Comment by levocardia

There's a little known alternative: Steward-ownership [1]. It's the kind of structure used by Novo Nordisk, Bosch or Patagonia.

LLM summary: "Steward-ownership is a model where a company’s control stays with long-term stewards (founders, employees, or a mission-aligned foundation) while profits are limited and the company cannot be sold for private gain. The goal is to protect the mission permanently."

The key, if I understand properly, is that these company cannot be sold (not even by the founders), so there is no "shareholder value" per se to maximize. It is also probably not a good way for founders to maximize their net worth, which is probably why it's not more popular...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steward-ownership

I find it a touch strange, in the abstract, that a corporation being public is a bad thing. On paper it should be a good thing; being publicly owned should mean that your corporation has turned from a private business venture into effectively public infrastructure that's impossible to boycott and depended on to some extent by everybody. As a result, financial statements should be (and are) public and transparent, and the company should be able to be externally steered via regular elections in a manner that benefits the public and not just its founders.

The issue really lies in the fact that the (long-term, majority) shareholders aren't much, if at all, related to the customers or employees of the business, but first the founders, and then parties who are merely interested in rising stock prices and dividends. It feels like the solution here ought to somehow desegregate voting rights from how many shares are owned, instead of dismantling the concept of public ownership entirely. (Or, perhaps, allow the general public to proxy vote via their 401(k) index funds?)

(There's also strange situations like Google/Alphabet, which is publicly owned, but effectively does not allow shareholders to vote on anything.)

>We have reached a point where the shareholders are a companies real customers and that is who they all try to attract.

We currently have a handful of AI companies who make no profit, have revenue far below operating costs, their entire business runs on investment and they're posturing themselves for IPOs. Meaning that the reason they can keep the lights on solely comes from attracting investors (and will likely be that way for the foreseeable future).

It’s definitely more than just private ownership. In fact I’d say that’s the least part of it.

Look at all the horror stories about businesses that were bought by PE firms; those are all privately held too.

Exactly. Going public is like leaving your baby to be raised by wolves.

Private or public, they are making stacks hand over fist. Why cant other companies learn that being good to your customers is a winning strategy?

I'm not really a fan of this reasoning when in the same breath: Epic is also a private company but has its share of stuff.

It's done some good stuff for the industry and even contributed to some bit FOSS projects. But business is still business.

But isn’t Valve extremely profitable compared to pretty much non private company in the industry?

They have few employees and massive revenue.

There's an argument that loot boxes that give you cosmetics just aren't that big of a deal, at least if we're talking about adults.

Especially since Magic the Gathering and similar card games are very normalized, and have a straightforwardly more evil monetization strategy, since you need to do gambling there to even play the game, it's not cosmetic.

There's always this question when Valve comes up of, "why are people more upset about gambling for cosmetics in a game than gambling for power/features in a game?" It's a clear double standard, and I've never heard an actually good explanation for it that makes it sound justifiable.

edit: The other thing is that the people blowing money on cosmetics gambling fund the game such that all the core gameplay stuff in Dota and CS and be totally free for the average player, and that's pretty great for a lot of consumers.

It's not exactly the same yet since Deadlock isn't being monetized yet, but I've spent hundreds of hours in the game having a blast for free, I can't give Valve money even if I want to, and that buys a fair amount of goodwill from me.

I'd guess that there's markedly different margins on lootboxes versus running the entire steam store.

I'd be surprised if lootboxes only earned them 6% of profits, I'd guess they're something like 10% or more, assuming that they're like 90% margin and the regular steam store side is more like 50% margin (which is still absurd, for what it's worth).

Because a billion dollars is still a billion dollars.

To be fair, they may have just wrecked the CS lootbox economy permanently.

Valve selling skins is just so trivial relative to dopamine-inducing doom-scrolling, social media in general, the toxicity of the news cycle, I can keep going.

It would be super democrat-american to address valves loot boxes before, say, fucking healthcare.

We need a government priority Jira board of things that need to be addressed. Loot boxes _might_ make the backlog.

They're doing things that are simultaneously good for business and good for consumers.

