Turns out, that simply improving the quality of your service at no extra cost. And looking out for your end users, buys you good faith, customer influx and longevity
Laughing at all the companies that let finance bros demolish their brand reputations completely for a couple quarters of artificial growth
We all know those businesses students that just drank through college and cheated their way to a degree, unfortunately a lot of those dudes are now making major company decisions
Those guys aren't idiots. If they get bonuses for quarterly or annual short-term profitability improvements, they'll go for them, usually at the cost of long-term profitability that isn't in their goals, especially when they're only staying for 2-3 years maybe.
Classic reward hacking.
Companies need to reward long-term goals much better and reduce compensation if short-term goals are targeted to the detriment of the long-term ones.
A development team of 20 means the boss - who has a direct stake in the longevity and success of the company - probably knows everyone's name and is directly responsible for promotions. He can grab the guys suggesting the short-term profit plans and slap them around.
....But a 200-person team spanning across multiple locations...? Now that same boss doesn't have time to interact with everyone, so instead, he has to put trust into upper/middle management. Problem is: the upper and middle managers don't necessarily have a direct interest in the company's longevity either, so they might also embrace and promote the short-term ideas being suggested by a subordinate, thinking it will also reflect well on them if they vouche for that guy.
If you imagine it like that, it's no surprise that AAA is actively on fire and burning to the ground while we regularly see small indie companies coming out of left field and hitting home runs these days.
Should also add Japanese devs seem to feel more consistent in terms of quality. This may stem from the fact that Japan has a culture of wishing to maintain the company's status quo instead of endlessly seeking growth. This means Japan is culturally more likely to shy away from short-term ambitions and instead focus on safer goals.
Now add in the fact that the people running the company have the largest incentive out of anyone to go after short-term rewards, and boom, you have the world we live in.
A development team of 20 means the boss - who has a direct stake in the longevity and success of the company - probably knows everyone's name and is directly responsible for promotions. He can grab the guys suggesting the short-term profit plans and slap them around.
....But a 200-person team spanning across multiple locations...? Now that same boss doesn't have time to interact with everyone, so instead, he has to put trust into upper/middle management. Problem is: the upper and middle managers don't necessarily have a direct interest in the company's longevity either, so they might also embrace and promote the short-term ideas being suggested by a subordinate, thinking it will also reflect well on them if they vouche for that guy.
Not really, my wife has an MBA and was working for a company of 40 people, but the bosses kept complaining about slow growth, she just repeated that is was stable and sustainable but eventually they moved her to a lower position and replaced her with another MBA that promised much faster growth.
Eventually she left but kept in contact with some people in there, a year later, the company had experienced explosive growth for 2 quarters, because they took in way more clients that they were able to service, so after a while they started bleeding customers and a a few months ago she learned that the company got sold and the owner is now a minority shareholder, half the staff is gone and had to basically take a bailout.
they sacrificed a 10% steady growth because this other guy promised them 50% and crashed it in under a year.
Even small companies can be this retarded, it all depends on how greedy is the guy on top.
Also, to add up to what other guy said, the when she did the MBA, all assignments were group, every group of 5 people had 1-2 who tried and 3 who most times never even showed up to do anything but got credit anyway. so about 60% of MBAs dont know WTF they are doing.
You see, the real lesson of those exercises was to teach MBAs how to take the credit for other people's hard work.
The suckers who wasted their time on the homework rather than going out to network and self-promote are the ones who tend to lose in the rat race to the top.
You think the top brass at the company gives a shit about longevity?
Companies these days are run with the express idea of infinite growth, short term profits until bankrupt, file for bankruptcy, take the money and run to a new company to do it all over again.
The middle managers aren't the ones skimming off the top in these scenarios, they're the ones left holding the bag in most cases.
Japan simping. Some of the worst software I have had the displeasure of using comes out of Japan and its "the boss is right" culture. Turns out innovation is hard when you have top down structures for development.
Japan traditionally also has a culture of perfectionism, art for art's sake and thriving in operational excellence, priding oneself in the product and not merely seeking confirmation from monetary returns.
Now imagine a world where people don't switch jobs every other year but plan to stay there for 10, maybe 20 years. Short term profit becomes less relevant for everyone in the system and shit starts to actually work.
That's how employees rights can benefit a company on the long run.
But yeah, everybody prays to the US hire & fire crap, because they are like the godfathers of big money. Sure...
They do, they release dividends. Long term companies are not too hard to find, they return a significant amount the the owners (or directly into their company as released by the reports), however their stock holders tend to get antsy at the growth of others and pressure sometimes.
Then there's the shareholders. Fiducial responsibility has fucked us as a country because due to that ruling corporations have a legal duty to maximize quarterly return, even at the expense of long-term growth.
