves to be shot in the streets just because they were successful.

    leggettc18 ,

    Billionaire, yes. Dickhead? That’s subjective. I’m not gonna worship the man but his actions point to him being among the most pro-consumer of CEOs out there, so I wouldn’t say he’s a dickhead.

    njordomir ,

    Yargghh?! Seriously though, I was furious when they bought Mojang and partially enshittified Minecraft.

    TWeaK ,

    I remember when they bought Rare, then squandered it. They pretty much solely did it to try and stop Nintendo making better games than them.

    Raz ,

    They bought Bethesda because they feared Starfield would become a (timed) PlayStation exclusive. They just bought the entire publisher… And now Activision is next.

    Having said that I’m not a fan of Sony buying Bungie to use their “live service” expertise either.

    WhiskyTangoFoxtrot ,

    Bungie’s been selling themselves out to one megacorporation after another for more than 20 years now. If Sony hadn’t bought them, someone else would’ve.

    uberkalden ,

    This is so stupid. Of course they would buy it. Valve won’t sell, but let’s do the click baits!

    Chunk ,

    Yeah 100% this. Why would you not buy Valve? The store is a cash cow and the userbase is huge. They have a lot of good faith with the community too. These must be rage bait articles.

    DarkThoughts ,

    They can buy the Steam forums.

    hansl ,

    They’d buy Sony and Nintendo if those were up to sell. For the right price (I dunno, in the hundreds of dollars according to my bank account), I’d buy them too.

    sugartits ,

    in the hundreds of dollars according to my bank accoun

    You decadent bourgeois pig

    OldQWERTYbastard ,

    Look at Daddy Warbucks over here.

    Kyrgizion ,

    As long as Gabe lives, this won’t be a problem.

    But he’s getting on in age so this will eventually be an issue, no doubt…

    Zetta ,

    Gabe will have a good successor. Valve has a lot of talented and passionate employees that have been with the company since near the start.

    Anestoh ,

    This nothing email has been making headlines for a week and it’s so frustrating. It’s literally just a guy from outside the gaming division saying “what if” and Phil saying “sure, that’d be neat”

    Four_lights77 ,

    Gaben is one of the few people in tech I trust to resist the money MSFT would be willing to throw at something as successful as valve. I mean - they’re the closest thing to a trustworthy company as you can find these days.

    sugar_in_your_tea ,

    Yeah, I doubt he cares about the money at this point, and he did leave MSFT, so I’m guessing he isn’t interested in selling. He also went out of his way to use Linux to stick it to MSFT.

    As long as he runs the company, I don’t see it happening.

    Sabin10 ,

    Even if he left the company he still has over 50% ownership.

    sugar_in_your_tea ,

    Only if he decides to retain his stake. Let’s say he dies, perhaps his heir chooses to sell instead of stay involved in the company.

    A_Random_Idiot ,

    Eh, I would hardly call Valve trustworthy or the good guy

    I would say don’t worship multi billion dollar companies.

    Especially ones that only give you things you should have always had, like refunds, after being forced to by state lawsuits to force them into compliance with the law.

    I miss the days when you actually owned your fucking games and could loan them to friends or sell them to get something else.

    greenskye ,

    They aren’t the ‘good guy’ but they are one of the few tech companies left that try to make money by selling a product people want to buy. Basically everyone else is just trying to screw people over or sell out to investors as soon as they can.

    That’s not good, but it’s the way people understand and think businesses should be run, even though most modern companies no longer work that way.

    rambaroo ,

    Valve is not worthy of your trust. Gabe won’t sell to MS because Valve is an absolute gold mine and it’s extremely unlikely even MS could make him an offer that actually makes more money for him in the long run.

    TWeaK ,

    I like to think Gabe knows all too well the importance of remaining a private business. Publicly traded businesses are the root cause of a lot of problems in the world.

    azulavoir ,

    I work for a company that has specifically stated it will never do that and has stuck to those guns for 50+ years

    RagingRobot ,

    I work for one who said the same thing then 2 years ago sold for $12 billion dollars to a public company. The employees didn’t get very much of that either.

