Honestly, the secret is not being a publicly traded company. All the others have to make the shareholders happy while steam just does steam. If the line doesn’t have to constantly go up you can pretty much do whatever you want as long as you’re still making profit. And if what you’re doing is already working you don’t need to add gimmicks or advertisements to milk it as much as you can just to appease the shareholders.
Being a private company has allowed Valve to take some really big swings. Steam Deck is paying off handsomely, but it came after the relative failure of the Steam Controller, Steam Link and Steam Machines. With their software business stable, they can allow themselves to take big risks on the hardware side, learn what does and doesn’t work, then try again. At a publically traded company, CEO Gabe Newell probably gets forced out long before they get to the Steam Deck.
Man Intel are so dumb for firing Pat. And they did it while seeing positive reviews for their second gen GPUs!
That’s just what happens to CEOs of publicly traded companies when they have a bad year. And Intel had a really bad year in 2024. I’m certainly hoping that their GPUs become serious competition for AMD and Nvidia, because consumers win when there’s robust competition. I don’t think Pat’s ousting had anything to do with GPUs though. The vast majority of Intel’s revenue comes from CPU sales and the news there was mostly bad in 2024. The Arrow Lake launch was mostly a flop, there were all sorts of revelations about overvolting and corrosion issues in Raptor Lake (13th and 14th gen Intel Core) CPUs, broadly speaking Intel is getting spanked by AMD in the enthusiast market and AMD has also just recently taken the lead in datacenter CPU sales. Intel maintains a strong lead in corporate desktop and laptop sales, but the overall trend for their CPU business is quite negative.
One of Intel’s historical strength was their vertical integration, they designed and manufactured the CPUs. However Intel lost the tech lead to TSMC quite a while ago. One of Pat’s big early announcements was “IDM 2.0” (“Integrated Device Manufacturing 2.0”), which was supposed to address those problems and beef up Intel’s ability to keep pace with TSMC. It suffered a lot of delays, and Intel had to outsource all Arrow Lake manufacturing to TSMC in an effort to keep pace with AMD. I’d argue that’s the main reason Pat got turfed. He took a big swing to get Intel’s integrated design and manufacturing strategy back on track, and for the most part did not succeed.
k
The GPUs aren’t even a drop in the bucket for Intel. While Gelsinger had the right ideas, he wanted everything all at once which just wasn’t doable.
When “everything is AI now” and your motion board/investors are watching nvidia nearing 1T, then they want you in the GPU business.
And now we’re back to the public companies are terrible at innovation argument. If the line can only go up, you can’t take risks and you have to hurt people to continue at some point.
Agreed, but if I’d had the money at the time, I absolutely would’ve jumped at the steam machine and steam controller. I want a modern one now more than ever. If it weren’t for parts getting shittier and pricier, I’d probably build one myself this spring/summer and figure out which distro would be best for it. My steam deck is great and I want basically the exact same thing but more powerful at the cost of not being a handheld. Bonus points if I can easily remote play that new steam machine through my steam deck, which I think is a reasonable expectation. And I’d love to run an HDMI out splitter to easily swap between using it as a PC at my desk or using it as a console from my couch.
If you buy parts that are a couple of generations older there is absolutely a middle ground between the ridiculous new GPUs and the steam deck on performance, that you could probably build for a similar price to the deck. I would aim for an AM4 build to take advantage of how cheap ddr4 RAM is, with a 3xxx or 5xxx Ryzen CPU. Something like the 3080 is a great card for a cheap price but I personally would go for an AMD card. A few hundred extra (again in AUD) gets you a good 7800XT which is a pretty damn beefy card, but might be better to drop down a couple of models to save on power consumption.
Going even further, you can take someone’s ATX PC secondhand, swap out the motherboard for a smaller form factor and slap it in a little case.
As for OS, if you want it to be exactly like the deck you could run Bazzite, but SteamOS is either available, or about to be available.
I was actually targeting a 7800XT on an AM4 build already lol!
Yeah, it’s just hard to justify the cost when I already have a PS5 and not a whole lot of free time. It makes more sense to wait until the next generation of consoles comes out and then get something that runs games at that time at 1440p, 60+fps. Right now I’d just be building a lateral system for no real reason, pretty late in the current gen lifecycle.