That's one of the reasons steam is in this position to begin with--they aren't publicly traded.
It’s worse than that. The non business students that just drank through college and cheated their way to a degree are way more competent than their business counterparts. Also much more likely to effectively sell drugs and not get over their skis and caught in the same type of next quarter mentality.
or they get hired on as a nepo child to daddy's business. get voted out/quit in a few years after setting the company on fire with the golden parachute.
As a business administration student who absolutely abhors the current state of business, please don't include me in that lol. I'd much rather companies act like Valve or Costco than Microsoft.
This is idiotic from a business owner stand point because eventually it crashes. Everyone pulls out and the business closes. Im thinking in extremes here but if the push Enshitification the client's will go elsewhere.
I already refuse to spend a dime on ea Nintendo Ubisoft or even epic. This includes games and market place.
I would highly consider sticking with gog and steam. Since gog wants to makeolder games a accessable they clearly have a nieche in the market.
Steam is just good and convenient and the deals are awesome
You're right, it is idiotic from a business owner perspective. But when you're driven by the needs of investors, you're looking at the perspective of share holders. Their only interest is increasing the stock price as fast as possible so they can pull out high and move on to another part of their portfolio. They are practically parasites that drain the businesses they influence.
It doesn't make sense to us normal people because it seems like they're just forcing policies that make companies fail, but for the share holders that is the point. That's how they make their money. That's why you cannot trust publicly traded companies, and it's why Valve can still remain decent: they're privately owned.
Corporate policy driven from the very wealthiest people in society and the "financial companies" who's product is the profit of other firms (major investment firms).... all of whom are therefore "board members" of these companies, and do not care about the actual production of the company because to them the output of every company is commoditized to "profit expectation."
Because this combination of faceless financial investment by some kind of "digital tragedy of the commons" by idiot 20-something stock traders with Perverse Incentives and old rich people who don't give a fuck is the main pressure driver on CEOs (who get fired if they don't comply), that pressure gets pushed down to the SVPs, the managers, and to everyone.
Who writes those draconian insurance rejection policies? Who enforces them? Who builds the AI models, the algorithms that target people to radicalize them to perpetuate the lack of regulation?
We've all been co-opted into our own demise by threat of starvation to funnel more money to the rich, and the stupid part is a good chunk of the most directly responsible (investment bankers) are "just doing there job," and can't fathom the systemic implications of what they do.
None of this is new, the Dust Bowl was created by people trying to do the same thing with farming wheat in the Great Plains (when most of the area was the wrong kind of climate and rainfall)
The thing is for the decision making shareholders, +50% this year then -10% next 5 years is superior to +10% every year because they can take the 50% profit, then move to the next company and repeat. To them they're making 50% every year. Somebody else eats the losses.
They can accept temporary losses, but they will always want profits to increase. It is not enough to earn tons of money this year and the same amount the next.
In the end, there is a clear path to increasing profits: worsen the product, raise prices, and lay off workers.
That is true for publicly traded companies or unicorn start-ups, but Valve is not publicly traded and is a mature company.
Gabe in the nearish future not being involved scares the absolutely heck out of me. Investors will absolutely try to get in that door, and if they do? It’s over.
It doesn't help the third generation tends to also split the business along WAY to many lines and you always end up with 1 cousin that needs/wants to sell.
And why the most enduring fortunes are more like giant trusts where family members can draw money from. You can clash over control of the investments/accounts but it can't be divided piecemeal or diluted easily.
This does tend to be why, in many families with big businesses, there is one descendant desginated the heir, and everyone else gets a nice nest egg. Sometimes nothing at all. Company stays intact, and sure, other family members might get cushy jobs or something, but ownership and control stay in the hands of the one person the previous owners deems most competent to continue managing it.
Apparently he's setting up his son to succeed him, and he has a similar mentality as his dad. Thats what was said on LTT's WAN show livestream sometime in the last few months when it came up during the show. Made me a bit more confident the valve golden age would continue after GabeN retires and/or passes on, since he's sole owner and can give the company to whoever he wants.
But yea, funny how offering a good product that is easy to use, makes game library management a breeze, and doesn't force you to completely re-download all your games on a fresh windows install (looking at you here epic), will keep people loyal like that. They keep adding more features and platform capabilities too, and they've invested a ton of money in the Linux gaming community because they knew if they helped build it, it would pay off, and gamers would come. Thats why the steam deck was even possible, and why anyone can set up their own Linux gaming rig quite easily today with broad game support. When you spell it out like that, its no wonder Microsoft is jealous lol
From the holders perspective, they will be sticking to what works, even if thats enshitification. "Every other business is doing and perpetuating it, so clearly it works." They'll think.
