I just read in Wikipedia that Valve is privately helded.
There must be something magical in the fact that they don’t need to feed their shareholders with mountains of cash every quarter, and actually focus on their customers, as happened in this post.
Fun fact, they used to be public but Gabe took it back private after realizing how shitty it was having to answer to shareholders.
True, private companies are generally more focused on customer satisfaction, but that can suddenly change, for instance when the owner dies, and the new owners don’t share the same ideals.
Private companies have a certain single point of failure built-in by having often just one or sometimes a small number of owners.
Nobody really knows what will happen when Gabe dies.
I just hope that valve becomes a worker cooperative… That would be the most stable form of company that probaly stays focused on customer satisfaction long term, since workers tend to favor providing long-term profits via good service instead of short term gains, for high frequency traders.
And the fact is they still make a mountain of cash every quarter, just by focusing on their customers.
I don’t know about that. They run one of the most predatory examples of gambling in gaming.
The new EU ruling really brought to light how big of a problem the CS:GO gambling is.
Is gambling really that bad though? It’s voluntary. Valve isn’t forcing you to buy keys or cases if you don’t want them
Also to be fair they tried to kill PSN store on the PS3 but the resulting backlash made them realize to do so would kill customer faith in the PS4 and PS5 PSN stores and so they backed off. Nintendo could only get away with it because they already trained us not to trust their online stores and buy physical only. Since Steam doesn’t have a physical option they need to play their cards right.
Twitter (sorry, X.com) is also privately held now so it’s not always a happy story :/