I’d argue you could sell the ps5 and the games and make enough money to mostly (possibly entirely) cover the cost of building a more versatile device, but it’s also a bit of effort when you already have a setup that works for you
Edit: also, the system we’re talking about should comfortably run 1440p60 for the foreseeable future. Newer flagship hardware is targeting higher resolution and much higher frame rates.
Give up haptics??
I thoroughly enjoy the Steam controller and would’ve loved to try out one of the less conventional prototypes. I hope Valve can justify making another controller.
and figure out which distro would be best for it. My steam deck is great and I want basically the exact same thing but more powerful at the cost of not being a handheld.
Bazzite might be your jam. They’re a sort-of competitor (?) to SteamOS, as in they have distros for handhelds in the same way Valve has with SteamOS (which they are now leasing out to manufacturers like lenovo). But they also have versions for laptops and desktop PCs.
I’ve been using their PC (nvidia) version for a week now, and it’s been wonderful. Of course I probably wouldn’t have made the switch if Valve hadn’t helped pave the way and made proton so powerful. Also I probably wouldn’t have switched if I hadn’t given up on LoL and Battlefield (kernel-level anticheat).
I don’t think I’ve even heard of that, so I’ll look into it a bit more. I was leaning more toward an AMD build since that tends to play nicely with Linux compared to Intel/Nvidia. And there were a couple of distros I was interested in trying on my old laptop to compare before committing.
You are right, but let me add that Gabe knows that being tied to Windows is not a good idea, as he worked there and understood that they would block Steam if they could.
Valve supporting ‘their’ alternative OS, away from Microsoft (and Apple) or any other direct competitor in gaming is the only way to survive.
It’s not like they pour all that money into Linux from the goodness of their heart. They need their own OS just as much as the Linux desktop community needs some stable funding.
Given how Valve lets children gamble with skins, I’m not sure how moral that company really is.
man, i hope that Microshaft blocks steam. That would send so many people to lunix.
Linux was also the only way to make sure Valve was viable long term. Eventually Windows was going to have an Xbox store built in and would’ve basically been a monopoly on PC gaming, cutting out steam altogether. I think windows now sort of does have that, but it can’t compete with Steam quite yet.
The steam controller didn’t really fail, but the patent fight was a mess that took way too long (much too late disqualified patent over paddle buttons). That sucked a lot of energy out of the project. Don’t forget the steam deck kept those touch pads (although with a different design)!
Steam Link IMHO also wasn’t bad, but there didn’t seem to be much interest in it then. (interestingly enough I think it could be recreated today in a Chromecast-like form factor)
Stream machines was definitely a big mess however, there just wasn’t enough interest, too limited compatibility, the machines just wasn’t versatile enough for average Joe to pay for one.
The problem with the Link is its wireless performance. It works perfectly with an Ethernet connection, but not many people have one of those by their TV, even today.
And also not be backed by venture capital firms expecting to make infinite profits. Private or Public, if the company shareholder’s only goal is to continue to receive 10% gains on their investment after already making back 20x their principal, they’ll squeeze the company for all it’s worth.
Publicly traded companies mean that the people who invested get a say in how the business is run. Those same people are typically riding the success of other people’s decisions and have no idea how to not fuck up. So they demand the company make stupid fucking choices or the CEO will be replaced by someone who will listen.
The trick is to remove the power of the board to remove the CEO and keep them as advisors instead of drivers. The CEO should cook and if they drive the business into the ground, that’s what happens. Businesses need to fail because otherwise the wrong people end up leading.
Businesses need to fail because otherwise the wrong people end up leading.
When businesses fail, their competitors buy their assets, employees, customer bases, and get bigger. Keep playing that a few more rounds and you get a monopoly that can and will prevent or buy new entrants. Then anyone including the wrong people in the industry enter this one company because that’s the only company in this industry.
This isn’t an argument against letting businesses fail. It’s an argument to show that the game of competition doesn’t produce stable competitive environment in the long run. Instead it’s a temporary stage that some markets exist in on the way to consolidation. You can find countless examples for this around us. And therefore letting businesses fail through competition isn’t a long term solution to these problems.
And that’s why you have laws and agencies to prevent that like the German Bundeskartellamt.
I’m not familiar with the corporate landscape in Germany, but the US and Canada also have anti-trust law and competition agencies whose purpose is to prevent consolidation. Why hasn’t that prevented it?