    Buffalox ,

    A public traded company has way more transparency, I have no idea why you believe privately held companies would be in any way better.

    The problem is often when the original founder of a private company leaves, the company loses its roots and by that its reason to exist. And those two often go together.

    just_another_person ,

    Only more transparency in the fiduciary sense, which only really helps shareholders. All companies are still required to follow any regulatory disclosures, which generally benefits the public and users.

    Valve has only gotten to where they are being on the pulse of the gaming community, and being agile to adapt to those needs. Publicly traded companies only care about profits and shareholders by contract. That’s kind of their job once they go public. Very few buck that trend.

    Buffalox ,

    Yes you are somewhat right. But IMO Valve is what it is because of Gabe Newell, private or public is not the determining factor.

    When Gabe Newell at some point leaves Valve, the company will change, no matter if it stays private or goes public.

    31337 ,

    Large “activist” shareholders (usually fund managers, I believe) often step-in and make demands when the stock isn’t performing as they would like. Gabe could be CEO, but shareholders could threaten to dump stock to get the company to act in a certain way. I believe that was behind all the tech layoffs. My conspiracy-biased mind believes these shareholders sometimes push for things that aren’t exactly in the company’s best interest, but are in the investor’s best interest. E.g. if the fund management company is also heavily in commercial real-estate, they may try to get other companies they are invested in to institute return-to-office mandates. My guess is these big players do all kinds of shady shit (use their influence to control media narratives, politicians, etc).

    Buffalox ,

    Just because a company is public, doesn’t mean control suddenly is with some Capital company.

    Microsoft as an example was absolutely controlled by the founders for decades, before they left the company and handed control over. There is NOTHING different about that, compared to a private company, that can also be traded.

    TWeaK ,

    My point was that Valve could only be what it is without being a publicly traded company. Yes, it also requires Gabe or the business owner to direct the company properly, but there are a range of things that publicly traded companies are legally prohibited from doing.

    Just because a company is public, doesn’t mean control suddenly is with some Capital company.

    Control still primarily lies with the CEO, but the CEO of a publicly traded company is legally obligated to pursue profits above all else.

    Buffalox ,

    Control still primarily lies with the CEO

    No control lies with the owners, a public company can easily have a single or a small group of owners that control the company. Your entire premise is simply false.

    TWeaK ,

    Yes you’re right, the control lies with the owner. The owner is quite often also the CEO with a private company, but the distinction is worth clarifying.

    Strictly speaking, the same is true of publicly traded companies. However with publicly traded companies there is also law that obligates the CEO to act on behalf of the shareholders. The shareholders are the owner, just like with private companies. However a private CEO would just be in breach of their employment contract, a public CEO would be in breach of the law.

    Ultimately the reality of publicly traded companies means that “the CEO works for the owner” in all practical purposes is “the CEO pursues profit above all else”. While it would technically be possible for all the shareholders to vote that the company do something else, in reality that almost never happens - there are too many ways for shareholders to buy into the company and say “no I want money”. Thus, privately owned businesses have the opportunity, under direction from the owner/CEO of behaving differently to publicly traded companies. That doesn’t mean they will, because many private business owners want to make money just the same as public shareholders, but the possibility is much higher.

    Your entire premise is simply false.

    No it isn’t, and the things I’m explaining to you are widely understood.

    meeeeetch ,

    That the shareholders push for things in their interest over that of the company doesn’t exactly strike me as conspiratorial thinking. Nearly everyone in an organization will push for what’s best for them.

    Maintaining a healthy organization is in nearly everyone’s best interest, but if you have a small group of decision makers who are not invested in the health of the organization, they’ll be willing to make decisions at the expense of the organization.

    variaatio ,

    When Gabe Newell at some point leaves Valve, the company will change, no matter if it stays private or goes public.

    Depends how that happens. Since frankly I think people think “the way Gabe Newell leaves ownership of Valve is by him eventually dying”. Since he has never shown any indication to sell. He has offered shares to employees as part of compensation packages, but as I understand even then he has controlling share.