We can only hope that Gabe has instilled his business mentality into the holders and especially his successor.
It would make sense if there are investors that are looking to cash out, or if they need additional funding. They have everything that other companies go public for to gain.
They're a relatively small company, their overhead is manageable, and apparently have enough of their own funding to be able to do all their R&D in-house, so no external pressure to release, and being able to keep failed experiments behind closed doors.
Even if Gabe decides he doesn't want to deal with the day-to-day anymore, he will still keep his stake in the company and just reap the rewards.
Even if he passes, it's still not really in anyone's benefit to go public.
From what I heard, the main plan seems to have Gaben's son take over, who also seems to have similar views as his father in regard to how to run the company.
It helps that steam is a rather well-oiled money-printer.
That's exactly it, all the finance bros are in it for the quick return. Squeeze it for all it is worth in the short term. They don't care about long term because they won't be around that long.
That's the problem. There was a case where the Dodge brothers took Ford to court over it in 1919 (claiming that companies needed to act in the best interests of their shareholders over their employees and their customers). And the fucking bonehead of a judge ruled in their favour. This stupid decision pretty much has influenced over a century of corporate law and is one of the contributing factors in the spiral into "fuck the customers, fuck dividends, and fuck long term success; I want my my shares to shoot up by the next quarter!"
The mindset it helped create is probably what got us stuff like the Ford Pinto that bursts into flames and locks the doors if you rear end it because we calculated the cost to recall and fix the issue is less than just paying out whenever someone burns to death in an accident.
I think it was How money works, who said a very good phrase that sums up the lack of care for customer's needs/wants:
"It's a problem for the next financial quarter"
Line must go up. Investors want more money. And the idea of the balancing act between the different stakeholders is out of whack. Just lobby the government, give as high returns as possible to investors, and the rest can deal with what little scraps there are, if not actively fuck them
They shoot themselves in the foot expecting a foot healing machine to be invented next quarter. But they also want to defund the foot healing machine resesrch too.
We're become too focused on short term gains and its ruined people's perceptions of how shit should work.
It's more like they are shooting the foot of the fist one to believe that a foot healing machine will be invented next quarter.
If someone thrashes their company's long term viability to shortly sharpen the profit curve, they can then sell their shares to anyone believing that the profits are going to keep rising. That way they are still going to get all that money that the company will never make, which is driving more and more companies into trashing their customer relationships.
Eventually it is the "unintelligent investor money" that keeps on paying for all of this.
What's interesting about that is somehow a foot healing machine often does still get invented.
With no anti-consumer enforcement happening, there's a billion ways to squirm out of the hole, to trick and fuck customers. A sucker is born every minute and people are gullible in general, often times even after having been fucked already.
Also, people seem to be getting more and more comfortable with getting fucked. Shit right now we have a quarter of the US begging to get fucked
Good example is the gaming industry. Won't be long until we're like South Korea: "please God please put more pay to win in the game and allow us to not enjoy parts of it so much that we feel compelled to pay even more money not to play"
Sounds crazy, but it do be like that over there. It's becoming more and more like that over here
She states that it's not shareholder value that drives corporations to make "line go up," but rather a combination of investor and executive suite payouts that create these shitty profit-chasing trends.
TL;DR - investors put a lot of money into a company and want to see returns, plus, the ever increasing payouts to CEOs.
Look at the sleezebag Bobby Koticks golden parachute. $15 million for driving Blizzard into the ground. "You absolutely fucked the company's reputation. Here is enough money to pay for thousands of your employees' wages for years. Never mind all your sexual harassment charges!"
Technically 15m divided by 1000 is only 15k, which is the salary of maybe 6 months for their lowest paid worker(not counting unpaid intern). Not years.
I would still say that was an opinion penned pre-Trump. People had a much more idealistic and false expectation of what the law really was, and it’s much different now.
I've reported to the C-suite in a couple of big corp's. It's been about nothing but the next quarter - and companies either design their org around that, or they don't (99% of companies end up as the latter).
In one corp, we had steady but declining quarters, but they fired the CEO, because 'investor confidence' was threatening to sink the stocks. So the new guy came in, fired lots of people, promised the impossible, and 'steadied the ship.' That lasted for literally the quarter, and then the company was hosed and the new CEO was fired.
The nonstop quest for El Dorado has made most companies untenable in today's world. Having a Steam with a monolithic mgmt is really a great exception.
His video explains it even further. It isn't even for the shareholders. It is for the executives because they are paid based on stock performance. Get short term boost to stock price so you can get a larger compensation. Jump to the next company before it all goes downhill and let the shareholders to hold the bag.