Because you have an oligarchy
How does an oligarchy come into existence in a capitalist democracy that didn’t start with a monarchy? Can you see a relationship between the process of consolidation and the creation of this oligarchy, where the oligarchs are the people who accumulated wealth through this process, gradually using this wealth to capture the regulators, leading to more consolidation, more wealth and greater capture, and repeat? We didn’t wake up one day with an oligarchy that wasn’t there yesterday. It’s not like all of the current oligarchs can be traced back to an oligarchic family from the past.
I wouldn’t call whatever the US has or had real Democracy to begin with. You only have two viable parties and it’s so easy to abuse. Just look at the mess your electoral college ans gerrymandering is.
I’m not fully happy with the German system because we for example can’t directly elect our chancellor and president but there at least five parties who jump the 5% hurdle to enter the Bundestag and ten or so others you can directly vote for.
Because nobody enforces the law. There are so many mega corpos that needs to be broken up, but it doesn’t happen.
Honestly, the secret is not being a publicly traded company.
Valve fortune doesn’t come from not being traded publicly. They built a nearly monopoly on pc videogames with their walled garden proprietary third party launcher.
Valve isn’t a walled garden. They allow other apps to be launched through their app and devs can sell steams key on other platforms.
It is still a mega corp, but trying to attack it from the walled garden angle is pretty dumb.
Does nothing? DOES NOTHING?! He spent the last few years ripping Microsoft a new a@@hole, rendering their operating system meaningless for gamers! …but nice meme
Gaben has done lots of awesome shit. I fear what valve will become when he’s gone.
I’m not actually too worried. He surrounds himself with champions.
they’ll fuck shit up. Look what happened to apple after Steve died.
So. Many. Dongles.
you know they developed the iPod touch in secrete because they feared that if Steve saw the ugly prototype, he’d shitcan the project?
And where’s the iPod now, eh?
Same
Just my two cents but as others have said, not being publically traded helps a lot. The focus on short term benefits that come with shareholders stops “master plans” when they come with mistakes. Learning from relative failures, like the steam controller and the like, ultimately contributes to major successes like the steam deck. Being able to stay committed to improving the software experience over time, instead of killing the product when it didn’t immediately succeed, is fairly rare in the tech industry. And in all honesty, it would be better if they released a polished profuct, but being committed to it made it a success.
I feel like the pressure to have a majorly successful product day one means that smaller companies can’t innovate the way they want to, so they have to find other ways to produce revenue. Huge companies, like Apple can afford to do both but still stumble, like with the vision pro. Maybe it’ll be a success, but for now its not great and iteration makes it more difficult to maintain the original vision.
eh, kinda think strapping a monitor to your face just isn’t the future movies seem to think it should be
Yeah, Apple was able to fall on their faces with the Lisa but still get to the Macintosh and greatness.
I’m not quite sure they have “done nothing”. They have made a digital storefront that other storefronts strive for, they have help with Linux compatibility with windows only games, have released a few bits of awesome hardware every now and then. I think this is what happens when you are not beholden to shareholders and the mantra “make line go up at all costs”
“Don’t interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.”
You know sometimes I actually straight up FORGET that Steam is run by the same company that created Half-Life?
They:
- identified a gradient of human wants
(Video games exist; I want them on my computer) - Created a vector for that want to be satisfied
(Digital distribution that conveys the games I want to my computer) - Stayed the FUCK OUT OF THE WAY
When you do something well, people don’t notice you’ve done anything at all.
They simply did what everyone else refused to do, get out of their own way.
- identified a gradient of human wants
Being a private company, it’s what it is called
I can’t really get my head around why people dislike Gabe Newell. As best I can tell, he’s been a fantastic steward for Steam.
Gabe Newell has a net worth of $9.5 billion and there is no such thing as an ethical billionaire. Steam is great and as long as the company behaves well there’s no reason not to use it, but billionaires are not your friends.
They are some rare cases where someone becomes a billionaire because something suddenly took off.
Had she not went TERF, JK Rowling would be next to Gabe.
Even then, a person can survive just fine with $900 million dollars, and $100 million to the right charity can do a world changing amount of good.
There are no ethical billionaires.
Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
That statement is an absolute.
