Look, I got hit with that stupid 2011 data breach PSN had and I still get scam emails with details from that due to the unique stuff I put in my various accounts. I’m not going to try to resurrect my now defunct account or create a new one so they can do more data mining and lose more of my PII, again.
I think there are important considerations to keep in mind.
First and foremost, Valve is not a public company. I don’t know if it has investors, but it is not driven by profits like many typical public companies are. These companies tend to allow themselves longer investments without any clear visibility of immediate profits. They also do things for the greater good, even though it does not bring profits.
But also, I think the whole of valve is a set of gamers and people who genuinely care about the gaming business and making great products. I think they all share Gabe’s values and goals. It’s not like Gabe is the only one holding everything together or else it would instantly crash into the profit driven company it could be.
Both of these scenarios keep me hopeful that this is a longer lasting stance and doesn’t hinge on just one person. It’s not a proof it will never be a typical profit company but these are barriers which are not typically present. Let’s hope for the best and keep rewarding them for their contributions to gaming, open source and for their good actions.
I don’t understand where this myth came from that if a company is a public that they aren’t potentially ruthlessly profit driven.
Valve is not special. Gabe is to a certain degree (though I would also caution people from deifying anybody period). We can never take for granted that the valve and steam experience we largely enjoy today will be there tomorrow. That’s a simple fact.
It’s not that they can’t still be profit driven, it’s that they can’t be sued by investors for not being ruthlessly profit driven. Private just means that they have the choice at all
In the US, there are multiple Supreme Court precedent cases that force profit-maximizing. Shareholders can sue the CEO and board to maximize profit seeking.
So yes, increasing shareholder value is enshrined in US law. Only private corporations can get around that rule. Also, a corporation cannot be forced to break the law to maximize profits, that’s just something most CEO’s are willing to do for fun.
I didn’t say people don’t redline publicly traded companies. I’m saying not being public doesn’t mean leadership won’t. I’ve personally seen it plenty of times.
Also, “fiduciary duty” (the “Supreme Court cases” I’m assuming you’re vaguely referring to) does not mean a CEO needs to always slam the gas at all times to maximize every single red cent at the cost of all medium and longterm considerations. This is a commonly parroted assertion by people online without a basis. “Fiduciary duty” and other obligations to the shareholders simply mean they can’t make obviously bad decisions that will hurt the shareholders. They don’t get hauled off by the Investor Police if they make a single longterm decision at the expense of a little short term profit.
All of this isn’t to say we don’t see it happen all the time anyway. But if it was so strict we’d see more CEO’s hauled off, not golden parachutes everywhere as they break their companies apart.
So yes, increasing shareholder value is enshrined in US law. Only private corporations can get around that rule.
This is true, with one exception.
There are non-profit corporations. They have to declare that they are non-profit at the time of foundation, though. They have to write that in the statute (idk what it’s called in English, it’s “Satzung” in German).
Publicly traded companies are, by law, driven to make as much money as possible for shareholders. Privately held companies are not held to this same limitation. So while a company like Valve could be highly profit-driven (let’s be honest, all for-profit companies in a capitalist system are driven by this motivation), it doesn’t seem to be driven to maximize profits in the short term. This means that they can focus on things other than profit if they so choose.
There is a common belief that corporate directors have a legal duty to maximize corporate profits and “shareholder value” even if this means skirting ethical rules, damaging the environment or harming employees. But this belief is utterly false. To quote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the recent Hobby Lobby case: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.”
For-profit vs. Non-profit is an entirely different distinction under US law, with specific legal definitions for each. This is entirely separate under US law from publicly traded vs. privately owned, which has separate specific legal definitions.
Valve is a for-profit privately owned company. That is what allows it to not maximize shareholder value, and is the unstated distinction that allows your quote to be true.
For-profit publicly traded companies do have a legal responsibility for such.
I don’t want to quote dump multiple paragraphs, but Stout explicitly explains that’s not correct in the following paragraphs, citing relevant case law where appropriate.
I’m not a lawyer, but that article reads pretty clearly to me; I’d be interested to hear if you read it and get a different interpretation.
More important than who works there is who inherits Gabe’s ownership of the company. A new owner can completely change a company and drive out or fire anyone who doesn’t go along with the new direction. Look at what happened with twitter when Musk took over. Or his inheritors could take Valve public and introduce all the issues with that.
It would be so awesome if they went employee owned. I get the impression the employees are people who are passionate about video games. I feel that they would choose leadership that is both good for the community and good for the long-term health of the company.
Im totally with arrowhead here. I wasnt aware of PSN being banned in countries either and at least theyre trying their best to make it right again. I dont think theyre burning goodwill, sony is though.
