Valve is a whole company of people like Gaben.
Valve is a unique company with no traditional hierarchy. In business school, I read a very interesting Harvard Business Review article on the subject. Unfortunately it’s locked behind a paywall, but this is Google AI’s summary of the article which I confirm to be true from what I remember:
According to a Harvard Business Review article from 2013, Valve, the gaming company that created Half Life and Portal, has a unique organizational structure that includes a flat management system called “Flatland”. This structure eliminates traditional hierarchies and bosses, allowing employees to choose their own projects and have autonomy. Other features of Valve’s structure include:
- Self-allocated time: Employees have complete control over how they allocate their time
- No managers: There is no managerial oversight
- Fluid structure: Desks have wheels so employees can easily move between teams, or “cabals”
- Peer-based performance reviews: Employees evaluate each other’s performance and stack rank them
- Hiring: Valve has a unique hiring process that supports recruiting people with a variety of skills
Kinda sounds like how worker cooperatives work tbh, but with Gabe still technically being the owner.
I remember reading a news piece a while back about how the founder of a food company made sure to transfer ownership to the employees before leaving. While we’re talking about worst-case scenarios, let’s also hope for the best and hope that Gabe has a similar plan.
Him being a pretty smart guy overall surely has at least some sort of continuity planned.
PeopleMakeGames has a two part series on Valve that’s pretty interesting. The second part (here) dives into the structure of the company. It does have a bit of an angle, fwiw, so if you’d prefer something more objective, it might not be a great watch. Personally I think the issues they bring up are valid, but figured I’d mention it.
A little unsure about the “peer based performance review”, sounds like bullying might somehow have to be kept in check. Otherwise this sounds awesome.
Fun fact: Former employees of Valve have said that is actually a huge problem in the organization and that its organizational structure seems to encourage bullying and high-school style “cliquishness” by design.
I mean it’s not as though that’s not a problem in normal companies. It’s just that normal companies can sort of use the guise of structure or professionalism to harangue whatever employees the clique ends up disliking. The cliques are baked in, in a normal company.
It can be a problem at other companies, but even worse than average at Valve by virtue of corporate structure. Both of these things can be true.
Realistically, it’s only a matter of time until Steam becomes as enshittificated as any other services. There is profit to be made from Steam selling advertising space and customer data. They can either choose to capitalize on the profits that are in front of them, or allow another company to and take that capital from them. For a business it’s not a matter of what’s right and wrong anymore but consume or be consumed. If Steam isn’t willing to do that someone else will be willing to play the long game and do it. Then it’ll be only a matter of time until Steam gets acquired by another company and then it’s game over.
What many posters in this thread fail to realize is that there is a very good reason why steam hasn’t been hit by the enshittification that otherwise permeates human existence in 2024.
Of course, Gaben as their CEO has the last say in it. And he’s just a good guy. But wait, aren’t there other companies that have good guys as their CEO and yet the enshittification persists?
The profound reason is that Valve is not a publicly traded company. They have no obligation to any investors to make number go up. They are a private company, they can do whatever the fuck they want. If they stay flat and keep paying their employees, that’s totally fine, and there is 0 pressure on them to change anything. THAT‘s why Valve seems like such a different company compared to everything else that’s out there.
Of course it’s still a choice to go public or not, and they have made the right call (for us consumers).
there is a very good reason why steam hasn’t been hit by the enshittification that otherwise permeates human existence in 2024.
Come again? Steam is enshitifed af. from forcing CS:GO players to move to CS:2 to adding DRM left and right, they do it all. They even release remasters of old games that are essentially always broken one or another.
Gabe is helping, sure, but he isn’t holding up gaming. People were gaming on Linux before Proton even existed, myself included. Also, even if Valve went away completely, Proton is open-source and there are people like GloriousEggroll who work on Proton entirely as a community member. Proton will live on, specifically because it is open-source. All the progress made on Proton won’t suddenly disappear, all the games that were previously playable on Proton will still be playable on Proton.
It’s a somewhat reasonable fear but it’s not a realistic fear. Proton isn’t going anywhere.
