it’s amazing to me how valve employees & gaben haven’t become out of touch with their customers (i.e. ordinary people), despite how rich they must have gotten. it’s documented phenomenon in psychology that the richer and more powerful you got, the less capacity you will have for sympathy. basically, as a company gets big and rich, they stop being able to understand what will piss their users off (think “dO yOu GuYs NoT hAvE pHoNeS?”).
this hasn’t seemed to have happened with valve yet, somehow. they still seem to be down to earth people. (btw, if you haven’t watched any of the steam sales promotion videos, they are pretty fun, take a look).
Not surprising when I think about all the different ways the extremely wealthy have corrupted all of our democratic and regulatory institutions, but it’s pretty ironic that only privately held companies can respond to public feedback in a healthy way these days
There’s absolutely no obligation to be penny pinching for public companies, the leadership is obligated to act in the best interests of the company but that’s about it.
The motivations and reward schemes may be very different, public company CEO may be incentivised to maximise share price for instance and that may attract the kind of psychopath that will try and maximise share price by penny pinching - equally I don’t think anyone could make a serious argument that being more like Steam would be acting against the best interests of a company selling games.
public company CEO may be incentivised to maximise share price
It’s not even really CEOs that make all the bad decisions. Layoffs for instance are almost always in reality a direct decision by the board, and the board members of public companies are usually even worse people (and in many cases just a direct representative of a bigger company so it bubbles to the same worst people at the top) than the CEOs, as hard as that is to believe
I think it’s because it’s filled with competent people who genuinely like what they do. I definitely see that in their hardware division at least. Money isn’t so corrupting if it’s a tool to enable what you do and not the focus.
it’s amazing to me how valve employees & gaben haven’t become out of touch with their customers (i.e. ordinary people), despite how rich they must have gotten. it’s documented phenomenon in psychology that the richer and more powerful you got, the less capacity you will have for sympathy. basically, as a company gets big and rich, they stop being able to understand what will piss their users off (think “dO yOu GuYs NoT hAvE pHoNeS?”).
this hasn’t seemed to have happened with valve yet, somehow. they still seem to be down to earth people. (btw, if you haven’t watched any of the steam sales promotion videos, they are pretty fun, take a look).
Not a public company, makes big difference
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Not surprising when I think about all the different ways the extremely wealthy have corrupted all of our democratic and regulatory institutions, but it’s pretty ironic that only privately held companies can respond to public feedback in a healthy way these days
Hyper-Capitalism? Nooo.
//RETRO//-Captialism? … significantly better by comparison.
Terrifying, but true.
‘Stakeholder Capitalism’ turned out to be approximately the same degree of bullshit as ‘Abundance Agenda’ is now.
You say that, but spaceX wasn’t a public company 3 weeks ago either.
SpaceX was also founded and largely owned by Elon Musk.
That was rather my point, public or private company doesn’t really matter much compared to the leadership.
Public companies must be penny pinching
Private companies have the choice not to be
There’s absolutely no obligation to be penny pinching for public companies, the leadership is obligated to act in the best interests of the company but that’s about it.
The motivations and reward schemes may be very different, public company CEO may be incentivised to maximise share price for instance and that may attract the kind of psychopath that will try and maximise share price by penny pinching - equally I don’t think anyone could make a serious argument that being more like Steam would be acting against the best interests of a company selling games.
It’s not even really CEOs that make all the bad decisions. Layoffs for instance are almost always in reality a direct decision by the board, and the board members of public companies are usually even worse people (and in many cases just a direct representative of a bigger company so it bubbles to the same worst people at the top) than the CEOs, as hard as that is to believe
What did they do to gamers
Oh, didn’t notice the part you specified gamers
I think it’s because it’s filled with competent people who genuinely like what they do. I definitely see that in their hardware division at least. Money isn’t so corrupting if it’s a tool to enable what you do and not the focus.
The entire company is somewhere between 300-500 people.
It literally fits into a few floors of a tower in Bellevue.
Meanwhile… Microsoft essentially bought the land area of a mid sized US city, and turned it into a sprawling corporate complex.
… and that is just their main campus.
Microsoft literally runs a private shuttlebus system in the Seattle-Bellevue-Issaquah area, to get people into and out of their campuses.
They then also have local private taxi services to get people from one building in a larger campus, to another.
There’s your scale difference.
Microsoft is essentially a semi-sovereign entity, occupies substantial territoty, got their own police too.
… Valve has something like 5-10 floors in a single building that is basically on top of a shopping mall.
I imagine because their work environment is laid back, it’s easier to just enjoy it and not worry about squeezing everything out of it.