Steam is selling lootbox and profiting from cs skins gambling. Pretty fucking scummy.
Eron Wolf might be one of these exceptions. FUTO is trying to support and make sustainable small software projects.
Yes, their profits.
Sort of agree but look how much he’s done for Linux gaming. Also the steam deck was well thought out and designed to be user serviceable.
Sort of agree but look how much he’s done for Linux gaming.
Let’s not forget that Steam is a proprietary third party launcher that doesn’t share any values with linux. Valve built the apple store of videogames, while they are now moving in a better direction keep in mind that they are part of the problem.
Sort of agree still. Steam deck is a great example. They built it to be user serviceable, and you can literally switch to the Linux desktop and use root, and reinstall your OS if you want. It’s not locked down crazy like other systems. Remember the PS3 other os? Didn’t even get graphics drivers, then they ultimately removed it when it was used to jailbreak it.
Was that all Gabe? Or was that people at Valve who had the ideas and executed the ideas and Gabe is given credit for?
“yes”? He’s definitely not building any significant fraction himself, but if he didn’t care for these things he wouldn’t let the company put so much resources into them.
Credit for the things built goes to the people building them. Credit for it being possible to build goes to the people who founded and funded the teams
Ah, so that’s who this guy is. Thanks! Tbh I had no clue and thought it might be George R. R. Martin.
A massive, massive astroturfing campaign Epic Games paid for in hopes of tarnishing Valve and Gabe Newell’s reputation to try and bolster their failure of a shop ecosystem.
Unfortunately, it worked, because there are people on the net who don’t remember the and days before steam, or even the initial versions of steam that people had Actual problems with, and not just made up ones.
You can’t become a billionaire ethically. Steam has a pretty big market for lootboxes and cs skins gambling is pretty widespread.
We are on lemmy, a decentralized and open source platform. Steam is closed as much as reddit is.
Promoting gambling to kids and use the profits to buy multiple mega yachts is peak scum.
I have a mixed feeling about Gabe and Valve.
While I am insanely grateful for proton (even if it was strategically important for them, they didn’t do it out of kindness of heart), some other stuff disturb me:
- Valve being so lenient on CS2 skin gambling, hurting the young people
- A steam account being un-inheritable, making you defacto a tenant of your games
- The 30% percent cut, stealing money from devs
- Gabe spending his money on multiple mega yachts, like every asshole billionaire, instead of making the world a better place
- Gabe claiming to be a libertarian, like Elon and other pieces of shit
- The 30% percent cut, stealing money from devs
Sigh. Here we go again. I’ll just copy one of my older comments about that attitude.
Steam is not a parasitic middle man, it is a collection of services that would have to be provisioned and operated by the developer otherwise. The 30% cut pays for:
- A massive infrastructure to store and deliver the game and its updates, worldwide, and at an acceptable bandwidth that Valve operates
- A storefront that enables monetizing the game
- The audience and discoverability that would not exist otherwise
- The Steam API, achievements, cloud saves
- The client itself, content management, validation, and Linux compatibility tools
- Network and operational security
- Also keep in mind that Steam and its services are operated by experts. A game developer would have to hire the experts or get training.
If the revenue from the cut exceeds the operational costs: it’s called profitability, not theft. The world doesn’t run on good vibes.
Yeah you’re of course right, they are not a charity and shouldn’t have to provide their service for free.
I expressed myself too quickly (the rage!). What I meant is the this cut of 30% is fucking predatory, mafia or middle-age money lender style. You get one third of the rewards of my efforts just for delivering my product? And don’t talk about promotion because this store is now stuffed with too many games for visibility.
You can argue “but this is it the standard rate of the industry”. Well it is predatory everywhere else and I hate Google and Apple as much for it.
A cut of 10% would be more humane. Or whatever to reach a “normal” profitability. But now the discussion becomes complex because we don’t have the concrete numbers.
What is sure, is that it is possible without pain to take way less than 30%. This is something EGS got right, even if I dislike them for many other things (Epic and Tim Sweeney).
predatory, mafia or middle-age money lender style.
Your words have lots of sentiments, but present no facts. I know that Wolfire and Sweeney are independently throwing a tantrum, and we all hate taxes, but I don’t see public exposés showing game developers who went hungry because they couldn’t afford the 70-30 split.
