Amazon thought it could compete with Steam because it was so much larger than Valve, but Prime Gaming's former VP admits that 'gamers already had the solution to their problems'

Steam is a platform that happens to also have a storefront. Other companies are building storefronts and hoping that's enough.

If you can't provide fast downloads, cloud saves synced across devices, achievements, mod support, friends lists, and multiplayer support, it's not a real option. Being cheaper or having some exclusives aren't attractive. Gog already has the drm free angle to be a legitimate competitor.

Being consistently cheaper would actually be attractive to many people. The thing is, none of these competitors can even muster that. Steam consistently has better sales, more often. And it's pretty funny seeing Amazon of all things not able to match or beat that. They are known for undercutting the competition, even at their own expense, just to get customers; It's literally how they got to be as big as they are.
- Epic kinda tried that by giving away tons of free games in the Epic Games Store. It didn't work.
  If I want Steam games cheaper, I go buy a Steam key for that game from a separate retailer and activate it on Steam. Save like 50-70% irrespective of Steam sales. It's remarkable that Steam allows us to even do that in the first place.
- It would be so easy for another store front to just take a 20% cut instead of 30% and pass the savings on to the end consumer. That would be a pretty strong start. But nope. They just want to charge the same base price.
I commented elsewhere that I’ve been trying out some classic PC games in their native Linux form lately.
It is so amazing to see my old saves just show up like nothing ever changed. Plus lots of other little things like time played and friend list and all that.
This is something from before 2010, but I distinctly remember not being able to play Borderlands 1 with my friends because the site I bought it from didn't have a patch yet that Steam did. This was one of the things that sold me on Steam. Prior to that I hated it. It's nearly two decades ago so it's hard to really remember why, but it wasn't always viewed as favorably as now.
This isn't some dig at Steam, like I said, this was over a decade ago.
- There was definitely heavy skepticism at first. Buying online was new when it launched and physical was still king. I remember thinking it was dumb to buy from a website that could disappear instead of good old CDs.
Steam is a platform that happens to also have a storefront.
I would like to see government intervention to break up Steam to remedy this
Though arguably Epic is way bigger of a platform since it goes from developer to end user
- I'd rather see competitors actually try and be better than steam rather than make steam worse.
- What exactly would you be breaking up? Steam isn't a mishmash of companies...
- Steam is hardly a monopoly.
  There are plenty of successfully competing stores. The only real thing Steam has going for it is network effect that every gamer has an account therefore it's decent for socialising, but even that is being challenged by Discord and a multitude of others.
  GamePass is probably the closest we're seeing to a potential monopoly. The purchase of activation should never have been permitted.
- No don't break up Steam. Standardize DRM and make digital games licenses ownable/transferable. I could see the EU eventually doing this.
  I say this as someone who loves Steam but wants more ownership, in the games I "own".
- They offer keys which allows for third party sellers to exist, and there are a handful of legitimate sites that sell keys for steam.
- It's a launcher successful on the most popular OS in the world that they don't even own that anyone can come in to compete at. And had decades to do so when "PC gaming was dead" so was wide open for anyone that wanted to try to reach potential customers over fixating on the console demographic. What more do want.
  It doesn't even come pre-installed with Windows.
- Nobody else has a platform that comes close to competing and most of my games are already on there. From my pov this looks like an awful idea.
- Sounds like a free market proponent.
  Can I give the classic example of US healthcare where for very minor benefits, the absolute richest can afford to have great healthcare whilst everyone else seems to be crippled (financially) by even minor ailments.
  But the industry is worth billions, the line goes ever up, and the shareholders are happy. Just fuck the customer.
- lol

Valve wins by doing nothing... it's a tale as old as time.

Steam's market share is a huge factor in why their competition never succeeds, but it's hardly the only reason. Steam is a whole platform, not just a launcher or storefront. And they're also cognizant that the consumers are not just a revenue source to be milked, but actually long-term customers whose loyalty is important.

It really shouldn't be a surprise that when you enter an established market, you're not going to accomplish shit by providing a lesser service while simultaneously treating the consumer worse.