Proton will live on, specifically because it is open-source.
Don’t just thank open source; thank copyleft for the fact that Valve couldn’t make a closed-source fork of it even if it wanted to.
Proton is open source. Anyone can pull it together and integrate it. Gog have been doing DRM free games for a while, they’ll be quite keen to fill this niche. Epic probably won’t care. If none do, someone will want to.
What are you smoking? GOG Galaxy doesn’t even have a Linux client. In fact it has been one of the most requested features for years and nothing has happened.
Edit: it’s also the reason I stopped buying from them when I got my Steam Deck.
Valve is a private company whereas GOG belongs to CDProject - a publicly traded company. GOG might want to fill the void but they’re more likely to do dumb, shortsighted decisions in contrast to Valve.
Maybe, but DRM free content isn’t exactly shareholder value…
It’s better shepherded than Epic. They probably don’t fill the space because Steam do it better, but you invest more if the return is higher.
The case I’m referring to is in the future if Steam badly enshittified.
Obviously his death will trigger a worldwide AR Easter egg hunt, where the Steam user worthy enough to find the three keys first will become the new Gaben and Master Of Steam.
Must drive backwards…
Or talk to a girl!
I cringe just remembering that movie.
I haven’t seen it, is it even worse than the book ?
I looked at the movie as a fun romp that’s a bit inspired by the book and that makes it bearable. The movie took the nerdiness down in a way that was very unrealistic, but understandable to the general public. Anyone actually in the nerd community knows that people find shortcuts and glitches, and do speedrun records competitively; but they removed the entire part about the first key being in the school area (where it would be attainable by all for free) and instead make it “Oh, I was supposed to drive backwards in this race that I need a very expensive car/weapons for”
It’s a very pretty movie with a lot of fun Easter Eggs, but you’ve gotta separate and realize it wasn’t made for them to enjoy it.
What movie/book?
Ready Player One
For sure, valid to fear the enshittification of steam. But they aren’t killing proton. Maybe ignoring proton at worst. But Steam has profit motivations for not being reliant on Windows, which has actively been trying to supplant them with the Windows Store for years.
As another separate, profit-motivated company, with a gaming division and a lot to gain from eating Steam’s lunch, Microsoft is not Steam’s friend. Proton is a critical bargaining tool for them, and not having to include windows licenses for devices like the Steam Deck helps their costs too.
Deep discounts are locked behind a subscription
I think Gabe has been getting healthy lately. Last picture I saw of him he was looking like he lost a lot of weight. Maybe repost this in 10 years and then we can panic.
GOG.
We need to support GOG and it’s model as much as possible.<3
If only they would support Linux more.
They barely “support” Windows, they aren’t rally a software dev company, they are just sell you the actual game (unlike Valve etc).
And that is precious, the world needs companies that help restore some equality on the market.
And also what Nothing said.
they aren’t rally a software dev company
CD Projekt is very much a software dev. I’m not sure why you would think they are not.
Well, they’re a game developer. And they own GOG. GOG as a subsidiary is a digital distributor of prepackaged digital content. Developing a system that allows people to find a digital item, pay for it, and then download it, is hilariously, vastly different than developing a compatibility layer for games developed for one operating system to run on another. Like…the former is straight up just basic web development. The latter is hardcore systems programming. They are worlds apart.
Lutris > gog as source > set proton as a runner (or wine, or whatever else if specific games require it, like FFXIV)
I tried this for a while and it was incredibly janky. Heroic launcher is a night and day difference.
The life expectancy of 75 is an average (of the US population i assume), billionaires are likely to live longer
Gaben is not exactly an inspiring portrait of health…
The latest pictures of him look good, though. The man has definitely lost some weight.
And that one “old fat guy” is constantly under attack from degenerates because “sTeAm mOnoPoLy”.
Steam/Valve is pretty much one of the only companies I actually am perfectly willing to let be a monopoly as they currently stand. Especially since they have come a long ways towards making gaming so much more accessible to Linux users, like me, who don’t know how to take full advantage of wine.