    So ofcourse the most simplest way is “Gabe dies and has done no special arrangement”… shares go to inheritance to his family. So his wife and children. Which might mean nothing changes or everything changes. Maybe he has given private last wishes, maybe not. However they get to decide. They might decide to keep the company as is. Since given they are inheritors of Gabes fortune, not like they would be immediately hurting for cash.

    Second option is… Gabe does actual official arrangements. This isn’t unheard of in case of big private family or personal companies or holdings. For example he might put his shares in a foundation or trust with legally binding last wishes unlike non legally binding personal last wishes. Then what happens is whatever the trust charter is. Given example of say some European industrialist foundadtions like Bosch, instructions are left to run the company as commercial business by board of managers to best benefit of the company finances. However the one option the holders don’t have is “sell the company”, since the shares are hold up in the foundation/trust with instructions “never sell”. Company is to be run profitable enterprise as his and best ability of managers and then… the trust gets the profits and uses them for it’s purposes. It might be a private family trust, where upon the money is then shared to Gabes descendants, but don’t really have say in “we want to cash out, just lump sell our shares”. It could also be as in case of Bosch, that it is charitable foundation. After which all of the business profits of the Bosch conglomerate end up financing various charities, foundations, clinics and so on run by the Bosch stifftung.

    It will change no doubt, since well Gabe isn’t there anymore with his personal personality and well each person has their own personality and influence. However it might not change as much as people think, if say his heirs decide to keep running the company based on same base ethos and principles as Gabe did.

    That or everything might change. Two days after he dies, his estate sells Valve to Electronic Arts.

    Buffalox ,

    Two days after he dies, his estate sells Valve to Electronic Arts.

    As I’ve stated before, it’s 100% up to the owner, not what type of company it is.

    phoneymouse , (edited )

    Gaben used to work at Microsoft and left because he hated it.

    frippa ,
    @frippa@lemmy.ml avatar

    Wow really? This may explain why valve likes Linux so much (at least in part, it’s an untapped market, 10 other reasons etc)

    muhyb , (edited )

    Fun fact, he left Microsoft before the release of Windows 3.

    mammut , (edited )

    I think that must not be right. In this interview, he says that he went around showing Doom to everyone at MS, and he hints that he didn’t leave Microsoft until about 1996.

    muhyb ,

    Also checked Wikipedia and it says “Newell spent 13 years at Microsoft as the producer of the first three releases of the Windows operating systems.” and he stayed at MS until found Valve which is indeed 1996. I guess that was some kind of a joke?

    mammut ,

    Is that why he left? In this interview he makes it sound like he just felt like making games. It seems like he wouldn’t have been at MS for 13 years if he hated it that much.

    cypher_greyhat ,

    I am ruined if this happens. MS would discontinue Proton / Linux and Mac support.

    tallwookie ,

    eh, i dunno. the reason Apple didnt die years ago was due to Microsoft funding back in the late 90s, and they had a linux distro for a while too (or was it unix? I forget). diversifying your interests as a company is one way to grow market share, so steam would probably still exist.

    valve’s not for sale though, so… eh

    gamer ,

    Never give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt.

    cypher_greyhat ,

    You mean Windows NT?

    Anyway, this is an interesting read: …wikipedia.org/…/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

    float ,

    Iirc the funding from MS to Apple was part of a deal they made with the authorities. Not because they wanted to.

    Yearly1845 ,

    deleted_by_author

    •
    A_Random_Idiot ,

    We need a president that carries a big stick, and uses it to beat the shit out of monopolies and billionaires.

    mjhelto ,

    What exactly could a president do? They aren’t kings despite what some would think.

    shitescalates ,

    They nominate positions on the FTC, which is supposed to be responsible for managing monopolies. Recent nominations have shown interest in updating or outdated policies regarding monopolies.

    kboy101222 ,

    What? Microsoft added Linux on top of Windows not long ago with the WSL. I severely doubt they’d discontinue proton or Linux and Mac support

    CarlosCheddar ,

    They would discontinue it because Proton moves users to Linux(or more specifically outside of Windows) which they don’t want. WSL keep users on Windows.

    leggettc18 ,

    Well, Proton is pretty important for the Steam Deck, and I doubt Microsoft would want to kneecap that device, at least while it’s still selling units.