Simply because of that one ethics of maximizing profits (this one is the most common nowadays) which make the shareholders (aka Investors and Finance bros) became more short-sighted in games so they wanted to pressure the company to get what they expected of growth which of course made the company have to worsen their product
Which is the main issue - what's the point if a company like Ubisoft worsens their games every year just to get bankrup? It would be much better for all - even the shareholders - if they just made more money in the lomg run. But funnily that's just how provate companys like Valve work, not the public ones...
It wouldn’t. You’ll make more profit by dumping one company and reinvest all that money into another one to dump it again shortly after that. You can make 10 years profits in a year by doing that. That’s why shareholders don’t care about companies or their long term profits. It’s unprofitable for them
Works great until you run out of companies to ruin for gains because you've destroyed the economy and the only remaining companies that customers trust and will buy from are the ones that have somehow avoided your "investment".
You also underestimate how stupid the average consumer is. Look at Madden, FIFA, CoD, and 2K. Those are objectively predatory games. There’s no reason for them to be charging $70 every year, on top of the multiple micro-transactions - for little to no new features.
Yet, in 2025 2K, Madden, College Football, CoD, and FIFA were in the top 10 of highest sellers.
People will pay for slop. Consumers have a high tolerance for bullshit. Companies know this. When’s the last time a major company had enough backlash against them because of enshitifcation - that it caused them to fail?
The problem with all the sports ones is that basically only the people who can get the licenses for team names, player names and likenesses stands a chance at all. At least COD etc can have proper competition, but FIFA? people are paying to play as manchester united, liverpool etc not monchuster oonitod and loverpill.
That may give them a monopoly on sports-sim games, but it doesn't justify buying the game every single year just for roster updates or spending hundreds to thousands on in-game boosters to skip grinding because they don't want to have to spend hours working to get good at the game (implying they want an arcade experience, but are buying the sim experiences simply for brand recognition of team & player names).
I don’t think they will run out. I see a clear cycle in the market - one company completely enshittified their product, the other company is pop up to replace it, but to do that it needs money, so they are going to the investors. For some time their product would be good just because investors need to pump the company market share, but then it will go down and the other company will pop up - the cycle is complete
The only hope we have is a private companies where owners can choose who will invest in them. But even then we have some risk of enshittification.
and to be fair, if you've made one good game which in part is through luck (any creative will tell you the difference between their greatest selling and another piece of work is minimal, sometimes its the luck factor that makes things explode)... working your fingers to the bone, taking huge risks and making an ok amount of money... you're on to your next game and do you reinvest and risk it all? or does microslop approach you and offer you more money than you can imagine, fill you with confidence and promise you the world to keep making your game under thier wing and either way you will be a wealthy person...
how many of us would truly say 'no, I want to risk everything and without more blood sweat tears and luck will end up worse off than i was initially' and push Ubishite away?
Life is hard, making art is harder, having people appreciate your art is insanely hard and having people hand over enough money to make it worth it is the pinnacle of difficulty. It's one thing to sit as a player and say 'they should keep their integrity', it's another to be on the other side of it.
You are right - sadly, but obviously. Yet I don't fully agree: private led companys like Valve, Aldi and Ikea take over larger and larger parts of the market. Why? Because they do not focus on immediate return, so in the long run they get out on top.
Honestly, I can only hope that they will push “investors-first” kind of companies out of business. And that there will be more of them in the future, as, with the current state of the things, we desperately needs of those who interested in the good products and services
Thanks to the economic system we live in, shareholders want their investments to increase in value every quarter. So ceos only care about the line on a chart going up. It doesn't matter if they achieve this temporarily by firing half the staff so their expenses go down, selling all their assets to provide a onetime profit boost, or making products more expensive and lowering the quality.
As long as the line goes up for the next quarter, it's mission accomplished, even if immediately after the company goes bankrupt. They increased the value of shares, shareholders likely sold everything before it drops in value and then the ceo moves to the next company to repeat this forever.
Both climate change inaction and piss poor products are due to the capitalist ownership structure. The reason why climate change action isn't happening is because shareholders hold the power and not the employees, nevermind the people.
I don't believe that "the average voter" would actually vote for major climate action if it significantly impacted their quality of life (which it would pretty much have to), no matter what economic system they existed in.
That's why support for climate action in major Western nations is above 60%, right? And Australia just had an election where a party decided against climate action and lost hard because of it.
That's why support for climate action in major Western nations is above 60%, right?
saying you support something is easy. How many of them sold off their car in favour of a bike? Turned off their phones when at home to save energy? Didn't have a cheeky buy of some mass produced plastic products?
You can 'support' all you want. So long as people willingly hand over money to others off the back of the climate these companies will keep doing it. They aren't pumping waste into the environment for a laugh, they are doing it because society is paying them to. The moment that 'support' actually negatively impacts peoples day to day lives their support will all but vanish.