MBAs walk into this arena thinking they've got their quarterly agile reports synergized outside the box to the max.
Somehow none of them have learned the concept of long term customers
Gaben and Steam: does nothing, wins
- It always baffles me when I see an established company fail to understand long-term customers and still expect any kind of meaningful growth.
The loyalty thing is what kept me.
I was wary of another gaming platform, there were so many and they all seemed the same, I never liked one over the other - they were just means to an end.
A few years back I really wanted to play RDR2 with my friends. It was expensive and I never pre-order, but as soon as it came out on (a small) sale I bought it for all 4 of us.
It was a lot of money for me, but I really wanted the story to play with everyone.
All was well at first, until we had each completed the tutorial and met up in open world. That's when we learned that the game was based on GTA and the devs do not care about hackers.
We had one fucking with us for over an hour, teleporting us into the air and dropping us, setting us randomly on fire, spawning space ships and so on.
I begged in voice for them to just leave us be, to no avail.
We are all older, we rarely have time to play together. I was crushed.
I was an hour over the return time on Steam, one of the other friends took a bit longer exploring and was even more than that.
I contacted steam anyway and tried to get a refund, and they granted it for all of us.
Later I learned this was a thing in RDR2 and there was now the ability to create private lobbies, but I just can't make myself try it and give Rockstar any money.
Steam however, won a lifelong fan. They didn't have to honour the refund, and they don't have to provide personal support that offers more than just the canned responses, but they do.
I hope Gabe lives forever, or finds another like him to carry the torch after he's gone.
- Yeah my loyalty to them comes from the fact that they treat me like they value my business. Every company says they do, but they help when help is needed and get out of the way when it isn't. The only other businesses I feel that way towards are small restaurants and bars. It's not an unconditional loyalty but so long as they treat me right they'll keep my business.
Us corporate MO is to treated the end user as stupid fucking bitch that you boss around with ToS.
I mean it works, look at EA and sports ball gamers...
But PC gamer has some shread of respect left. Granted a lot of it comes from knowing better from using steam
They are reinvesting money back into r&d, and linux. They keep updating everything. Wish they kept making steam controllers. I have seen steam change a lot over the last +10 years.
- i think ive heard rumblings about a steam controller 2? not entirely sure though

The biggest advantage Steam has over other platforms:

They're not publicly-traded, meaning they are inclined to look out for long-term success vs. short term profits.
Steam is already on their systems, and may have been for 20+ years. Nobody wants a dozen fucking game launchers and Steam already has virtually every game in existence available there. Not to mention the "community" features, friends lists, etc. Every other platform is simply too late.
They have 20+ years' experience learning what gamers want and implementing it.

Amazon could probably compete with them if they really wanted to, but that would involve a large, long-term, consumer-centric investment, which probably isn't a good use of their money.

#3 is the key I think. Valve's business model is figuring out what their customers want and then providing it to them. Amazon's model is to capture enough market share so they can start the enshitification process.
- Yes but also #3 is closely tied to #1.
Steam is already on their systems, and may have been for 20+ years.
since the update to counter-strike that required it. so that's what? 2003?
my original retail counter-strike was the first thing on mine. retail hl2 was second.
- Our Lord and savior has always been gamespy
Heroic is FOSS. They have no money, and still made a better launcher for Epic and Amazon's games than Epic and Amazon can.
- I have held off game launchers on Linux for a long time.
  Then I tried Heroic to play Frostpunk and avoid the hassle of setting it up myself.
  It is perfect.
I bet the fallout with Vivendi and the lawsuit that almost bankrupted them taught them a major lesson to never be beholden to outsiders and thus never go public.
Basically only 2
I want a launcher for each game though
- do you also keep every single fork in its own kitchen drawer?

I saw this posted a couple days ago which pretty succinctly summarizes the current state of the market.

Commented this a year ago, and its just as relevant today.

