I’m sus on GabeN
he’s like the willy wonka of video games
oh and this is my 200th comment here on this lemmy instance. seriously!
“No one does sales”
Sure. Don’t even need to get past the first line. I send my regards to OP.
Eh, its true that no-one does sales like Valve. Even while the sales aren’t as good as they used to be, Steam pretty much forced the market to move on what a “good” discount was. Calling it a nice move to save you money is a joke but they really did bring prices down in the whole market.
I was extremely impressed that Valve did an RMA replacement for one of my Index base stations even out of warranty. They explicitly did not have to do that. It’s been years but I’m still amazed
Yeah my white OLED Steam Deck broke (it was definitely my fault), and they sent me a replacement, no questions asked. Also white OLED, after you couldn’t even buy them anymore.
Love live Lord Gaben!
Guys I know he is not perfect but it’s understandable that people like him in a world where the average CEO drinks the blood of newborns daily.
Huh, so that’s why they’re all so prolife. Need to keep the source of fresh babies going…
“Don’t get an abortion! Have that baby and dispose of it at your nearest “Leave your baby here for our coalition of friendly CEOs to take care of” location for a 25$ amazon gift card!”
That fully sounds like a program a literal vampire would implement with wild success. Parents selling their kids for money happened in the past, so not even that much of a stretch. It does sound like a potential cobra problem though.
very literal cobra problem as well
Steam refused to issue refunds for a long, long time. In the end they started allowing refunds for everyone because governments started requiring it and it was easier to just allow them for everyone than having to do the legal footwork to have different policies based on geography.
I think they’ve even been forced to pay fines because they refused to give refunds in countries where it’s a legal right.
As a fan of TF2, I’ll quote another greentext: “does nothing, competition keeps shooting themself in the foot.” It was about Overwatch vs TF2, but it’s mostly similar.
TF2 completely abandoned their whole design philosophy to cater to the gambling crowd…
They made multiple design documentary videos on their whole “recognizable unique sillouette” class design. Then they created loot boxes…
Unfortunately gaming might already be dead with these RAM prices and Micron giving up on the consumer space. Unless Valve wants to start buying chips wholesale and selling DIMM and SODIMM modules.
Eh, ram prices will drop again when the ai bubble bursts
Talks about AI bubble burst been there a long time. I sure hope it will happen tomorrow, but I really wouldn’t put my bets on that happening any time soon.
A long time? It’s only been in full swing for like ~2 years now. That is not a long time for financial bubbles.
They are talking about bubble popping soon for 2 years except AI is older than that. For a bubble to burst - 2 years is not very long time. How is to have one talking point for 2 years is not a long time?
The AI investment craze wasn’t going on the whole time even LLMs have been around. There will be people calling out doomsday financial scenarios every day for years that never happen.
Some have been proclaiming daily we’re overdue for another recession ever since we hit the bottom of the 2008 one. Hasn’t happened yet, 17 years later.
“gaymers”
intentional or not?
Intentional and gaymer
People saying that when Gabe dies so does Steam seem to be missing a piece of the puzzle.
From everything I’ve read and can tell they work using an ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Program). Meaning each employee working there today is becoming partial owners in Valve. If you think they will allow some new face to show up when Gabe dies and flip the table you are missing the piece where the owners of this company are extremely well compensated today and a core part of making Valve successful today.
A ton of companies have ESOP, but that doesn’t stop enshitification because the employees generally don’t own enough shares to exert control.
Those shares are also generally for sale for a high enough price. Given the immense current value of the brand, when Gabe dies vultures of every variety will start circling. If they offer employees 2x their share price to sell, enough of them will do it to lose control to investors that just want to enshittify everything and milk it’s brand for every last penny as they drive it into the ground.
My company is an ESOP and shares don’t give us voting rights or any actual control, it’s just a monetary incentive. The C-suite/board still control everything and unilaterally makes all the executive decisions.
I am a fan of Valve, but this is just way exaggerated. For example, encourages you to save money by having sales? Isn’t that about manipulating you into buying more games than you would otherwise, because you perceive the value as being better?
They don’t set the prices. Developers and Publishers of the game are the ones that do that.
PlayStation has been known to straight up limit and even DENY developers and publishers of indie games on their platform but its strange I never see hate for them very much. And they also have crazy sales on AAA games too.
Yeah, Valve are certainly one of the best options for buying games other than sometimes GoG or directly from the developer. But this level of simping for Valve is odd.
I fall for it every time and I couldn’t be more proud
Where I am, games in Steam cost about five to ten bucks normally, and two or three bucks on sale. Ten bucks goes quite far here, and without sales many wouldn’t buy games at all. Now, is it good value to buy games instead of not buying any?
Lets pray valve never goes public
Why would they?
The fuck do they need investors for?
Depends on who gets the crown - or prices thereof - when Gabe passes. There are lots of cases where the beneficiary of an estate can’t afford to keep the asset due to a lack of liquidity, and is forced to sell.
When he dies gaming lives on within us.
The power vacuum this man will leave behind sucks.
