Valve is set up as a horizontal organization. I expect that to continue after Gaben’s death. He doesn’t really do much at valve these days anyway.
Comment on gabe³ half-life 3 confirmed
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
Valve having such a stronghold on the market is both:
- amazing because of projects like this,
- frightening because we’re one Gabe brain damage away from having PC Gaming enshittified.
CatsPajamas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 hours ago
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 hours ago
Yeah, well, somebody is going to inherit his share of ownership, and even if he goes out of his way and sets up a Foundation for the purpose of preserving the founder’s vision that will inherit his share, such Foundations tend to over time end up subverted and doing the very opposite of what the founder would’ve wanted.
Best avoid situations were your shit is hostage to the whims of a big company for whom you as and individual consumer are irrelevant.
CatsPajamas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 hours ago
I wouldn’t be surprised if it became employee owned.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 hours ago
I avoid buying from Steam and prefer GOG when I can because I don’t really want to have continued access to my games collection be dependent on Gabe eating his veggies, avoiding saturated fats and doing at least a 30m walk a day to keep the risk of a heart attack low and look both ways before he crosses a road so as not to be run over by a car.
In almost 4 decades as a gamer and a techie I’ve seen plenty of good companies turn into evil companies and start to leverage whatever dependencies customers had on them to pretty much blackmail them into paying more, sometimes after the founders died, others when the founders cashed out or just lost interest in managing the company’s direction and yet others because they were evil all along and just hid it whilst they built their customer base - enshittification isn’t ust a XXI century thing, what’s XXI century about it is that many companies nowadays already have it as part of their mid and long term strategy from the start.
Best avoid situations where you give power to some big company (for whom you as an individual customer are basically a nameless bacteria) over something you care about, unless you have no other choice, even if at the moment they’re basically a benevolent dictatorship.
Better safe than sorry.
kevin2107@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
They are not public so we are safe for now. When they go public they go shit mode
Mr_Dr_Oink@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Sadly i guess it could happen to GOG too. I mean, anything you have already bought is safe but someone could step in and change the business model and end such a great thing.