this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2024
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Is it bad I like steam for what they've done for Linux gaming
Also piracy, indirectly
At least proton is open source
Linux is self-serving for them because it's the only way to not have to pay a third-party for licensing the OS. Enjoying the side effects of that is still fine though.
~~If I'm not mistaken Steam is cooperatively owned by its employees, which is why it's far from the worst hegemonic online distribution platform.~~
I was mistaken, see below.
It's not a co-op. They're just relatively small and mostly hire senior developers who demand a higher level of respect and work/life balance. They used to only work on projects people wanted to based on consensus and personal interest. People floated between teams, you were free to convince people to work on your pet project instead, etc. They stopped doing that when they started on Half Life Alyx and talk about it in the design booklet because it also meant that literally nothing ever got completed since there was no direction and promising projects floundered from lack of support.
Yeah I looked into it a bit more and they've never actually revealed how ownership at Valve is structured, it's just their management which they keep as flat as possible (though perhaps it was too flat for a while).
I don't think this is true I think Gaben owns it
not to give any capitalists too much credit but often privately held companies will make better decisions for consoomers than traded companies which are gonna have an array of varying levels of rabidly money hungry capitalists calling the shots. like as if epic games would ever put out something like steam families.
Hmm okay so from what I can tell they've never released info about who owns it and everybody is just speculating or citing one Forbes article that says that Gabe owns "50% or more."
What I was thinking of was something Yanis Varoufakis said in an interview with Hasan Piker, where Hasan asked if Valve was a still cooperative and Varoufakis said "not really... Valve today is very different to when I was there in 2011/2012," so maybe it was at one point or maybe it never was and Hasan was mistaken too, I dunno.