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From the opinion piece:
Last year, I pointed out how many big publishers came crawlin’ back to Steam after trying their own things: EA, Activision, Microsoft. This year, for the first time ever, two Blizzard games released on Steam: Overwatch and Diablo 4.
This genuinely doesn’t get talked about enough. Steam is a private company and Gabe Newell seems to be the de facto “head” of the company, despite its famously “flat” management structure. There is no guarantee a new leader will have the same values or lead the same way. There is ripe opportunity for Steam to become a steaming pile of shit. I don’t know about the exact ownership structure beyond Newell, but unless the employees are far more empowered through things like ownership stake in the company, new leadership could effectively destroy how things currently work at Valve to be replaced by any number of terrible business decisions.
Gabe is old as hell. It’s coming.
Dude, he’s 61. You guys are making it sound like he’s as old as a presidential candidate…
You don’t need to be old to die tomorrow.
True, but that’s unrelated to people pretending that he’s older than dirt 🤷
Yes its so damn bizarre. Every time talk about steam comes up, people start talking about how ancient Gabe is. What are they on? Lol
It’s probably teenagers talking. To them 61 IS nearing death.
61 != 450,000,000
Long live the King!
Hopefully they have some sort of transition plan for who will take over when Gabe retires. As long as they hand the reigns over to someone with similar ideas and not some business type they could be fine given they are privately owned.
Has there been any news at all on who the potential successors are?
Read somewhere that his son who has a similar philosophy was going to take over
First time hearing about this. Hope it works out.
Because nepotism usually works out amazingly and never goes badly. /s
I looked it up and apparently Gray Newell doesn’t work at Valve, so it’s actually unlikely that he’s going to be the successor.
So steam is a family owned company?
Gabe is only 61. But based on his size he will probably go from health issues from that sooner than old age will get a skinnier Gabs.
That’s because at a certain point things like this should just become services.
But that’s wildly against capitalists mindset so…
Agreed, further the behavior of valve has to be understood like that of bandcamp before it was sold, an anomaly in a capitalist system that is vastly underperforming and dysfunctional from the perspective of those with money and power. It isn’t, valve is doing great (so was bandcamp) but and I really want to stress this point for the naive gamers here who dont have a very well developed sense of the political realities of capitalism as an ideology (as opposed to some “natural order” of commerce or trade), it doesnt matter if valve is in its most profitable state right now. When it falls under the control of different rich business people it will immediately begin having its heart ripped out, rationality actually comes a lot less into the picture than you think if you believe in economics as a pure science rather than a belief system that uses more math and acronyms than most.
If there arent robust alternatives to valve then, it will be a big step back.