The fact that people non ironically visit 4chan in 2024 kind of worries me
I already have enough games to last a lifetime, stored to my storage
Yeah hate to say it but by the time this golden age ends with valve I’ll prob either not be gaming as much anyway or to your point have enough that I won’t really care about the newer games.
I mean, I’m not even bummed! Life has gotten very busy, but I have about 10 old standbys in multiple genres. When time allows, I can get tons of enjoyment out of them.
I look forward to playing them years into the future and don’t feel limited. It’s rare that a new game piques my interest and rarer that it hits my “list”
Good news. Unreal Engine 4 is usable on Linux and works pretty well too.
Learn some C++, get some ppl and make good games.Also, GoG means old games don’t die. (well at least the non DRM ones)
GoG does DRM free, and not just old games. Not many new AAA because convincing a big company to sell their game DRM free is hard, but Baldur’s Gate 3 is on there.
And of course the ones they (i.e. CD Projekt Red) make themselves. The Witcher series, including Gwent spinoffs, and Cyberpunk 2077
Yeah, and lots of new popular indie games. Some recent oneish I’ve got are DREDGE, Rimworld and Stardew Valley. OK not super recent but not all the games are 20 years old or more. Even Skyrim Anniversary is on there.
Yeah, I recently bought X4, which is so badly implemented (at least on Linux) that it gives the same FPS (in the 30s) on Low settings as it does on Ultra.
I even went ahead and bought a new GPU just for that and hardly see a difference, even being suspicious of there being a miner in it.
Fun game nonetheless.
x series has largely been cpu limited by single main thread as long as it’s existed fwiw
Wait, so all I had to do was disable my underclock and I would have gotten the same marginal perf gains that I got by upgrading both my CPU and GPU?
Will Egosoft hire me if I offer to refactor their code into something multithread friendly?
I mean if you’re german you could try working for them lol
This is not “a prediction” - this is inevitably what’s going to happen.
Everyone here who has drank the Valve kool-aid and pretends like they can do no wrong is dangerously short-sighted. Steam’s virtual monopoly on PC gaming is a huge issue. You think Epic has a monopoly on the concept of “Store Exclusives?” Fucking spare me. It’s a matter of time before Steam locks in its own exclusives, kills Proton, and locks every. single. game. behind always online DRM.
If you want to distribute your new PC game, guess what? You don’t get to contract with both GOG and Steam. You don’t get to say your game is Linux compatible because it runs well in the Proton compatibility layer. Oh, and if you say “games could run on Linux before Proton!” then you’re deluding yourself by remembering a time when games were distributed with their own launcher and weren’t packed to the gills with platform specific code so that the game integrates seamlessly with a specific third-party launcher and its DRM tools. You bought a Steamdeck? Cool. The version of Arch it runs is no longer supported. You have to upgrade to “Windows for Steameck.” Yes, you have to pay for a fucking Windows license. Yes, it has fewer features than baseline Windows. No, it’s not less expensive.
You think what’s happening to YouTube is bad? Fucking strap in, boys. Welcome to digital content distribution in the age of unfettered capitalism. I wonder how many of you are gonna eat this shit up, huff lethal quantities of copium, and say it’s “not that bad” once it starts happening and you’re faced with either standing by your own stated convictions and giving up almost all PC gaming in general or bend the knee so you can get your precious Steam Library back. Probably most of you.
What you’re saying is “inevitable” hasn’t happened for the entire 20+ years of Steam. I’m going to guess Valve is going to continue being a private company and doing whatever the fuck they want, without investor pressure towards enshittification.
Steam’s monopoly is actually what’s holding PC gaming together. Other types of digital distribution services are so fucked up by exclusivity deals that any “competition” is always going to mean “megacorporation uses existing wealth to deny competition”.
Epic is trying really hard to bring the exclusivity nightmare over to PC gaming as well, but so far Valve still holds.
What you’re saying is “inevitable” hasn’t happened for the entire 20+ years of Steam.
Something being “inevitable” by definition means it will eventually happen, but has not already occurred.
Steam’s monopoly is actually what’s holding PC gaming together.
“Steam good. Steam has monopoly. Therefore, monopoly good.”
Woof.
