Whats his problem?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Ocean_Strategy

Does nothing? DOES NOTHING?! He spent the last few years ripping Microsoft a new a@@hole, rendering their operating system meaningless for gamers! ..but nice meme
- Fun fact many don't know, Gabe helped create the first versions of Windows and claims he learned more at Microsoft than he ever did elsewhere (at the time). So in a way, he's transcended Windows, vs ripping it apart.
- Gaben has done lots of awesome shit. I fear what valve will become when he's gone.
  
  I'm not actually too worried. He surrounds himself with champions.
  
  Same

Just my two cents but as others have said, not being publically traded helps a lot. The focus on short term benefits that come with shareholders stops "master plans" when they come with mistakes. Learning from relative failures, like the steam controller and the like, ultimately contributes to major successes like the steam deck. Being able to stay committed to improving the software experience over time, instead of killing the product when it didn't immediately succeed, is fairly rare in the tech industry. And in all honesty, it would be better if they released a polished profuct, but being committed to it made it a success.
I feel like the pressure to have a majorly successful product day one means that smaller companies can't innovate the way they want to, so they have to find other ways to produce revenue. Huge companies, like Apple can afford to do both but still stumble, like with the vision pro. Maybe it'll be a success, but for now its not great and iteration makes it more difficult to maintain the original vision.

Private company with long-term strategy VS public company chasing short-term profits to pump stock prices for shareholders.
- That's the primary reason I abhor the stock market. It no longer works for the creator/owner or the customers at all. It simply feeds the greed of the wealthy (special call-out to private equity here).

"Don't interrupt your enemy when he's making a mistake."

I can't really get my head around why people dislike Gabe Newell. As best I can tell, he's been a fantastic steward for Steam.
- Gabe Newell has a net worth of $9.5 billion and there is no such thing as an ethical billionaire. Steam is great and as long as the company behaves well there's no reason not to use it, but billionaires are not your friends.
  
  They are some rare cases where someone becomes a billionaire because something suddenly took off.
  
  Sort of agree but look how much he's done for Linux gaming. Also the steam deck was well thought out and designed to be user serviceable.
- Ah, so that's who this guy is. Thanks! Tbh I had no clue and thought it might be George R. R. Martin.
- Just wait till he dies and the next person in charge decides to go public to make a quick buck. That'll begin the immediate enshitification of Steam. How many years do we got till he croaks? Ten? Fifteen? Better hope we have a better alternative before then.
  
  doesnt gabe already do basically nothing though? afaik there are other people managing valve and he only acts as valve's face
  also theyd have to be extremely stupid to start enshittification when they already have the best ways to monetize games (skins in cs2, hats in tf2, etc)
  im not saying its not possible, im just a very optimistic person
  
  A very typical arc for innovation is that the first organizational goal is getting people to buy it, then the next goal is getting them to keep buying it again and again. The original visionaries who were trying to solve a problem tend to lose interest by then and drop out, and the money weasels completely take over. New versions are released on a marketing schedule regardless of whether they're necessary, and the thing begins to suck progressively more and more until some new player shows up to solve that problem.
  Rinse and repeat.
  
  I'm not going to use something that's shitty now in hopes it will be better later in order to avoid using something that's better now out of fear it might become shitty later.
  If Steam becomes shitty I have no issue dropping it and pirating my already paid for collection.
- A massive, massive astroturfing campaign Epic Games paid for in hopes of tarnishing Valve and Gabe Newell's reputation to try and bolster their failure of a shop ecosystem.
  Unfortunately, it worked, because there are people on the net who don't remember the and days before steam, or even the initial versions of steam that people had Actual problems with, and not just made up ones.

Honestly, the secret is not being a publicly traded company. All the others have to make the shareholders happy while steam just does steam. If the line doesn't have to constantly go up you can pretty much do whatever you want as long as you're still making profit. And if what you're doing is already working you don't need to add gimmicks or advertisements to milk it as much as you can just to appease the shareholders.
- Being a private company has allowed Valve to take some really big swings. Steam Deck is paying off handsomely, but it came after the relative failure of the Steam Controller, Steam Link and Steam Machines. With their software business stable, they can allow themselves to take big risks on the hardware side, learn what does and doesn't work, then try again. At a publically traded company, CEO Gabe Newell probably gets forced out long before they get to the Steam Deck.
  
  The steam controller didn't really fail, but the patent fight was a mess that took way too long (much too late disqualified patent over paddle buttons). That sucked a lot of energy out of the project. Don't forget the steam deck kept those touch pads (although with a different design)!
  Steam Link IMHO also wasn't bad, but there didn't seem to be much interest in it then. (interestingly enough I think it could be recreated today in a Chromecast-like form factor)
  Stream machines was definitely a big mess however, there just wasn't enough interest, too limited compatibility, the machines just wasn't versatile enough for average Joe to pay for one.
  
  You are right, but let me add that Gabe knows that being tied to Windows is not a good idea, as he worked there and understood that they would block Steam if they could.
  Valve supporting 'their' alternative OS, away from Microsoft (and Apple) or any other direct competitor in gaming is the only way to survive.
  It's not like they pour all that money into Linux from the goodness of their heart. They need their own OS just as much as the Linux desktop community needs some stable funding.
  Given how Valve lets children gamble with skins, I'm not sure how moral that company really is.
  
  Agreed, but if I'd had the money at the time, I absolutely would've jumped at the steam machine and steam controller. I want a modern one now more than ever. If it weren't for parts getting shittier and pricier, I'd probably build one myself this spring/summer and figure out which distro would be best for it. My steam deck is great and I want basically the exact same thing but more powerful at the cost of not being a handheld. Bonus points if I can easily remote play that new steam machine through my steam deck, which I think is a reasonable expectation. And I'd love to run an HDMI out splitter to easily swap between using it as a PC at my desk or using it as a console from my couch.
  