While this is funny, it is not true: Valve has contributed tremendously to the Linux environment (Mesa above all, and Proton) and based their own console on top of it, making it possible to play almost every game you own, both from their store and from elsewhere.
People at Valve have been cooking every day. Never sitting idle.
This without considering the countless features Steam already sports: friends, achievements, cloud saves, a curated front page.
- In a parallel universe where epic came out with the Deck instead of Valve, things are probably quite different. But no, Valve announces steam deck and the first thing epic does is drop their already small support for Linux.
- Even though proton is legitimately amazing, I love turning on the filter in steam that shows Linux native games in my library. There are so many of them!
  And it’s not just new stuff. Plenty of old favorites have Linux versions too. All the big valve titles of course (including Alyx) and classics like all the infinity engine RPG Enhanced Editions. Being able to hang out with my family, sitting on the couch, but also playing high res Baldur’s Gate with a trackball is some real gaming comfort food.
- Yes, but that's beside the point. Most people use Steam not because of Linux support or because of BPM.
  Valve hasn't revolutionized their business once Ubisoft, EA, Amazon, CDPR and Epic started to compete with them. They just kept doing what they were doing and eventually saw the bodies passing in the river
- Yeah really the strategy is chasing resilience and value rather than profit. And the strategy is called reasonable long term planning. Yeah they're throwing millions into Linux now, because the alternative is being at the mercy of Microsoft who is a competitor with a known monopolistic streak.
  Adding features is choosing to stay ahead of any competition now or in the future and to maintain the skills of your devs.
- Ten years ago when I first tried to play a game on Linux, with no experience, I was completely lost. I spent a few hours trying to get anything to run and eventually gave up.
  Last year when I fully abandoned Windows and moved to Linux; I installed Steam, clicked play on a game, and it just ran no questions asked.
  Since, I've run into a few titles that claim incompatibility; but when you enable the forced use of Proton to make it compatible; it fires right up, no problem.
  Now, I could likely find and use the various compatibility tools without involving Steam; but this path has required 0 effort, it just works. I haven't had to install and experiment with several packages and mess with configuration and pull my hair put after hours of failure or any of that. Just click play.
I think it’s called “Do no evil” 🤔

To be honest I really do prefer buying games on GOG. One day steam will go shit and we will be stuck with huge game libraries locked there. The day GOG goes dark I’ll still have all the offline installers of everything I bought.

Piracy is our friend. If Steam ever goes to shit, gamers would go back to piracy.
- Steam also never took it's eye off the piracy ball. Offer up a service better than free piracy.
  Just pulling from my memory:
  Family Share
  Easy controller support
  Game Casting
  Gameplay recording
  "Invisible Login" for social network
  Torrent from a local area network friend who has the game on their computer
  (list goes on)
Because you're smart and you are archiving everything. Most people don't even know they can download the installers, they just install Gog Galaxy.
- There's always someone in the world archiving stuff, and with GOG the installers can be shared freely if they ever close shop, since they don't have DRM. With Steam that can be a lot harder, depending on the DRM they have
- GOG Galaxy has the ability to download offline installers. They're listed under Extras on the game's page. It's arguably even better there than on the website because you can download those .bin files all in a single click.

They were competing?

I once playtested their MMO, I believe it was called "New World". It sucked balls. Didn't realize they were also trying to get going with game distribution.
- It had a somewhat interesting combat system for an MMO, but there were a TON of glaring gameplay and balance issues that essentially guaranteed the game would be dead after a month or two.

Tim Sweeney shit on Linux gamers enough that I refused to ever give Epic a penny

Gaben should sue Epic Games for monopolistic business practices - Epic keep making bad decisions that leave gamers with no good choice but Steam
- That would wind up being one of those court cases lawyers love citing wherever they get the chance
They came out of the gate with anti consumer bullshit in the form of exclusivity deals. Trust was shattered before they even got going.

steam pros: a store that always has a sale or big holiday sale right around the corner, a social network, a library for game info and game modding, and a trophy case etc.

what was amazon offering? full priced games, no sales that beat steams (a free game offer now and then only if you give them $140 a year and forget about it), and shitty cloud streaming of few games? so they tried nothing actually meaningful, were all out of ideas, but shocked they lost

oh and also on a platform notorious for making e-books unable to work on pcs, forcing their proprietary hardware for a PDF. and now they're actually going in and changing/censoring whats written in books without authors consent.

