Does nothing? DOES NOTHING?! He spent the last few years ripping Microsoft a new a@@hole, rendering their operating system meaningless for gamers! …but nice meme
Gaben has done lots of awesome shit. I fear what valve will become when he’s gone.
I’m not actually too worried. He surrounds himself with champions.
Honestly, the secret is not being a publicly traded company. All the others have to make the shareholders happy while steam just does steam. If the line doesn’t have to constantly go up you can pretty much do whatever you want as long as you’re still making profit. And if what you’re doing is already working you don’t need to add gimmicks or advertisements to milk it as much as you can just to appease the shareholders.
Being a private company has allowed Valve to take some really big swings. Steam Deck is paying off handsomely, but it came after the relative failure of the Steam Controller, Steam Link and Steam Machines. With their software business stable, they can allow themselves to take big risks on the hardware side, learn what does and doesn’t work, then try again. At a publically traded company, CEO Gabe Newell probably gets forced out long before they get to the Steam Deck.
Man Intel are so dumb for firing Pat. And they did it while seeing positive reviews for their second gen GPUs!
Just my two cents but as others have said, not being publically traded helps a lot. The focus on short term benefits that come with shareholders stops “master plans” when they come with mistakes. Learning from relative failures, like the steam controller and the like, ultimately contributes to major successes like the steam deck. Being able to stay committed to improving the software experience over time, instead of killing the product when it didn’t immediately succeed, is fairly rare in the tech industry. And in all honesty, it would be better if they released a polished profuct, but being committed to it made it a success.
I feel like the pressure to have a majorly successful product day one means that smaller companies can’t innovate the way they want to, so they have to find other ways to produce revenue. Huge companies, like Apple can afford to do both but still stumble, like with the vision pro. Maybe it’ll be a success, but for now its not great and iteration makes it more difficult to maintain the original vision.