I’m with Arrowhead as well, none of this shit is coming from them, it’s coming from Sony. The most you can criticize them for is partnering with Sony in the first place.
I think it’s pretty shitty from Arrowhead as well, because they knew six months in advance that PSN requirement was going to happen and said nothing. That should’ve been stated front and center when people bought the game.
Came to the comments to say exactly this. The rootkit debacle was the end of the road for me and Sony. They’re still exactly the same company, and this move proves it.
A related thing that annoys me, if you start Steam manually, it takes ~30 seconds to launch and it will steal your focus multiple times during launch. So annoying!
What many posters in this thread fail to realize is that there is a very good reason why steam hasn’t been hit by the enshittification that otherwise transcends human existence in 2024.
Of course, Gaben as their CEO has the last say in it. And he’s just a good guy. But wait, aren’t there other companies that have good guys as their CEO and yet the enshittification persists?
The profound reason is that Valve is not a publicly traded company. They have no obligation to any investors to make number go up. They are a private company, they can do whatever the fuck they want. If they stay flat and keep paying their employees, that’s totally fine, and there is 0 pressure on them to change anything. THAT‘s why Valve seems like such a different company compared to everything else that’s out there.
Of course it’s still a choice to go public or not, and they have made the right call (for us consumers).
there is a very good reason why steam hasn’t been hit by the enshittification that otherwise permeates human existence in 2024.
Come again? Steam is enshitifed af. from forcing CS:GO players to move to CS:2 to adding DRM left and right, they do it all. They even release remasters of old games that are essentially always broken one or another.
Steam doesn’t control the quality of remasters. That’s up to publishers. I’m not the most active gamer and might have missed something, but didn’t valve release a major revamp to the way the Library and Store were layed out in the past year or two? They also recently expanded family sharing and remote co-op. The only L I can remember in recent memory is the whole “You can’t leave your games to another person when you die”
Based take imo. I think many posters fail realize the insane amount of money steam makes Valve. Rough estimates are that Steam sold 400 million games last year. Average cost for a game is ~$15.5. Steam has a platform fee of 30%. That means that, roughly, Steam made Valve ~1.86 billion dollars just through the sell of games. Not considering microtransactions or hardware sells. Reportedly, Valve made 1 billion dollars just off cases from CS2 crate openings. Let’s just give Valve the benefit of the doubt and assume they made $5 billion dollars last year.
Impressive, but honestly not that impressive when you consider that Xbox brought in 18 billion and PlayStation brought in 30 billion last year. However, if you factor in that Xbox has a head count of ~$20,100 and Sony has one of ~12,700. While Valve has a head count of about ~400. We see that Xbox and Sony are bringing in about $900K and $2.4M per head respectively. Valve is bring in 12.5M per head. Plus Xbox and PlayStation have multiple studios and campuses. While I believe Valve only has the 1 or 2 campuses and they are their only studio.
My point being that, Valve has a ton of liquid cash for investment and growth opportunities. I’d wager Valve brought in more than 5 Billion last year, but with them being a private company, it’s hard to pin down what exactly they could’ve made.
Really? Don’t fuck with valve. I hate every single other launcher.
They are the ONLY game service that caters to Linux users. There are millions of Linux gamers, seems to me like the other companies are abusing their dominant position of using Windows to keep linux users out. How about that?
What if the legislation required that content platforms provide an API that adhered to an open standard? Such that there could be open source clients that unify them all (not just janky ones that do their best to not break with every platform update), so that consumers can have their libraries in one place, and still browse all store deals in one place.
Ideally the legislation would also extend to all content including music, shows, movies, and internet content/streams, so that we don’t have to have separate apps for Netflix, and Hulu, and Amazon, and HBO, and Roku, etc.
But if I were involved with the #FixTF2 movement, I’d want it to be careful not to make the big wigs at Valve want to just slap Valorent-like anti-cheat on TF2.
It does seem like the page for #FixTF2 talks about zero tolerance policies and basically manually banning people based on reports. But not explicitly saying in the petition to Valve that kernel-level anticheat is not the solution seems risky.
Edit: Ok, looked a little closer. It doesn’t seem like #FixTF2 is really against invasive client-side anticheat measures. They talk about “updated anti-cheat measures” as something they want, but don’t put any qualifiers on that. That’s unfortunate.
Yep. It’s a 17 year old game on a 20 year old engine, and most of the improvements made to more recent multiplayer source games were never backported.
It only got a 64 bit release last fucking year, after the last big fixtf2 push, when valve hired a single contractor to work on things for a few months.
