I know we're all shitting on Valve here, but allow me to shill for them for just a sec:
They don't release many games anymore, but people seriously underrate Valve's gaming-adjacent software. Steam is a fucking great program that adds a lot of value to the games you play on it - using a controller on a PC game used to be a roll of the dice, now pretty much any game can get pretty much any controller support via Steam's interface. You can get access to previous versions of games if the developers break something, you can stream games between computers, SteamVR has enabled a ton of cool indie games to come out for headsets. All of this functionality doesn't come from nowhere, and it doesn't stay up-to-date for free.
Valve deserves criticism for their huge cut of Steam sales, basically inventing the modern video game gambling economy, and not curating their storefront - but put them up against Epic or Ubisoft or Blizzard or EA and it's clear that there's something about Valve that really is better. Someday Gabe is going to retire and leave his company to some ghoul who will streamline it to be the same as every other major video gaming company, and if I had to guess I'd say that Steam's non-sales-related functionality will be allowed to decline and eventually removed and PC gaming will be undeniably worse off for it.
Yeah, I do think what has kept Valve from being like EA or something like that is Gabe. He seems different from most executives, in that he actually seems to like games and tech and has his company make the kind of stuff he wants.
I know we're all shitting on Valve here, but allow me to shill for them for just a sec:
They don't release many games anymore, but people seriously underrate Valve's gaming-adjacent software. Steam is a fucking great program that adds a lot of value to the games you play on it - using a controller on a PC game used to be a roll of the dice, now pretty much any game can get pretty much any controller support via Steam's interface. You can get access to previous versions of games if the developers break something, you can stream games between computers, SteamVR has enabled a ton of cool indie games to come out for headsets. All of this functionality doesn't come from nowhere, and it doesn't stay up-to-date for free.
Valve deserves criticism for their huge cut of Steam sales, basically inventing the modern video game gambling economy, and not curating their storefront - but put them up against Epic or Ubisoft or Blizzard or EA and it's clear that there's something about Valve that really is better. Someday Gabe is going to retire and leave his company to some ghoul who will streamline it to be the same as every other major video gaming company, and if I had to guess I'd say that Steam's non-sales-related functionality will be allowed to decline and eventually removed and PC gaming will be undeniably worse off for it.
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It would be so cool if steam was a public utility and the stuff for it was all FOSS.
is there a ghoul factory somewhere?
Yeah it's called "business school".
Yeah, I do think what has kept Valve from being like EA or something like that is Gabe. He seems different from most executives, in that he actually seems to like games and tech and has his company make the kind of stuff he wants.