That leaked email conveniently assumes the owner of Valve would sell it. I can’t think of a reason for Gabe to do that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
@TWeaK @LoafyLemon it’s not a co-op. Still, that would be an interesting business model in the gaming space. I think people would be down to support something really alternative. I’m tired of MS and apple and all these business that are still stuck in old school business mindset.
Co-ops are owned by a community, eg customers can be members. Employee owned businesses are just owned by the employees. It’s a relatively new thing, however where it’s being implemented in the UK it’s more of a tax fiddle - the business owner gets their business to buy itself from themselves, then the owner gets zero capital gains tax. If you sell a business for £25 million, you save on a £5 million tax bill. It’s great for people looking to get their investment out of a cash-rich business.
It’s still a pretty good idea, but I’m not holding my breath to see the range of companies adopting Employee Owned practice actually pass on all of the benefits to their employees.
Either way though I’m fine with Valve being a private business, at the bare minimum it retains the opportunity of being better than a publicly traded company. Also, it’s not like video games are some essential service that really belongs under social ownership.
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
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.
depends who he passes ownership to. it could be a bunch of inheriters who have no interest in owning/running it and it will be forced to sell off to split shares out. or maybe he gifts it to a single person he sees as a successor. who knows, i dont know shit about his family so have no idea
I would trust Gabe’s judgement 100%. Dude runs one of the most pro-consumer companies in history. In doing so, he has built a fiercely loyal fan base by simply being good to his customers; not trying to squeeze them for every single cent.
Gabe is a rarity; part of a bygone era of business owners and software engineers who truly care about their projects and want to build things that they themselves want to use and play. He’s a smart man and Valve has been his baby since he left Microsoft. He’ll make sure it’s in good hands when and if retirement comes calling.
third option is he sets up some kind of foundation or trust arrangement and testaments his shares to that trust, which is then run by board of trustees as per trust charter. Usually meaning “well board of trustees is entrusted to see to the continued profitable management of the company by selecting suitable new management as comes necessary” combined with possible whatever extra instructions there is as to how to and underwhat principles the company is to be run.
Be it either private trust to benefit the descendants/described beneficiaries or a charitable trust with funds to be used for charitable causes.
Family trusts aren’t that unheard of to exactly avoid the splintering of the ownership and thus risk take over bit by bit.
Yeah where’s our antitrust enforcement?
The oligopoly thing has definitely been fucking everything up for decades.
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.
Bungie’s been selling themselves out to one megacorporation after another for more than 20 years now. If Sony hadn’t bought them, someone else would’ve.
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.
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.
Look at Daddy Warbucks over here.
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.
They can buy the Steam forums.
As long as Gabe lives, this won’t be a problem.
But he’s getting on in age so this will eventually be an issue, no doubt…
Gabe will have a good successor. Valve has a lot of talented and passionate employees that have been with the company since near the start.
I like to think Gabe knows all too well the importance of remaining a private business. Publicly traded businesses are the root cause of a lot of problems in the world.
I work for a company that has specifically stated it will never do that and has stuck to those guns for 50+ years
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.
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.
I am ruined if this happens. MS would discontinue Proton / Linux and Mac support.
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Never give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt.
Microsoft kept apple alive because they were the only thing standing in the way of an anti-trust lawsuit. Microsoft didn’t do it to be benevolent, they did it to avoid being ripped apart like Bell.
The government hasn’t been as aggressive in pursuing monopoly cases, so it’s not likely (imo) they’d go after Microsoft for purchasing Valve.
We need a president that carries a big stick, and uses it to beat the shit out of monopolies and billionaires.
What exactly could a president do? They aren’t kings despite what some would think.
They nominate positions on the FTC, which is supposed to be responsible for managing monopolies. Recent nominations have shown interest in updating or outdated policies regarding monopolies.
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.
Day 1 of suddenly having the urge to keep an offline and DRM free copy of all my steam games.
The article says Microsoft would like to buy Valve. Of course they do. Valve is actively working against Microsoft’s interests (and we have to thank them for that).
It does not say Gabe Newell has the slightest intention to sell. Because he doesn’t.
Yea, but Gabe is not going to be around forever, and any successor leadership might have a different philosophy. And it’s never a bad idea to have a backup.
I hope to god he personally takes a someone he wants as his company successor under his wing and mentors them under his ways so that we may not worry as much. That’s if he doesn’t already have one or doesn’t have plans for it.
Yeah for a while now I’m been buying games on GOG where possible and keeping an archive of them, because I know at some point every company will eventually let you down.
@festus @headmetwall how do you make sure that when you load up a gog game that it does not launch the gog launcher? What are the steps?
The GOG launcher is optional (I don’t use it). On their website you can download offline installers for every game you own, and these installers don’t require the GOG launcher or any account authentication.
@festus where is this offline installer, exactly? Link? I just get hit with the gog new launcher option being advertised on the site.
https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/213148105-How-do-I-download-my-purchased-items-?product=gog has as the second option how to download the offline installers.
@festus nice. So what’s the point of the gog launcher app after this? Anyways, I prefer to use heroic. Much lighter and easier.
Honestly I’m not sure - as I said I don’t use it. I know of at least one game that’s “DRM-free” but requires the GOG launcher for multiplayer (No Man’s Sky). That’s fairly controversial and I think the only reason why it’s on GOG is because it came onto GOG back when it was a singleplayer only game.
I imagine they would immediately drop proton and move the steam deck too some windows bs
Windows CE is back babyyyyyyyy!
This brings back nightmares from my first job!
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.
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
I love Steam (have 2000 or so games on it) but I realize it is only a matter of time before it gets enshittified.
Maybe, but it’s still a private company.
Yeah, there is some hope for as long as Valve isn’t publicly traded. It’s investors that push companies to care only for short term gains.
Valve is not saintly, they have their own sketchy aspects like how they profit over that cosmetics trading market, but releasing the Steam Deck shows they are still thinking of the long term future of PC gaming.
When one company in an industry has nearly endless cash, as Microsoft and Apple do, it is natural that everyone else would be seen as acquisition targets
The difference is Valve is completely privately owned, Microsoft cannot force a sale.
With a publicly traded business, the business must be run in the interests of the shareholders, ie it must pursue profits above all else. Thus a buyer can effectively present “an offer you can’t refuse”, at least the business can’t refuse on behalf of shareholders (maybe the shareholders could vote and refuse). With a private business the owner generally has free reign to run the business as they see fit, they could run it into the ground if they so desired.
So it doesn’t matter how much cash Microsoft or whoever have, so long as Gabe doesn’t want to sell.
So long as Gabe doesn’t like die or have a personality changing stroke. Not sure what Valve’s plans are for his retirement
Selling to Microsoft would be a good retirement plan
According to Forbes, as of today, his net worth is apparently $4.3 billion. That man could quit now and live a very comfortable life until he dies.
This would be a nightmare
People would riot. GOG would have a massive influx of traffic.
Not likely, GOG barely has any reach
I agree. I’m surprised people are convinced that everyone would just leave a service they’ve been using for years once it starts to suck.
First of all, all your purchased games will only work on Steam, so you’re probably not going to just abandon it and give up access to all your previous purchases. And then you’re going to think to yourself, “Well, since I have to keep using Steam anyway, and since all my friends are here, I guess I’ll just keep buying games here anyway.”
Second of all, people, historically, just continue to use large services even when they go to shit / evidence that they’ve gone to shit comes to light. Hell, even when substantially better services show up, people don’t just suddenly switch.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish moment
Triple E gaming
