That leaked email conveniently assumes the owner of Valve would sell it. I can’t think of a reason for Gabe to do that.
deleted by creator
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?
Not a surprising position for them to take, but yes that isn’t pro-consumer. I still don’t think that really backs up the statement “He’s a greedy bastard who really only cares about money.”
deleted by creator
What I don’t believe is that you know exactly what the situation is or the people involved and what their plans are.
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?
deleted by creator
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
deleted by creator
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.
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?
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.
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.
deleted by creator
?
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
Yeah where’s our antitrust enforcement?
The oligopoly thing has definitely been fucking everything up for decades.
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.
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.
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.
To some people every billionaire deserves to be shot in the streets just because they were successful.
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.
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
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.
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.
I am ruined if this happens. MS would discontinue Proton / Linux and Mac support.
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
deleted by creator
Never give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt.
deleted by creator
We need a president that carries a big stick, and uses it to beat the shit out of monopolies and billionaires.
Iirc the funding from MS to Apple was part of a deal they made with the authorities. Not because they wanted to.
You mean Windows NT?
Anyway, this is an interesting read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
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.
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.
Gave 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.
I imagine they would immediately drop proton and move the steam deck too some windows bs
Windows CE is back babyyyyyyyy!
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.
Hopefully Gabe doesn’t allow that to ever happen
It’s a private company that isn’t for sale. There was another leak a week ago where they were trying to acquire Nintendo which IS publicly traded, but I think the private shares still control 51%, but that’s old info.
The enshittification continues.
I’ve tried switching to Linux and didn’t succeed. Nevertheless i wouldn’t wanna see a Microsoft Deck with Windows 11.
Tons of Windows based gaming handhelds already exist from Asus, Lenovo, Aya, GPD, etc. I’d doubt Microsoft releasing one, hypothetical Valve acquisition or not, would set the world on fire.
Knowing good old M$, though, if they tried it they’d make it some kind of Xbox product.
And it’d be adorably digital-only
Yeah, but SteamOS is definitely a better OS. A lighter OS specifically. The Steam Deck, while being powerful, isn’t exactly too powerful and having Windows on it isn’t optimal.
Luckily GPD (i think) offers SteamOS for their devices and i do want to buy a Win Mini.
deleted by creator
I would bet money that it was because of games that aren’t on steam.
Sure, I can think of many valid reasons and issues. I was just curious. Maybe they could be helped across the finish line somehow.
Once my mental health doesn’t suck so bad anymore, i am considering to use SteamOS (or ChimeraOS where SteamOS is not officially available). Alternatively Kubuntu, because Ubuntu has the most help resources. May not be as fancy as a runit based system like Void Linux but it’s fine.
Perhaps, but many people don’t realize that “Add Non-Steam Game” also gives you a Proton prefix on Linux, as if it were a Steam game. Can be used for non-DRM games or even another launcher and keep everything relatively tidy.
And theres lutris, which has automated scripts for tons of games to install non-steam games and set them up properly to run.
Didn’t get my favorite Sims games to run on Void. And my mental health is so bad, i can hardly deal with failures while tinkering, which is necessary on Linux in conjunction with Windows gaming.
Maybe you just haven’t found the right distro that made you feel at home. If you’re still willing to try, experiment with a bunch of different distros, then use the one you like the most for an extended period of time (weeks instead of days) to build familiarity. Resist the urge to boot windows during that period and try to do everything on Linux.
I did try Void initially. Void Linux doesn’t have much resources but they did have an IRC chat willing to help… albeit with a little dont ask to ask schtick. I actually installed Void on a few of my devices for a while to try and get my favorite games to run.
Aaaanyway i encountered some weirdness like being able to install a game one time and then not anymore after installing Void on the internal SSD. I didn’t get my favorite Sims games to work and tried various Proton configurations… It was sad. My ex gf told me to buy a graphics card for my GPD Win 2, which has an Intel HD 600. I could but first i’d have to somehow make this thing compatible to Thunderbolt. Intel HD graphics aren’t exactly good but “buy a graphics card” sucks as an answer too, even if in jest.
I do still want to switch to Linux later once my mental health is better. And perhaps once i got the new Win Mini with integrated AMD graphics. I think GPD actually offers SteamOS for their devices so that’s a distro i may want to give a shot. I do love the SteamOS interface and the KDE desktop.
You probably want to try something more mainstream, an Ubuntu derivative perhaps. Kubuntu might be a good choice given your preference for KDE.
Try, try again.
This would be a nightmare
