341–350 of 876 posts
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Exactly. Going public is like leaving your baby to be raised by wolves.
If you IPO but the founders still have more than half the voting rights, you can fully ignore the public in all your decision making and there is nothing the other shareholders can do.
Any leads on when the next generation of Steam Deck will be released? Hoping it could be sometime in 2025, but suspect it will be more like 2026. Over the holidays I was playing GTA: San Andreas on a Nintendo Switch. It's fun but so underpowered for a game released in 2004 (Yes, 21 years ago! Damn..). I'm really craving something more. As a sidenote, it's really cool Valve allows installing SteamOS on any hardware. T…
Just get a Steam Deck. it's an incredible value for what you get and for what it can do. I'm no expert, but I do pay as close attention as I can to what's going on with gaming hardware because of my limited budget, and I'm guessing Steam Deck 2 is more like Q1 2028, not any time sooner. I'm ok with that. I play all the games I want on my Steam Deck OLED, and I see plenty of life left in it, even this "late" in the ga…
I'm still kind of flabbergasted that we're in a world where the cheapest Steam Deck model literally costs less than the Switch 2. Sure, neither of them are exactly powerhouses as far as console hardware goes, but at least on one of them you literally can just use the system however you want as a desktop OS as a bonus...
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I wonder when games will start supporting Linux natively, especially after the Steam Machine is released.
It would be better for Linux to gain native support for some of the Windows and DirectX 12 APIs. Linux gets a useful set of API targets and meets Windows devs more than halfway.
Everything valve doing for linux is making such a huge impact. The HL3 memes don't even seem fair to use anymore. I don't even want to un-seriously make joke fun of them at this point. They are just genuinely doing so much for the community.
I love Proton and I like Steam and Valve definitely has done a lot of good for the FOSS world, but let’s not make the same mistakes we made with Google by worshipping a company. All it takes is new management to change the policies to make the company horrible and evil, and in the case of Google people made the realization far too late, and now Google owns too much of the internet to avoid.
It's a bit of miracle that Valve beat MS to the punch and built momentum behind Steam as the marketplace for games. They know this.
If gamers move to Linux and all the compatibility issues are solved, Valve is not going to pick a different passion project. Conversely, as long as Microsoft has a monopoly on OSes for gaming, Valve will support linux gaming.
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Valve is one of the few companies regularly seen on HN where the headline is something like "[company] is secretly doing something really great" as opposed to "[company] is secretly doing something evil"
People complain about the gambling/loot box stuff, and yeah there's legit ethical concerns there. But overall Valve just seems straightforwardly less shitty towards the consumer than other major companies in their space, by a long shot.
They are relatively better, but we still need to keep monopolies accountable. Valve is just smart enough to remember what worked 30-40 years ago compared to the rampant greed these days.
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I have plenty of complaints about them. The highly addictive gambling mechanics in their games, the extortionate cut afforded them by their dominant market position or the very rough UX in many parts of the Steam client (takes forever to startup, shows pop up ads on startup, is quite the resource hog, the store that is a pretty poorly optimized website and a lot of cruft in the less well trodden areas). But they do m…
If you're a dev and think their cut is too high, you can generate infinite keys for your game through Steam for free and sell them through third parties - Valve doesn't even police this. The fact that people still tend to buy throught Steam shows their cut is worth it.
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People complain about the gambling/loot box stuff, and yeah there's legit ethical concerns there. But overall Valve just seems straightforwardly less shitty towards the consumer than other major companies in their space, by a long shot.
The major reason is they are a private company with good business. The don't have a need to keep adding to shareholder value ie stock price instead just need to generate a yearly income. We have reached a point where the shareholders are a companies real customers and that is who they all try to attract.Everytthing else a company does is just to attract shareholders
It's done some good stuff for the industry and even contributed to some bit FOSS projects. But business is still business.
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If you IPO but the founders still have more than half the voting rights, you can fully ignore the public in all your decision making and there is nothing the other shareholders can do.
Can't they sue you out of control? Fiduciary duty and all?
But if you're just running the company 'badly' (in the shareholders eyes), probably no.
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Valve is one of the few companies regularly seen on HN where the headline is something like "[company] is secretly doing something really great" as opposed to "[company] is secretly doing something evil"
I have plenty of complaints about them. The highly addictive gambling mechanics in their games, the extortionate cut afforded them by their dominant market position or the very rough UX in many parts of the Steam client (takes forever to startup, shows pop up ads on startup, is quite the resource hog, the store that is a pretty poorly optimized website and a lot of cruft in the less well trodden areas). But they do m…
Steam is a store. When you open it, they highlight stuff in the store.
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And why would they care? Not even Microsoft really cares about Windows licensing for consumers and businesses are never going to use computers running fake Windows. There is no real business case.
Here’s an idea, charge money for it? I’m sure there are lots of businesses that dislike Microsoft and the freemium model they’re using.
They definitely aren’t going to trust the long term viability of Valve over a company that has been releasing operating systems and supporting business for almost half a century.
$20 a seat is a nothing burger to basically make sure you support every Windows APi forever. You’re not going to tie your horse to valve