That leaked email conveniently assumes the owner of Valve would sell it. I can’t think of a reason for Gabe to do that.
For now. But his son is now focused on his own business and it’s got nothing to do with gaming. Once Gabe is gone, I doubt Valve will remain privately owned and by the same people.
Other people work at Valve other than Gabe. It’s entirely possible there’s others in the top management team.
Valve doesn’t have a management team.
Maybe they could transition to being a worker-owned collective when Gabe wants to retire. I’m not sure what else keeps Valve as we know it alive post Gabe.
Obviously other people work there, that doesn’t matter. What matters is who can make legal decisions about the company and I doubt that goes beyond Gabe. He’s a greedy bastard who really only cares about money. He’d make less in the long run if MS bought them out but that doesn’t mean the next person won’t take the payout.
We’ve needed real alternatives to valve for a long time for this exact reason. They’re already a monopoly. If they get bought out they’ll abuse their status even more than they already have.
He’s a greedy bastard who really only cares about money.
What makes you say this?
They’re already a monopoly
but they arent. there are plenty of other storefronts out there, albeit many being publisher owned. steam continues to succeed not because it has cornered the market like some monopolies, but because it is pro consumer and actually embraced by its target audience
If you believe in the fiction of a passionate worker leading the company when the CEO is gone, be my guest. Though I hope you’re good at coping with disappointments.
What I don’t believe is that you know exactly what the situation is or the people involved and what their plans are.
I never claimed to know.
But his son is now focused on his own business and it’s got nothing to do with gaming. Once Gabe is gone, I doubt Valve will remain privately owned and by the same people.
Ook
Yes, we can all read my public comment.
Now highlight the part where I claim to know what will happen.
You don’t either. So stop acting like you do.
When I act like I know you can say that to me.
So like…
Now?
Companies rise and die all the time. Let’s just hope when Valve dies, other (not shitty) company rises to replace it.
If Valve dies and I lose thousands of dollars in games, there won’t be another company for me, pure piracy until I die.
Its gonna happen.
Cause its already happened with other services, like Direct2Drive. Lost dozens of games from that being bought/sold/going under/rebranding whatever weird as fuck path its taken to be able to keep my money and not let me have any of the games I bought.
Digital Distribution is a plague, and most people refuse to look past the tip of their instant gratification to realize it.
Oh we did look. Gabe’s promise was to give us warning and an unlock on all our games so it could run without steam. There might be a jam in the rush to download and backup everything.
I didn’t like digital distribution and have been burned by Stardock (for selling out to Gamestop) and then by Gamestop (for shutting down my account without cause or notice). But Steam is the least offensive of the DD offerings.
Then again I’ve never been wronged by Steam and others have. Others have, amd I understand Steam support can be ruthlessly cold.
I still have CD and DVD games I like with no DD alternative sources. (I’ll buy them from GOG when they’re on the cheap just for convenience.) Some of them have exceeded their official shelf lives, and would depend on finding a no-disc-check mod online.
In this age, we should be able to download a game from any archive and just keep our licenses. But our society and the game industry only gets more and more resentful of its customer base.
If Steam dies, I’ll likely just pirate relentlessly and only actually buy games whose dev teams I want to support. ( Terraria and DRG serve as good examples – games where lighting and mining are complex mechanics). And the industry will suffer every time a DD platforn enshittifies.
I argue that digital is good as long as you make backups of your games.
I have an external drive full of steam games that steam can’t touch. So I’ll always have those games. Barring I lose the drive or don’t transfer the files before it becomes unreadable.
Another example where digital is good imo is the Switch. Those tiny game cards can suck my ass. If I drop one on my carpet it’ll be gone until next spring. Having multiple games saved on SD cards is the way to go.
Other than that, I agree.
You’re backups wont work if valve ceases to exist, since you need to be logged into a steam account, that owns the games, to restore the backups.
Same reason my D2D games ceased to work, cause D2D went away, along with their authentication servers.
That hasn’t been true for like ten years now.
