Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

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>Oh please. Any time a company does something good. "Let's not kid ourselves. It's all for the money, honey!"

I didn't say that I'm not happy for what Valve is doing, but I don't trust any billion dollar tech megacorp like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Nintendo, Valve, etc. to have the best interest of the consumer in mind, regardless of how fun their IP is for my entertainment.

Pro-consumer actions on their end are always motivated by their internal Embrace-Extend-Extinguish strategy against their competitors, but ultimately they're not your friends, they're just fighting for your money and marketshare.

In the end, you're still just a dollar sign that pads their stocks or bottom line, regardless of some of how pro-consumer some of their actions seem.

Yes, everyone here knows a company does things for money, and I'm not knocking Valve for wanting to make money, I'm just saying it's good to be paranoid when billion dollar tech companies are being too generous and benevolent with consumers, and try to think of what their end-game is, as that might turn out to be not be very consumer-friendly in the long run if they become a monopoly.

I wouldn’t exactly consider valve a billion dollar mega corp. For one, they aren’t public and therefore aren’t beholden to the whims of share holders.

They are still beholden to the whims of those who stand to benefit the most from the company making a profit, even if they aren't "shareholders" as such.

But that is very different, every company owned by shareholders starts behaving in exactly the same predictable manner. However as long as the founders controls everything the company behaves as the founder wishes, it could be good or even worse than what you'd get with shareholders. On average it is probably the same but for an individual company it still matters a lot.

Yes, but they are not subject to the whims of short-term "investors" who only care about maximizing the next quarter or financial year's numbers.

That's the biggest problem in modern public corporations, a significant number of shareholders have no long term interest and will happily hurt the company to sell out with a higher number.

I hold no delusions that Valve is doing things for my benefit, but they have managed to position themselves in a place where their interests and the interests of PC gamers mostly align.

Valve is valued at $10+ billion. They're not big tech in the style of Microsoft, however they are a mega corporation (a very large company). Any company with their scale, revenue and influence is a mega corporation. If Valve had been public in this extreme stock market era, they'd probably have gotten a $30+ billion valuation (Unity at the peak was worth $60 billion).

Gabe Newell is worth $8 billion courtesy of his ownership stake.

https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/gabe-newell/

Yes, and we're not their friends. We'll go elsewhere as soon as we see a better deal.

So what?

There is no elsewhere, when you consider network effects. The largest platform has the most to gain, when it makes use of social interaction.

> There is no elsewhere, when you consider network effects

There is an elsewhere. Playstation, XBoX, Nintendo, GoG, Epic, Apple Games, Android. Network effects aren't anything to do with a company being your friend. You aren't staying through friendship with the company; why is it non-silly to criticise them for not being your friend?

Most of the social interaction in the games space happens on discord these days though, and has since about 2016. The only social network effect steam currently has is with game invites, since it's slightly more annoying to join a party of friends via the xbox version of sea of thieves than the steam version, for example.

I’ve been using Xbox Game Pass on PC, and while for me it’s a good value. Their invite system is terrible compared to Valve. I just want to play games with my friends and Valve seems to have that part down. Hell even the whole “play with friends” thing has worked great. Like the good old days of friends coming over and playing a four player game only now we play on the internet (and we only need one person to own it).

Consider also that Steam is the only place to go for Valve games like CS:GO and Dota 2.

This is still nothing to do with a company not treating you as a friend. You're not their friend; they aren't yours, and that's normal.

> corporations are not our friends

While true, good luck living your life without dealing with a corporation.

In fact, you're a dollar sign for your next door shop as well.

Exactly, mom & pop shop doing it for the money too. Mom & Pop good at making pies, you’re good at fixing cars. Instead of bartering, you exchange cash. Mom & Pop happy their car is fixed, you get pies in return. Everyone is happy, every one benefits, despite money exchanged. No one sceptical that mom & pop doing it for cash.

Doing something for money does not mean that you can't be interested in what the effects of your work have on others and it abusolutely does not mean that you have to prioritize the amount of money you make over everything else - but for publicly traded companies the incentives do push that way and that's where the cynicism comes from.

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