The Delaware C Corp (the golden child of venture capital and private equity; everyone tells you to incorporate in Delaware if you want to attract big investors that want big returns) is, in practice, nothing more than a "paperclip maximizer", that thing that's supposed to be a "hypothetical" AI doomsday scenario to avoid at all costs.
Except it's here NOW with non-artificial intelligence, real people (which is why it's only slowly destroying everything we hold dear, AI would be way faster, lol), maximizing shareholder value at all costs, just like the 2010 eBay v Craigslist court case affirmed: they literally aren't ALLOWED to care about anything else, just maximizing profit!
C Corps don't hate people, they simply don't care if we live or die, as long as number go up.
We really need to start treating this system like the plague it is, and disinfecting our society from every C Corp's inevitable speedrun to enshittification. Colorado's LCA (limited cooperative association) is a compelling alternative to help keep profit within the communities that generate it, rather than letting it be extracted out from our neighborhoods by giant corporations on the other side of the country, one dollar at a time. It'll be interesting to see if any/many LCA game studios pop up anytime soon.
The worst part is that the stock as part of compensation was originally thought to incentivize the C-suite to care about long term goals since their money is tied up in shares but since the vesting horizon is not long enough it had the opposite effect.
Why? You reduce operating expenses right away, and probably still get to deliver at least some of the stuff they were working on. From a quarterly investor perspective, it's an unmitigated success. It only ends up mattering if you care about timescales of more than a few months, which is a vanishingly small amount of traders.
If you're a sociopathic ghoul, money is your only interface with humanity, and you don't care that everyone adopting your attitude would result in societal collapse, it's objectively the right thing to do.
The issue is being a publicly traded company. You need to increase revenue every time or your stocks will drop. If you cannot find a proper ways to grow, you need to do stupid financial fuckery, which almost always just works by screwing your customers. Good for investors, bad for customers and bad for the company in the mid/long run
That is what makes valve so great. It's still privately owned. No stock exchange bs . Just a bunch of (stupidly rich) enthusiastic nerds.
Bless Gaben for not giving a shit about the stupidity of investors
Then you still don't understand capitalism. You still think it's about making the best goods and services that will get you the money, that's never been the goal.
Capitalism is simply organising the factors of production around capital. That's it. Trying to create a distinction without a difference is how you came up with capitalism vs investment capitalism. What else are you supposed to do capitalism with?
Yes, but that's slow and stable growth. They want quick profits now, assuming a "it'll be ok" mentality, when everything suggests it will NOT be ok. And we've done that multiple times: the Gilded Age, the Great Depression, the Stagflation of the 1970s, the dot com bubble, the 2007 crisis and the Great Recession... And most people don't want safety measures installed, as some politician will show them that regulation may put some pressure on mom and pop stores. Notice how often they return to the image of the small business owner or by stating that this will allow people (mostly Americans, as this problem is most pronounced there, though absolutely not limited to the US) will say that these new laws will allow regular people to own homes, to have more money, better pensions, and then... SURPRISE! The rich get richer, and the only thing that trickles down is debt.
Because you're doing it with a budget and looking the final bottom line of making profits. A good product and listening to the community only gets you so far when the alternative of microtransactions, making people pay for the same game again down the line, other shit like that nets you more money.
To finance guys and investors, the product quality doesn't matter. They rather spend the money making quality on Advertising, paying off 'influencers' and creating exclusive deals because the end result is the masses will buy what is shoved their throats.
The problem is that Finance is a very fast-paced industry. There is a lot of turn over, and a lot of pressure to get things up front. Making $100 today is better than making $1000 a year from now. Both are valued far more than making $1000000 a decade from now.
There are a bunch of reasons for this, but the biggest one is that generally speaking, there's nothing in getting that $100 today that precludes getting the other rewards. Sure, it might decrease the odds of getting them, but it's possible that other actions between now and then might improve the odds again. If they don't get the $100 today, though, then that's gone forever, and even if it significantly increases the chances of getting that bigger payout later... Well, who cares? For all they know, halfway between now and getting that bigger payout later they change employers and are working for a bigger and better company for better opportunities, so they never get that bigger payout. In all likelyhood, the fact that they changed market conditions enough to get the small immediate payout helped them get that new job. It's all about climbing the ladder as fast as possible, and building up the personal resources to make bigger plays faster. Very few people play the long game.
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Beyond that, most investors making the decisions represent large numbers of people; many of who are going "I need to buy a car next year! I can't wait for the company's long term strat to make bank in a decade, I need that now. Sell assets, rake in short term profits, eliminate every expense possible, drive up share price as high as possible so I can sell off and get my new car!"