Obviously anything that needs an internet connection will require steam. But pretty much almost all single player games do not need steam to run.
Valve did promise their customers will have a way to access their game if the company have to shutdown. But if the company got enshittified instead of dying, suck to the customers I guess.
I don’t know why people would trust Valve on that. They’ve blatantly lied a bunch of times yet for some reason people let them get away with it.
Game only available through Microsoft Xbox online stadia
This is the biggest problem with Valve at the moment. They’re awesome, but only because of the current leadership. Once these guys retire or die, it’s very likely Valve will enshittify like every other business.
Valve needs to be hit by regulators at some point. They just have too much market power.
I wish the decent guys who started companies would leave a directive for the company that must be followed to prevent it from becoming just another shitty piece of garbage like everything else these days has become thanks to the geniuses with business degrees running the world.
But there’s no practical way you could hold the future owners of the business to that directive. If you own the business, you get to set the directives, including overwriting previous ones.
The only way to enforce it is to maintain controlling interest in the business. Or, at least spread the interest among multiple parties so no one person can dictate it.
The best way to do this would be to make the company Employee Owned
Even then though you could have employees voting to change the direction of the business. If someone offers to buy the business for billions, then it’s possible everyone would vote to accept the sale and change everything.
The business is always going to change over time.
Valve is not awesome at all. Ffs, they didn’t become a monopoly by accident. People need to stop worshipping this company just because they started packaging wine with their app.
This is the same company that literally started the trend of requiring storefronts and custom installers for their games with HL2… the exact same thing people whine about EA and Blizzard doing.
PC gaming will become a total shit show if Valve dies and they’ll be fully responsible for it.
This is the same company that literally started the trend of requiring storefronts and custom installers for their games with HL2… the exact same thing people whine about EA and Blizzard doing.
But the thing is, Valve were never really dicks about it. They gave you a storefront, but it was actually useful. They collected user hardware data, but presented it aggregated to you and didn’t use it for marketing. Valve did many of the things gamers are rightly wary of, and did some of them first, but they rarely did it in a way that was predatory towards their users, like many other businesses do.
What valve does is so distinct from what most of the industry does the comparison is laughable. Valve is still a company and not our friend sure, but they are not openly anti-consumer like EA or Blizzard. And they don’t abuse their monopolies like Google or Microsoft.
just because they started packaging wine with their app
Even if that’s all they did, that is more than anyone else is doing. What they really did was make nearly every game they sell easily playable without requiring you to use Windows. As byproduct, DXVK (part of Valve’s Proton) provides greater compatibility and performance for Windows users as well (Intel ARC driver and DX9 game support for example). They have salaried employees working exclusively on making this work and their development is open source for anyone to use modify and share. Epic or any other store front could freely take advantage of this work and benefit why don’t they do that instead of whining?
Money? Remember when people thought that about Mojang?
Mojang, at least, was not founded by two guys who gave Microsoft the finger on their way out the door at their previous job.
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?
Other than the part about tons of money, basically nothing you just said is actually true.
I also think you’re conflating the person, Markus “Notch” Persson, with the company, Mojang. By the time Microsoft bought Mojang, and Minecraft, Notch had already left any kind of development role on Minecraft years before.
Notch himself has made several small indie games after Minecraft, none of which were successes. Mojang also made another game after Minecraft, Scrolls (now “Caller’s Bane,” after they got sued by Bethesda over the name). It was also not a success. So much for “not creating anything since.”
They’ve also made Minecraft Dungeons and Minecraft Legends. Both of which were meh successes.
But honestly when you’ve got a cash cow eternity game like Minecraft, why TF would you need to make anything else?
Because no matter what you do or how well you do it, punters on the internet will act like you still owe them something.
Gabe seems to be able to handle wealth much better than notch, at least. If he would have been susceptible to falling off the deep end like notch, he would have already done so.
@SkyeStarfall @xkforce how do you know this?
Know what, that Gabe hasn’t fallen of the deep end like notch? Well, mostly by the lack of any controversy with him personally. Sure that’s not a perfect measure, but it still puts him above notch.
