Valve has done some good things for the game industry: they encouraged modifications, and made some good games.
However, I feel as if the gaming community praises Valve too much.
- The gaming community praises Valve’s monopoly on game distribution services.
That’s about it though.
They are a worker run company and support Linux a lot. Plus sometimes they make really great games. Sure they are not perfect, but compared to the possible alternatives I think they do deserve some praise.
Wait they’re a worker run company? Awesome!
Not in the purest form, but pretty much. You can find their employee handbook online I think.
But they still exploit peoples’ labour, right?
You might call it self-exploitation as they mostly pay people on a peer-review bonus system, so if other workers in the same company think you significantly contributed to the success of the company your salary will increase multiple times.
There is an older Podcast with Yanis Varoufakis who used to work for Valve where the general (anarcho-syndicalist) principles are explained: https://www.econtalk.org/varoufakis-on-valve-spontaneous-order-and-the-european-crisis/
Linux gaming would not be exploding the way it is without Valve.
Sometime around the time when Windows 8 came out, Valve realized that Microsoft wanted to take over their business. No more Steam store, all games go through the Windows Appstore. As a result Vale has been suporting open source and Linux to prepare for the inevitable showdown with Microsoft.
Valve is not a charity for the benefit of open source and Linux gaming. It’s just business.
This. I didn’t even have a Steam account and I used to avoid it. Until they became the first to support Linux nativelly. Then I slowly started to become a supporter.
I personally think that what the gaming community worships too much is companies like Ubisoft, Bethesda, EA… those big companies are the players, the human brain is their game, they are exploiting the gaming comunity’s weaknesses and desires, some even tapping into casino-like psychological incentives to entice people to spend money on them.
Nowadays, except for a few exceptions, AAA games are pretty bad and I much prefer indies.
And Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo want to be the owners of the ecosystem so they can control it all. They actually artificially impose limitations as much as they can to make sure they can keep people buying into their platform.
Personally, I think Steam is the lesser of all those evils. Even though they have a huge marketshare on PC, they keep innovating with interesting features (it feels like many other game stores don’t even try) without looking for exclusivity deals or going out of their way to lock anyone in (yes, there’s DRM, but it’s the game publisher who decides to use it, and it’s not even hard to crack). It’s the only game store I know (other than itch.io) that has accepted games that are 100% Free and Open Source.
I haven’t seen a good AAA game since Witcher 3. All the games I buy are from smaller studios.
Half-Life:Alyx was great.
It seems like everyone forgot that Proton (aka Steam Play) is forked off of Wine, which is a project that’s been around for more than a decade. Proton wouldn’t even be possible without Wine. That is not to discount Valve’s contributions, but it is a bit tiring to see Valve get all the praise especially combined with corporate worship.
I think Valve’s main contribution was to push DXVK as the main driver of Linux graphics. It’s a huge game changer.
It’s a symbiotic relationship: Valve benefitted from years of accumulated knowledge in the Wine project and now contributes to it. I hope more companies do the same.
valves “monopoly” with steam singlehandedly saved the pc gaming industry from ending up with copyright region locks and wrangled control away from the traditional giants like EA who still insist on overpricing games, stupid drms, and locking them away from platforms and regions. additionally, back when, they let people share the keys of the original halflife on the precursor to steam (won) with up to 10 friends. and encouraged people to use their sdk for a great modding community (that also ran through won).
valve in general is pretty open and supportive, with quite liberal policies and have some of the best employment environments in the industry. i actually feel that the quality of their service and library have gone down when they loosened some of their publishing restrictions.
valve is pretty great as far as capitalism goes. but it’s all thanks to gaben. the day he retires/dies, there are no guarantees valve won’t turn into yet another capitalist cesspool.
valve’s steam is imo, is still to this day, managing to stay ahead and enabling gamers and devs access to a library in a way that just can’t be found in other entertainment industries (netflix has been gutted by the giants, and spotify is morphing into an awful cesspool of evil).
i would love for GOG to have succeeded, and put more effort into their client for multiple platforms, and a better publishing transparency. but unfortunately GOG has failed on many levels, and that leaves steam still as the leader in this type of service.
additionally, i believe services like steam should be publicly owned. same for netflix. etc. there is literally no reason and awful for consumers to split this type of service up among multiple companies or even profit from such services. it should be public. but we don’t live in a world where that’s currently possible. so for now, we just have to be thankful that gaben is a pretty nice guy who doesn’t prioritize greed like all the others, and maintains monopoly despite of it, and thankful that a non-greed-first model has been so successful in establishing a cultural victory among its consumers.
valve is pretty great as far as capitalism goes. but it’s all thanks to gaben. the day he retires/dies, there are no guarantees valve won’t turn into yet another capitalist cesspool.
This is the key point people need to realize. Any capitalist company can seem good if it’s run by a decent person but that’s putting a lot of eggs in one basket. No different than how there may very well be some authoritarian leader who manages to be a good person, but the next guy is more likely going to abuse all that power so it’s not particularly an ideal system.
Valve are an important part of the community and at one time released some of the best AAA titles, but valve love makes less sense now as a services and hardware company.
why, they’re literally bringing a handheld linux gaming console to the market. that alone is awesome and helping open gaming by leagues and miles. it also helps that gaben is a huge opponent to microsoft.
i do wish they’d make more games. but that’s up to their game developers to decide due to their work environment structure, so they decide if they want to make a game or not, and it seems they aren’t interested, currently.
Keyword is worship. You could also say Microsoft has done great things with the Xbox or live.
I don’t think anyone believes that DirectX has been ‘great things’ for the industry or players.
Valve has had every opportunity with their early monopoly on the online distribution of games to screw everyone over and they choose not to. That is why they get the praise they get.
I play a good bit of DotA 2 and I really like their treatment of female characters. There are a wide range of female characters: a squirrel, a tough fighter, a elderly woman, and more. And instead of putting massive amounts of cleavage on all the models like Blizzard’s Warcraft 3 models used in WC3 DotA, they have most amounts if that.
Cleavage sells games.
That was always the assumption, but what if the assumption is wrong or no longer true? It may also have been a side effect of Blizzard’s culture, given that Activision-Blizzard currently is being sued for a pattern of sexism including sexual harassment.
I will continue liking Valve as long as they continue supporting Linux.
It sure does. There’s a difference between enjoying a product (i.e. Half Life, Steam Deck) and corporate bootlicking and I think a lot of Valve’s fans can’t tell the difference.
Example: Literally any criticism of the Steam Deck is met with all kinds of rabid fanboys angrily shutting down points.
