Honestly, the secret is not being a publicly traded company. All the others have to make the shareholders happy while steam just does steam. If the line doesn’t have to constantly go up you can pretty much do whatever you want as long as you’re still making profit. And if what you’re doing is already working you don’t need to add gimmicks or advertisements to milk it as much as you can just to appease the shareholders.
Being a private company has allowed Valve to take some really big swings. Steam Deck is paying off handsomely, but it came after the relative failure of the Steam Controller, Steam Link and Steam Machines. With their software business stable, they can allow themselves to take big risks on the hardware side, learn what does and doesn’t work, then try again. At a publically traded company, CEO Gabe Newell probably gets forced out long before they get to the Steam Deck.
Man Intel are so dumb for firing Pat. And they did it while seeing positive reviews for their second gen GPUs!
That’s just what happens to CEOs of publicly traded companies when they have a bad year. And Intel had a really bad year in 2024. I’m certainly hoping that their GPUs become serious competition for AMD and Nvidia, because consumers win when there’s robust competition. I don’t think Pat’s ousting had anything to do with GPUs though. The vast majority of Intel’s revenue comes from CPU sales and the news there was mostly bad in 2024. The Arrow Lake launch was mostly a flop, there were all sorts of revelations about overvolting and corrosion issues in Raptor Lake (13th and 14th gen Intel Core) CPUs, broadly speaking Intel is getting spanked by AMD in the enthusiast market and AMD has also just recently taken the lead in datacenter CPU sales. Intel maintains a strong lead in corporate desktop and laptop sales, but the overall trend for their CPU business is quite negative.
One of Intel’s historical strength was their vertical integration, they designed and manufactured the CPUs. However Intel lost the tech lead to TSMC quite a while ago. One of Pat’s big early announcements was “IDM 2.0” (“Integrated Device Manufacturing 2.0”), which was supposed to address those problems and beef up Intel’s ability to keep pace with TSMC. It suffered a lot of delays, and Intel had to outsource all Arrow Lake manufacturing to TSMC in an effort to keep pace with AMD. I’d argue that’s the main reason Pat got turfed. He took a big swing to get Intel’s integrated design and manufacturing strategy back on track, and for the most part did not succeed.
The GPUs aren’t even a drop in the bucket for Intel. While Gelsinger had the right ideas, he wanted everything all at once which just wasn’t doable.
Agreed, but if I’d had the money at the time, I absolutely would’ve jumped at the steam machine and steam controller. I want a modern one now more than ever. If it weren’t for parts getting shittier and pricier, I’d probably build one myself this spring/summer and figure out which distro would be best for it. My steam deck is great and I want basically the exact same thing but more powerful at the cost of not being a handheld. Bonus points if I can easily remote play that new steam machine through my steam deck, which I think is a reasonable expectation. And I’d love to run an HDMI out splitter to easily swap between using it as a PC at my desk or using it as a console from my couch.
If you buy parts that are a couple of generations older there is absolutely a middle ground between the ridiculous new GPUs and the steam deck on performance, that you could probably build for a similar price to the deck. I would aim for an AM4 build to take advantage of how cheap ddr4 RAM is, with a 3xxx or 5xxx Ryzen CPU. Something like the 3080 is a great card for a cheap price but I personally would go for an AMD card. A few hundred extra (again in AUD) gets you a good 7800XT which is a pretty damn beefy card, but might be better to drop down a couple of models to save on power consumption.
Going even further, you can take someone’s ATX PC secondhand, swap out the motherboard for a smaller form factor and slap it in a little case.
As for OS, if you want it to be exactly like the deck you could run Bazzite, but SteamOS is either available, or about to be available.
and figure out which distro would be best for it. My steam deck is great and I want basically the exact same thing but more powerful at the cost of not being a handheld.
Bazzite might be your jam. They’re a sort-of competitor (?) to SteamOS, as in they have distros for handhelds in the same way Valve has with SteamOS (which they are now leasing out to manufacturers like lenovo). But they also have versions for laptops and desktop PCs.
I’ve been using their PC (nvidia) version for a week now, and it’s been wonderful. Of course I probably wouldn’t have made the switch if Valve hadn’t helped pave the way and made proton so powerful. Also I probably wouldn’t have switched if I hadn’t given up on LoL and Battlefield (kernel-level anticheat).