That contrasts against the companies doing things that are good for business (at least short term) and bad for consumers.

Your argument doesn’t make any sense. What does this have to do with supporting Arm chips? It’s not like AMD and Intel are waging a war against Valve. If anything Steam helps them by strengthening the PC gaming market, leading to higher CPU/GPU sales.

Why is it though. Just release a SteamOS with Secure Boot enabled and you’re done. It’s really simple

> Windows is closing in on them: stricter kernel access (tougher time for anti-cheat)

Why would Microsoft not work with leaders of a multi-billion dollar industry they benefit from to develop anti-cheats that work with whatever limitations they put on kernel access? Also isn't stricter kernel access in part being done for anti-cheat and related measures?

> Encouraging users to use the app store, or more accurately: discouraging users to install from binary

Why would this threaten Steam? Unless you're suggesting they can't just distribute Steam through this app store?

> They threaten Valve's business model, and Valve is responding with proton & SteamOS

You didn't even mention Game Pass or their store, which are actually more of a threat!

I don’t see it. Stricter kernel access is pressure on game devs, not Valve. And I don’t see MS booting steam off windows any time soon.

It’s more about Valve having complete control over the stack and being able to vertically integrate, something they will never have with windows, especially as it continues to enshittify

GOG has a strong anti-DRM stance, but unfortunately not all of the games GOG sells are truly DRM-free if you consider things like online services and online service requirements and live patching/live service. Often considered the worst offender is Sony published games with some of the worst root kit anti-cheat installs still bundled in the GOG edition, with mandatory online "data collection" for the game to run, even for single player games.

GOG will still give you an offline capable installer file for that game, and hasn't entirely compromised its values on that aspect of DRM-free, but the game won't boot up offline and/or without agreeing to the data collection terms and installing the rootkit.

I like GOG and the criticisms here are only because I'd love to see GOG do better, but I also know GOG alone can't fight "the cloud" and even single player games from major publishers having "required" online services. It's a DRM of a different sort (and remains a long term archival issue, because few of the companies like Sony will ever unlock the game or open source the service at the end of the games' commercial lives and would seem to prefer to just leave those games unplayable).

Steam makes installing windows games easy. With GoG i would need to setup wine myself.

We really shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good here. Of course they have their faults, but I'll take Valve over any of the other players in their market all day every day without even thinking twice. EDIT: You're absolutely right, is what I'm trying to say.

>They even seem to be on of the rare companies that recognized the issues of this and massively pulled themselves BACK from these dark patterns

??? They didn't

All the 3rd party trading and gambling sites are up and running on the Steam API. They didn't change anything at all

The difference is that you aren't forced to buy a game from steam.

This doesn’t apply because valve doesn’t have a monopoly.

Not to mention, you still get to leverage all of the benefits of Steamworks.

There was news couple of seasons back that they've capped key generation to some function of on-steam sales.

Steam is also a launcher and when I use it as a launcher I don't want to see ads for the store and burying a setting to turn if off in the settings is not sufficient. At the very least let me turn it off on the pop up.

Settings -> Interface -> "Notify me about additions or changes..." to disable it, by the way.

Not an excuse.

It is not okay to abuse someone just because they can ask you to stop.

Maybe I'm not up to date. Are there no longer loot boxes in Counter Strike?

I measured an LCP or 3.5s + significant layout shift. The images are poorly optimized jpegs, instead of WEBP/AVIF. The start page takes a cool 6MB. A games page clocks in at around 12MB before the video starts loading including a whopping 4MB JS. None of the links appear to utilize preloading and it's and old school multi page app, so navigation takes a long time. I don't have a way to measure it, but subjectively it performs worse in the Steam client than in a browser.

The steam store used to burn CPU on Windows until at least up to 2017 (on fresh install it would a strong PC stutter on startup). It tries to kill your DNS resolver on linux when downloading games (~20 requests/sec when) which actually decreases your download speed by a bunch. This bug has been documented in 2014, and was still present last time I had to debug this a year or two ago.

FWIW Epic is also privately owned.