Comment by SXX
1 month ago
At least with Valve we can hope its gonna be okay for 4 reasons:
1. Even though Gabe is formally CEO he from his own words was barelly controllibg company for years. He spend more time on his other projects.
2. Flat structure and and a small team. I know few people who has worked at Valve and while there are some downsides company of ~400 employees with a lot of internal power play is just more resilient than normal corporation. Many of people on the team are just rich enough already and they dont need to go and cash out.
3. From what is publicly known Valve is family owned basically since Gabe own major part of company. And while a lot of people would hate example of e.g Ubisoft its good example how family controlled business often sink before selling out.
4. It would be just hard to sell Valve and remove control from the team without destroying both company and gaming community goodwill.
Yet I fully agree that Valve just like other company can be sold off just for userbase and run to the ground.
Valve just have better chance to stay customer friendly than your overall VC/PE/BlackRock owned corporation with 10,000 employees and 50 for-hire top managers / board directors.
> Even though Gabe is formally CEO he from his own words was barelly controllibg company for years. He spend more time on his other projects.
The time he spends on Valve day to day is irrelevant to the question of what would happen if those actually running the company decided to do something stupid like taking games away from people vs. what would happen in the same scenario without Gabe around.
> Many of people on the team are just rich enough already and they dont need to go and cash out.
Rich people are largely the kind that can never have enough money.
> From what is publicly known Valve is family owned basically since Gabe own major part of company.
And there is no reason to believe his heirs will want to keep the company rather than cash out for the right offer just because Gabe wouldn't have.
> It would be just hard to sell Valve and remove control from the team without destroying both company and gaming community goodwill.
That has never been an a showstopper for vulture capitalists.