Much like Epic, they also did free games for people with Amazon Prime, but they undercut that by offering free games on other platforms as well.
Not that I'm complaining, but nothing to make themselves stand out.
- not like epic, epic offers free games, Prime's games are paid for by subscription.
You are twisting it a bit. Amazon is not censoring books (yet). It just made impossible to transfer books from the Kindle to a PC.
- i wish i was, if you'd watch the video he cites and reads a list of examples.

Granted I'm not a gamer, but I don't think I've ever even heard of prime gaming. I've heard of steam though.

I'm a vivid gamer. I've never heard of prime gaming.
- My partner streams on twitch, only reason I go on that site (also found out T pain streams a lot of things there and he's genuinely amazing to watch, I will shill him every time I can). I only found out about prime gaming because I'd get notifications from twitch that I can claim free games from epic and GOG. So I got several big titles that way.
Prime Gaming gives away free games every week or so. It's one of the perks available to those subscribed to Amazon Prime.
Those games can be on EGS, Amazon's own launcher (that nobody uses), GOG, or Legacy Games Launcher.
https://gaming.amazon.com/home
I've checked in on it for the last several months and only picked up like 3 games that sounded interesting. And those only because they were free/included in my prime subscription.

So after investing millions in this, this is incredible insight that the VP has gained:

Talk to Real Customers Before Writing Code

I really recommend reading his LinkedIn post, just to understand how these people think, and how fucking incompetent people at the top raking in millions are. It's surprisingly honest for a LI post (although that bar is very low), probably because the guy is now retired and doesn't give a shit anymore.

I honestly never even processed that Prime Gaming was a thing and that it was trying to compete with Steam. I just knew they purchased Twitch and thought they'd probably abandon it into a shitty, old and slow site like they did with IMDB and Goodreads.

Feels like every 5 years some major Internet company looks at how many billions video games draws in, established markets with PC and consoles, and how much hype and marketing gets thrown around the space and decides they can do it better.
With zero understanding of what consumers want, expecting to be able to charge extra for content that no one asked for or services like steam offer for free, and usually with such an awful UI and interactions with the consumer you wonder if they see potential customers as anything but cattle to be figuratively slaughtered and try to milk as much currency as they can with overpriced subscription(s) and not-so-micro microtransactions.
Edit: For those that want examples, most recent one comes to mind is Stadia
Could you link a screenshot of the LinkedIn post? I don't want to make a LinkedIn account.
- As VP of Prime Gaming at Amazon, we failed multiple times to disrupt the game platform Steam. We were at least 250x bigger, and we tried everything. But ultimately, Goliath lost. Here's why:
  The 15+ year long attempt to challenge Steam started before I was VP of Prime Gaming, but we never cracked the code. Not under my leadership or anyone else's.
  The first way we tried to enter the online-game-store market was through acquisition. We acquired Reflexive Entertainment (a small PC game store) and tried to scale it. It went nowhere.
  Then, after buying Twitch, we created our own PC games store. Our assumption was that gamers would naturally buy from us because they were already using Twitch. Wrong.
  Finally, we built "Luna," a game streaming service that let people play without a high-end PC. Around the same time, Google tried the same thing with their product "Stadia." Neither gained significant traction. The whole time, Steam dominated despite being a relatively small company (compared to Amazon and Google).
  The mistake was that we underestimated what made consumers use Steam.
  It was a store, a social network, a library, and a trophy case all in one. And it worked well.
  At Amazon, we assumed that size and visibility would be enough to attract customers, but we underestimated the power of existing user habits. We never validated our core assumptions before investing heavily in solutions. The truth is that gamers already had the solution to their problems, and they weren't going to switch platforms just because a new one was available.
  We needed to build something dramatically better, but we failed to do so. And we needed to validate our assumptions about our customers before starting to build. But we never really did that either.
  Just because you are big enough to build something doesn’t mean people will use it.
  Reflecting on these mistakes, I realize how crucial it is to deeply understand customers before making big moves. That’s why James Birchler’s guest newsletter caught my attention—his piece is a practical guide on obtaining real customer insights and using them to challenge entrenched assumptions that can hurt product success.
  James breaks his advice down into three key steps, illustrated with stories from his time as VP of Engineering at IMVU:
  Talk to Real Customers Before Writing Code
  Test Assumptions, Not Just Features
  Build Measurement Into Your Process
  After explaining how he learned these lessons the hard way (getting screamed at by customers and board members), James shares action items you can implement within a week to improve how you understand your customers.
  I wish Amazon had followed James’ playbook before trying to take on Steam. But since we didn’t, at least you can.
Every prime gaming offer I took was for games on steam. I really thought they were just promoting twitch with drops and stuff, not actually trying to compete. Haha, the balls.
What's awesome is you will still catch Twitch streamers actively encouraging people to use their free prime gaming sub to their channel or any channel because "fuck Jeff Bezos" lol

