• RQG@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Valve good.

    But valve company. Company bad.

    But valve company do good thing.

    But selfish reason.

    But good outcome.

    But what if no GabeN.

    We pray.

    • TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz
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      8 months ago

      Valve is motivated by money. But their strategy is to make excellent products, that put the customers first. A rare sight these days.

      • Julian@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        I think the the main reason is that they’re private with no intention to go public. They’re not beholden to random shareholders who know nothing about games and just want infinite growth, their decisions are actually made by people inside the company.

        • thisisawayoflife@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          I played a lot of Sierra games in the 80s. I grew away from computers for a while and at some point in the 90s, Sierra sold out. They were basically drug through the mud, canned all its devs and became a brand rather than a software company. Sierra was also the first publisher of Half Life.

          I was reading the history of Sierra there other night on Wikipedia and was sad because so many great games came out of that company and most were memorable. Hard to see that in any gaming these days

          Back to my point, I started thinking that Valve saw what happened to Sierra and Newell decided fairly early on that they would be a software company and publisher and not sell out to a third party or take the company into the market. Pure speculation on my part, but they got their start sort of at the end of life of a bunch of 80s software companies. EA is certainly a shadow of what it was but it’s still around at least as a brand.

      • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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        8 months ago

        Valve’s strategy is to maintain dominance of their software platform, Steam.

        It has been pushing Linux as a viable computer platform as a counter to if/when Microsoft wanted to monetize PC gaming in direct competition to Steam, which seems to be a wise decision.

        • KinglyWeevil@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          8 months ago

          As we get closer to Microsoft forcefully shoving windows 11 down our throats, more and more I consider switching to Linux as my daily driver for home.

            • Sentau@feddit.de
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              8 months ago

              What will they shove though¿? They don’t control linux like how Microsoft controls windows. The only OS they have control over is SteamOS.

              • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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                8 months ago

                And what are most people running to game on Linux? Consumer Linux right now is Android and Steam; servers have their own systems.

                • rivalary
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                  8 months ago

                  Right now Valve could disappear and gaming on Linux would continue, better for the efforts Valve have already made. I would think that the improvements would stagnate without Valve, though.

                  Non-Steam utilities like Lutris, Bottles and Heroic run games nearly as well as Steam. We’d carry on.

                • Sentau@feddit.de
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                  8 months ago

                  Valve is not forcing us to run steam. It can’t do that. What it can do is offer a very good product which makes us use it. If in the future, valve starts doing shitty things with steam, most of the community will just move on.

                  Also what the hell do you mean by consumer linux is steam¿?

                • Synapse@lemmy.world
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                  8 months ago

                  Most of the linux world is not for “consumers”, it’s for “participants” also refered to as “the linux community”. Android and SteamOS are consumer oriented indeed, you buy your device that ships with a Linux-based OS. But on the PC side of things, you just get, install and use linux for free with no strings attached. Just by doing so you become a participant of the linux community, and you contribute to shape the future of Linux as an OS by choosing a distro over another, by choosing a DE, by reporting bugs, etc.

                  Any company that has influence on the development of Linux, can only have it by contributing to the whole project. This is what Valve is doing, as well as Intel, Canonical, Redhat and even Microsoft.

                • flashgnash@lemm.ee
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                  8 months ago

                  On everything but the steam deck people are running their own choice of distro. You can’t even install steamos on a non steam deck right now

      • Landmammals@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Not just money, they’re motivated by a long-term success. A lot of these companies can’t see past this quarter’s profits and bring a lot of Goodwill trying to make the numbers go up forever.

    • toastal@lemmy.ml
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      8 months ago

      If they ever went public & were legally bound to make profit for shareholders, there would be no good feelings anymore.

      • RQG@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Going public is usually bad for product quality and consumer oriented business models.

      • Tak@lemmy.ml
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        8 months ago

        Private companies still have shareholders who they are bound to make profit for. They’re just shareholders not fixated on stock value as it’s not publicly traded.

        • Bartsbigbugbag@lemmy.ml
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          8 months ago

          Private companies aren’t bound to make profit. I purposefully tanked my companies profit to literally 0 during the pandemic so I could keep my employee on at full wage while only open half time. A private company can make profit for shareholders, but it doesn’t have to. It can do whatever the shareholders want it to do, within the boundaries of the law.

    • soloner@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Hahaha thanks for this. I really find it fascinating how bad CEOs make lemmy think all companies are bad. It makes no sense.

      Blame the system maybe, I get that. But good grief we are all trying to make a living. The only way to do it is to do business. Like any system, it will be exploited, but I’m not gonna shit on private companies especially who clearly have a vision and don’t need investor snobs to drive them to commit evil.

      • RQG@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        I meant it the other way around. No matter how benevolent a dictatorship is, eventually the dictator will change and you better hope there will be another benevolent one.

        I personally don’t think the problem is doing business. I think the problem is businesses not being democratic.

      • Franzia@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        8 months ago

        Thats funny because shareholders are deeply involved in Valve, and those shareholders frequently decide which products get investment and which don’t.

        • psivchaz@reddthat.com
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          8 months ago

          Which stockholders? Valve does have some, but it doesn’t appear that they are published and are probably mostly employees since it’s not publicly traded. Maybe you’re saying that like game publisher stockholders from EA and such are involved in decision making at Valve? That seems plausible but it doesn’t seem like they’d have a ton of power over operations, more just some negotiating power.

      • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        It’s not their own opinion, they’re just repeating what they learned online. There’s multiple valve devs being “exploited” for $250k a year, it’s really tragic. They even exploit their worker by having college classes on the top of their building for their employees.

    • rwhitisissle@lemmy.ml
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      8 months ago

      Valve gud. EA bad. Why Valve gud? Because me am told Valve gud. Why EA bad? Because me an told EA bad. Fact that each is purely motivated by profit and that my sentiment is almost entirely a byproduct of effective Valve PR coupled with it being the defacto gaming marketplace for 20 years and that the only value I have to it is as a data point in a spreadsheet is lost on me.

      • demonsword@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        “Please pay this monthly access fee to maintain access to your account.”

        that’s the day you download all your game catalog to disk and cancel your account, of course

        • iso@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          8 months ago

          Or hope that GoG finally created their Linux client, although it has only be requested by a quiet minority of literally every single suggestion on their community wishlist.

          For the love of the gods CDPR, please, finally realize that Linux users are you main customer base.

  • EccTM@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    The “bluescreen” was actually a bunch of hints at Portal 2’s announcement at E3 later that year IIRC, but whatever.

    • Logster998@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      They could have talked about windows 8’s closed ecosystem and UWPs, but I guess this is easier to point the finger at.