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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • How are you differentiating stakeholder and shareholder? The employees are certainly shareholders.

    Valve doesn’t really hire “grunts”. The people who are actually considered employees of valve are very few and highly skilled. The number of Wikipedia from 2016 is very out of date and estimates 360. But valve’s LinkedIn still says “over 300”.



  • I think this post massively overestimates the power a CEO has. The CEO is beholden to the shareholders. Valve is private, so and its shareholders are its workers. It would be useful to know how many shares Gaben has of valve, but I still don’t think the next CEO would suddenly also be the majority owner.

    Also, I know things have changed a lot in the last 12 years, but 12 years ago regarding the total dissolution of Valve, Gaben said:

    “It’s way more likely we would head in that direction than say, ‘Let’s find some giant company that wants to cash us out and wait two or three years to have our employment agreements terminate."

    Also, forcing users onto windows is THE way to kill valve’s profits. The whole point of the Linux push was a direct response to the windows store, and msft’s threat of forcing valve to give them a cut of purchase through steam. Msft will still do that the first chance it gets. So even the most profit-minded new leader wouldn’t make that choice, as it’s plainly shortsighted.




  • What if the legislation required that content platforms provide an API that adhered to an open standard? Such that there could be open source clients that unify them all (not just janky ones that do their best to not break with every platform update), so that consumers can have their libraries in one place, and still browse all store deals in one place.

    Ideally the legislation would also extend to all content including music, shows, movies, and internet content/streams, so that we don’t have to have separate apps for Netflix, and Hulu, and Amazon, and HBO, and Roku, etc.






  • Yeah, back when the game came out, I made a point to buy it on GOG so that they would get all the money for their game. I have only regretted that decision since.

    As everyone knows, the game was an unfinished mess at launch, so after ~20h of play I put it down to wait for them to finish it. In the meantime, I have switched all my gaming to Linux, but GOG (the platform that prides itself on open access to gaming) still doesn’t support Linux, so I have to jump through hoops to get the game running (vs just clicking Play if I had a steam copy). Which was a main reason I didn’t double down on my GOG purchase and buy the expansion. Now that the game is in better shape, as soon as I can reliably play my GOG copy on Linux I want to go back and play my save. But now they’re threatening to delete it? Just…wild.

    I don’t like how dependent PC gaming is on valve, but…for the time being I’m grateful that they seem to pretty consistently just make a good gaming experience for the players.