His plan isn't based off trying to squeeze blood from stones, it's to sell some video games. Not a very capitalist mindset, but there you have it.
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Valve takes 30% from every sale on Steam, which is quite landlord-like. Although there are much worse practices in the market.
Oh no, a sales platform that takes a cut of revenue.
Valve isnβt a charity, and they provide very good services for what developers pay.
Devs donβt need to host download servers, they donβt need to staff customer service reps, they donβt have to set up banking infrastructure or worry at all about handling payments from hundreds of different banks across hundreds of countries.
Itβs not like valve takes 30% and sits on it. They put that money to use.
I am not against it.
you gotta take into account the insanely good service both devs and players get in exchange for those 30% here is a list
EGS finally has a shopping cart now, so it's basically equal now, right?
now it just needs to stop sucking
"If you have the patience to sit by the river and wait, eventually, the corpses of your enemies will float by." Sun Tzu
The "do nothing and win" strategy.
It's called making a product/service for their customers instead of for the shareholders bank balance.
Honestly, the secret is not being a publicly traded company. All the others have to make the shareholders happy while steam just does steam. If the line doesn't have to constantly go up you can pretty much do whatever you want as long as you're still making profit. And if what you're doing is already working you don't need to add gimmicks or advertisements to milk it as much as you can just to appease the shareholders.
Being a private company has allowed Valve to take some really big swings. Steam Deck is paying off handsomely, but it came after the relative failure of the Steam Controller, Steam Link and Steam Machines. With their software business stable, they can allow themselves to take big risks on the hardware side, learn what does and doesn't work, then try again. At a publically traded company, CEO Gabe Newell probably gets forced out long before they get to the Steam Deck.
Does nothing? DOES NOTHING?! He spent the last few years ripping Microsoft a new a@@hole, rendering their operating system meaningless for gamers! ..but nice meme
Just my two cents but as others have said, not being publically traded helps a lot. The focus on short term benefits that come with shareholders stops "master plans" when they come with mistakes. Learning from relative failures, like the steam controller and the like, ultimately contributes to major successes like the steam deck. Being able to stay committed to improving the software experience over time, instead of killing the product when it didn't immediately succeed, is fairly rare in the tech industry. And in all honesty, it would be better if they released a polished profuct, but being committed to it made it a success.
I feel like the pressure to have a majorly successful product day one means that smaller companies can't innovate the way they want to, so they have to find other ways to produce revenue. Huge companies, like Apple can afford to do both but still stumble, like with the vision pro. Maybe it'll be a success, but for now its not great and iteration makes it more difficult to maintain the original vision.
You can either be publicly traded and let greedy shareholders sell things for parts or you can have private ownership and pray to God that they're benevolent. There has to be another option, surely. Maybe one where Valve becomes employee-owned with a trust/foundation backing it once Gabe dies?