From the opinion piece:
Last year, I pointed out how many big publishers came crawlin’ back to Steam after trying their own things: EA, Activision, Microsoft. This year, for the first time ever, two Blizzard games released on Steam: Overwatch and Diablo 4.
This genuinely doesn’t get talked about enough. Steam is a private company and Gabe Newell seems to be the de facto “head” of the company, despite its famously “flat” management structure. There is no guarantee a new leader will have the same values or lead the same way. There is ripe opportunity for Steam to become a steaming pile of shit. I don’t know about the exact ownership structure beyond Newell, but unless the employees are far more empowered through things like ownership stake in the company, new leadership could effectively destroy how things currently work at Valve to be replaced by any number of terrible business decisions.
Gabe is old as hell. It’s coming.
Hopefully they have some sort of transition plan for who will take over when Gabe retires. As long as they hand the reigns over to someone with similar ideas and not some business type they could be fine given they are privately owned.
Read somewhere that his son who has a similar philosophy was going to take over
Dude, he’s 61. You guys are making it sound like he’s as old as a presidential candidate…
True, but that’s unrelated to people pretending that he’s older than dirt 🤷
This genuinely doesn’t get talked about enough. Steam is a private company and Gabe Newell seems to be the de facto “head” of the company, despite its famously “flat” management structure. There is no guarantee a new leader will have the same values or lead the same way. There is ripe opportunity for Steam to become a steaming pile of shit. I don’t know about the exact ownership structure beyond Newell, but unless the employees are far more empowered through things like ownership stake in the company, new leadership could effectively destroy how things currently work at Valve to be replaced by any number of terrible business decisions.
Agreed, further the behavior of valve has to be understood like that of bandcamp before it was sold, an anomaly in a capitalist system that is vastly underperforming and dysfunctional from the perspective of those with money and power. It isn’t, valve is doing great (so was bandcamp) but and I really want to stress this point for the naive gamers here who dont have a very well developed sense of the political realities of capitalism as an ideology (as opposed to some “natural order” of commerce or trade), it doesnt matter if valve is in its most profitable state right now. When it falls under the control of different rich business people it will immediately begin having its heart ripped out, rationality actually comes a lot less into the picture than you think if you believe in economics as a pure science rather than a belief system that uses more math and acronyms than most.
If there arent robust alternatives to valve then, it will be a big step back.
