Valve is simply the last major company in this industry that I still like. Imagine that! A company makes bank off of treating customers and employees right! What a novel concept!
I really hope that the workers are well compensated.
They really figured out the infinite money glitch.
They've been nothing but fair to me as a customer but the cynic in me thinks they've got an excessive amount of good will to squander since they dominate the PC gaming scene.
Please don't become shitty. And please release new non competitive games.
When Gabe dies, steam falls
Not necessarily. That man has proven he cares about his legacy. I'd severely doubt he hasn't come up with provisions to try to prevent that from happening.
That ia what I am afraid of :(
That's what you can do if you're not publicly traded. The supposedly "wise" market whenever anything goes wrong always seems to insist on burning down decades of good-will to extract a few bucks.
the average person really needs to realize that most businesses are just hilariously incompetent, the only reason things stay together is because of shittily paid workers doing their jobs despite management's best efforts.
They really figured out the infinite money glitch.
Provide a decent service then sit back and watch your would-be competition develop increasingly effective footguns?
Yep that the one
Gaben said it best when he said "piracy is a service issue, not a price issue." There is no other company that even comes close to matching Steam's services, both to consumers and developers. The industry could become a different place when he dies. I don't see any other CEO continuing to spend money to innovate and expand services rather than offer less and charge more to extract record profits.
I mean this is obvious af
When Netflix had 90% of the shows that you wanted to watch and they weren’t annoying little fucks with account sharing and geo location, everyone was happy to support them
But once paying users feel like they are being taken advantage of, instead of catered to, they leave.
There’s so many cases where pirating is not only cheaper (duh) it’s actually a better product/experience. And when you charge to provide a worse product/experience than what people can get for free, then you can’t be surprised at the outcome
I've been on Steam since 2005, and the only thing that sucks about Valve is that their steam sales are shit now. Other than that I've had no issues with Valve. They seem like a decent company.
Flash sales were great but refunding is better.
While they are worse now, part of the problem is that long time users already have many of the games that get big discounts in the newer sales.
There's also the gambling, and the 30% cut that allows them to make $3.5 million per head.
Steam is pushing the industry forward on Linux support though, so they have my support.
Other thing that is questionable is gambling, apparently lot of people get into online casino through CS.
I think the culture surrounding DoTa to a lesser extend is not good too
genre defining design, literal decades ahead of the rest of the industry
Half-Life? What's that? I'm talking about Team Fortress 2 hats
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