Valve seems to be the only company on this capitalist world that actually understands that company profits cannot and should not grow exponentially forever without eventually destroying itself. All other companies don’t know or want to stop the greed ad are constantly pushing for more profits to see until where they can push the greed and milking without losing “too much” costumers. They even weight the amount of costumers lost vs the extra profits to see if its viable to lose those costumers and still profit, like Netflix. Valve does not work like this. Valve grew to a size, and that size is giving them stable and steady profit. And they are holding that size, slowly growing more here and there but nothing big. The biggest thing they did in like 10 years was the Steam Deck and they will not update it with a Deck 2 anytime soon. Valve plays the very slow, but steady profits game. This is how you win as a company. You try to keep yourself on a balance between good profits and good public perspective.
Being privately held helps a ton. Gabe is his own boss. Once a company’s public they’re beholden to the investors, and investors want big short term returns so they can dump their stock and move onto the next one.
I truly fear the day Gabe passes on. Do we know who would own Valve if Gabe were to pass on today?
Maybe that shouldn’t be possible.
Yep. Investing should tie you to a stock for at least a year - as soon as you decide to sell, the one-year timer starts.
Why is trading stocks even allowed? Seems like a net loss for basically everyone, except the ultra-wealthy.
Stocks = certificate of ownership in a fraction of a company. The basic principle is sound and goes back at least to the Renaissance, it’s everything else around it that sucks and creates a plethora of perverse incentives that benefit the capital owners.
Company stocks are not unique there, it’s the most common example but the principle extends to every commodity. You can buy virtual coal or gold right now if you want and sell later, without actually having coal delivered to your doorstep. This is actually a very important market mechanism when it works right because it allows the market to internalize external forces, reducing risk. European energy providers learned this the hard way when prices shot through the roof in 2022 and they were buying gas at “current prices”, leading to funds drying up unexpectedly sometimes to the point of bankruptcy, rather than buying gas at “future prices”, guaranteeing deliveries that were paid for months in advance. When it works well, speculation is actually an inescapable tool of complex modern economies. Without it you cannot maintain supply chains fit for the modern world, as speculation (when not abused) is the market’s way of accounting and preparing for the expected future.
Even in a communist society, you’d need stocks: the disagreement then becomes whether the state should own (part of) the stocks, or if the workers should own all the stocks (legally equivalent to the means of production).
Oh huh, neat. Thanks for the write-up! Basically the only thing I know about stock trading comes from family members trying to convince others to buy meme stocks, so I don’t really have a high opinion of the craft.
Agree wholeheartedly, there should be risk.
I really hope that Gabe has future-proofed valve. It really is a remarkable treasure and one of the most user-friendly platforms of all time. Especially in these days when we are seeing a corporate takeover of the internet, or realizing that we lost a long time ago when we put all of our eggs in the Google basket.
I could see so much potential for fuckery happening, can you imagine if steam was as fond of kicking people off the platform as Reddit is? Or if games were constantly being curated to make sure they check all the boxes like the YouTube algorithm does? Five Nights at Freddy’s would have never existed if steam played by those rules, same for every other surprise Indie hit
If you wonder why public companies with billions in revenue can’t make a Steam competitor is because they can’t think long term, being a private company allows Valve to just work on what they want and grow If they need to
I’m not one that usually calls for the “Hail Corporate” BS where people lick the boots of big companies. In fact, I typically am very anti-corporate in every way, but Valve is one company I honestly have very little problem giving my money to. They very rarely have any anti-consumer things that crop up and every one to memory they’ve taken feedback and course corrected very rapidly. I’m afraid for the day Gabe Newell dies or retires, though. Whoever takes over Valve is going to have some big shoes to fill.
