Comment by ethbr1
2 days ago
Because it's not, all other things equal.
Valve can be Valve because HL + Steam, in the same way that Google ~2010 could not be evil because search + ad revenue.
The difference is that Google IPO'd and took market capital, and Valve didn't.
Once public investors are onboard, you maximize profits or face lawsuits.
But thats the point, Valve IS maximizing profits. If they treated their customers like Epic does, do you think people would still be using Valve when Epic is generally a bit cheaper?
The entire point of this thread is that there are many things that Valve could do to increase its profits over the short, intermediate, and long terms... that it doesn't (presumably because that's not the kind of company it wants to be).
As the simplest example, they could have stamped HL3 on a third party game and made several millions of dollars with only a minor hit to their brand (in 5 years, "that bad HL").
In more realistic terms, they could have built proprietary, closed source emulation packages (they are funding a lot of development, apparently) to give themselves a unique advantage.
If they were a publicly traded company, they probably would be doing all these things.
I don't see a problem with the first, if they want to outsource HL3 go ahead. Consumers can decide if they want to buy it when it releases, that's just normal economics.
As for the 2nd, that's sort of what Epic does, yet Valve's store revenue is 10x Epic. So if enacting these anti-consumer practices were actually more profitable, why is Epic doing so shit? Not even in terms of absolute numbers but in terms of growth, Epic store isn't growing at all. Epic can't hit even a fraction of Steam's numbers despite giving away hundreds of games.
Developing open source emulation is essential to their success - no developer would build and verify for Steam OS and Proton if it were closed source and only available on a single device (lol). Steam being very pro-consumer is what makes them successful.
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