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Can anyone overthrow Steam on PC? "As long as Valve is independent and not a publicly traded company," analyst says it looks impossible (www.gamesradar.com)
submitted 2 days ago by to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca
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[–] 375 points 2 days ago (21 children)

Do they realize that what they really said was: having shareholders destroys businesses.

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  • [–] 26 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    The full quote in the context of the article makes it even worse:

    "As long as Valve is independent and not a publicly traded company, they probably have a certain ambition, but not an extraordinary ambition," Rosier says. "So I think they can still decide to make some decisions that are player-first, and that helps, right? To get the goodwill from the players."

    So, customers like using a product that focuses on the customers to create profits, rather than extracting profits by abusing the customer? How unambitious... /s

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  • [–] 12 points 1 day ago* (1 child)

    and that helps, right? To get the goodwill from the players

    It helps?! It HELPS?!! That's the fuckin customer base right there, that's engagement, customer retention, customer satisfaction and THE top reason for sales.

    "It helps" pffftt... it does not help, it's the ENTIRE PRODUCT

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago

    This is what is endemic in our current shareholder first sustem, it's not about profits, it's about leveraging the stock, products, customers, image and every other tool at their disposal to manage the value that the shareholders control so they can game the stock market as they see fit. Everything else is secondary.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    I was thinking around the same, more specifically that what they're saying is that "in the long run companies managed to produce value for shareholders actually produce less value that companies managed to produce value for a single private owner".

    This is actually pretty consistent with what we see in many industries with both kinds of companies and a pretty daming indictment of publicly traded companies as a mechanism for increasing value creation.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 days ago (10 children)

    Private companies have shareholders as well.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 days ago (9 children)

    That's a new one for me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder

    Both public companies and private corporation have shareholders.

    But only for companies participating in the equity ownership, right? I'm not fully versed with that, so need to ask here. I don't know how this works with Gabe and Valve. I think the important detail here is, that Valve is not publicly traded and can decide who buys shares from their company and could reject any money. I don't think this is possible with publicly traded companies, right?

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  • [–] 9 points 2 days ago

    Ownership of companies via shares is only for LLCs (which is a possibility but in practice uncommon) and Corporations and both Sole Proprietorships and Partnerships do not have shares.

    That said, it is indeed possible for a company to have ownership by shares and not be publicly traded (i.e. not in the stock market) so for example a corporation with no traded shares would be a private corporation.~

    This is what I found out for the US by searching for "types of companies" and "LLC shares".

    The countries I lived in and owned companies in Europe have similar things but with different names (for example what a Partnership in the US is roughly what's called a "Society by quotas" in Portugal and is actually the most common kind of company).

    In my experience people that never had their own registered business don't usually know any of this because they have no need to look into it.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 days ago* (6 children)

    i think in private corporations only a very limited amount of shareholders can have shares

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  • [–] 4 points 2 days ago (5 children)

    If they are shareholders, they hold at least one share. Every one of them. There's no limit on number of shareholders or shares held. But those shares are not publicly traded.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 days ago* (4 children)

    There are limits on shareholders in private companies.

    https://www.investopedia.com/terms/5/500-shareholder-threshold.asp

    Looks like the number is 2000, but that excludes employees. It used to be 500.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 days ago* (3 children)

    That's only a (USA) reporting limit. A private company can still have more than 2000 shareholders, but it must then publicly report its finances like a public company would.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 days ago (2 children)

    Fair... but why would any private company do that without going public? Do any?

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