Valve is set up as a horizontal organization. I expect that to continue after Gaben’s death. He doesn’t really do much at valve these days anyway.
Comment on gabe³ half-life 3 confirmed
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Valve having such a stronghold on the market is both:
- amazing because of projects like this,
- frightening because we’re one Gabe brain damage away from having PC Gaming enshittified.
CatsPajamas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Yeah, well, somebody is going to inherit his share of ownership, and even if he goes out of his way and sets up a Foundation for the purpose of preserving the founder’s vision that will inherit his share, such Foundations tend to over time end up subverted and doing the very opposite of what the founder would’ve wanted.
Best avoid situations were your shit is hostage to the whims of a big company for whom you as and individual consumer are irrelevant.
CatsPajamas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
I wouldn’t be surprised if it became employee owned.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
I like to believe the main reason he got into BCI research is to digitize himself and live on as an actual Steam Machine.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
I avoid buying from Steam and prefer GOG when I can because I don’t really want to have continued access to my games collection be dependent on Gabe eating his veggies, avoiding saturated fats and doing at least a 30m walk a day to keep the risk of a heart attack low and look both ways before he crosses a road so as not to be run over by a car.
In almost 4 decades as a gamer and a techie I’ve seen plenty of good companies turn into evil companies and start to leverage whatever dependencies customers had on them to pretty much blackmail them into paying more, sometimes after the founders died, others when the founders cashed out or just lost interest in managing the company’s direction and yet others because they were evil all along and just hid it whilst they built their customer base - enshittification isn’t ust a XXI century thing, what’s XXI century about it is that many companies nowadays already have it as part of their mid and long term strategy from the start.
Best avoid situations where you give power to some big company (for whom you as an individual customer are basically a nameless bacteria) over something you care about, unless you have no other choice, even if at the moment they’re basically a benevolent dictatorship.
Better safe than sorry.
kevin2107@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
They are not public so we are safe for now. When they go public they go shit mode
Mr_Dr_Oink@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Sadly i guess it could happen to GOG too. I mean, anything you have already bought is safe but someone could step in and change the business model and end such a great thing.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Indeed. Any online store can go under or enshittify.
If you want to stay safe with GOG, download the offline installers for your games and archive them. If you don’t you’re running the risk of losing some or all of it.
Fortunatelly GOG has that possibility as standard, Steam does not make that option available - at best you can copy and zip existing installations of Steam games and hope for the best, a which is not official supported.
The point being that Steam could make something like that available, at least for games whose developers/publishers are willing and mark that as a feature in the game page in their store, but they have chosen not to.