  Man Intel are so dumb for firing Pat. And they did it while seeing positive reviews for their second gen GPUs!
  
  Unlike companies like Google or Microsoft, whose products are never disappointing!
- And also not be backed by venture capital firms expecting to make infinite profits. Private or Public, if the company shareholder's only goal is to continue to receive 10% gains on their investment after already making back 20x their principal, they'll squeeze the company for all it's worth.
- Publicly traded companies mean that the people who invested get a say in how the business is run. Those same people are typically riding the success of other people's decisions and have no idea how to not fuck up. So they demand the company make stupid fucking choices or the CEO will be replaced by someone who will listen.
  The trick is to remove the power of the board to remove the CEO and keep them as advisors instead of drivers. The CEO should cook and if they drive the business into the ground, that's what happens. Businesses need to fail because otherwise the wrong people end up leading.
  
  Businesses need to fail because otherwise the wrong people end up leading.
  When businesses fail, their competitors buy their assets, employees, customer bases, and get bigger. Keep playing that a few more rounds and you get a monopoly that can and will prevent or buy new entrants. Then anyone including the wrong people in the industry enter this one company because that's the only company in this industry.
  This isn't an argument against letting businesses fail. It's an argument to show that the game of competition doesn't produce stable competitive environment in the long run. Instead it's a temporary stage that some markets exist in on the way to consolidation. You can find countless examples for this around us. And therefore letting businesses fail through competition isn't a long term solution to these problems.
- Honestly, the secret is not being a publicly traded company.
  Valve fortune doesn't come from not being traded publicly. They built a nearly monopoly on pc videogames with their walled garden proprietary third party launcher.

I’m not quite sure they have “done nothing”. They have made a digital storefront that other storefronts strive for, they have help with Linux compatibility with windows only games, have released a few bits of awesome hardware every now and then. I think this is what happens when you are not beholden to shareholders and the mantra “make line go up at all costs”

Being a private company, it's what it is called

'Not sucking'
- Guy owns how many yachts? I think Gabe sucks personally.
  
  Eh. He's a human being. I hadn't heard about his fleet.
  https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/gabe-newell-luxury-yachts.php
  It seems nearly impossible for a person to be billionaire loaded and not make some irresponsible purchases. Is there anyone with that kind of money we should be highlighting as a role model instead?

Why does this photo looks like he's doing a porno
- I was thinking more obi wan kenobi
- His shirt does kinda look like a white bathrobe

Ultimately it's a slow and steady strategy. There goal is long term profitability, not short term gains. In the long term, the best strategy is not to piss off your customers.
The advantage of this is that it can snowball to impressive levels. At least until a exec with more education than brains does a pump and run on it. A mistake steam seems to know to avoid.
- I'm not looking forward to what happens to steam post-gaben. I expect a stupid successor to IPO and fuck it all up.
  
  That makes me nervous as well. Hopefully, there are enough people involved to know not to kill the golden goose for a quick buck.

They were not liked at first, but they've spent enough time making money while not pissing people off that they are doing far better than every public company who must find a reason to piss people off to be more profitable.
They've been able to use that time to "cook". Valve time has been known to be within its own dimension, but from that we got Linux to be just click start and play for 90% of games like Windows, and with the Steamdeck a powerful, comfortable, DIY-able handheld PC gaming device.

You'd think it wouldn't be that hard for publishers with billions of dollars to hire enough competent devs for enough time to make a halfway decent storefront, especially when they don't even have to reinvent the wheel on a lot of UX and marketing research that's already been done for them by Steam existing as long as it's had.
That none of them have even come close to that is a monument to their incompetence.
- Large companies do not generally innovate. Their internal inertia prevents them from successfully creating new things. Also the larger a company gets, the more layers of brainless MBA parasites latch on to suck them dry.
  Large companies rely on purchasing innovation by buying up a never ending stream of smaller companies. They then take the ideas/products and launch them to a wider market.
  Steam has remained small by rejecting massive buyout offers. This has allowed them to remain innovative.

It was the first centralised gaming platform/hub/whatever on PC.
I remember having to search for matches on the All-Seeing Eye.
I lost my first Steam account. It would've been from September 2003, the same month Steam released. So apparently it would have had some real life value.
Tried restoring it once, but the email I had had on it was a service that no longer even existed so...
Anyways practical monopolies make money. Microsoft, Amazon, Google etc.
Steam isn't really in any way anti-competitive unlike the other examples, though.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent
- Dang! You got me beat. The account I still use is from 2004, when Half-Life 2 came out. I remember thinking it was bullshit that I had to sign up for something, and connect to the internet to install a physical game I bought.
  Then about five years later, I stayed at my mom's house for a couple nights, found myself bored, remembered I had my PC in her basement, and set it up. When I discovered that Steam remembered the three games I had, and let me download them (despite losing my HL2 disc years before), my head exploded. It's wild what it is now and how normalized that is.

Idk. With that camera setup I imagine myself on a black leather sofa with a plain white wall behind it.
Gabe , what kind of movie are we making? Gaben?
- Someone hasn't played TF2 lol
- You're gonna want to avoid looking down the lens of that "camera", lol
- Half life 3 : ReLoaded

He was the first to make something and its extremely hard to compete vs the entrenched giant. Also he was the only one fighting for PC gamers so we had to accept the abuse or get no games.
- Yep.
  And it's especially difficult to compete with the entrenched giant when that giant actually doesn't suck while some of the storefronts going up against it absolutely do, both in features and as toxic companies.

"Valve used to be a company that made games, now it just makes money" is a joke so old I can't find the source, but I know it goes back at least 15 years.