Right? Its like someone leering at you.
Valve was founded in 1996 by former Microsoft employees Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington.
You have no idea how this works.
Gabe Newell quit working for Microsoft before Windows 3.0 was released. Valve is an employee-owned private company, Gabe Newell ensured that even after his passing, Valve stays true to their roots as long as there’s the majority of employees sharing his ideals.
No, that’s not how it works. You have no idea how valves shares are spread out and neither does anyone else outside the company. Just because Valve employees own shares does not mean their votes are all equal, in fact they almost certainly aren’t.
Their text book is publicly available, so I disagree.
@LoafyLemon @boo @ono @DrVortex @rambaroo what book?
Employee owned businesses are something else, Valve is just a regular privately owned business, one that the owner works for and takes a salary from.
Employee owned businesses are owned by all of the employees, collectively, with a slightly more democratic decision making process. The CEO still makes the decisions, but employees have a right to have their input heard as shareholders. With Valve, Gabe has the final say on everything.
Gaben already refused to sell to EA and made it abundantly clear that we would rather let valve die than go public.
Microsoft also just recently said they’d buy Nintendo if they could.
All this means is that Microsoft is filthy rich and still doesn’t know how to make an original quality game studio. They seem to overly rely on buying out studios and IPs that are successful to rake in more money.
spoiler
All of which reeks of an oligigopoly and reminds me of even worse companies like Oracle and AT&T
The funny thing about selling valve, what would it even give for Gabe? He’s already filthy rich. What more could one want with more money?
Saying no to selling only makes sense in his position, in my opinion. At least I personally would think so. Because then you still keep what is effectively your creation, and can use it to shape the world.
At some point you really do just have enough money.
Well, the idea is you can do something else with the money instead of it being tied up with that company. You could start another venture if you want to. I’m pretty sure Valve is what he wants to be doing though, so starting a different company isn’t really something he’d want to do.
Even if he doesn’t want to run it, doesn’t mean it has to be sold to another company. It can just keep on being a private company with a new handpicked leader. There’s no upside to selling for Gabe. After he passes however… all bets are off.
depends who he passes ownership to. it could be a bunch of inheriters who have no interest in owning/running it and it will be forced to sell off to split shares out. or maybe he gifts it to a single person he sees as a successor. who knows, i dont know shit about his family so have no idea
I would trust Gabe’s judgement 100%. Dude runs one of the most pro-consumer companies in history. In doing so, he has built a fiercely loyal fan base by simply being good to his customers; not trying to squeeze them for every single cent.
Gabe is a rarity; part of a bygone era of business owners and software engineers who truly care about their projects and want to build things that they themselves want to use and play. He’s a smart man and Valve has been his baby since he left Microsoft. He’ll make sure it’s in good hands when and if retirement comes calling.
Yeah where’s our antitrust enforcement?
The oligopoly thing has definitely been fucking everything up for decades.
The thought of another company buying Valve, especially one like Microsoft, makes me actually sick. I have spent so much fucking money on my Steam library at this point. If my Steam library gets jacked by some billionaire dickheads it’s all over, I’m never paying for anything again.
Yargghh?! Seriously though, I was furious when they bought Mojang and partially enshittified Minecraft.
I remember when they bought Rare, then squandered it. They pretty much solely did it to try and stop Nintendo making better games than them.
They bought Bethesda because they feared Starfield would become a (timed) PlayStation exclusive. They just bought the entire publisher… And now Activision is next.
Having said that I’m not a fan of Sony buying Bungie to use their “live service” expertise either.
Bungie’s been selling themselves out to one megacorporation after another for more than 20 years now. If Sony hadn’t bought them, someone else would’ve.
bad news my friend. Valve is owned by a billionaire dickhead.
Billionaire, yes. Dickhead? That’s subjective. I’m not gonna worship the man but his actions point to him being among the most pro-consumer of CEOs out there, so I wouldn’t say he’s a dickhead.