    Also Proton is open source, so while it can get less convenient to use, it can’t really go away.

    leggettc18 ,

    Microsoft made WSL to get market share from web devs who were using Linux or Mac, so they could use a Linux shell for their development while using Windows as their main OS. I wouldn’t use WSL as evidence that they wouldn’t gut Proton support in Steam.

    That being said, the Steam Deck is a very successful device that I doubt Microsoft would want to get rid of, and Proton is pretty vital for that, so they’d probably keep Proton going because of that. They might still seek to make the next revision of the Steam deck run a Windows based OS though.

    dis_honestfamiliar ,

    I don’t think so. MS is more interested in moving customers to the cloud. So whatever gets more people to use the cloud.

    cloud based os

    BackOnMyBS ,
    @BackOnMyBS@lemmy.world avatar

    getting rid of linux support may cause people to switch to windows, if not prevent people from switching to begin with…at least that’s how executives in ms would think

    qwertyqwertyqwerty ,

    Gabe has been a large proponent of avoiding the kind of consolidation that Microsoft is doing. He saw the writing on the way years ago when Valve released the Steam consoles. I don’t think (and certainly hope) that he wouldn’t sell.

    headmetwall ,

    Day 1 of suddenly having the urge to keep an offline and DRM free copy of all my steam games.

    reonu ,

    The article says Microsoft would like to buy Valve. Of course they do. Valve is actively working against Microsoft’s interests (and we have to thank them for that).

    It does not say Gabe Newell has the slightest intention to sell. Because he doesn’t.

    headmetwall ,

    Yea, but Gabe is not going to be around forever, and any successor leadership might have a different philosophy. And it’s never a bad idea to have a backup.

    AceFuzzLord ,

    I hope to god he personally takes a someone he wants as his company successor under his wing and mentors them under his ways so that we may not worry as much. That’s if he doesn’t already have one or doesn’t have plans for it.

    festus ,

    Yeah for a while now I’m been buying games on GOG where possible and keeping an archive of them, because I know at some point every company will eventually let you down.

    Privatepower42 ,

    @festus @headmetwall how do you make sure that when you load up a gog game that it does not launch the gog launcher? What are the steps?

    festus ,

    The GOG launcher is optional (I don’t use it). On their website you can download offline installers for every game you own, and these installers don’t require the GOG launcher or any account authentication.

    Privatepower42 ,

    @festus where is this offline installer, exactly? Link? I just get hit with the gog new launcher option being advertised on the site.

    festus ,

    …gog.com/…/213148105-How-do-I-download-my-purchas… has as the second option how to download the offline installers.

    Privatepower42 ,

    @festus nice. So what’s the point of the gog launcher app after this? Anyways, I prefer to use heroic. Much lighter and easier.

    festus ,

    Honestly I’m not sure - as I said I don’t use it. I know of at least one game that’s “DRM-free” but requires the GOG launcher for multiplayer (No Man’s Sky). That’s fairly controversial and I think the only reason why it’s on GOG is because it came onto GOG back when it was a singleplayer only game.

    Privatepower42 ,

    @festus do you know why I get this error message using gog on heroic on the Steam Deck?

    festus ,

    Sorry, unfortunately I don’t use heroic.

    XenoStare ,

    Did everyone conveniently forget that Steam DRM is the reason why Steam came to prominence, and why it was ever used by any devs in the first place. Yes it’s easily cracked and barely an anti-piracy measure, even admitted by Valve, but it is still DRM.

    Privatepower42 ,

    @XenoStare @headmetwall that’s right. Steam is a business. They are not really for open source. Open source, is still a business model. It’s not public domain or libre software. Then can always make their stuff closed source at anytime. Just need to gather free work from the community and to elevate its private business. Still, there are articles detailing Valve as anti-consumer. It’s a search bar away.

