If Steam or Valve ever goes public and IPOs, I’m gonna fucking kill myself.
They seem to be the only ones who aren’t like going through an enshitification cycle right now.
That’s a little dramatic.
I don’t think they’ll ever become an IPO.
But it’s more likely that if Gabe doesn’t have someone or something in mind that keeps Steam on track, there’s few companies that can buy it. Microsoft could acquire it. Sony could acquire it. Epic games could acquire it.
Companies that would have no care or clue in how to keep Steam as is.
Safest option would be to turn Valve into a foundation, similar to Zeiss: The company owns itself thus can’t be bought out, statutory stipulations go along the lines of “Make sure we don’t go bankrupt, do great optics, funnel some money to the University of Jena as well as less well off workers in the city”. No grand charitable aspirations besides being a good citizen as per 1846 bourgeois values (though that’d be Gabe’s choice), otherwise just continue as they’ve been doing. Make sure all stakeholders (incl. gamers, or at least Valve customers) have standing to enforce those statutes.
Good guy steam. Their family sharing beta is currently a game changer for people like me whose friends have diverse gaming interests and thus, we can try out each other’s games without the need to buy them.
wonder if it’s going to rat someone out by saying something along the lines of
A member of your Steam Family already owns Horny Hentai Ladies: Stupidly huge dongs GOTY
this will only increase the family bonding.
You can put those games as private
I’m still not 100% trusting that. Any time a dev comes up with a new feature like this one, they might forget to implement a check if the game is privated (or do the check and mess up properly hiding it).
Exactly. This is like someone I knew who was a CSR blowing off steam at difficult customers by hitting mute and cussing them out. Like you realize that mechanisms fail all the time, right? This dude wouldn’t entertain the idea that a mute button could fail. I tried.
Honestly that’s a great analogy.
I worked briefly as a CSR and during training they made a point of telling us that people had been fired because of doing exactly that when the mute button failed. That was over a decade ago, but I wouldn’t expect increased reliability today.
More recently, a friend who is a CSR told me that their software mute buttons only prevent the audio from going to the customer, but it’s still recorded and can be grounds for termination if the call was audited. I introduced her to a microphone with a physical mute button but made sure she knew that it could also fail (or most likely, that she might be using a different connected mic, in case the hardware mute would do nothing).
Office conferencing software also has a really bad record with their software mutes. I’ve had experiences with Teams, Zoom, and Webex where I’ve clicked mute, but wasn’t muted.
The mute button should be thought of as a feature for the person on the other line / the other people on the call - you’re reducing the noise so the focus can be on the conversation - not as a feature for your privacy. You can treat Private Games similarly - it’s so you don’t subject your friends to the thought of you playing sexually themed games, not so you’re guaranteed to be saved the embarrassment of people knowing that you’re playing them.
I did that when I worked customer support. The only way I could retain the little bit of sanity I had left. But to be honest, we were so understaffed that even if I slipped, they wouldn’t have fired me. There was one guy who was so angry with a customer that he wrote their number down, and then over his break called the customer with his private phone to argue with them. Still didn’t get fired, lol.
damn, i had exactly this happen to me.
i’m very happy to be a) not working with costumers anymore and b) much more chill than i was 20 years ago.
This world really does not deserve Valve
something tell me the publishers are not gonna be happy about this and will try to sabotage it.
They cant do shit. What are they going to do? Stop releasing on the biggest platform?
And this boys is why we choose to give money to valve, and as a bonus steam sales are amazing. Valve really knows how to keep a steady income of profit and just dont fck with what works
valve makes more money by being decent company than many others combined who actively try to exploit users.