Easy: Amazon just gotta invent new problems for gamers! And then sell the solution.

This'll only work if they also buy everyone else who sells the solution, and shut them down.

The only launcher I use the same amount if not more is gog.com. Give me those good old games.

GoG is just the best. They don't have all the nice things Steam has, like workshop for example, but they compensate for it by actually selling you a game, not just renting it out with drm.
- GOG providing installers is absolutely amazing.
Maybe it's nice on windows, but on other systems, got still relies on steam.
- GOG + Lutris
I use gog, but fuck the launcher. Fuck all launchers. An icon on desktop is all I want.
Thankfully it's easy to get no matter the storefront.

That's not how Capitalism works!

/s

The larger company simply needs to create/invent problems that the smaller company cannot solve, and then sell a solution.

And buy them out at some point too. Very important step.

The larger company needs to hinder the smaller company with pointless slapp lawsuits. That way the smaller company will be too busy to innovate anything new.

Then there's me on Gog buying DRM free games that I can download and keep at my leisure.

You're not the only one.
Whilst I do have a small collection of games in Steam, my collection of games in GoG is about 30x larger, because I prefer buying from GoG when I have the chance.
As the old saying goes "Possession is 9/10 of the Law" - when the installer of a game is in your hands (kept in storage media under your control) such as with games in physical media or offline installers downloaded from GoG, even if they wanted to take it away from you, they would have to take you to Court for it, whilst if the installer of a game is in somebody else's hands (in Steam's servers or in GoG's servers if you only ever use their launcher and don't download offline installers) they can take it way from you (even what happenned was that they just mistakenly locked you out of your account) and now it's your problem and you have to throw yourself at their mercy to get what's supposedly your stuff back and if that fails take them to Court (which for most people costs more than the games are worth).
It's hilarious that people think "Steam is great" because they don't often lock people out of their game collections or remove games from people's collections and when they do and people throw themselves at their mercy to get it reversed they're generally understanding, when Steam themselves were the ones who created a system where they have all the power and you have none, it's just that so far they've not purposefully abused it and are generally nice when their own mistakes cause problems which one wouldn't have in a different system - they're comparativelly better than most other stores because those other stores are so shit (except GoG, IMHO), but they're still worse than good old physical media when it comes to consumer rights.
Absolutelly, use Steam when it's worth it for you, just do it with your eyes wide open, aware that you're chosing to be at their mercy because the system they designed for digital game sales makes sure all customers are at their mercy, so they're definitelly not your buddies, just (so far) nowhere as abusive as most faceless companies out there.
PS: Back to the post of the OP, amongst all the digital stores with "it's not really yours" systems, with all the power over gamers than entails, Steam are by far the ones that least abuse it (I think they never did on purpose, though some people have been locked out of their accounts and couldn't recover access to them) so comparativelly are way above the rest, especially Amazon as demonstrated by their practices when it comes to digital books.
Yep. GOG is good. I've been getting a bit more into itch.io as well though. itch is packed with small simple experimental indie stuff. I've got no interest in most of it; but there's a surprising amount of good stuff there too. (At least, it was surprising to me when I started visiting it more frequently.)
I don't use the Amazon launcher, but I'm pretty sure the Amazon games are DRM free as well. Not sure if it's all of them but I know a lot are
- Amazon launcher requires an internet connection for games, at least the free ones.