    DAMunzy ,

    I love Steam (have 2000 or so games on it) but I realize it is only a matter of time before it gets enshittified.

    betsysoul ,

    Maybe, but it’s still a private company.

    TwilightVulpine , (edited )

    Yeah, there is some hope for as long as Valve isn’t publicly traded. It’s investors that push companies to care only for short term gains.

    Valve is not saintly, they have their own sketchy aspects like how they profit over that cosmetics trading market, but releasing the Steam Deck shows they are still thinking of the long term future of PC gaming.

    turbowafflz ,

    I think valve will be okay as long as they have Gabe Newell, since it seems like he really does care about things like linux support. I’m worried what will happen if he ever leaves though

    BlemboTheThird ,

    the man is 60 and morbidly obese. even if he never leaves there’s every chance he’ll have sudden health problems. at least he’d have the money for good medical treatment

    mammut ,

    That doesn’t guarantee much of anything, though, and private companies still have investors that can influence the direction of the company. E.g., a lot of people are wary of Tencent’s influence over Epic or Reddit even though both are private.

    variaatio , (edited )

    Well the thing is … yes Valve has shareholding investors… Only one that matter as far as anyone knows is Gabe Newell. Given it’s private corp, they don’t have to publicly tell what his exact ownership is and I think it is known it isn’t anymore 100% unlike at some point. However all “as far as we know” indications are, Gabe Newell maintains 50%+ controlling shareholding. Rest of the shareholders as people understand are employees and ex employees, who got private shares as part of compensation packages.

    We don’t have actual look at the books, but Valve people have on multiple occasion said “Valve doesn’t have external investors”. Given it was public official comments by official people, I would think they wouldn’t lie about it. So there is no external VCs or share external investor investors.

    Gabe pretty much has probably pretty universal control only limited by business regulation and maybe whatever clauses the corporate charter has. However since he was at one point sole owner, I doubt it contains anything too much curtailing him. Since the way any other people have gotten shares is by Gabe agreeing to give them or sell them to people in the first place.

    As far as I understand at no point has Valve been cash strapped such as to need to ask for external investors. Since it is company founded by two early ex-Microsoft people who had made decently money at Microsoft already before Founding Valve. Gabe ended as sole owner as the other founding owner decided to leave the business and Gabe bought him out.

    mammut ,

    One person being the majority shareholder doesn’t stop people from worrying, though. Epic is majority owned by its founder like Valve is, but everybody still points to the minority investors and says, “What about their influence?”

    In any case, my point is more that just being private isn’t some kinda of magic bullet to forever avoiding outside influence. It’s possible that, eventually, the other 49% not controlled by Gabe have sold out to Tencent and they’re in the same position as a lot of other companies with outside investors holding just under the majority.

    betsysoul ,

    That’s true, but Gabe still owns over half the stock, and I doubt he’s looking to sell.

    Honestly I just assume Valve is Gabe’s hobby workdesk at this point.

    thedeadwalking4242 ,

    I imagine they would immediately drop proton and move the steam deck too some windows bs

    kautau ,

    Windows CE is back babyyyyyyyy!

    Lmaydev ,

    This brings back nightmares from my first job!

    WuTang ,
    @WuTang@lemmy.ninja avatar

    no, especially not. After messing/locking down gaming for 2 decades and people having doing the job in porting/reverse engineer their API, etc… they will simply exploit it without any effort.

    MSFT is evil, it does not “love” opensource (which is only TS and .NET), it just came with their massive war treasure and eat the effort of people while having been the MAIN responsible of slowing down innovation!

    derpgon ,

    They pretend they love FOSS. “Look, we own GitHub, the biggest FOSS code sharing platform!”. Of course, because you bought it you morons.

    For the love of God, please Valve never sell out. I love the current state of things and every day I dread someone might get a bad idea and fuck it all up for the rest of us to enrich himself.

    I am not sure if there are any failsafes in the BoD at Valve, but I am sure as long as Gabe is at the helm, we are all safe.

