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Comment by tzakrajs | Hacker News Reader

Valve figured out how to print money by hooking teenagers with gambling on loot boxes. They stopped having to create AAA titles, they stopped having to do anything remotely creative, and now they are a giant cancer with no value left to add. Their client is an insecure, slow, instable piece of shit and has been this way for well over a decade. I regret being a customer of theirs.

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I remember listening to some of their commentary tracks where the employees talk about how their desks had wheels, there's no managers, and there's no deadlines and no stress. They also at one time had higher profit per employee than Google! [1]

Turns out that all along having no accountability in your company would result in complacency and a critical lack of production. I'm curious to see how Valve Software as a company is going to climb over this security wall they've found themselves in front of if seemingly nobody has to answer to anyone and everybody gets to do what they want in a leisurely fashion. I mean we give Chinese IoT vendors crap all day long, and it turns out Steam might be just as bad!

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2012/04/27/a-glimp...

I heard somewhere it's very stressful, toxic politics and so on. Not sure where but it's interesting to see a report to the contrary.

Personally I always thought it would be cool to work at Valve, but not anymore. I don't see them doing anything broadly relevant that doesn't involve coasting on the momentum/market share of ancient products. Their VR stuff is cool, but even there it feel like they're lagging behind e.g. Oculus in ways that matter.

Eh, every review of the index has put it head and shoulders over any rift version so far. I'm not sure if we'd consider that "lagging behind oculus"

It's a premium product, and if I were going to buy a new VR headset right now it'd be the Index, but it's not a generational leap (it's basically a Vive++) and I've lost confidence in Valve to produce such a leap, let alone to bring VR gaming to the mainstream.

I'd love to be proven wrong, because I dislike Oculus. I am simply stating my observation that Valve seems to be in decline.

> Their client is an insecure, slow, instable piece of shit

And yet, it's still the best client out there.

If you want slow and instable(sic!) try competition. Steam client is actually fast and stable compared to what else is on offer.

It's actually not better than Blizzard or EA's client at this point. I will agree it is better than Epic and Bethesda launchers.

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