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this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2024
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Just wait until GabeN retires and the inheritors of Valve start to enshittify it. Unless GabeN had a good succession plan in place, or GoG can swoop in and become the new standard, things might get rough. I might stick to retro games from then on.
Ugh, the thought of some generic investment company swooping in and running Valve hurts my heart.
I'm seriously concerned about this, yet I keep using steam because of the convenience.
Steam is currently a good company so I am happy to support it. If it enshittifies then I will stop using it and sail the high seas if need be.
Steam is privately held, so there's plenty of reason to be hopeful. The recent rapid enshittification of what feels like every company is mostly due to US laws that require publicly traded companies to squeeze every last dollar out or face severe penalties. Privately held companies are not subject to those laws, and so they can stay actually decent and care about their customers without threat of legal repercussions. An example is Lego Group - there's some valid criticism, but legos have stayed a top quality product for nearing a hundred years - and show no signs of suddenly degrading in quality. So, I wouldn't worry unduly about this until Valve announces an IPO. Then you should start worrying.
Just to be clear, there's no actual law requiring that. It's just an excuse they use to be greedy.
If you breach fiduciary duty the best thing you can hope for is to be fired. Executives have been criminally charged for it as well though. And while it has to be an intentional act of malfeasance, that gets pretty blurry when the shareholders hire thousand dollar an hour lawyers to come after you.
So while yes, the root cause is greed, the system itself is setup to feed that.
It's more complicated than just one law that says "you must be a bastard" I admit, but fiduciary responsibility is a core requirement of any publicly traded company and very much is legally enforceable (this parenthetical aside stands in for about three pages of niche caveats and overly wordy exceptions that I'm just going to shamelessly handwave away). At best a CEO might be found to be civilly liable, but ~~peasants~~ non-C-suite employees are criminally charged for neglecting their fiduciary duty every day in the US.
Absolutely, but fiduciary responsibility, has never and was never intended to mean absolutely maximizing profits and especially at the long term expense.
That was a twisted idea that was put forward in the late 70s early 80s as a means to justify destroying companies for short term gain.
Oh, then yes I agree completely!
...
So anyways you coming to Steve's "eat the rich" party? I hear he's got a new barbecue.
My hope is that Gabe actually gets direct brain connection technology off the ground and he uploads his consciousness into an everlasting machine so he never has to retire.
Perhaps one encased in a giant stone bust of himself. With lasers.
Luckily BG3 is on GOG. I don't think I've bought a new game on steam for years, granted I don't play a lot of games nowadays.
I bought BG3 on GOG simply because it was on GOG, otherwise I would have waited a few years. I want to support AAA games being release on GOG at release because it doesn't happen much. GOG isn't gonna take over Steam, because largely the industry isn't going to support DRM free AAA games.
Why should they enshitify a service that is printing money with minimal effort? Right guys 🥲.
because they don't understand why it's printing money
Not only do they not understand, they actively don't care: they have a product-agnostic business process that can convert any type of stable business into a pile of extracted equity and spare parts. They are literally bleeding their own society to death
At least actual vampires would probably have the good sense not to destroy the breeding stock that keeps them alive.
Because most of these MBA fucks don't understand the concept of piracy being a service problem. They have run perfectly fine systems into the ground because they insist on making it infinitely harder to use legit services than to just rip shit off.
Like the 28. Streaming service, so that I can't find what I want anymore.
Yeah, the thing about Steam is that buying your game at Steam feels better than downloading it for free somehow.
Because they could make it print even more money, and make the line go more up for a very short time!
That looks good on the CV you know.
Because it could be printing even MOAR money. Line must go up at all cost.
Supposedly the answer is inflation. The same profit next year is worth less, so it needs to go up to be the same.
Of course thats not where most companies stop, is it.
The thing that pisses me off if that my comp only goes up by 3% but that is failure to a corp.
Thats interesting, I hadn't connected those before. I think it would be hard to argue in favor of separate expectations for inflation of wages and the companies profits.
Like I understand having a stellar year, but the goal is still set the same, and its fine to return tk that baseline next year. Or maybe even doing well one year means we can lower the goal next year, or bank the difference for bad weather years.
Would be interesting if companies had an interest in the long term like that.
it's a very closely held private company, gaben absolutely has someone to take his place with ideals similar to his.
You hope. It wouldn't be the first time.
example? /genq
Oh geez there's so many people tend to write articles about the general phenomenon rather than specific examples.
One of the biggest recent examples though has got to be Boeing. While they're a publicly traded company, they resisted the call of greed above all until they merged with McDonnell Douglas and the MD executives won the battle for control of the merged company. Things went on a decades long slide after that which resulted in hundreds of deaths and a chain of high profile mechanical failures we're still not sure is over.
For privately held corporations it's all about that new leadership. In fact around 70 percent of family run ones fail in the second generation. But any generation can run the business into the ground or change it up. Bancroft and Barings are great examples of that. Barings was 232 years old when it went bankrupt under mismanagement.
Need someone to track videogame piracy rates and if steam gets enshittified make a graph and mark each of their bad decisions against it
Whether or not we believe it will be true, Gabe has said that he will release code that will allow you to play every game you've bought on steam without steam service if ever things headed in that direction.
I don't think he's really that involved into Steam or Valve proceedings anymore