It's not as if gamers could smell the stench of corporate greed

There's also this thing that happens where, as a whole, we'll just act capriciously.
I don't know if it's true of younger gamers but my generation seems to really choose at random whether we like your product or want you to die in a fire. Any fishy behavior can tip that scale pretty quickly, and if we already recognize a brand, and it's not one of our arbitrarily Chosen Few, then we might not even give you a chance. Just because we know the name, and that's already a strike against you.
I love your optimism, but looking at the current trends of preorders, microtransactions, gacha games, .... Most gamers don't care about corporate greed and dive into it head first...

Amazon who? Never heard of them.

It's a rainforest, I think.
- I thought it was a matriarchal warrior society?

Why does every single picture of Gabe look like hedonism bot wrapped in skin?

I recently learned that you get free games with prime. I even got a decent title via that way, I believe. I wouldn’t know where to look it up though…

!freegames@feddit.uk is a great community to get notified. I've grabbed a couple thanks to posts from there.
- Thanks!

Lrrr: Why does the larger company not simply eat the smaller one?

Oh they do, frequently

I do like steam

Do nothing. Win.

I knew they were trying to compete, but at the end of the day fuck bezos. Useless shit on the world.

Huh, did they make an alternative I don't know about?

Who would've imagined given your disaster apps like the Appstore and your shitty "free app" giveaways. Even the FAQs you posted after shutting down the service were purposely vague and irresolute.

Of course I will consume digital products from you again! Said fucking no one.

Also it was just brazenly clear they never talked to gamers and were aiming for a nonexistent customer. Cloud based gaming (i think that's what they were trying to sell) might attract a few people, but it's obviously a bad idea and it was clearly being phoned in as part of a "we have decided this is what we will tell thr customer to want" type deal.

I'll take all the free Amazon and Epic games. I've never bought a game from either one but they are 95% of my collection.

correction you never bought from epic, you've paid 15 a month for amazons.
nothings ever free if there's a subscription fee
- Yes, but in my case I pay Prime for the shipping and the shows. Not for the games, I don't even care about them, I just have a hoarder impulse.

Honestly I was excited about o3de and still follow it from time to time, but the project feels so industrial versus Godots work

You can see why Amazon's efforts suck just by using it. That isn't to say I defend Steam, or Epic, or GOG, or UPlay, or Origin, or Battle.net, or Microsoft Store because they all suck. They suck for existing as separate things that all do the same thing but each eating 500Mb of space on my computer.

The ideal situation would be a federated platform where everyone shares a single sign on, everyone shares the same update, backup & restore mechanisms, everyone can join the same lobbies and matchmaking. But that's too sensible.

Or they stop trying to lock people in with exclusive games and instead attempt to actually compete by the quality of the service. I know it will never happen but I can dream.

I went to their website, it reminded me of AWS.

At least prime video looks half decent.

I'm hoping Valve, a relatively small company that is sitting on what i imagine is gamings biggest revenue stream, will choose to keep the company private.
- The reason Valve is so great is because it's a private company. I hope they'll never sell out.
Valve is a private company with no debts. No reason to sell to anyone.

Pretty ballsy to put up a long LinkedIn post that boils down to "I am incompetent and should not be hired under any circumstances."

Not when you're retired

The only reason anyone even knew about Prime Gaming was they pushed it with Twitch.

Valve can make some good calls, but do you guys -really- think enshittification is not coming for it ever? It's just a matter of time.

Valve is Augustus Caesar. A benevolent dictator that did much to improve the quality of life of his citizens, but still a dictator. They've centralized control over the PC gaming sphere and brought tons of legitimate improvements to the hobby. Now they have no legitimate competitors. Epic Games is a mosquito bite, Prime Gaming is nothing, GOG is the closest thing and even they're miles behind.
It only took a couple of generations to go from Augustus to Nero. I do not anticipate good things once Gaben retires/dies.
When Gabe dies, sure, enshittification will happen. In the meanwhile, enjoy Steam for what it is for now, but prepare with contingencies.