I give Valve the benefit of the doubt and assume that they know that there’s plenty of consumers that are heavily against a kernel level anticheat. Valve is not really known for anti-consumer bullshit like this.
Yeah, that had me already decided that if I did get it, it would be on ps5 not pc. Though this move will probably make me do that in general for any ps exclusive game they make a pc port of.
i don’t play nor care about helldivers 2 but i can certainly emphasize with people that have had their favorite game linking to a service that is blocked/not supported. you either use a free VPN which good luck with shitty connectivity, high packet loss and ping, or use a paid VPN which basically converts all your games into a subscription that is most certainly not affordable for many 3rd world users, and at the end you are still probably dealing with the issues mentioned before since you are adding extra hops in your route. and that’s if you can get your hands on a working VPN which since most companies have their IP addresses known you get forced into shady VPNs automatically.
plus you are massively risking your data since you can’t trust the person at the other end, especially with free VPNs that could be loaded with viruses and spyware. in addition in most cases using a VPN can and will trigger false bot flags, causing either a temporary block or worse a ban, not to mention lying about your region when creating an account is in most cases is against TOS (although it’s unlikely you get banned for it).
for example i wanted to play titanfall 2 when it came out but couldn’t due to it being linked to EA account system which is definitely blocked here. never bothered with the official Ultima Online because EA. wanna play the free copy of GTA V? can’t download shit off Epic Games. wanna play any games made by Riot? you better get that DNS service ready cause otherwise you can’t get in. wanna update warframe? too bad the CDN service they use blocks your region (this was a long time ago i remember being pissed off about it).
so stop being an asshole online. we deserve to play games like other people without resorting to hacks in order to have a worse experience that was forced upon us. even ignoring all of my rant this decision is still against privacy of most users by handing their data over to yet another big company. i cannot imagine what would compel someone to make an ass out of themselves to call people that are against this cry babies.
Paid VPNs are dirt cheap worldwide… If you can already afford a PC capable of playing HD2, you can afford a few bucks a year for a reputable VPN.
You have actual clueless first-worlder logic
If 60 to 160 USD per year is “dirt cheap” to you, you have absolutely no place to speak. Hundreds of dollars over the course of 5 years just to circumvent stupid geolocation restrictions and nothing else – about the same cost to twice the cost of a low-to-mid range gaming PC BTW – is not affordable to most people. How do you compare basically throwing away hundreds of USD yearly opposed to a one-time purchase of an important utility in the modern age? How do you view that as cheap for people in countries where that could be a large chunk or most of their salary? Are people not allowed to buy expensive things for themselves rarely and actually enjoy them without having an unnecessary subscription expense tacked on just because they were born in a poorer county?
How would you feel if I told you there were a “fuck you” fee of 10% of the cost of your house every year just because you’re American or Canadian or British or some shit, on top of your income & property taxes? I mean you’re a homeowner so you can obviously afford it.
well nice job ignoring literally everything else i said but alright. my rule of thumb for comparing my purchasing power vs an american is to multiply the product’s value by 15. so you tell me that you wouldn’t feel annoyed if you had to pay 375$/year (ignoring the increased data cap costs that comes with using a VPN of course) for a service that might get blocked at any moment? never mind the scammers that are absolutely littered everywhere.
and the regions that are not supported by PSN probably don’t have regional pricing in steam as well, so we also have to pay that fuck you fee if we want to buy our games legit, unless of course you are willing to risk a ban (which actually isn’t that unlikely) in order to region hop, or get a CD key that was most likely bought with stolen gift card money of scam victims. and steam recently has been cracking down on both region hopping and the price disparity seen between different regions.
yes it’s not the most earth shattering issue on the planet, but at least we get to complain about it online right?
Why do people expressing frustration deserve your explicit lack of empathy? Why do you care so much? Why is “aha! Gotcha! You’re from Iran, so you’re neglected luxuries in other situations but not this one so your opinion doesn’t matter” sound like a reasonable response to you?
You sound like a bitter spiteful individual who’s more interested in finding a reason to be contrarian and angry with people than compassionate. Coincidentally with frustrations over corporations.
Go take a break from the internet if “why does a human deserve my empathy?” Seems like something that is ever reasonable to say or think. Empathy doesn’t mean you have to agree with someone, to preempt that lame excuse.
Good catch! Just a typo on my part. I used mapchart.com to make the map, and it was unfortunately an entirely manual process and the map builder I used didn’t include most microstates; the rest of the ones I listed weren’t on the map. Sri Lanka and Suriname are pictured though. :)
steam
Top
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.