I’m not super informed on the man I guess, please enlighten me.
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This is so stupid. Of course they would buy it. Valve won’t sell, but let’s do the click baits!
They’d buy Sony and Nintendo if those were up to sell. For the right price (I dunno, in the hundreds of dollars according to my bank account), I’d buy them too.
in the hundreds of dollars according to my bank accoun
You decadent bourgeois pig
Look at Daddy Warbucks over here.
Yeah 100% this. Why would you not buy Valve? The store is a cash cow and the userbase is huge. They have a lot of good faith with the community too. These must be rage bait articles.
They can buy the Steam forums.
As long as Gabe lives, this won’t be a problem.
But he’s getting on in age so this will eventually be an issue, no doubt…
Gabe will have a good successor. Valve has a lot of talented and passionate employees that have been with the company since near the start.
Gaben is one of the few people in tech I trust to resist the money MSFT would be willing to throw at something as successful as valve. I mean - they’re the closest thing to a trustworthy company as you can find these days.
Yeah, I doubt he cares about the money at this point, and he did leave MSFT, so I’m guessing he isn’t interested in selling. He also went out of his way to use Linux to stick it to MSFT.
As long as he runs the company, I don’t see it happening.
Even if he left the company he still has over 50% ownership.
Only if he decides to retain his stake. Let’s say he dies, perhaps his heir chooses to sell instead of stay involved in the company.
Eh, I would hardly call Valve trustworthy or the good guy
I would say don’t worship multi billion dollar companies.
Especially ones that only give you things you should have always had, like refunds, after being forced to by state lawsuits to force them into compliance with the law.
I miss the days when you actually owned your fucking games and could loan them to friends or sell them to get something else.
They aren’t the ‘good guy’ but they are one of the few tech companies left that try to make money by selling a product people want to buy. Basically everyone else is just trying to screw people over or sell out to investors as soon as they can.
That’s not good, but it’s the way people understand and think businesses should be run, even though most modern companies no longer work that way.
Valve is not worthy of your trust. Gabe won’t sell to MS because Valve is an absolute gold mine and it’s extremely unlikely even MS could make him an offer that actually makes more money for him in the long run.
Gaben used to work at Microsoft and left because he hated it.
Wow really? This may explain why valve likes Linux so much (at least in part, it’s an untapped market, 10 other reasons etc)
Fun fact, he left Microsoft before the release of Windows 3.
Gabe has been a large proponent of avoiding the kind of consolidation that Microsoft is doing. He saw the writing on the way years ago when Valve released the Steam consoles. I don’t think (and certainly hope) that he wouldn’t sell.
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I don’t think so. MS is more interested in moving customers to the cloud. So whatever gets more people to use the cloud.
getting rid of linux support may cause people to switch to windows, if not prevent people from switching to begin with…at least that’s how executives in ms would think
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Never give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt.
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We need a president that carries a big stick, and uses it to beat the shit out of monopolies and billionaires.
What exactly could a president do? They aren’t kings despite what some would think.
They nominate positions on the FTC, which is supposed to be responsible for managing monopolies. Recent nominations have shown interest in updating or outdated policies regarding monopolies.
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Iirc the funding from MS to Apple was part of a deal they made with the authorities. Not because they wanted to.
What? Microsoft added Linux on top of Windows not long ago with the WSL. I severely doubt they’d discontinue proton or Linux and Mac support
They would discontinue it because Proton moves users to Linux(or more specifically outside of Windows) which they don’t want. WSL keep users on Windows.
Well, Proton is pretty important for the Steam Deck, and I doubt Microsoft would want to kneecap that device, at least while it’s still selling units.
Also Proton is open source, so while it can get less convenient to use, it can’t really go away.
Microsoft made WSL to get market share from web devs who were using Linux or Mac, so they could use a Linux shell for their development while using Windows as their main OS. I wouldn’t use WSL as evidence that they wouldn’t gut Proton support in Steam.
