also worrying so much about something that may happen 14 years later according to op is unnecessary and distorted thinking.
why assume there is going to be a power vacuum? can't he and his leadership make pans of succession?
then believing a whole made-up story going down the rabbit hole of the worst case scenario is again unnecessary and distorted thinking. Is okay to think of worst case scenarios but to take them as if they were real is gifting ourselves anxiety for free.
in any case, the mental exercise of thinking of some undesirable possibilities allow us to take precautions and prepare to the extend that is appropriate and reachable. Which would be the most efficient behavior that thwarts "actual fear" as OP writes it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago

Valve doesn't need infinite growth to survive wallstreet. Proton is open source and very popular.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago

Deep discounts are locked behind a subscription

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

What many posters in this thread fail to realize is that there is a very good reason why steam hasn’t been hit by the enshittification that otherwise permeates human existence in 2024.

Of course, Gaben as their CEO has the last say in it. And he’s just a good guy. But wait, aren’t there other companies that have good guys as their CEO and yet the enshittification persists?

The profound reason is that Valve is not a publicly traded company. They have no obligation to any investors to make number go up. They are a private company, they can do whatever the fuck they want. If they stay flat and keep paying their employees, that’s totally fine, and there is 0 pressure on them to change anything. THAT‘s why Valve seems like such a different company compared to everything else that’s out there.

Of course it’s still a choice to go public or not, and they have made the right call (for us consumers).

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Based take imo. I think many posters fail realize the insane amount of money steam makes Valve. Rough estimates are that Steam sold 400 million games last year. Average cost for a game is ~$15.5. Steam has a platform fee of 30%. That means that, roughly, Steam made Valve ~1.86 billion dollars just through the sell of games. Not considering microtransactions or hardware sells. Reportedly, Valve made 1 billion dollars just off cases from CS2 crate openings. Let's just give Valve the benefit of the doubt and assume they made $5 billion dollars last year.

Impressive, but honestly not that impressive when you consider that Xbox brought in 18 billion and PlayStation brought in 30 billion last year. However, if you factor in that Xbox has a head count of ~$20,100 and Sony has one of ~12,700. While Valve has a head count of about ~400. We see that Xbox and Sony are bringing in about $900K and $2.4M per head respectively. Valve is bring in 12.5M per head. Plus Xbox and PlayStation have multiple studios and campuses. While I believe Valve only has the 1 or 2 campuses and they are their only studio.

My point being that, Valve has a ton of liquid cash for investment and growth opportunities. I'd wager Valve brought in more than 5 Billion last year, but with them being a private company, it's hard to pin down what exactly they could've made.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

there is a very good reason why steam hasn’t been hit by the enshittification that otherwise permeates human existence in 2024.

Come again? Steam is enshitifed af. from forcing CS:GO players to move to CS:2 to adding DRM left and right, they do it all. They even release remasters of old games that are essentially always broken one or another.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago

Steam doesn't control the quality of remasters. That's up to publishers. I'm not the most active gamer and might have missed something, but didn't valve release a major revamp to the way the Library and Store were layed out in the past year or two? They also recently expanded family sharing and remote co-op. The only L I can remember in recent memory is the whole "You can't leave your games to another person when you die"

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

if steam dies we need to support GOGS

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Or just buy games on GoG.com now to ensure they’ll be there in the future. Why wait?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Because they refuse to suport linux with their launcher. The moment they do that ill start buying more games from them...

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Yeah, I had many games on GOG, still have, and after I did full switch to linux using Proton is such great experience. I have Steam Deck too and it's just more convenient to get stuff on Steam, sadly. I've already finished Cyberpunk 2077 on Windows two years ago and I've recently wanted to play Phantom Liberty DLC. I've tried to install it through Heroic, Bottles and directly through Steam and experience to setup GOG Galaxy to maintain cloud saves and achievements is frustrating at best, but I've also noticed some lags and micro-stutters when using GOG client.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago

Gamers truly are the most oppressed minority group

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago

Steam, my Steam library and Proton could disappear. But at least it will have supported a big traction in the ecosystem : Wine, DXVK, Lutris, Heroic Launcher, Bazzite, etc... are all open source projects (so they can't really disappear) that have never moved as fast as they are today.

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