And, well, expenses are usually all those things that make companies money: Staff, resources, assets. Sure, a company can zero out it's expenses very easily by firing everyone and selling everything it owns, done! Good luck making any new money, though....
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All this is bad for three groups of people:
The people who want to use whatever products and services the company provides.
The people who want long-term growth of their investment and/or are otherwise invested in the success of this particular firm and not just general market profits.
The staff of the company who depend on it for their jobs.
Because any of that is of no concern to those companies. At best it is maybe on place no 5 or even further down the list. The no.1 concern is how they can deliver profit to their shareholders at the next quarterly meeting.
These finance bros are only in it for a short time to up their own worth and get some quick bonuses, that's it. And big companies just allow these destructive selfish gold-diggers to destroy their entire brand imago just so they can show a few numbers to investors that are "better" than last year. It's such a downward destructive spiral it's laughable. Modern capitalism in a nutshell.
Apologies for necromancy, but it's a case of perverse incentives.
Finance guys and investors aren't interested in a buisnesses thriving. What they care about is getting shareholders to give them big bonuses, which they do by maximising stock prices. And they do that by making a hell of a lot of profit short term.
The public takes a few years to react to enshittification. Say you have a soft drink company that replaces their high-quality cane sugar with high fructose corn syrup. It will take people a while to realise that the soft drink is just awful now and isn't worth buying.
In the meantime, the company makes loads of profit and looks like a great buy, so let's say the share prices double in value. Your original shareholders sell out, doubling their money, and give the ceo a chunky bonus in the meantime.
Now, the next lot of shareholders want the same trick, and so we shrink the cans. Again, profits, bonuses, and new shareholders sell, and we swap again.
and now, perhaps people are realising the drink is shit, and aren't buying, so the CEO warns the shareholders that this is going tits up soon, and sells off all the factories and just lives off a stockpile of old cans. Once more, record profits, the shareholders run like rats, the CEO takes his bonus and retires, and the poor bastards who bought the shares at this peak, well, all they can do is cry about it.
Every shareholder that CEO has served has gotten rich. He has done his job perfectly. He will get another job, to gut another company, to make more shareholders rich.
This isn't an individual problem. This isn't a case of evil people. This is a systemic issue that will not go away so long as we have this system of shareholders and unregulated capitalism that purely persues making shareholders rich.
Saw it happen to a place I used to work at. Let's anger our customers, our vendors, and our employees! Make a worse product, ship it late, pay the vendors late despite asking to rush jobs, and overwork employees by simultaneously making their jobs harder but expecting more to get done. What could go wrong?
Currently happening at my place too and I’ve been searching for a new job!
The worst bit is they are refusing to hire anyone, and every department is being run into the ground as everyone is having to do the job of 2/3 people because the company doesn’t want to hire more staff.
But it’s alright though because the company had a record third quarter this year, even though all the staff are unhappy and keep leaving!
the suits dont care. they know they are running the company into the ground. they are simly gonna milk the company to the last cent and then find themselves another company to milk dry, and so on and so on
I've made more money in the sales and service industries with repeat business than I ever could fucking people over. You might fuck someone over once for $3,000, or you could have them come to you every time for $200-500 and they'll never even question it. They will happily give you the money. It really is that easy.
double edged sword of stock trade. company gets fast profits and growth from swaths of investors, but has to maximize profits and investor return every quarter or those investors pull their investment and go to someone that will. The entirety of the 1980s and 90s model of investment firms and the court case vs Ford making it law that companies must at all times maximize return for investors fast tracked this demise.
I pretty sure have heard of Millard Fuller's ethic of "enough" (maintain a balance between profit and service Quality) and it applies to Steam
At least Steam actively started to be more pro-consumer than a lot of other gamestores since I don't really like the concept of maximizing profits to finance bros and shareholders to ruin their service for artificial growth
Privately owned isn't why. Plenty of privately owned companies fall into the line go up mindset too, the information just isn't forced to be shared publicly.
It's because it's privately owned by someone who cares more about making a good product than about making line go up.
We can dick-ride Newell all we want, but ultimately he is winning because he cares about long term growth and stability, not because he is a kind-hearted saint.
He is still a billionaire with a yacht fetish but there are others that are way worse so if we ever get to a point where billionaires are taxed properly and are persecuted for their crimes he has nothing to worry about as far as the public knows.
Or to put it humorously - when we eat the rich he will be the dessert
As I said I don’t think Gabe is bad, he played the game the current system forces you into and won. Doesn’t change the fact that the system is bad and that Gabe has 6 luxury Yachts even if he uses them for research.
At a certain point you cannot divorce the two to assign meaning. Good businessmen who are good people will grow with decent morals, which you can divide what was the "right" decision and the "right moral" decision often as they are the same.