That being said, the Steam Deck is a very successful device that I doubt Microsoft would want to get rid of, and Proton is pretty vital for that, so they’d probably keep Proton going because of that. They might still seek to make the next revision of the Steam deck run a Windows based OS though.
I like to think Gabe knows all too well the importance of remaining a private business. Publicly traded businesses are the root cause of a lot of problems in the world.
I work for a company that has specifically stated it will never do that and has stuck to those guns for 50+ years
I work for one who said the same thing then 2 years ago sold for $12 billion dollars to a public company. The employees didn’t get very much of that either.
A public traded company has way more transparency, I have no idea why you believe privately held companies would be in any way better.
The problem is often when the original founder of a private company leaves, the company loses its roots and by that its reason to exist. And those two often go together.
Only more transparency in the fiduciary sense, which only really helps shareholders. All companies are still required to follow any regulatory disclosures, which generally benefits the public and users.
Valve has only gotten to where they are being on the pulse of the gaming community, and being agile to adapt to those needs. Publicly traded companies only care about profits and shareholders by contract. That’s kind of their job once they go public. Very few buck that trend.
Yes you are somewhat right. But IMO Valve is what it is because of Gabe Newell, private or public is not the determining factor.
When Gabe Newell at some point leaves Valve, the company will change, no matter if it stays private or goes public.
Day 1 of suddenly having the urge to keep an offline and DRM free copy of all my steam games.
The article says Microsoft would like to buy Valve. Of course they do. Valve is actively working against Microsoft’s interests (and we have to thank them for that).
It does not say Gabe Newell has the slightest intention to sell. Because he doesn’t.
Yea, but Gabe is not going to be around forever, and any successor leadership might have a different philosophy. And it’s never a bad idea to have a backup.
I imagine they would immediately drop proton and move the steam deck too some windows bs
Windows CE is back babyyyyyyyy!
This brings back nightmares from my first job!
no, especially not. After messing/locking down gaming for 2 decades and people having doing the job in porting/reverse engineer their API, etc… they will simply exploit it without any effort.
MSFT is evil, it does not “love” opensource (which is only TS and .NET), it just came with their massive war treasure and eat the effort of people while having been the MAIN responsible of slowing down innovation!
They pretend they love FOSS. “Look, we own GitHub, the biggest FOSS code sharing platform!”. Of course, because you bought it you morons.
For the love of God, please Valve never sell out. I love the current state of things and every day I dread someone might get a bad idea and fuck it all up for the rest of us to enrich himself.
I am not sure if there are any failsafes in the BoD at Valve, but I am sure as long as Gabe is at the helm, we are all safe.
only millennials and JS soyboy devs think that MSFT is good opensource boy, they didn’t grow up during while Ballmer/Gates were in charge and didn’t notice how nasty MSFT was for the computing and still is.
It’s impossible for me to understand not having enough. M$ is like some megacorp villain that wants to swallow everything
Always has been.
Thugs4less LOL
@Krzak @boo There used to be much more diversity in the marketplace, but those are bygone days.
Power, influence and greed are the prime movers these days and whowever is in a position to monopolize on this will have a caravan of equally minded people who will agree to participate in the slaughter of the free marketplace just for a piece of the action.
When one company in an industry has nearly endless cash, as Microsoft and Apple do, it is natural that everyone else would be seen as acquisition targets
The difference is Valve is completely privately owned, Microsoft cannot force a sale.
With a publicly traded business, the business must be run in the interests of the shareholders, ie it must pursue profits above all else. Thus a buyer can effectively present “an offer you can’t refuse”, at least the business can’t refuse on behalf of shareholders (maybe the shareholders could vote and refuse). With a private business the owner generally has free reign to run the business as they see fit, they could run it into the ground if they so desired.
So it doesn’t matter how much cash Microsoft or whoever have, so long as Gabe doesn’t want to sell.
So long as Gabe doesn’t like die or have a personality changing stroke. Not sure what Valve’s plans are for his retirement
Selling to Microsoft would be a good retirement plan
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish moment
Triple E gaming
This would be a nightmare
