Comment by johnnyanmac
2 days ago
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.
I think the point was about publicly traded companies becoming inevitably evil due to shareholder expectations, not about private companies being inherently ethical.
This is a pretty serious problem, since we would like lots of companies to participate in public markets so that regular people can gain some of the upside and so there is transparency and increased oversight.
I find it so weird that you say public companies being 'evil' (which is to turn a profit) is a problem, yet you also say you'd like for companies to exist on the public market so that the public can access some of the upside.
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Attributing it to private company behaviour really minimises what Valve chooses to do. Per your counter example: Epic Games has been having a very public meltdown this week regarding Steam's inclusion of Gen-AI labelling - here we have two private companies, with two very different priorities.
It's also worth reminding ourselves that Epic settled with the FTC for over half a billion dollars for tricking kids into making unwanted purchases in Fortnite.(1) Epic also stonewalled parents' attempts at obtaining refunds, going so far as to delete Fortnite accounts in retaliation for those who arranged charge backs.
Furthermore the FTC's evidence included internal communications showing that Epic deliberately schemed and implemented these dark patterns specifically to achieve the fraudulent result, even testing different approaches to optimise it.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/...
I don't really get it myself. I personally don't give Steam credit for weakly saying 'hey you need to label something'. Let me know when really enforce it. Heck, let me know when they at least add a filter. That's when you can really impact the behaviour (or prove consumers really don't care).
But yew ,both private companies do their own forms of evil.
Yeah we also need to get out of the dichotomous thinking that companies are either all good or all bad.
Companies will do things that represent their interests, sometimes their goals align well with their customers, or the greater good, and sometimes they do unpopular things where they believe the profitability will outweigh the blowback.*
It's a lesson in not being too attached or needlessly loyal - our connection to a business is not a personal one.
*The Epic example is useful because their actions represent a steady pattern of deceptive conduct.
Valve's employee handbook: https://assets.sbnation.com/assets/1074301/Valve_Handbook_Lo...
They seem to have a high ownership, consensus driven organizational structure. The only time I'm aware the consensus model was violated was when Gabe overruled a veto to ship Steam with half life 2.
It's very interesting to me because it seems to operate similarly to a lot of anarchist shit I've been involved in, but at a highly effective level. And they make oodles of money.
this is widely known (been discussed on here many times) that the employee handbook was marketing apparatus and doesnt reflect how the business actually works day to day, and never did
Really? It aligns with what I've been watching employees say in various interviews, such as the recent half life anniversary series of interviews. Would love to read more if you could point me in the right direction.
> And they make oodles of money.
I see it the other way round: they can do all that because they print money.
Not that it's necessarily a bad thing: maybe they stay relevant because they are doing that.