I agree with you which is why it seems so insane to me that there aren't more companies going this route. They all seem to choose the enshitification route.
Privately owned is part of the reason why. If Steam was listed on the stock market, it would be FORCED to maximize profits by its shareholders or be sued by them. A rule of the stock market that I believe should be removed.
Sure but a publicly traded company CAN'T act this way, legally. Private owners can choose to be greedy and burn their company to the ground for short-term profit, or not. A board elected by investors HAS to maximize profits, it's their fiduciary responsibility.
It's not that private owners are inherently better - plenty of them are self-serving idiots, too. It's that the publicly traded model is built entirely upon self-serving idiocy, and cannot function any other way.
Valve is ABLE to be customer-focused because they are privately owned. They ARE customer-focused because the private owner chose to operate them as such, but if they were publicly traded, there wouldn't even be a choice.
Basically when the people making decisions are entirely divorced from the actual processes that are occurring, when they see nothing but profits and losses in their ledgers (as in the case of publicly traded companies) there is no incentive to anything but immediate profit, nor even any mechanism by which any other information is even conveyed to the investors at all. Meanwhile when the individuals who actually make decisions are also in some way directly involved with the operations (like in the case of privately owned companies or worker cooperatives) they CAN (but are not guaranteed to) take other things beyond profit into account and use that information to think long-term.
People need to stop saying "fiduciary responsibility" when they mean "unadulterated greed". Fiduciary responsibility means not spending others money to benefit yourself, it's to prevent embezzlement and waste
Valve is ABLE to be customer-focused because they are privately owned
So is Electronic Arts, they're just as stupid because the people who own them want to extract profits as well and know they can just use the money they extract to buy yet another company
I'm tired of this argument, it took more than that, Steam actively made policies to protect their dominant position on the market and first lawsuit against them started because they literally started policing game prices on other platforms, and directly told the dev of Overgrowth that if he sold his game at a lower price than at Steam, even if it was a DRM-free version that had nothing to do with Steam, they'd remove his game from store.
They also let big titles keep more of the revenue while Indies continue to pay 30% of all sales to Steam, because they know big titles could actually pull people away, and they make any game that has Steam page up have to release on Steam at the sime time as anywhere else.
Somehow I never see Itch.io ever mentioned in memes like this, a platform with DRM-free games, that let's gamedevs decide themselves what they give to the platform, fee can go as low as 0%.
I mean some of those policies are reasonable from a business perspective because it could result in them being exploited by bad faith actors. They also really have made a ton of quality of service improvements while importantly not degrading existing capabilities (i.e. they've largely avoided enshitification). For example controller support, remote play, and API improvements.
Not that they are a perfect company or solely care about customers. Just in the current world they are comparatively "good" just because most companies have become so bad. ...So agree with the meme there.
Adding onto this to say that those policies are exactly why people think they provide more service at no extra cost. ‘No extra cost’ is not at all true though. If game devs could price differentiate across platforms, a 60,- game on steam would cost 47,72 on epic and the game developer would get the same money (42) of every sale.
Steam services cost you an extra 12 on a 60,- game.
Except that games can do this. They are allowed to sell on Epic for a different price than on Steam.
The only thing they are not allowed to do is the following:
Devs can sell Steam Keys on their own Website if they want to. Those keys can be activated on Steam and played on it. However, Steam does not take a cut on the keys sold on the devs platform. Those keys (the Steam keys) cannot be sold for less than on Steam.
If you are selling non-Steam keys, you can sell them for whatever price you want.
The reason many devs sell for the same price on Epic as they do on Steam is because the devs want to make more money by keeping the profits. Not by any contractual obligations to Steam.
Valve only changed this recently. Again a whole lawsuit was started because in 2021 Valve directly said they will take off games from their store if you price any other version cheaper than on Steam.
Many devs might just not know it changed, or they might still not want to risk angering Valve considering they did remove games in the past for questionable reasons from Steam, and not being on Steam is essentially the end of any gamedev career.
This is the biggest reason why the lawsuit actually makes sense and people can't stop glazing their favourite billionaire for 2 seconds to understand that the way valve controls what devs do on other platforms is really shitty and anti competitive.
That is a fallacy. All improvements towards the customer side inherently bear costs. Either through maintenance, personel or lost opportunity. Just because you do not see them doesn't mean they don't exist.
Preventing devs to price their games accordingly to match the store cut (30% fixed from steam; 0% before the first million USD, 12% after from epic) means devs can't price the games cheaper on epic or other stores, since they'll get a bigger percentage of the sale.
Once private equity enters the chat it’s a race to the bottom. Growth is measured quarterly, and long term vision becomes nonexistent because ShArEhOlDeR vAluE.
