In case you’re out of the loop, the old Steam Deck had Philips screws that screwed into self-tapping plastic holes. This lead to occasional stripped threads and often stripped screwheads.
Valve absolutely did not have to change their screws, and its probably actually against their best interests. While other companies around the world are constantly in search of new ways to screw their own consumers, Valve goes out of their way to update their screws to make them easier to install/remove by changing to torx screws and added metal threads in the backplate. Those who know anything about mechanical engineering know this is not an insignificant amount of effort they put into it.
This is a small change that makes a huge impact, and speaks volumes about the ethos of the company. It says:
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We want to make our devices last longer, and be easier to repair.
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If you want to buy the cheaper tier and save yourself a few bucks by installing whatever SSD you want, go right ahead.
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We trust you to make decisions for yourself.
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Most importantly, we respect you, the consumer, and want you to fully own and control the devices we sell.
Valve is by no means perfect, and there’s plenty more they could be doing, but they’ve earned my respect and my patronage and I won’t buy games from anywhere else. I will buy whatever future products they sell, even if I don’t think I’ll use them regularly.
I think Valve in on very early steps of enshittification. Maybe not everyone, but most companies started like that. I mean being nice to users. Counterargument to my claim is that they are already millionaires, which is true, but humans’ greed may be limitless.
I think a reason that Valve has been able to be consumer friendly for so long is that they aren’t public and not beholden to shareholders.
To be clear, that gives them the opportunity to avoid enshittification. There’s plenty of private companies that are dogshit. Valve happens to be one of them that took the opportunity and ran with it.
When Gaben retires or dies, things could very easily change. But I don’t think it’ll happen before then.
This is the correct answer.
When a company only has to please customers they are allowed to bend and in extreme cases break their own rules for a customer to be satisfied.
When you have to please share holders and customers. You as a laborer must decide to please the customer or the share holders. Sadly the longer you work somewhere the more like you are to please a customer if you work with them directly. The further you are from the customer the more likely you are to disagree with choosing customer satisfaction over shareholder satisfaction. Begin enshitirication.
That’s interesting. Are there other large non public gaming companies? I actually want to ask this outside of gaming, but don’t want to stray outside the community.
Epic Games*, Mihoyo**, IO Interactive, Bethesda/ZeniMax***, Deep Silver.
* Epic games is 40% owned by a publicly-traded company, Tencent.
** Mihoyo filed for an IPO in 2017, but withdrew its application for unknown reasons.
*** ZeniMax Media was recently acquired by Microsoft, and is now a Microsoft subsidiary. I’m not sure if this makes it count as a ‘non-public gaming company’ by your definition.
Valve being a private company is probably the thing that allows them to focus on putting out good products w/o dealing with shareholders demanding more.
And they make a ton of money doing right by their core consumer base, I would be very surprised if we see any of that change.
If Valve were any other company they would have laid off half their staff and coasted on that 30% from Steam. They’re not perfect, but maybe the only company I feel good about giving money to, consistently.
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Gabe himself is worth over 4 billion.
Okay, I may have misplaced few zeros here ant there, my apologies.
Always be on guard and claim no allegiance to any huge company.
Also, Valve have been pretty consumer friendly for 20 years.
I fear when lord gaben dies volvo will go public and enshittification will begin
Fortunately Gaben has only a minor interest in Volvo 😉.
But actually his son is involved in the games industry, and there’s plenty of other like-minded people at Valve. Hopefully the (far) future of Valve is as bright as its present.
Looks at copier sheet that’s not a Vol-vo.
If valve were public, and required to make a lot more money than the previous quarter, they would absolutely need (want?) to get the maximum amount of money from wherever they could. It’s what I think it’s happening with netflix & others. It doesn’t matter that (hypotetically) they make a billion dolars of revenue. They need to make more next quarter. So they need to raise prices, forbid account sharing, reduce content quarity, anything to earn as much money as possible for next quarter.
Volvo could earn a billion dollars, and if they don’t want to earn more, they could happily stay the same. They might even want to make moves thinking on the long term, such as keep customers happy and excited, or invest in new technologies like proton. Compared to netflix execs, who don’t care about the long term, they care about next quarter.
I don’t know a lot about the stock market, but it looks stupid to me to bet on infinite growth. If the company earns money, and I own shares, shouldn’t I earn money via dividends? It looks to me like the only way to make money is to buy low and sell high? Or is that just greed?
You do. Companies give dividends all the time (well, every x months, usually at least yearly).
Just greed… mostly. A lot of people want to “get rich quick”, and a bunch of already rich people like to gamble to get even richer, so a lot of market volatility comes from greed… but a share price with good growth expectations can make it attractive enough that the company may decide to give lower dividends (no need to attract people), so if you can “buy low, sell high”, you may still want to do it regardless.
You can still ride the market mostly on dividends by diversifying and investing into multiple companies whose share prices will average out in the long run (picking the right diversified portfolio, is an art on itself).
That’s mostly an effect of tying C-suite compensations too closely to share prices, with no further checks in place. When the main driving force behind the decision makers is increasing share prices, they’ll happily burn down the whole company, cash out, and jump ship.
Sometimes it’s done on purpose, when some long-time investors grow tired and decide to cash out, maybe because they expect a change in the market and the company becoming less competitive or even obsolete. If the expected changes are big enough, it’s easier to start a new company from scratch, than to restructure an old behemoth with thousands of people used to doing things “like they’ve always been done”.
The fact that you said Volvo on accident brings me back to the old ThioJoe troll days
I don’t think it will happen. Enshittification has a predictable life cycle. Valve has had years of opportunity to sell out, but haven’t.