You are right, but let me add that Gabe knows that being tied to Windows is not a good idea, as he worked there and understood that they would block Steam if they could.
Valve supporting ‘their’ alternative OS, away from Microsoft (and Apple) or any other direct competitor in gaming is the only way to survive.
It’s not like they pour all that money into Linux from the goodness of their heart. They need their own OS just as much as the Linux desktop community needs some stable funding.
Given how Valve lets children gamble with skins, I’m not sure how moral that company really is.
Linux was also the only way to make sure Valve was viable long term. Eventually Windows was going to have an Xbox store built in and would’ve basically been a monopoly on PC gaming, cutting out steam altogether. I think windows now sort of does have that, but it can’t compete with Steam quite yet.
The steam controller didn’t really fail, but the patent fight was a mess that took way too long (much too late disqualified patent over paddle buttons). That sucked a lot of energy out of the project. Don’t forget the steam deck kept those touch pads (although with a different design)!
Steam Link IMHO also wasn’t bad, but there didn’t seem to be much interest in it then. (interestingly enough I think it could be recreated today in a Chromecast-like form factor)
Stream machines was definitely a big mess however, there just wasn’t enough interest, too limited compatibility, the machines just wasn’t versatile enough for average Joe to pay for one.
And also not be backed by venture capital firms expecting to make infinite profits. Private or Public, if the company shareholder’s only goal is to continue to receive 10% gains on their investment after already making back 20x their principal, they’ll squeeze the company for all it’s worth.
Publicly traded companies mean that the people who invested get a say in how the business is run. Those same people are typically riding the success of other people’s decisions and have no idea how to not fuck up. So they demand the company make stupid fucking choices or the CEO will be replaced by someone who will listen.
The trick is to remove the power of the board to remove the CEO and keep them as advisors instead of drivers. The CEO should cook and if they drive the business into the ground, that’s what happens. Businesses need to fail because otherwise the wrong people end up leading.
Businesses need to fail because otherwise the wrong people end up leading.
When businesses fail, their competitors buy their assets, employees, customer bases, and get bigger. Keep playing that a few more rounds and you get a monopoly that can and will prevent or buy new entrants. Then anyone including the wrong people in the industry enter this one company because that’s the only company in this industry.
This isn’t an argument against letting businesses fail. It’s an argument to show that the game of competition doesn’t produce stable competitive environment in the long run. Instead it’s a temporary stage that some markets exist in on the way to consolidation. You can find countless examples for this around us. And therefore letting businesses fail through competition isn’t a long term solution to these problems.
And that’s why you have laws and agencies to prevent that like the German Bundeskartellamt.
Honestly, the secret is not being a publicly traded company.
Valve fortune doesn’t come from not being traded publicly. They built a nearly monopoly on pc videogames with their walled garden proprietary third party launcher.
Does nothing? DOES NOTHING?! He spent the last few years ripping Microsoft a new a@@hole, rendering their operating system meaningless for gamers! …but nice meme
Gaben has done lots of awesome shit. I fear what valve will become when he’s gone.
they’ll fuck shit up. Look what happened to apple after Steve died.
So. Many. Dongles.
Just my two cents but as others have said, not being publically traded helps a lot. The focus on short term benefits that come with shareholders stops “master plans” when they come with mistakes. Learning from relative failures, like the steam controller and the like, ultimately contributes to major successes like the steam deck. Being able to stay committed to improving the software experience over time, instead of killing the product when it didn’t immediately succeed, is fairly rare in the tech industry. And in all honesty, it would be better if they released a polished profuct, but being committed to it made it a success.
I feel like the pressure to have a majorly successful product day one means that smaller companies can’t innovate the way they want to, so they have to find other ways to produce revenue. Huge companies, like Apple can afford to do both but still stumble, like with the vision pro. Maybe it’ll be a success, but for now its not great and iteration makes it more difficult to maintain the original vision.
You can either be publicly traded and let greedy shareholders sell things for parts or you can have private ownership and pray to God that they’re benevolent. There has to be another option, surely. Maybe one where Valve becomes employee-owned with a trust/foundation backing it once Gabe dies?
I’m not quite sure they have “done nothing”. They have made a digital storefront that other storefronts strive for, they have help with Linux compatibility with windows only games, have released a few bits of awesome hardware every now and then. I think this is what happens when you are not beholden to shareholders and the mantra “make line go up at all costs”
“Don’t interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.”