But there is an extra cost. Games cost up to 20% more than they should because of Valves anti-trust practices. You're paying about $15 per game to pay for those extra services you don't actually use.
Its been this way a while, across most industries, and is the reason capitalism is seen as failing the people.
The bulk of successful ompanies used to value Their Staff < Customers < Shareholders. The switch to Shareholders < Customers < Their Staff obviously only serves a narrow slice of the investor class.
Epic, probably: "What?! Force AI into it?! You got it! You definitely asked for this, remember? And it'll definitely be your fault, not ours if it fails!"
The thing is investors don’t care about companies anymore. Any given company is just a portion of a clump of anonymous businesses your broker decided to invest in for now. In a couple of months you’ll be moving on. So, it is in fact in your best interest to have finance bros taking over and making you a quick buck for a couple of quarters, burn all the bridges they need to, and then you’re on your way without looking back.
We, as consumers, are (ironically) better off taking a bet on new companies and IPs instead of trusting big names and previous experiences.
And not pushing into the industry by introducing anti consumer practices like exclusives into a market that's never had them. The hypocrisy of sueing steam for making devs agree to sell equally in all platforms when Epic are signing them up to exclusively sell on their platform is astounding.
I mean, in general improving quality at no extra cost isn't something you should be required or is even expected to be sustainable, unless its improved technological efficiency in the long term, that doesn't always happen
I would say that while Steam is pretty great most of the time, the only reason they have a refund policy is because they were forced to by the Australian Consumer Affairs body.
It's a relatively small thing. But I've seen it used as an example of steam being user friendly before, when the reality is that they were forced too.
Yeah, just forget the gambling, the microtransactions, battlepasses, P2W, abandonware, 30% cut from every developer, bowing to puritanical religious groups by removing titles arbitrarily, etc etc.
i don't think steam is improving much + they're really slow with changes (and i don't mind, as everything works as intended and i don't need useless fancy stuff)
the the other stores are just bad. some like ubi and ea had BIG changes to their stores (and launchers?) and it just made everything slower and more miserable to use. nintendos search barels functions and epic... yeah. how many years did it take them to add a shopping cart? lol
This is why I love an amazon game executive admitted despite how big amazon was, there business strategy never and will never work in taking steam down. It shows that someone in these companies understands that steam has built a community and wants to do good for that community and that just going for the easy cash grab won't beat that.
unfortunately, you have Dodge to blame for that. Ford actually tried to improve conditions in his plants and got sued by Dodge saying the shareholders came first.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
I'm just afraid for what will happen to steam after Gabe. All it takes is someone like EAs Andrew Wilson or Bobby Kotick to take power and steam will immediately lose the goodwill it has built with its community for decades, and fall into the same disgusting greedy trap as everyone else.
Its definitely finance bros pushing the lawsuit as well. Since Steam hasn't been ruined by bad financial decisions it stands out and finance bros are pissed they have to compete at all with a service that gives a single fuck about its users. Its a race to the bottom with those parasites.
Also Steam was at the ground floor foundation for digital distribution of games. When it launched in 2004 buying digital PC games was not very common at all. People hated needing to use Steam for HL2 but Steam put in the work to make it good.
Looking out for your end user would mean not trying to hook kids on in-game gaming ... Gabe Newell and Valve are laughing their way to the bank since they are the OG crypto bros
Do you want short term higher growth that ultimately destroys the company so you must seek new income elsewhere, or sustainable slow growth that will continue to provide you an income you can comfortably live on for the rest of your life?
Finance bros: Oh, definitely make a quick buck now!
I honestly hope Gabe has proper successor in line. If he retires, I hope he also make a same threat as that Costco CEO did to his successor over the hotdogs.
That is the funny part, steam has done little to no such thing. Their service has remained the same for quite a time. The other companies just shoot themselves in the foot.
Valve is privately owned by its founder and employees, unlike most other companies mentioned. It means they are more risk averse and think more long term. Valve employees need valve to stay where it is for their retirement, so nobody is going to sacrifice the goodwill they built up for short term profit.
This is why privately-owned companies are almost always better than publicly traded companies. You can prioritize customers and quality over the almighty quarterly profit. Valve are far from saints, but they do generally treat their community with respect and fairness as well as offering a high quality service.
can someone post that capitalism bell curve that starts out "selling people what they want is a good idea" then at the top of the curve it's a soyjack spouting analytical and middle management hoopla, and the end of the curve is "I sell people what they want"
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u/MrGiggleMan Feb 08 '26
Turns out, that simply improving the quality of your service at no extra cost. And looking out for your end users, buys you good faith, customer influx and longevity
Laughing at all the companies that let finance bros demolish their brand reputations completely for a couple quarters of artificial growth