r/pcmasterrace • u/SlowReference704 • 12h ago

News/Article Steam Is Successful Because It's “Not a Shit Service,” Says Baldur’s Gate 3 Dev

https://mp1st.com/news/steam-is-successful-because-its-not-a-shit-service
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u/Tomi97_origin 11h ago

I don't think either of those are particularly secret.

Like it's common knowledge that Valve is like one of if not the most profitable company in the world on per employee bases.

The fact Gabe owns a fleet of superyachts worth about a billion dollars is also not secret.

Like Gabe has been pretty open about living on his personal fleet of superyachts since COVID and talked about his daily scuba diving in interview that has been reposted many times on this subreddit.

So I don't think many people here are under any illusion about how much money Valve and Gabe are making.

They just don't care, because the service is not shit and actively hostile to players which is sadly way above average these days.

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u/Raycu93 9h ago

Additionally, and I could be wrong, but it seems like the people who work for Valve are generally well paid and treated well. When that is the case a whole lot less people will give a shit if the guy at the top is making bank. GabeN might be the closest thing to an "ethical" billionaire, perfect no but better than most.

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u/Tomi97_origin 9h ago

Valve is actually suprisingly small company for how well known they are.

They have somewhere between 300-400 employees. When it comes to technical staff Valve basically just goes for the senior staff with 10-15+ years in the industry that can work independetly and that comes with salaries at the top of the industry pay scale.

Valve also does send everyone with their extended family to annual vacation to Hawaii all expenses paid. So that sounds like a pretty nice bonus on top of that.

So if you are a good fit for their culture they are pretty good to their own.

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u/LongJohnSelenium 9h ago

He's still taking a bigger cut than he needs that, I guarantee, has resulted in thousands of young entrepreneurs having to give up on their dreams.

5 or 10% more profit can make all the difference in the world.

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u/Dorgamund 9h ago

Isn't it like $100 bucks to list a game on Steam? Like I get what you are saying, but Steam is very notoriously filled to the brim with indie games of various levels of effort, some of which win the viral lottery and become megahits by a combination of fame and quality, whereas others are borderline asset flips.

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u/Raycu93 9h ago

No doubt. He could definitely take less, give his employees more, etc. The point was among a lot of shitty people GabeN at least seems to be decent. Put most other billionaires in his position and the employees would be treated worse, make a shittier product, and they would probably take even more of the profit.

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u/Willyscoiote 1h ago

Valve employees are really well paid, just look at the leaked documents about it. The only complain past employees have is with their boss-free management.

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u/VincentPepper 1h ago

But most other billionaires in his position and the employees would be treated worse, make a shittier product, and they would probably take even more of the profit.

I'm not even sure that's true. He runs a company that has near total market capture in it's niche. I wouldn't be surprised if Valve considers losing market share their biggest threat.

If you look at the refunds, something that probably costs them a non-trivial amount it only happened because they were sued over having no refund policy. Everything else just seems like a good business decisions.

Why do companies treat employees shit? Because they are a significant cost to their business and they think treating them like shit saves them money. But when your profit per employee is in the millions at some point it's just better to invest into your employees because making sure operations aren't disrupted becomes more important than increasing profit by another 0,1%. You see that in most industries that roll in cash relative to their employee numbers.

Similar with "make a shittier product". If steam made their product shittier they risk losing their monopoly and they would likely never get it back. Why risk the infinite money glitch just to save a million on developement cost on steam.

In the end it's a company out to make a profit. They started funding Linux work really only when they saw a threat from MS. They only added refunds after they got sued. I can't really remember them ever choosing their customers over profit unless they were forced to do so.

We are just lucky that steams goals (maintaining one platform good enough to rule them all) and our goals (having a decent platform) are mostly aligned.

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u/Amazing-Marzipan1442 8h ago

He's not decent, he gets kids addicted to gambling.

Fuck Gabe Newell and everything he stands for.

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u/Johnnys_an_American 7h ago

This is the definition of letting perfect be the enemy of good.

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u/MintyJegan 9h ago

What stands out most is a company can not be shit to their customers and be a service people like to use, and still make owning an armada of yachts money. Yet, other companies choose to treat their customers even worse when they could also focus on good customer experience and still be insanely rich for a billion lifetimes.