    WuTang ,
    @WuTang@lemmy.ninja avatar

    only millennials and JS soyboy devs think that MSFT is good opensource boy, they didn’t grow up during while Ballmer/Gates were in charge and didn’t notice how nasty MSFT was for the computing and still is.

    Krzak ,

    It’s impossible for me to understand not having enough. M$ is like some megacorp villain that wants to swallow everything

    jaxwxboss ,
    @jaxwxboss@fosstodon.org avatar

    @Krzak @boo There used to be much more diversity in the marketplace, but those are bygone days.

    Power, influence and greed are the prime movers these days and whowever is in a position to monopolize on this will have a caravan of equally minded people who will agree to participate in the slaughter of the free marketplace just for a piece of the action.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVxYOQS6ggk

    stepbro ,
    @stepbro@lemmy.world avatar

    Thugs4less LOL

    sep ,

    Always has been.

    clutch ,

    When one company in an industry has nearly endless cash, as Microsoft and Apple do, it is natural that everyone else would be seen as acquisition targets

    TWeaK ,

    The difference is Valve is completely privately owned, Microsoft cannot force a sale.

    With a publicly traded business, the business must be run in the interests of the shareholders, ie it must pursue profits above all else. Thus a buyer can effectively present “an offer you can’t refuse”, at least the business can’t refuse on behalf of shareholders (maybe the shareholders could vote and refuse). With a private business the owner generally has free reign to run the business as they see fit, they could run it into the ground if they so desired.

    So it doesn’t matter how much cash Microsoft or whoever have, so long as Gabe doesn’t want to sell.

    jjjalljs ,

    So long as Gabe doesn’t like die or have a personality changing stroke. Not sure what Valve’s plans are for his retirement

    ILikeBoobies ,

    Selling to Microsoft would be a good retirement plan

    AceFuzzLord ,

    According to Forbes, as of today, his net worth is apparently $4.3 billion. That man could quit now and live a very comfortable life until he dies.

    rip_art_bell ,
    @rip_art_bell@lemmy.world avatar

    People would riot. GOG would have a massive influx of traffic.

    boo OP ,
    @boo@lemmy.one avatar

    Not likely, GOG barely has any reach

    mammut ,

    I agree. I’m surprised people are convinced that everyone would just leave a service they’ve been using for years once it starts to suck.

    First of all, all your purchased games will only work on Steam, so you’re probably not going to just abandon it and give up access to all your previous purchases. And then you’re going to think to yourself, “Well, since I have to keep using Steam anyway, and since all my friends are here, I guess I’ll just keep buying games here anyway.”

    Second of all, people, historically, just continue to use large services even when they go to shit / evidence that they’ve gone to shit comes to light. Hell, even when substantially better services show up, people don’t just suddenly switch.

    bgtlover ,

    @mammut @boo agreed, and that's what they rely on, though valve isn't by far the worst offender here

    auraness ,

    The irony of saying that on Lemmy.

    BlemboTheThird ,

    reddit is still wildly popular. lemmy’s user numbers have been dropping over the last 2 months. it’s way more active than it was before june but if anything the lemmy/reddit masto/twitter dynamic is emblematic of how things would go

    Draedron ,

    Which isnt nearly as popular as reddit and has decrrasing user numbers. I don’t see the irony, more that lemmy is proving the point

    mammut ,

    Lol. I left Reddit for Lemmy, and I continue to use Lemmy. I am very much the exception and not the norm, though.

    I will be very, very surprised if Lemmy ends up growing more popular than Reddit at any time in the near future. As others have pointed out, Lemmy’s popularity has been decreasing and Reddit’s popularity has not substantially decreased. There’s still way more people and content on Reddit than there is on Lemmy, and I don’t think there’s any evidence there was any real mass exodus. Some people left, but it was basically a rounding error in the grand scheme of things. I would expect the same even if Microsoft, Tencent, Activision, or pretty much anyone else were to buy Steam. People may get irritated, and some people may even leave and never come back, but most people generally want to just continue using the services they’re used to.

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