• SkyezOpen@lemmy.world
      762·
      6 months ago

      Valve support has historically been pretty awesome. They even replaced an index controller nearly a year out of warranty. Granted their controllers have a shit switch and they break after a few hundred hours, but good on support for being bros.

        • Tak@lemmy.ml
          13·
          6 months ago

          That’s basically all corporate entities. They’re not beholden to the workers, the consumers, or the general public and instead answer to people generally trying to milk everything as hard as possible.

          • GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip
            33·
            6 months ago

            Not gonna defend corporations here, but valve isnt public. They are privately owned by the bosses and employees, valve has one of the lowest turnover rates in the industry. It is quite difficult to get a job there for that reason. So they are actually quite beholden to their workers.

            • lad@programming.devEnglish
              4·
              6 months ago

              At least until the leader gets corrupted by the power if there is enough of it. Then they become not so benevolent

              • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
                2·
                6 months ago

                Hence the use of the word “can” and not “are”

                Valve wouldn’t exist at it is if it was public and might not exist as it is if it wasn’t for Newell (and I say that as a person that’s very critical of Valve, they’re still very far from how bad they could be considering their position)

                • lad@programming.devEnglish
                  1·
                  6 months ago

                  I see, that’s valid then, and I agree that Valve isn’t some godsend charity, it just happens to work better than the rest for us buyers

        • Phegan@lemmy.world
          6·
          6 months ago

          Gaben has ensures that he has 51% of the company so he can veto anything including a leadership change. He would need to sell or die.

      • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
        281·
        6 months ago

        It’s not shareholders specifically, but management that doesn’t give a shit about the company long term.
        The business has a fiduciary duty to benefit the shareholders, but it doesn’t have to be short term only, or at the cost of long term benefits.

        Most publicly traded companies end up with leadership who are only interested in justifying their employment through the next earnings call or making sure the stock price has gone up between when they last got options and when they next vest.

        Valve does good not because they don’t have shareholders, but because their leadership is not gonna get fired for thinking about next year instead of next quarter. So they don’t squeeze the consumers for every dime, so people stick with them, and developers stay even though their fee schedule is not the best because they have all the people.

        • Donkter@lemmy.world
          1·
          6 months ago

          This is kind of true. But the leadership often answers to the board of directors, which have often been shareholders that buy into control of the company after it goes public. At this point, you have shareholders who own no personal stake in a company. Often their only goal is to make a profit, sometimes they’re “serial entrepreneurs” who make their millions getting on boards and “flipping” the company to make a huge profit in a short amount of time.

          So it’s kind of management, but it’s also management brought on by the presence of public investment in a company.

          Combine this with the fact that the law has come down more than once on the side of choosing options that make the company money over maintaining company policy and you get a really terrible culture of publicly traded companies gouging themselves for short term profit (or even long term profit done in a shitty way.)

          Oh, I realize I repeated some of what you said. But you did say “it’s not about shareholders” to be contrarian, then went on to explain (like I did) how it’s actually exactly because of shareholders.

          Edit: what the fuck I literally can’t comment on the comment below.

          • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
            2·
            6 months ago

            I wasn’t actually trying to be contrarian, but okay.

            I’m pretty sure I didn’t explain how it’s actually shareholders, because the board of directors isn’t “the shareholders”, but leadership of the company.

            Valve isn’t publicly traded, but it’s still a corporation with shareholders, a board of directors, and the usual trappings of corporate leadership. They tend to operate in a not shitty way because their leadership isn’t interested in sacrificing greater long term profit for lesser short term profits.
            A private, family owned partnership style business can operate with a focus on short term profits over long term profits.

            The safest way to ensure that the leadership of both of those businesses out as much money in their pockets as possible is to continuously maximize short term profits. “The shareholders” aren’t the cause for that mindset.

    • secret300@lemmy.sdf.org
      27·
      6 months ago

      Image

      I love this green text because valve really just be doing the bare minimum most of the time but everyone else is just so shit in comparison

      • Rose Thorne(She/Her)@lemm.ee
        12·
        6 months ago

        I feel like GOG deserves at least some respect. They don’t have a perfect track record, by any means, but I find them at least reliable, decent sales, have gotten some fun freebies out of them in the past.

        And, hey, shopping cart. Which shouldn’t be a selling point, I’m fucking flabbergasted that it came to this on any platform, but that’s another point above EPIC.

    • m-p{3}@lemmy.ca
      26·
      6 months ago

      I can’t wait for the inevitable clusterfuck from Sony making PS+ sub mantatory to play their PC games online.

  • Psaldorn@lemmy.world
    22·
    6 months ago

    Sony: we make so much money selling these games to a giant pc audience;

    Also Sony: what if we restricted them geographically a huge amount and require them to go through extra steps so we can (???) which allows us to (??? + Harvest data)?