Comment by nialv7

I have been a big fan of Valve since the Orange Box days and I always dreamed of working there, but let’s not kid ourselves. This is all enabled by the massive monopolistic cash-cow that is Steam that requires a tiny team to maintain. Similarly their top games have minuscule teams and still rake-in millions in microtransactions, fueled by a shadow economy of gambling and speculative trading aimed at kids.

Yes to a large extent they got those monopolies by building truly outstanding products in good faith and by being pioneers in quite a few areas. And certainly they are an exemplary case of investing that wealth into legitimately innovative and widely appreciated long-term endeavors.

My point is that Valve is not all that special for being nice, many organizations do crave to be like that but they don’t have the luxury to have hit that jackpot. For people with mountains of money, they are among the best, but it’s not exactly a high standard, and they are remarkably inefficient in leveraging that advantage.

They’ve long lost the organizational know-how to make good games, and they have delivered remarkably few public facing successes in the last decade: mainly Valve Index and Steam Deck, both still relatively niche and wide apart, both primarily attempts at expanding Steam’s dominance to fairly uncharted markets, with mixed success. The first iteration of Steam Machines was dead on arrival, as was their long-anticipated game Artifact. CS 2 was not a significant enough upgrade to Go to really count. Half-Life Alyx was popularish I suppose. Anything else of note?

Valve cuts 30% of your revenue no matter how much you earn. They also cut 15% of the transaction by being the middleman on the market.

They also ignored the gambling/trading plague for too long, until a lot of countries threatened them to stop indirectly promoting gambling (which definitely hit them financially).

They are sitting on a money printing machine and their job is making it print no less to buy GabeN another yatch. They are like the cigarette company who donates shit load of money to the charity and cancer prevention lab while making more cigarrate then ever because people love smoking it.

I don't think they wanted or planned to be monopolized, but they are definitely taking the advantage of being it.

> acting in their own self-interest end up benefiting everyone

I'm so sick of people acting like Valve is some saint that does no wrong. Their market dominance means game developers wanting to reach the PC gamer market must comply with Valve's terms. Why do you think every Japanese visual novel released on the platform is a cut down, all-ages version that requires an off-site patch to restore the full game (and often even then it's censored in weird ways)? They got sick of being delisted while Valve turns a blind eye to all the trash porn games.

Ask yourself, does a marketplace that exerts creative control over specific studios' works while threatening financial repercussions if they don't comply benefit everyone? That sounds more like the mob to me.

Stop deifying companies.

It’s funny, because Zach Barth (of SpaceChem and many other wonderful games fame) worked at Valve and then described them as the ideal anarcho-communist type of organization.

Many of steams consumer benefits were a direct result of Valve getting sued and losing court cases. For example refunds and forced arbitration clause.