It’s weird how gamers see Gabe Newel as “their” billionaire, and valve as “their” corporation, and convince themselves that this makes it ok and ethical to be a billionaire and a massive corporation bordering on monopoly. Stop behaving like these corporations are your sports teams.

Ive never heard anyone say that its ethical for someone to be a billionaire if they are Gabe Newel.
Ive heard people say they like steam and would prefer to do business with a non-enshittified private company.
It's weird that a corporation is able to and continues to offer a good product at a reasonable price, do so in a way that is convenient for the customer, and somehow hasn't enshitified yet.
People like valve because valve earned that trust.
- To add to that, if valve starts going in a direction I don't like, I may cut ties with them. Gabe and Valve haven't earned undying loyalty. They have earned the benefit of the doubt for now. We should be skeptical of anyone that is profit driven, but there isn't anything wrong with enjoying moments where their actions seem to align with our interests.
I don't see it that way but Steam has never enshittified in way that was noticeable to me and the features they offer along with the games are valuable. They are also a big driver of Linux development for games. That earns them a lot of points. If they flip or something better comes along I have no loyalty to them.
Yeah you are totally right, we shouldn't think of corporations as friends.
There is however a difference and that is that Valve is a private company while others like Amazon are publicly traded and therefore even more profit-orientated. As long as Valve makes enough profit to be able to cope with a couple bad years it is doing alright.
- This is the key thing. Publicly traded companies effectively have no head. They are driven by the legal mandate to pursue the profit motive for faceless and litigious investors. Yes the ceo/chairman of the board usually has a controlling share, but some rando who has one share from Robinhood can sue if they think the company is not operating with their interests in mind.
  Small businesses and private companies can also be evil, but at least everyone who owns the company knows each other. They may decide to take a loss if they think it would make them look better to the public in the long run. Public companies cannot. They are expected to gobble up as much profit as they can. And when they can’t make more profit they are gobbled up by other more vigorous companies that are owned by the same investors. It’s a sick game that is eating the world and humanity to death.
How a corporation uses its money and how it earns its profits should be under scrutiny. Customers can have a “fair” relationship with a company where everyone gets what they want - a good product at a fair price and a fair profit.
However, if a company gets their profits via enshittification, suppressing wages and benefits, using their profits to politically undermine workers and engage in monopolistic behavior, etc. they are just another run of the mill evil corporation.
Yeah, billionaires suck. You don’t get to be a billionaire by not taking as much as you can vs improving the costs to customers or employee benefits.
Your mom was wrong
It's more people like Valve as a service than liking Gabe. Helps that it is a private company so not beholden to stockholders and has a reasonable amount of employees for a more sustainable business. Not that it can't all go to shit, but I trust publicly traded companies even less when it comes to having to rake over consumers to keep increasing stock prices.
I feel similarly, but I don't (often) see people forgiving Steam's faults. You can like a product and a company for doing good things for you without believing they're beyond fault. Steam is pretty fucking nice. Saying you like it doesn't mean you believe it's 100% good and Gaben can do no wrong.
- I think people just ignore and don't pay attention to them. Also valve is great at hiding them.
  It's no secret that a lot of their ventures are funded by child gambling addictions that valve has enabled
Their „sports teams” are vessels for billionaires to make more money too. They have barely anything at all in common with sports.
True, we shouldn't be 'backing' them.
Consumerism and capitalism essentially dictate that large-scale gaming can't exist without publishers. Studios need to get funded, and most developers struggle with tasks like publishing, marketing, analytics, and handling payments. While a company could theoretically manage all of this itself, it demands a lot of specialized talent, which schools only teach to a limited extent in a manner relevant to the gaming industry.
Publishers (almost) can't help but be somewhat offensive to the public. They are there to make money and (the good ones, at least) put money back into the market so they can make more money.
Valve is less offensive than many/most. Gabe was an underdog story. Valve released some damn fine games before they primarily became publishers.