I’ll also remind you that the EGS (12%) is barely profitable, and operated for years at a loss, only sustained by Fortnite (which used dark patterns to extract money from kids, in case you want to see something actually predatory).
I have read your link but they didn’t say the EGS is at loss specifically because of the 12% cut nor that the Fortnite money is subsidizing the lower cut.
It could be that the EGS is at loss because creating a new store and client from scratch costs money ?
To be honest here, we don’t have the numbers to say exactly how much margin Valve is making. But my guess is the following: if EGS estimated that with a 12% cut they could be profitable if they had enough customers, it makes me think that the cut of valve is way overinflated in regards to their costs.
And yes Fortnite is awfully predatory. But the topic is Valve and Steam there 🙂
You get one third of the rewards of my efforts just for delivering my product
you have not read the comment you responded to.
and forgot or ignored that it often is not the dev who gets most of the money at all but publishers like ea and ubisoft. why should customers act in defense of those companies who actively try and make gaming worse for everyone?
an indie dev paying 30% is expensive but steam is really a premium platform for distributing games. it would be nice if it were cheaper but I don‘t really understand the outrage here
I didn’t knew about he claiming to be a libertarian. Rothbard must be turning over in his grave.
Not to mention his insane Porsche collection, yeah he’s just another billionaire
Valve ruined my favourite game (dota) by flooding the game with ridiculous cosmetics that even change particle effects with no way to disable any of this
There’s nothing wrong with having money or expensive hobbies. It’s not like he’s collecting Senators or buying himself a seat in the Oval Office
A steam account being un-inheritable, making you defacto a tenant of your games
This is unenforceable under US Law
Well I am European 😂
don’t you guys have better consumer protections?
Maybe, maybe not.
Frankly I don’t even know if this clause can be enforced in Europa. I wanted to point out that we shouldn’t rely on the customer protection laws of each country to address that: this clause shouldn’t exist in the first place.
But to be frank, it most likely doesn’t come from Valve and rather from the games company themselves.
Don’t ask TF2 player how they feel about this meme
I mean it’s true for TF2 also, overwatch killed itself lol
They did the bare minimum of banning bots so TF2 has been going pretty great recently. I think I’ve encountered 1 or 2 bots in the last 2 weeks and I’m pretty sure those were just blatant cheaters and not actually bots
They were not liked at first, but they’ve spent enough time making money while not pissing people off that they are doing far better than every public company who must find a reason to piss people off to be more profitable.
They’ve been able to use that time to “cook”. Valve time has been known to be within its own dimension, but from that we got Linux to be just click start and play for 90% of games like Windows, and with the Steamdeck a powerful, comfortable, DIY-able handheld PC gaming device.
Idk. With that camera setup I imagine myself on a black leather sofa with a plain white wall behind it.
Gabe , what kind of movie are we making? Gaben?
You’re gonna want to avoid looking down the lens of that “camera”, lol
Half life 3 : ReLoaded
You’d think it wouldn’t be that hard for publishers with billions of dollars to hire enough competent devs for enough time to make a halfway decent storefront, especially when they don’t even have to reinvent the wheel on a lot of UX and marketing research that’s already been done for them by Steam existing as long as it’s had.
That none of them have even come close to that is a monument to their incompetence.
Large companies do not generally innovate. Their internal inertia prevents them from successfully creating new things. Also the larger a company gets, the more layers of brainless MBA parasites latch on to suck them dry.
Large companies rely on purchasing innovation by buying up a never ending stream of smaller companies. They then take the ideas/products and launch them to a wider market.
Steam has remained small by rejecting massive buyout offers. This has allowed them to remain innovative.
Ultimately it’s a slow and steady strategy. There goal is long term profitability, not short term gains. In the long term, the best strategy is not to piss off your customers.
The advantage of this is that it can snowball to impressive levels. At least until a exec with more education than brains does a pump and run on it. A mistake steam seems to know to avoid.
I’m not looking forward to what happens to steam post-gaben. I expect a stupid successor to IPO and fuck it all up.
That makes me nervous as well. Hopefully, there are enough people involved to know not to kill the golden goose for a quick buck.
His plan isn’t based off trying to squeeze blood from stones, it’s to sell some video games. Not a very capitalist mindset, but there you have it.
